Paul Cain - The Paul Cain Omnibus

She was holding on to the edge of the door with her two hands. Her eyes went back in her head suddenly and her body folded; she fell.

Green came forward into the room.

Picelli was shivering violently and his face looked very pinched and small; his revolver fell to the floor and he raised his hands slowly.

Costain’s mouth twisted upward a little to a kind of grin, he toppled sidewise and as he struck the floor he straightened his right arm until the muzzle of the big automatic was jammed into Demetrios’ stomach.

The dark doorway was suddenly crowded with faces, men. Doyle and Kessler and two detectives from the Ninth Precinct Station came into the room. One of the detectives picked up Picelli’s and Demetrios’ guns, the other knelt beside June Neilan.

Doyle went past Green and stood looking down at Costain. Costain had emptied the big automatic into Demetrios’ stomach; he rolled over and raised his head a little, grinned up at Doyle, then at Green.

“That was a good job,” he whispered. “That was the best job I’ve ever done...”

His head fell back. Doyle stooped over him.

“He’ll be all right, I think,” Green said slowly. “I tried to shoot him in the leg and in the shoulder...” He turned to Kessler with a very faraway expression on his face. “I wonder why.”

The detective kneeling beside June Neilan looked up. “The gal hasn’t got a scratch,” he mumbled. “She bumped her head on the door when she fell but that’s all.”

Green said: “I guess she fainted. Costain’s a lousy shot.”

He peeled off his overcoat and his suit coat, sat down and rolled up his shirtsleeve. The wound on the arm was slight, a crease; one of the detectives wrapped a clean handkerchief around it and tied it.

Kessler was staring blankly at Costain. “I still don’t get it,” he stuttered. “How many times can you kill one guy? Who was the guy they — they found on the tracks?”

Doyle was at the phone.

Green smiled at Kessler. “That’d be Gino,” he said. “Picelli tipped Costain that Gino and Tony were running out on him with all the syndicate’s dough. Costain left the ticker at Tony’s and then caught up with Gino on the late Boston train. He probably got the bright idea that if he made it look like he’d been killed he could sneak back to a spot where he could watch the apartment, he might catch Demetrios and his girlfriend in the act.”

Doyle hung up the receiver and turned to listen.

“He’s probably been suspicious of them for a week or so,” Green went on. “That was his reason for keeping away from her until Demetrios showed. He planted his things on Gino and tossed him under the train; he wasn’t sure it’d work or how long it’d take for ’em to find what was left of Gino, so he called Picelli and told him to check on it. Picelli checked and sure enough, the report had gone out that Costain’s body had been found. Then all Costain had to do was wait for Demetrios to turn up to break the big news to the girl.”

Green rolled his shirtsleeve down and got up and put on his coat.

“Picelli shot Solly Allenberg tonight because Solly drove Costain to the corner of Bleecker and Thompson. That’s about a half block from where Maxie Sillmann lives and Maxie’s the boy who specializes in plain and fancy pineapples. Costain wanted to be sure no one got to Solly because Solly knew a little bit too much about the whole business, and he probably had Picelli watching him. My guess is that Picelli called him back and told him Solly and I were in the bar and that I’d been at Tony’s after the blast, so Costain told Picelli to let both of us have it.”

Green was looking at Picelli. Picelli nodded slightly.

Kessler had perked up amazingly; he suddenly dashed for the telephone.

Green said: “Wait a minute, Blondie. I’ve got a couple of important calls to make.”

He crossed to the telephone and sat down and called the Receiving Hospital, asked about Solly Allenberg. He waited a minute, then shook his head and whispered, “That’s too bad,” hung up the receiver and looked at Kessler. “I’ll take that fifty, now,” he said softly.

I’m Finn; thirty-three, white, unmarried, and a professional gambler. By professional I mean up until six or seven years age I was an amateur and turned over most of the money I made — which was plenty — to the bookmakers. That got to be pretty monotonous. I finally broke the monotony by the simple expedient of becoming a bookmaker.

Late last Fall I came out to California — Los Angeles. It was my first trip but it was just like coming home because practically all my friends were here. I took a big apartment in the Strip on the edge of Hollywood — the Strip is where the speakeasys and class nightclubs used to be when there was still reason to speak easily and when you could tell the difference between a class club and a honkytonk — and listened to propositions. I had a bankroll as big as your thigh.

I finally picked the proposition that looked best and it turned out to be — to put it modestly — a pip. Fritz Kiernan and I went into partnership and inside of six weeks we had the juiciest play on the Coast. We had two spots, one in the center of Hollywood and one for ladies only in a house in Beverly Hills.

That Number Two spot was an inspiration. The Santa Anita track had just opened and all Southern California had gone nag-nutty. We got the cream in Number Two; at two o’clock of any afternoon in the week you could stand in the middle of the main room and poke your finger in the eye of anywhere from ten to two dozen picture stars, wives of stars, “cousins” of producers, and just plain rich women. If you think men are natural gamblers you ought to see a lot of gals who can afford it in a bunch. A two grand parlay was chickenfeed.

We got most of the she class play that didn’t go to the track, and after the track closed for the season about a million new horse players had been made and we had wire service to all the eastern tracks and kept on getting it. Our Number One place was holding its head up, too. The proverbially flourishing green bay tree was a stunted sapling alongside of us; we were rolling in dough.

Then one night a couple months ago — it was a Friday because I’d been to the regular Friday night fights at the American Legion Stadium — I was sitting in the Brown Derby with two or three of the boys and a waiter brought a phone over and plugged it in and piped: “Mister Kiernan wants to talk to you.”

I nodded at the girl at the switchboard, said: “Hello.”

Kiernan’s voice was a shade and a half above a whisper: “Listen, Sean...”

He was one of the even half-dozen people who pronounce my name the way it should be pronounced: Shane.

I listened.

“I’m out at the house — my house...”

I said: “You sound like you were in a coal mine. Stop whispering.”

There was a meaningless jumble of sound and then: “Somebody took a shot at me...”

His voice faded away. I yelled “Fritz” but there wasn’t any answer. The phone hadn’t clicked off so I didn’t waste time trying to call him back. I was out of the Derby in nothing flat, roaring out Sunset Boulevard.

He lived to hell and gone out in Bel-Air. I took all the shortcuts I could remember and made sixteen cylinders do even better than the salesman had promised but it took the best part of half an hour.

The house was all by itself on a private road about a quarter of a mile off the main highway. I pulled up and snapped off my headlights and took the front steps in one jump. The front door was partway open. There was a big tanned athletic looking gent in a light camel’s hair coat lying on his back just inside; his eyes were wide open and one of his legs was sticking out through the doorway. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his chest, high. I’d never seen him before. I stepped over him and went across to Fritz.