Paul Cain - The Paul Cain Omnibus

“The only thing that doesn’t fit in is the business on Crescent Heights Boulevard when they tried to get me. How could Axiotes be so sure I smelled a rat that early in the game? I’d already been to see Amante and it seems to me Axiotes would figure I’d already spilled whatever I knew and could be counted out.”

Delavan didn’t answer. In a few minutes we pulled up in front of my place and I got out and asked him to come up for a drink.

He grinned at me silently for a moment and then he asked: “Have you ever taken a good look at my car?”

I shook my head and stepped back a couple steps and looked at it. It was a dark blue Buick roadster with a cream-colored top and cream-colored tire covers.

Delavan was watching me and suddenly he threw his head back and laughed until I thought he was going to bust a lung. He finally quieted down enough to sputter:

“I was sure you knew a lot more than you gave out when you and Amante and I had lunch; one of my men picked me up afterwards and we followed you.”

I leaned against the door of the car and said: “Oh.” There wasn’t anything else to say.

Delavan had calmed down to a broad smile.

“We hadn’t gone more than five or six blocks before we knew we weren’t alone,” he went on — “there was another car following you and pretty soon they spotted us and ducked up a side street. They disappeared while I was deciding which one to follow and, anyway, they had us pegged so we kept on after you. I was sure you had some kind of an inside but I was afraid you’d lay down on it, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I threw a scare into you or made you mad you wouldn’t lay down — you’d give us some action...”

He chuckled some more and pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

“The fella with me was Ormiston, who is one of the best shots in our outfit, so I changed seats with him and when you turned off on Crescent Heights I told him to let you have it close enough to look good without mussing up the car too much.”

I said, “Oh,” again.

“Then a couple blocks further along Ormiston jumped out and hailed a cab, and when you came along he tailed you to the drug store and went into the next booth and heard you call Myra Reid and Amante. I’ve been following your leads ever since — that’s all I had to go by. I’ve had men tailing your men — the two you’ve had on Bergliot and Axiotes—”

I cleared my throat and tried to look intelligent, interrupted: “And me?”

He nodded. “Uh-huh — and you.”

I felt like two cents but there wasn’t anything I could do about it but laugh with him. I said: “The least you can do, under the circumstances, is come up and have a drink.”

Harry was waiting. He yelped: “Hollberg has a fifty-fifty chance.” He turned to Delavan. “Your boys lost ’em.”

We told him we’d found ’em and I sketched the business at Axiotes’ for him.

The three of us had quite a few drinks. Delavan called up his headquarters and said he was cleaning up some very important evidence in the Kiernan case and he didn’t leave till about one-thirty.

Harry and I had a nightcap and talked it all over and then I went to bed and had a beautiful dream. It was mostly about the expression on Amante’s face when he heard the news.

Lefty Bowman and I played Spit-in-the-Ocean to see who’d take whose vacation when. I won, or maybe I lost — I forget which. Anyway, I took the last two weeks in July. I spent a week in Bermuda and a couple of days in Havana, got back to town on the twenty-ninth. The Old Man met me at the dock and on the way uptown told me all about the Castell business.

It was the biggest lick of its kind in twenty years. On the night of the twenty-first a collection of unset emeralds had been stolen from the safe of Castell Ltd, in London. There wasn’t anything to work on, or if there was Scotland Yard hadn’t found it; the stones had simply disappeared. The insurance company that carried the policy had offered a reward of twenty thousand pounds and its American office had called in the Old Man the day before I got back.

It seems someone in the London office had a big highly polished hunch the stuff had been rushed to the States, and a half-dozen assorted English sleuths were on their way to New York.

Our firm — the Old Man was it, Lefty and I just worked for him — handled more insurance cases than anything else and had a pretty swell reputation — as reputations of confidential investigating outfits go.

When the Old Man stopped for breath I suggested that he get to the point — what angles did we have to work on? He said there weren’t any angles. I asked him if he meant we were to go to work with nothing but the fact that somebody in England had a hunch a million dollars’ worth of stolen emeralds were somewhere in America, and he said yes.

I told him what I thought, and he asked since when did we need facts to work on? We’d find our own facts.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get a lead. I went to the branch of the insurance company and talked to a British gent named Wister who had less to say, for his size, age, and weight, than any insurance man I ever saw. I called up a few people who might have bright ideas where anything as hot as the Castell stuff might be, if there was enough money in it. Maybe a thirty-three and a third percent split on twenty thousand pounds wasn’t enough money; none of them had anything to say, and said it very emphatically. I got down to the Immigration Bureau at about four-thirty and after wading through several acres of red tape I got a list of everyone who’d come in from England during the past few days. There were two names in the lot that meant something — maybe.

One of them, Lina Ornitz, ran a restaurant on upper Broadway. She’d been born and raised in London, spent most of her mature life in one or another English prison. In the year of 1932, in her badly preserved late fifties, she’d married a Russian with a couple of thousand dollars and they’d come to New York and opened the restaurant. There hadn’t been a reputable British crook in the last thirty years that Lina didn’t know and have some kind of line on. And she’d been visiting England! She’d left New York on the tenth of July and returned on the twenty-eighth.

It was a little after seven when I got off the subway and walked up Broadway to the restaurant. Ornitz was sitting behind the cigar counter. He grunted, “Hello, Mister Keenan.” He weighed about two-ninety in his sock feet and didn’t stand around more than he could help. I asked for Lina.

He said she was home, he expected her in a few minutes.

For eleven years I’ve made it my business to know people like the Ornitzes — know them pretty well. I said I’d go on over to the flat. They lived about a block and a half away, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

Ornitz said: “Maybe you’ll miss her.” He picked up the telephone. “I’ll see if she’s left.”

I sat down at the counter and ordered a bowl of cold borscht and he dialed a number, waited a minute, said:

“Hello, Lina... Mister Keenan is here to see you... Uh-huh — how long?... All right, I tell him.” He hung up. “She’s leaving now. She’ll be here in a couple minutes.”

I finished my borscht, waited. I told Ornitz I’d heard Lina had been away and he beamed and told me how good business had been and how Lina had been able to afford a trip back to England to visit her folks. I’d already figured out that on the ship she’d crossed on she couldn’t’ve had more than six days in London. When I asked Ornitz how long Lina had been away he grinned and said: “Not even three weeks. She got homesick.”

We talked about this and that for another ten minutes. Lina didn’t show. I finally said: “I guess she got stuck. I’ll go on over and see what’s keeping her.”