Dan Marlowe - Shake a Crooked Town

“If Jim wants to talk to me he knows my telephone number!” she replied spiritedly.

“It'd be a good idea if you called him, Jessie,” Kratz said patiently. He rocked slightly on his heels, perfectly relaxed. Beside him Savino was taut as a bowstring, Johnny thought. “Take care of it, will you? Goodnight.”

“Goodnight?” she echoed, surprised. “What-” She looked from the two men to Johnny and back again. Johnny had moved casually a few feet from the door at his back, out into the small lobby with its polished floor. “Now look, Jigger-”

Savino's leash snapped. “Get inside!” he barked at her. He looked at Johnny with a dark, triumphant sneer. He circled to Johnny's left with the short, graceful steps of a dancer.

“Jigger!” the girl cried out. “Stop him!”

The big man smiled. Savino rushed Johnny, throwing a long right-hand punch. Johnny blocked it easily. In close, the slender man darted the forked fingers of his left hand at Johnny's eyes. Johnny caught the fingers and bent them back steadily upon the wrist. Savino went to his knees with a strangled sound.

“Give me a reason I shouldn't break 'em, wise guy,” Johnny growled down at the ashen face. He moved to put Savino between himself and Kratz who had made no move at all. Savino scrambled on his knees turning with Johnny, his eyes bulging as he tried to relieve the pressure on his fingers. His free hand came up and clawed at Johnny's hand. Johnny put a foot in Savino's stomach and thrust explosively, letting go of the fingers. Savino skidded on his knees across the lobby floor and crashed into Kratz's shins with a force that would have driven the average man backward. The big man never even missed a puff on his cigarette. “Try your luck?” Johnny invited him.

With no change of expression Kratz reached down and hooked thick fingers in Savino's coat collar. He hauled him to his feet. “He was told not to do that,” he rumbled to Johnny. “That's the only reason you're gettin' away with it.” He turned to the white-faced librarian. “You call Jim, Jessie.” He steered the reeling Savino through the door and was gone.

Jessamyn Burger drew a long breath as Johnny looked down at his right hand. Blood welled up on the back of it. “You're hurt!” she said sharply.

“Just a scratch,” Johnny told her. He reached in his pocket for a handkerchief.

“You come inside and wash that out,” she ordered him. “That man's fingernails could give you hydrophobia.”

“But you said-”

“I don't care what I said.” High heels click-clacking, she led the way up three steps and along a dimly lighted aisle past a self-service elevator. At a door marked 2-A she stopped and removed a key from her handbag.

The drab exterior of the building and the small, cluttered lobby had left Johnny unprepared for the room into which she led him. Solid cherry paneling covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Vividly scarlet linoleum on the floor was partially covered by a huge oval rug braided in a concentric black-and-white pattern. An austere white brick chimney centered the farther wall. Below it the fireplace was an old-fashioned Franklin stove extending outward on a raised white brick hearth. Bronze andirons in front of it and bronze knobs and medallions on the stove itself relieved its jet black severity. At the side a bronze-hooped, cherrywood bucket contained white birch logs. A low cherrywood table to the left held an ivory lamp and a bowl of flowers, and to the right a high cherrywood buffet held a matching lamp and a trailing green fern. Halfway to the ceiling on the white bricks of the chimney a golden rooster crowed silently.

“I like this,” Johnny approved. He realized that every fiber of wood visible in the room was cherry.

“Thank you. I designed it myself.” She glanced around as though trying to see it critically with his eyes. “And paid for it myself. My well-meaning knowledgeable friends tell me it has no particular distinction or artistic merit, but I like it. I like nice things.” She returned her key to her handbag. “You can wash up behind that door on the right.”

Beyond the bathroom Johnny had a quick glimpse of a bedroom in frilly pinks and whites. He ran the cold water and stuck his hand under it. He heard the sound of her heels on the tile beside him and turned to look. “Duck your head,” she commanded, and opened the medicine closet door when he complied. She took down a bottle of Mercurochrome and a box of Band-aids. “You have the biggest hand,” she said in surprise, working on it. Her voice trailed off.

Back out in the cherrywood living room he raised the question that had been on his mind. “Those two seem to think you're still on the home team the way they boss you around,” he said. He watched her face while appearing to smooth down the Band-aid on the back of his hand.

“I was kicked off the home team so long ago the bruises have nearly healed.” She said it with no real emphasis but it sounded sincere to his critical ear. “You'll have to watch yourself with Savino,” she continued.

“He's dropped a couple decisions today. He may go back into trainin'.”

She shook her head emphatically. “Not Savino. If he can't do it from in front he'll do it from behind.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You're very strong, aren't you?”

“As strong as Kratz?

Her eyes darkened. “No one is as strong as Kratz.”

“He the boy who did the job on Thompson?”

Her face closed up. “I'm sure I have no idea.”

He'd touched the wrong button that time, Johnny decided.

He waved the bandaged hand at her. “Thanks, Jessie. For everything. I'll give you a ring.”

Her features opened up again at his use of her name.

“I–I'd like that.”

“Just keep the line clear,” he told her cheerfully, and departed.

He walked back to town, detouring out into the street each time a corner building ran right out to the sidewalk.

He saw no sign of Savino, or of Kratz, either.

Johnny sat in Richard Lowell's library as the white-maned mayor pushed a low, wheeled table alongside his chair. The table contained a brandy decanter, two pony glasses, and a cigar humidor. Lowell splashed brandy into each of the glasses and nudged one in Johnny's direction. He picked up his own and drained it at a gulp, set down his glass and refilled it. He selected a cigar from the humidor and carried brandy and cigar to the unlighted fireplace. “Help yourself to a cigar,” he said as an afterthought. His back was to the room. He flung the crumpled cellophane from his cigar at the set logs in the fireplace with exaggerated force. To Johnny he looked as nervous as a cat on hot bricks.

Johnny chose a cigar and glanced around the tremendous room whose walls were book-lined two-thirds of the way to a ceiling he estimated at eighteen feet. The fireplace was large enough to roast an ox. “Who pays the heatin' bills here?” he asked. “The city?”

Richard Lowell's expression was concentrated as he rotated the tip of his cigar carefully in the flame of a silver lighter. “This is the Lowell House,” he said when he had the cigar going to his satisfaction. His manner indicated that that should be all the explanation necessary.

“The Richard Lowell House?”

The mayor made an impatient gesture with his cigar. “The Lowell House,” he repeated. “Built by my people shortly after 1800. There've been Lowells in Jefferson ever since. There've been Lowells in city, state, and federal government ever since.” He looked moodily around the huge room. “This place is an anachronism now. I let my housekeeper go. I live in three rooms and I take my meals out. I have no family.” He shook his head. “Lately I've begun to understand the problems of dynasties when the succession peters out. Toby never married at all. After me, I don't know what becomes of the Lowell House.”