Dan Marlowe: Shake a Crooked Town

Johnny tested the sound of her voice in his ears. She appeared earnest and sincere. Her eyes rested upon him anxiously. “Carl-my husband-was a part of the operation we know during the war,” she continued. “He heard me speak of you many times. I thought he might try to enlist your aid in the desperate thing he hopes to do.”

“How would he find me? How did you find me yourself?” Johnny asked bluntly.

“Jim found you.” Johnny glanced at Daddario. The dark man flicked ash from his cigar, unheeding. A very quiet master of ceremonies, Johnny thought. He looked back at Micheline. “Jim is a good friend of Carl's. Jim has been of much help. He is the president of the city council in Jefferson. He was able to hush things up when Carl-when it happened.”

“There's no question in your mind about the truth of the charges brought against your husband?” Johnny asked her.

“Please.” Her hands, large for a woman's, tightened in her lap. “There is no question. It was explained to me in detail.”

“Explained? How about proved?”

“Please,” she said again. “There is no doubt, Mr. Kill- Johnny.”

There was no mistaking the hopeless discouragement in her voice. He wondered uneasily what her reaction would be if she knew her husband at that moment lay dead on the floor of Johnny Killain's room in the Hotel Duarte. He was conscious of Daddario's enigmatic gaze above the wreath of his cigar smoke. Johnny rose to his feet. There were undercurrents here he didn't understand, as well as two diametrically opposed stories. “You want me to call you if I hear from him?” he asked her.

“I would very much appreciate it.” She rose and walked with him to the door. Daddario leaned back on the chaise longue but followed them with his eyes. “Be careful that if Carl comes to see you he doesn't talk you onto his side,” she said earnestly. “It's a losing side but he can be most persuasive.” She gave him her hand, her touch cool. “I'm most grateful for your response to my call.” Unexpectedly, her hand in his tightened, gripped hard. The sudden pressure indicating emotion of some sort was belied by a practiced hostess-smile. “Merci, mon ami,” she said softly and closed the door behind him.

Johnny stood irresolute in the corridor. Was she trying to tell him something? They'd never been out of Daddario's sight. He looked at the closed door. Was she a prisoner in that damned suite? Was Daddario forcing her to act a role in order to insure silence about Carl Thompson's knowledge of Daddario's political activities in Jefferson? Daddario had been able to “hush things up” when charges had been made against Thompson Johnny set himself in motion toward the elevator. He was still preoccupied on the way down. In the lobby he went directly to a phone booth. There was one thing he could do. Carl Thompson had said his wife had been with him at the Taft. If she had been, her story of having been driven down from Jefferson that night was a lie. At least part of the story was a lie anyway because they'd been checked in too early. But if she'd been with her husband that morning how else could her presence upstairs now telling a story so unfavorable to him be explained except by pressure?

He dialed the Taft. It didn't take long to find out that there had been no Mr. and Mrs. Carl Thompson at the Taft that day or for several days past.

Johnny left the booth feeling frustrated. He had no alternative but to believe that Carl Thompson had tried to play him for a sucker. But why had Thompson been killed?

He pushed through the lobby revolving door and outside, on the neon-lighted near-midnight deserted sidewalk, he halted abruptly. Had his call to the Taft proved anything except that, as spooked as Carl Thompson had been, he hadn't registered in his own name?

He was tempted to go back upstairs and take a fall out of Daddario. Two things stopped him. If Daddario actually was a family friend helping out in an emergency any commotion that Johnny caused would just intensify the shock Micheline Thompson faced when the news from the Duarte reached her. And, as far as Johnny himself was concerned, the smartest thing he could do would be to get back to the Duarte and get straightened away on the discovery of Carl Thompson's body.

Without thinking, he had used the Manhattan Eighth Avenue exit. He turned right to Forty-Fifth Street. Around the corner, a man in a dark suit stood against the sheer wall of the hotel, his back to Johnny and his eyes glued on the Forty-Fifth Street exit. Across the street a horn blatted, short and then long. The watching man spun quickly to look at the horn-blowing car. Almost without a pause he continued to pivot until he was facing Johnny head on. He raised his arm and a thick-looking weapon glinted in his hand.

Instinct took Johnny to the sidewalk. He grunted as his knees hit the cement hard under the impact of his own weight. He rolled toward the curb and the shelter of illegally parked cars. Above his head he hear a muffled plop-plop and the whine of metal distressed by sharp contact with concrete. The lights of the marquee seemed all too bright.

The sound of running feet drummed in his ears. He snaked his way on hands and knees out into the street between cars. He was in time to see a sedan pull away from the opposite curb and roar west across Eighth Avenue against the light. He stood up warily. When nothing happened he brushed off his palms and the knees of his trousers. His knees were stinging and the trousers had huge rents in them. For the benefit of a rubberneck gazing curiously at him from the sidewalk, Johnny lifted his right leg and inspected the heel of his shoe as though wondering what had tripped him. The rubberneck walked away.

Johnny drew a long breath. A man with a silenced gun watching the Manhattan's Forty-Fifth Street entrance for Killain's exit? A man in a car across the street who recognized Killain unexpectedly turning the corner and warned his partner in time for him to get in a couple of shots? What in the hell was going on?

He examined again the torn-out knees of his trousers. A button was missing from his jacket and street dirt was ground into it. He was positive he'd never before seen the man who had shot at him. He was just as positive he'd know him the next time he saw him.

He set off grimly up the street, his knees twinging at every stride.

At the Duarte he walked into a lobby boiling over with blue-uniformed police and snap-brim-hatted detectives. He discovered that it somehow didn't surprise him. Behind the front desk, Marty Seiden all but stood on his head in a wordless effort to catch Johnny's eye. Had to play it straight, Johnny decided. Looking neither right nor left he headed for the elevators.

“Killain!” Johnny turned at the strident bark. A hatchet-faced, sallow-complexioned man with protruding eyes rushed up to him. “I want to talk to you, Killain.”

“So talk, Cuneo,” Johnny invited him. Ted Cuneo was a Detective First Class attached to the local precinct, and he and Johnny Killain had no use at all for each other. Johnny looked around the lobby and appeared to notice the herd of police for the first time. “What's the matter? One of your boys lose a collar button?”

“You've got some explaining to do,” Cuneo said with evident satisfaction. “Upstairs,” he added, and barged onto an elevator.

“That's for the paying customers,” Johnny said. He walked to the service elevator. “You types that run up the tax bills ride over here.”

“Just so we get there,” Cuneo sneered, following him.

“Where to?” Johnny asked him, a hand on the controls.

“Your room.”

“My room?” Johnny pretended surprise. “That big nose of yours finally caught up with the still I've got up there?” Detective Ted Cuneo's saturnine features flushed darkly. Johnny could see that it was only with an effort that he contained himself.