Dan Marlowe: Shake a Crooked Town

In the sixth-floor corridor the first thing Johnny set eyes on was Lieutenant Joseph Dameron's impressive bulk. The lieutenant was emerging from Johnny's room. Frosty gray eyes in an apple-cheeked broad face surveyed Johnny impassively. The close-cropped hair was iron-gray. “Well, well, well!” Johnny said softly. “Heap-big-frog-in-a-small-puddle himself. What the hell have I been up to that requires your august presence, Joe? You were just leaving? Don't let me detain you.”

Without a word the lieutenant turned and re-entered the room. Johnny and Ted Cuneo followed. The first glance was enough to tell Johnny that the police had already been there long enough for Carl Thompson's body to have been removed. Johnny's lips tightened. He didn't like what he was thinking.

Micheline Thompson didn't look exactly the type to be any sort of prisoner of Jim Daddario. If, instead, she were an accomplice, her call to Johnny could have been contrived to get him out of the hotel before the police arrived. Had she and Daddario wanted to know if he had already spoken to Carl Thompson? Johnny wondered what turn the conversation might have taken if he had admitted it. The idea put Micheline Thompson in a different perspective.

Lieutenant Dameron turned from a brief conversation with the medical examiner, a lean-faced, clear-eyed man carrying a small black bag. Technicians still milled about the room. Johnny headed for his armchair. “When you boys get ready-” He broke off, whistled, and pointed at chalk marks on the floor. “Is that for real or are you guys practicin'?” He turned to the lieutenant. “Thompson? Someone used my place for a shootin' gallery?” He made a sound of disgust at Dameron's silence and turned again to the chair.

“Don't sit down there!” A tall man with a black box on a cord around his neck dashed up. “I want more prints from that.” He grabbed Johnny's arm as he went to sit down.

Johnny grabbed back, and the man whitened and cursed. “If it's mine you want, take 'em off your arm, Jack,” Johnny advised him. “Keep your damn hands to yourself.”

“That's enough of that,” Lieutenant Dameron said mildly. He shook his head at the tall man who had colored angrily. The lieutenant said nothing further until the last of the laboratory men had departed. Ted Cuneo closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it.

“Well?” Johnny demanded. “Did you come over here to sell me sweeps tickets?”

Lieutenant Dameron lit a filter cigarette. He sat down on the edge of the bed and studied his well-polished shoes. All his movements were leisurely. He looked like a man with all the time in the world. He exhaled a thin cloud of blue smoke in a diminishing stream before looking up at Johnny again. “What happened here?” he asked. His voice was quiet but the official steel lay close to the surface.

“How the hell do I know?” Johnny grumbled. “Was I here?”

The lieutenant's hard gray eyes rested on the torn-out knees of Johnny's trousers. The eyes moved up until they encountered the gap left by the missing button. They missed nothing of the street grime. “Since you weren't here, just where were you?” he probed.

“Maybe I need a lawyer,” Johnny countered. “Maybe I shouldn't even be tryin' to answer your questions. Who was killed here, Joe?”

“You seem to think it was someone named Thompson. What happened to your knees?”

“Oh, those.” Johnny glanced down at them. “A guy just now unloaded on me up the street with a silenced gun. I was tryin' to dig a foxhole in the sidewalk.” From the doorway Ted Cuneo snorted in patent disbelief. Johnny ignored him. “What's it all about?” he continued to Dameron. “What bugged you enough to get you out on the street this time of night?” At the resulting silent stare Johnny rose to his feet and walked to the bedside telephone.

“Get away from that phone!” Detective Cuneo rapped at him. He took two steps into the room.

Johnny looked at him over his shoulder. “If I'm under arrest, boy scout, pull your gun an' hope it works. Otherwise shut up.” He picked up the receiver. Cuneo glared at him and looked hopefully at Dameron. The lieutenant made no sign. “Hi, ma,” Johnny said into the phone. “What's all the excitement?”

“Oh, Johnny, I've been trying to call you everywhere!' The night switchboard operator's voice pushed into an upper register. Sally Fontaine was a slim* brown-eyed girl with whom Johnny had a long-time, comfortable understanding. “I tried to get you at Mickey Tallant's, at the apartment, at the poker game-” Her tone turned curious. “Say, how did you get rid of them so soon?”

“The constabulary? I didn't. They're breathin' hard on the back of my neck. What happened?”

“Oh. One of the uniformed men said there'd been a phone call. The lieutenant and that man Cuneo were in the lead. Cuneo didn't seem to want to believe Tommy Haines when Tommy told them you'd been in the bar for four hours until just ten minutes before they got here. Johnny, who was the-”

“Get me later, ma.” Johnny hung up and looked from Dameron on the bed to Cuneo at the door. “If four hours gets me an alibi he must've been killed just before you got here, right, boys? I always knew your pigeon service was the best, Joe, but are you wired right into the gunners now? The kid says you were here first.”

“The message to the stationhouse said 'Tell Dameron there is a stiff in 615 at the Duarte'.” The lieutenant's expression was bland. “Since I've been half-expecting a call like that for a long time, I thought I should take a look.” He stubbed out his cigarette without removing his eyes from Johnny. “Why would anyone line you up on the street with a silenced gun?”

“Was the man who was killed heavy-set, redheaded, with a badly scarred face?” Johnny asked innocently. He continued at Dameron's grudging nod. “Then I can tell you. That was Carl Thompson of Jefferson, N.Y.” He told them Carl Thompson's story, omitting only his prior discovery of the body. “The same people who scratched Thompson from the entries would be the only ones interested in addin' me to the score. They don't know how much he told me.”

Ted Cuneo made a loud br-r-acking noise. “What a pipe dream!” he jeered.

Johnny kept his attention on the lieutenant. “The phone call to the precinct was a little more of the same, Joe. If I got hung for Thompson, fine.”

“A phone call to me and an attempt to kill you right back-to-back?” Deep furrows etched themselves in Dameron's ruddy forehead. “That's too much of a good thing.”

“Maybe somebody got nervous. I'm tellin' you that's what happened. Get on your stick an' find out why.”

“If it's 'why' we're talking about, why was Thompson killed?”

“For Christ's sake, were you listenin' to me? He was killed to keep him from goin' on up to Jefferson an' burnin' down the barn over the heads of the outfit that gave him the goosin'.”

“You believed his story?”

“What the hell difference does it make if I believed it or not? He believed it. He was goin' back there an' shake that place to pieces. The people who ran him out knew it. They found him here an' put a stop to it.”

Lieutenant Dameron frowned. “You expect me to believe that someone in Jefferson close to the policy-making level had this ex-police chief murdered?”

“What's so hard to believe about it? They'd had him half-killed when they threw him out of office. It hadn't shut him up.”

Ted Cuneo repeated the sound he had made previously. “A man of your talents ought to be able to come up with a better story than that when a dead man's found on the floor of his room, Killain.”

Johnny rose suddenly from his chair. “All of a sudden I don't like the tone of your voice, Cuneo.”