Dan Marlowe - Shake a Crooked Town

“About three thousand. If you run short get on the phone-”

“Three thousand? You lunatic, all I need is about three hundred. Here-” Johnny tried to separate some of the bills.

Mickey Tallant caught his wrist. “Take it,” he said brusquely. “You don't know what you'll need. Jesus, I'd give a farm to be goin' with you. I wouldn't give a damn if it was to Australia.” He looked at Johnny hopefully. “All I'd need would be twenty minutes to get the old lady over here an' I'd be on my way.” He wadded up the money and thrust it at Johnny.

“Man, you're three-to-five to win the Poorhouse Derby in a pulled-up trot.”

“Shut up. I owe you a favor, an' if I've got to stand around here listenin' to my arteries harden at least I can finance a little action.”

Johnny put the roll in his pocket and raised his hand in a half salute. “Well, keep punchin', Mick.”

“You keep punchin'. An' if you run into a buzzsaw you call the Mick.”

Johnny left the tavern with the silver-studded leather jacket on his arm. He walked over to Broadway and caught a south-bound cab to the apartment. Full dawn was not far away when he let himself in quietly. His eyes felt as though they had been sandpapered.

Sally was asleep sitting up in a living-room chair. She was in robe and slippers and Johnny's bag lay open at her feet. Johnny picked her up and sat down in the chair with her on his lap. Her eyes flew open. “Johnny, why are your clothes in that bag? Are you going somewhere?” she began immediately.

“Not if anyone asks you, ma.”

“Does Dr. Randall know about it?” Her brown eyes probed at him. “You know he prescribed a rest. What-”

“I'm restin', an' I'm not married to Doc Randall. Have I got any clothes over here?”

“I'll look. There's pajamas, I know.”

“Pajamas I got no time for.” Johnny dropped his head and lipped at her neck. “Ever.”

“Stop it, Johnny.” He could feel the little shiver that rippled through her. The slim body moved uneasily on his knees. “I don't think you ought to be going anyplace. You're barely out-”

“You're outvoted, ma, two forty to a hundred. Pounds. How about the clothes?”

She slid from his lap and caught sight of the jacket Johnny had dropped on a couch. “What in the world is that?” She picked it up, held it up by the shoulders an instant, and slipped it on over her robe. The bottom hit her at the knees and the sleeve-ends hid her hands completely. Johnny burst out laughing at the small-featured bright face above the huge jacket as she pirouetted before him. “What's so funny? What is it, a disguise?”

“For you it would be, sure as hell.” Johnny rose and captured the jacket, swinging Sally off her feet and up into his arms. He carried her into the bedroom and stood her up in the center of the bed while he removed the jacket.

“I haven't looked for your clothes,” she murmured as her robe followed the jacket.

“F-forget it.” He picked her up by the elbows and set her down on the floor. “Maybe I could use this.” He whisked her nightgown up around her shoulders.

“Johnny!” she cried out, her voice muffled as he pulled it over her head. He dropped the nightgown, boosted her slender whiteness aloft and tossed her onto the bed. Before she had bounced twice he was beside her. She snatched off a slipper and flailed away at him. “You-big-walrus!” she panted, and yelped as he inserted a finger in her ribs. “Johnny! No tickling!”

“Say somethin' now, ma,” he said deeply as he tucked her down beneath his weight. “Say somethin' now.”

A long-drawn, hissing inhalation was his only answer.

There was no further conversation in the bedroom.

Late afternoon sunlight bathed the Albany terminal as Johnny alighted stiffly from a Greyhound Scenicruiser. He had been awake for twenty-four hours, and he felt it. He could have gone straight on to Jefferson in the same bus but he had decided against it. No one should be looking for him in Jefferson, but if they were the bus terminal would be watched.

On the ride up he had dozed fitfully without getting any real rest and thought his way around in circles. The role of Micheline Thompson bothered him. The timing of her call to him and the call to the police bothered him. Was it possible she'd known all the time that her husband was already dead? Johnny didn't like to think so.

Had she collaborated with Daddario to call him down to the Manhattan where he could be looked over at close range by Kratz and Savino who could then step down to the street to engineer the first attempt on Johnny's life? The possibility left a bad taste in his mouth.

He remembered Micheline Laurent in the hands of a German corporal screaming a warning to Johnny Killain to save himself. Could such a girl sell out her husband? The answer should be in Jefferson, along with the people who seemed determined that Carl Thompson's story should end with Johnny Killain.

In the terminal washroom he changed from his wrinkled suit to slacks, a wool shirt, and Mickey Tallant's leather jacket. He had already felt the nip in the northern air. Back upstairs he asked directions and caught a local bus to Jefferson.

It bumped along interminably, stopping at everyone's back door. When it finally descended a long hill Johnny could see the city in the valley below. Smoke poured from tall chimneys. There was industry in the valley. He left the bus a few blocks short of the business district and walked toward it slowly. It looked clean and had an air of liveliness although an occasional gaptoothed empty storefront indicated a worm or two in the local economic apple.

He bought a paper at a corner newsstand. He had already decided he didn't want to stay at a hotel and he was in the process of folding the paper back to the classified section when the caption beneath a front page picture caught his eye. “Mayor Richard Lowell turns first shovelful of earth in groundbreaking ceremonies for new-”

It surprised him. Lowell. Mayor Richard Lowell. And Jefferson was Toby Lowell's home town. Johnny looked closely at the picture of a big, openfaced hearty-looking man smiling into the camera, an expensive-looking shoe atop a silvered shovel. There was no resemblance that Johnny could see, but a man might go broke in a hurry bucking the odds on it's being a coincidence.

Toby Lowell. Toby hadn't said a word about a Richard Lowell. After Johnny's Washington phone call, Toby Lowell had known where to find Carl Thompson. And someone had very definitely found Carl Thompson not so long afterward. Had Toby made a call to the man who had found Thompson? Had he made another to Dameron? Something certainly seemed to have frozen the lieutenant to his hotel thief theory.

Johnny took another look at the smiling face of the big man on the front page of the paper and put the paper under his arm. He turned off the main street and walked cross-town, away from the solid business district. As soon as he nested in someplace he intended to pay a call at City Hall. Mayor Richard Lowell might be able to contribute something to the picture.

In eight or ten blocks he had moved out of the banked lineup of stores. In the new neighborhood only an occasional corner grocery appeared among houses and apartments. A sign in a downstairs window across the street caught his eye. ROOMS. He crossed the street. It was close enough to downtown without being downtown. He climbed five stone steps fronting an old-fashioned Georgian house and rang the bell.

He had to ring it again before it was opened by a thin-faced woman with a mass of red hair loosely knotted atop her head. She wasn't young but the hair looked natural, Johnny decided. She had on blue jeans and a man's white shirt. She carried a dustmop in a work-reddened hand and shrewd blue eyes took Johnny in from head to foot. Her eyes came back to the silver-studded jacket and finally to his face. “I'd like to see a room,” he told her.