Hang by Your Neck Read online

  I sat on my cot. I could have opened that door and taken my chances. But why? And what for? And even if there were a why and what for, I couldn’t pull that on Parker—and Parker, good cop, damn well knew that.

  I played ball.

  I sat on my cot and palpitated.

  Then he was back. “No soap,” he said. “Boy, this is one for the books.”

  “What goes?”

  “Nothing. Everything is nice and quiet and sleepy. Nobody knows from nothing. But the guy simply ain’t around.”

  “But, Louis—”

  “Look, this ain’t a prison. These are police detention cells. They don’t run them strict like prisons. The guard here, this Nottiby, reports sick about three hours ago. They assign this other guy. He makes a routine check—you were sleeping then—and then he goes to sleep, and he don’t get up till I wake him to open your door. Meanwhile, nobody sees this Nottiby go home. It just gets taken for granted, but nobody sees him go home.”

  “Then how—”

  “Come on.”

  We walked along the quiet corridor to the rear and then down one flight of stone steps with an iron banister and then along another corridor, and we stopped in front of a narrow iron door. Parker pushed the door. The door swung open. The clean wind of the night swept at our faces.

  “This is how,” Parker said. “I figured this would be open, too.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch. That Johnny.”

  Morosely Parker said, “He got to the guard. He got to this Nottiby.”

  “Got to him? He took him with him.”

  “Okay. That’s all. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll get you locked back in, and then I got to break this to the boys.” He shook his head. “Murder.”

  “Wait a minute, Louis.”

  “Now what?” He saw my face. “This is going to be good, I know it.”

  “Why not, Louis?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why not me too?”

  “Why not you too what?”

  “You know what, Louis. They don’t need me around here. They don’t have a thing on me, Kelcey himself told me. So, when Johnny took the guard, he took me too.”

  “Like hell he did.”

  “But, Louis, what’s the difference?”

  “No difference, dope, except that I came for you, and the attendant opened the door and left you in my custody. No difference at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m excited. All right, how about this? How about—”

  “No.”

  Aggrieved I said, “But you haven’t heard—”

  “I don’t want to hear. You’re a nut, that’s all. You’re a—romanticist. That’s what you are, a romanticist. People can’t go busting out of jail, just like that, just like it’s one of them municipal lodging houses, or something. I mean, everybody can’t start flopping out of here like we got swinging doors.”

  “Busting,” I said. “Busting.”

  Parker’s eyes squeezed down. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking—no, brother. No!”

  “Look,” I said. “Please.”

  “No.”

  “Look.” I put a finger on his chin, tilting it. “We’re down here, talking. This rear door’s open, like those guys left it. All right, I bust you one”—I put pressure on the chin—”I bust you one right there. Like that, you didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay?”

  “No. Positively, no.”

  I took my finger off his chin, glum. “Have it your own way, but you’re awfully stubborn.”

  “Stubborn, he calls me.”

  I had a new idea. “I could start running, you know. Right now.”

  “Much better,” he said, “you shouldn’t.”

  I agreed with him. I let him lead me back up the stairs. I let him pat my shoulder and push me into my cell. I sat down on my cot and shrugged and made a hopeless gesture with the palm of my hand open toward the ceiling, and then succor turned up in the person of Lew Dickman tailing the snaggle-toothed attendant.

  “Writ,” Lew Dickman said. “I come bearing a writ. Hello, Chambers.”

  “Hi.”

  Parker said, “What’s this, now?”

  “Writ.” Lew Dickman was a springy little man in a natty blue suit, sleep fogging the usual shrewdness of his eyes, but sufficient shrewdness showed. “You know, Inspector, writ.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Writ, Lieutenant. For my client here.”

  Snaggle-tooth said, “They said I should bring him up to you. They said you’re supposed to talk to one of the counselors from the D.A.’s office before he gets sprung on this here writ. They said I should bring him up to you, and you handle it from here on in. You want I should close this cell?”

  “This writ kosher?” Parker asked Dickman.

  “Are you crazy, Lieutenant? Do you think I would present myself bearing other than a kosher writ? Do you wish to impugn—”

  “Let me have it.”

  “You want I should close this cell?” the attendant asked.

  Parker looked at the writ. “Kosher?”

  “You bet,” Dickman said.

  “Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” Parker’s eyebrows wrinkled.

  “He’s a lawyer friend of mine,” I said. “Lew Dickman.”

  “Name and address is right on there.” Dickman pointed. “See, Lieutenant?”

  The Lieutenant pushed past him. “He all right?” he asked me.

  “Perfect.”

  “You want I should close this cell?” the attendant said.

  Parker called me with his fingers. “Okay, shamus. Out.”

  Snaggle-tooth was slightly aghast. “But, Lieutenant—”

  “I’ll be responsible for this.”

  “Well, all right. So you want I should close this—”

  “Close the downstairs door, first.”

  “What downstairs door?”

  “Pete,” Parker said, “take your lawyer friend, and use that downstairs door, and show this guy where to close it. And this writ better be kosher.”

  Dickman said, “You wish to impugn—”

  I said, “Don’t worry about the kosher—”

  Snaggle-tooth said, “But don’t you want I should close—”

  “Out!” Parker said. “Out, out, out. My God. Ain’t I got trouble enough?”

  3

  In the taxi, Lew Dickman explained it: “I got this call and I was told that you were being held for questioning on a murder case. I was told that you’d requested that I come over in the morning to represent you, that is, if you needed representation. I said okay, that I’d see you in the morning. They got me out of bed for that.”

  “Your wife must have loved that.”

  “My wife cursed like hell. She’s got one song on that theme: that she married a lawyer and not a doctor, and a lawyer is supposed to have office hours.”

  “So how come you showed up?”

  “Well, I went back to bed, and I tossed around, and my wife’s grumbling didn’t help me fall asleep, so I kept tossing, and business hasn’t been too hot lately, and I saw a chance to earn a fee, a good fee. So I took the gamble.”

  “How?”

  “Who likes to stay in jail?”

  “Nobody.”

  “And why didn’t they let you call me yourself, instead of their calling me? I figured I’d take a gamble, and earn a fee. I’ve got a good many writs lying around, in blank, for emergencies. I filled one in, and I dressed, and I let my wife grumble some more, and I went over and woke Judge Nimiss, and he signed it—and here I am. Do I earn my fee?”

  “You earn your fee. Let’s have a drink, us two.”

  He looked at his watch. “Not now, we don’t. All the joints are closed; it’s four-fifteen. Furthermore, I’ve got to go home and placate the Missus.”

  “Right, counselor. Placate her for me too.”

  “C
rack, brother, go ahead and crack. But wait till you see your bill.”

  “Make it a big bill, Lew. You’re entitled to it. That was smart thinking, and I’m glad to pay for it. Anyplace I can drop you?”

  “You can drop me over there by that parked cab. We’re going uptown—but I live in Brooklyn. Remember? Unless”—he grinned—”you’re going somewhere special.”

  “I’m going home.”

  We pulled over to the other cab. We shook hands. Lew blew.

  “Home,” I said to the cab driver.

  The cab driver said, “Come again, bud.”

  “Fifty-ninth and Sixth.”

  “Right.”

  I sat back and I let my eyes close, and then I came awake with a jump, rattling against the glass of the partition like gravel in a gale. The cabbie moved his head up, his neck creasing.

  “What’s the matter with you, bub? Take it easy.”

  “Change that, will you please? Make it Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-third. Okay?”

  “Sure it’s okay. You’re the customer, bub. Relax.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The most unfashionable section of the City of New York is Eleventh Avenue, up and down, and all the way. The most fashionable club in all of the City of New York is on Eleventh Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street, but you park your car, if you’re coming, at least one block away. Taxis, too. That’s an order, unless you wish to arouse the adamant ire of the several loitering gentlemen, the quiet galaxy of the first remote sentinels of El Courvocco.

  El Courvocco opened its gaudy portals (in point of fact you had to work your way in through a grimy garage) at four o’clock a.m., and it shut down promptly at twelve noon (make that one o’clock for Sundays), at which time, if you were still in the mood, you could snag your drink in your neighborhood saloon without the embarrassment of the bartender regarding you over his lids as a before-breakfast hottentot.

  El Courvocco catered to class: to the boys and girls who rebelled at pulling in their awnings at the peremptory hour proclaimed by an arbitrary legislature for the renunciation of convivial gurgling in the public halls. It catered, too, to the lads and the lassies without the fortitude to step into a barren saloon at nine o’clock in the morning and order up a Pink Lady and light up the juke box, to the dismay and the mutterings of the matutinal passers-by (to say nothing of the harassed barkeep cracking ice to chill the beer for the more conventional-minded). In a city of nine million, there are hordes who hanker for a drink after a stern curfew has dispossessed them, and there are ladies and gentlemen of gregarious nature (aren’t we all?) who desire their grog amid smiles and music at a quarter to ten in the morning, and why is a quarter to ten in the morning less seemly than a quarter to ten in the evening?

  For them, El Courvocco, an institution created by Sweetheart Vaydelle and Johnny the Mick, aided, abetted, and gloriously adorned by Miami Moonbeam; a square block of converted car barn where the clap of curfew is the thunder of commencement.

  First there is a dark dank garage and an oil-speckled floor and a group of overalled gentlemen with faces more muscular than a ballerina’s thighs. To them you present your credentials—a permanent card of invitation, with counter-signature—and if you pass muster, you are led through a foul-smelling concrete anteroom, and instantly you are in a lobby spacious as a hippodrome, high-domed and marble-walled, with a pale blue carpet lush to the ankles. To the left and to the right are expansive hatcheck counters, each equipped with three smiling blondes in pale blue velvet, and in the middle, two enormous frost-glass swinging doors rise all the way up to the distant ceiling. You check your hat and coat, for free, and right there the largesse of El Courvocco terminates.

  And yours begins.

  Between the doors, a blue velvet rope extends all the way to the middle of the lobby, a sort of bisecting arm for the gentry, the right side for fresh fodder, the left side for go-homers. The right door, in faceted cut-glass, sparkles “In,” the left door sparkles “Out,” and as you approach, the door swings open on an electric-eye device, and immediately you are part of the most fantastic saloon of our age.

  Two broad red mahogany hand-carved drinking bars, parallel as good intentions, and so long they seem to converge in the rear, extend for two hundred feet, fronting for full-dress suits, tuxedos, evening gowns, banter, gaiety, laughter, tears, jewels, flesh, perfumes, and the constant hum of many languages, mostly English. The wide area between the bars is heavy with the glow of a deep phosphorescent sawdust, and behind the bars, each for her station, are thirty saucy ladies, tending bar in tight red side-slit skirts and red satin fluff-sleeved blouses and jaunty red satin caps of the overseas variety. And behind them, on each side, one immense panel of mirror is removed, and in its stead appears the legend, conceived, it is said, by Miami Moonbeam (which limits the clientele and restricts the sightseers) in tall electric tote-board letters:

  It’s five bucks a clout,

  Come beer, come gin,

  So before you shout—

  Who asked you in!

  Instead of a brass rail, each bar has a transparent plastic rail with an inner tube of neon, lipstick red, running all the way, and in the rear each rail rises up in a glowing frame for the entrance to the Hollow, a deep room, papered blue, with round walls like an amphitheater. There are tickers at the far end for the early morning brokers with an eye to business, and the wool gatherers, and the wheat and grain boys, and the newsgatherers, and the political nuts. Sturdy tables ring the room dressed in crimson tablecloths, tended by shapely waitresses dressed like the bar girls, only their skirts are shorter, who serve you from a kitchen with dual presidents, one Italian and one French, both imports, and both famous for their concoctions and political leanings.

  There is no dancing. Two quiet orchestras play in relays, each of eight violins. There is a small stage, but there is no entertainment, other than the best of entertainment, impromptu, donated by the customers of the joint, luminaries of stage, screen, and opera, as the impulse may move them, spurred by love, vodka, or ego.

  Bouncers in tuxedos are the one prosaic touch, but even they are overshadowed by the startling personality of Miami Moonbeam, born Rebecca Shlock, the flaming Juno of the night clubs. Six feet three of the most audacious curves granted a female, perfectly proportioned, she had owned a club of her own in Florida, entertaining in the manner of Texas Guinan, of revered memory. When Sweetheart and Johnny had grown up to where they had taken over and converted the car barn, Miami had been persuaded to sell her place and preside in perpetuity over El Courvocco, perpetuity being a contract that ran with the lease.

  Preside she did, in matching tones with the décor of the motif (voilà, suckers), always in a blue gown, and red of hair. She had enormous blue eyes, smiling most of the time, and the smoothest skin of face and neck and shoulders, and she wore her red hair simply, like a scarf, caught thick in a ring of sapphires and over one shoulder in front of her.

  I saw her the minute I got by the door, seated between two men, and I waved to her, and she waved to me, and she spoke to one of the men. He stood up and bowed and moved the table slightly so she could get out. She came to me, swaying in a skin-draped curving blue creation with no shoulders, which instantly caused you to wonder how it stayed up so far down. She came to me, walking as only Miami Moonbeam can walk, slowly, all of her moving, but separately, somehow, and devastatingly. She took my hand and squeezed it, and quietly, covering with a smile, she said, “What are you doing out of jail, lover?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hold it, lover. Let me kiss off that brace of suckers first.”

  She led me back to the table and she introduced us and I caught the names, “Merrill, Petersen,” and I pulled my lips back and showed them teeth and said, “How do.” Miami said, “Excuse us, folks, a long-lost relative,” and she yanked at my hand and I smiled some more and I followed her all the way across the Hollow to a small round table. She lifted wriggling fingers at one of the girls, and the Scotch came and a
red pitcher with water and tall slim red glasses, and we said, “Cheers” a few times, and I heard myself saying, “You know, you’re for me. A guy sits here like this near you, he forgets what brought him here, he forgets everything. It’s murder.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but whodunit?”

  “Wh-a-a-t?”

  “Pamela Reeves. That’s what.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard.”

  “How do you know I belong in jail?”

  “I heard. I heard all about it. So what are you doing here? And if you’re here, why isn’t Johnny here too?”

  I looked at her and she looked right back at me and I winked and so did she. “What do you know, kid?” I said. “What do you know?”

  “Know nothing. But I’m all ears.”

  “Not you, sister. If there’s anything you’re all of, it’s not ears.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Not good, brother. You’re just going to have to improve.”

  “For you, I’ll try. I’ll try real damn hard.”

  “Try telling me why you’re not in jail.”

  “I’m out on a writ. And it’s a writ that’ll never come to hearing, because they don’t have one damn thing on me.”

  “What have they got on Johnny?”

  I rubbed a finger down along my glass. “He been around?”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny.”

  “You nuts?”

  “Has he?”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny.”

  “Now, look, lover. Let’s break it off. You get sprung out of a few hours in jail, and you act like you’re stir-crazy. They got Johnny clapped away in the pokey, last I heard, and from what I’ve been told, they’ve got him clapped away good. So what’s with the idiotic questions?”

  Our eyes hit again, and hers were just big and blue—and very beautiful.

  “All right, sister. Move over. Close.”

  She moved over close. She smelled good. She looked good. Reflected light was a small explosion off her shining lips. Her shoulder leaned on mine. Her thigh was warm and soft and achingly pleasant. A blue night had finally produced some comfort.