Hang by Your Neck Page 4

  “Well?” she said, near my ear.

  “Johnny broke out.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No.”

  “Good boy,” she whispered. “Good boy, Johnny.”

  “See him?”

  “No.”

  “Hear from him?”

  “No.”

  “That the goods?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m on his side, you know.”

  “It’s the goods, lover.” She moved away. She sipped from the red glass. She was very casual. “Tell me, lover.”

  “The cell was empty. He and the guy down there, the guard, were gone. All they know is that the guard checked out sick. That was about one o’clock. So, all right. So where does he figure to go?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Look, I’m on his side. So far. The guy paid me five thousand dollars to run an errand. So—until I find out what it’s all about, I’m on his side. Now, where does he figure to go, on the lam, with no dough?”

  “I heard he had dough.”

  “Confiscated. You kidding? All right, where does he figure to go?”

  “I’ll bite, lover. Where?”

  “Here, that’s where. There’s got to be dough around here, and a guy on the lam needs dough, first thing. This joint doesn’t open till four. So at one o’clock, there figures to be nobody around. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Could he get in?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean he didn’t figure to have keys. Me, I was nothing. Nobody really bothered with me. Nobody took my stuff off me. But Johnny was a real red-hot murder suspect. A guy like that, they take everything off him—money, keys, doodads. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “So could he get in?”

  “You’re slipping, lover. Remember Johnny? Johnny could get in anywhere. Without keys. If he put his mind to it.”

  “And dough? Would there be dough around?”

  “There’s a safe upstairs in his office. I’d say that would be good for five, six thousand, any time.”

  “Let’s go look, huh?”

  We went up in a private red-lacquered elevator. I followed her along a wide hall that opened into a square, carpeted foyer, with two heavy wood-paneled doors, one to the right and one to the left. “That one’s Sweetheart’s.” She pointed to the right. She knocked on the door on the left. Nobody answered. She tried the knob. The door opened. The lights were on.

  “Check,” she said. “Look.”

  A small safe near a big desk was open.

  She said, “You want to examine that?”

  “No. Lights on, that can happen. But a safe with a door hanging open, that’s a guy operating in a hurry. Okay, let’s get out of here.”

  She shut the safe and put the lights out. We went back downstairs to our table. She said, “What’s the angle, lover?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But why?”

  “They had him dead to rights down there, according to what I heard. You can’t do yourself any good when you’re in the can. Outside, you might. That is, if you didn’t kill the girl. And if you did, then what the hell—you’re breaking out. You’re running.”

  “Not Johnny. Johnny didn’t kill that girl. Johnny wouldn’t pull one that raw. Not Johnny.”

  “Miami,” I said, “I love you. But I’ve got to get some sleep. If he wants me, I’m home.”

  “How would I know if he wanted you?”

  “I mean, if he should get in touch with you, I’m available. That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “So far, like I said, I’m on his side.”

  “Oh.”

  I finished my drink and I pushed out from behind the table. I clicked my heels (tiredly) and I bent over her hand and kissed her fingers.

  “Real cute and continental, lover. You’re improving.”

  “I hope,” I said, “to improve further.”

  2

  It was all black clouds and five o’clock of a sulky morning when I got back to the apartment. I picked up where Johnny had left off with what was left of the Scotch. I put coffee through the drip and I mulled over the coffee and ate a few cigarettes.

  I wasn’t happy.

  I hated the coffee. I hated the cigarettes.

  I loved the Scotch. Then there was no more Scotch.

  It was time for bed.

  I switched off the light and it was black dark. I felt my way to the bathroom stumblingly. I flicked the jigger and it was light again. I undressed in the bathroom and ran a hot shower. I sang a little, but it croaked. I tried to think, but nothing added. I let the hot water run down my back, and I slept, standing. I turned off the water, and I rubbed down sleepily. I threw the rough towel over my clothes heaped in a corner. I glared at myself in the mirror, and I shook my head sorrowfully. I clicked off the light and I shuffled through the blackness to bed.

  I folded and refolded the pillow and stretched my legs.

  I stared up through the darkness toward the ceiling.

  It was hot. It was numbly still. No air moved in the room. I turned, and the pump of my pulse banged off the mattress. I stayed like that, on my side, with my eyes closed, waiting for sleep. I began to sweat. I gave it up. I rolled back and opened my eyes to nothing, breathing hard through my mouth. I remembered I hadn’t opened a window. I swung off the bed, feeling through the pitch dark toward the windows. Close there, at the window, it bumped me.

  Something bumped me.

  I felt it … then it wasn’t there. I squeezed my hands against my wet face, rubbing at my eyes. I put my hands out again toward the window. Again it bumped me, and then it wasn’t there, and then it bumped again. A howl screamed noiseless inside of me and the hair of my body ridged. I stood there in the insane blackness, motionless, pounding. Nothing touched me. Nothing moved. My naked toes twitched.

  Then I turned and lurched for the light switch, bouncing off a corner of the bed, scraping my thigh. I cursed out loud, and I liked it. It was normal. It was reassuring. I liked it so much I did it again. Sound came tight, dry and flat. I shivered, and I shut my mouth. I found the switch, and I clicked it.

  Johnny the Mick was hanging by his belt from the cornice of my bedroom window, a pulled-over chair beside the dangle of his shiny, useless shoes. Johnny the Mick, turning aimlessly, his blue face cocked against one shoulder, his eyes out of his head, his tongue black between the fierce last bite of his teeth. He swung, gently, rippling the stain of his shadow beneath him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I got out of that bedroom.

  I looked for a drink. There was no drink.

  I called downtown for Parker.

  “Louis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pete.”

  “Hi.”

  “I found him.”

  “Whom?”

  “Mikvah.”

  “What?”

  “Mikvah.”

  “Pete … now, look, Pete—Pete—where?”

  “Here in my apartment. I—”

  “Don’t lose him.”

  He hung up.

  I put the phone down and I scrabbled a fingernail, silent, pensive, and nude. I scowled at the ignominious, erect, derisive, empty bottle of Scotch. I drew a long breath, sighing like a husband at the end of a marital fracas. I went back to the bedroom. I stood on the chair alongside of him and I kept him firm with one hand while I went through his pockets with the other. There was nothing in any of his pockets, except a jingling group of small metal instruments. I let go and he swung away from me and I got off the chair before he came back. I opened a bureau drawer, pulling out underclothes, socks, and a shirt. I took a suit and a tie out of the closet. I dressed in the bathroom. I tidied up. I transposed the towel, and the heap under it, to the hamper, all except the suit I had worn. I brought that to the bedroom and pushed it into the closet. I didn’t look at Johnny. I left the light on and I went back to the living room. I straig
htened up the room, patted the pillows of the sofa, hung away my hat and coat in a foyer closet. Then I sat back in a soft chair and stared at the adamantly empty bottle of Scotch, utterly transparent.

  They rang my bell, Parker and Kelcey, and Parker said, “Where? Where is he? Now, look, Pete—”

  “In there.” I pointed to the bedroom.

  They both went in.

  They both came out.

  “What the hell?” Parker said. “What the hell is this?”

  “That’s the way I found him.”

  “Like that?”

  “Like that.”

  “When?”

  “About a half hour ago, when I came home.”

  Kelcey tapped Parker and pointed a thumb at the phone. Parker called headquarters. Kelcey said, “All right. Give.”

  I gave. I got sprung out by Dickman. I took a cruising cab with Dickman. I dropped him off at another cab, and I went home. When I got out of the cab, instead of going up directly, I went across to the park and sat on a bench, ruminating.

  “Ruminating?”

  “Ruminating.”

  That covered the time spent at the Courvocco: nobody in his right mind talks about an after-hours joint to a policeman.

  “Then what—after the ruminating?”

  I went up to my apartment, had a few drinks, took a shower, and went to bed. I crawled out to open a window—and there he was.

  Parker was finished at the phone.

  “One hell of a note, huh?” he said to Kelcey. “One—hell of a note. What do you think, boss?”

  “I don’t think. Yet. I think after the boys give it a going over.” He looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Inspector, I can’t think. I don’t have my brains in order yet. For me, this has been one night. First, the dead dame. Then jail. Then this. How would you like to hit the sack, quiet and cozy, and wind up with a dead man hanging off your window? It’s—slightly disturbing.”

  Parker said, “How’d he get in here?”

  “The same way, I suppose, he got in the first time. There were a couple of little pick-things in his pocket. He must have acquired them after he got out of jail. That wouldn’t have been too difficult.”

  “How do you know?” Kelcey said.

  “How do I know what?”

  “That he acquired them after he got out of jail?”

  “Well, I’m sure you guys cleaned him out.”

  “No, no, no. How do you know he had those pick-things you’re talking about?”

  “I looked.”

  “Where?”

  “In his pockets.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Force of habit, mostly.”

  “Force of habit? Looking in a dead man’s pockets?”

  “All the time,” I said, with a degree of finality.

  Parker said, “Same as the first time? You mean—”

  “That’s right,” Kelcey said. “It’s in the report.”

  Parker went back for another look in the bedroom. Kelcey sat on the sofa. Parker came back and chose a straight-back chair and crossed his legs and lit a cigar.

  I collected their hats, coats, and gloves and put them away. “I’d offer you gentlemen a drink, but there ain’t one damn drink in the house.”

  Parker said, through smoke, “Knowing you, that’s—catastrophic.” He looked at his cigar, pleased. “Catastrophic Not bad. The first time I heard that, I was testifying—”

  “Quiet,” Kelcey said.

  2

  The boys came. They poured in like relatives for a will reading: the medical examiner, the fingerprint boys, the scientific boys, the thin-faced ascetic cops with the diction, the red-faced cops with the big hands, the boys with the glasses from the D.A.’s office, the psychiatrists. Two psychiatrists. Here’s a tipoff on our era: two psychiatrists.

  They puttered; then they gathered in the living room. The stretcher boys carried him out in a basket. The medical examiner delivered his pronunciamento: death by strangulation at about two o’clock. That put me outside the pale, as Kelcey noddingly acknowledged. At two o’clock I was beating my ear against a hard cot in a police detention cell. Then one of the psychiatrists started talking. One of them. The other one, the older one, bit his lip and looked worried and nodded his head. The psychiatrist talked. Everybody else sat around. And listened. When a psychiatrist talks, everybody sits around, and listens. His name was Bruce Winston, an animated young man with shiny teeth and wavy hair, profligate in monologue. Finally he added it up short: “He knew you people had him. When he came out of his daze, he realized it.”

  “And how we had him,” Kelcey said. “He’d had a terrific bustup with that girl a couple of months ago. She’d been giving him the two-time for a long time. It was his gun, and the bullets in her were from that gun. She was in the apartment and the apartment was locked, and I mean locked, from the outside. Drunk, he was yelling suicide, that she had killed herself. But the gun had no prints on it but his prints. You don’t rub off fingerprints after you shoot yourself and you’re dead. It didn’t even have his.” He pointed at me.

  “Why not?” said one of the red-faced cops.

  “I picked it up with a handkerchief.”

  “Plus,” Kelcey said, “he tried to give us the schmoos about she had a key to get in—but she had no key on her person, none that fitted that door. I told him that when I came in for his statement. He appeared too drunk to listen, or to care too much. I told him it was all lined up, that he didn’t have an out—but he didn’t seem to listen. Right there, he must have been figuring how to get to that guard. That was a shrewd apple, drunk or sober.”

  “He insisted he wasn’t there,” I said, “all day.”

  Parker said, “Where?”

  “At his apartment.”

  “Sure he insisted,” Kelcey said. “The doorman works an eleven-hour shift, with two hours off. Between three-thirty and five-thirty. He knew that, so that’s when he brought her there. About five o’clock, around that time. We know that from her sister.”

  “Who checked the sister?” I asked.

  “Parker.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Why send me for the bag?”

  “He knew you could keep your nose clean.”

  Nose clean. Reminiscent words. “I don’t mean that. I mean why risk it?”

  “There was upward of seventy G’s in the bag, mad money he kept around the apartment, I suppose. That’s all was in the bag, except a couple of suits of clothes, underwear, a few shirts and ties.”

  “But the dead dame—”

  “Look, even for Johnny the Mick, seventy G’s isn’t toilet paper.”

  Bruce Winston rubbed at his wavy hair, struck a pose, finger out. “I believe we can re-enact it like this. There had been a long-standing spat between him and the woman. From what I learn, she was most attractive, but an unsavory type. They went to his place—and there’s a murder. Possibly the whole business was premeditated; there’s the fact that he brought her to the apartment during the period when the doorman wasn’t there. We don’t know, of course. That might have been coincidence. But our Mr. Mikvah was not a gentleman of no experience. Regardless, there was one shot. It might have been heard, but we also know that a single shot is frequently mistaken by a hearer for backfire, that sort of thing. There is no disturbance. So now he has her there, a dead woman in his apartment.”

  “On the sixteenth floor,” Parker said. “I vote against premeditation. I think he brought her up there for some kind of showdown, and it blew up, and he let her have it. I don’t think a guy would premeditate a murder in his own apartment.”

  “We don’t know,” Bruce Winston said. “He might have had a plan that went askew. Whatever, he’s been brought up short, by a love affair. It has happened before, with people quite as worldly as our Mr. Mikvah. He cannot lug her out of there, of cou
rse. He waits around, probably pokes his head out of the door a few times. No excitement. Unheard. Good.”

  Kelcey said, “It happens all the time. Gun shot in an apartment is plenty screened off.”

  “Then what? He packs the bag, puts in the money that he has kept around the apartment presumably for an emergency, and then, before he even picks the gun up from the floor, he realizes there are many things to do, many preparations to make. He leaves the apartment, locking the door. He knows that nobody can come back there. According to him, only he and she have a key. And she’s dead. Perhaps, right there at the beginning, he had an idea of coming back and setting it up like a real honest-to-goodness suicide. But he wasn’t able to come back. All right. We have approximately a seven-hour span before we reach him again, this time at Mr. Chambers’ apartment. We do know that during that period he made certain preparations. We also know that he was drinking heavily, which is usual enough in the circumstances. All right, we pick him up again in Mr. Chambers’ apartment.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “Why? Why me? What could I do for him that he couldn’t do for himself?”

  Winston said, “The man was drinking. He was unworried about the body being discovered. We know he intended to disappear. We know that he had arranged for plane tickets to Mexico. The idea was, probably, to get in touch with associates later on. He might transfer all of his affairs to another country, under another name, with Mexico as a first jumping-off place. All of that has been done before. All of that is well within the realm of possibility.”

  “Sure. But why me?”

  “There were seventy thousand dollars in the bag.”

  “So why doesn’t he go get it himself?”

  “That’s just my point. We’re endeavoring to look into a man’s mind. He was intoxicated. As far as he was concerned, no one knew there was a dead woman in his apartment. I say he couldn’t go back. It has been established; there are people who cannot go back and look at the result of a crime of violence, their crime. Once away, they won’t, can’t, go back. Yet—seventy thousand dollars. That way it is perfectly explicable. Could he arrange a substitute? Was there somebody whom he could trust, a person of sufficient intelligence who could be counted on to act properly in the circumstances? I am informed that you measure to the specifications, Mr. Chambers.”