Lucky Stiff by Craig Rice (best large ebook reader txt) đź“•
This was their wedding anniversary. He couldn't even remember which one. It didn't really matter. All that mattered was the waking up every morning and seeing her long, silky hair spread out on the pillow, and her face, childlike in sleep, nestled in her arm. Coffee in the sunroom in the morning, Helene in her violet chiffon negligee, or her fluffy white robe, or her bandanna sunsuit, or, on special occasions, the blue satin house pajamas she'd been wearing the first time they met.
"Helene," he said, "every time I look at you I feel as if someone had just given my heart a hot-foot."
Her eyes warmed. "Darling," she whispered, "I didn't know you were a poet!" This time her hand reached out for his, and it wasn't icy cold.
Jake Justus, ex-reporter, ex-press agent, and, as he occasionally reminded himself, definitely ex-amateur detective, sighed again. Happily, this time. That unpleasant knot of anxiety in h
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The room where Big Joe had been killed was small, soiled, and sordid. A table, a couple of chairs, a wicker floor lamp, a few ash trays, a lumpy couch with a faded cover, and a few gaudy pictures on the walls. Helene was satisfied with one quick glance.
It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a room where someone had been killed. But there was something about this one that made her shudder. Big Joe had been a rich man, a lavish spender. He owned a five-acre estate in Highland Park, and when he came to the Casino he always acted as though he were slumming. And Anna Marie had been a girl who would have insisted on the best of everything.
Why had they picked this tawdry room, in the rear of a cheap saloon, as a meeting place?
Or had it been picked for them—without their knowledge?
Who had picked it, and why?
It had been damned bad stage setting on somebody’s part. That fact alone fairly yelled of a frame-up. What had been the matter with Anna Marie’s lawyer?
There was a murmur of voices at the end of the corridor. Helene went on a few steps. There were two more doors on the right, marked with enameled signs. Ladies. Gentlemen. The door on the left was marked Office, and it was just slightly ajar. That was where the voices were coming from.
“—and I don’t care if the song was specially written for you, you aren’t to sing it again, anywhere, understand?” That was Bill McKeown’s voice. A pause, and he went on, “I’m only trying to save you from a lot of trouble. See?”
A feminine voice called Bill McKeown an objectionable name.
“Don’t you lose your temper with me,” Bill McKeown said.
There was a silence. On a sudden impulse Helene pushed open the door marked Office. Bill McKeown sat behind a grimy golden-oak desk. The angry and sulky girl who was slumped in the one armchair was Milly Dale. She didn’t look up.
Helene muttered. “Sorry. I was looking for the—”
“Across the hall,” Bill McKeown snapped.
She said, “Thank you,” turned and entered the room labeled Ladies, and bolted the door. Suddenly she was scared, more scared than she had ever been in her life. Everything seemed to be tying up together. The murders, and everything else, certainly had something to do with The Happy Days. And here she was barricaded in the ladies’ room of The Happy Days, after having been entirely too nosy for her own good.
She heard the corridor door close. There was a firm, deliberate sound to the closing. The face that looked back at her from the mirror was pale.
It could still be her imagination, she told herself. Perhaps the door was customarily kept closed. Or it had blown shut. Perhaps no one was noticing her.
There was one way to find out. She added a touch more lipstick, tilted the broad-brimmed hat to an even more gay angle. Then she went back into the corridor.
The door to her right, leading to the alley, was padlocked and bolted. It had been, she remembered, the night Big Joe Childers died. A waiter working for The Happy Days had opened it and let in Ike Malloy, while a car waited in the alley. But no waiter was going to open it for her right now.
She noticed that the door to the office was wide open, and the office was empty.
Helene squared her shoulders, marched down the corridor, and tried the door. It opened. She walked through the bar and out to the sidewalk. No one stopped her. No one noticed her. A minute later she was in the convertible, lighting a cigarette.
There had been something strange about that room when she passed through on her way out. A different bartender looked bored behind the bar; the man named Jack had been replaced by a thin boy with a pallid face; the two customers had disappeared, and several others had come in. True, bartenders and bouncers did go off duty, and customers did come and go, but it had been a very quick and complete change for so short a time.
She started the convertible and headed for Michigan Avenue. At the same moment a black sedan slid away from the curb. Not until she’d reached State Street did she wonder if it was following her. A few experimental turns—Ohio, to Rush, to Huron, over to Wabash, back on Erie toward Michigan. The black sedan stayed discreetly half a block behind.
Helene’s lovely mouth set in a firm line. She slammed on the brakes, and the black sedan slid up almost bumper to bumper. She couldn’t recognize the man at the wheel from what she saw in her rearview mirror, but there was no mistaking that hat with the bright green feathers.
Losing the black sedan would be easy. She’d once lost the police department of the city of Chicago by the simple expedient of taking the lower level of the Michigan Avenue bridge.* But Helene had a better idea. She drove at a leisurely pace down the Avenue, turned into the Loop, and stopped at Marshall Field’s, where an attendant took her car for parking.
The great store was already a blaze of light and color with Christmas decorations. Helene stood behind an ornamental Christmas tree and waited. A few seconds later the Widow Childers came in, and after that it was only a matter of playing hide-and-seek, or squirrel-around-the-tree.
She was able to get a good look at Joe Childers’ widow. A pretty, early middle-aged, perfectly groomed woman who, right now, looked irritated and vexed.
It wasn’t long before Eva Childers gave up and went out into Washington Street. This time, it was Helene who followed. The sidewalks were crowded, but the bright green feathers were like a beacon. Across State Street, straight on west past Dearborn and Clark. The building Eva Childers entered was a dingy one, with a soiled tile floor and one rickety wire-cage elevator.
Helene waited until the elevator came down again. “Hello, Bill,” she said to the shabby old operator.
He grinned at her. “Hi, Mrs. Justus. Going up?”
“Maybe, maybe not. What floor did that woman go to—the one who just came in?”
“Eleven, Mrs. Justus.”
Helene said, “Thanks. I guess I will go up.”
There were, she knew, three offices on floor eleven— two vacant and one occupied. The occupied one belonged to John J. Malone.
*The Corpse Steps Out.
“The protection racket is a stinking one,” Malone said through a cloud of cigar smoke. “It’s making a guy pay for something he never gets. It’s blackmail when you haven’t done anything to be blackmailed for.” He paused and scowled sternly at Jake. “But, of course, when guys are dumb enough to fall for it—”
Jake said, “All right, I’m dumb. But I thought you were smart. My mistake.”
“You can take your choice,” Malone growled. “Keep your temper, or give me back that drink. When the muscle boys came around, why didn’t you tell them, in a delicate manner, exactly what they could do with their protection?”
“Because,” Jake said, “that’s just what they wanted me to do.”
There was a brief silence. Malone rose, strolled over to the window, gazed for a moment across the Loop roof tops. He relit his cigar and said, “Yes?”
“The Casino makes a lot of money,” Jake said. “It could make a lot more if I wanted to run it a little differently, but I don’t. To some people, it could be a gold mine. To me, it’s just a little tiny gold mine, but it’s the only gold mine I’ve got. And if anything happened to it, I’d be just another press agent out of a job.”
Malone nodded. “Of course,” he said, “if it burned down, or blew up, or was robbed, or someone threw bricks through the windows, you do have insurance.”
“Sure,” Jake said. He grinned wryly. “Only that isn’t the angle. Nothing quite that crude.”
“Begin at the beginning,” Malone said. “It’s customary.”
“It began with a telephone call,” Jake said. “Salesman for a protection agency. You know the routine. One grand a month, and nobody will drop stink bombs down your chimney. I told him to go to hell. Two days later a couple of guys came to call. They”—again he grinned wryly—“quote, urged me to reconsider my decision, unquote. I kicked them out. Then one of the bartenders—George, you know him, the fat guy with the bushy eyebrows—was caught selling liquor to a minor.
Malone pursed his lips, laid down his cigar, and sat up straight. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Turned out I didn’t need to,” Jake said. “George swore he didn’t know the kid was under twenty-one, and I still believe him. I paid the fine and thought I’d be stuck with a threat of having the license revoked. But the whole thing was settled, slick as a whistle. Then comes another call, telling me that was just a warning. The price had gone up to two grand a month. I lost my temper and said a bad word over the phone. Two days later one of my waiters was picked up for selling reefers in the Casino.”
He paused, lit a new cigarette, and said, “That time, I damn near did call you. Because I’d never hired that waiter. He was a plant.”
“I’d guessed that,” Malone said. “Only you couldn’t have proved it in court. In a pinch you couldn’t have proved that you didn’t know all about it.”
“And—” Jake began.
“Shut up,” the little lawyer said crossly. “I can tell the rest of it. If you hadn’t paid protection money, there would be more arrests. Finally, an injunction closing the Casino, and you thrown in the jug. After that, you’d be approached— sell the Casino for a small sum, the injunction would be lifted, and you’d be sprung from the can. After which, you’d go back to being a press agent, and someone would own a gold mine.”
Jake crushed out his cigarette and said, “How the hell do you know all this?”
“Because,” Malone said, “the Casino isn’t the only night club in Chicago, and you aren’t my only client. And this isn’t the first time this racket has been worked. It’s a damn slick trick, I wish I’d thought of it myself. Somebody owns a lot of saloons by now, and has a tidy sum of money tucked away. How much did you pay, and who to, and where?”
A dull red color crept into Jake’s cheeks. “Damn it, Malone. What else could I do?”
“Nothing,” the lawyer told him, “and answer my question.”
“Two grand a month,” Jake said. “I’ve had to go into debt. I paid off to a guy named Ambersley, who met me at The Happy Days bar. A white-haired guy with a broken-down face. Looked familiar to me, but I never could figure where I’d met him.”
“The Happy Days bar,” Malone said thoughtfully, “is where Big Joe Childers was killed.”
“And I was there,” Jake said. “I was sitting in a booth, waiting for Ambersley. I saw the man in the corridor—I know now it was Ike Malloy. I heard the shot. I—Malone!” He ran his lean brown fingers through his unruly red hair.
“Never mind,” Malone said. “I’d have done the same thing myself.” He poured a little more gin in Jake’s glass. “In your place, I’d have ducked out quick before the cops broke in, because you couldn’t be caught in a joint like The Happy Days on a pay-off trip. What’s more, I’d probably have kept my mouth shut afterward. So stop worrying.”
“I’m not worrying,” Jake said. “Only you see, afterward Ambersley talked
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