A Real Gone Guy, page 19
“Locate Jim Kiely. Try his home, or Muggsy’s. Any place he might be. I’ve got to reach him right away.” His eyes rolled up to the clock on the wall, and he checked it against his wristwatch. Then he pulled a sheet of copy paper in front of him, and started listing assignments for members of the staff in case it turned out that Eddie Sims was right, and the Dispatch would be forced to prove it could bury its own dead.
He finished with the assignment list, waved down a copy boy who was sauntering to the copy control desk with some Hold Matter. “You, boy! Hit the Annex and any other bars around that are still open. Round up anybody you recognize.” The boy dropped the galleys on the nearest desk, scurried for the door.
The telephone on Gold’s desk started pealing again. He cut it off with a scoop. “Desk.”
Jim Kiely’s voice was irritable. “What’s up, Bernie?”
“Got a call from Eddie Sims, one of our district men. Says they found Larry Jensen’s body in a parked car on Pier 26.”
There was the sound of a sharply drawn breath across the wire.
“Any special instructions?” Gold wanted to know.
“Play it by ear until we get more to go on.” There was a brief pause. “Locate Liddell. Have him meet me on Pier 26. I’ll be in touch.” The connection was broken at Kiely’s end.
Bernie Gold depressed the crossbar on the telephone.
“This is Gold. Locate Johnny Liddell for me. Try his home number and his answering service. But get him!”
Johnny Liddell was seated at the end of the bar in Mae’s Bottle Club on West 58th Street at 3:30 that morning. He was perched on a tall stool, watching the bartender making a production of building a drink halfway down the bar. He hadn’t made up his mind yet whether or not to accept the open invitation in the eyes of the redhead in the décolleté when the phone rang.
He watched idly while the bartender scooped the phone from the back bar, held it to his ear. His eyes ran along the people at the bar, stopped at Liddell. He covered the mouthpiece.
“Your service, Johnny. Want to take it?”
Liddell nodded, reached out for the phone. He looked down the bar toward the redhead as he held it to his ear, grinned. She smiled back, picked up her drink, started down the bar to where he sat.
“Yeah, Lee?”
“You told me not to bother you unless it was important, Johnny. You have a call from Jim Kiely of the Dispatch.”
Liddell watched with interest the dip in the décolletage as the redhead squirmed up onto the stool at his side. “What’s he want?”
“He wants you to meet him on Pier 26, East River. A reporter of his named Larry Jensen has been murdered. He wants you to get there as soon as you can.”
“Okay,” Liddell sighed. He handed the phone back to the bartender, stared into the slanted green eyes of the girl next to him. He sighed again at what he read there. He patted her knee. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”
The redhead started to say something, her mouth hung open as she watched him hop off his stool, head for the small vestibule at the entrance. She looked from his retreating back to the bartender and back. Then she expressed a highly censurable opinion.
At ten minutes to four, Liddell’s cab rocketed along South Street, skidded into a screeching turn onto Pier 26. At the far end of the pier he could see a cluster of cars and people milling around. He reached forward, tapped the cabby on the shoulder. “Wait for me,” he directed. He recognized Jim Kiely’s big sedan parked off to the side, empty. He headed for the cars and people on the end of the pier.
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Copyright © 1956 by Frank Kane, Registration Renewed 1984
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4029-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4029-5
Frank Kane, A Real Gone Guy
