A Real Gone Guy, page 2
“That’s the way they told the story. That’s not the way it happened. Hollister was murdered.”
“You’d better get yourself another boy. Or better still, a new head shrinker. That’s the way it happened. Hollister tried to shoot it out with two headquarters dicks. He only got one of them.”
“Would it hurt you to check into it? I’ll pay. I told you it was worth five hundred to me.”
Liddell swirled the liquor around the side of the glass, considered. “Suppose I say yes. Do I get to know who’s hiring me?”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It might be. You may know some things I should know.”
The girl on the other end laughed throatily. “Then you find them out. You’re the detective. That’s what I’m hiring you for.”
“Suppose I find out I was right the first time? Suppose I’m convinced Hollister was just a trigger-happy hood who was burned down while resisting arrest?”
“Then you keep the fee.”
Liddell grinned. “Suppose I take the fee and don’t even try?”
“You won’t. I’ve been in town three months and I’ve done a lot of checking. I’m willing to take the chance.”
“I should know where to contact you,” Liddell argued.
“I just told you. It’s not necessary.”
“Where do I send the receipt for the fee? Where do I report progress, if any?”
“I don’t need a receipt. And from what I’ve heard about you, I’ll be able to keep tabs on your progress just by reading the headlines.”
Liddell scowled at the mouthpiece. “This still doesn’t make sense. Why get me all the way down here into a phone booth to make a deal? Why not make it over the phone in my office?”
“I told you. They’d kill me if they knew I was trying to reopen the case. I couldn’t afford to be seen near you.”
“But?”
“I wanted a chance to look you over myself.”
Liddell held his hand over the mouthpiece, stuck his head out of the booth and looked around. He could see no other phones, nor was he visible to anybody standing outside the bar.
“Secondly,” the girl’s voice continued, “I could be wrong in what I heard about you. In that case, if you didn’t take the case I didn’t want to take the chance that maybe my voice had been recorded. The killers might recognize my voice from a recording.”
Liddell waved over a waiter. “Are there any other phone booths in here?”
The waiter shook his head.
“Liddell, are you listening?” the voice on the phone was querulous.
He stuck his head back into the booth. “Sure. I’ve just been thinking it over.”
The receiver laughed at him. “You’re a liar. You’re looking for me at the Savoy. You’re wasting your time. I’m nowhere near there.”
“I thought you wanted to look me over,” Liddell growled.
“I already have. And I liked what I saw.”
“I wish I could say as much.” Liddell handed his empty glass to the waiter, signaled for a refill. “You mentioned something about a fee?”
“You’ll take the case?”
“I’ll just satisfy myself that Hollister was killed resisting arrest, if that’s what you mean.”
“You won’t be satisfied,” she predicted.
“Maybe not. In that case you get your five hundred worth. That is, if I’ve gotten the five hundred.”
“Two hundred of it will be delivered to your office this evening, on account.”
“And anything you may have that will help me?”
There was a brief pause. “I have nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing that would convince the police. Or probably even you.” He could hear her breath drawn in. “But more than enough to convince me.”
There was a faint click as she broke the connection.
CHAPTER THREE
It was almost 5:30 when Johnny Liddell walked into the city room of the Dispatch. Already, approaching deadline had stepped up the tempo in the room. Phones were shrilling as leg men called in their stories, typewriters rattled as rewrite men dressed the bare facts into tomorrow morning’s news.
Johnny Liddell picked his way through the organized confusion, stopped at a little office that had been made by throwing three partitions up, using the wall of the building as the rear wall. It was furnished with a battered old typewriter desk and a machine of undistinguishable vintage. The cubicle was empty.
Les Marcus, the Dispatch’s City Hall man, looked up from a copy of a competitive evening tab. “Muggs hasn’t come back in yet, Liddell. The old man’s got her chasing a follow on that piece she did this morning on Jayne Mansfield. And that ain’t easy.” He balled the tab up, tossed it into a barrel-sized basket at his elbow. “Where’ll you be if she gets in?”
“Up with Jim,” Liddell told him. He headed for the city desk where Jim Kiely presided.
The city editor pushed his green eyeshade to the top of his head, grinned crookedly at the private detective. Jim Kiely was a thin, hollow-cheeked man with piercingly curious eyes. They were eyes that had seen almost everything and had known almost everybody worth the knowing in his thirty years with the Dispatch. They were eyes that made only a half-hearted attempt to disguise their disgust at having been fielded out to a desk job.
“How are you, Johnny?” Kiely greeted him. “You don’t get around here as much as you used to.” His eyes jumped from Liddell to the clock with which he fought a daily battle to deadline each evening at seven. The clock stared back at him blandly, impervious to the rapidly increasing crescendo of teletype pings, telephone shrillings, typewriter chatterings. Every night they fought the same battle, every night the clock emerged triumphant. Tonight would be the same.
Liddell grasped the gnarled claw the newspaperman shoved at him.
Kiely shook his hand free to pick up two typewritten pages of copy a boy stuck on his spindle. His eyes skipped along the lines, he grimaced. He looked around, spotted Teddy Levin in the slot.
“Tell Teddy to translate this into English,” he growled at the boy. “Bite it off at the end of page one and slug it for the second section.” He turned back to Liddell. “Not bad enough you got to make men out of them, you got to teach them to write on top of it. Well, what did bring you to this neck of the woods, Johnny?”
“Dropped by to see Muggs, but she wasn’t in. Thought I’d drop up and say hello to you.”
“Sure, sure. Look what a suspicious bastard I am. Here I thought there was something you wanted me to do for you.”
Liddell pursed his lips. “Now that you mention it, something does occur to me. How about letting me talk to the guy who covered the cop kill in the Hotel Seymour four, five months ago. I won’t keep him long.”
Kiely’s brow ridged for a moment. Liddell could almost hear the filing cabinet in the newspaperman’s brain opening and slamming.
“Seymour about four, five months ago?” he murmured. “Cop named Rosen was burned down. That the one you mean?”
Liddell nodded. “His partner got the guy who killed him. Right?”
“Yeah. Killer’s name was Hollister. He was wanted for mugging Tommy Lorenzo. Should have given him a medal. What’s your angle?”
Liddell shrugged. “Screwball stuff. Any chance of anything funny in Hollister’s kill?”
The interest drained from Kiely’s face. He shook his head, stole a look at the clock. “It was open and shut. The cops had Hollister pinned in, he tried to shoot his way out. Rosen stopped one and his partner, a guy named Ryan, Mike Ryan, evened it up.” His eyes roamed around the city room. “Casey Dennis covered it for us, but he’s out in Indiana doing an on the scene in that wife killing out there. He’s ghosting the Scotland Yard expert for us.”
Liddell nodded. “Okay if I prowl the morgue on it?”
Kiely forgot the clock momentarily, eyed Liddell suspiciously. “You sure there’s nothing in it for us?”
Liddell shook his head. “It’s like I told you. Screwball stuff. I’ve got a client thinks Hollister was murdered and the newspapers and everybody else are covering it up.”
Kiely snorted, yanked some copy off the hook, started slugging it. “You ought to be arrested for obtaining money under false pretenses. Tell Pop I said it was okay for you to prowl. I’ll verify as soon as the pile-up eases.” He snapped the eyeshade into position, appeared to have forgotten that Liddell was there.
Now the copy was really beginning to pile in from the district men, from City Hall, from the wire services. Copy boys who had been crawling minutes ago were now scooting between desks with copy in one hand, galleys in the other. Cigarettes lay forgotten on the edges of desks, adding service stripes as they burned down through what was left of the varnish. Half-filled containers of coffee grew cold as the desks rattled under the stepped-up pounding of typewriters.
Liddell stopped by Muggsy’s cubbyhole again on the way out. It was still empty. He scribbled a note on a sheet of copy paper, stuck it into her typewriter. On the way out, he waved to Les Marcus, but the City Hall man looked right through him, his lips forming the words of the story he was punching into shape for the early bird. Liddell recognized the stare as symptomatic of the disease that struck all good newspapermen at almost the same time every day—deadlinitis. He beat a retreat for the corridor.
Here some degree of normalcy is recaptured. People still seem to walk, find time to stop and talk in the corridors of a newspaper office even at deadline. The business department does not suffer the same extreme pangs of deadlinitis that afflicts the editorial side. Its function, like that of an expectant father, is to perform its services early and then to sit and wait with the hope that the other partner brings forth a suitable result of its labors at the appointed time.
Liddell nodded to a couple of space salesmen he knew, headed for the Dispatch’s morgue. It was housed in the basement of the building, a suitable last resting place for dead news, dead speeches and dead personalities. Yesterday they were all hot, but since nothing is deader than yesterday’s news, today they wind up, appropriately enough, in the morgue.
Pop Totter presided over the row on row of fireproof filing cabinets with fierce devotion. His staff filed upwards of 2,000 clippings a week, clippings gathered not only from the Dispatch and its daily competitors but from other periodicals and publications. In his files, interred in large Manila envelopes, was every published fact about every public character. The envelopes bore not only the name of the subject, but cross references to every known character with whom he had come into contact during his brief tenure as news.
The old man pulled a battered briar from between his teeth, grinned a welcome to Liddell. “They farming you out on the dead file beat, too, Johnny?”
“The way business has been lately, even that’d be a pleasure, Pop.” Liddell walked up to where the old man leaned with both elbows on the counter that separated the files from the rest of the room. “Jim Kiely get through to you yet?”
The old man’s eyes rolled up to the big clock on the wall. “This close to deadline?” He stuck the pipe back between his teeth, rattled the juice in the bowl. “Unless he’s changed a lot since I was cityside he wouldn’t talk to the Queen of England this close to 7:30 let alone a broken down ex-district man.” His shrewd little eyes studied Liddell. “What was he supposed to be calling about?”
“I want to go through the files on a character named Hollister. Larry Hollister. Make him?”
The old man sucked on his dead pipe for a moment, pulled it from between his teeth, knocked the dottle to the floor. “I make him. A gun. Chilled a headquarters man on the way out.” He pulled a pouch from his hip pocket, dug the bowl of his pipe into it and started packing tobacco with the tip of his index finger. “What do you want with Hollister?”
“Just curious. Any objection to my prowling the file?”
Pop considered, shrugged. “Hell, no. It’s your time if you want to waste it.” He pushed a pad of printed forms across the counter. “Just fill out a slip and make a note that Jim Kiely okayed you.” He stuck the pipe back into his mouth, scratched a wooden match on the under side of the counter and sucked the pipe into life. “You want the cross sheets, too?”
Liddell scribbled his name on the form, nodded. “Might as well.”
Pop filled out the rest of the form, initialed it. “Can’t figure what you’d want with a no-good like him,” he complained. He shuffled back toward the files, trailing a cloud of grey-blue smoke in his wake.
In a few moments, he was back with four large Manila folders. “Hollister,” the old man tossed one folder on the counter. “Ryan—that’s the headquarters dick who stopped him.” He added the second folder. “Rosen, the dead dick. A good Joe, too. I remember him from when I was covering the 56th.” He dropped Rosen’s folder, studied the notation on the fourth. “And Tommy Lorenzo. That’s the guy Hollister killed in a stick-up. Funny thing, with all the guys who’d have a good reason to knock him off, he gets it in a stick-up.” He pushed the four folders across the desk toward Liddell. “Be my guest.”
“Thanks. One more favor?”
The old man nodded.
“Can I call my office?”
Pop pointed with the stem of the pipe to the far end of the counter. “Phone’s down there. Dial nine and get an outside wire.”
The redhead in Liddell’s office answered on the first ring. “Anything stirring, Pink?”
“A messenger came with an envelope for you. Said you were expecting it. But I didn’t know where to reach you.”
“I’m at the Dispatch.”
Her snort was clearly visible over the wire. “And here I was laboring under the delusion you were working. Doesn’t that female Richard Harding Davis even give you breathing time?”
“I am working. I’m checking on a guy. That’s what that message is about. Did you open it?”
“The messenger made a big production about it being for you personally.”
“Open it.”
There was a slight pause, then Pinky’s voice came back. “Hey, there’s a beautiful message here—two brand-new century notes. They’re real, aren’t they?”
“I hope so. No message with them?”
“Just a typewritten slip. No signature. It says”—She paused for a moment, then read—” ‘On account, as agreed.’ Does that mean we get more?”
“Yeah. Look, I’ll be here for the next hour or so. If nothing comes up that you need me for, I’ll check you in the morning.” He tossed the receiver back on its hook, picked up the stack of Manila envelopes and headed for a large library table.
Something over an hour later he straightened his cramped back, started shoveling piles of clippings back into the envelopes. When the table was cleared, he leaned back, lit a cigarette and glared at them. The envelopes represented facts, cold unvarnished facts. Yet, taken together, they presented a picture that struck a false note to him. While he couldn’t put his finger on where it struck false, the neatly tabulated and carefully compiled facts gave him the feeling that they had been carefully shaped to tell a prefabricated story.
CHAPTER FOUR
Outside the Dispatch, Johnny Liddell flagged down a southbound cab, gave the address of police headquarters and settled back against the cushions. The cabby threaded the big car in and out of traffic with the ease born of long experience. He studied Liddell curiously through the rearview mirror.
“You ain’t a reporter on that rag?” It was more a statement than a question.
Liddell shook his head. “No reporter.”
The cabby shifted a well macerated toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Copper, maybe?”
Liddell shook his head.
The cabby sniffed, applied himself to his driving for a moment. He hurled the cab at a minute opening between two lumbering trucks, decided at the last minute that he couldn’t make it, almost braked Liddell off the seat. He swung around the trucks, screamed invectives at the drivers, cut in front of them.
“They don’t know how to push a heap, they got no right driving,” he complained. He swung the cab out of the line of traffic, squealed into a left turn that made a driver coming the other way stand on his brake.
“Just playing detective,” the cabby picked up the conversation casually.
Liddell unbraced his feet against the seat in front of him, wiped his upper lip with the side of his hand. “How’s that again?”
The cab shuddered to a stop at a red light, the cabby swung around on his seat. “I like to try to figure my fares. You know, make like a detective.” He chewed on the toothpick thoughtfully. “I see you come out of a newspaper office, you ask for headquarters. I figure that means a reporter or a cop. Figures, don’t it?”
Liddell nodded. “It figures. I’m a private detective.”
The cabby looked hurt. “Well, hell, why didn’t you say so the first time? You could shake a guy’s confidence.” The light turned green, he swung around in his seat and the cab lurched forward with a roar, slamming Liddell back against the seat cushions. “Private cop, city cop. I had you pegged. Right?”
“You had me pegged.”
“So you’re a peeper, eh?” There was a new note of interest in the cabby’s voice. “I get the picture. You just pulled a sneak on the cops and you wanted to make sure they don’t hog the credit so you give it to the rags before you break down and let the cops in on it. Right?”
Liddell sighed. “You see too many television shows.”
The cab jumped a light, scattering pedestrians who screamed their indignation in its wake. “It figures, doesn’t it?” the cabby retorted in a hurt voice. “For what else would a peeper be going to headquarters of his own free will?”
“I’m a taxpayer. I want to see how they’re spending my money,” Liddell said. “Let me out at the annex.”
The cabby nodded his head knowingly. “Homicide! I knew it. You want to play it cozy, that’s okay by me. I’m a guy who strictly knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
