“She catch you kissin’ the maid?”
He is pained. “Tim, you know I don’t look at no dame but Susie.”
This is true. He got a dozen dolls running around half-naked in his Chromos Club six nights a week and he could take his pick, any time he wants. But he treats them all like sisters, what I understand.
Susie Schlemmer is the one he picks, two years ago, right out of the hat check, and she takes him for the big fall. City Hall wedding, by the mayor, no less, who makes a nice, simple speech about marriage — no reform talk tacked on, either. Then Bobo takes his bride to Europe, all over France and Switzerland, real cultural — though I hear he stops in at Monte Carlo and picks up a little bundle, several times more than what the trip costs him.
“Tim,” Bobo says, “this convertible is for Susie, the way I said. We are in a little strain, you see. I think the car will make some points for me.” He grunts. We cruise around the block. “Right now, to make everything copasetic, I got the need of a little favor and you are the fellow can do it for me.”
I sit quiet, my hat off, letting the breeze dust my overheated bald spot.
“It’s worth five C’s to me,” Big Bobo says. “Plus we clean up the rest of the tab you’re into me.”
Now Big Bobo Barsted is not the kind of guy who goes around separating himself from the folding coin, can he help it. Even for his ever-loving Susie.
“Legal?” I say.
He laughs. “Getting dainty, Tim? I seen the day half a grand gets you real busy, no questions asked.”
“I’m a sergeant now.”
“So this is legal, Tim.”
I settle back on the cushions. “What’s the pitch?”
“Very simple. There is this scumbo, name of Larry Melody. You know him?”
“The guy who dances in your club?”
“The same,” says Bobo. “Well, he and my wife Susie — they been seeing too much of each other lately. I don’t like it. Now I got the fix in at Headquarters to have Melody’s entertainer’s license revoked, but I want you to personally escort him out of town for me. Tonight. Right to the Nevada state line.”
“That’s all? For five notes, this is not a very great deal of work, Bobo.”
He coughs, very polite. “I want you should make sure he gets the point to stay over the state line, Tim. Now, I don’t say you got to break his neck or anything, but if you was to rearrange his nose a little...”
“Unpretty him some, you mean.”
“Y’understand, I could just hire a muscle, but I want to get a good job done, and this is right down your street. Besides, you got the police car. It is very important that you got the police car because you can give him a little trip in it and nobody takes a second look.”
A real thinker, this Bobo. “No trouble at all, Bobo.”
We make a turn and there is my police car parked where we left it. Clancy is out at the curb, walking up and down, waiting for me. I get out and Bobo takes the green convertible away from there and I go over to the patrol car.
“What’s up?” Clancy says.
“Nothin’. Absolutely nothing’. Just talkin’ to an old friend. D’you mind?”
“What did he want? Did you tell him he is not supposed to cut in like that?” Clancy shoots the questions like he is studying to be the next D.A.
I climb in behind the wheel and do my best not to pay any attention to him. But he’s as jumpy as a brand-new father at the christening and he comes around to my side of the car and stands there, his hands on his hips, his jaw sticking out like a shovel.
“Is it... is it trouble, Sarge?”
“The guy wanted to know if the dew is goin’ to hurt the tomato patch. C’mon, Sherlock, get in the car.”
So he shrugs. “Okay,” he says, “you know what you’re doing,” and he slams the car door.
That is when the stars fall down and the drum and bugle corps goes off inside my skull. For a minute there it is like all the hangovers I’ve ever had, all put together — only it is not my skull that hurts; it is my arm, my working arm, my left one. It is just like somebody chops with an axe across my fingers.
“Sarge! I’m sorry!”
It is Clancy telling how terrible he feels, catching my hand in the car door like this. He feels terrible! My left hand is puffing balloon-size already, a big red crease throbbing across the back of it.
“You dumb baboon!” I manage. “You—”
He slides me over on the seat. “I’ll take you to Doc Spensil, Sarge. Gosh, you don’t know how sorry I am.”
Well, it is a break for me, all right. Not a compound fracture of the dingus whatchamacallis, says Doc Spensil, the department surgeon, but it is a bone bust just the same, and I gotta stay off any hands, he tells me.
Of all the times to get a bust hand! I wonder if I can beat the rap if I put a couple of .38 slugs in that bird-brain Ed Clancy.
Doc is not too much put out when Clancy rings his door bell this time of night and he shoots me right into his front parlor office and tells Clancy to go back and wait in the patrol car.
After he looks the mitt over he says, “We’ll just slap her in a little old cast, Tim, and I’ll send the report in to Monaghan. He’ll take you off the car patrol for a while.” He hunts through the pile of Racing Forms on his desk until he pulls out a medical report sheet. “Want me to write you up for limited duty?”
“Hell, no!”
With my good flipper I grab the sheet. I am thinking of them five hundred iron men of Bobo’s and how I can sure make them go to work for yours truly. But I can’t do no beat-up job for him, my hand in a cast and all, not if I want to make it a good piece of work. A one-hand deal means I got to handcuff this Larry Melody to a tree or something to give him his clumps, which is not the way I like to do it. A good beating is a two-hand proposition, way I see it, and I know Big Bobo has faith in my work, else he doesn’t hand out this job to me in the first place. Ed Clancy, I think, you dog, you!
“Look, Doc, suppose you just forget all about this here little accident. Suppose you don’t tell the Chief nothin’. If anybody — especially Monaghan — should happen to ask you did you treat Jim Fagan the other night, why you don’t know a blasted thing about it.”
“But Tim—”
“I got my reasons, Doc, y’understand. Ain’t no skin off you, now, is it?”
“Well,” he says, pulling at his lip. “But what about that playmate of yours, that Clancy?”
“I’ll take care of that jerk. He won’t peep.” I hold out my hand. “Can’t you just sorta slap some plaster of pans on the mitt and let it go at that?”
“Well, Tim—”
I know the tone of voice. So I promise him twenty-five bucks come payday if he’ll just do the necessary repairs and keep his official trap shut. I also tip him to a hot one that is running tomorrow and he does the business on my hand so it don’t look like I’m carrying nothing bigger than a grapefruit when the fist is all wrapped up.
Outside, I tell Clancy to keep the seat warm for a little while longer and I go down the block a little way to a little ginmill that I know where I grab a quick medicinal bracer, and then I use the phone booth and a couple of numbers I got in a special inside pocket.
I try Eddie the Carrot’s horse parlor first, because that is where Big Bobo sometimes opens his satchel at this time of the night, but I draw a blank; Eddie ain’t seen my boy. It is the same with Mother Mary’s novelty shop and with old Preacher Kelley’s Super-Salvation Shelter; neither joint has got a line on him today, though the Preacher tells me, between pulls at his bottle of musky, that he expects the big boy one time or another, maybe tonight. These are honest hand-book havens that Bobo has right in his pocket and they are on my own list, too, for a touch now and again when I give them the word that the raids are heading in their direction so they should put the chalk boards away and imitate the business they are supposed to be in.