“Not there,” I said sullenly, “I’m holed up in a cheap furnished room now, off Second Avenue. I’ve hocked everything I own, down to my vaccination mark! How d’you suppose I got that lawyer Schlesinger for him? And a lot of good it did him! What a wash-out he turned out to be!”
“Don’t blame him,” he said. “He couldn’t buck that case we turned over to the State; Darrow himself couldn’t have. What he should have done was let him plead guilty to second-degree, then he wouldn’t be in line for short-circuiting. That was his big mistake.”
“No!” I shrilled at him. “He wanted us to do that, but neither Chick nor I would hear of it! Why should he plead guilty to anything, even if it was only housebreaknig, when he’s innocent? That’s a guilty man’s dodge, not an innocent man’s. He hasn’t got half-an-hour’s detention rightfully coming to him! Why should he lie down and accept twenty years? He didn’t lay a hand on Ruby Reading.”
“Eleven million people, the mighty State of New York, say that he did.”
I got out, went in the grubby entrance, between a delicatessen and a Chinese laundry. “Don’t come in with me, I don’t want to see any more of you!” I spat over my shoulder at him. “If I was a man I’d knock you down and beat the living hell out of you!”
He came on, though, and upstairs he closed the door, behind him, pushing me out of the way to get in. He said, “You need help, Angel Face, and I’m crying to give it to you.”
“Oh, biting the hand that feeds you, turning into a double-crosser, a turncoat!”
“No,” he said, “no,” and sort of held out his hands as if asking me for something. “Sell me, won’t you?” he almost pleaded. “Sell me that’s he’s innocent, and I’ll work my fingers raw to back you up! I didn’t frame your brother. I only did my job. I was sent there by my superiors in answer to the patrolman’s call that night, questioned Chick, put him under arrest. You heard me answering their questions on the stand. Did I distort the facts any? All I told them was what I saw with my own eyes, what I found when I got to Reading’s apartment. Don’t hold that against me, Angel Face. Sell me, convince me that he didn’t do it, and I’m with you up to the hilt.”
“Why?” I said cynically. “Why this sudden yearning to undo the damage you’ve already done?”
He opened the door to go. “Look in the mirror sometime and find out,” was all he said. “You can reach me at Center Street, Nick Burns.” He held out his hand uncertainly, probably expecting me to slap it aside.
I took it instead. “O.K., flatfoot,” I sighed wearily. “No use holding it against you that you’re a detective, you probably don’t know any better. Before you go, gimme the address of that jig maid of hers, Mandy Leroy. I’ve got an idea she didn’t tell all she knew.”
“She went home at five that day, how can she help you?”
“I bet she was greased plenty to soft-pedal the one right name that belongs in this case. She mayn’t have been there, but she knew who to expect around. She may have even tipped him off that Ruby Rose was throwing him over. It takes a woman to see through a woman, even a permanently sunburnt one.”
“Better watch yourself going up there alone,” he warned me. He took out a notebook. “Here it is, 118th, just off Lenox.” I jotted it down. “If she was paid off like you think, how you going to restore her memory? It’ll take heavy sugar...” He fumbled in his pocket, looked at me like he was a little scared of me, finally took out something and shoved it out of sight on the bureau. “Try your luck with that,” he said. “Use it where it’ll do the most good. Try a little intimidation with it, it may work.”
I grabbed it up and he ducked out in a hurry, the big coward. A hundred-and-fifty bucks. I ran out to the stairs after him. “Hey!” I yelled, “aren’t you married or anything?”
“Naw,” he called back, “I can always get it back, anyway, if it does the trick.” And then he added, “I always did want to have something on you, Angel Face.” I went back into my cubbyhole again. “Why, the big rummy!” I said hotly. I hadn’t cried in court when Chick got the ax, just yelled out. But now my eyes got all wet.
“Mandy doan live here no mo’e,” the colored janitor of the 118th Street tenement told me. I went there during the daylight hours, don’t worry. I wasn’t taking any chances on Harlem after dark by my lonesome.
“Where’d she go? And don’t tell me you don’t know, because it won’t work.”
“She done move to a mighty presumptuous neighborhood, doan know how come all of a sudden. She gone to Edgecomb Avenue.”
Edgecomb Avenue is the Park Avenue of New York’s darktown. She’d mentioned on the stand, without being asked, that Reading had died owing her two months’ wages. Yet she moves to the colored Gold Coast right on top of it. She hadn’t been paid off — not much!
Edgecomb Avenue is nothing to be ashamed of in any man’s town. Every one of the trim modern apartment buildings had a glossy private car or two parked in front of the door. I tackled the address he’d given me, and thought they were having a housewarming at first. They were singing inside and it sounded like a revival meeting.
A fat old lady came to the door, in a black silk dress, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’se her mother, honey,” she said softly in answer to what I told her, “and you done come at an evil hour. My lamb was run over on the street, right outside this building, only yesterday, first day we moved here! She’s in there daid now, honey. The Lawd give and the Lawd has took away again.”
I did a little thinking. Why just her, and nobody else, when she held the key to the Reading murder? “How did it happen to her, did they tell you?”
“Two white men in a car,” she mourned. “ ’Peared almost like they run her down purposely. She was walking along the sidewalk, folks tell me, wasn’t even in the gutter at all. And it swung right up on the sidewalk aftah her, go ovah her, then loop out in the middle again and light away, without nevah stopping!”
I went away saying to myself, “That girl was murdered as sure as I’m born, to shut her mouth. First she was bribed, then when the trial was safely over she was put out of the way for good!” Somebody big was behind all this. And what did I have to fight that somebody with? A borrowed hundred-and-fifty bucks, an offer of cooperation from a susceptible detective, and a face.
I went around to the building Ruby Rose had lived in, and struck the wrong shift. “Charlie Baker doesn’t come on until six, eh?” I told the doorman. “Where does he live? I want to talk to him.”
“He don’t come on at all any more. He quit his job, as soon as that—” he tilted his head to the ceiling, “mess we had upstairs was over with, and he didn’t have to appear in court no more.”
“Well, where’s he working now?”
“He ain’t working at all, lady. He don’t have to any more. I understand a relative of his died in the old country, left him quite a bit, and him and his wife and his three kids have gone back to England to live.”
So he’d been paid off heavily too. It looked like I was up against Wall Street itself. No wonder everything had gone so smoothly. No wonder even a man like Schlesinger hadn’t been able to make a dent in the case.
“But I’m not licked yet,” I said to myself, back in my room. “I’ve still got this face. It ought to be good for something. If I only knew where to push it, who to flash it on!”
Burns showed up that night, to find out how I was making out. “Here’s your hundred and fifty back,” I told him bitterly. “I’m up against a stone wall every which way I turn. But is it a coincidence that the minute the case is in the bag, their two chief witnesses are permanently disposed of, one by exportation, the other by hit-and-run? They’re not taking any chances on anything backfiring later.”