The barkeep was a young guy with a fresh white apron on; he had a solitary customer, a fat man in a light, wrinkled summer worsted, whose eyes looked as though they had been cooked.
“Where’s Polumbo?” Terrin asked.
The kid wagged his head briefly.
“He’s not around.”
“Maybe he is.” Terrin leaned both elbows on the rim of the tiny bar. “He wants to know about Liano.”
The kid — on the bar-shelf a sign with a removable name-plate stated that “Jimmy” was on duty — indicated a door near the back of the bar. He said, “Last door down the hall, on the right.”
“Thanks, Jimmy.” Luette trailed after Terrin while looking back at Jimmy. The lock on the door clicked, and they went through.
Jimmy inspected a cigarette burn on the walnut bar, polished it thoughtfully with a beery rag. He told the fat man: “I think you better beat it.”
“One more drink,” the fat man said. “Make it stiff; I can’t feel nothing.”
At the back of the hall, Terrin grasped the doorknob, found the door open. Luette crowded into a small chamber behind him and closed the door gently.
Jack the Bug Polumbo had been awake all last night. The skin under his eyes looked deadish and baggy. He had bunchy ears like mushrooms, straight black hair, and he was a bigger man than Terrin, who was big. He was writing in a canvas-bound ledger on a littered desk, and his head came up with a wondering, weary slowness. He had somber, dead-black eyes, and be asked in a monotone, “What did you come here for, you Gawd-damned fools?”
He folded the ledger shut and sat there, two hundred and twenty-odd pounds of fat and muscle bulging through his soiled clothes.
“We lost that grand,” Terrin said. “We come back for another one.”
After a stare Polumbo said, “You’re out of your mind. How did you get in here?”
“Jimmy, out there. Pal of ours.”
The muscles bulged momentarily along Polumbo’s swarthy jaws. After another pause he asked. “What makes you think I owe you a grand? Didn’t I pay you guys once?”
“I just told you it got lost.” Terrin made his voice heavy and patient. “It blew out the window; a guy picked it up and beat it before we could get down there.”
“You must be going nuts!” Polumbo complained. “Is it my fault if you lose your dough?”
“You don’t get it.” Terrin started over. “We did this job for you — we bumped this guy — and we got nothing to show for it. See? We can’t bump off a guy we never seen before, and not get any dough for it. You can see that: that’s business.”
“What’s business? Listen, Terrin,” Polumbo said, “the only thing I heard about you was that you’d do a job if the price was right, and you said you’d do it for a grand. I never heard that you were dumb. I passed you that grand down in that bar yesterday, and now you’re trying to tell me I didn’t.”
“Sure you did,” Terrin agreed calmly. “Only we haven’t got it any more. We didn’t use any part of it; if we used some of it would be different. You owe us a grand.”
“Say, what’s the matter with you guys? I paid you a grand, didn’t I? How do you figure, anyhow?”
“You wrote on the back of that bill.”
“Sure I wrote on it. What the hell? Do you think I want to shoot off my mouth that I’m hiring you to kill a guy, and some fink will hear me and tell the cops? You looked at it, didn’t you? That’s all there is to it.”
Terrin’s heavy lips grinned. “It’s your fault we lost that grand. You wrote on the back — the guy’s name, Frank Liano, and his address, and so on.”
“Sure. You read it.”
“Sure I read it. Only we had to buy an eraser to erase that off. We couldn’t pass it that way. I was at the window in the hotel erasing it, and all of a sudden the damned bill blew right out the window. Things like that happen. We had to erase it, and if that writing wasn’t on it, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Polumbo kept his hands spread out in sight, and they twitched a little on top of the ledger. They were whopping big hands, with stumpy, pale fingers like country sausages. For all his size he could move fast and handle one of them, but not both Luette and Terrin. He temporized, “Did you take care of that Liano all right? How?”
“We picked him up where you said,” Terrin recounted. “We took him down to the car. He got rubber legs and we had to drag him, but that was all right, he was drunk, maybe or scared. Up on the Number 3 Transverse in Central Park I just took the thing out and stuck it under his ear. There was no cars or anybody around, except maybe somebody in the bushes.”
“Your car must look nice.”
“I’m not dumb. I had the guy on the flood with his head on an old pillow. He was just like jelly. I was telling him this one about the drunk that was trying to break into his own house, see, and I stuck the thing under his ear while he was listening, and it just made a little pop. And the slug sticks in the pillow, too.”
Polumbo’s face expressed something like satisfaction.
“Then we drove east to the river, and found a dead end where there was nobody around, and dropped him off a barge.”
Polumbo nodded, eying his callers critically. There was his girl, Audrey Starr, whom he was keeping in the apartment down in the Village. She had been two-timing him with young Frankie Liano; he couldn’t take it out on her because there weren’t enough like her to go around, as it was; so he got the same result by removing the temptation.
There was nothing to connect him with the murder except these guys. He had paid them, and the dirty chiselers were back already with a squirrely story about losing the grand out the window. As though that could happen! If he gave in to them now, they’d keep right on coming back for more.
“O.K., boys,” said Jack the Bug. “But you don’t think you’ll be coming this way again, do you?”
“Not a chance,” Terrin promised readily. He looked steadily at Luette.
On the desk was a large cashbox, and alongside it a couple of canvas bags of coin. The lid of the box was up, but the contents couldn’t be seen. Polumbo stuck his paw into the box with deliberation, scowling, grasped firmly the butt of the .38 revolver which acted as a paperweight for a loose pile of currency. Terrin advanced expectantly.
Polumbo fired through the lid of the box. With the advantage of surprise he thought he could get both men, and nearly did. But Luette had a gun in his hand as though it had simply sprouted from his fist, and the two reports occurred almost together.
Jack the Bug sat still for a minute with his eyes open. Then his lungs deflated with a bubbling sigh, spattering blood across the ledger. There was a puncture in his fat, perspiring neck, and some of the back of his head was missing. Luette had ducked and fired upward, but Polumbo’s bullet had hit his pal, Terrin. Polumbo leaned forward heavily, struck the desk with his chest; his chair shot out behind him, dumping his bulk to the floor with a crash.
Luette bent over Terrin. There was a hole in the redhead’s back under the shoulder blade, so that was that. He darted his eyes around, listening and breathing hard, his ears ringing.
He looked into the cashbox. There was a lot of money in it, much more than the receipts of one night’s business; plainly it constituted Jack the Bug’s entire wealth. Closing the perforated lid, he tucked the box under his arm. He cracked the door open furtively, listened some more, slipped out and cat-footed down the hall toward the bar.
When he heard the blunt bark of a shot, then another in swift succession, Jimmy raised his head with an air of quiet malice. Then came a crash from the back room, as though someone had felled an ox. He said to the fat man, “Scram.”
The fat man didn’t have to be told. A Collins slipped from his hand, smashed on the bar rail. With his stomach bouncing ludicrously in his waddling run he reached the head of the stairs. At which point he had propelled his bulk to such a speed that his short legs couldn’t keep up; he sat down and went rumbling in that fashion all the way down to the street.