“Like Happy Lado and Silk Flaim, huh?” Slabbe mused. “You think they’re coming together here in our peaceful metropolis to cut the cake?”
“Maybe,” Gage said cautiously. “We’ll see. There was a girl working with ’em, too, when they heisted that jewelry store in Philly last month. At least, she was Tommy Rex’s girl, and she dropped out of sight about the time the others did. Pola Velie. Get a lead to her and I’ll kiss you.”
Slabbe made a “phlutting” sound with his lips. “Any other little thing I can do for you, cousin?”
“Well—” Gage broke off. Then he hissed: “Here comes Tommy out of the washroom. I’ll call you back.”
The line went dead and Slabbe knuckled an itch somewhere in the quarter-inch-long gray bristles that grew on his head. He finished the current quart of beer, deposited the empty in a desk drawer and got another one going, out of the refrigerator conveniently near his desk. His ample poundage was not distributed at all awkwardly on his six-one, but sitting down made his thick shoulders all the bulkier. He telephoned Homicide Lieutenant Carlin, over at the City Hall.
“Got something, Pat,” he said. “A Zenith op just put Tommy Rex down here on the two-thirty from Philly. He, the op, wonders if Happy Lado or Silk Flaim are slumming around. See ’em?”
Carlin cursed, said no, he hadn’t seen ’em and hoped to hell he didn’t, and cursed some more.
“Don’t bust,” Slabbe advised. “I’d say they’ll be good boys. They’re not here to turn anything, just to divvy up the stuff they heisted out of that jewelry store, last month.”
“Oh, sure!” Carlin spat. “They’ll be good, eh? Guys like that have a habit of making nasty remarks to each other with forty-five’s.”
“Tommy Rex’s girl friend, Pola Velie, might be around, too,” Slabbe continued. “Just letting you know, is all. I’ll call you back when and if.”
“When and if what?” Carlin demanded.
“When and if anybody makes any nasty remarks to anybody.” Slabbe chuckled, and hung up. He held his hand on the receiver while he squinted thoughtfully, then he called four numbers rapidly, said each time that a grunt responded: “Tell Whitey Fite I want him.” This done, he tilted back again and waited. Once he slid his .38 out of its rig under his armpit, checked it and eased it back.
The time elapsed since Al Gage’s first call and his second was no more than twenty minutes. This time the Zenith operative said: “I’m at the Carleton Arms Hotel. Tommy came straight here, looked over the lobby like he was expecting somebody but didn’t get his expectations and went into the dining room and ordered. He’ll be set here till he wraps around a steak. Step over.”
“Five minutes,” Slabbe said.
“How will I know you?” Gage asked.
“I look like a mucker,” Slabbe said. “Wearing gray tropical worsteds, green sports shirt and white Panama hat.”
He finished his beer with a gulp that wouldn’t have dropped the Pacific ocean more than an inch, tossed a handful of chiclets into his mouth and used ten minutes to walk over to the Carleton Arms Hotel. Barney McPhail, the head houseman, spotted him coming into the luxurious lobby and looked less happy. “Now what?” he said.
Slabbe murmured: “The guy must be good if you didn’t spot him.”
“Who?” McPhail sighed.
“A Zenith op,” Slabbe explained. “He’s waiting for me here somewheres.”
McPhail bristled and scanned the lobby. “Don’t tell me I can’t spot a dick.”
Slabbe felt a touch on his arm, turned and saw an inconspicuous man at his elbow. “Gage?” he said, and when the man nodded briefly, Slabbe said to McPhaiclass="underline" “That’s right, Barney, you can’t spot a dick. Let us be, now, and you won’t have any headaches.”
He followed Gage to adjoining chairs which commanded a view of the dining room entrance. Gage passed over his wallet. Slabbe looked at a card in a celluloid protector that informed whoever it concerned that Albert Gage was an operative of the Zenith Detective Agency. The description on the back of the card fit the man in the chair: five feet eight, one hundred sixty-five pounds, brown hair, green eyes, pale complexion, no distinguishing blemishes, age 44. It did not mention the fatigue that deepened the crow’s feet around Al Gage’s eyes and the tired lines beside his mouth.
“Boy, am I pooped,” Gage groaned. “In case I fall asleep while I’m talking, Tommy Rex is a husky good-looking blond guy about six feet, a hundred and eighty pounds. Blue eyes, small tight mouth, small ears close to his head, wearing a tan gabardine sport jacket and brown slacks and brown and white shoes. He’s still in the mess hall. He isn’t walking so chipper. He just got out of a Philly hospital this A.M.”
“That where you picked him up?” Slabbe asked.
“Uh-huh.” Gage closed his eyes wearily for a few seconds, rubbing his forehead, then smacking ft with the heel of his hand to zip up the circulation.
“Keep your eyes closed if it’ll rest ’em a little,” Slabbe said sympathetically.
“Thanks. I was doing some stuff upstate the last couple days and nights and just got back to Philly this morning and heard Tommy was being discharged from the hospital, and got right on him. He and Happy Lado and Silk Flaim knocked off a jewelry store last month in Philly and picked up eighty thousand in unset stones. You know that. What you maybe don’t know is that since Pola Velie, Tommy’s lady friend, dropped out of sight along with Happy and Silk, she was in on it. How we figure it is that she was outside of the jewelry store and they passed her the stuff on the way out. She’d be supposed to meet them later for the split.”
“So close to Philly as here?” Slabbe objected. “It’s only an hour on the train.”
“Well, they might’ve changed plans some on account of Tommy going to the hospital for a month,” Gage explained. “See, he cracked up in the getaway car. That was how we got onto him in the first place. The job went smooth: Tommy and his buddies slugged the clerks in the jewelry store from behind just when they were ready to close the vault for the day. No pedestrians outside the store noticed nothing fishy, and nobody could identify nobody. Tommy and his pals would have been away clean except they cracked up. We knew right away when they cracked up in the neighborhood five minutes after the heist that it was them that done it, but Happy and Silk got clear anyhow. Tommy was pinned behind the wheel but he didn’t have no evidence on him, not even a rod, and even the car wasn’t stolen but borrowed from a guy dumb enough, or maybe smart enough, to lend his car to a guy like Tommy.”
Slabbe nodded. “So Tommy went to the hospital and you waited for him to get out and tailed him.”
“Right.”
“And the change in their plans might be that since it’s a month old and Tommy might be weak and not in shape to travel a long ways, they’d come back this way and meet him here?”
Gage shrugged tiredly. “It depends on how good of guessers we are on Wednesdays. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe Tommy’s here for another reason and the others are out in Frisco. Did you check any place to see if Happy or Silk or the babe showed up here?”
“The cops say no,” Slabe said. “I’m contacting another guy who might know.”
“Stoolie?”
Slabbe nodded. “He’ll be sliding into my office any time, now. Would Tommy meet Happy and Silk right out in the open, like here?”
“I’d say no,” Gage admitted. “But he might meet Pola and she’d take him to them, on account of she’s a dame that can get by in ritzy places like this: tail, built, black hair and eyes, white skin, smooth dresser. Tommy don’t look no worse than a young lawyer hisself. They’d just pick a place like this to come together.”