They were a good hundred yards away and Slabbe’s long legs pumped to close as much of the distance as possible before they glanced around and saw the score. But it was inevitable that the heist men should look around. They did so simultaneously. Slabbe saw Silk Flaim’s dark, thick features freeze into a stolid killer’s mask. Happy Lado’s knife-scarred lips, permanently twisted into a grin from which he’d derived his nickname, pulled back on his teeth.
Both men let go of Abe Morse and clawed at their armpits. Abe dived headfirst into a hedge. Slabbe saw Al Gage going for a gun.
“No!” he bellowed. “The kids!”
He put on a burst of speed, a hand out to knock Gage’s gun down. He saw Silk Flaim’s hairy hand kick, and gun thunder drowned a child’s shriek. Gage went down on a knee. He snapped two shots. Happy Lado returned one. Slabbe hit Gage. There were no further shots from Silk Flaim. Slabbe didn’t notice exactly: he and Gage were tangled together on the sidewalk. Gage was cursing obscenely, trying to scramble for his gun, which had been knocked free.
Slabbe clawed at him, grunting. “The kids, you dam’ fool! They’ll get hurt!”
Gage went on his face again as Slabbe’s paw slapped on his rump. Slabbe looked down the street to place Happy and Silk so he’d know which way to roll out of the line of fire. Silk was easy to place, and would be from then on. Gage’s shots had been centered.
Happy was away, though, legs scissoring. Abe Morse was scrambling out of the hedge, ready to give chase, but Slabbe saw that it would need a sprinter now and Abe was no chicken. Happy rounded a corner and was out of sight. Abe made a beautiful try by charging unerringly across a lawn to cut into the next street and head Happy off, but Slabbe knew Abe didn’t have the moxie to overcome the heist man’s start.
He heaved to his feet, dusted his knees and helped Gage up. The Zenith op’s green eyes were bitter. “I would’ve got Happy, too, you dam’ fool!” he grated.
“And maybe Junior Smith or Mary Jones!” Slabbe snapped.
“I shoot where I aim! Look at Silk!”
Slabbe growled: “I wasn’t worrying about our shots — I was worrying about theirs. If you hadn’t zeroed in on Silk, he’d have kept shooting wild.” He turned from Gage, sang out: “Beat it, kids! Go home! We’re truant officers!” A beat cop’s whistle shrilled somewhere.
Gage wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, spat, picked up his gun and started for the dark huddle that Silk Flaim made on the sidewalk. He was muttering to himself, and Slabbe slung an arm over his shoulders, saying: “Lookit those kids scatter. Suppose one of them was keeping Silk company?”
“All right, all right,” Gage rasped. “You were right, I was wrong! I got one of the sons, anyhow!” He bent over Silk Flaim and started to rifle the man’s pockets. Slabbe stooped beside him, bumped him a little. Gage sprawled again and roared: “Watch what you’re doing, you big tank!”
“Simmer down,” Slabbe said easily and searched Silk. He found no jewels.
Gage punched the sidewalk. “It would happen like this! I get the guy who don’t have the stuff!”
Slabbe snapped his fingers, whirled toward the apartment house. He said: “If the dame is there and heard the shooting, she’s gone now!”
Pola Velie was in apartment 2-A, however, though she hadn’t heard the shooting or anything else for some time. She’d been tortured and killed.
Chapter Two
One Good Burn Deserves Another
Slabbe looked at the tall, black-eyed, black-haired girl tied hand and foot in an overstuffed chair beside the blaring radio. She was dressed smoothly in lime-green gabardine and a yellow silk blouse, and her skin was very white: so white that it made the angry rosettes on her long arms and soft throat uglier and crueler by contrast.
“They worked on her with lighted cigarettes,” Slabbe said, deep in his chest. Gage, beside him, gave no sign of having heard. He simply stared at the dead woman and breathed heavily.
Slabbe reached out and snapped off the radio. The volume had been turned full on to drown out Pola Velie’s cries. She had been gagged, too, but the wadded handkerchiefs which had been used had been torn out of her sensuous mouth, as if the killer had tried to get a last word out of her before she died.
Al Gage said thickly: “Happy and Silk did it to her. You should’ve let me blast Happy, too.”
Slabbe straightened his shoulders and his jaw took up its normal rhythm on his chewing gum. If his granite-soft face had shown anything, it did so no longer. It was set, and his gray eyes were opaque. He glanced around the room. It was ripped and stripped, and a bedroom beyond had received the same treatment.
“It shapes up different than we figured,” he murmured. “They weren’t coming together to divvy up. Looks more like Pola ran out on Silk and Happy, maybe to meet Tommy here, and they caught her.”
Gage agreed: “They give her the business to make her say where she hid the jewels, only she don’t talk. So they strip the place and kill her.”
“How?” Slabbe asked. “How’d they kill her, I mean? No marks of gun or knife. She wasn’t choked, and poison doesn’t fit their style.” He bent over the girl and probed spatulate fingers into her thick dark hair, exploring the skull thoroughly. “She wasn’t slugged,” he decided. “We’ll have to wait for an autopsy.”
Gage flopped into a chair, pinching and massaging the back of his neck wearily. “Maybe I ain’t sorry at that. It’s cops’ work now. I can get some sleep.”
“I wonder if Happy got the jewels,” Slabbe pondered.
Gage waved at the ripped upholstery and broken furniture, the wallpaper stripped here and there. “If Pola had them, Happy got ’em,” he said. “Nothing’s been missed.”
“Yeah, but maybe she didn’t have them,” Slabbe reminded.
“She could have them stashed somewhere else,” Gage admitted, “but it ain’t likely. If she was crossing Happy and Silk by running out on them to meet Tommy, she’d have the stuff right with her. Happy got it.”
“Maybe.”
Gage scowled. “What do you mean?”
Slabbe chewed placidly. “I wonder is Nikki tricky.”
Gage jerked. “Nikki? Oh, the babe who rents here?”
Slabbe nodded. “Who is she? Where is she? Why did Pola come to her? If Nikki knew that Pola was connected with the heist, then she might know, or figure, that Pola was packing the jewels. Maybe Nikki tied into Pola.”
The Zenith investigator’s lips moved in tired swear words. “Let’s just keep it simple. Let’s just drag the town for Happy Lado.”
“We’ll do that,” Slabbe soothed, “but until we get the loot right in our hands we can’t be sure just what happened. How close we are to right depends, like you said, on how good of guessers we are on Wednesdays.”
He cocked an ear. A siren’s whining was dying in the street. Slabbe took three strides into the bedroom, eyes cruising one quick trip around the room. The mattress had been ripped, the drawers pulled out. The only thing that looked as if it hadn’t been upset was a small framed picture of a man on the dresser. There was handwriting on the picture. Slabbe swept it into his pocket and was back in the other room beside Gage when police brogues rumbled on the stairs and Homicide Lieutenant Carlin’s long, bony nose appeared in the doorway. His dark eyes flashed hotly.
“Now, now, we didn’t do it,” Slabbe clucked. “Gage here is the Zenith op I told you about. He potted Silk Flaim out on the sidewalk. We got the tip to come here from Whitey Fite.” Slabbe went on, explaining.