Something had to be done about ready cash. He ran his mind over a list of prospective lenders. The only possibility was Max Hook. No, the last time he’d borrowed money from the Hook, he’d got into no end of trouble. Besides, he was going to ask another kind of favor from the gambling boss.
Malone went down Washington street, turned the corner, went into Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar, and cornered its proprietor at the far end of the room.
“Cash a hundred dollar check for me, and hold it until a week from,” — Malone made a rapid mental calculation — “Thursday?”
“Sure,” Joe the Angel said. “Happy to do you a favor.” He got out ten ten-dollar bills while Malone wrote the check. “Want I should take your bar bill out of this?”
Malone shook his head. “I’ll pay next week. And add a double rye to it.”
As he set down the empty glass, he heard the colored janitor’s voice coming faintly from the back room.
The voice stopped suddenly. For a moment Malone considered calling for the singer and asking to hear the whole thing, all the way through. No, there wasn’t time for it now. Later, perhaps. He went out on the street, humming the tune.
What was it Paul Palmer had whispered in that last moment? “It wouldn’t break!” Malone scowled. He had a curious feeling that there was some connection between those words and the words of that damned song. Or was it his Irish imagination, tripping him up again? “You didn’t know his heart could break.” But it was Paul Palmer’s neck that had been broken.
Malone hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to the swank Lake Shore Drive apartment-hotel where Max Hook lived.
The gambling boss was big in two ways. He took in a cut from every crooked gambling device in Cook County, and most of the honest ones. And he was a mountain of flesh, over six feet tall and three times too fat for his height. His pink head was completely bald and he had the expression of a pleased cherub.
His living room was a masterpiece of the gilt-and-brocade school of interior decoration, marred only by a huge, battle-scarred roll-top desk in one corner. Max Hook swung around from the desk to smile cordially at the lawyer.
“How delightful to see you! What will you have to drink?”
“Rye,” Malone said, “and it’s nice to see you too. Only this isn’t exactly a social call.”
He knew better, though, than to get down to business before the drinks had arrived. (Max Hook stuck to pink champagne.) That wasn’t the way Max Hook liked to do things. But when the rye was down, and the gambling boss had lighted a slender, tinted (and, Malone suspected, perfumed) cigarette in a rose quartz holder, he plunged right in.
“I suppose you read in the papers about what happened to my client, Palmer,” he said.
“I never read the papers,” Max Hook told him, “but one of my boys informed me. Tragic, wasn’t it.”
“Tragic is no name for it,” Malone said bitterly. “He hadn’t paid me a dime.”
Max Hook’s eyebrows lifted. “So?” Automatically he reached for the green metal box in the left-hand drawer. “How much do you need?”
“No, no,” Malone said hastily, “that isn’t it. I just want to know if one of your boys — Little Georgie La Cerra — smuggled the rope in to him. That’s all.”
Max Hook looked surprised, and a little hurt. “My dear Malone,” he said at last, “why do you imagine he’d do such a thing?”
“For money,” Malone said promptly, “if he did do it. I don’t care, I just want to know.”
“You can take my word for it,” Max Hook said, “he did nothing of the kind. He did deliver a note from a certain young lady to Mr. Palmer, at my request — a bit of a nuisance, too, getting hold of that admittance order signed by the warden. I assure you, though, there was no rope. I give you my word, and you know I’m an honest man.”
“Well, I was just asking,” Malone said. One thing about the big gangster, he always told the truth. If he said Little Georgie La Cerra hadn’t smuggled in that rope, then Little Georgie hadn’t. Nor was there any chance that little Georgie had engaged in private enterprises on the side. As Max Hook often remarked, he liked to keep a careful watch on his boys. “One thing more, though,” the lawyer said, “if you don’t mind. Why did the young lady come to you to get her note delivered?”
Max Hook shrugged his enormous shoulders. “We have a certain — business connection. To be exact, she owes me a large sum of money. Like most extremely mercenary people she loves gambling, but she is not particularly lucky. When she told me that the only chance for that money to be paid was for the note to be delivered, naturally I obliged.”
“Naturally,” Malone agreed. “You didn’t happen to know what was in the note, did you?”
Max Hook was shocked. “My dear Malone! You don’t think I read other people’s personal mail!”
No, Malone reflected, Max Hook probably didn’t. And not having read the note, the big gambler probably wouldn’t know what kind of “terrible trouble and danger” Madelaine Starr was in. He decided to ask, though, just to be on the safe side.
“Trouble?” Max Hook repeated after him. “No, outside of having her fiancé condemned to death, I don’t know of any trouble she’s in.”
Malone shrugged his shoulders at the reproof, rose and walked to the door. Then he paused, suddenly. “Listen, Max. Do you know the words to a tune that goes like this?” He hummed a bit of it.
Max Hook frowned, then nodded. “Mmm — I know the tune. An entertainer at one of my places used to sing it.” He thought hard, and finally came up with a few lines.
“Sorry,” Max Hook said at last, “that’s all I remember. I guess those two lines stuck in my head because they reminded me of the first time I was in jail.”
Outside in the taxi, Malone sang the two lines over a couple of times. If he kept on, eventually he’d have the whole song. But Paul Palmer hadn’t been leaning against the prison bars. He’d been hanging from the water pipe.
Damn, and double damn that song!
It was well past eight o’clock, and he’d had no dinner, but he didn’t feel hungry. He had a grim suspicion that he wouldn’t feel hungry until he’d settled this business. When the cab paused for the next red light, he flipped a coin to decide whether he’d call first on Madelaine Starr or Lillian Claire, and Madelaine won.
He stepped out of the cab in front of the small apartment building on Walton Place, paid the driver, and started across the sidewalk just as a tall, white-haired man emerged from the door. Malone recognized Orlo Feather-stone, the lawyer handling Paul Palmer’s estate, considered ducking out of sight, realized there wasn’t time, and finally managed to look as pleased as he was surprised.
“I was just going to offer Miss Starr my condolences,” he said.
“I’d leave her undisturbed, if I were you,” Orlo Featherstone said coldly. He had only one conception of what a lawyer should be, and Malone wasn’t anything like it. “I only called myself because I am, so to speak and in a sense, a second father to her.”
If anyone else had said that, Malone thought, it would have called for an answer. From Orlo Featherstone, it sounded natural. He nodded sympathetically and said, “Then I won’t bother her.” He tossed away a ragged cigar and said “Tragic affair, wasn’t it.”