Back in the parked limo, I am trying to focus in on the faces on Tish’s list, but no luck. No guy with a mustache and scar.
“Why would Flip come down here anyway?” Mario asks me. “If someone found it they would give it to the cops.”
“The kid was on the right track, Mario. Because the other guy came down here, too. Now that guy’s got two problems. He has two kids running around loose who might be able to identify him, and the blackmail papers are also floating around somewhere. I’m trying to visualize what Corbett must have done on that subway. He spots this dude and knows he’s going to get it, so he tries to beat him into the next car. Now he couldn’t have stashed the brief case in the 14th Street station because the cops have pulled it apart and found zero.”
“Hey, Chick, I ain’t been on a subway in years,” Mario says from the front seat, “but why didn’t that D.A. get off at 18th Street if he spotted the guy at 23rd?”
“Mostly because there isn’t an 18th Street station, Mario.”
“Hell, there ain’t. I used to date a bimbo on East 19th Street years ago and always got off at that station.”
I didn’t bother to mention it to Mario, but I think we knew the same bimbo because I remember getting off at 18th Street too, on the same mission. I’m out of the car and back into the Transit Authority lickety-split. I ask the guy at the Lost and Found what happened to the IRT 18th Street station, and do you know what I get? “Did someone lose it?” he asks. Everyone wants to be a comic.
“Look, you’re breaking me up, pal. Just give me a straight answer.”
“Yeah, they closed it down about ten, fifteen years ago. It was some kind of economy drive. I forgot it was there, to be honest with you.”
“Maybe it was demolished. You know, sealed up or something?”
“Maybe the entrance, but not the station. Why bother?”
When I got back to the car and asked Mario for the gun, he gave me the Alice in Wonderland routine.
“Come on, Mario, you’ve hauled iron around in this heap for years. Give. Please?”
“But, Chick, you don’t have no license.”
“Neither do you, buddy. Is it sterile?”
He gives me a nod, hands me the gun, and I slip it into my pocket. I’ve got an idea in my head that’s going to make Jaffee the joke of the Department. I tell Mario to get back to the club. I can get where I’m going faster by the rattler.
At the Jay Street station I grab the IND and get off at Sixth and Fourteenth. I probably could have figured a route to take me directly to the 14th Street station at Union Square, but I really didn’t have five years to spend. Besides, the best way to go is the way you know. I came up on Sixth (okay, Avenue of the Americas) and headed east, stopping at one of the rag shops where I bought a genuine Japanese flashlight. With all the Jap goods flooding the country, I’m beginning to think they really did win World War II.
I flagged a cab and had him take me to 18th and Park and found just what I expected. No entrance. I then hoofed down to the 14th Street station, went through the turnstile, and pushed my way to the downtown local track.
There is one criticism leveled at New Yorkers that is unfair. People, mostly tourists, think that local citizens are indifferent and cold. They’re just minding their own bloody business, folks! Now if I were in Cleveland, and Cleveland had a subway, someone would wonder what a guy was doing entering a dark subway tunnel and report it. Not in New York, baby. If you want to go for a stroll up the tracks, you can go right ahead and nobody will make a peep.
I waited till a downtown local train had cleared the station, then slipped down the narrow stairs to the track and ran like hell toward 18th Street. Up ahead of me I could see the headlights of another train, probably as far up as 33rd Street. I have read that if you lie down in the center of the tracks, a train will roll over you without touching you, but I wasn’t about to prove the theory. Old Fleetfoot Kelly made it in plenty of time in the half light of the tunnel.
The 18th Street station was something out of a Fellini movie. It was a complete station with its tiled walls, muted change booth, and stairs that led nowhere. It was something dead. A tomb.
I came up on the platform on all fours. The station had about four dirty 40-watt bulbs burning a dull illumination that created a bevy of shadows. A painter broad I used to know would call it chiarascuro, and the chiarascuro was scaring the devil out of me. I heard a scurrying in the comer and reeled with the gun ready to find a rat or something, when I found two rats in Chinese clothing.
“Uncle Chick, baby,” that young punk says to me with his sister hanging on his arm. Man, I wanted to bust him one in the chops.
“Boy, you two are beautiful, really beautiful. What are you trying to do, give your mother a heart attack?”
“Chick, we solved it, man, don’t you dig it?” he says, holding up the ostrich brief case. His father sends him to one of the best schools in the city, and he talks like a hipped sideman.
“Yeah, I dig, Foster.”
“What’s with the Foster bit, Chick?”
“Uncle Charles to you, buster. How are you doing, McCawber?”
The light of my life says she’s okay, but I know she’s scared. She comes to me and I give her a hug. That’s the chimpanzee syndrome. And she’s part monkey anyway. I had put the gun in my pocket and was holding her when I heard him.
“Bring the case over here, kid,” the voice said from the dark end of the platform. “Don’t move, Kelly.”
Flip walked into the shadow, then came back without the brief case and stood next to me. I would jam the bloody gun in my jacket pocket where I couldn’t get it out easily!
“Look, pal,” I said to the voice, “I can’t see who you are, so let’s call it even. You scamper out of here and we’ll forget the whole thing. You’re as free as a big beaked bird. We’ll wait here for ten minutes — an hour if you like.”
He didn’t answer and I knew his silence was going to be killing us. I couldn’t see him, but my ears are like sonar webs. He hadn’t moved since he had last said his piece, so I had a blind fix on him. I have played soldier with the kids since they were old enough to hate pablum, so I hoped they’d remember the script.
I yelled as loud as I could, “Hit the deck!” and dove into the dark at the voice.
I was almost on him when I felt the bum in my arm. I had one hand on him and we both went down. There was no scuffle — he was motionless. Jaffee’s shot had gone through Ted Saunders, Corbett’s wife’s brother, and plinked me in the arm...
Jaffee was, of course, full of threats; there was my carrying iron, trespassing on subway tracks, interfering with a police investigation, and contributing to the delinquency of minors. The last was AH-thur’s two cents.
What really ticked Bullet-head off was the interview I gave to the media. I told them I knew it was Ted Saunders all along. He could easily have had a peek at the papers Corbett brought back from the airport, and he could have known the kids were in Oriental dress. My theory was that Teddy-boy had seen a lucrative future in the papers Corbett had gotten, and went after them. I also added that Columbia’s Drama School should beef up its course on make-up. Ted’s phony mustache and scar were from hunger. I had him on voice anyway; that’s why I tried to fake him out with the escape bit.
One TV newsman went bananas over my heroics and called my leap at Saunders Kier-kegaardian. And we all know what a fine acrobat he was.
Anyway, I got the headlines and the club is jammed with tourists who want to meet the great comic-detective. No, that’s not right — the great detective-comic.