Mitch thought he had it all settled, until Borsky tried to pull a prima donna and say that no damn fight doctor was going to fiddle around with his thumb. He was a musician, and not some kind of a pugilist.
“You got a different kind of bones in you?” Mitch asked.
“Adele knows somebody,” Borsky said. “She’ll be here pretty soon. She’ll handle things.”
That gave Mitch the signal that something wasn’t legit. Here Borsky didn’t want his thumb to get fixed and Mitch didn’t know what was wrong with it, if anything, so he said, “Let’s see it.”
Borsky backed off. “You a doctor?”
“Just let me see it,” Mitch said again, and Borsky squirmed away like a kid that was afraid of a flu shot. So right now it was kind of a tie score between them, except Mitch wasn’t going to leave it that way much longer.
“This girl friend of yours,” he said. “Tell me about her.”
“Nothing to tell,” Borsky said.
“You and her got something cooked up,” Mitch said. “What’s the angle?”
Borsky didn’t answer, and Mitch told himself the guy was trying to play five-handed solitaire all by himself. He had something going with this girl and he had a concert on tonight and a guy named Eberly was after him with a hammer on account Borsky was seeing the guy’s wife on the sly and so Eberly wanted to ruin him, and here was Mitch homing in on whatever Borsky had dreamed up.
The knock on the door came about three minutes later. Borsky called out, “Who’s there?” And a woman’s voice answered, “It’s me. Adele.”
Borsky yelled out, “No — not now!” Only Mitch was way ahead of him and opened the door while Borsky was still calling out. So this female dynamo — all Mitch saw at first was a face with a lot of chin and with blonde hair falling all over it — was charging past Mitch and right behind her was this character with murder in his eye and a hammer in his hand and he looked like King Kong. Mitch got pushed back and almost fell, what with the two of them ramming him like they were hitting the line and hellbent for a touchdown.
Mitch hit the wall and sort of bounced back, and he grabbed a chair and slung it at King Kong, which knocked the big guy off-balance and gave Mitch time to come barreling in. That would have ended the whole business, except that the dame got in the way and slapped out at Mitch, not hard, but enough to keep him from grabbing the hammer.
You get in a mess like that, and you can’t sort stuff out until later on. All Mitch was after was to stop the hammerer and save Borsky’s hand, which Mitch managed to do by taking a poke at the hammerer and then knocking Borsky back on the bed, which got Mitch between the concert pianist and the hammerer. But in doing it, Mitch lost his balance, so him and Borsky ended up lying there on the bed while King Kong and the dame went racing out of the room, slamming the door behind them.
Mitch got on the phone to tell them downstairs to stop the pair and call the police, only Borsky knocked it out of Mitch’s hand. By the time Mitch picked up the phone it was still buzzing and nobody was at the other end. He figured the girl at the switchboard had maybe gone out for a cup of coffee or else she was fixing her hair, but in any case it was too late to stop the pair, so Mitch gave up. Still, he now had a handle on the whole business and had most of the facts wrapped up.
“That was the Eberly dame,” he said, “and the guy with her, that was her husband. Right? And there’s nothing wrong with that thumb of yours, but there would have been if I hadn’t stopped the guy. And you just stood there and waited to get creamed. What for?”
“I was scared,” Borsky said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“The hell you say,” Mitch said, and wondered why Borsky didn’t want that concert tonight and why he was practically willing to have his hand busted. If this had been the fight game, Mitch would have had the answer, but who bets on a pianist? And what could you bet on?
Dough. Dough was involved. It always was and always would be, and so it had to be this time, too, which was more or less how Mitch happened to latch on to this theory.
“A guy like you,” he said to Borsky, “you got pretty valuable hands. What do you make? A hundred grand a year?”
“Sort of.”
“So if you’re out of action, you make nothing. Right?”
Borsky agreed. “That’s right.”
“Then you got insurance on your hands,” Mitch said. “How much?”
“You’re crazy!”
“Easy to find out,” Mitch said. “It must be plenty, to make you pull a fast one like this. And you’re in trouble, my friend. You fixed it up for me to get conked, and that’s conspiracy to commit assault and attempt to commit assault and maybe criminal solicitation besides, and just now that was interference with a police officer in the performance of his duty. That adds up to two misdemeanors and two felonies, so think it over and what it’s going to mean.”
Borsky didn’t have to think it over. “It’s all her fault,” he said. “It was her idea. She’s been following me around, she’s driving me nuts, and last night she made this proposition. She had it all arranged with this doctor she knew, he’s her cousin. He’d put me under an anesthetic and break my finger. It wouldn’t hurt, and we’d say her husband had done it and I could collect all that insurance, which was enough so I could retire. With her.”
“Think you’d get away with it?” Mitch said. “The insurance dicks would ask a lot of questions and one of the guys they’d ask would be me, and you know what I’d tell them.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“Not yet you haven’t, but you better take off that bandage and start getting ready for tonight. Because it looks like this dame of yours switched sides and went back to her husband. He was going to commit mayhem and she threw a block on me when I tried to stop him, so where do you stand now?”
“Just keep Eberly away from me, because he’s liable to kill me, him and his hammer. You saw what he tried to do, didn’t you?”
“I thought you wanted him to, for the insurance.”
“I don’t know. She’s trouble and I was crazy to listen to her and—” Borsky stared at his hands. “These are all I got, and she’ll ruin me, she and that husband others. She’s mad.”
“Look,” Mitch said. “I’ll take care of him, you take care of yourself and them hands of yours.” Then, patting his gun, he added, “And this says nobody’s going to bother you, not till you get done with your piece tonight.”
So Mitch had everything tied up real good. Eberly might make another stab at Borsky, and if he did, Mitch would be ready for him. With Eberly collared and Borsky safe, Mitch would be in pretty good shape, the story would hit the front page, the Commissioner would congratulate him, and Mitch was pretty sure they’d give him a day off, so what more could you want?
That was when the phone rang. It was Tony Spino, from the Fifth, and he was downstairs.
“Taylor?” he said. “We got a guy here by the name of Eberly. Somebody saw him running around loose with a hammer in his hand, so they called us and we got him down here. He was on his way out and he’s making a lot of noise about some piano player. Know anything about it?”
“He was up here trying to commit mayhem on a guy who’s been playing around with his wife.”
“And you let him go?” Spino said, acting like he was surprised, which told Mitch what the official story was going to be and that Spino was due to get credit for the arrest.