“Where was he?”
He licked his mouth nervously and toyed with the food on his plate. “He ain’t that simple. He called direct”
“Why?”
His eyebrows went up then. “Money. What else? He wants me to send him five hundred bucks. Now where the hell am I supposed to get five hundred bucks? He didn’t even ask. He just told me to get it ready and he’d tell me where to send it”
“Going to?”
Once again, his tongue snaked out. “I... don’t know.” He took a sip of coffee to wet his mouth and added, “I’m scared of him. I always was.”
“He’s your brother, isn’t he?”
Wilder shook his head. “Stepbrother. Hell, I’d sooner turn him in, only it might not work and he’d come after me.” His eyes held a pleading expression. “What am I supposed to do?”
“The cops aren’t the only ones looking for Gus, buddy.”
“I know. That’s what I figured. So I’m caught in the middle either way,” he said.
“Then take a chance and play it right. If he calls you, call us. We have ways of keeping things quiet”
“Can... I think about it?”
“Sure. One way or another he’ll turn up, but like you said, why get caught in the middle? He asked for anything he gets.”
I went to get up, then changed my mind and asked, “You know the girls René Mills had working for him?”
For a second his face took on a startled look, then he nodded. “Rose Shaw and Kitty Muntz. They come in all the time. Rose should be in soon to pick up her stuff. That Mills, he gave ’em the boot before he kicked off.”
“So supposing we go downstairs and wait for her, Henry.”
“In the shop?” He swallowed hard, knowing what they thought of cops around here.
“Don’t worry, I’ll even help out behind the counter.” Rose Shaw didn’t show until ten after three, a flagrant little whore with a hard, tight body encased in a too-small sweater and blouse combination, her eyes showing the cynicism of her profession, the caustic twist to her mouth accentuating it. She threw her ticket down on the counter top with a crumpled ten-dollar bill from a plastic purse and stood there with a hurry-up look on her face.
I got up from the stool where I was sitting while Henry Wilder was collecting her clothes. She made me as fast as Ralph Callahan did, but in a different way. The lids half closed over her pupils and the mouth went into a semi-sneer that spat copper, and she was ready to tell me to stuff it because she wasn’t working a pad at the moment and there was nothing I could lay on her. She was too wise to get trapped by a phoney approach, and wasn’t about to get stuck with a pay off if I was a bad one.
One by one the possibilities ran through her mind, eliminating the wrong ones, and when I still didn’t make a move her face clouded because she couldn’t tap the right answer. Then she got jumpy. There is something peculiar about those on the stiffer sides of the fence, the law and the punks. In some ways they seem to look alike sometimes. They work in the same areas in the same profession with the same people, and it gets to them so they adopt common mannerisms and expressions and deep in the back of their eyes is buried a mutual hatred for each other.
But we had the advantage. We could read them. They could never quite read us. They were the ones who were mixed up, not us.
I said, “Talk or walk, Rose.”
“Look, mister...”
The badge lay in my hand, nicely palmed. “Talk here, walk downtown. Take your pick.”
She said something under her breath and glanced around her. “Screw you, copper. Not in public.”
“You name it then.”
“I got a room at 4430. It’s where I live, not work.”
“Go ahead. I’ll give you ten minutes.”
“Second floor in the back.” She swore under her breath, draped her clothes over her arm, picked up her change and walked out, her face still full of disgust.
I gave her the ten minutes and picked my way down to her brownstone, cut in quickly and shoved the door open. The odor of burned grease and cabbage was heavy on the air, cutting through the mustiness of dirt and decay. The steps were hollowed by the tread of thousands of feet traversing them, creaky with age and littered with odds and ends of callous living. I found her door, knocked once and turned the knob without being asked to come in.
Rose Shaw sat with her feet up on a table, a beer in her hand, deliberately posed so I could see up her dress past the muscular smoothness of her thighs. I said, “Forget the peep show, Rose,” and swung a chair around and sat down with my arms lying across its back.
“Swing me, copper. I’m waiting to hear the pitch.”
“Let’s start with René Mills.”
She shrugged elaborately and took a pull from the can of beer. “He’s dead. What else?”
“Why, Rose?”
“I can think of a hundred reasons. Somebody beat me to it. Kitty too. Hell, she pulled out before René was knocked off. I thought she was dumber’n me, but she saw the signs, she did. She knew what was coming and cut out before she was told to.”
“Where is she?”
“Jersey City. She left yesterday. Her old man let her go back to work for him in a factory. She won’t like it.”
“And how about you?”
“What the hell do you care?”
“I don’t”
“So why the action?” she asked.
“René Mills,” I repeated.
“You seem to know the score. Where do I come in? So I’m puttin’ out for cash, man. It ain’t the best, but it’ll do until something better shows.” She lost her hate for a second and stared at the ceiling. “Would you believe it, I used to be big time. Miami, then, and that was only four years ago. I was seventeen and rolling in the long green. Man, what days.”
“What happened?”
“I got clapped up and handed it out, and like that I was out. Two trips to the medic and I was okay, but the curse was there, man. So what’s new?”
“Get back to René Mills.”
She made a face and finished the beer. “He took me on. Me and Kitty. We was broke, willing and able. The trade was lousy compared to the other, but that’s the breaks. He set up the scene, we split fifty-fifty only we paid all the bills.” She gave another of those resigned shrugs and said, “We made out”
“Why’d he drop you then?”
“Went big time... like ha ha. He always had ideas and they got him dead. So this time he tells us to get lost, lays on a hundred bucks apiece when he’s all grins and new shoes with that watch back on his wrist he stole from some guy in a bar and hocked... got eighty bucks for it from Norman at the hockshop, so it was worth plenty.”
“How, Rose?”
“Who knows, copper? You think he’d spill? Hell, he booted Noisy Stuccio out of his pad a week before, and you know how close they were. Sure, old René had somethin’ going for him all the way.”
“And what would you say it was?”
She reached back over her shoulder, opened the small refrigerator and took out another bottle of beer. She didn’t offer me one. When she jacked the top off she said, “It was fresh money he didn’t expect. It came sudden like, but I’ll tell you this... he couldn’t get his hands on all of it. What he had was plenty, but not the large stuff. He liked to talk big, and kept hinting at what he was going to come into, but I knew that slob too damn well. He was thinking and working on something he didn’t have but sure damn well expected to get one way or another. That bastard wouldn’t let a penny get past him if he could help it”
“Who supplied it?”
“What’s it get me, copper?” She eyed me curiously, waiting for my answer.
“Ask,” I said.
She started to speak, stopped and gave me one more of those shrugs and went back to her beer.