As usual when I saw Fausta I found that, despite my resolve not to feel any reaction toward her, the familiar lump formed in my throat. Fausta Moreni was born in Rome, but her coloring isn’t olive like most Italo-American beauties, it is the color of coffee with cream, and her hair is a vivid natural blonde. Nevertheless you would never mistake her for anything but a Latin. If her expressively liquid eyes didn’t give it away, her emotional explosiveness would.
When I left Stub with Mouldy, and started to walk with her to my car, she threw her arms around my neck and made me agree now that she was taking care of Stub that I’d take her out one evening for each day she furnished him room and board. The dates would start tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Before the war when Fausta was only nineteen and I was twenty-four, we had a violent romance which we both expected to eventuate in marriage. But when I returned to civilian life, I found a sophisticated woman who had parlayed her culinary genius into a fortune, until she now owned half the money in town.
I have an old-fashioned notion that the man should be the breadwinner in the family, and the richer Fausta became, the further I backed. Both of us long ago accepted the fact that we aren’t going to marry, but Fausta seems to enjoy seeing me try to struggle off the hook. It’s my own feelings I have to struggle against rather than Fausta, a fact she understands perfectly.
Once she’d won her bargain with me, she asked, “Are these gangsters after you, too, Manny?”
“Not the juvenile ones,” I said. “The adults don’t like me much.”
“Maybe you had better hide out here too,” she suggested. “There is a day bed in my upstairs apartment.”
She cocked an inquiring eye at me and I said, “I’ve got work to do.”
“Let the police do it. If the gangsters are after you, just call them up and report it. I would not like it if you got all shot up and perhaps were made even uglier than you are.”
I left before I gave in to her on that, too.
11
The next morning, just before noon, Dave O’Brien called me. “You sure Stub’s safe?” he asked.
“Couldn’t be safer. Why?” I asked.
“The guys are out to get him. Or some of them, anyway. They say Stub has to be shut up before his squealing wrecks all the club’s rackets.”
“Bump him off, you mean?” I asked.
“The whole gang’s gone kind of nuts.” Dave’s voice was high-pitched. “I went back to the club room after I left you last night, and they had a party till nearly morning. Buzz Thurmond dropped in with a whole flock of H and passed it out to anybody that wanted it. I don’t think a guy in the club made school today.”
“Buzz suggest that the gang get Stub?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Dave said. “The guys were all talking about Stub squealing to a private cop, and Buzz just said if it was his gang, they’d know how to handle it. The next I knew half the guys were saying squealers ought to be rubbed out.”
Almost as an afterthought he added, “Buzz let it drop that his gang was going to take care of you, Mr. Moon.”
“I was having similar thoughts about Buzz and his gang,” I said dryly.
When Dave had hung up, I called Stub at the El Patio, and got him to release me from my promise and let me bring the cops into the case, giving them everything I knew.
When he sounded stubborn, even after hearing about the gang’s threat, I said with mild exasperation, “For cripes sake, kid! These people intend to kill you! What in the name of jumping Jehosaphat do you think you owe them?”
There was a moment of silence, and I knew he struggled between self-preservation and loyalty to an underworld code that had been bred into him. A code which regarded squealing to the police as the lowest crime in the book, no matter what the pressures were.
Finally he said with a peculiar mixture of apology and belligerence, “I’m not just going to sit still and wait for a bullet. You tell the cops anything you want, Mr. Moon.”
Inspector Warren Day was dubious at first.
“Maybe Buzz Thurmond is just concerned because he’s afraid your digging around will mess up his racket,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he had anything to do with Bart Meyers’ death.”
But after I filled him in on all the details, he began to look pleased with me. “You’ve given me enough dope to keep Narcotics, Vice and Burglary busy for a long time just checking up. We’ll go over Thurmond when the other boys are through with him. But I can’t offer you much hope about tying him to the murder. Without evidence, what do you expect me to accomplish? He doesn’t sound like he’d confess because of a bad conscience.”
I hadn’t expected him to do much more than give my theory about Buzz being connected with the murder careful consideration, so I was satisfied with this answer. Grouchy as Warren Day is, he’s not the type of cop who closes his eyes to any lead which points away from his prime suspect. I doubted that I had lessened his belief in Joe Brighton’s guilt in the slightest, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t follow up the theory I had dumped in his lap. And he’d do just as thorough a job of investigation as if he believed Thurmond guilty.
For once we parted mutually satisfied with each other.
I knew that as soon as Warren Day passed along the dope I had given him to the proper departments, whole squads of cops would begin a co-ordinated effort to smash the gang of which Buzz Thurmond was a member. Before that evening Thurmond, Limpy Alfred, Sam Polito, Art Cooney, Harry Krebb and Sherman Bremmer would be under twenty-four hour surveillance. None of them could make a move which wouldn’t be eventually relayed to headquarters and entered in a co-ordinated intelligence record on the whole gang. If Bremmer was the leader of the gang, as I suspected, the police would establish the fact beyond any doubt through the record of his contacts. From here on out every bit of stolen merchandise received by the fence, Harry Krebb, or the two dope pushers would be recorded, and each boy who brought stolen merchandise in to them would immediately acquire a shadow.
I gave the Purple Pelicans, the Gravediggers and the adult gang exploiting them another week before the police moved in for mass arrests and smashed the entire setup.
That didn’t necessarily mean they’d uncover any evidence concerning Bart Meyers’ murder, however. I was reasonably certain that if Buzz Thurmond actually had killed the boy and framed Joe Brighton for it, none of the Purple Pelicans knew anything about it. And unless one of the adults broke under questioning, there didn’t seem much likelihood of freeing young Joe without turning up actual evidence.
Instead of seeking the safety of El Patio, I decided to stick my neck out a little more. The Bremmer Hotel seemed to me to be the logical place to stick it.
The Bremmer Hotel was a three-story brick building on Ninth, at the very edge of the slum area. It was old, but it wasn’t a particularly disreputable-looking place. As a matter of fact it looked cleaner than most of the second-class buildings and stores in the same neighborhood.
The hotel lobby was a bare but relatively clean room with only the faintest odor of antiseptic about it. As I was asking the skinny old man in his seventies at the desk if Buzz Thurmond was in, and getting no satisfaction, a smooth voice behind me said, “Can I help you?”
Swinging around, I looked down at the moon-shaped face of Sherman Bremmer, the hotel’s proprietor.
12
I had to look down a full eight inches, because Bremmer was only about five feet four. He was built like a snowman: round pillars for legs, a round ball for a body, fat arms, and a round head with tiny black eyes. A complexion resembling sooty snow helped the illusion.