This unnerved me more than if he had done a little gloating. The man impressed me as little more than an animal, standing there holding his knife and patiently waiting for an order to begin. I felt sweat pop out on my forehead and roll off the side of my face.
I clamped my mouth shut and looked at Polito’s knife.
Bremmer gave a resigned nod and the point dipped toward my chest.
I brought my legs up, shot them forward again and hurled Limpy Alfred halfway across the room. The knife retreated and the barber said unemotionally, “Such a little man cannot hold his legs alone.”
“You can say that again,” Limpy Alfred said as he returned to the table and dusted himself off. “Why not bring Krebb down from upstairs?”
Bremmer nodded and went to the door.
He opened it just as a figure reached for the knob on the other side. But it wasn’t Krebb or one of the Bremmer’s gang. When the doorknob receded from his seeking grasp, Mouldy Greene changed the direction of his grab and instead gathered a handful of Bremmer’s shirt front.
Pushing the hotel man before him, Mouldy came all the way into the room, gave me a friendly wave with his free hand and said, “Hi, Sarge.”
Both my arms were released as Thurmond decided to straighten up and draw his gun. Mouldy picked all two hundred pounds of Sherman Bremmer off the floor and tossed him at Buzz Thurmond like a medicine ball.
I didn’t see what else happened, because I was rolling on my side and clamping one hand across the cylinder of Limpy Alfred’s revolver as it appeared. I clamped down tight, preventing the cylinder from rotating and consequently making it impossible to fire. At the same time I swung my left leg around, got my foot under his armpit and pushed.
Limpy let loose the gun and staggered across the room to crash into the bar.
When I turned my attention back to the rest of the room, Mouldy was nimbly leaping aside to let Sam Polito’s knife whistle past him and sink into the door jamb. As I scrambled off the pool table Mouldy stepped forward and landed a six-inch jab on the barber’s chin. Polito made a complete spin and collapsed on his face.
Catching the fat hotel proprietor in his stomach had knocked Buzz Thurmond down and jarred the gun from his hand. I scooped it up and turned to cover the room with both guns. “What brought you rolling in like the Marines?” I askedy Mouldy.
He gestured toward Limpy Alfred. “I spotted him coming out of your flat and followed him.”
I thought about Harry Krebb, upstairs. “There’s another one,” I told Mouldy.
“You mean the guy upstairs? He’s hung up in the laundry room. That’s what took me time in getting to you.”
“What do you mean, hung up?”
“By the seat of his pants on a spike in the wall,” Mouldy said. “I checked upstairs before I tackled this room. I hogtied him with his necktie first, so he couldn’t reach up and turn himself loose.”
It occurred to me that it must have taken incredible bad luck for Mouldy Greene’s former employer, the owner of Fausta Moreni’s club when it was a gambling house, to get himself killed while Mouldy was acting as a bodyguard for him.
I said, “Let me get this sorted out a little. You followed Limpy Alfred from my apartment. What were you doing at my apartment?”
Mouldy’s brow furrowed in an effort to remember. Then an expression of enlightenment crossed his flat face. “Oh yeah. Fausta sent me. When you was nearly an hour late for your date with her and didn’t answer your phone, she sent me to check up. I got there just as the little guy came out. Boy, if you think you had trouble with these guys, wait until Fausta catches up with you.”
“I think I had a fair excuse,” I said dryly.
Handing the two guns to Mouldy so that he could supervise our captives, I put on my shirt, tie and coat. Then I retrieved my P-38 from Buzz Thurmond’s pocket and thrust it under my arm.
I was just rising when a voice from the door said, “Freeze, buddy. And put those guns down real slow.”
My gaze jumped to the door. A tall, lean man in a light gray suit stood there covering the room with a short-barrelled pistol. “This one’s a stranger,” I said to Mouldy as we slowly lowered our guns to the floor. “I thought I’d gotten to know the whole gang.”
The tall man advanced into the room. His left hand dipped into his breast pocket and came out with a small leather folder which he flashed open to exhibit a badge and an identification card.
“Sergeant Hudson of Burglary,” he announced. “You’re all under arrest.”
It took me some time to convince the sergeant that Mouldy and I weren’t criminals. But after he had examined my license and listened to my story, he finally decided to believe me.
It developed the place was practically surrounded by police. On the basis of the information I had given Warren Day, and he in turn had passed along, the Vice Squad, Burglary Squad and Narcotics Squad had all gotten together and detailed men to cover each of the suspects starting at five that afternoon. Sergeant Hudson was in charge of the combined detail.
When Limpy Alfred had been seen leaving the Hotel Bremmer that evening by the man assigned to tail Sherman Bremmer, the word was passed along to Limpy’s assigned shadow, who had been patiently waiting in a doorway across the street from Limpy’s living quarters. The gray-haired man’s shadow joined Bremmer’s shadow at the hotel in time to see Limpy return from his trip to my flat and also to spot Mouldy Greene tailing him.
On a hunch that Buzz Thurmond might be at the Bremmer Hotel too, as he hadn’t showed at the place he lived, Buzz’s shadow was also ordered to the Bremmer Hotel. Consequently the car in which I rode to Krebb’s was followed by two cops in addition to Mouldy, and when Bremmer drove over to pick up Sam Polito, he was followed by one.
At the barber’s place Sam Polito’s shadow joined the caravan. Krebb’s tail was watching the garageman’s home. When the other four cops arrived on the scene, they all got together, decided something important was up and phoned Hudson.
15
The next morning I got back on ray normal schedule by sleeping until noon. Probably I would have slept even later, since it was two-thirty A.M. before I fell into bed, but the phone woke me up.
It was Ed Brighton.
“Sorry to bother you, Manny,” he said. “But I wondered if you’ve turned anything up.”
“I’ve been at least partly responsible for getting some hoodlums thrown in the can,” I told him. “The gang I mentioned to you which may have been responsible for killing the Meyers kid and framing it on Joe. There isn’t material evidence tying the mob to the murder, and they’re being held at present because of narcotics and stolen goods found on their property last night. So all we can hope for is that somebody breaks down and talks. Homicide’s got a pretty good staff of interrogators. It’ll probably be tomorrow before they’re even turned over to Homicide, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Actually I was a little more hopeful than I sounded, since there was a good chance Joe Brighton would be released even if Homicide couldn’t prove a case against the Bremmer gang. All that was necessary was for Warren Day to become convinced the gang had engineered the kill. Even if he couldn’t prove it, he’d recommend to the D.A. that charges against young Joe be dropped.
I didn’t mention this to Ed, though, as there was no point in building what very well might be false hopes.
At one-thirty I dropped by Warren Day’s office.
“You certainly loused things up good, Moon,” were his first words to me. “Burglary, Vice and Narcotics wanted to check that gang’s contacts for a few days before they moved in. Now we can’t nail any of the kids they were dealing with.”