“I never thought he’d do a thing like that. I had no idea he was in with the Reds! But when I heard of the assassination this morning, I realized what a fool I’d been, playing into their hands.”
She met his eyes. “I thought you were one, too.”
“No,” he answered. “Only a simple thief.”
“What do you want, to keep silent?”
“My freedom. And the money Vonderberg promised me. I imagine it’s in his pocket.”
“And if I say no? Would anyone believe you now that Vonderberg’s dead?”
“I think so. You showed no emotion just now when the crown was smashed. You say that Prince Baudlay knew nothing of the plot, but I’ll bet if someone examined that glass they’d find it of recent make. You wouldn’t take a chance on the real crown being damaged in the robbery. You’d have arranged for the substitution of a false one. So somebody in the palace knew about it.”
“You guess very well, Nick Velvet.”
“It helps me stay alive. I’m no detective, only a good guesser when I have to be.”
She turned away, sighed, and then turned back.
“Take this ferry back to Corfu,” she told him finally. “I’ll see that you aren’t bothered.”
“And the money?”
“You devil.”
“Exactly,” he said, and waited while she got the envelope from the dead man’s pocket.
“Come back some time. As a tourist.”
Nick Velvet smiled at her and turned away, looking off across the sea toward Corfu. “I don’t think I could afford the rates.”
The Last Payoff
by Jim Duke
He was a baddo, a good man gone wrong, which is the worst kind of all. But he had been my pal and now he was dead and I had a debt to pay him. “Give me the dough,” I said. “Or you get a .38 where your heart was.”
The sign painted on the side said it was fireproof. That wasted bad. Forty years ago Carpenter was a big railroad town for the melon farmers; then came the trucking revolution and down went the dry, dusty town in the lower California desert.
The Dunpair Hotel shared a lot with the town: they were both havens for derelicts.
The bald-headed, pot-bellied guy at the main desk in the big empty hotel lobby eyed me sleepily when I came in out of the June Desert heat.
“Ed Glass,” I said.
Leaning back in his swivel, he glanced at the key slots.
“Two-oh-seven,” he said.
One look at the cage elevator and I decided to use the stairs.
I rapped five times on the door.
“Pick a number,” said the voice. A silly code, but it was Ed’s voice, thin, a lot weaker, but it shot me with memories.
“Thirty-one,” I said.
When Ed opened the door I knew what death looked like. Red eyes hid in dark hollows of a sallow, drawn face with stained islands all over. He gave me a bony hand, but he still had a hard handshake.
“You old S.O.B., Jason,” he said, closing the door quickly, locking it and aiming me at a beat-up table with a pair of chairs. Away from the window.
I pulled out the envelope and tossed it on the table.
“Got your message,” I said.
“Money talks, don’t it, Jason?”
“Five grand does, which I don’t need from an old friend. And which doesn’t explain this dump.”
Ed folded the money away, tried to grin, but his face wouldn’t let him. It was barely the face of a man I’d been a partner with ten years ago. The partnership was dissolved when the state took away his private investigator’s license after a solo blackmail scheme of his fell through.
I figured him dead, since I hadn’t heard from him. Not until the letter with the money the day before came to my L.A. office. He had backed me up in more than one scrape before, and I owed it to him.
“Your note said you’re in a corner,” I said.
“I’m a dead man, Jason,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“You gotta help me. I’ve done a dumb thing, amigo. A real number one dumb thing and I’m fingered. I’m scared even to leave this hole.”
“And you can’t call for a cop,” I said.
“Sure, if I want to buy time at Folsom.”
“Better than no time, Ed.”
“Says you. Walls and me, Jason.”
I tossed a glance around the small, neat room and Ed knew what I was thinking.
His big-knuckled fingers went out and touched my hand. “You’re my only hope, amigo.” It was a dry little laugh. “Me, sharp as a tack, huh? Yeah, trying to buck the Mexican Mafia.”
“Great,” I said. “What were you, a bag man for them?”
He nodded. His body began to shake with the left-over booze in him. “Fifty grand, Jason. Simple delivery to a guy in Mexican Hernandez. Middle man in the Mexican syndicate. Six months I’ve been carrying payoffs between there and L.A. But fifty grand...”
He took on that far away look of a sot with dreams.
“You stupid bastard,” I said harshly.
I’d had more than one bump with Mafia, Mexican style. It was a popular reference to a loosely knit bunch of Latin narcotic dealers. They handled their own police by gunning them down, in between payoffs. They were right out of the Chicago-style of the 30’s.
“Been shot at twice,” he said. “Tried to get the money back. But the vine says they’ll get the money and me, too.”
“You want me to arbitrate,” I said.
“You gotta, Jason. It’s my only card. Set up the return of the money to Hernandez. Tell him to call off the muscle.”
I looked at my hands and felt tired. Seeing Ed Glass brought back the years, the good times. He and I cutting red tape, making good cases; then his hang-up with the bottle, the broads, the long slide. Blackmail. Now this. A cheap carrier, bag man. I wanted to walk out, leave him with the cards he’d given himself, but I came down knowing it wouldn’t be pretty and knowing I owed him.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do what I can to call off the dogs. The money, I take it, is well-hidden?”
“Yeah.”
I was at the door when he stopped me. “If you shake ’em off, Jason, I’m cutting out, cutting clean.”
I knew he was lying, if not to me, at least to himself.
Fifteen miles south I crossed the border at Calexico and was in Mexicali. It’s a border city with more respectability than Tiajuana and about as big as San Diego.
It was late afternoon when I made a first contact in Charro’s, a handsome restaurant-bar with mariachis in black and silver suits. Charro’s famed for its meat barritos, but I wasn’t eating. I had to go through three slick Italian-dressed Mexicans, a cab drive and two blocks of walking before I would up at a red brick, two-story house surrounded by a ten-foot adobe wall.
Bennie Hernandez, dark, heavy, looking at peace with the world, was on the back patio beside the big pool.
“Jason Varney, an L.A. private detective,” he said in fine English, and showing me his info system was quick.
Beside him sat a beautiful, long-haired Mexican girl, maybe eighteen, her pointed breasts making her red sweater work for its keep.
“Fifty grand and Eddie Glass,” I said.
Hernandez sipped a Margarita and smiled pleasantly. “You’re a friend, of course.”
“He’s had it,” I said. “Call off the dogs.”
“Really?”
“Set the place, the time. I return the money.”
“He’s set a bad precedente, Mr. Varney. A carrier that does this can give others bad ideas.”