He tucked it into his wallet and stood staring at the silent radio. «Steve, I think you got another job,» he said under his breath. «Something about this set-up smells.»
He slipped into a closet-like phone booth in the corner of the room, dropped a nickel and dialed an all-night radio station. He had to dial four times before he got a clear line to the Owl Program announcer.
«How’s to play King Leopardi’s record of ‘Solitude’ again?» he asked him.
«Got a lot of requests piled up. Played it twice already. Who’s calling?»
«Steve Grayce, night man at the Carlton Hotel.»
«Oh, a sober guy on his job. For you, pal, anything.»
Steve went back to the davenport, snapped the radio on and lay down on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head.
Ten minutes later the high, piercingly sweet trumpet notes of King Leopardi came softly from the radio, muted almost to a whisper, and sustaining E above high C for an almost incredible period of time.
«Shucks,» Steve grumbled, when the record ended. «A guy that can play like that — maybe I was too tough with him.»
THREE
Court Street was old town, wop town, crook town, arty town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from down-at-heels ex-Greenwich-villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody’s evening to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak, mahogany and Circassian walnut.
It had been a nice place once, had Bunker Hill, and from the days of its niceness there still remained the funny little funicular railway, called the Angel’s Flight, which crawled up and down a yellow clay bank from Hill Street. It was afternoon when Steve Grayce got off the car at the top, its only passenger. He walked along in the sun, a tall, wide-shouldered, rangy-looking man in a well-cut blue suit.
He turned west at Court and began to read the numbers. The one he wanted was two from the corner, across the street from a red brick funeral parlor with a sign in gold over it: Paolo Perrugini Funeral Home. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick building, smoking a cigar and waiting for somebody to die.
One-eighteen was a three-storied frame apartment house. It had a glass door, well masked by a dirty net curtain, a hall runner eighteen inches wide, dim doors with numbers painted on them with dim-paint, a staircase halfway back. Brass stair rods glittered in the dimness of the hallway.
Steve Grayce went up the stairs and prowled back to the front. Apartment 211, Miss Marilyn Delorme, was on the right, a front apartment. He tapped lightly on the wood, waited, tapped again. Nothing moved beyond the silent door, or in the hallway. Behind another door across the hall somebody coughed and kept on coughing.
Standing there in the half-light Steve Grayce wondered why he had come. Miss Delorme had carried a gun. Leopardi had received some kind of a threat letter and torn it up and thrown it away. Miss Delorme had checked out of the Carlton about an hour after Steve told her Leopardi was gone. Even at that —
He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked as if it would listen to reason. He tried a pick on it, snicked the bolt back and stepped softly into the room. He shut the door, but the pick wouldn’t lock it.
The room was dim with drawn shades across two front windows. The air smelled of face powder. There was light-painted furniture, a pull-down double bed which was pulled down but had been made up. There was a magazine on it, a glass tray full of cigarette butts, a pint bottle half full of whiskey, and a glass on a chair beside the bed. Two pillows had been used for a back rest and were still crushed in the middle.
On the dresser there was a composition toilet set, neither cheap nor expensive, a comb with black hair in it, a tray of manicuring stuff, plenty of spilled powder — in the bathroom, nothing. In a closet behind the bed a lot of clothes and two suitcases. The shoes were all one size.
Steve stood beside the bed and pinched his chin. «Blossom, the spitting blonde, doesn’t live here,» he said under his breath. «Just Marilyn the torn-pants brunette.»
He went back to the dresser and pulled drawers out. In the bottom drawer, under the piece of wall paper that lined it, he found a box of .25 copper-nickel automatic shells. He poked at the butts in the ash tray. All had lipstick on them. He pinched his chin again, then feathered the air with the palm of his hand, like an oarsman with a scull.
«Bunk,» he said softly. «Wasting your time, Stevie.»
He walked over to the door and reached for the knob, then turned back to the bed and lifted it by the footrail.
Miss Marilyn Delorme was in.
She lay on her side on the floor under the bed, long legs scissored out as if in running. One mule was on, one off. Garters and skin showed at the tops of her stockings, and a blue rose on something pink. She wore a square-necked, shortsleeved dress that was not too clean. Her neck above the dress was blotched with purple bruises.
Her face was a dark plum color, her eyes had the faint stale glitter of death, and her mouth was open so far that it foreshortened her face. She was colder than ice, and still quite limp. She had been dead two or three hours at least, six hours at most.
The purple bag was beside her, gaping like her mouth. Steve didn’t touch any of the stuff that had been emptied out on the floor. There was no gun and there were no papers.
He let the bed down over her again, then made the rounds of the apartment, wiping everything he had touched and a lot of things he couldn’t remember whether he had touched or not.
He listened at the door and stepped out. The hall was still empty. The man behind the opposite door still coughed. Steve went down the stairs, looked at the mailboxes and went back along the lower hall to a door.
Behind this door a chair creaked monotonously. He knocked and a woman’s sharp voice called out. Steve opened the door with his handkerchief and stepped in.
In the middle of the room a woman rocked in an old Boston rocker, her body in the slack boneless attitude of exhaustion. She had a mud-colored face, stringy hair, gray cotton stockings — everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish.
«Are you the manager?»
The woman stopped rocking, screamed, «Hi, Jake! Company!» at the top of her voice, and started rocking again.
An icebox door thudded shut behind a partly open inner door and a very big man came into the room carrying a can of beer. He had a doughy mooncalf face, a tuft of fuzz on top of an otherwise bald head, a thick brutal neck and chin, and brown pig eyes about as expressionless as the woman’s. He needed a shave — had needed one the day before — and his collarless shirt gaped over a big hard hairy chest. He wore scarlet suspenders with large gilt buckles on them.
He held the can of beer out to the woman. She clawed it out of his hand and said bitterly: «I’m so tired I ain’t got no sense.»
The man said: «Yah. You ain’t done the halls so good at that.»
The woman snarled: «I done ’em as good as I aim to.» She sucked the beer thirstily.
Steve looked at the man and said: «Manager?»
«Yah. ’S me. Jake Stoyanoff. Two hun’erd eighty-six stripped, and still plenty tough.»