“Pardon?”
“I paid already this month. I’m not made of money.”
“Miss, I’m just here for some information. I don’t want your money.”
“Oh,” she said, warming. She opened the door wider. Her slender little shape was wrapped up in a blue-and-pink floral kimono. She looked as easy as ticktacktoe, but her timing was lousy.
“How can I help you, cowboy?”
“Do you know if any new tenants moved into this building recently?”
“Why, no.”
“Well, then-any apartments empty right now, that you know off?”
“No. I don’t think so.” She blew a smoke ring. “Didn’t you check with the janitor?”
I gave her my best suave smile. “Maybe I’d rather talk to you.”
Ronald Colman had nothing to worry about, but she bought it just the same, a sultry smirk making the cigarette in her lips erect.
“I’ve been here over a year, cowboy, and nobody’s moved in or out in all that time.”
I thought about that. Then I took out the circular and folded it so that all she could see was Bernice Rogers’s picture.
“Know her?”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s Bernice Smith. She lives upstairs in 4-B.”
The one buzzer without a name.
“She got a kid?”
“Yes.”
“Baby?”
She thought I was calling her “baby” for a second. Then she figured it out and said, “Uh, yes-year-and-a-half old or so.”
“What color is the baby’s hair?”
“Blond, I think.”
“And Bernice?”
“Well, like that picture-brunette.”
Interesting.
“If you’re looking for her,” she said, exhaling blue smoke, “I don’t think she’s around.”
“Yeah?”
“She’s on vacation. Over a month already. Her brother’s staying in her place while she’s gone.”
“Thank you, miss,” I said, tucking the circular away.
“My name’s Marie.”
“Thanks, Marie.”
“Got a name, cowboy?”
“Nate,” I said.
Her cupid lips formed a kiss of a smile. “Careful, Nate.”
She liked me. On the other hand, I had a feeling all that was required out of me was a pulse. And five dollars.
I nodded and went on up; halfway up the stairs, I heard her close the door. I unbuttoned my topcoat as I climbed. Then I unbuttoned my suit coat and got the automatic out from its shoulder holster. I’d had both my suits tailored on Maxwell Street to hide the Browning. I slipped my right hand with the gun in it in my topcoat pocket.
And now I was on the fourth landing, looking at 4-B.
I stared at the door, at the brass number and letter. I had no backup. I was trembling a little, my body mixing a fear and adrenaline cocktail. Should I wait? Should I kick the door in, or knock?
I knocked.
The door cracked open. The harsh, pockmarked pretty face glared at me suspiciously.
“What do you want?”
I showed her the badge, and said-nothing. She pushed the door shut before I could.
Inside, she was yelling, “Coppers!”
Gun-in-hand still in my topcoat pocket, I lifted my foot and kicked that fucking door. It sprung open first try.
I rushed in to see two boys in shoulder holsters, white shirts, suspenders, loosened bow ties and unshaven faces standing up hastily from a round table where a gin rummy game had been in progress. Both were smoking cigarettes and a blue haze hung in the room like bad weather. One boy was razor thin with a razor-thin mustache and slicked-back Valentino hair. He wore a revolver in a shoulder holster. The other was big and fat and sloppy and a half-eaten sandwich and several bottles of beer were before him at the table, and so was a revolver, which he went for, and I shot him twice. Once in the chest, once in the head. Shot right through my damn coat. Damn!
The woman began to scream. She was standing in a doorway to what appeared to be the kitchen. The child was not in sight.
The razor-thin guy overturned the table and began to fire at me from behind it. I ducked back out in the hall, to put a wall between us, while his slugs flew through the open door and chewed the wood of the door across the way.
“Give it up!” I said, my back to the wall. The smell of gunpowder scorched the air. “Place is surrounded. You want out alive, it’s with your hands the hell up!”
The gunfire subsided.
“Slide your rod out in the hall,” I said, my gun out from my coat pocket now. “Don’t throw it, slide it!”
After a moment or two of hesitation, the guy pitched it. It clunked against the baseboard of the floor at my left, harder than I liked but it didn’t go off; the barrel was still trailing smoke.
“Playing it smart, finally,” I said, stepping back inside, where I saw that he was indeed playing it smart-his version.
He held the small, black-haired, angelic-faced baby around its waist with one hard forearm; the child was asleep, or doped. The blonde was against a wall over at my left; her eyes were round and wet, her hard face distorted with fear, a knuckled hand up against one cheek. She wore a simple blue frock that hugged her curves. Behind her on the wall, crooked, hung a peaceful Maxfield Parrish print.
The razor-thin man had small eyes, but they looked large, the white showing all round. He looked crazed and quite capable of squeezing the trigger of the small automatic pressed to the unconscious child’s head.
“Let me pass,” he said. His voice was as thin as his mustache.
“No,” I said. “Put the kid down.”
“You kidding? He’s my ticket.”
To hell.
“What’s your name?”
“What do you care, copper?”
“What’s your name?”
The blonde said, breathlessly, “Eddie.”
I didn’t know whether she was answering my question, or talking to him. And I didn’t care.
“Put the kid down, Eddie, and I won’t mention you took a hostage. I’ll even lay the resisting arrest off on your dead pal, here.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” he said, and laughed. He moved forward a step, holding his tiny hostage tight, keeping the nose of the gun against the kid’s temple.
I shot Eddie between the eyes.
Not as impressive a shot as it sounds, close as he was to me; what was more impressive was the dive I made toward him as he dropped the kid. I caught the sleeping baby like a touchdown pass.
I sat on the floor, cradling the slumbering kid in my arms, the smoking gun still in one hand, the corpse of the thin guy at my feet, the other corpse between me and the blonde, who was stuck to the wall like a fly. I had just killed two men, and it would hit me later, but right now I felt good.
“You…you shot Eddie,” the blonde said. She was shaking her head, disagreeing with reality.
“No kidding,” I said. Rocking the child as I eased back onto my feet.
“How could you risk it? He had his finger on the trigger…”
“A shot in the head kills all reflex action, lady.”
“Am I…under arrest?”
“You’re under arrest.”
“What…what charge?”
“Kidnapping.”
She sighed. Nodded.
“This is the Lindbergh baby, isn’t it?”
She cocked her head, like she hadn’t understood me. Her Master’s Voice.
“Well?” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Mister,” she said, “that’s Hymie Goldberg’s kid.”
“Hymie Goldberg?”
“The bootlegger. In Peoria. He’s loaded. We were gonna get five grand for the little bastard.”
My boss burst in the open door, then. Lou Sapperstein, a sturdy, balding cop of about forty seasoned years. He took off his hat, eyes wide behind wire-framed glasses; snow dusted his topcoat like dandruff. He had a.38 in one hand.
“What the hell are you up to, Nate?”
“I just cracked the Hymie Goldberg kidnapping,” I said.
And I handed him the baby.
1