Chapter Eighteen
Headless Man
Merlini’s face didn’t wear the dismayed look I half expected. Instead he said, “That’s fine. I’m glad to hear that there’s one detective in the immediate vicinity who doesn’t think that I’m the culprit. Now, let’s blow before we meet someone else we’ll have to lock up. We’ll hear your story on the way.”
“Okay,” O’Halloran agreed. “Can I have my gun now?”
“No. I’ll keep it for the moment just in case you should get the urge to revert to the side of law and order. I don’t want to see any more jails tonight. They slow me up. Come on.”
As we left the building O’Halloran said, “My car’s right here.”
“Our transportation,” Merlini replied, “is all arranged for. You can get your car later.” Rapidly he led us down the street to where a Ford sedan was inconspicuously parked a block away. There was a man at the wheel.
Merlini’s appearance as an officer of the law wouldn’t have won him any commendations at police inspection; too many extra inches of wrist and ankle projected from beneath his uniform’s inadequate coverage. But this unnatty appearance wasn’t greatly noticeable in the darkness; and, in any case, the bullying, officious voice he suddenly assumed more than made up for it.
“You can’t park here,” he said sternly to the figure in the car. “I’ll have to give you a ticket.”
Farmer’s voice answered, “Now listen, Officer—” Then at Merlini’s chuckle he stopped. “Oh, it’s you. What kept you so long? You must be slipping.”
“We were busy delaying the pursuit,” Merlini explained. “The showground, James.”
As we piled in, I said, “I’m beginning to get it now— or part of it. Case the can means ‘watch the jail,’ and I’ll light a rag, I suppose is ‘I’ll escape.’” (Light a rag actually means: to leave. Synonymous with cop a sneak, take a powder, lam.)
“Okay,” O’Halloran said. “Here’s where you find out who your Headless Lady was. I’d better go slow, start way back at the beginning and break it to you gradually. Three weeks back a couple of gorillas walked into Maxie Weissman’s country hide-out near Bridgeport and let a lot of daylight through him with Tommy guns. You know that. What wasn’t in the papers was the fact that Maxie’s pals, mainly his mouthpiece, Duke Miller, and Bo Lepkewitz started scrapping about who was going to take over. In the mixup, somebody with an ax to grind spilled a lot of first-class beans in the D.A.’s ear. He had himself a picnic. He had Judge Commager and Judge Parton busy issuing warrants in shifts. But they needed just a little more than what they had to really pin down the big shots. They figured that the right kind of pressure on the Duke would do the trick, but he got a tip-off and turned up missing just as they reached for him.
“The Crime Prevention Association and the Merchant’s Bureau put up rewards that added to ten grand. The agency business hasn’t been too hot lately, so I thought maybe I could, with luck, cut myself a piece of that. When the D.A. found the Duke had gotten off the hook, he got Inspector Gavigan assigned to special duty and they got busy. First thing they did was put tails on Paula Starr.”
I groaned. “So that’s it. Paula Starr, café society’s darling. El Algier’s acrobatic dancing sensation, Broadway’s cutest nudist. The Duke’s gal friend. And you’re going to tell us that she—”
“Is Pauline’s sister, Paulette Hannum; that she was the Headless Lady; that she’s not only the Duke’s girl friend — they’ve been married for five years; and that Duke Miller is the ex-circus legal adjuster, Andy Meyers, that she eloped with. You begin to see light?”
“The dawn came up like thunder,” I said. “But what—”
“Ross,” Merlini cut in impatiently, “shut up and let him talk. Gavigan’s men were tailing Paula, hoping that she’d contact the missing Duke. Then what?”
“Well,” O’Halloran went on, “I hung around her apartment some, too, looking for a break. Last Friday I got it. Paula left her apartment in the East Fifties and ankled into the classiest eating joint on Park for lunch. One of the city dicks, Mike Brady, followed her in, flashed his shield, and got a table in the corner and a glass of water. The cover charge alone in that place almost runs into three figures, and if he’d ordered anything more than water the mayor would have started an investigation. That was where I had the edge on him. I took a chance, pushed in enough blue chips to buy me meals for a week, greased the headwaiter with a fin, and got a table next to hers. So, when it happened, I was close enough to get something Mike missed. I caught her giving the wink to another dame a couple of tables away. What made me sit up and take notice was the fact that they looked a hell of a lot alike. The other gal wasn’t the 14K looker that Paula was, but she’d get by all right. The main thing was I had a hunch that kept getting stronger all the time that they were sisters. Then what happens but Paula gets up and heads for the nearest ladies’ can and a minute or so later the other gal does the same. It was a smart dodge — Paula knew Mike was tailing her, and she knew he couldn’t follow her in there, not unless he was carrying a disguise kit with a wig and a set of skirts in it, like these pulp-magazine dicks do.
“I was damned sure now that the lunch money I’d risked was going to pay off, and when Paula left with the boys after her, I hung around and gave attention to sister. You know what happened then. It was Pauline, and she ends up at your shop and disappears on me. I still want to know what happened. Secret passageway you have built in, I suppose?”
“No,” Merlini replied. “She got a glimpse of you and left via the fire escape. Then you followed us, thinking we were Duke Miller in disguise, probably.”
“Well, I admit I didn’t know what the hell to think. If you were friends of the Duke’s you were new ones on me. But he had funny friends. And anyway, all I could do was check on you. I followed you downtown to the Square, and then I phoned one of my men and, when he took over, I went back to the office and started checking on sister. She’d made a stop at Billboard magazine before coming up to your place, so I phoned there and found out that she’d come in to pick up some mail, that her name was Pauline Hannum, and that she was with the Hannum Circus, which was showing in Bridgeport the next day. The first names, Paula and Pauline, clicked; and I knew damn well they were sisters and had had a conference in the ladies’ room and that something was on the fire. I figured this could be the contact with the Duke, and I decided to make tracks for the circus. And then that night, while you two were driving up from Albany, hell busted loose.”
“Your man was still tailing us?” Merlini asked.
“Yeah. He stayed on until Sunday when I called him off. He’d been sending in some of the dizziest reports about a convention of crackpots you were attending. What made him sure you were all fresh out of a loony house was when some guy who had been talking to you marched over and calmly cut off most of his necktie with a pair of scissors. Anyway, it didn’t sound much as if you were tied up with the Duke, so I called him off.”
“That joke,” Merlini said wryly, “seems to have turned and bitten me. If the O’Halloran Detective Agency had only decided I was a more sinister character, you’d have kept the man on, and Ross and I would have had a witness to the fact that we were in Albany when the Major was killed.”
“Teach you a lesson, maybe,” O’Halloran said. “And you owe me two bucks. My man put the cost of the tie on his swindle sheet. What the hell was the gag?”