“In the meantime, doubts and wonders about Maxie will be rising all over the city. I want you to go down to the offices. You’ll know what to do. Keep things running. Put up a front for at least today.” The phone buzzed. Myart went to it.
I stuck my head back in the rumpus room. “I’m going to be out for a while,” I said.
Cecil Calhoun looked up from the table where she was jotting on a note pad.
“Just stay in here and you’ll be okay, I promise you.”
“And I believe I can believe you, Steve Hilliard,” she said.
“Calhoun, I like you.”
As the afternoon wore on, an air of dread and doubt, like fingers of darkness, stole across the underworld of the city. I knew it from the people I talked with in the offices, the phone calls that came for Maxie that I had to cover. No one outside the organization knew what had really happened, but you can’t turn loose a score of human hunters asking questions without causing people in dark places to talk and wonder.
Calhoun was still in the rumpus room when I got back there. I had a tray of food in my hands. I kicked the door closed with my heel. “Your dinner,” I said.
“Is it that late? I hadn’t noticed.”
She had the face of the dart board covered with glossy photos of Melissa, mostly close-ups of Melissa’s soft, golden face. She had ruined the ping-pong table with a clutter of tools and plaster of paris scattered everywhere. Midway down the table what looked like a lump of plaster of paris was showing the outlines of a human face. “I hope you like chop suey,” I said.
“Adore it.” She sat down to eat. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon, Steve.”
“That’s flattering.”
“I’m really serious. You don’t belong here. This Maxie is a crook, isn’t he?”
“Let’s say the average man has ten fingers. Maxie has a hundred with each finger in a different place. He can push a lot of weight around, Maxie can.”
“But you don’t belong with him,” she repeated. “You need to put that good-looking, smiling kisser in a brokerage office.”
“And get up every morning at seven-thirty, jostle my way through the mob to get home at five, read the paper and go to bed? Set myself up so that a Saturday night bridge game is a big celebration?”
“I wish I knew your early environment,” she said. “Something has twisted you up. How did you ever get hooked up with Maxie?”
“I inherited it,” I said. “An old uncle raised me. He was a side-kick of Maxie’s. Maxie has always regarded me as a son. That’s why I have the run of the place, why I’m one of the few people he can trust.”
She was looking at me with a world of expression in her dark brown eyes. I leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t move.
When I took my lips away from hers she said, “I’m sorry you did that.”
“Would slapping my face help?”
“Not that kind of sorry. Get out of here, will you!”
I went back in the living room. Myart was on the edge of his chair at the phone. Beads of sweat stood out on his narrow forehead under his patent-leather hair and his waxed mustache had got a little limp. He was saying in agitation: “No!.. Really?... Wonderful!”
He slammed the phone down, turned to me. “We pushed through the blank, Hilliad.” He laughed in that way of his, that dry, mirthless sound that wasn’t real laughter at all. “Until one-twenty-five this morning we had connected Melissa with no one who might have had a motive to kill her. But Boudreau has found a cab driver who remembers taking her to Augie Feldman’s place about two this morning. She wasn’t seen after that until she showed up here — in the trunk. Get Feldman, Steve. Boudreau says he just went back to his rooming house after eating in a hash house. Boudreau is watching the place. Dominick is downstairs. Take him with you.”
Augie Feldman’s rooming house was on the lower side of town in a neighborhood of 1890 houses, huge, gloomy old hulks, that had been converted from once magnificent private homes. I rolled the car to a stop. Beside me, Dominick stirred ponderously, breathing through his adenoids. “There’s Boudreau,” Dominick said.
We got out of the car, drifted to the shadow at the far side of the sidewalk. Boudreau said, “He’s still in there. Room 10. Upstairs.”
“Cover us from here,” I said.
The front door creaked and the stairs sighed. Dominick and I stopped before the door of Room 10. We each put a hand under our coats against the pressure of our guns, and I palmed the knob and slammed the door open.
The room smelled. It looked fly-specked and scaly in the light of the one naked bulb. Augie Feldman reared up on the bed, a racing form and pencil in his hands, a cigarette dangling from the middle of his mouth.
I looked at him and remembered him as he had once been, prosperous, sure of himself, heavy on the dough. This quaking, gaunt hulk with the thinning grey hair, slack jowls and fear-haunted eyes was certainly a different man. The big-time bookie was long gone.
He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the overflowing ashtray from the straight chair beside the sway-backed bed and made haste to wipe the ashes, with his palm, that had spilled on the hard bottom of the chair.
“Hello, Steve. Sit down, sit down.” He pushed the chair toward me. I pushed it back. I watched a nervous tic develop in his left eye as he sat on the edge of the bed and stared up at us. The room was hot, close, unpleasant. I said, “What was she doing here in the early hours of morning, Augie.”
“You mean Melissa,” he whispered.
I waited. He said, “She was around here asking about Roy Meek. She knew how it had been between me and Meek once.”
“And how long was she here?”
“Not long.” The pouches under his eyes looked heavy and purple. He looked; at his hands. “She left about three o’clock this morning, said she was going home.”
“You’d better come along and tell it to Maxie.”
His gaze darted from Dominick to me. He licked his lips. “I’ll get my hat.”
We went out of the house with Augie between us. I put him in the back seat of the car between Boudreau and Dominick. When we got back to Maxie’s apartment building I got out of the car with Feldman and prodded him across the sidewalk. I would take him up alone. Dominick and Boudreau were both good men, but in a case like this Myart said you could never know for sure, you couldn’t be too careful who came into the penthouse.
At the top, Feldman slouched out of the elevator like a man sapped of strength and will. Myart met us in the living room. He looked at Augie with those narrow black eyes and said, “Take him in to Maxie.”
I opened the door to the den, shoved Augie in. Maxie was standing beside the couch, spread-legged, face slick, a near-empty rye bottle in his hand.
Augie stopped at the sight on the couch.
“Melissa,” Maxie hissed.
Augie’s face seemed to crumble and freeze that way, a thing of grey disjointed angle and shadow.
He stumbled across the room, mouth working, and slipped to his knees. A dry sob racked at his throat.
“You did it!” Maxie said.
Feldman didn’t say anything, just stayed there with those dry sobs tearing at him.
“Damn you, talk when I speak to you!” Maxie said. He swung the rye bottle. It hit Augie across the bridge of the nose, brought blood, knocked him over on his back.
I bent over him. “You knocked him out, Maxie.”
Maxie wiped his hand across his slack lips. His eyes were burning. Swaying on his feet, he said, “Drag him out in the living room. Then go down and bring up Georgie. If anybody can make him talk, Georgie can. And I want to watch it.”