The Death Dealers (20 page)

“That I’d like to know too. He disappeared a little while ago saying he was going to his room and nobody could track him down. The boys who were supposed to stay with him got one damn hot reading-off but they didn’t have an explanation. What’s your business with him?”

“Message to deliver.”

“Good luck.”

“Maybe he’s with Vey Locca.”

“Hell, she ducked out before he did.” Jenner looked around speculatively. “Guess I’ll take your advice and hop downstairs. Nothing more here.” He gave me a knowing look. “If anything turns up, you know where to get me. One good turn always deserves another, buddy. I might come in handy some day.”

“I won’t forget you,” I said.

 

The two cops were still on guard at Sarim Shey’s suite and my identity papers with Army Intelligence came out and they scrutinized them. One cop said, “Nobody’s inside. The others went through the place piece by piece.”

“You see Shey come in?”

“We weren’t on duty then. They had Feds covering the door. He came in and went out but somebody had their head up and looked and caught hell for it. Maybe he went to the World’s Fair,” he smiled.

“Well, I’ll look around anyway.”

“Go ahead.”

Nobody had cleaned the suite up yet. There were still half-empty glasses around, whisky bottles on the bar and the ash trays full of butts. Every bedroom was loaded with fine luggage, the closets filled with clothes. Sarim Shey’s room was directly opposite Teish’s and a casual inspection of the place couldn’t determine what was missing from his collection.

Getting out was easy enough. He simply went through the room he had used before and down the service entrance. Why he left was another thing entirely. I took a swing around his bedroom, pawed through the wastebasket cans, but apparently I hadn’t been the first one there. A note pad on his dresser showed a few pages torn off, but no impressions were imprinted on the top page showing.

Nothing was in the desk drawers except hotel stationery and a ball-point pen. The blue desk blotter had a few inkstains and some squiggly lines where somebody had scrawled to get a ball-point pen writing. Outside a faint outline of oblong blocks there were no other indentations in the soft paper.

I started away, stopped and turned back to look at the markings again. There was something familiar about them. It took a few minutes to make sense, then I got it. There were six blocks. The right-hand one had an X drawn through it. Outside in the corridor were six elevators. Teish El Abin had come down in the one on the far right.

Sarim Shey had gotten a diagram of the route Teish was to use under guard to get to the ballroom and Sarim had passed on the information in time for the elevator to be gimmicked.

So the bastard was in it
up
to his ears
after all.

And he wouldn’t want Teish alive. Even if Teish kicked the deal and went to the Commies, Sarim Shey would still be a stooge, always second in command and not the powerhouse he wanted to be. He didn’t want to have to outlive Teish and couldn’t take a chance on having a successor oust him completely. He couldn’t afford to have Vey Locca in an advisory capacity either. With Teish dead she had no importance. With Teish alive she could point the finger right at him.

So Sarim Shey had to contact Malcolm Turos. One way or another he had to convince him Teish had to be knocked off. The only thing that could save Teish was his ultimate importance in the Soviet scheme of things, and it was Malcolm Turos who would make that decision.

I tried the door Sarim had used leading to the extra room on the end of the suite. It was locked, but three hard raps with my heel tore the metal loose from the wood and the door flew back. Light from the bedroom behind me threw a glow inside and I saw the lamp on the dresser and switched it on. I walked past the beds, stopped, and looked down between them.

Vey Locca lay sprawled out face down, her clothes torn, hair spilled forward over her head and a small pool of blood spreading under her body. I turned her head, feeling my face grimace at the sight of the ugly blue welts that discolored her jaw and eye.

But she wasn’t dead! Damn, she had been left there to die and she was still alive!

I rolled her over and saw the hilt of a stiletto, a wicked thin-handled thing that was made to deliver death at one blow, sticking from her belly and when I ripped away the cloth from around it I saw why she was still alive.

When the blade was driven into her belly it hit the ruby in her navel and was deflected sideways into the flesh and muscle of her stomach without the killer realizing what had happened. She lay there unconscious from the beating she took on her face and from shock of the wound, but she was alive.

She couldn’t hear me, but I touched her face and said, “You’ll be okay, baby,” then picked up the ruby and dropped it in my pocket.

I didn’t want anybody to stop me. I didn’t want to have to deliver any explanations. I went out, spoke to the cops a minute, then took the elevator down to the lobby. I made my call from there. It took a couple of minutes to locate Charlie Corbinet upstairs and when he came on I said, “Tiger, Charlie.”

“Where are you?”

“Across town,” I lied. “Listen ... check the room adjacent to Sarim Shey’s. Vey Locca’s there and she’s hurt. She was supposed to have died but it didn’t work out. She’s unconscious now and when she comes around she ought to have a story for you. But, damn it, keep her under cover. If word gets out she’s still alive somebody will get to her.”

“Tiger ...”

I didn’t hear the rest. I hung up, but I was thinking back to the room and the telephone on the nightstand between the two beds. The phone was almost on the edge of the table where somebody had used it, not where it normally would be.

My identity papers bought me the information. The operator at the PBX board looked up her charge calls and found the only one credited to that room. It had been made that evening to a number she wrote down and handed to me. I didn’t want to hang around so went out to the street and looked around for a gin mill that would have a pay phone.

It was still raining. It always rained on nights like this.

I headed west, picked a bar a block away and called Virgil Adams, asking for a reverse on the number. He went through his listings and found the address that went with the phone number that had been called.

Then I felt like slamming my fist through a wall. When I got there it was a public pay booth on a comer of Tenth Avenue and the gas station behind it was closed. The phone had been used as a contact point and nothing more.

I called Virgil Adams back, gave him the information and asked if any of our informants had come up with anything. Several false leads had been tracked down and found to be negative and the best we could hope for was a little luck coming from the manager of a belly dance joint like the Turkish Gardens who remembered seeing a person answering the description of Malcolm Turos as he had looked the night I spotted him.

He had changed a five-hundred-dollar bill when he paid his check for a meal and drinks and the manager had noticed a card in his wallet from a club owned by his friend, Stephen Pelloni. Virgil had placed two men and a female operative in the place in case he showed again.

Virgil was about to sign off when he said, “Hold it, Tiger. Just got a note.”

“What is it?”

“A little oddball, but it’s from one of our sources. The guy has a used clothing place on the East Side.” He rattled off the address and I memorized it. “Something about a man with a strange voice buying a very small-sized suit of old clothes. His boy happened to look in the car outside and saw a man there in what looked like a nightgown to him. What do you think?”

“May have something, Virg. I’ll get over there.”

“The guy makes ten grand if he comes through.”

“We’ll know soon enough.”

The taxi dropped me off on the end of the block and I walked the rest of the way. During the day the street would teem with people and pushcarts, but now it was almost deserted. A couple of bars were still open, a restaurant had a few people in it, but the blinds were drawn on the door and the lone waiter inside was standing beside it, arms crossed as he waited for everybody to go home.

Halfway down I found the address I was looking for, a rundown place that had a window full of odds and ends and a sign, WE BUY OLD CLOTHES, over the doors, with Leo Rubin, prop. under it. There was a night light on in the back of the place, but no one inside. I checked the door next to the store and flicked a match on to read the names under the doorbell.

The lower one had Rubin scratched in the metal and I pushed the buzzer. Nobody answered so I stood there with my finger on it until I heard a door slam upstairs and a voice yelled down the stairwell, “Yes, yes, what is it? Don’t you know what time it is? A man is to sleep at this hour. Now what do you want?”

“To give you ten thousand bucks maybe,” I called up. “So it is not too late for a little work then. Upstairs. Come upstairs and watch out for the junk on the stairs. These kids ... junk all over everyplace. There is no light.”

I picked my way up, toeing toys and boxes out of the way until I reached the landing. Framed in the light from his door was a withered man of indeterminate age wrapped tightly in a bathrobe, peering at me from behind heavy-lensed glasses, his face squinted up trying to make me out in the darkness.

“Now who are you, please? Who is it that wants to give me so much money?”

“Does the amount ring a bell?”

“I have heard such a sum mentioned.”

“And you reported about seeing a man with a strange voice.”

He stopped squinting then and looked around the darkness uneasily. “Come in, come in. It is not right to talk about such things in public.”

“Anyone live upstairs?”

“Only mice. It is a storeroom for me and sometimes a place to put the relatives who you don’t want to visit too long.” He stepped aside and waved me through the door.

From one side a voice thick with the accent of the Lower East Side said, “Who is it, Leo? If it is those card players tell them that they should go home where they belong.”

“Be quiet!” Rubin said sharply. “This is business for men.” Obviously he was the head of the house because the woman shut up and didn’t say another thing. “In here, the kitchen,” he told me. He went to the cupboard, took down two glasses and a dusty bottle. “It is the custom here. First the wine, then the business. After the wine I can tell if a man speaks truthfully.”

I dumped mine down in a hurry, anxious to get with it, but some types you can’t push and he was one. When he was ready he sat down, pointed to a chair for me, folded his fingers inside one another and waited. “My name is Mann,” I said, “Tiger Mann. We have people looking for a certain person with an odd voice.”

“Who is this one, please?”

“Nobody you need know. He’s a killer and he’s ready to kill again if it eases your conscience any. We have to nail him before it happens. Now you tell me what you saw, when and how. All the details.”

He nodded, took off his glasses and wiped them, then adjusted them back on carefully. “It was the little one they call Dog who has told us to watch for this person. So for that much money, everyone is watching. Once Dog himself was paid generously for giving information and we know this. Ohce I myself was given a tidy sum for letting someone know what I found in the pocket of a suit that was stolen and later sold to me. Yes, I know how you people work, so I am watching.

“It is tonight and I am finishing repairing several old garments for sale when this man came in. Naturally, I first notice his clothes and they are not in need of replacement.”

“Describe him?”

Leo Rubin made a peculiar face and spread his hands out in a gesture as he shrugged. “So nothing special. A man. Maybe forty. Not big, not small.”

“Average?” I probed.

“Yes,” he agreed at once. “Like so. It is hard to describe him. His suit, that I can tell you. Dark gray, not too old, but it is not an American suit. There are differences only an expert can tell,” he said proudly. “Glasses and a hat he wore and good shoes with rubber soles. Why he wants to buy in my store is a curious thing.” He shrugged again and made another gesture with his hands. “But who knows people? Sometimes they see a bum, they buy him a suit, the bum sells it right back to me for less and drinks down the street. We all make a little bit then.”

“The guy. Tell me about him.”

“So I am telling you. It is when he talks that I notice this. It is like he is having a hard time to talk and all the time he keeps his chin down, like so.” He demonstrated it for me, then looked up. “At first I forgot about what Dog has told me because I am trying to understand him. He wants a suit, size thirty-four, any color, any style. Just a suit and I feel bad because I do not think I have any that small in stock without going upstairs to the storeroom. So I look anyway and I find a suit. For five dollars I sell it, not in a wrapping even. He takes it over his arm and leaves. Outside he is in a car. He goes away.”

“What kind of a car?”

“So who can tell? It is raining and I do not go out to look. My boy comes in then and he tells me that inside the car is a man in a nightshirt. A white one. I think then and call Dog and tell him about the one with the voice that can’t talk and he tells me later he has made a phone call and has let somebody know about it. Then you come.” He looked at me hopefully. “Is it enough?”

“No.”

His face fell with regret.

“I have to know about that damn car.”

“That I cannot tell you.”

I was going to stop right there and not waste any more time, but a piping voice from the doorway of the kitchen said, “I can tell, Papa.”