The Death Dealers (21 page)

“You can tell nothing. Go to bed,” Rubin commanded.

“Wait a minute.”

“What do these boys know?” he insisted. “They ...”

“How old are you?” I asked the kid.

“Eleven. And it was a black Chevy sedan, a 1963 model”

“And you saw a guy in a nightshirt in the back?”

He nodded. “Sure. I even jumped so I could look through the back window. Some old guy. He looked sick.”

I tried for the impossible. “You get a look at the plates?”

“Naw.” The kid shook his head.

“See,” Rubin said, “what do these kids know? They see nothing and ...”

“But I know whose car it was,” the kid grinned.

The feeling was there. I felt good all over, a wild, crazy good and knew I had hold of something. I said, “Whose?”

For a second the kid hesitated, a sly look on his face, then Rubin said in a voice that was going to tolerate no nonsense, “Say your piece.”

“Yamu Gorkey’s.” I waited, watching him, and he added, “He’s got that loan place down on Fulton.”

Leo Rubin stood up, his face stern. “You have been so far from home?”

“Aw, Pop.”

Rubin took his glasses off again, worked the earpieces, put them on and said. “That Gorkey is a bummer. A real bummer. He is a Communist and a bummer.”

“How do
you
know him, Pop?” the kid chuckled.

“I know from the people he takes,” Rubin exploded. “You are not to go near Fulton, do you hear? I am telling you ...”

“How did you recognize his car?” I asked the kid.

“Last week on the back somebody scratched
Yamu stinks.
I seen it there. Besides, I’m sure some way else.”

“Spill it,” I said.

“Yamu was driving, that’s how I’m sure.”

“Where does he live?”

“Upstairs over Sloan’s Bar four blocks from here. That’s the big one in the middle. Got about six on that block. The Greenies ... that’s a social club... they’re havin’ a party tonight and that block’s jumpin’. Boy!”

“To have seen such things. To think such a young boy ... Mr. Mann, it makes me afraid.”

I pulled a five-dollar bill out and held it out to the kid. He grabbed it eagerly and folded it up in his palm. “You earned it. Just don’t talk it up.”

“What do I care? That Yamu Gorkey does stink. He’s always taking a poke at us.”

“To bed!” Rubin said, arm outstretched, his finger pointing. The kid grinned again and ran off. When Rubin looked at me with another shrug he shook his head. “They are so different.”

“Maybe he just got you a wad of dough, Mr. Rubin.”

“Perhaps. Is it worth what they have to see?”

“In this case it is,” I said.

The kid knew what he was talking about when he said the block was jumping. Every bar and store on the stretch between the two avenues sported bright orange placards with blazing lettering announcing this as the Greenie’s annual social week and listed events coming up with everything from a softball game in Central Park to beer barrel rolling down the street. This was their opening night and from the friendly blasts they got from stickers plastered on the walls and poles from the other clubs, they had plenty of rivals for competition.

All six bars were wide open and blaring jukebox music and what crowd wasn’t packed inside was going from one place to another. Everybody had half a jag on and paid no attention to the rain. One guy was sprawled up against a parked car, out like a light, and further down two more were getting sick at the curb. One finished chucking his cookies and turned back into the bar again. Like a seagull, I thought.

I looked at them all with a nice happy grin because if they hadn’t been there it wouldn’t have been necessary for Turos to buy clothes to wrap Teish in. He would have stuck out like a sore thumb in his native dress he was wearing, but in a nondescript suit, propped between a couple of guys, he was just another character who had belted too many and was paying for it and his friends were carrying him home.

Sloan’s was the hit spot, all right. They had a three-piece band hammering away instead of a juke and the B girls were making theirs at the bar. A couple of hustlers were trying to make a buck, hitting the guys who came out of the place, but right then they were more for the beer and booze than they were for the broads and waved them off with a “later maybe” sign.

One of the dames spotted me, got the drop by cutting in front of her friend and swung over, her legs flashing whitely under the belted black plastic raincoat. The pert little hat she wore was soaked through, but it didn’t dampen her spirits any.

She smiled broadly, her pocketbook swinging from her shoulder and said, “Going places tonight?”

Then she got up close where she could see my face and the smile became a little forced. She was tabbing me for the fuzz and could see herself in the cooler already. I didn’t want to shake her illusions. Sometimes you could play it right and come out winning, even with that type. “Relax, kid,” I told her. “No roust. Vice can handle their own business.”

The smile got friendly again. “They told Buddy not to pull that gun on Gretch. Somebody called in, eh?”

“You know these socials.”

The broad got friendly cute then. “You ain’t gonna pop ’em are you?”

I shook my head. “Nope. As long as it’s peaceful, let them have fun.”

“Huh, with all the squad cars rollin’ by nobody’s messin’ around. It ain’t like last year.”

“You seen Yamu Gorkey?”

“That punk?” She made a face of disgust. “He needs more nudgin’ than he gets to stay in line. He’s probably upstairs countin’ his dough, the Commie bastard. Always talking it up with the jerks who don’t know better. You know how many May Day parades he was in?”

“We know.”

“Sure, and you let him run that racket of his. Why don’t you roust him?”

“Better than standing in the wet,” I said.

“He went upstairs a long time ago. Shake him up good.”

I winked at her, let her walk back to her friend and went over to the door that led to the apartments over the gin mill. Parked directly opposite the building was a black 1963 Chevy sedan. I didn’t have to look at the sign scratched on the back to know whose it was.

The outside door opened into a small vestibule and the inside one was locked. All it took was a plastic credit card slipped into the slight space between the door and the jamb to force the beveled tongue back and the door opened easily. I closed it behind me, letting the lock fall in place quietly, then took out the .45 and cocked the hammer back.

Old carpeting ran up the stairs, muffling my steps, but I stayed near the junction of the wall to avoid making them creak. I took them two at a time, but slowly, and once when one let out an ominous groan, stopped and waited to see if the sound was heard. There was only one light in the place and that was behind me, so that if anybody jumped me I was going to be a beautiful target. Ahead all was wrapped in the dusky gloom of shadows I couldn’t see through at all, a perfect place for an ambush.

A good five minutes passed before I reached the top, then stood there trying to make my eyes adjust to the darkness. I couldn’t hurry, yet I couldn’t afford to wait. When I thought I was ready I felt my way along the wall, touched a door and paused there. My fingers felt a padlock snapped into a hasp and I debated blasting it open, but if I was wrong it would only alert anyone waiting. I felt the gossamer touch of a spider-web then and grinned because the luck was still there. That was one door not used recently.

I had to run my hand along the banister until I came to the bend in the stairs going up, then took those steps the way I had the others. Only this time I didn’t have to be quite so careful. From the landing above I could hear the distant sound of a television, the theme music of a popular program and the voice of an announcer running through a beer commercial.

The door was a wood panel job, the lock a fine new Yale, but the house was old and the framing around the door warped enough so that even the precaution of a massive lock was insufficient. The plastic credit card got the latch back again and I twisted the knob so that the door opened about four inches.

No more. A chain was strung across the opening and through the angular inch-wide gap I could see a pair of crossed legs cut off by a wall where somebody was very nice and comfortable watching his favorite show.

I had two choices. I could put a shot through the legs then try to break the lock out of the wood or shoot the damn thing off and get in there as fast as I could. The trouble was that with the odds at stake, one second’s delay would give anyone inside a chance to grab a gun and even the odds up ... or drop a slug into Teish. If he was there.

And it was a chance I couldn’t take.

But I got my third choice when I looked at the chain carefully. Those things are supposed to be strung up in a way so that any opening of the door at all automatically slides the stop in a position. It was designed so that the door had to be fully closed first before it could be unhooked, but in this age of do-it-yourself gadgetry too many people tried doing things their own way without reading the directions first and made mistakes. Yamu Gorkey made a beauty.

He left slack in the chain.

All I had to do was close the door almost shut, use the tip of my pen to reach in and slide the catch back out of its holder, and the chain swung down across the door with a metallic click and I walked on inside. The legs were still crossed, keeping time to the rugged beat of the theme music.

Yamu Gorkey was a big, wide-faced guy with scars over both eyebrows and lips twisted in a perpetual sneer even when he was enjoying himself. He sat there in his shirt-sleeves, hands folded across his belly, his expression mirroring the action on the TV screen. Unlike the outside of the building, the apartment was ornate, from the biggest color TV available to the expensive furniture that was shoved with lousy taste in any place it would fit. Jammed in a comer were three filing cabinets and the office desk next to it was loaded with papers and account books. Yamu Gorkey ran his operation out of his house as well as his office.

I stood there thirty seconds before he saw me, and when he did his face become loose and flabby and for the first time his sneer dissolved into a look of fear. It was too sudden, too quiet. The gun was too big and just my standing there was enough to give him the wild shakes without a word being said.

His mouth hung open and he swallowed hard, finally saying, “What the hell ...”

“Teish,” I said. “Where is he?”

Somehow they all do the same thing. They think they have the edge because you don’t shoot first and ask questions later. They grab the odds because they know that they have no conscience and when death is the perfect answer, they can produce it. Everybody else is a patsy to be taken and when you have them in your own back yard you can even get away with it in a court of law. They know that the right guys won’t move until the wrong ones make the first move and by then the wrong ones are right because the other ones are dead.

So he got that look on his face and I wanted to tell him what kind of a mistake he was making and he didn’t give me a chance. He had the gun wedged in the chair beside him where it wasn’t supposed to be seen and it was only when he had it in his mitt and pointed at me that he knew he had made the big mistake, the one-of-a-kind type, and tried to scream for me to stop even as he pulled the trigger of his gun.

The slug caught me in the left side with an impact that half twisted me around. Behind me I heard something break from where it had gone on through, smashing into glass, but by then it didn’t matter. Yamu Gorkey had no top of his head and was going backwards over his chair to lie in a ridiculous heap on the floor, a corpse that was too dead to bleed.

On television, the announcer came on and talked about beer some more.

I opened my coat, looked at the hole in my shirt turning red and felt the passage of the bullet. It had gone through the fleshy section between my ribs and hip, almost painless at the moment, but in a little while I’d be hurting. I stayed flattened back against the wall, protected by the angle of it. No other slugs came at me; there was no sound except the television, the rain and occasionally a yell from the street below.

I left Gorkey where he was, pushed through the other rooms until I came to the bedroom at the back of the building. Every time I opened a door I expected another gun to blast out of the darkness and was ready for it, but none came.

Then there was Teish El Abin, a pitiful little guy lying trussed up on a bed, spreadeagled so that his arms and ankles could be lashed to the metal framework, a gag stuffed into his mouth. His eyes were wide with some terrifying fear, not knowing who I was, but seeing the shape of me silhouetted there with the .45 in my hand.

I yanked the gag out of his mouth and cut him loose before he recognized me. If I thought there would be thanks, I was wrong. All his Eastern wariness came back to him in an expression of absolute disdain and he said, “Your game has gone far enough, Mr. Mann.” He was exhausted, frightened and old, but he had to tell me.

I jerked him out of bed and led him stumbling into the front room. Even the sight of the body on the floor didn’t seem to alter his attitude any at all. He sat down, slumping there, watching me. “It will do you no good.” He waved his hand toward the floor without looking at what was left of Yamu Gorkey. “Do you not think that in my time I have ... arranged such a scene?”

I got sore then. He was still a gook in my country and he wasn’t handling me like that at all. He was begging, we weren’t asking. He came over here with his hand out and something to sell, but he didn’t own the world. He controlled only a tiny chunk of it that was good if we managed it for him. “You were suckered, old boy. You were jostled by the Soviets and they wanted you to think it was an American plot.”