The Paul Cain Omnibus (23 page)

After a while he opened his eyes and looked up at a dingy ceiling of another room. He knew when he opened his eyes that the phonograph was not far away, but was in the room, and he turned his head very slowly and saw it—a small garishly decorated box—on a table across the narrow room.

Brennan was lying on the floor and he painfully turned his head a little more and saw the fat, bald Negro who had been with Harley. He was lying across a low couch with a pile of cushions behind his back and shoulders; his big shiny head propped up against the wall. His bulging, heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on Brennan; as Brennan looked at him he lifted a brown wisp of cigarette to his thick lips, inhaled deeply. The air was blue-gray and heavy with the acrid smell of marijuana.

The phonograph went suddenly into the tonal contortions of running down. A door behind the couch opened and the Negress came into the room, crossed to the phonograph and wound it, started the record over again. She glanced down at Brennan, spoke over her shoulder to the fat Negro: “Yo’ boyfrien’ is comin’ around.”

The fat Negro nodded slowly.

Brennan sat up very slowly and carefully. He felt the top of his head gingerly with his fingers; there was a thin raw stripe across his scalp, a throbbing furrow through the thickness of his matted and sticky hair. He looked at his hands and they were dark with blood.

He started to get up and the fat Negro got up swiftly and came over and put his foot on Brennan’s shoulder and shoved very hard; his face was entirely expressionless as he put the middle part of his foot against Brennan’s shoulder and shoved and Brennan crashed into the wall and slid down on his side on the floor. Then the Negro drew back his foot and kicked Brennan very hard in the stomach and ribs. He was breathing very hard and there were little drops of perspiration on his vacant yellow face; he drew his foot back carefully and slowly and then kicked very swiftly and hard several times. Brennan groaned once, lay still.

The Negro turned and went back to the couch and sat down. He sat on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, stared at Brennan.

The Negress had turned from the phonograph to watch him. She shook her head slightly and said, “That ain’t good,” as if to herself; then went to him and reached down and took the thin cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and took several deep drags.

Brennan groaned and rolled over on his stomach. Very slowly he raised himself to his hands and knees, leaned against the wall.

The hoarse feminine voice of the phonograph blared to metallic crescendo: “
Underneath the Harlem moon
… .”

The Negro got up and went to Brennan again and put his boot on his back and pressed him down to the floor. He looked back at the woman and grinned, and then he kicked the side of Brennan’s head hard, once.

Brennan did not groan anymore, nor move.

The Negro stood over him a moment, then turned and went to a door on the far side of the room. He said: “Ah’m goin’ up an’ see how Cappy is—be back in a minute.” He went out and closed the door.

Brennan stirred; he slid one hand along the floor slowly and touched the side of his mashed bloody face, put his hands flat on the floor and raised his body. It took him almost a minute to get to his hands and knees by bracing himself against the wall, working slowly a little higher, a little higher. His breath came in short, rattling gasps.

The woman stood in the middle of the room with the marijuana cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She watched Brennan with wide, hard, fascinated eyes as one might watch a complicated and difficult acrobatic stunt.

Then Brennan stood up. He held on to a small table against the wall and pulled himself up very slowly and leaned against the wall and the table. His face was a dark mask of bruised, bleeding flesh, his eyes bright, shiny, insane; he swayed back and forth drunkenly and stared at the woman. Then he lurched towards the door and the woman screamed; she ran past him to the door and pulled it a little open, screamed again.

Brennan crashed against the door, slammed it shut. He fumbled for the key and as the woman whirled and clawed at him he swung one arm in a wide arc, his forearm struck her throat and she slide sidewise along the wall, down to one knee. Brennan found the key and turned it, jerked it out of the door. He turned and staggered across the room and the woman got up and ran after him and threw her arms around his neck, dragged him down to the floor; her nails ripped across his face. He braced himself against the side of the couch and savagely threw her off; her head struck the phonograph stand and it tippled over, the tinny voice of the blues singer came to an abrupt end. The woman lay still.

Brennan again struggled to his feet. He drew the back of his hand across his face, started towards the door on the far side of the couch and crashed blindly into the wall. There was sudden pounding on the outside of the door, a muffled shout. Brennan felt his way along the wall the little distance to the other door, went through and closed and locked the door behind him. He vaguely registered that he was in a dimly lighted bedroom, lurched across to the one window and opened it.

It was raining a little. Brennan could see the indistinct outline of a roof about five feet below the window; he could not tell whether it came all the way under the window or not—it was very dark there. He got his legs somehow through the window and sat on the sill, and then he took a deep breath and pushed himself forward hard, with his hands and arms. He landed in a heap on the sloping graveled roof, crawled slowly, painfully down the slope. When he came to the edge he could see nothing but darkness beneath him, but a little light from a window some distance away made him feel in a dazed way that he wasn’t very far above the ground. He worked himself carefully over the edge and tried to hold on to the rough wet gravel with his hands to let himself down slowly, but he could not hold on very long. He fell.

He landed on his back in mud, and after a while he rolled over and got to his hands and knees and started crawling. He did not know where he was crawling; he crawled forward. Several times he stopped and sank down in the mud; the darkness went around him and it was full of bright blinding flashes and he thought he was going to vomit, but the feeling would pass and he would get up and crawl ahead.

After a long time he saw the reflection of light ahead and he went on a little faster and then he thought he heard a voice and there were hands on his body and he fought the hands, but there were too many of them, and he sank finally into a deep pool of darkness and hands and confused voices.

A voice that Brennan did not know said: “I’ll come back early this afternoon—change the dressings. He’ll be all right.”

Nick’s voice said: “Sure, he’ll be all right—he’s too tough.”

Brennan opened his eyes, squinted up at Nick; he could see with only one eye—he pulled one hand up slowly and felt his face. There was a bandage over all one side of his face; one eye was covered.

Nick grinned down at him. “How d’ya feel?”

Brennan grunted, “Swell,” as though he didn’t mean it very much.

Johnson’s square pink face, and the thin, bony face of a stranger leaned over the bed.

Nick’s head jerked towards the stranger. “This is Doc Chapell.”

Brennan nodded slightly.

The doctor said: “You stay in bed—I’ll be back this afternoon.”

His face disappeared and his voice said, “So long,” and then there was the sound of the door opening and closing.

Brennan lifted his head a little and looked around the room; it was his own room at the Park Royal. He asked: “What time is it?”

Johnson glanced at his heavy yellow watch. “Nine twenty-five.”

“Huh?” Brennan’s exposed eye opened wide. “It’s morning… .” He started to sit up in bed and it felt suddenly as if the ceiling had fallen on his head. He lay back, closed his eyes, moaned: “I’ve got to do the story.”

Nick said: “I thought you’d done it. You told Harley—”

“Don’t be a sap.” Brennan scowled with his eye closed—“I said that to throw a scare into Harley.”

Johnson picked up the phone, said: “You can’t get up. I’ll call the office and have Renée come over—you can give her the story.” He dialed a number, mumbled into the phone.

Brennan opened his eyes and pulled the bandage a little off the covered one, stared up at Nick.

“So what?”

Nick said: “A copper found you crawling down an alley in the next block to the Gateway. He called an ambulance. We were leaving the Gateway after the pinch an’ we heard the ambulance an’ came over around the corner, an’ there you were—large as life—looking like you’d been run through a meatgrinder.”

“What do you mean, ‘pinch’?”

“We raided the Gateway… .”

Brennan said: “How about beginning at the beginning?”

“I saw you go down when the fireworks started—upstairs,” Nick went on. “I don’t know whether I winged Harley or slugged him—he was pretty limp. I know I got the big guy—I didn’t know it then but I know it now… .”

Johnson hung up the receiver, interrupted: “That was Sam Kerr—used to be a houseman at Harley’s joint on Long Island. He’s very dead.”

Brennan nodded.

“Every time I’d move,” Nick went on, “somebody—the guy who cracked ‘Fancy that!’ an’ started shooting, I guess—would take a shot at me. The light had been smashed an’ it was plenty dark. I was scared to shoot back because I wasn’t sure where you were, so I just laid there an’ didn’t breathe. I figured you were all washed up, from the way you fell—but I couldn’t be sure… .”

Brennan moved his eyes to Johnson, said: “Order me some coffee, Johnnie.”

Johnson went to the house phone.

Nick sat down on the edge of the bed, lighted a cigarette. “In a little while I got tired of lying there doing nothing so I started edging in the direction I figured the door to be. The door was still open as far as I knew—it was dark in the hall, too. The dinge gal who had opened the door was moanin’ an’ groanin’—carrying on something terrible—I figured the direction of the door from that. I finally found the door an’ there wasn’t anything to do but go on out.”

Brennan nodded.

Nick grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t want to leave you there but there wasn’t anything else to do—if I struck a match to find out where an’ how you were, that guy would’ve popped me sure—that didn’t make good sense.”

Nick looked appealingly at Brennan.

Brennan laughed, said: “For the love of God, go on, Nicky. Of course you couldn’t do anything else—you did exactly right.”

Nick looked immensely relieved.

Johnson turned from the house phone and came over and sat on the other side of the bed. He said: “Coffee coming up.”

“I crawled on down the hall,” Nick went on, “an’ on downstairs. The door to the Gateway office was locked so I went on out the street door an’ got to a telephone—”

“Wasn’t there anybody outside the joint?” Brennan interrupted—“Didn’t anybody hear that barrage?”

Nick shook his head. “I guess the whole layout is soundproof.”

Johnson said: “Those cabarets have to be soundproof if they’re in a building that anybody lives in—city ordinance.” He took off his glasses, polished them with a handkerchief. “Nick called me,” he went on, “and I called Centre Street and told ’em we located Joice Colt in Harley’s place uptown.” Johnson smiled. “I didn’t tell ’em you were in on it, because I’d just finished telling the chief I’d canned you. Then I hopped a train uptown and when I got there they were smashing down the door upstairs.” He put his glasses on.

They were silent a moment; Brennan was looking at Johnson, waiting for him to finish.

Nick shook his head, smiled faintly, said: “We didn’t find a thing, Cy—except Sam Kerr. Everybody else was gone. If it hadn’t been for Kerr, an’ a lot of bullets in the wall, the coppers would of thought it was a pipe dream. I guess Harley wasn’t much hurt—anyway—he was gone—an’ Colt an’ the guy that started shooting an’ the black gal. An’ there wasn’t anybody downstairs either—they’d all beat it.”

Brennan stared at the ceiling. He said slowly: “Well, anyway—we know my hunch was okay. Harley’s our man—my story will make that plenty clear—“

Johnson interrupted: “Your story isn’t going to prove it.”

“I’ll attend to that when they pick up Harley.”

“They’re not even going to pick up Harley—we haven’t been able to tie him up with Gateway yet. Joice Colt is still it so far as the police are concerned.

Brennan muttered: “The dumb bastards.“ Then he raised himself carefully, leaned on one elbow. “The story will stick Harley an’ put Colt in the clear—and it’ll be so tight nobody will be able to ignore it …”

Nick said “It won’t do her much good being in the clear if we don’t find her before Harley puts her out of the way.”

Brennan looked at Johnson. “Put everybody you can spare on locating her, will you, Johnnie?” He said. “Or locating Harley—where we find one, we’ll probably find the other.”

Johnson nodded.

“You go over to the Glass Slipper, Nick,” Brennan went on, “an’ check on the alibi Harley framed there yesterday. Put the old scare on whoever was in on it.”

Nick said: “Right.”

Someone knocked at the door and Nick got up and let a waiter in. The waiter put a tray with three pots of steaming coffee on the bed table, poured the coffee and held the check for Brennan to sign. When he opened the door to go out Renée Jackman came in. She was very tiny, very dark; had the reputation of being one of the best editorial secretaries in the newspaper business.

She looked at Nick and Johnson and came over to the bed, looked down at Brennan with wide, soft eyes, said softly: “Poor baby.”

Johnson pulled a chair close to the bed for her; she sat down and crossed trim silken legs, opened a notebook and held a pencil poised tremulously in midair. She smiled. “Ready, set, go… .”

Nick was at the door. He said: “I’ll call you, Cy,” went out.

Johnson picked up one of the cups of coffee and offered it to Renée; she shook her head. Johnson gulped down most of it, put on his hat. He said: “I’ve got to get back to the office. Hurry it up, Cy.”