Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (44 page)

He sawed on and on, grunting, groaning, sucking in sharp breaths, biting his lips till they bled. The wire snapped. He looked for an instant at his red hands. Then he worked the wires free of his ankles. His socks were torn, soggy. He stood up and limped. He looked around for a weapon. He went to the gas jet, turned it on. No fumes came out. The house was ostensibly vacant and the gas had been turned off. He unscrewed the heavy brass bracket—it came off into his hands, a length of pipe a foot long. He hefted it.

“Donny, don’t be a fool!”

But Donahue had reached the door, a ragged spectre of a man, his hair matted and scraping his eyebrows. He opened the door and looked out into a dark corridor. He went out and felt his way down the stairs. He reached the landing below and listened. He plunged beneath the back stairwell as he saw a beam of light sweep from a door at the front of the hall. He waited. He saw the beam feel its way down the hall, heard the creak of a shoe. Then he saw a hand holding the flashlight—and another hand abreast of it and holding a gun.

He saw the head of Mr. Bunn. He struck. Viciously. The length of brass pipe seemed like a great weight that, falling, bore Mr. Bunn to the floor. Donahue grabbed his gun, stood for a moment listening above the inert Mr. Bunn.

Then, commingled with the pounding of machinery, he heard a faint outcry—below. He found the next stairway and went down on shaky legs. His hands were almost numb. He saw the sweep of a flash’s beam. “I got her! I got her!” a voice cried.

Feet pounded from another direction. Another flashlight leaped out of a door. A man followed with his gun drawn. Archie. Donahue’s gun exploded and Archie looked upward with a blank stare, turned half around, like a dog getting ready to lie down; then he crumpled.

Donahue fell down the remainder of the stairs. A flashlight swept across his face. A gun boomed. A bullet broke plaster on the wall behind. Donahue fired at the flashlight, heard a groan, a thud, scraping feet and then a louder thud. He swept up Archie’s flash and aimed it down the corridor.

Homer was lying flat. Helen was standing, wide-eyed, with her palms pressed to her cheeks. He toiled to his feet and sagged towards her.

“What are you doing here?”

“I—saw. I followed. I broke—in—a basement window.”

He fell against the wall. “I owe you things. Now beat it, Helen.”

“But you’re hurt and—”

“Beat it! You can’t be found here! The newshawks’ll get here and your mug’ll land in the papers and there’ll be questions. Beat it. I’ll call you tomorrow—see you get away. Beat it!”

She turned and fled.

The sound of the machinery was thunderous, shaking the walls.

Donahue climbed up the stairs on hands and knees, crawled into the room where McPard lay on the iron cot.

“Hear it?” he said.

“Not much.”

Donahue hauled himself on to the cot.

“Who was it?” McPard said.

“Nobody. It was just an idea they had.” He began working on the piano wire that bound McPard’s wrists. “I’ll pass out any minute, Kelly. So you ring in for the wagon. There’s one guy I didn’t get completely. He’s sleeping down in the hall. Get this, Kelly: you fought it out with these guys. They collared me and you fought it out with them.”

“Is that the way you want it?”

“You wouldn’t turn down a guy who’s saved your life, would you? That Archie was nuts on cops. He would have killed you before the night was out.”

“You win, Donny.”

Donahue said: “Thanks,” and passed out.

He woke up next morning in the hospital, swathed in bandages.

Castleman sat beside the bed.

“Did you get them?” Donahue said.

“This morning.”

“Jake. What did Kelly say?”

“He said you could take it.” He nodded to the table. “Some flowers—from a lady.”

“Who?”

“Anonymous.”

Donahue muttered: “The pooch.”

“Huhn?”

“Go ’way, Frank. I wanna sleep.”

When tough dick Donahue makes up his mind about anything it goes—or something breaks

Donahue looked at himself in the elongated door mirror. He had lost twenty pounds during the three weeks in the hospital. He showed it in his face, and it was accentuated in his body by the dark blue suit he wore. But the old lean hardness remained, and the self-assurance, the sense of steel beneath the surface.

He turned and walked across the room to a bureau, took a flat black automatic from the top drawer, jacked a cartridge into the chamber and slipped the gun into his coat pocket. He lit a cigarette and watched the door with one eye narrowed against a rising column of smoke.

Eastward, a Third Avenue Elevated train slammed its way south. The air that came in through the open window was cool, crisp. He took four steps and closed the window, looked at his cigarette, looked at the door.

He heard the elevator doors down the hall open and close. He kept his eye on the door and started forward simultaneously with the sound of a knuckle on the panel. He let his right hand lie in his pocket and reaching the door, put his left hand on the knob and turned it.

“Ragtime Bliss, huhn?”

“I’m glad you know me. I thought maybe—”

“Get in.”

Donahue jerked his head and the man came in and Donahue toed the door shut and turned at the same time to keep his eyes on the gray face of the man. He had turned on the center lights so that the room would be bright. Ragtime Bliss blinked in the incandescent glare. His clothes were new, cheap, and of a youthful cut that did not harmonize with his old, warped face. He had washed-out eyes that kept flicking but did not meet directly Donahue’s dark, unpleasant stare.

He muttered: “You don’t seem glad to see me.”

“Why should I be? I never saw you before in my life.”

“I’m just out of stir. Fifteen years of it. You might at least say—”

Sit down.” Donahue pointed. “Sit down there and get it off your chest. Heeled?”

Ragtime touched his pockets. Donahue said: “What’s under your arm?”

Ragtime’s face looked pained and Donahue clipped: “I’ll take it while you’re in here.”

He went close to Ragtime with his own gun making a bulge in his pocket. Ragtime drew a gun from beneath his left armpit and Donahue, placing it on the desk, told him: “There’s a Sullivan law in this state. Or,” he mocked, “have you got a license?”

“Cripes, what are you pickin’ on me for?”

Donahue said nothing for a long moment. He sat on the edge of the desk, folded his arms and studied Ragtime’s face with keen disapproval.

Presently he said: “Well, what do you want?”

Ragtime moved forward to the edge of the chair, rubbed his hands on his knees, stared mournfully at the mouse-colored carpet. “I been in stir for fifteen—”

“I don’t want your history. What did you come here for?”

Ragtime made a hopeless gesture. “I been readin’ the papers. About Cherry—my wife—bein’ bumped off by some heels and about you bein’ her friend. See?—I been readin’ the papers.”

“So what?”

“So—so—well, hell, I been thinkin’ about my kid. About Helen. I been wonderin’ how she is and if I can do anything for her. I been thinkin’ maybe—”

Donahue’s voice was wooden, like his face: “You couldn’t do a thing for her.”

“Where—where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Ragtime looked up. “Huhn?”

“I said I don’t know. And if I did know, you’re the last guy in the world I’d tell!”

Ragtime jumped up, made a supplicating gesture, his knees bent. “You wouldn’t tell me—her father?”

Donahue straightened from the desk, put his hands in his pockets and took three slow, inimical paces until he stood over Ragtime. “Listen, punk. I know all about you. I took the trouble to look up Cherry’s history and in doing that I naturally came across yours. You bailed out on her when she was having her kid and the next time she heard of you was when you landed in stir for a manslaughter rap two years later. She’d washed her hands of you before that. She had to make her way. You started her on the downgrade. Now get out.”

The self-pity left Ragtime’s face like a cinema black-out. He shrank back several steps, screwing up his hands. He croaked: “I guess I got a right to see my kid!”

“You mean,” Donahue said, “that you think you’ve got a right to the dough Cherry left her.”

Ragtime’s eyes popped. “I never even thought o’ that! It’s my own flesh and blood I’m thinkin’ of. She’s got a right to a father’s protection—”

“The flesh and blood you ditched before she was born.” Donahue took a stride and his voice hardened, his long teeth gleamed. “I told you I don’t know where she is. I wish I knew. And I’m telling you this, grifter: if you find her first I’ll frame you, I don’t care how—I’ll frame you so that you’ll go back to stir for the rest of your life. She doesn’t know you exist. She doesn’t know anything about you. Get that. And get this!” His hand shot up and gripped Ragtime by the throat. “It’s going to stay that way. You hear, punk!”

Ragtime babbled. “I get you! I get you! You’d like that dough for yourself, huhn? You’ve got your own eye on her—”

“I’ve got plenty of women without taking ’em in their teens—and when I go in for that kind of stuff, sweetheart, my intentions are never honorable. But I like the kid. I’d like to see her get a break. Scram!”

His arm straightened violently and Ragtime, with a shocked grimace, traveled the length of the room and stopped hard against the wall. He pawed at his throat, made a few gasping sounds, then lurched toward the door.

“Wait,” Donahue said.

He scooped up the gun on the desk, walked across the room and held it out, barrel first. Ragtime clutched it and stuffed it beneath his armpit.

Donahue said: “Try using it on me in a dark place some night and see where it gets you.”

Asa Hinkle, the Agency head, was nibbling at potato chips and washing them down with an Old Fashion when Donahue, lean and a paler brown than he used to be, came into the small, discreet bar at Milio’s. Hinkle was the direct antithesis of Donahue—being older, fat in a solid way, and smoothly pontifical behind delicately rimmed pince nez. Paul, behind the bar, was a dark cameo aptly set in the black marble, mahogany and chromium of the bar.

“Oh,” said Hinkle, quietly, and dabbed at his lips with fresh linen. “I’m caught, eh?” He grinned, winked. Donahue said: “Getting better taste in your liquor, huhn?”

“I—er—heard the food was good here.”

“I remember—I told you…. Whiskey-sour, Paul—not too sweet.”

He leaned with his elbows on the bar, massaged his palms slowly together and stared at nothing, absorbed with himself.

Hinkle said, offhand: “Penny for your thoughts.”

“Piker.”

On the floor above, where the restaurant was, a string quartet was worrying through “Barcarolle.” It was dinnertime and afterwards. Later, the strings would be put away and there would be brass and reeds and drums getting hot. The place had a surface elegance, in the best Upper East Side, New York, taste. Park Avenue was only a stone’s throw away and once this house had been tenanted by an ambassador.

“That girl?” Hinkle tried, carefully—and then looked innocently at a potato chip.

Donahue said: “Ragtime Bliss showed up—sure enough.”

“I knew he would.” Donahue stared hard at his hands. “If I know my heels, he’s way down—way down.”

“What did he want?”

“What do you suppose?”

Hinkle said: “H-m-m,” reflectively and then looked sidewise at Donahue. “The girl, eh?”

“His daughter.”

“You treated him nicely, I suppose.”

“Can you imagine,” Donahue said, “that fat-head spinning me a hearts-and-flowers yarn about his flesh and blood?… Oh, yes, I treated him nice! Like an old friend! Yeah….” His voice trailed off into a harsh rasp.

Hinkle turned and got close to him. “Donny, listen. For the love of——listen: don’t be a sentimental Mick all your life. Granting the girl is good, which I don’t doubt she is, why tangle yourself up in this web? Her mother was a notorious vice queen that made a last try to clean out. She was going to turn information over to you that would incriminate several vice squad men, several police magistrates and a surrogate. She got bumped off doing it. The information landed in other hands. You went through a lot of heartache and headache to get it. You got it. You turned it over to our client—the District Attorney. In the meantime this daughter of Cherry Bliss, the vice queen, turns up—broke, desolate, down from an upstate girl’s school where she was known as Helen Thompson. She comes to you. Seventeen or eighteen, isn’t she? She comes to you and suddenly I find you being godfather—”

“And now you’re trying to be godfather to me. Pardon me, Asa, but—”

“I know, but on the other hand—”

“On the other hand,” Donahue cut in, turned, raising his palm, “that little girl saved my life. Downtown that night, when those guys were ready to kill me—she’d followed me there. She got in the house. They heard her. They let up on me and that gave me a chance to fight my way out—and get her clear. But it’s not mainly that. It’s”—his face became warped with brown disgust—“it’s that I want to see her get a break.

“Libbey, that foul-minded newshawk, has a hunch that Cherry left a daughter. Don’t ask me how he found it out. But he’s got his nose to the ground because his boss is on his neck and they’re aching to spread it high and handsome. Kelly McPard, a good guy but a cop, wants to know who the woman was somebody or other saw coming out of the house downtown after the shots. And here’s a girl who was kept ignorant of her mother’s profession for years, learns about it suddenly and has her whole viewpoint knocked cockeyed.

“I liked Cherry, Asa, no matter what she was. This punk of a husband of hers started her on the downgrade when he pleaded with her to go to a rotten state’s attorney out West to use her charms to get him out of Dutch. And she went, the fool, and later he bailed out on her. The kid came to me—what could I do? She wasn’t on the make. She was on the deep end—and it was partly my fault that her mother got bumped off. I talked her into giving me that information—and, damn it, I really think she thought I was falling in love with her. I was out after information and determined to get it at any cost. And that’s why I’m for the kid.”