Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (48 page)

“Once,” Donahue said, “you were halfway decent, but that cheap bathtub gin ate more than your guts out.”

Mike was bending over Libbey. “Hadn’t we better go?”

Donahue pivoted, climbed out of the areaway and walked away. His face and neck were red and there was sullen red color also in his eyes. He walked three blocks, entered a door flush with the sidewalk and came into a bar.

“Scotch—straight, Jerry,” he said, and went on down the bar to a telephone booth. He inserted a nickel and asked for a number. In a minute he said: “Helen…. Yes, this is Donahue. Leave right away. Go to the Hotel Alacar and take a room…. Everything’s all right. Remember—the Hotel Alacar, off Washington Square. I’ll phone you there in an hour, so…. No, no; nothing’s wrong, Helen. Register under the name of Ann Brady.”

He hung up and the bartender slid the drink across the bar as Donahue came toward it. “How’s tricks, Donny?”

“Tricky.”

He got back to his own hotel at five-thirty and went directly to his room. He thumbed a telephone book and got the number of the Hotel Alacar. He called.

“No,” said the Alacar operator. “No one by that name has registered.”

He hung up and let a slow, exasperated breath steam from his nostrils. He yanked off the receiver and called another number.

“Miss Mary Stone checked out about forty minutes ago.”

He pronged the receiver more slowly this time and stared quizzically at the wall. The Alacar was only four blocks from the hotel at which she had spent the night….

He called the Agency. “Hello, Asa…. Oh, you were just about to leave?… Well, listen. Who’s there?… Okey. Have Jonesbury, Wills and Garfinkle stand by. If they go home, I’ll clout them…. Never mind…. Oh, yeah? Well, then why did you ask?… For this reason: When I start something, I finish it—even if I’m wrong.”

Bang! went the receiver on to the hook.

He got up, walked around the room three times—then barged into the little pantry. He reappeared a moment later, darkly, slushing ice, White Rock and Scotch in a short glass. He tramped up and down the room, the long skirt of his yellow overcoat slapping his calves. He finished the drink in two swallows.

He made one more call—to Roundsville. “You’re there, huhn?… All right, stay there—with your hat and coat on…. Your bags in the car? Car outside your hotel?… Swell. I’ll be calling you.”

He went out. Like the wind.

Big Bertha was dressed up like a Christmas tree when he walked in on her. She had on ivory-colored silk far overtrimmed with sequins. Her bare arms were white powdered boughs and she looked tremendous, comical, absurd.

“Whoah!” she said.

“Listen, you—”

“Mind your tone, Donahue!”

He made an impatient gesture. “I’m sorry, Bertha. She’s dropped out of sight again. She was to move from one hotel to another. She left one. She should have been at the other an hour ago. She’s not.”

“Love her?”

His eyes blazed and his lips hardened. “Make that crack again and I’ll bop you!”

“You will, eh?”

“Shut up, then. I’m not in love with her. I got myself into this thing. I’ve got an idea how it ought to be finished. I told her mother, before she died, that I’d finish it right. I hate like hell to lose. I’m the world’s sorest loser. Now shut up.”

She was back on her heels. “Go ahead, Donny.”

“Get that woman—what’s-her-name—Mabel. See if she can find Helen. It’s something else this time. Helen didn’t pop out of sight of her own accord.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Big Bertha relaxed. She smiled. “It’ll be all right.”

The phone in her bedroom rang. The maid got it and called Bertha and the big woman went in, walking as if she were troubled with corns. She reappeared and beckoned.

“Mabel just tried to get you at your hotel. She’s on the phone. You take it.”

He took it “Go ahead—shoot.” He had a pencil out, and an old envelope. He wrote rapidly, listened, nodded and finally said: “Thanks, Mabel. That’s great.”

He hung up and turned on Big Bertha. “Why didn’t you tell me Mabel had her shadowed?”

“What are you crabbing about? Didn’t you get what you wanted—from Mabel?”

He put his hand across his mouth, shook his head, took his hand away. “I guess I’m going ga-ga.”

She lit a fat cigar. He watched her light it. Then he pulled his hat on and strode past her, out into the corridor. An elevator plummeted. He was in the street. He stood for a moment beneath the bright marquee and studied what he had written on the back of the old envelope.

“Taxi, sir?” That was the chasseur, ivory whistle lifted.

“Yes.”

The whistle piped.

Donahue said to the chauffeur: “Cut through the Park. Hit the West Side and go south till I tell you to stop. Make it snappy, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

At Seventy-second Street the cab turned south into Eleventh Avenue. At Thirty-third it whipped around the front end of a locomotive. It took the ramp at Twenty-third Street to the overhead speedway. There were signs saying Speed Limit: 35 miles per hour. The cab did forty-five and left the speedway at Canal Street.

“East,” Donahue said.

Three minutes later he got off at a busy corner, paid and tipped the driver and walked away. Balls clicked in a pool hall. Two radio stores, side by side, had loud speakers outside hurling different melodies into the street. There was a big sign over a haberdashery shop: Closing Out—Bargain Prices. There were smells, noise, the clanging of a street-car bell. Kids pitching pennies against a house wall and a boy kissing a girl in an areaway. The girl giggled.

And then all this was left behind as Donahue cut through quieter streets. He reached a dark one. He walked down it past narrow, silent houses. He stopped before a four-storied brick house whose hall door was only one stone step removed from the pavement. He looked up and down the street and then he walked around the block and found a grocery store with a telephone booth inside. He spoke for two minutes on the telephone.

He returned to the house in the dark street and walked into the vestibule. The inner door opened at a turn of the knob and he found himself in a narrow hall. A drop light hung from a high ceiling and shone dimly on battleship gray walls.

The stairway, like the hall, was narrow and crowded the right-hand side. There was no heat and the wall had little bubbles of dampness. Donahue covered the first two staircases with speed, but on the third he moved slowly and with care. He reached the summit and stood for a moment regarding the drop light that was just like the one in the lower hall and that cast quite the same feeble glow on battleship gray walls.

In the front of the corridor, where the drop light’s glow failed to completely penetrate, there was a horizontal sliver of light close to the floor. It was a beacon toward which he moved on soft soles, until it glowed at his feet and before him was the shape of a door, dark-colored.

He listened for a full moment, recognized voices—one voice spoke rapidly, eagerly, breathlessly. His left hand closed slowly on the knob and he spent a long minute turning it. He pushed ever so lightly, paused, while his right hand went into his pocket and came out gripping his gun.

Whipping open, the door made one fleeting creak.

“All right, Ragtime—stay that way.”

Ragtime sat on a chair, far forward. Facing him, on another chair and very close, was Helen. She had on a dark blue coat with a cape-like collar, and a small, snug hat. Her handbag stood in the middle of the floor.

Donahue closed the door behind him, with his left hand.

“What did I tell you, Ragtime?” His voice was low, stiff.

Helen started to get up.

“Sit down,” Donahue clipped; and then, again: “What did I tell you, Ragtime?”

Ragtime Bliss looked at Helen, pleading. “You see now? You see how he’s got it in for me? Just like I was tellin’ you.”

Donahue spoke to Helen: “How’d you get here?”

Ragtime jumped up, shoved his chest out. “I brought her here.”

“How’d you find her?”

“I seen her on the street. I been lookin’ day and night for her—to give her what she needs, a father’s protection.”

Donahue laughed contemptuously. Helen rose and he snapped at her: “What made you fall for his line?”

She pointed. “He stopped me on the street. He asked me who I was. I ignored him and went on and then he followed me and held his watch open and I saw my mother’s picture—when she was very young. I stopped. I looked at him. He said: ‘You’re the dead image of her. I’m your father.’ Why didn’t you tell me, Donahue, that my father was alive?”

He said: “Why didn’t your mother?”

She reddened. “There is no need to bring my mother into—”

“She didn’t,” he went on, “for the same reason that I didn’t. Because your father’s a bum, a louse, a dirty trickster—”

“He didn’t tell you,” panted Ragtime, “because he didn’t want you to get any help from the place you should. I asked him on me bended knees, I did, where you were. I wanted to help you, hon. He wouldn’t let me. He slammed me.”

Donahue was cold, deadly. “You want, Ragtime, to drag her down to your level. You want her money. You want her to travel in the company you travel in. You’re getting on in years. You want her to take care of you. And when the money’s gone you’ll make her support you—and maybe I’ve got a good idea how.”

Helen was white-faced. “You should have told me, Donahue, about my father. How can I believe you now? You knew I had no one in the world to turn to. Why didn’t you say my father was living?”

He said: “How do you suppose he found you?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was hooked up with those newspaper guys who tried to get your picture. They didn’t know—they only guessed—that Cherry Bliss left a daughter. He told them—”

“I didn’t!” cried Ragtime.

“You are going, Helen,” Donahue said, “out of here.”

She was high-chinned. “I am staying. I am going to do what I’d intended doing. I’m going to make myself known, claim my mother’s estate, go with my father to California—and we both can start over again. That is what I’m going to do.”

He said: “I’ve given myself a lot of headache, I’ve made a number of enemies, in order to keep you in the clear. I’m not going to let you fall for this bum’s sob-story. I could walk out on this now. But I won’t. I hate to lose. You keep your hand away from your armpit, Ragtime!”

“Please,” she said, “leave us. Leave us—let me do what I want to do and don’t ever see me again.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because this business of finding your father has knocked your common sense all haywire. You found him—and presto!—the magic word… father. Someone to turn to. But it’s all the bunk. I tell you he’ll ruin you, rob you, send you on the streets. I know his record. He sent your mother—”

“You are,” she said, “a bad loser. All these maledictions get you nowhere. Will you please, please let me live my own life?”

His gun steadied. “I figured it out how this should end. I’m a conceited guy. I’m not going to have certain people say that I fell hard for a girl who chose the streets in the end. I hate that line, ‘I told you so.’ Button your coat.”

Her chin was up and he watched it come coolly towards him. She laid her hand on the barrel of his gun and gently turned it aside.

“You’re not going to use that gun, Donahue.”

Ragtime Bliss moved swiftly. His hand brought a gun from his armpit and he darted, trained it on Donahue’s back. “You get out! You leave my poor daughter alone!”

Donahue’s neck got red. He turned slowly on his heel and looked at Ragtime.

Helen said: “Put your gun away, Donahue.”

Watching Ragtime, he put his gun into his pocket.

Helen stepped between them, looking at her father. “Now you put yours away.”

“No,” he said. “If I do, he’ll slam me.”

“Put it away.”

Fear welled in Ragtime’s eyes. “No! No! I’ll handle this! Get out, Donahue!” He thrust Helen aside. “You hear, Donahue!”

She flew back at him, grabbed his arms. “Please, please, put that gun away!”

“He slammed me once! I hate him, I do! I hate him like poison! Let go—me—me arms!” He heaved violently and his left elbow cracked her on the jaw. She tottered, fell, and her head grazed the corner of a table on the way down.

“Oh,” she moaned.

Horrified, Ragtime’s glance whipped towards her.

Donahue’s fist traveled like a piston. Ragtime went over the bed backwards and landed on the other side. With one hand Donahue grabbed up Helen’s handbag. He was able to use both hands in raising her from the floor. Her eyes looked fogged. He sped to the door with her, into the hall, while Ragtime was scrambling on the floor.

Donahue went down the three stairways swiftly, with Helen moving in his arms. He reached the street door and outside the street looked dark, deserted. But when he reached the step, he saw the red light of a car a few doors up the street. Then a shadow moved towards him.

“Donahue!”

He stood the girl on her feet. She put a hand to her forehead and then what had been a shadow was now Roundsville, very close.

“Helen!” he cried in a hoarse whisper.

She was a little dizzy, but she must have seen his eager face. “Bob—Bob—”

“Scram!” Donahue muttered.

Roundsville’s hand gripped Donahue’s arm hard. “Old boy… !”

“Beat it!”

Roundsville half-walked, half-carried Helen up the dark street. Donahue watched—saw them disappear into the car—saw the car move off and vanish. He backed across the street and dropped down into an areaway. His gun was trained on the opposite doorway.

He murmured: “He asked for this. It’s waiting for him.”

A minute passed and no shadow moved in the doorway. Donahue rose a bit. The sound of three shots, muffled, drove him back into the areaway. The echoes died away. The street was silent. Donahue walked out of the areaway, walked west. A man came out of the doorway and yelled:

“Help! Police!”

Donahue ducked into an alley, followed it to another street that was dark and as yet unaware of the cries. He took his overcoat off and carried it under his arm. He zigzagged through the streets and after a while, blocks away from the narrow house, he climbed into a taxi.