.
from Kyle’s end.”
It was nicely put. He was her agent. That made me the mob’s. I left his office and walked across town to my own.
THREE
THE DOOR reads: Barney Glines, Investigations in two neat lines. The door opens on an office ten feet by fifteen feet at sixty cents a square foot in a building that’s been just west of Madison Avenue on 49th Street for the last thirty-five years. That makes it four years older than me but some mornings I wonder.
I opened the door and went over to the desk. I sat down and looked hard at the telephone.
“Ring, you son of a bitch,” I told it.
The telephone rang.
“Glines?”
“Yeh.”
“There’s something for you at the desk of the Leewood Hotel. That’s 45th off Broadway.”
The receiver clicked softly and he was gone. See? It’s simple. Why does everybody think it’s hard to make a million dollars in this business? All you have to do is open an office and pay your telephone bills. And do things that make your stomach crawl.
I told the hackie that took me to the Leewood Hotel to wait. I walked into a foyer that held four chairs, a couch, a table, a sand-filled urn for butts and a seedy, threadbare rug that had been an ugly red fifteen years ago.
On the couch sat a sailor and a Broadway chippie who couldn’t have been fifteen and could have been twelve. On one of the chairs was an old man studying the Green Sheet before he donated two more bucks to a bookie. On another chair was a bookie. On the third was a whore who got her legs crossed and uncrossed twice in the time it took me to pass her. The fourth chair held a hatchet-faced character who stared through my beltline from beneath his pearl gray Adam with the upturned brim.
The thing to do, of course, was to pick him up, carry him into the john and bounce him around until he came up with the right answers. That’s the way I used to play this game. But this was a different league with different ground rules. And a girl named Kyle Shannon.
The desk clerk was a third-stage consumptive. Sick eyes turned to me vacantly out of a face that was little more than a transparent covering for his skull.
“Is there something here for Barney Glines?” I asked him softly.
He seemed to be thinking it over, getting the words in place. “You got some identification?”
I gave him a card that had my name on one side and my picture and thumb print on the other. He held it on the tips of his fingers and turned it backward and forward. Then he reached under the desk and handed me an envelope.
He moved away from me quickly as I tore it open and read the brief note. This was the jungle, and none of the cats was curious.
“Go sit in the lefthand phone booth,” was the message.
Silly? For you and me, maybe, but not for them. They wanted a look at me, for one thing. That’s so they’d know me if anything went wrong. Chances are I had even been photographed by this time. They also wanted me out of my office and on a phone they knew wasn’t tapped—at least not tapped by me. There was also the psychology of having me jump every time they said jump.
I went to the lefthand booth, closed the door, sat down, lit a cigarette and waited. It took five minutes for the phone to ring.
“I’ll give it to you once, Glines, so open your ears. Get twenty grand. Twenty. Small bills. Nothing higher than a twenty. Twenty tops. Put it in a briefcase. A black briefcase. Check the briefcase in the Long Island Terminal at Penn Station. Long Island Terminal, Penn Station. Put the check in an air mail envelope. Air mail. Leave the envelope with the night clerk of the Hotel Barnet. Night clerk. Barnet. 33rd and Seventh. Pick up the envelope he will have for you.” He stopped the monologue for a brief pause. He said, “Don’t be a wise guy. You’ll get killed, Mr. Glines.”
Click. Gone. Phone call from a stranger. So was hatchetface gone from his spot in the lobby. But that had been a stupid play. I’d pick out that punk again from the thousands who looked just like him. And take him off the junk for three hours, let him miss just one needle, and he’d spill his guts until you had to shut him off. That would be when Kyle Shannon had her stuff back and I was on my own again.
I got in the cab and we started on the long, long trip back across town. Three avenues and four streets. It would take twenty-five minutes, if we were lucky.
“The guy in the white hat,” I said to the cabbie. “The thin one.”
He lifted his head. “What about him?”
“Did he keep walking when he left the hotel or get in a car?”
“Car,” said the cabbie. “Fifty-six Caddy. Black job with four doors.” He swerved on Broadway to miss another cab and cut across a bus for his turn on 46th.
“New York plate?” I asked him.
“Yeh. But don’t ask me the number. I don’t play ’em.”
That was too bad. Most of them do try to hit the numbers. Those that play memorize every license they see and they can read it back to you for five minutes afterward. Too bad but not hopeless. This was February and I doubted if delivery had been made on more than 300 Cadillacs in New York. That made it not more than 50 painted black and less than 25 of those would be four-door sedans.
This mob could be had. But who said thieves were smart?
All I got from the phone in Archie St. George’s office was a busy signal. He uses about eight-hundred square feet—foyer, reception room, office—in a spanking new, steel-and-concrete, air-conditioned giant at 53rd and Sixth. If the nut is less than four hundred a month I’m surprised. But then, he’s an Artist’s Representative and works for his money. I walked over.
But the reception room was empty. Empty, even, of the receptionist who had been there an hour ago. A blonde, about nineteen or twenty, whose bosom performed at a ridiculous angle that confessed Made on 34th Street. But not a bad looking girl. They never were around Archie.
I forget whether I knocked on the door or not. But when I opened it I was met by the sight of the blonde, lying facedown on the couch, her black dress hiked above her stocking tops and her upper body shaking with sobs that even the cushion couldn’t muffle. Archie St. George sat on the edge of the desk, a leg dangling, a cigarette between his lips.
We looked at each other for a moment. “All work and no play,” I told him.
“See me later, Barney.” His thin, high-cheekboned face was not its suave self but tightened and white with anger. And for the first time I was looking at his ink-black hair when it was not sharply brushed. It even looked as though somebody had gotten her hands into it and clawed.
“I’m seeing you now.”
The girl had begun to lift her head at the first sound of my voice. Now, still crying uncontrollably, she swung herself untidily to her feet. On her left cheek was an ugly red welt.
I took her arm. “You better sit down a while,” I advised her.
“Why don’t you butt out, Barney?”
“What happened to your face?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she whispered. “It’s all right.” She moved around me and left the office.
“If you need a workout,” I said to him, “why don’t you try the gym over on 52nd?”
He took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Let me work out my own little problems, hanh? My dames are not your worry.”
He had me there.
He said, “You turn up anything on the diamonds?”
I sat down on the couch. “Her stuff is going to cost somebody twenty