Stephen Marlowe

CATCH THE BRASS RING

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A STICKY hot carnival day, the sun sweating down on Surf Avenue, Coney Island, through a murky sky and wringing people out like wet washrags. Even the fat blue-bellied flies swam through the heavy air in slow circles before homing in on the watermelon rinds and corn cobs in the gutter.

It was the kind of day you wanted to shut your ears to the clattering el trains, the carousel organs brassily gargling Lathi music and waltzes, the clanging gongs, the rat-tat-tat from shooting galleries, the staccato chants of the pitchmen, the steady throbbing hum of a million perspiring people dragging themselves from one fun house to the next.

Unless you were feeling great you wished you could pull down God’s window shade and then lift it and look out on a different, cleaner world. I was feeling great.

I found a bar and grill sandwiched between a freak show which offered a thousand-dollar reward if you failed to see Trina the Turtle Girl as advertised and a gift shop crammed with feathers and cheap jewelry glaring out at the street with pinwheel eyes. Inside, the bar had a cool beer smell and I started chasing gin and tonics with gin and tonics and I was feeling better all the time.

I stabbed a finger in the barman’s direction and asked him, “Where’s Tolliver’s Funland?”

He was tall, that barman, with the name Ben stitched in blue on his white shirt. He had the look of a cadaver, thin and leathery, with a nose so long and drooping he could probably stick out his tongue and touch the tip of it.

“You looking for someone special at Tolliver’s?” Ben demanded.

“Yes, an old friend of mine. Bert Archer.”

“Bert’s a nice guy.”

“The best.”

“He’s not in any trouble, mister?”

I shrugged. “Not from me.”

Ben wiped his hands on a dishtowel, rubbing the sweat-matted hair on the backs of his fingers until it dried and curled. “It’s a coincidence,” he said. “I’m on my way down to Tolliver’s, too. I’ll take you.” His head swiveled on a thin, veined neck and he showed me a side view of his bobbing Adam’s apple while he shouted, “Hey, Becky! It’s all yours.”

A fat woman waddled out from the rear of the place. She wore dark slacks and the heat had pasted them to her. She wore a white man’s shirt like Ben’s, with the name Becky stitched over the big left breast which undulated as she walked. “I’ll be back soon,” Ben told her. “Going to Tolliver’s.”

“Tell them what I said, Ben.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all you ever do, think about it.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“That’s the trouble. You don’t want any trouble. It’s so damned hot we should have air-conditioning. Can we afford air-conditioning?”

“I think I ought to keep my nose clean.”

“We should take a vacation up to Blue Mountain Lake or someplace. Can we afford it?” Becky was raising her voice.

“It’s too hot to argue, Becky. We got customers.”

Becky looked at me. “I’m sorry, mister.”

I winked at her, then glanced at the stitching over her breast as if I’d seen her name for the first time. “That’s all right, Becky,” I said. “This heat would make anyone want a vacation at Blue Mountain Lake or someplace.”

“Don’t get her started on Blue Mountain Lake,” Ben pleaded, leading the way outside. “Tolliver’s is three blocks up, by West 12th. Friend of Bert Archer, you say?”

Most of the pitchmen didn’t direct their spiels at us. They must have recognized Ben. “We fought together,” I said. “In Korea. Third Division.”

“If you’re really a good friend of Bert’s, you can give him some advice. I get to know things, but I don’t talk much, understand?”

An old woman, fatter than Ben’s wife, wanted to guess my weight, my age, my first name, occupation, state of birth, girl friend’s name, favorite food, hobby, anything. She sat, sweating and unabashed, in her big chair-scale. She tipped it at a sylphlike two hundred pounds, the needle quivering as she rocked back and forth.

“What kind of advice?” I asked Ben as we crossed the street and he waved to a young kid at the mike in a pokerino joint.

“Good advice, the very best. Tell Bert to get out of Tolliver’s, out of Coney Island, even. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I usually mind my own business, but Bert’s a nice guy.”

I didn’t know whether to believe Ben or not. It was too hot and I still felt too good to care much. I said, “Has he done something wrong?”

“He’ll know what if you tell him, mister.”

“Call me Gid. Gideon Frey’s the name. I can’t very well tell Bert to leave Tolliver’s, Ben. You see, I’m going to work for him there.”

“Oh, no. I should have kept my big mouth shut. I always put my foot in it.” Ben grinned sheepishly, but underneath he seemed alarmed.

On the corner of West 12th, a crowd had gathered. A white-smocked boy who couldn’t have been out of high school very long sat at a bridge table, staring indifferently at a rack of blood-filled phials in front of him, twisting a length of thin rubber tubing in his fingers. An overheated car was parked at the curb, its hood up, double microphones bolted to its roof blaring a man’s voice. He said I had four or five quarts of blood in my body, he said it was the most important thing I had, more important than time or money. He said all they wanted to test was five cc’s, a mere spit in the bucket. It was for my own good only, a public service. The guy in the smock told a twelve-year-old kid he was too young for that kind of thing and the kid said, how do you know, smartie.

The crowd outside Tolliver’s was bigger, but quieter. It was so still you heard more noise from two blocks away. The gin had come through my pores and plastered my shirt to my back. It must have lingered on my lips, too, for when I asked someone what was up he averted his face and jerked his thumb toward the two green and white police cars and the emergency ambulance at the curb.

A cop walked by and I tapped him on the shoulder, but his eyes stopped me with a mind-your-own-business look. I pushed after him through the crowd, Ben, following in my wake. The place had no doors, but a cop stood between two of the pillars supporting the first-story roof.

“You can’t go in there,” he said.

“No?”

“No. Those that are inside stay in. Those that are outside stay out. Orders.”

I peered inside. All the rides had shut down. Faces stared out at me, nervous and pale, female and male, all looking identical. The brilliant masses confronted with the unexpected. Gideon Frey, I thought, you are a no-good snob.

A dark-haired girl sat on the sidewalk just outside the place, her back propped against one of the green and white pillars, her knees drawn up and circled by her arms. She cried softly but steadily, eyes opened wide and fastened on her knee-clasped hands without seeing.

I hated to bother her, but she probably was from inside and knew what was going on. I was still bursting with enthusiasm and a little high and dying to see my old friend, Bert Archer.

“I’m looking for Mr. Archer,” I said. “Bert Archer?”

I think the girl heard me. She started crying louder. The cop said to me, “O. K., Mac. Let her alone.”

The girl glanced up at me and kept on crying. It caught on a sob and changed to hysterical laughter.

“You’re about an hour… late,” she told me. “Bert Archer is dead.”

I heard a sharp sucking in of breath behind me. I whirled and got stared down by a matronly woman who’d caught my swinging elbow in a compromising spot. Ben had vanished.

The girl was honking her nose in a big man’s handkerchief someone had given her. She made no attempt to stand up, so I squatted on my haunches at her side. Someone had crept up behind me and shoved just when I’d stood up high on the top of the world with a pair of rose-colored glasses you needed a valise to carry. I yelled, “What the hell are you talking about? Do you know Bert? Goddammit, how do you know he’s dead? I only spoke to him on the phone this morning. Goddammit.”

A hand closed on my shoulder and a voice said, “Uh-uh. Cut it out.”

I looked up at a cop in a new, starched uniform. He had a baby face. If the uniform had been boy scout khaki you might have figured he was a little old for that sort of thing, but only a little. Blond hair peeked out from under the visored cap, baby blue eyes appraised me. I suddenly thought if they let boys like this on the police force I was getting old but I’m only thirty.

“Did you know Bert Archer?” the young cop asked me. Waiting for my answer, he removed his cap and ran the fingers of one hand through his blond hair like the teeth of a comb. I’d have bet he spent a lot of time preening in front of a mirror.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s got no right to talk like that about Bert Archer.”

I’d squawked right into his baby face. He turned away from the gin fumes distastefully and said, “Brother. Did you tie into one. Drinking alone?”

I shrugged.

“Listen, mister. We have enough trouble now. Don’t make me run you in.”

“What’s she got against old Bert?”

“It will come out in the coroner’s inquest.”

The girl kept on crying. The cop just looked at me, trying to decide whether to run me in or not. I took deep breaths and became drunker by the minute on stuff I’d downed half an hour ago. The heat, probably.

Other cops drifted in and out of the crowd, disappearing into Tolliver’s Funland. The ambulance attendants entered their buggy and took off, siren wailing because they were in a hurry to sprawl out on their cots at the hospital until another call came. Soon another vehicle slipped into their spot at the curb, looking like a cross between an ambulance and a panel truck. Two men climbed out with a big wicker basket, and that should have sobered me. It made me higher. I lit a cigarette and dragged it down to an ember in a minute flat, thinking that would help. I wound up as high as and with a sore throat.

Tolliver’s Funland swallowed the basket and its attendants. Another crew of men came out with cameras and flash attachments, talking about the weather and how the chiefs wife was probably going to have triplets, she looked so big in her seventh month. When the basket boys hit Surf Avenue again they had to struggle with their burden. The blond cop strutted about, patting his nightstick against the palm of his hand and clearing an aisle through the crowd.

I lurched over to the heavy basket and lifted the lid before anyone could stop me. My tongue was so thick I didn’t think I could clamp my teeth shut in front of it. A lady or a eunuch in the crowd screamed.

The cop’s nightstick crushed my fingers against the wicker. “Cut it out, mister,” the blond kid said.

“That’s Bert,” I said. “Christ, that’s Bert.”

The dark-haired girl honked again. The wicker basket bobbed on through the aisle in the crowd.

“I have a good mind to run you down to the precinct,” the blond cop told me. “Just who do you think you are?”

“Forget it. I was all ginned up. I’m sober now.” And I was. Looking inside the basket had flushed the gin from my brain. It was Bert. Bert had fought with an infantry platoon through the hills of Korea and stayed alive despite the best efforts of the gooks so he could return to Tolliver’s Funland in Coney Island and get himself killed.

“What’s your name?”

“Gideon Frey. I’m sorry, officer. Bert and I…”

“Where are, you from?”

“Camp Kilmer. I just got separated yesterday. What happened in there?”

“Mind your own business.” He tried on a sneer for size but the way I looked at him said it was five years away from being perfected.

“I’m his friend. I’ve got a right to know.”

“You veterans are alt alike. Think the world owes you a living. Why don’t you wise up and act like other people?”

“What’s the matter, the Army reject you?” He had a way of bringing out the worst in me. Besides, if I didn’t act nasty I was going to sit down on the sidewalk near the dark-haired girl and bawl like a baby.

“How well did you know the deceased?” The cop was scribbling in a little pad with a mechanical pencil.

“We built the best damned kill-proof bunker in Korea,” I said. “We swapped stories and dry socks and C-rations. We got scared together and went out on patrols together.”

“Had you seen him earlier today?”

“Go practice your questions on someone else,” I said. It surprised him so much he stuttered over it three times before he told me to answer his questions and shut up. He stuttered some more when I informed him it was impossible to do both.

“I’m going to run you in,” he threatened me.

“O.K. If it will make you happy. But get this straight. The guy who died was my friend. Bert Archer. It doesn’t mean a thing to you but it means a lot to me. Are you from Homicide?”

“No. They told me to get names and addresses.”

“Fine. Then get them. Any questions you ask they’re going to ask all over again, only better. Why don’t you just run along and stop the kids from throwing candy wrappers on the beach?”

His knuckles whitened on the grip of the nightstick. “I’m going to run you in.”

“Am I your first?” I wanted to know.

I was striking out blindly. Later on I was going to have to live with the thought of Bert being dead. Now I couldn’t.

“I’ll ask the questions!”

I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face, making him cough. I offered him one and he reached out to take it, but I withdrew the pack and said, “Careful. You’re on duty. You’ll never make wolf scout this way.”

“Where do you live, wise guy?”

“I told you. I bought some civilian clothes and came straight here from Camp Kilmer. My duffle’s in a locker at Penn Station. I was going to report to Bert and start working here, then worry about a place to live.”

“Don’t get snotty. Then he hired you?”

“We were friends. We were going to work together and open our own Tolliver’s some day.”

“The people here wouldn’t have liked that.” It wasn’t the cop, but a throaty woman’s voice, sort of like a younger Marlene Dietrich without the Kraut flavor. She was standing close to us in the crowd and maybe she’d been there listening a long time. Wearing spike-heeled shoes that swelled her insteps out in full, rounded curves, she was my height, an even six feet. I don’t know what made me start at the bottom and work my way up, but I did and she had it all and I kept on liking it better and better until I saw the face. Don’t get me wrong. She was beautiful, if you like your women tanned with high cheekbones and flesh drawn taut over them and white-blonde hair longer than it’s supposed to be worn today and eyes under arched brows a deep blue like the eastern sky on a clear day just after the sun goes down.

But I’d seen her dog-eared photograph a hundred times on the southern slope of Hill 311 in Korea, a hundred more times on the crest, and half that on the northern slope before we’d both been hit by the same round of artillery fire and talked about how much better our own bunker was than the one we’d commandeered from the Reds while we waited for the doc to stop the bleeding and kill the pain in the aid station. And I saw it another hundred times, that picture, when we lay bandaged and doped on canvas cots in the field hospital with two Negroes calling across the squad tent, “Hey, this is better than the Waldorf-Astoria!”

This was Karen Tanner who Bert said he was going to marry. The way Karen looked, smiling and interested, she had just arrived and no one had told her about Bert. “You must be Gideon Frey,” she said, offering a long-fingered hand for a quick, mannish shake. “What’s all the fuss about? I’ll vouch for him if he’s in any kind of trouble, Billy. So will Bert. This is Bert’s friend from Korea.”

Billy was the cop. Billy mumbled something and showed Karen his clean white teeth, then busied himself attending to the dark-haired girl who was now on her feet but still sobbing. And that left me.

Strip him of dry socks, or good boots or anything you need, notch his dogtags in his teeth, roll him in a blanket and wait for the boys from graves-registration who wore cleaner fatigues on which you could still see the herringbone twill pattern. Only this was different. This wasn’t Korea.

“Bert’s talked about you a lot, Mr. Frey.”

I muttered something and tried to figure out how to tell her. Then she surprised me.

“I’ll be frank with you, though. We’ve only got a small concession in Tolliver’s and, well, you’ve heard the old expression about three being a crowd. Don’t misunderstand. If Bert has his heart set on you working here, that’s that. I thought you’d like to know before you start it would be an unnecessary expense, that’s all. Now will somebody tell me what’s going on here? What happened to Sheila?”

Sheila must have been the dark-haired girl. The cop had her in tow now, patting her back and stroking’ her hair and telling her to take it easy.

One of the almost-white eyebrows arched high and furrowed Karen’s broad forehead. “Something bad? Did we have a fire in our concession? I always told Bert some of that equipment would burn like tinder. I don’t see any fire engines.”

“No fire.”

“Then stop playing guessing games with me. If you’ve got something to say, say it.” Karen was neither angry nor arrogant. Haughty, you’d call it. Bert had been a quiet, bookish guy who belonged in the Infantry about as much as he belonged in Coney Island. I began to wonder how he’d hit it off so well with a haughty blond who would have towered over him in her high heels, who could outstare him, out-talk him and — looking at the strong curves of her body — very possibly outfight him.

“I don’t think this is the time or place,” I said.

“I don’t care what you think. If you don’t tell me what’s the matter, someone else will. You’re not exactly winning friends and influencing people on our first meeting, Mr. Frey.”

“All right. O.K.” We had an interested audience. Pleasure-seekers. They riled me right then. So did Billy-boy and Karen. I still felt like hurting someone else because I should have been drinking over old times with Bert. I said, “They just carried Bert out of Tolliver’s. He was dead.”

Karen’s deep blue eyes got big. She brushed a stray lock of hair back from her forehead where it had been matted with the sultry heat, opened her pocketbook and took out a silver cigarette case. I offered her a light and she took it and inhaled without saying anything. I wished she’d scream or rant or throw a tantrum.

“I knew it,” she said so low I hardly heard the words.

“So did a guy named Ben Lutz,” I shouted. “That makes two of you. But Bert probably didn’t know it because Bert’s dead. Was he murdered? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“If he’s dead he was murdered, Mr. Frey. Please leave me alone.”

“What do you mean, you knew it?”

“I said leave me alone!”

Billy had finished with the dark-haired Sheila. He tapped my shoulder and I told him to keep his hands to himself again. He said, “You’re coming down to the precinct with me, Frey.”

“Yeah? What for?”

“For what you did to the basket. For disturbing the peace. For anything I please.” Billy whispered the last part of it. I was the only one who heard him.

“I wasn’t disturbing the peace,” I said. “Was Bert murdered?”

“I can’t say anything about that,” he told the crowd importantly. “It might have been an accident. Might have been suicide. Might have been murder. That’s for the coroner to say. Ready, mister?”

Another cop poked his head out of a prowl car at the curb. “Do I shut her or leave her overheat, Billy? It’s a hot day.”

I bent and tied my shoelaces. I was feeling nasty. I wanted to rile him. When I straightened up I butted his chin with my head and heard his teeth click together. “I’m terribly sorry, officer,” I said.

He stuck a handkerchief between his lips and prodded me tentatively toward the prowl car. “Damn you…”

I looked back hoping Karen would at least show some signs of crying. She merely crushed out her cigarette and turned to walk inside Tolliver’s. She had long legs and a lovely behind but right then I hated every part of her.

CHAPTER TWO

DOWN AT the precinct on West 8th, the desk sergeant listened to Billy’s report. The desk sergeant was bald and sweating profusely, even on the top of his head. His uniform was darkened under the armpits and across his chest and his hands left big wet stains when he lifted them from the surface of the desk. “How about it, Mr. Frey?” he asked me.

“Sort of guilty,” I admitted. I’d calmed down plenty. I wanted to get back to Tolliver’s on the double, although I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I got there. “That is, I did open the basket and look inside. I’m sorry about that, sergeant. I shouldn’t have, but we were buddies in Korea and I—”

“Marines?” the sergeant wanted to know.

“Army. Third Division.”

“If it was the Marines I would have thrown the book at you, Frey. I saw some action on Guadalcanal the last time. We did the fighting, the Marines got the press. I’ll bet it was tough in Korea. I’ll bet it was the same way, though.”

I grinned at him. “I’m just glad to be back, that’s all.”

“You shouldn’t go poking your nose into police business. Leave an address where we can call you.”

Billy was finger-combing his wavy blond hair again. “You mean he can go?”

“I mean he can do anything he wants, Drake.”

Billy’s lips started to curl but he forced them into a smile. “I’m sorry you don’t see things my way, sarge.”

“I’m sorry we wear the same uniform, kid. Get back to your beat now.”

“You see that they keep those wrappers off the clean sand,” I told him again and winked at the sergeant. We got along fine.

“Good luck, Frey,” he said. “If you’re going to be around Tolliver’s awhile keep your nose clean. We don’t want any trouble.”

“Neither do I, sergeant,” I said, and went out to look for some.

On my way back to Tolliver’s I passed Ben Lutz’s bar and decided to follow a teen-aged couple inside. The boy had his arm around the girl’s waist, his fingers dropping down over her wagging backside. When they reached the bar they had to settle for sarsaparilla after they couldn’t convince Ben they were eighteen. The girl pouted but the boy seemed relieved.

“Hello, Ben,” I said.

He looked at me and his eyes said he wasn’t happy with what he saw. He waved the head off a glass of tap beer with a plastic wand and busied himself over some clean glasses. I tossed a fifty-cent piece on the bar and left the change there for some refills.

“You wanted me to warn Bert about something, Ben. Care to tell me what?”

“No.” Ben drew a beer for himself.

“You left in a hurry when you found out he was dead.”

“Umm.”

“But you said you had some business over at Tolliver’s. Your missus wanted you to tell them something which got the both of you all hot and bothered for different reasons. Any connection, Ben?”

“Are you a cop?”

“No, but I can talk to the cops. Tell me or tell them, either way it will come out in the wash.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone? I’ve got my own problems.”

One of them waddled out from the rear of the place. It was Becky, his wife. “You didn’t tell me,” she said. “Did you talk to them like I wanted or didn’t you?”

“I — I didn’t have a chance,” Ben said.

“That’s right, Becky. He got scared off by a corpse.”

“What are you talking about, mister?”

“Bert Archer,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Becky stood there staring at me, her puffy face draining white then flooding red as the blood rushed back. Her eyes narrowed to slits and she jabbed a pudgy finger against Ben’s chest and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t, that’s all. Are you satisfied now? Do you still want I should go back up to Tolliver’s and ask them?”

“Let me think,” Becky said, wringing out a gray washrag and patting her face with it. “Mister, are you a cop?”

“Ben just asked me that. No.”

“Then you’re working for them.”

“I don’t even know who them is.”

She didn’t believe me. I could almost see the wheels spinning inside her head. It wasn’t hard to see who wore the pants around here.

“My friend is dead,” I told Becky. “Someday the cops will find out how he died, but I can’t wait till someday. I’ve got to find out for myself or I won’t be able to go about the business of becoming a civilian again. You got it so far? O.K., this is where you come in. You wanted Ben to ask them something at Tolliver’s. He wasn’t sure if he’d ask them or not. When he heard about Bert he didn’t walk, he ran. So, there’s a connection. What did you want him to do, Mrs. Lutz?”

She had small, shrewd eyes under scraggly, masculine brows. She stared me down blandly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you be a nice boy and go away? We’ve got customers.” The teenagers were sipping their sarsaparilla and listening avidly.

I gave Ben a look which said I’d see him later or tomorrow or sometime and he’d best have some answers. On my way out, I heard Becky’s voice call after me:

“See, mister? We mind our own business. You tell them that. We don’t talk unless we’re supposed to. Don’t forget to tell them, mister.”

So she still thought I was grinding someone else’s ax. Well, it might come in handy at that. As I left I heard her giving Ben hell, teenagers or no.

A few tired-looking gals paraded around on the outside runway of the sideshow next door to the Lutz’s place, wiggling and stamping to the sounds of an electric guitar. The pitchman hinted they had a sense of propriety outside and would really cut loose once the show started.

I cut out for Tolliver’s with long strides. The more I thought about Karen Tanner the angrier I got. Men talked about a lot of things in Korean bunkers, with Red artillery fire muted and distant or so close it shook the walls. They talked of good food and better liquor or girls, and the Pittsburgh Pirates who Branch Rickey was supposed to do wonders for but hadn’t yet. Bert Archer had only two things on his mind, though — Karen Tanner and a marriage license. Karen hadn’t even bothered to look sad. The crowd outside Tolliver’s had returned to normal, entering, leaving or just wandering by but no longer milling about to see corpses toted out in baskets. An old couple strolled by munching great yellow ears of corn and gawking at the sights. A fat slob of a kid trailed them, dripping tomato and cheese from a broad slab of pizza pie. Behind him came a buck-toothed girl of sixteen with a pin between her haltered breasts which said LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH.

Inside Tolliver’s the air was damp and cooler, and smelled strongly of chlorine from the swimming pool, grease and dough from a huge machine which turned out doughnuts on an assembly line, pungent spices from Mama Lucca’s Pizzeria, and people. Another smell seemed to form a kind of sweet-sour base for all of these but I couldn’t place it and figured it might have been the sum-total playing hob with my nostrils.

I nodded at the dark-eyed Italian boy serving up the thin heavy slabs behind the counter of Mama Lucca’s Pizzeria and said, “You’re not Mama.”

“Pizza?” he asked me, ignoring the crack.

“Not now. I’m looking for Karen Tanner.”

“She runs the penny arcade back of the merry-go-round. The place is closed though.”

“Yeah? Why?” I damn well knew why, but I wanted to hear it from one of the Tolliver people.

“An accident. Her partner got killed earlier today.”

“You don’t tell me.”

“That’s right, mister.”

“Fall out of a roller-coaster?” I asked.

“No. Suffocated in a steam room at the bathhouse.”

“You don’t tell me.”

“That’s right. Excuse me.”

The fat slob was back for more pizza, buying a wedge for each hand this time.

A frenzied organ cleared La Paloma from its brassy throat while the merry-go-round spun row-on-row of four-abreast horses in medieval trappings around and around. The carousel was far from full, so most of the riders sat outside mounts and had a chance at plucking the brass ring off its pole. A brass ring won a free ride, a sign said, but you leaned out of your saddle for them at your own risk.

Behind the merry-go-round a door led to the Penny Palace. No one had bothered to close the door, but a placard had been strung across the entrance with the words Closed For Alterations painted on it in blocky black letters. I swung my long legs over the rope which bore the placard and called, “Anybody home?”

“In the back.” It was Karen Tanner’s throaty voice. I wended my way among boxing machines, baseball games, strength-testing devices, machine gun emplacements, kinescope peep shows, foot-easers, horoscope venders and the like. I found an archway and went through it to an office. Window-less and small, it had a desk, two chairs, a small filing cabinet. A stationary fan groaned its need for oil and whipped Karen Tanner’s white-blonde hair back. “Hello, Gideon,” she said. She’d been chain smoking. The butts were strewn in a large bronze pipe ashtray although the fan had blown the ashes out. Bert Archer smoked a pipe and the ashtray was old and chipped in spots and if I were Karen I’d never have been able to use it, not today.

“Hi. Your friend Billy couldn’t make the charge stick. He’s mad.”

“Billy’s all right. He just acts like a kid sometimes, but if you bother him he’ll make trouble for you.”

“I’m shaking like a leaf.”

A single green-shaded light hung suspended from a ceiling chain and swung in the fan’s breeze, throwing grotesque shadows about the small office. In its light I couldn’t tell if Karen had been crying.

“I’m going to need help here now,” she said. “Bert would have wanted it to be you. If you’d still like the job, it’s yours.”

Her composure rattled me. I wanted to hit her and make her scream. I said, “How did Bert die, Karen?”

“I’d rather not talk about it today.”

“Was he murdered?”

“I’m not the coroner.”

“Do you think he was murdered?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Were you going to marry him?”

“I… don’t know. We’d planned on it, but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sorry Bert’s dead?”

“You… louse!” Her voice caught. She choked on the first word and gagged on the second and I started feeling better. I let her hit me twice, hard, stinging blows with her open palm, then I caught her wrist and felt still better. It affected her after all.

“Get out of here!” she cried. “I asked you to leave me alone before but you wouldn’t listen. What I said still goes, you can work here if you want because Bert would have liked that. It’s strictly business, so don’t expect me to answer any of your questions.”

“I want to find out what happened to Bert.”

“I don’t care what you want to find out. You can start to work tomorrow. The salary is sixty dollars and that’s all I can afford. Come in around noon with your social security card, but don’t try to find things out on my time. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Yes, sir.”

I smiled and found it was a mistake.

“If you think anything around here is funny, I don’t want to know it. Don’t call me Karen until I act like I want you to call me that. My name is Miss Tanner.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good afternoon, Gideon.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Tanner.”

I watched her light another cigarette from the stub of her old one. A big blonde girl, and built. You could get yourself all hot and bothered just thinking about the way she looked, the long, clean lines of her legs, the sudden hip flare, trim flat waist and high sharp breasts with the fan blowing the cotton of her dress tight against them. But I had a hunch she was as cold as the winds that would come howling down Surf Avenue next December.

I got out of there and didn’t know what to do next. I thought about all the private detective novels I’d read while convalescing in Japan. Those guys always knew where to head and what to do when they arrived. Even if they walked into a latrine, chances were they’d find someone sitting on a stool who could supply them with a vital piece of the puzzle. Me, I wasn’t sure I had any puzzle at all. I certainly had no pieces to fit it, not even vague ideas, except for Karen’s relationship with Bert, which I didn’t like at all, and the Lutz’s business at Tolliver’s, which I didn’t understand. Oh, yes. I had one other thing — a pretty strong notion it was murder and the kind of half-assed proof which means something to a friend but would hardly stand up in a court of law. “Taking in the sights, Mr. Frey?”

I whirled at the sound of the voice, a musical voice, lilting but not affected, with the suggestion of Ireland in every syllable, although you couldn’t really call it a brogue. She was small and trim and wore her black hair cropped short over a pert, pug-nosed face with wide, yellow-flecked brown eyes. Freckles clustered at the bridge of her nose and made her look younger than she probably was. She was smiling and her lower lip was a little too full over her small pointed chin. She wasn’t stacked like Karen Tanner, but she was a nice bundle all the way down to the ballerina slippers she wore. The last time I saw her she’d sat in front of Tolliver’s on the sidewalk, crying.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m starting to work here tomorrow.”

“I thought you would. Miss Tanner told me all about you after we had a typical female crying jag together.”

“Karen was crying?”

“My gosh, yes. She was crying her eyes out, only she’s smarter than me and wanted to cry in private. It was funny. She brought me inside to help me. She got out a handful of tissues and told me to blow my nose and then started bawling herself. She’s nicer than you think, Mr. Frey.”

“What makes you think I have to be told that?”

“You looked surprised when you found out she cried. Gosh, she and Bert loved each other.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Bert wouldn’t give me a tumble. Mr. Frey, do you think it’s possible for a girl to love two men at the same time? I mean, really love them both in every way so she’d want to marry them both if the law let her?”

“How old is the girl?”

“She’s eighteen. But she looks older.”

“It’s quite possible,” I said, grinning. She grinned back at me.

“Would you like me to show you around Tolliver’s? It’s like a little Coney Island inside the bigger one.”

“You’re telling me,” I shouted over the noise. Small caliber rifles cracked flatly at the shooting gallery. Gongs clanged, feet shuffled on the dirty boardwalk floor, voices shouted, pitchmen pleaded. And there was this smell, a mixture of every kind of fun house smell, all wafted to your nostrils on a cloying base.

Sheila grabbed my elbow and began to steer me around. “That’s Vito Lucca in the Pizzeria,” she said. “He works the day shift and his mother does some of the swinging. Vito’s a nice boy.” She got stars in her eyes when she said that. I’d already met Vito but I got introduced formally and heard Sheila tell him I was Bert’s friend and was going to work for Karen. Vito obliged with a wedge of pizza on the house.

We met a whole crew of fun-makers whose names slipped through my mind like confetti through a sidewalk grate because I was still thinking of Bert. I kept thinking about Bert and Karen while Sheila kept introducing me to people but talking about Vito Lucca every chance she got. “Vito’s a nice boy,” she repeated a dozen times. “Vito’s got to learn we can’t all climb to the top of the world, that’s all.” Sheila pouted. “Well, shouldn’t he?”

So Sheila had a crush on Bert and one on Vito. “I guess so,” I said. “What’s upstairs?”

“Oh. We’re coming to that now. You go up, then along a hallway and down another flight of stairs. It’s Tolliver’s bathhouse, second largest in Coney Island. You can also enter it off the boardwalk.”

“The place with the steam rooms?” I demanded. Sheila got solemn. “Yes. I thought I’d just show you the stairs, but if you really want to go up…”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I can hop up there myself. What do you do around here, Sheila?”

“We have a little show at night in the restaurant. I dance a solo mambo.”

“I’ll bet you’re good.”

“Vito thinks so. He says Tolliver’s is too small-time for me. But that’s like Vito. Gosh, he’s always running around.”

“Thanks for the tour, kid. I’ll catch your number later, maybe. Right now I want to go upstairs and have a look around.”

“Honest, I’ll take you if you want.”

“Uh-uh. You go let Vito make eyes at you. I’ll see you later.”

A flight of wide wooden steps with the white paint flaked and scabby led upstairs to what could have been anything from a restaurant to a convention hall at one time. Now the place was deserted. Downstairs, Tolliver’s was cooler than the street because this place offered a cushion of air as insulation. Up here it was like walking through a furnace and by the time I found the hallway on the other side I was wringing wet.

The hallway opened on another flight of steps on an outside wall of the place. Spread out below me in a huge courtyard was Tolliver’s bathhouse. A high school girl in a two-piece bathing suit watched me remove my damp shirt and asked me why I didn’t come in through the boardwalk entrance instead of getting all sweaty like that, so I told her I had to see her and she wasn’t on the boardwalk gate, was she? She smiled coyly, dropped my four bits in a metal cash-box and gave me a numbered key, a pair of blue bathing trunks and a towel and then went back to her issue of Love Comics.

Five women paraded around the place for every man. Women queued up to use the low diving board, women filled the great rectangular pool with acres of scantily clad flesh, women lined the counter of the refreshment stand, women formed patterns of tanned arms and legs on the sand around the pool, women chattered and yammered and roved the bathhouse in small wolf-gangs looking for prey.

I made for the life guard’s stand and called up to him: “Hey, Weissmueller! Talk to you for a minute?”

He breathed deep and expanded his chest and the women around me ooh’ed and ah’ed. “Shoot,” he said.

“I’m looking for the manager.” If I ever wanted to operate around here I’d have to soak up some ultraviolet because alongside the life guard I looked like the White Cliffs of Dover.

The life guard jerked a brown hand behind him. “Down that ramp,” he said. “Then turn left. You’ll have to take your shoes off first.”

I unlaced my shoes, then tied them together. I carried them by the strings in one hand, with my shirt under my arm. In the other hand I carried the bathing trunks and the towel and I decided it was high time to find the locker my key fit. So instead of turning left at the bottom of the ramp I went straight ahead, wading through a trough of muddy chlorinated water which was supposed to keep sand out of the locker rooms. I followed the “men” arrow and went left.

The place was deserted except for an occasional old duffer who’d spread a blanket between the aisles of lockers and had sprawled on it with a portable radio, a bag of fruit and a lot of smelly suntan oil.

I’m not very good at these things. I asked someone where locker 1418 was, but he didn’t know, so I kept wandering around with my arms growing heavy, threading my way in and out among the lockers.

I was about to pile my gear in a corner somewhere and change to the bathing trunks without benefit of a locker when I heard something besides the portable radio commercials. The slapping sound of flesh against wet flesh was punctuated by uneven grunting off to the right of the last aisle of lockers, where a sign said I neared the solarium and steam rooms. I entered a roofed-over passageway and the sounds grew louder. My heart thumped as if I’d just run a four-minute mile when I realized Bert had probably died in here someplace. I heard the distant hissing of steam.

The passage opened on a bare-walled room with an archway leading out the other end. A stocky, hair-matted man with a pale white belly lay on one of the three sheet-topped tables grunting and groaning and dripping sweat. A towel like the one I carried was draped across his loins.

Paul Bunyan himself was working the man over, kneading the flesh of his putty-soft belly, gouging strong fingers into the flab of his thighs. Paul Bunyan stood almost six and a half feet tall in shower clogs and a black bathing suit. He made the lifeguard outside look like the before half of a Charles Atlas ad. He was brown as a bar of milk chocolate except for his right forearm, which was yellow-white and scrawny. I’d have bet my separation pay against a free ride on the rollercoaster that he’d worn a plaster cast on that arm until recently.

He looked up but didn’t pause in his kneading. He said, “Have a table, friend. With you in a while.” He really liked his work, did Paul Bunyan. He attacked the soft belly with gusto. I thought his patient would leave the table black and blue.

Paul Bunyan was working up a man-sized appetite, grimacing between cleaver-like strokes of his great hands but grinning when they landed and blinking sweat from his eyes and grunting more than his victim. I did some blinking too. Old Paul Bunyan was having quite a time. The Marquis of Sade had nothing on him, nothing at all, but that was only the half of it. He should have worn gossamer wings on his back and I don’t mean angel’s wings.

CHAPTER THREE

“I ONLY WANTED TO TALK to you,” I shouted over the slap-slap of flesh-on-flesh and the grunting noises.

“With you in a minute.”

“He… wants to… talk,” Pudgy said gratefully. “I can wait… I guess.”

Paul Bunyan wiped his hands on a towel hanging from the side of the table then came over and looked down at me. I’m six feet tall, “Well, talk.”

“This is where Bert Archer died, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” He had a huge brow slung low over eyes so wide spaced he probably could almost see a full three hundred and sixty degrees. His highbridged nose had been broken and smeared against his face over a small, thin-lipped mouth half-pursed as if always on the verge of whistling. “Who wants to know?”

“I’m with Nationwide Insurance,” I said. “We’re trying to ascertain whether the beneficiary gets paid double indemnity or not.” I realized that was a mistake too late. I’d be seeing more of Paul Bunyan and while he didn’t look like the younger generation’s answer to Einstein, he still could put two and two together in a way that would tell him Nationwide Insurance investigators don’t double as money-changers in penny arcades.

“Say, you don’t waste any time.” Nature had broken the illusion with Paul Bunyan’s voice. He sounded more like Mickey Mouse.

“I’ll send a salesman around to see you if you’re interested, Mr….”

“Kellum, friend.”

“That accident with your arm could have been covered by my company, Mr. Kellum.”

“Say, how did you know about that?”

“Company secret. We get around.”

“I’ll say.” Kellum cradled his newly healed arm in his other hand and drummed baseball bat fingers against the bone.

“Sure,” I said. “Could I see the place where Archer died?”

“I wish you could, friend, honest. Only the police closed off that room. But say, if you’re with an insurance company the police will let you in.”

“Hell,” I said confidentially. “Just between you and me, I’d as soon take a swim in your pool. If you could tell me what happened how could the company know? After you’re at this game a while you get to learn all the tricks.” I peeled a five dollar bill off the three hundred dollar roll the government had given me as a token of its appreciation for services rendered and slapped it against Kellum’s big wet palm. “You can start talking anytime.”

“My pleasure, friend. There isn’t much to tell. You see, it was just before noon when it happened. We don’t have our steam rooms open for business till afternoon, but the gang from Tolliver’s can use them any time. That Mr. Soolpovar, he’s number one.”

“You in Korea?” I asked. Number one is strictly a south-side Korea expression.

“Listen, would you believe it? The army wouldn’t have me.” Kellum giggled. “I should worry.” He clop-clopped around the room on his clogs. The pudgy man, who had donned a pair of shorts, winced when he thought Kellum was returning to the wars, but the big guy only wanted a pack of cigarettes from a wall shelf. He lighted two and gave me one, just like I’d do for a girl and I thought I had him tagged right for sure. As for the number one, I guess you come back from a place like Korea and you can’t believe that somehow the expressions picked up there have beaten you back to the States.

“Anyway,” Kellum told me, “it’s not unusual to hear the steam even early in the morning. This was almost noon and it was hissing away and I didn’t think anything of it, not until one of the cleaning men we use to get the rooms ready for the afternoon came rushing in to me and says there’s a guy in there from Tolliver’s and he looks dead.”

“In where?”

“In room three. It’s locked now. If you know where the knobs are you can regulate the steam from inside. We have no secrets from the Tolliver’s gang, you understand? Well, there was this figure inside and so much steam that I couldn’t go in after him right away, even though I opened the door and let the steam out. By the time I got in it was too late, that’s all. He’d turned the nozzles all the way for some reason. I found him on the other side of the door, like he was trying to get out but the steam overcame him first.”

“How do you figure it? We don’t pay anything for suicide.”

“Suicide? Suicide? I hadn’t thought of that. Say, listen, Bert Archer wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“No? Did Archer use these steam rooms very often?”

“Now that you mention it, no. I never remember him taking a steam bath before.”

That was the hunch that might spell a lot of trouble for someone. Bert used to talk about Tolliver’s once in a while, when he wasn’t dreaming of Karen. He never liked steam rooms, couldn’t understand what people saw in them. I said suicide but I didn’t think suicide. And definitely no accident. I thought murder.

“But that proves it was an accident,” Kellum went on. “Suppose Archer didn’t usually use the steam rooms but decided to try them. He wouldn’t know what was a safe amount of steam and what wasn’t. Sometimes the rooms are opened up to make one big steam room when it’s crowded, then all that steam wouldn’t hurt a fly. But closed up in room three, poor Archer didn’t have a chance.”

I figured Kellum would gab like a woman if he had something to gab about. It suited my purposes just fine. I said, “This is strictly confidential, Mr. Kellum. I guess I can trust you, though.” I leaned close and whispered so the pudgy customer wouldn’t hear. Kellum embraced my shoulders with wet-hot hands and became mildly excited. If I hung around here much longer I knew I’d have to poke him, so I talked fast. “My theory is that Mr. Archer was murdered,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t spread it around. But if you find anything out, we’ll pay you.”

I stepped away and watched him drop his arms to his sides with regret. He’d left white handprints on my shoulders. Lovely fellow. Unless I missed my guess he’d have a woman’s compulsion to bend every ear in Tolliver’s with my murder theory in no time flat. But I still had to tell him I was Gideon Frey, a coin-changer at Karen Tanner’s penny arcade. My fey-winged Paul Bunyan would react like a woman scorned but I had more important things to worry about. I wanted the murderer to know exactly what Gideon Frey thought.

“You’re no dope, Mr. Kellum,” I said, grinning at him. “You probably wondered how an insurance investigator could get here so soon after Archer’s death.”

“Say, that is a point.”

“You probably were too polite to question it.”

“I like to mind my own business.” I couldn’t tell if Kellum was trying to bide his alarm or if a storm was brewing. “I’m not an insurance investigator.”

“No?”

“You must have known it all along. All that muscle and you’ve got a brain, too.”

Kellum strutted. The pudgy guy retreated into a corner. It was going better than I thought.

“I took advantage of you,” I said. “My name is Gideon Frey. I’m a friend of Bert’s and I’m working with Miss Tanner in her penny arcade.”

“Well, you did have a pretty convincing line, I must say.”

“Then you’re not angry?”

“Why should I be? I’ve got to hand it to you, Frey. Actually, I took you for a private detective.”

I’d be the last to deny it. “You’re smarter than I thought,” I said. “All this is on the Q.T., of course.”

“Certainly.” We shook hands. I made a good try at squeezing back but lost.

A short man with a hard, stocky body and huge ridges of muscle between his bull neck and sloping shoulders clomped into the room in trunks and clogs. “What’s on the Q.T.?” he demanded. “What’s going on, King?”

King? I almost burst out laughing. King Kellum spent all his time on the make for queens. Well, it figured.

“I’m Gid Frey,” I said. “Maybe Miss Tanner…?”

“Yes, she told me about you. Glad to meet you. I’m Janus Soolpovar.” Soolpovar had short-cropped graying hair bristling up over a narrow brow and close-set eyes which protruded. We shook hands. “A terrible thing about your friend,” Soolpovar sympathized. “I’m sorry, Frey. Truly sorry.”

“It must have been quite a shock to Karen.”

“She’s not the kind of girl who shows it. I wouldn’t judge her too harshly by her actions, Frey. Meanwhile, you want to use any of the facilities around here, they’re free. That goes for the dames, too, ha-ha.” Soolpovar didn’t laugh; he spoke the sound of laughter. He had even white teeth and not an ounce of spare flesh on him. He paced about the room and his bull neck thrust his head forward like a rooster’s with every step. “All kinds of dames pay their four bits to come in here,” Soolpovar went on. “Most of ’em are desperate, see? The summer’s the time to make ’em, don’t you make any mistakes about that. They don’t mind a little sweat, it gets ’em excited. Ask an old stud horse like me, I know.”

Kellum examined his fingernails with a complete lack of interest. This conversation left Kellum as cold as the inside of a deepfreeze, but Soolpovar was probably on testosterone by now and would have lewd pictures pasted on the ceiling over his deathbed. They made a balanced team here in the bathhouse, all right.

Picking up my gear from one of the empty tables, I said, “Does anyone know where I can find locker 1418?”

Smiling, Soolpovar drew me a mental road map. I thanked him and headed for the locker. Sure, I’d found out what I could here in the bathhouse but it was a hot day and I thought maybe a swim would make me feel better. I stripped, climbed into the woolen shorts which were a size too large.

Soon I was waiting on a shuffling line while a plump girl with breasts as big as basketballs stamped an identification tag on the backs of our hands with invisible ink which she claimed could show up under some kind of purple light gadget. Then I walked out under the boardwalk and onto the footprint-rippled brown sand. A sea of bodies, mostly female, lay out there on blankets and under big green and orange umbrellas. A lot of them were lookers, but taking it all in was something like trying to down a bottle of good whiskey all at once without pausing for breath. You can spoil the effect.

I found a spot big enough to stretch myself out down pretty close to the water. They don’t have breakers at Coney Island. The gray water sloshes up sluggishly on the sand and then recedes, leaving a thin greenish scum. Kids splash and yell. Old ladies do something special called dunking, lowering their bodies waist-deep in the waster so that the bathing-suit skirts billow out about their fat-dimpled legs.

I stood up to do some swimming, then decided on a cigarette instead. I started smoking it in bright, hot sunlight.

I opened my eyes again and it was raining. Quite a cigarette. The sun had set and rain clouds had gathered and it was almost completely dark in front of me, out over the water. I was all alone on the beach with rank on rank of trash baskets marking right up to the water’s edge and illuminated only when lightning ripped jagged cracks in the dark sky.

I felt awful. My skin was dry and parched and I wanted to peel it off. I couldn’t see but I knew I had a sunburn a boiled lobster would have been proud of. I was drenched and miserable and hungry and I could picture how all the parents must have told their kids earlier in the day, “See that man? The red one? He’s getting sunburned and you mustn’t ever do that.” But the dopes didn’t bother to wake me up and then everyone got chased indoors by the quick summer rain.

Everyone but me.

I stood up and groaned because the rain was still falling and felt like needles on my crisp skin. Something exploded inside my head and I thought of sunstroke and sat down again: It wasn’t sunstroke. I heard movement in the sand behind me and I tried to turn around by my head got detonated again. A soft thinking sound ushered in the pain.

I climbed to my knees and shouted but only a tired whisper escaped my lips. Something struck my face and tried to push all the features clear through to the other side of my head. It didn’t work because I flopped over on my back and found I could still breathe. A shadow hovered there in front of me, watching, indistinct in the gloom. My hands came up, fluttery and weak in front of my face, and got themselves smitten.

Then the thunder crashed in my ears and the lightning lifted up my eyelids and peeked behind them. Whoever had worked me over did a good job and I fell through the sand and through the bedrock and kept falling and my last thought was Oh God, Korea is on the other side….

CHAPTER FOUR

“HE’S DEAD.”

“Dead? Wanna bet, stupid? He ain’t dead.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The carrion birds had come to argue over my cadaver. They argued in piping little-boy voices and when I forced one swollen eyelid open they even looked like little boys. I groaned.

“See? What I tell you?”

I tried to spit sand, old pennies, sea water and last night’s garbage out of my mouth. During the night a pint-sized fiend had crawled in through my mouth or one of the new openings in my head and was now beating out something from John Philip Sousa inside my skull. His fellow-fiends had doused my body in alcohol and lit a match. I burned like my own funeral pyre.

“Go away,” I croaked.

Scurrying feet kicked sand in my face as one of the boys hustled down the beach. The other one surveyed me out of dubious eyes and said, “Well, he looked dead.”

I rolled over on my back and gazed up at a bright blue sky. A stiff breeze blew in over the water and except for the first kid disappearing down the beach and the second one viewing my remains solemnly, there wasn’t a person in sight. Early morning, I figured. My watch confirmed this. The hour was eight, much too early to wake up after getting your head beaten in. I groaned again for the kid to scram, but he just stood there.

“We were going digging for clams,” he said, sticking a tanned foot near my face. “With our toes.”

The other kid pounded back along the hard-packed sand at the edge of the water. A cop trailed behind him, far enough back not to have wet sand kicked up in his face. The way the cop ran head thrust up, arms bent at the elbows and pumping vigorously, knees kicking high, exactly the way it’s done in all the track meets only more so, I knew who it was. Another day had dawned. Young Billy Drake was back on duty.

“You still think he’s dead, stupid?”

Young Billy paced about studying things, sniffing like a bloodhound. He finally said, “On your feet, Frey. This is a hell of a place to sleep one off.”

“Damn you, Drake. I don’t want sympathy, I’m just telling you this because I happen to be on your beat and this is what you get paid for. Someone conked me last night, but good.”

I stood up and didn’t move while the beach and the distant boardwalk and the breakwaters thrusting out into the water like skinny black fingers all whirled like a carousel. “See,” I said. Billy examined the back of my head, probing with his fingers and making me wince.

“I wasn’t on duty last night,” Billy said, as if that could explain how this could happen on his beat. “Who did this?”

“That,” I said, “is a pregnant question. I didn’t have a chance to look. Someone worked me over with a baseball bat.”

“Uh-uh. They didn’t use a baseball bat,” Billy informed me clinically. “It looks like the work of a blackjack.”

He looked around for footprints, but the wind had tucked them away with last night’s dreams. “You can go now if you’re feeling all right.”

“Thank you, officer.”

“You want me to call an ambulance and have you taken to Coney Island Hospital?”

“You do that little thing.”

“I’m warning you, Frey, quit needling me.”

“Then act like a cop, damn it. Bert Archer was murdered yesterday. Someone either tried to kill me last night or wanted to scare me away from Tolliver’s. Both times you come along and tell me I’m drunk.”

“Where’s your shirt? Better put your shut on. The sun will be pretty strong by the time the ambulance comes and it won’t help your burn any.”

“Unfortunately, it’s in a locker at Tolliver’s.” I grinned at him painfully.

“All right, all right. Kid, you stay here.” He jerked an index finger at the other boy. “You come with me.”

They headed for the boardwalk. The boy returned in about fifteen minutes, lugging a big beach umbrella. He forced it into the sand and piled more sand high around its base and said. “The cop went to get an ambulance, mister.”

The more I thought about the trip to the hospital the less I liked the idea. I needed something for my sunburn. I thought it would be a good idea to have my head wounds cleaned, for whoever wielded the sap didn’t know his own strength and had left some cuts and gashes to decorate the bumps on my skull. Then I could use some more sleep and some good food and they’d better save their hospital beds for sick people. I’d had my fill of hospital beds in Japan.

“Listen, son,” I asked the kid who’d toted the umbrella, “how would you like to do me a favor? This is a key to locker 1418 in Tolliver’s bathhouse.” I took the key off my wrist and flexed the elastic band until he got the idea and slipped his own wrist through it. “You know where Tolliver’s is?”

“Sure.”

“O.K. They’re not open yet, but show the key to anyone you can find there and tell them there’s a man who fell asleep on the beach and sent you for his clothing. Then you get the stuff and bring it back to me.”

“Well…”

“I know the boardwalk entrance will be closed, but all you have to do is walk around on Surf Avenue and through Tolliver’s Funland. And I tell you what. Anytime you want, drop around to the Tolliver’s penny arcade and ask for Mr. Frey. That’s me. You get to play all the free games you want.”

“And my friend, too?”

“And your friend too. You bet.”

The kid scampered off. I mean, scampered. The other one smiled at me and wandered into the shallows near one of the breakwaters, poking his toes around for clams. Soon the first one returned triumphantly with shirt, trousers, underwear, shoes and socks. I dressed over my bathing trunks and was glad the night man at Tolliver’s forgot to ask about them.

I stood up while someone probed behind my eyeballs with a scalpel. Both kids went hunting for clams and I staggered toward the boardwalk. I was going to do some hunting too. I didn’t know the name of the prey yet, but I’d find out. At this moment I favored King Kellum, first because whoever had clobbered me had used the sap with authority and Kellum could probably bend el girders with his toes, and second because Kellum wasn’t as dumb as he looked and might be hiding anything behind a Mortimer Snerd expression and a Mickey Mouse voice. But the more I thought of it, the more Kellum lost his monopoly. It looked like everyone in Tolliver’s and the Lutz’s outside of Tolliver’s had something to hide. Karen Tanner either hadn’t given two hoots and a holler for Bert despite all the love letters which had crossed the Pacific Ocean or I missed something in their relationship. Dark, Irish Sheila said Vito Lucca was really a nice boy which meant she knew something about Vito which the police or somebody wouldn’t like. And there was this miasma of disagreement which kept the Lutz’s yammering at each other.

I started wishing there was a V. A.-approved school which gave a quick course in detection in ten easy lessons. I wished that and a lot of other things, none of them very practical, and by then I’d dragged my swollen legs and burning body to the front of Tolliver’s. A panel truck was parked at the curb with no lettering on it but the tail gate down and the doors swung wide. I peered in and saw a solitary cardboard carton holding down a lot of floor space when someone grabbed my shoulder and made the sunburn sting down to my ankles.

“Cut it out!” I yelled.

He let it go. “You cut it out,” he said. “Quit poking your nose where it doesn’t belong.” It was Vito Lucca. Vito looked angry.

“What have you got in there?” I said, for no other reason but to goad Vito. The lone carton looked about as deadly as a box full of eggs, which for all I knew, it was.

“I was only unloading some stuff for our pizzeria, that’s all.”

“Then why get so upset?”

“I’m not upset. I’m always cranky early in the morning. Now leave me alone, will you?”

I nodded. Vito lit a cigarette. Vito’s hands trembled. As an undercover man for someone or something he was a bust —or my imagination was running riot and maybe I did have a touch of the sunstroke. “Hey, what happened to you?” Vito, demanded, getting a good look at my head for the first time.

“You won’t believe this,” I said. “I got hit by lightning.”

Vito scowled at me. “No, I won’t.” He climbed into the truck, picked up the carton and then changed his mind. He put the carton down again, went around front, kicked the panel truck over and sped away with a clashing of gears.

Strung out flimsily like paper cut-outs all along the open front, the storm doors which closed Tolliver’s for the night were not locked. I went inside and over to the pizzeria. Vito hadn’t unpacked a damned thing in there.

If I could have found out what was in that carton and the others like it Vito must have taken somewhere inside Tolliver’s, I’d have let them bash my head all over again. I nodded to a clean-up man who shoved a push-broom across the dirty boardwalk floor in front of him.

“Good morning,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Mr. Lucca took his cartons, would you?”

He leaned on the handle of the broom and blinked sweat from his eyes. “His cartons?”

“That’s right.” I took out a fiver and flashed it. Well, it always worked in the private eye books.

“I didn’t see nothing, mister. Some kid came and went a while back.”

Damn. “Anyone else inside?”

“Yessir. Miss O’Keefe, I think. Went down to the pool in a bathing suit. Some looker, you bet.”

“You bet. Would that be Sheila O’Keefe, the dancer?” No one had told me Sheila’s last name, but she was Irish enough to be an O’Keefe.

“The dancer, that’s her. Excuse me, mister. I got to sweep up.”

I found the stairs to the second floor and climbed them. I reached the top of the outside stairs and looked down on the swimming pool. A solo swimmer kicked up a frothy wake out in the middle of the clear blue water which was gushing in from a fountain at the far end of the pool. Otherwise, the place was deserted. Deck chairs stood in neat rows, awnings had been rolled back for the night over long lines of green and yellow benches. The sky was a cool, distant blue and when Sheila stopped swimming and began to tread water, it was so quiet I could hear the distant wail of a siren. The ambulance attendants would find a vacant beach unless the two kids still nudged the sand for clams.

Sheila looked up at the sound of the ambulance and I waved to her. She waved back and did a graceful breaststroke to the edge of the pool, climbed out and shook herself like a terrier. I went down to meet her and terriers never looked so good.

Her short black hair needed no bathing cap. It sparkled wetly in the early morning sunlight and she shook it at me and sprayed me as I reached her. She smiled. She was one big smile from the top of her head clear down to her toes, and I hadn’t realized it yesterday. She wore a one piece bathing suit black and sleek as her wet hair, strapless and hugging her like a lover. There wasn’t a point or an angle on her anywhere. She was just rounded, beautifully rounded and maybe a shade on the plump side but delicious enough to eat.

“I love to swim in the morning when no one’s around, Gideon,” she said, then squeaked like a mouse. “What happened to you?”

“It’s nothing much. It’s…”

But she had bounced away across the sand which must have been carted into the bathhouse at considerable cost and streaked up the stairs and out of sight.

It didn’t take long. Sheila returned with a little brown lunch box, sat me down on the sand and squatted on her heels next to me surveying the damage. “Umm,” she mumbled, cataloging it. “Umm. Take your shirt off.”

I took it off. I was looking at her and grinning and soon she told me to close my mouth. “What are you wearing under your pants?”

“A bathing suit, last I saw. Hey, now—”

She pointed at my belt buckle. “Take ’em off.”

I did so. Sheila opened her lunch box. It didn’t contain lunch. First aid supplies, all kinds of them.

She gave me the full treatment. She cleaned my scalp with some astringent liquid in a medium-sized brown bottle, then applied something from a small brown bottle. It stung so much I yelped, but Sheila said, “Aren’t you the baby?” and kept right on stinging me. “I ought to shave your hair off and bandage it,” she told me next. “You’re lucky. Sit still, darn you!”

I sat still. It wasn’t easy. She squeezed a pale yellow snake of tooth-paste consistency out of a tube and began to rub it on my chest. Her fingers got tangled in the hair there and pulled it and I yelped again but she kept on rubbing. My shoulders and back were next, and my arms. Everyplace she touched with the ointment I felt cool and wonderful. I wanted to object when she squirted another yellow snake on my leg and began to rub it in there, but it felt too good. I sighed and closed my eyes and let her have her way. Presently a lit cigarette got shoved between my lips and I inhaled gratefully.

“AH right,” she said, jamming things back into her lunch box, “now you can tell me what happened.”

“That’s easy,” I said. She was standing up and looking down at me, so I got up too, and wrapped my greasy arms around her and kissed her. “I just fell in love with Florence Nightingale.”

I shouldn’t have done it, I guess. But after feeling so miserable I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me, she came along and in a few minutes made me feel like singing.

“Hey, stop that! Look at me.”

I looked at her. I’d greased up the front of her black bathing suit and the smooth stretch of bronzed flesh that looked out over its top. She brushed herself off and the top of the suit swayed back and forth. The grease stayed put. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was just to say thanks.”

“You’re welcome, but not for what you just did. Have a heart, Gideon. Everyone says I’m an impressionable little girl. You must feel awful, anyway. Just tell me what happened.”

“Someone sneaked up behind me on the beach last night. I never even saw him.”

Sheila scowled at me. She removed a comb from where it was tucked between thigh and bathing suit and ran it through her damp hair, fluffing it with her free hand. “You need a shave,” she said. I could see she was considering what I’d told her.

“I need some food and a long sleep first. Is there anyplace around here we can get some grub this time of morning?”

“Ben Lutz’s bar. Ben lives upstairs, so even if it’s closed…”

“I know Ben. Ben is one of my suspects. So are you, by the way.”

“Me? I don’t know whether to be flattered or scratch your eyes out. Do you think I’d do something like that to you?”

“Search me. Someone did. It was done with a blackjack, usually a man’s weapon. But even a kid could learn to use one.”

“Listen to me, Gideon. Take some advice, will you?”

“What kind of advice?”

“Just get out of here, that’s all. Go far away. Forget all about Tolliver’s and Coney Island. Please, Gideon. You’ll be doing yourself a favor. They killed Bert. Once they’re sure you’re trying to find out why, they’ll try to kill you.”

“They already tried.”

“Can’t you listen to me without poking your two cents in? Please. They didn’t try. They probably just tried to frighten you off.”

“Do you know what’s going on around this place, Sheila?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t try to find out. Gideon, for heaven’s sake. You’re the third guy I’m trying to get out of this thing.”

Her brown eyes were big and watery, on the verge of overflowing. I said gently, “What makes you think I’m your responsibility?”

“Bert is dead. Vito won’t listen to me. I’m sure Vito knows the score but he just won’t listen. It’s crooked. Sometimes they laugh at me. I’m eighteen, Gideon. I’ve been around.”

“I’m thirty.” I said in my best fatherly voice. “So have 1. Now I’m giving you the same advice, Sheila. Keep out of this. And who laughs at you?”

“Mr. Soolpovar. Karen, Becky Lutz. Everyone. Its dirty. It’s the kind of thing people get killed for. It’s a lot of money, I don’t know what. They’re all so suspicious and secretive, but they can’t hide it. Even Vito laughs at me. He… I .. .” Sheila sniffled and knuckled her nose. “Oh, damn it all… Come on, Gideon. I’ll take you over to Ben Lutz’s for some breakfast. Just wait till I change.”

CHAPTER FIVE

I CAME BACK FROM the Lutz’s toting a stomach full of bacon, eggs, toast, coffee and cake. Ben had minded his own business, but Becky, after nagging him, deposited her considerable girth at our table with a third cup of strong coffee for me and said I mustn’t forget that Ben was a good worker. I said I wouldn’t, I certainly wouldn’t. Apparently Becky thought I was taking Bert’s place at Tolliver’s in more than Karen’s penny arcade. While I didn’t come out and admit it, I didn’t bother to contradict her, either. Then we got to talking about Bert’s death and I insisted it was murder but wouldn’t say why.

All the proprietors were on hand at Tolliver’s when we returned, dusting off their stalls and such for the day’s trade. It was Vito Lucca who pointed me out to a tall, unsmiling man wearing a herringbone jacket and a rope-thin tie.

“Mr. Frey?” he demanded. “Mr. Gideon Frey?”

“That’s right.”

He slammed a folded sheaf of papers in my palm with the expression you’d expect if someone had just informed him he’d won the Irish Sweepstakes. “First try,” he chuckled. “Yes, sir, this is my good day.”

I started reading and learned why taxes are so high. It took four pages of fine print to tell me I’d been subpoenaed by the Kings County coroner concerning the demise of Mr. Bertrand Newton Archer. Young Billy must have fingered me for the County after the way I’d run off at the mouth, but I wasn’t complaining.

I told Sheila I’d see her dance number tonight for sure and headed for the penny arcade. Karen arched an eyebrow at the sunburn and the grease and offered me a cool hello. She gave me an apron with pockets deep enough to hold all the pennies minted last year and an ample supply of nickels, too. She gave me a set of keys and told me how to empty the coin boxes and where to stash the take. Then she said, “I suppose you received a subpoena, too?”

“Sure did. Day after tomorrow.”

“I know, Gideon. I’ll be there. You ought to watch the sun.”

“That’s the trouble. I was watching it too long.”

“If you have any questions about your job, I’ll be roving around the place.”

“There are five pennies in a nickel, ten in a dime, twenty-five in a quarter,” I said. “If I run out of fingers I can always count on my toes. I’ll refer the half a buck capitalists to you.”

“Well, you needn’t get so snotty. I meant if one of the machines jammed.” Karen wore her blonde hair in an upsweep, looking about as penny ante as a mink coat. “I’ll forget that crack, Gideon. If you’re going to work here, why don’t we stop jumping down each other’s throats?”

“Yes, Miss Tanner,” I said.

“Did you receive the subpoena because of what you went around telling everybody? That you thought Bert was murdered. That you knew Bert was murdered.”

“I think so. I can think of no other reason. I hope to do my duty as a public-spirited citizen.”

“Oh, shut up. If you don’t want to bury the hatchet, say so now. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“You didn’t lose any sleep over Bert, either.”

“That was nasty. And here we go again.” Karen hardly ever smiled, but when she did it was worth waiting for. It plucked at the corners of her mouth and gathered momentum. It tugged her pink lips apart and showed their moist insides and an edge of white teeth. Then it started working on her eyes. I got giddy, just looking. “Shake?” Karen said, offering her hand.

“It was nasty,” I admitted. Karen pumped my hand vigorously. She had a man-like grip but long, graceful fingers. “I’m sorry Ka — Miss Tanner.”

“That was nasty on my part. It’s Karen.”

“O.K., Karen. O.K.” I tried a smile too, but it threatened to peel off the sunburned skin, so I gave it up. Unpredictable wench, I thought. If you tried to butter her up she’d snap your head off. But cuss her out and she might give you that house-in-the-country smile. It was something to remember. The round almost went to Gideon Frey, but not quite. A moment later my two clam fishermen swaggered in like they owned the joint.

“Hullo, Mr. Frey,” one of them said, sticking out a grubby hand.

I reached into the till and filled his hand with pennies. He divided them with his buddy on the top of a Bat ’Em game and after a series of consultations which carried them around the arcade they began to plunge plungers and light lights.

“What was that for?” Karen said.

“They did me a favor,” I pulled a dollar bill from my government roll and stuffed it into the cash box, slamming the lid down. “There,” I said. “A neat profit for your side.”

Karen opened the box with a louder noise. She slapped the dollar back against my palm. “Just don’t do things like that without asking. You only work here, remember?”

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. How could I ever forget?”

A good try, but we were right back where we started.

Forty-eight hours later, someone tried to kill me. It was my fault, because I’d spent the two days setting myself up as a clay pigeon. I told everyone Bert was murdered. Never mind how I knew, he was murdered. Don’t argue with me, I’ve got the inside poop. It stays inside until I tell the people at the coroner’s inquest.

I wasn’t cut out to be a Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t even cut out to dig around for information like that Spade guy. Knocking heads in to ferret out the facts seemed more my speed, but Mr. Hammer and his compatriots knew which heads to knock. Since I didn’t, I put my own on the block.

It brought results, after a fashion. Karen left the arcade early on Thursday because she had some shopping to do before answering the coroner’s subpoena. I closed up half an hour later and walked east on Surf Avenue toward the subway. Dark, heavy clouds brooded sullenly overhead, barely clearing the tops of the buildings and threatening to up-end the harried weatherman’s applecart by splashing rain on his no-relief-from-the-heat-till-next-week prediction.

Slugs peppered the moving targets in a shooting gallery as I walked by its front. Something thudded into the wooden wall beside me. Splinters stung my face. It could have been Korea all over again the way I instinctively plunged to all fours and flattened myself on the sidewalk.

A crowd gathered. A fat man helped me to my feet and said, “It’s the heat. I always take a salt tablet. Are you all right?”

“I only tripped.”

Not without regret, the crowd dispersed. Maybe that’s the kind of sideshow the people at Coney Island really like. It would make the topic of conversation at a dozen noontime lunch counters. Such a strong-looking young man, too.

The bullet had gouged a hole in the wall, head-high. If it had come in on an angle I never would have found the slug. Actually, I found only pieces. Someone had cut an X in the nose of the slug to fashion a makeshift dum-dum. Some of the pieces had stuck in the wall like grape shot, but most of them had fallen to the sidewalk. Had the bullet even creased my forehead I’d have contracted a bad case of lead poisoning right through my thick clay pigeon skull.

Horns tooted and squawked as I darted across the wide street, giving a bus driver and a few hacks apoplexy. Directly across from the shooting gallery stood a comfort station. Everything cost money at Coney Island. There was a turnstile and a big, fancy sign which said: SANITARY TOILET — 5 cents.

An old lady in a starched blue uniform sat on a folding chair near the turnstile. The expression on her face indicated she was aware she ran the one sure-fire concession at Coney Island.

“Any customers?” I demanded.

“What do you think, dearie? It’s a hot day, so people do a lot of drinking. Some dope even set off a firecracker in here.” That was my man. “Any windows looking out the front on the first floor?”

“You don’t see any, do you?”

“What’s up on the second floor?”

“Only some storerooms. You looking to rent some space?”

“No. Listen, did someone come in here with a rifle?” It had to be a rifle, from that distance.

“A rifle — in here? You mean it wasn’t a firecracker?”

“Well, then a package.”

“A lot of people come with packages. We’ve got lockers and they cost another five cents. Everything is cheap, you see, and…”

“Forget it,” I said. I slid a nickel into the slot, pushed through the turnstile and went inside. It was sanitary, all right. The smell of disinfectant almost made me gag.

I entered a dark waiting-room which contained folding chairs, a trash can and a soda dispenser. On my left was where the men went, on my right the women. Straight ahead was a flight of stairs which I ascended three at a time. Upstairs, cartons of toilet paper, soap and paper towels were strewn about a large, musty room. My footprints joined others in the dust on the floor but there were far too many to tell me anything. Big, wind-driven drops of rain had started to fall outside, splattering in through an open window up front. This was my sniper’s perch, for his elbows had cleared dust from part of the window-sill. I sniffed and sniffed and thought I smelled the sharp odor of gunpowder.

I plunged downstairs and to the back of the place. The rear exit opened out on a parking lot which extended all the way back to the elevated line. Reading the first of a stack of comic books, a skinny kid with a crew haircut and cup-handle ears sat near an old shack with a 75 cent sign faded and peeling on the gray wood.

“Hey!” I said. “Did someone just leave the John through here?”

“Huh?”

“The John. Did someone just leave?”

“I heardja.” The kid didn’t bother to look up. “Umm-hmm.”

“Who was it?”

“How should I know? They already drove away. I was reading.”

“Do any of the people over at Tolliver’s park their cars here?”

“You kidding? If they didn’t we’d be outa business tomorrow.”

“Who?” I asked desperately.

“Lemme see. There’s Mr. Soolpovar, Mr. Kellum, Miss Tanner, Mr. Lucca. Oh, yeah. And Miss O’Keefe.”

“What kind of cars do they drive?”

“Well, Mr. Soolpovar, he drives a Studebaker Commander ’49. Mr. Kellum, now he—”

“Never mind. Whose car is missing?”

The kid stood up and folded the comic book back in the pocket of his dungarees. He squinted around the lot myopic-ally and scratched his scalp through the bristle of his hair. “All of ’em,” he said finally. “There ain’t a Tolliver car in the whole lot. You looking for someone, mister?”

“The person who came out of the John. Didn’t you get a look at him at all?”

“Naa. For all I knew it could have been a dame. I just heard somebody come out, that’s all. I should look every time? Hey, mister, are you a cop?”

“I’m J. Edgar Hoover,” I said, and walked across the parking lot toward the street. The wind had stopped but the rain came down harder, spilling out of a dreary gray sky. I caught the elevated train at West 8th and let it rock me to sleep until my stop downtown. I didn’t have much to tell the coroner. I hoped he had more because I knew it was murder but couldn’t prove it.

When I reached the address indicated on the subpoena it was raining so hard I couldn’t even light a cigarette. I paused at the revolving door when someone honked a horn and called my name. Turning back into the rain I saw a car which definitely did not belong to the Tolliver set. It was a long Caddy limousine which you’d have difficulty parking at a bus stop. A black leather top had been fitted over the metal and the whole thing was spanking new and six or seven thousand dollars worth at least. The wipers were going slipslop across the one-piece windshield. A man sat beside the woman who piloted the two and a half-ton monster.

My legs got rubbery. My mind fled back through the rain and through more rain like it but worse in Korea and through three years of a second Army hitch although I’d realized I was too old to play tin soldiers or anything else. Her name was Allison and she wore copper hair piled high on her head and had eyes you could tell were green even through the rain. Her father had owned an eight-pump Amoco station at the other end of Staten Island near Outerbridge and for all I know he still owns it. I’d foremanned the repair shop that went with it and got to know his daughter and forgot about my bank account and started spending all my money on her and liking it because she liked it and responded by giving me what virile men dream about. (“Allison’s got wild blood in her, Gid, but you can tame her, boy,” old man Hiller had said.) Everything got rosy red until people started pointing at me and snickering and talk-big in whispers and I really believe old man Hiller never knew.

Allison was the reason I’d joined the Army although I’d served my time with George Patton in World War II. Allison had wild blood, let me tell you. She collected bedfellows like other girls collected jewelry. I had been laboring under the kind of misapprehension that grows horns on men.

So now Allison waved at me from the driver’s seat of the big black Caddy and the rain soaked me while I stared and thought myself back three years.

“It is you! Gideon. Gideon Frey. Come on in out of the rain, Gid.”

I debated it. Looking at my watch I saw I was still fifteen minutes early for the coroner’s inquest. If I accepted her invitation I’d feel like a fool. If I didn’t accept I’d feel like a bigger fool. I opened the back door of the Caddy and stepped inside.

Allison was full of tricks. There was no seat in the back of the limousine and none of those pull-down chairs that accommodate two additional people. Rubber matting covered the floor and a couple of hard rubber toys were strewn about. Something in the far corner under the fly window growled sullenly, then subsided as I closed the door and squatted on my heels.

A boxer glared at me with its black, pugnacious, flattened face. Sixty pounds of brindle-colored dogflesh with sturdy forelegs and a deep chest and one of those stout harnesses that seeing-eye dogs usually wear.

“Who is your friend, my dear?” The man next to Allison spoke for the first time. He had a calm, cultured voice and the kind of accent which said he might have gone to the same schools as Roosevelt and Dean Acheson. He didn’t turn around to look at me. He merely asked. And the dog wore one of those harnesses. Allison was chauffeuring around a blind man.

“We knew each other a long time ago, Gregory. His name is Gideon Frey.”

Gregory twisted around on the front seat and shoved his hand back in my general direction. His wide eyes stared without seeing at a point midway between me and the boxer. He had a lean face with a shaggy mane of white hair that accentuated the gaunt cheeks, the long, high-bridged nose, the thin lips and small, pointed chin. Bushy black eyebrows jutted out over the sightless eyes. His face conveyed exactly the right blend of sophistication and dissipation for a Man of Distinction ad.

“Allison certainly has interesting friends,” Gregory told me.

Allison smiled at me in the mirror. “Gideon was an officer in the Navy or something.”

“A sergeant in the Army,” I said.

“Indeed?” Gregory seemed genuinely surprised. “Would you believe it, I’ve never spoken to an enlisted man before. I was beginning to think the Army commissioned everyone these days. Did you serve in Korea, Mr. Frey?”

“Yes, I did.” I shifted my weight around uncomfortably on my haunches and decided to sit down on the floor. The boxer growled but stayed put.

“Don’t mind Shamus,” Gregory said. “He won’t hurt you.”

Allison laughed, down deep in her throat, as deep as the boxer’s growl. “Don’t you believe it, Gid. That dog would bite your arm off if Gregory said so.”

“But I won’t, Mr. Frey. Allison and Shamus just cannot seem to hit it off.”

“Shamus,” I said. “That’s kind of a strange name….”

“Shamus is my private eye, you see.”

Allison found it very amusing. This time the laughter bubbled out of her lips, tinkling with music I hadn’t forgotten. It was the kind of sound that makes you perk up your ears and that must have gone double for Gregory, who had to depend on sound for a lot of things we use our eyes to see.

When Allison offered me a cigarette from a gold case with a single blue jewel at its center I noticed the simple wedding band on the customary finger. She saw me staring at it so she said easily, “I’m sorry, Gid. I forgot to complete the introductions. This is Gregory Tolliver, my husband.”

I declined the cigarette but Shamus snapped at Allison’s hand and she withdrew it quickly. “Tolliver?” I said. “Say, wait a minute. Are you here for the inquest?”

“That is correct,” Gregory Tolliver told inc. “I take it you are somehow concerned?”

“You must be the Tolliver who owns Tolliver’s Funland,” I said unnecessarily. “I’ll be darned.”

“It is merely a hobby with me, Mr. Frey. I have diversified interests scattered over the metropolitan area which take up all of my time, but when we first visited Funland, Allison was so taken with the place that she insisted—well, you know women. Allison handles many of the affairs at Funland for me, drawing her own personal income from it.

“To get back to the inquest, though, I hardly think Mr. Archer’s death was an accident, Mr. Frey. I have utterly nothing to base the contention on, of course, but of the three possibilities — barring death from natural causes which is of course precluded — I favor murder.”

“Gregory bothers himself over trifles all the time,” Allison explained.

“My dear, murder is no trifle.”

“I mean, you don’t know it was murder, darling. You’re only guessing. I didn’t mind driving you here, but I do think we ought to have a chauffeur.”

Tolliver clucked his tongue. “The back of the car is for Shamus. It is either a Chauffeur or you, my dear. Since I wouldn’t have married you if I did not find your company far more pleasant, we have no chauffeur.”

He couldn’t see his lovely wife, not with his eyes. He used his fingertips. He ran them slowly over her hair, down her brow and the fine Grecian line it formed with her nose, across her lips while she made a small kissing sound, then her chin and her throat. The fingers lingered on the firm, curving breasts, sculpting them anew for the thousandth time, dropped to the flat stomach, to the lap and thighs. A blind man could take certain liberties. Hell, Allison was his wife. Still it made me boil and then it made me angry with myself. Jealous of Allison after three years? A fat lot of good the mud of Korea did me.

I saw Allison’s face in the mirror. Beautiful. Carved in marble it would sit on a pedestal in all the best museums. But not the faintest flicker of expression touched the marble. Chalk up a change of character for Allison Tolliver, I began to think. Then I changed my mind. Allison had donned the pokerface for me, but couldn’t maintain it. She was sitting sideways in the front seat, facing Tolliver. His fingers passed from view after a time. Then Allison’s lower lip trembled. She sucked it in and nibbled on it. A low sound stirred within her, faint and faraway. She leaned toward Tolliver who withdrew his seeing hand, patted her shoulder with it and smiled. I saw that smile in the rear-view mirror. It said maybe he knew how it was with Allison but he didn’t care because he had no chauffeur and probably no butler and had a rigid monopoly on Allison’s time, so it was fine men could stir her so easily since he did all the stirring.

Tolliver said, “You must come out and visit us soon, Mr. Frey. I’m sure you and Allison will want to talk over old times.” That didn’t jibe with the way I’d figured things, not at all.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Allison said. “Our house is out at Port Washington, Gid. You can take the Long Island Railroad or drive.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy.”

“You’re not that busy.”

Damn her, she could do plenty of stirring herself. And brother, I was really going to hate myself if I found three wasted years hadn’t helped me at all. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “We’d better go on up to the inquest.”

Tolliver climbed out of his side of the car without help as Allison slid across the seat and joined him in the rain, opening a plaid umbrella. I got out the back and stood aside barely in time. Shamus lunged out after me and nuzzled against Tolliver’s surrah silk trousers while he sought and found the harness. Shamus growled and Allison scampered to the other side of Tolliver. They made a fine looking family, the man, the woman and the dog. But Allison must have been thinking three’s a crowd.

I followed them through the rain, seeing images on the wet sidewalk and again on the glass panels of the revolving door. There was Sheila, grinning coltishly and gently massaging me with Unguentine. There was Karen saying let’s not be nasty and showing me her rare vintage smile. And there was Allison, twisting her crazy barbs in my heart after three years.

CHAPTER SIX

SO WE HAD ourselves an inquest. King Kellum, a huge hulk of a man with a Mickey Mouse voice. Yes sir, I came running as soon as I heard. Say listen, you don’t think I’d wait? The man in the ambulance said he was dead. Such a horrible accident. No sir, I didn’t see any signs of a struggle. About 12:05. I remember the time because…

Bull-necked Janus Soolpovar, rooster-strutting to the fore. We run a good, honest bathhouse at Tolliver’s. People get their money’s worth, see? Yes, we passed inspection. No, it’s not unusual for all that steam to be available. After all, the room opened into others. If there is anything I can do to help, anything at all, any little thing… Yes, sir. My opinion? Well, I offer it humbly, you understand. I am an expert on bathhouses, not suicides. Suicide? Did I say suicide? Well, you want to know what I really think? Bert Archer — the deceased — was acting peculiar the last few days. What I mean, he seemed… sort of far away. Thinking of other things. Glum, you know. I sure can’t prove it was suicide. Well, you asked me. It’s the summertime, see? Don’t let them give you that crap about in springtime and what a young man’s fancy does…. I apologize to the ladies in the room… it’s the summertime, see? Sure you can feel it in a place like my bathhouse in the summer tune. The deceased maybe was spurned or something. He’s a war veteran, see?… oh, you know? Well, kind of edgy and all that and then a dame comes along and says they’re through. It wouldn’t be the first time. You’re welcome.

Karen Tanner, regal and aloof (but the sky-at-sunset eyes spit venom at Soolpovar). Yes, I suppose I knew Bert Archer better than anyone else at Tolliver’s. I wouldn’t say we were engaged. Bert thought there was some kind of an understanding between us. I’d rather not answer that question. Well, all right. No, I don’t think we would have been married. Yes, I already told you that. Bert wanted to marry me. Certainly he was upset, but he wasn’t the kind of man who… Now, just a minute. I heard what Mr. Soolpovar said, too. He’d say Eisenhower was responsible if he thought it meant a clean bill of health for his steam rooms. No, I didn’t see Bert that morning at all. The night before, at closing time. We got my car at the parking lot across the street and I drove Bert to the Coney Island Avenue trolley. No, not particularly nervous. We didn’t talk much, I don’t remember about what. We were not arguing.

Gideon Frey, boy detective. That’s right, I served with Bert in Korea. I was his assistant platoon leader, a sergeant first class. Hell, no, I’m not making a career of the Army. He did a lot of talking about Miss Tanner, but I don’t see… Sure, it would have made him unhappy if Miss Tanner rejected him, but he was no kid. That’s right, twenty-six. I’m glad you mentioned that. It was a funny thing with Bert. He got a kick out of Coney Island and Tolliver’s, but the one thing he just couldn’t see was steam baths. It was a big joke with him. So it’s hardly evidence. All I know is this — Bert wouldn’t have taken a steam bath at Tolliver’s or anyplace else. Yeah, people change their minds. But not Bert, not that stubborn mule. I believe it was murder. (After that lack of evidence, whoever tried to kill me must have felt like seven different varieties of a damned fool.)

The Medical Examiner, dropping his bombshell. There were about the body of the deceased definite signs of a struggle. A laceration above the right cheekbone, a discoloration of the right eye. Contusions in the lumbar region on the left side. It has definitely been established that the injuries were sustained shortly prior to the time of death. Certainly no more than three hours and probably less.

Verdict: homicide.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“TAKE YOU BACK TO Coney, Gid?”

It was Karen. I shook my head and it surprised her. I wanted to see the Tollivers. Allison appeared in the hallway a moment later, face flushed an angry red. “Damn that dog, Gregory,” she said. “He tried to bite me. One of these days I’m going to kill that animal. Those places over in New Jersey with nice, tame German Shepherds weren’t good enough for you, oh, no. You needed a goddamned rabid boxer!”

“My dear, please. You and not Shamus are frothing at the mouth at the moment. You know Shamus is not rabid.”

“I swear, he’ll kill me some day when you’re not around. Or I’ll kill him.”

“There had better be signs that he attacked you first in that case. But, my dear, we are arguing like children.”

“I’m sorry, Greg… oh, there’s Gideon. Hi, Gid.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Have you decided to visit us, Mr. Frey?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m pretty busy at my new job.”

“Then a quiet day in the country will certainly do you some good. We have our own dock and a forty-foot cabin cruiser and anything else you’d want.”

“Anything at all,” Allison said. “Incidentally, we had Bert Archer out once or twice, you know. You’d be surprised how you can relax and let yourself go once you get away from the city.”

I hadn’t expected that. I smiled at them. “You’re twisting my arm. In another minute you’ll have me saying yes.”

Allison did twist my arm. At least she took my hand in both of hers and squeezed it. “How about Sunday, Gid? You could come out early in the morning and make a day of it.”

“Well… all right.”

“Splendid,” Tolliver said. “We’ll look forward to it.”

Shamus chose that moment to growl and show Allison his teeth. Anger crossed her face so quickly you would have missed it entirely unless you were staring. I was staring. Then Allison whimpered. She wasn’t the whimpering type and Tolliver must have known it, but of course he couldn’t see what happened after that. I not only saw it, I felt it.

Allison flung herself against me sideways, retreating in mock-horror from the dog. It was about as convincing as one of those old silent movies where the heroine throws her hands up over her head and wails noiselessly while Simon Legree proceeds to foreclose the mortgage on the old homestead. Her hip jarred against my thighs and tried to grind a hole through me. Her face rolled against my chest and the copper hair tickled my chin. “I’m just a big baby,” she said while Tolliver fingered Shamus’ throat until the boxer stopped growling.

“We should apologize to Mr. Frey for this scene, Allison.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Gideon,” Allison said contritely, but she winked at me.

When I returned to Funland and told Karen I wanted Sunday off she said it was one of our busy days and anyway, I’d only started working this week.

I shrugged. “So fire me.”

“But I thought you…”

“I want to find out what happened to Bert. Having Sunday off is part of finding out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“When Sunday comes I’ll find out. You want a written report?”

“All right, Gideon. You can have your day, but I won’t pay you for it.”

“At the inquest you said you wouldn’t have married Bert. That’s not the way he saw it.”

Karen’s eyes widened and I thought she was going to holler and maybe start swinging again. “It’s none of your business, you realize. Whatever happened between Bert and me had nothing to do with the killing.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Look, Gid. People change their minds. I met Bert before he got drafted and spent a lot of time with him after he went to OCS and became a second lieutenant. It gave Bert a great deal of free time, more than I had expected. We had some wonderful days together. Bert started getting ideas.

“Before he received his orders for Korea, he’d already proposed to me three or four times. I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either. I wasn’t sure. We only knew each other on our best behavior, I said. Always going out, always having a great time.”

“So while Bert was in Korea you changed your mind.”

“Will you listen to me? I’m telling you the whole story, once and for all… well, most of the story. Then do whatever you want about Bert, but leave me out of it.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“That’s my business. Anyway, I told Bert I didn’t know him well enough and suggested that we spend a weekend together. Maybe you think this is just too new-fangled to be decent, but I wouldn’t marry anyone until I saw what he was like when he woke up in the morning, among other things.

“It shocked Bert. You know what he was like, kind of a kid and very proper.”

“If you mean he was stuffy, he wasn’t.”

“Stop putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say stuffy. He had to grow up and get rid of some Victorian notions, that’s all.”

“I’m listening.”

“All right. Well, Bert asked me if… if I were a virgin. I’m twenty-seven, Gideon. I told Bert no, I wasn’t. I don’t think he commented on that. He just said we’d better not spend that weekend together. We’d both have time to think when he went to Korea. He’d already asked me to run the arcade while he was gone, though. We drew up partnership papers, fifty-fifty.” Karen lit a cigarette and abruptly asked a question. “Gid, do you know if Bert ever had a woman?”

“What kind of a crazy question is that? Are you trying to tell me he wasn’t normal?”

“You keep putting words in my mouth.”

“I don’t know. He never said. In a lot of ways Bert was a kid and I was his big brother in Korea. But he was an officer and I was a noncom. Everyone used to talk about conquests, but come to think of it, Bert didn’t.”

“I didn’t mean Bert wasn’t normal. I mean he’d led a sheltered life.” Karen blushed faintly. I hadn’t thought she was capable of it. “I’m going to hate myself tonight. The inquest must have wound me up, that’s all.”

“You wound yourself up, now you’re going to unwind while I listen.”

“I want to. I’m tired of us fighting with each other all the time. I can’t.”

“Baloney. If people want change they’ll just have to wait.” I locked the cash box, took Karen’s hand and half-dragged her into the back room.

“Sit down,” I said. “Maybe I never made my position clear to you. I have no patience for the police if Billy-boy Drake is one of them. You’re on my list right now, Karen. You’re near the top. I don’t want to make any mistakes. When I find the killer maybe I’ll turn him in and maybe I won’t, but he’ll be punished. Get that through your head. Here’s something else for you to think about. Someone tried to kill me today.”

“I—”

“Shut up. It’s open war now. Me and them, whoever they are. There’s something dirty going on here at Tolliver’s, I don’t know what. Bert was killed for it.” I tried to read Karen’s face. I’d hate to play poker with her. “Maybe they’ll kill me too and maybe they won’t. I’m not going anyplace. I set myself up as a clay pigeon once and I’ll do it again. Do you have anything to drink back here?”

Karen stared at me like she’d seen me for the first time. Her mouth hung open slightly. She said, “You mean that, all of it.”

“Dammit, get the truth serum.”

It struck her funny. I expected a nervous laugh but was treated to that mink coat smile for the second time. Karen opened a desk drawer and took out a fifth of Old Taylor and two shot glasses. “You rat,” she said, still smiling. “Two shots of sodium pentathol coming up.” She poured, all the while staring at me. I was some kind of strange animal.

We toasted wordlessly and drank. “More,” I said. We toasted and drank again. We did this five times and while I have an extensive capacity for whiskey I began to wonder. If Karen had a wooden leg it was more shapely than any I’d ever seen.

“This is silly, Gid. You can’t get me to talk like this. If I drink wanting to get drunk I never do.”

After that, I did the pouring. We kept right on drinking.

“See? It isn’t working.” But a thickness had crept into Karen’s speech. “It’s just no good, Gid. If you think I’m going to get so stinking you can ask anything you want, you’re mishtaken… mistaken. I’m free and… light this cigarette for me.”

I did. I felt unsteady, too, but not that unsteady. “Get it off your chest,” I said. “It’s a kind of psychotherapy.”

“Would Freud have approved of all this whishkey?” Karen tittered.

“Freud would have approved of anything.”

“That’s what you say. Don’t go thinking the wrong things because of what I said about not being a virgin. Are you trying to make me?”

The spring wasn’t just unwinding now, it was unwinding in all directions. “No,” I said. “When I try to make you, you’ll know it.”

“I’ve heard that song before, Gideon Frey. I’ve beaten off bigger wolves than you. It isn’t ladylike but I’m five foot nine in nylons and I have muscles. See?” Brother, we were moving about in a fog of alcohol. Karen wore a short-sleeved blouse and flexed her biceps. I laughed because it looked trim and feminine, the kind of arm which, if all the other items of equipment matched it, could win beauty contests hut not hurt anyone.

“You think I’m kidding. Lishen… listen. I had a twin brother I grew up with. Nature made me big and gave him a nasty temper. We fought all the time and I could take care of myself. Gee, how could I have married Bert? It wouldn’t have worked. I liked the guy, I felt sorry for him more than anything, I guess. Say, are you listening? Give me another drink.” Karen drank and sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes. “We used to go down to the beach and wrestle around in the water like anyone else. I could duck him or pin him on the sand and he used to call me his Amazon. His beautiful Amazon. You’re not listening. Am I beautiful?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’m not an Amazon. I weigh a hundred and forty-five pounds but I’m skinny. I can’t help it if I’m six feet tall in spike-heels.”

“You are not skinny. A little angular perhaps, but not skinny. Keep talking.”

“I don’t want to be anybody’s darn Amazon. When I fall for a man he’ll have to be able to throw me around with one hand. Shay, could you do that, Gid? Could you do that?”

I squinted and wasn’t sure which image of her to pick up, but I managed to find the right one and lifted her and put her on the desk. I placed my hands at the base of her ribcage and lifted her overhead while she giggled. I was Atlas holding up the world.

“Hercules my shipmate,” she squeaked. “Let’s go swimming.”

Someplace in the back of my mind the reason why all this had taken place still lurked. I rationalized and told myself maybe a good swim would make her feel like talking even more. We staggered out of the penny arcade and didn’t bother to lock up. We went upstairs and across the hall to the bathhouse. We had to walk past the pool to reach the locker rooms and people stared at us. So we were holding hands. So what? So we were smiling at each other but no one here knew we hated each other a little while ago. So what? So we were stumbling and making a great effort to walk a straight line and failing, that’s what. Brother, we were pie-eyed.

I managed to climb into a pair of trunks in the men’s locker room and found Karen wailing for me outside. “You didn’t rent that contraption here!” I yowled. “It’s gorgeous.”

She wore a two-piece suit of some iridescent yellow material. Enough on top to support her breasts, not rounded like Sheila’s, but firm and high-arched and struggling with the top of the halter. It looked like a game halter but I’d have put my money on what was inside if she indulged over-zealously in beach athletics. Enough downstairs to cover the delightful unmentionables, commencing just below the navel and ending right where the long, golden-smooth thighs began.

“Oh, it’s my suit,” Karen said. She pirouetted and showed the backs of curved calves and thighs and a hip flare which had to be padded to look like that only under the trunks of that Bikini you couldn’t have fit a Kleenex tissue. Picture Karen with a little patch of yellow iridescence on the mainsail and one on the poop deck and picture us both higher than box-kites on a windy day and running out to the beach after getting stamped at the Tolliver gate while all the women in line made nasty, jealous faces. Picture us running straight out into the water, kicking sand into a lot of faces and not caring and then plunging on into the slight gray swells which passed for waves here and surface diving and swimming out rapidly beyond all the bobbing bathing caps, then treading water and looking at each other, breathless and still high.

“I’ll bet we’re halfway out to Sandy Hook,” Karen said. “Where’d you learn to swim like that?”

“I used to be a life guard.” I waxed philosophical. “It’s strange,” I said while my chin dipped in and out of the water. “I was a life guard down at Riis Park before I managed a gas station in Staten Island, but that’s another story. Anyway, if someone drowned, we’d call the Royal Mounted Police if we had to in order to save him. We’d go out in a pontoon boat and we’d swim, and we’d drag him back to the beach and pump his lungs. They’d have an oxygen inhalator if it was needed and an emergency ambulance standing by ready to rush him to the nearest hospital and everyone at the beach would probably talk for the next two weeks how the guy almost drowned and what a terrible thing it was. Then maybe a year or two later the guy would go to Korea and get his head shot off by some kill-crazy gook so full of opium you could smoke him and put on a jag and the guy who almost drowned at the beach would become a statistic in the latest casualty report and no one but the immediate family would give a good God damn.”

“You’re a funny guy, Gid… Excuse me!” Treading water, she bicycled up and down. I had a glimpse of bronzed skin and yellow suit and something flashing white. What was inside the halter had won the battle on our long swim. Karen rose up and I saw what there was to see and then she plunged under the surface headfirst and became a faint shadow and was gone. So I caught my breath and followed her down.

Out this far the water was briny and buoyant and clear. Karen tried to refasten the halter and tried to stay down at the same time. I stared and stared and wished the water would go away until she shook her fist at me, then started to surface. In her excitement she lost the halter completely. I swam after it and saw Karen’s legs kicking up frantically because she needed air. I retrieved the strip of yellow iridescence and wondered how it could cover anything. Then I surfaced and gulped in oxygen and there was Karen still shaking her fist.

Up over my head I held the halter, grinning and taking a mouthful of water. The nearest swimmer was a good fifty yards closer to the beach and there’s something as private as a hermit’s cave about a lot of cool, deep ocean water. “Come and get it,” I said.

A sober Karen might have stood her ground or yelled for help or cussed me out until I relented. A high Karen disappeared under the water’s surface with an I’ll-fix-you look on her face. Well, she tried.

She grabbed my ankles and tugged. She gave a man-sized yank and I floated down below her, then her long legs had scissored my neck from behind and she was sitting there, underwater on my shoulders and trying to reach my outstretched hand and grab the halter. She knew her way around in the water, all right, but she was monkeying with an ex-lifeguard. When we surfaced I had Karen in tow, dragging her out deeper until we couldn’t even see any other swimmers. Then I put the halter back on her while she yelped and raved and splashed and half-drowned herself.

We swam back toward the distant beach without a word. We went back to Tolliver’s still without speaking and changed back to street clothing and met on the far side of the pool.

“Darn you, Gideon Frey,” Karen said. “I’m beginning to get sober. What did you want to ask me?”

“Ask you? I can’t remember.” Like hell I couldn’t. I remembered and so did Karen but if I broke this spell now it would never come back quite this way again. Karen and I were good for each other, like a kind of tonic the doctors haven’t invented yet, like spinach for Popeye. There was an urgency about it all, as if we’d have to hurry and keep moving and keep doing things if we didn’t want to lose this thing we’d so suddenly found. The questions could wait. I said. “I’m hungry. I’d like some chow.”

“Restaurant variety?”

“Hell, no. How commercial can you get, woman? Where do you live?”

“Out in Queens,” she said, leading me toward Surf Avenue. The kid in the lot was still reading his comic book. Karen gave me the keys to her ’47 Mercury. I kissed the tip of her nose and took them. I hugged her until it hurt me and I can imagine what it was doing to her. She said, “Hurry, Gideon.” Out along the Belt Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway we did sixty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. We passed everything on the highway except our own racing hearts. I looked at Karen so much she had to remind me to glue my eyes to the road. It’s a miracle we reached the garden apartments where she lived.

The baby carriage brigade stared at Karen and me with quiet distaste. The lips said nothing. The eyes said she was single and bringing a man to her apartment in the afternoon. In the night was bad enough, but in the afternoon all decent people should be working.

Karen must have seen it all but she didn’t care. She said hello Mrs. Ardello and hello Mrs. Greengrass and how’s Marvin and my doesn’t little Stevie look cute with that new hat and it certainly is a lovely day and no, I’m sorry I couldn’t baby-sit tonight Mrs. McGarity in a way that made Mrs. McGarity’s eyes follow us up to the apartment door on long, invisible stalks.

We closed the door behind us. We slanted the blind slats up and drew the draw-string drapes and Karen lit a small lamp on a corner table between two sections of a low, modern sofa. “They’re as bad as that Army of yours, Gid. Hup, two, three, faw. Hup, two, three, faw — you know.”

“Cut the chit-chat and give me a drink,” I said. Karen went into the kitchen and I heard ice-cubes clinking in glasses. She came out in a while with two highballs and the fixings for more on a wooden tray. She spun us some music on one of those open Webster jobs. Beethoven’s Eroica.

We refilled then re-refilled our highball glasses. We talked about everything and nothing. I flipped the LP record over and said, “I’m still hungry. How about those culinary tricks, now, Karen? Want to show them off?”

“I’m no Escoffier, but you’d better like it. Mrs. McGarity was looking that way because you’re the first man I’ve had out here for dinner or anything.”

“Truth?”

“Truth. Why don’t you make yourself presentable while I whip up some supper? There’s a little razor in the medicine cabinet I use for…”

“I know where you use it.” I fingered the stubble on my chin. “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea.”

“That settles it. You are trying to impress me. Yonder lies the bathroom.” Karen pointed and I weaved my way through the living room and a hallway. “Make some cocktails before dinner,” I called back over my shoulder.

I heard Karen’s “yes, master,” and closed the bathroom door behind me. I peeled off my shirt and used a cake of bath soap and plenty of hot water to work up a sparse lather on my face. Finding a gold-plated razor in the medicine cabinet, I began singing up a storm and scraping the whiskers from my left cheek when the bathroom door opened.

“Cocktails are served,” said Karen. She held a cocktail glass in each hand and had broken all speed records changing into a wheat-colored hostess gown which stayed in place by virtue of a sash belted at her waist. “You know, I always wanted to shave a man,” she told me cheerfully, giggling. All those drinks had finally had their effect, but I was so busy trying to figure out what, if anything, lay between the wheat-colored robe and Karen’s skin that I let her pluck the tiny razor from my hand.

Probably, she’d seen it done in the movies. She yanked up my skin with her left hand and brought the razor down across it with her right. It was a quick slash, but not deft. My face began to sting and Karen mumbled, “uh-oh,” then wadded some toilet paper and patted my nicked cheek with it.

Karen hid the razor behind her back and leered at me. She’d had more than just the kiss of the hops, as the ads say. She had the heart of the grain, thrice distilled.

She had deposited the cocktail glasses on the edge of the bathtub for safe-keeping. Her gown swirled out from her legs as she whirled away from me with the razor, brushing the cocktails into the bathtub with a tinkling of glass.

“Talk about your bathtub brew,” she said. But her eyes were big and somehow solemn when she backed away as far as she could go and I still kept coming. We bumped hard and laughed and I didn’t retreat. The hostess gown did the job all alone.

I told her I wasn’t thirsty anyway while she leaned away from me. The backs of her knees caught on the edge of the tub and she began to go over with a little yelp, the hostess gown riding high on graceful thighs and parting when the sash began to come loose. I caught her before she could fall and lifted her of! the floor and padded out of the bathroom with her kicking and thrashing but laughing too. The soap had dried and stiffened on my face and was smarting where she’d cut me with the gold-plated razor.

“Gideon, wait. If this is just a joke to you, like what happened at the beach….”

“Shut up, baby.” It was no joke. It was suddenly, devastatingly, wonderfully the sum-total of all that mattered in the world. Karen, with the white-gold hair framing her face and the wheat-colored gown almost matching her skin as it parted further and slipped from her shoulders and left me holding bare skin, smooth as satin but animal warm with a woman scent of perfume and musk….

“Say something nice. Say something nice or I’ll scream.”

She meant it. “It’s crazy, “I told her, “but it’s like things ought to be.”

I dumped her on the bed, a big, oversized job done in what they call Chinese modern. She crouched there on hands and knees, staring at me, ready to leap at me or dart away, I didn’t know which. She crouched there, bronze with two white slashes across her body. “Say something. I’ll make you say something.”

She hurled herself at me, a gouging, kicking, slapping wildcat. She was dead serious. I found myself wrestled over on my back. A knee plowed into my stomach and drove the wind from my lungs. “If this was just a game with you….”

I fought for breath and knew she could handle a lot of men with that feline strength of hers. But when my breath returned I laughed and got my hands under her armpits and threw her off. She tumbled to the floor and was silent. I didn’t even hear her breathing.

I looked at the ceiling and called myself every name in the book. What a way to conduct an investigation, but there it was. “Goddammit, Karen,” I said. “I think I’m falling in love with you.” And I meant it.

A halo of white-blonde hair appeared over the edge of the bed. And then her face and the rest of her in solemn repose now, all the fight gone from her and all the pentup agony which makes the most interesting people live the shortest lives.

It was dark outside by the time we ate dinner.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IF YOU EVER TRIED taking the circuitous subway route from Queens to Coney Island via Manhattan you’ll realize I arrived at my own place pretty late. I had a room in a dubious hotel which held down the corner of Surf Avenue and West 16th Street, two storeys of drab green asbestos shingle with all the dirty yellow windowshades drawn down. On the ground floor below the hotel, supporting the small rooms and dusty hallways, were a shooting gallery and one of those scooter rides. You walk into the hotel and the first thing you see is a blank wall with a hand-lettered sign which says, “upstairs” and an arrow indicating that you do an abrupt column right up a flight of creaking wooden steps.

At the top you find a desk and a row of mail slots and a desk clerk who slept with one eye open. For a small commission he’d get you anything from a bottle of whiskey to a sleeping companion. From the rhythmic squeaking of bed-springs in the hall the desk clerk must have carried on a brisk trade.

I passed the desk and the clerk’s other eye remained shut so I figured he was asleep. I unlocked the door to my room, went inside and began to undress. I stripped down to my undershorts in the semi-darkness, with light and carnival commotion streaming in through the yellow window shade when some female throat-clearing made me turn around.

There was a dark shape in the room’s one chair.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, Mr. Frey,” the dark shape said. The shape had a voice I recognized. It wasn’t the shape, but the shapeless. It was Becky Lutz.

I put my pants back on and pulled the string for some light from a naked bulb hanging down from the low ceiling.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Frey. I didn’t mean to disturb you or anything. But I had to see you.”

“How did you find me here?”

“Well, I said to myself, Mr. Frey would probably live nearby in a hotel or a boarding house. I kept looking until I found the right one and the nice clerk let me in. I don’t usually do this. I don’t visit strange gentlemen in their bedrooms.” Apparently Becky saved the nagging for Ben. She spoke in such a diffident tone and so formally I half expected her to drop to the floor and salaam. “Whatever you do, Mr. Frey, I hope you do not entertain the wrong idea about me. Ben and me, we’re happily married.”

“Becky, the moment I saw you I knew you were not a loose woman.” I tried to keep from smiling. I was suddenly wide awake, though.

“Mr. Frey, I… I do wish you would put on your shirt.”

I slipped into my shirt but left it unbuttoned. Becky’s eyes roved the room anxiously. They said I was the most virile thing she’d seen since Valentino’s death.

Becky licked her lips nervously. She’d come prepared to barter for whatever she wanted, if necessary. As she leaned forward the low neckline of her print dress revealed a couple of items entirely too large, shapeless and — I guessed — soft. There would be one of those steel-ribbed girdles below the brassiere, also pink, perhaps embroidered with some flowery stitching. It kept Becky tucked in and squeezed the fat into a dumpy but not obese mold.

“Mr. Frey, it’s about my Ben. Ben is a good, hard worker and he’s been at it a long time now. You remember that day you came into the bar for the first time? You looked like such a gentleman. Right away I knew from the polite questions and the way you smiled so courteously. I’m a good judge of that, Mr. Frey. I forget your first name.”

“It’s Gideon.”

“Everybody’s been talking since you came here. You can’t hide those things, you know. Everybody is saying that Mr. Frey is either the letter writer or he’s working for the letter writer.”

“The letter writer,” I said. This was a new one. “Well, I won’t deny it in front of someone as astute as you, Becky. How are those plans for Blue Mountain Lake coming?”

“That’s just it. I came to see you about Blue Mountain, Lake, Gideon. We need more money. My Ben is only scared a little. We should take vacations like to Blue Mountain Lake and live out in Forest Hills someplace. I only want what’s good for Ben. A good legman you need? That Vito Lucca is a baby, all wet behind the ears yet. Let my Ben take over the legwork.”

“Well,” I said, wishing I knew what we were talking about, and wanting to give the impression I did. “Vito is a younger man.”

“But my Ben has the contacts. For that you would be willing to pay more money, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “How does Vito feel about all this?”

“Vito? A baby! We will leave Vito out of it.”

I got up off the bed and listened to the springs creak. I placed my hand on Becky’s shoulder, big and flesh-padded, and felt her shiver. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “We like our people to come out and say what they’re thinking. Incidentally, does Ben have the necessary transportation?” It was a hunch. I’d run into Vito with an unmarked panel truck and a suspicious attitude.

“You mean a truck? I didn’t know Vito owned his truck. I thought you gave it to him. Ben could use the same truck. He’s a more careful driver, too.”

“It’s a good point,” I said. “Does Ben know you know what we’re doing over at Tolliver’s?”

“Certainly my Ben knows. He keeps no secrets from me. I keep no secrets from him, except little ones.”

Maybe Becky would have gone right on talking, I don’t know. Unfortunately, a bed spring began creaking overhead in the top floor of the hotel. They were in earnest, those two upstairs, and one or both of them must have been well-stuffed. Becky mopped sweat off her face with a gayly colored handkerchief. She lumbered toward the door mumbling something about it being later than she thought and Ben would worry.

I knew I couldn’t detain her. But there might be another time, so I shook Becky’s plump, dimpled hand and held it and leaned over with my face inches from hers and said, “I’m glad you came, Becky. I like talking with you.”

“About what I said…?”

“I’ll consider it. Don’t worry. A man like Ben has a wife as unselfish and devoted as you, he’s bound to go places.”

“You really think so? I’m younger than Ben, you know.”

I leaned closer. Becky’s lips began to tremble. I felt like every kind of an unmentionable heel that never gets mentioned, but what the hell, I was playing for keeps. Becky took me off the hook, though, by spinning around and darting down the hallway despite her bulk. At the top of the stairs she turned and blew me a kiss. I showed my fangs and shut the door softly.

Becky had almost told me a lot. My actual take in serviceable information, however, was zero. I’d already guessed Vito was delivering something to Tolliver’s or taking something from Tolliver’s. Aside from the fact that an ambitious Becky was gunning for his job, I’d learned nothing.

Who or what in hell was the letter writer?

I thought and thought about what Becky told me and got nowhere, so I began thinking about Karen. This revealed a desire to return forthwith to Queens, the newly ordained garden spot of the universe.I think I’m falling in love with you, Karen. That’s what the man said. But was he? Three years ago, I’d decided to play the field after Allison. Such a stalwart display of will power. Go to hell, Gideon Frey. That’s where you’re heading anyway. The first broad you hook up with after doffing the khaki uniform makes you want to change your mind.

None of it helped. I slept.

I found King Kellum manhandling a boy in our penny arcade the next morning. I didn’t recognize the boy at first but I said, “Damn you, Kellum, cut it out.”

“Mr. Frey, am I glad to see you,” the boy wailed. It was my favorite clam digger, squirming and writhing while Kellum kept him pinned under one thick, muscular leg and swatted a heavy paw at the twisting face.

“Frey,” he said. “Say, listen. You people ought to watch this place more carefully in the future.” The Mickey Mouse voice probably masked lewd thought Mickey never would have dreamed of.

The kid said, “This big goon is nuts! I only came in because I wanted a job here, Mr. Frey. Right away he starts chasing me and doing all kinds of stupid things. Leggo, stupid!”

Kellum stood up and dusted himself off. “He was trying to steal something, Frey.”

The kid’s shirt was ripped almost in two, revealing red welts and discolorations on his chest and stomach. He snuffled back tears of rage and pain and said, “Am I gonna catch hell when my Ma sees this.”

“What was he trying to steal?” I asked coldly. “The cash is locked up.”

“Listen, Frey. Do you think I was trying to take something?”

“Kings go around looking for queens, you punk.”

“Say, listen…”

“No, you listen. Keep your nose out of this place. You can monkey around all you want in your steam room, see?”

Kellum’s big face twisted into a pout, like a woman whose virtue has been questioned. He was something unclean which crawled around holes in the ground and only came out at night. I slammed my open palm against the big face and rocked it.

The kid clapped his hands. Kellum bleated like some kind of female animal. He lunged at me and swung a haymaker which I ducked under. But I neglected to tuck my chin close to my chest and his left blurred up at me and slammed against my Adam’s apple. I gagged. To make matters worse, Kellum lifted me half off the floor with a knee. If I had any breath I might have screamed. The kid never would have forgiven me.

Kellum’s right fist floated toward me. Time seemed suspended. I couldn’t seem to avert my head. Something crunched and I went over backwards against a bowling game. I tumbled to the floor in a shower of splinters and Kellum leaped on me with a glad little Mickey Mouse cry. He pummeled me with one hand and tried to enjoy himself with the other. His lower lip hung slack and I grabbed it. I yanked and felt something give and the lip hung slacker than before. I’d torn something big because blood started gushing in a quick rich red stream. Kellum squawked and clamped a hand against his mouth while I twisted and squirmed out from under him. Bleeding mouth and all, the son of a bitch bit me in the shoulder as he rolled clear. I rapped him in the teeth once and stood up.

Kellum came after me, but he was done. His bleeding mouth bothered him. He tried too hard to protect it while I pounded his unprotected gut. I chased him back across the room and his head began to slump as if it were too heavy for the muscle-corded neck. He leaned back against a hockey game, his back arched across it. I drove my right fist against the point of his jaw and felt it up to my shoulder. Glass shattered as his head jerked back but his legs swung up and caught me coming in.

I bettered the world’s broadjumping record in reverse. I hurtled against two or three assorted penny games and a whole row of peekaboo movies. Everything crashed and clattered and so did I, but I caught Kellum’s bulk on the soles of my shoes as he came down and kicked up and over. Kellum shattered the glass front of our Gypsy Horoscope but got his fortune told. It said he was licked.

He climbed to his feet without much gusto and I hit him. He staggered to his feet and limped toward me and I hit him. He sat up and I kicked him in the teeth and he spit out a mouthful of blood before he subsided.

I asked the kid, “You want… a job… here as a… change-maker?”

“Gee whiz, yeah. Gee whiz, you sure won that fight.”

“Gee whiz,” I groaned, “I’m not so sure.” The floor prevented me from falling clean through to the basement.

CHAPTER NINE

THE FIRST THING Karen said, laughing, was, “Why don’t you fight with someone of your own sex, Gid?” The second was, “Are you all right?” She slopped a wet washrag on my face until I almost drowned. The third thing, not laughing, was, “Darn, it will cost us close to a thousand dollars to fix this place up. You’re going to be a mighty expensive employee, Gideon Frey.”

“Ow,” I said. “That hurts.”

“Good for you.” Karen was wiping the cuts on my face. “Mind telling me what happened?”

“It will disappoint you. Kellum got fruity with your new change-maker, that’s all.”

“With you?”

“With that kid,” I said, pointing. Orienting myself I found I was lying on the floor, my neck arched over one of Karen’s thighs and my eyes staring straight up at her thirty-sixes. “Let me up, will you, woman?”

I started to stand. Then I started to fall. Karen had climbed to her knees and caught me under the arms and eased me down.

“I’m a wee bit dizzy,” I admitted. “Where’s Kellum?”

“Soolpovar and someone else from the bathhouse carried him upstairs. They asked what happened and then if you would press any charges. Will you?”

“Why the hell not?” I wanted to know, propping myself up on one elbow and getting shoved back down.

“Because I know King Kellum better than you do, that’s why. You haven’t made an enemy, Gideon. You’ve made a friend.”

“You are crazy nuts.”

“Do you know anything about how perverts behave?”

“Not being one myself except when the moon is full…”

“Listen, then. Kellum has a guilt complex a mile wide because of his perversion. It ain’t doing what comes naturally to most people, as the expression goes. Kellum feels terrible about it and wants to be hurt so he can expiate his sins. Not that I’ve made a study of it or anything. I just read about it once.”

“O.K. I’ll buy so far. What has that got to do with…”

“You hurt Kellum and he’ll like you for it. He’s liable to hang around you like a Pekinese lap dog.”

I shrugged, then said, “I’ve got most of the pieces of the puzzle now. I need a few more and I’ll get the picture. But I can’t make change ten hours a day and make progress, too.”

“If you quit, what will you use for money?”

“I still have some government bonus left. Don’t worry about that.”

“Why don’t you leave it to the police, Gid? This had nothing to do with murder and look what happened to you. Maybe the police are slow, but they get results. They’re here every day, poking around and asking questions and getting facts which they’ll put together and come up with a killer.”

“Look what happened to the other guy,” I said jauntily. I didn’t feel jaunty. I ached all over and the way Karen averted her eyes I must have looked a mess.

“I don’t care what happened to the other guy. I care what happened to you. I love you, Gid. Do you love me back?”

I looked at her and watched her staring at my cut face. I said, “I, uh, love you back. And your front, and your sides and top and bottom and all over. Now will you let me up? I’ve got to see a man about his wife.”

Karen let me go, all right, but not until I’d become a walking advertisement for Bandaids. I toted my freshly covered scars in the direction of Ben Lutz’s place. Now I knew how a beautiful woman felt walking down the street. Only, of course, everyone was gawking at Bandaids now.

Ben was outside lowering his awning with a long metal pole. “Going to be a strong sun today,” he said. “What happened to you, Frey?”

“You,” I repeated because it always told people to stop talking about the fight, “ought to see the other guy. Ben, I want to talk to you.”

He jerked a thumb toward the entrance. “Come on inside.”

I followed him in and sat at the bar while he went around behind it and sprayed some blue liquid at the mirror with a squirt bottle and then began to rub it clean. His eyes tried to peel off the Bandaids and see what they covered. “Drink’s on the house.”

This wasn’t exactly the cocktail hour, but Ben poured a double from a Seagram’s Seven bottle and lowered a bombshell. “Goddamn, Frey. How do you people do it? I even had you fooled, it tastes so much like the real thing. You see, Becky woke me up last night and made a confession. We don’t keep secrets, the wife and I. It makes me a little scared to hear I’m finally going to move up in the old organization after all this time.

“I’m forty-three years old, Frey. I’ve gone through the first forty-three years keeping my nose clean. But now I’m beginning to poke my nose into things. Becky says it’s the only way to get ahead. I say I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out. Do you really think I’m ready to move up the ladder, Frey?”

It tastes so much like the real thing.

… So they manufactured bathtub brew at Tolliver’s. At least, that’s what it looked like. But what the hell, there wasn’t any Prohibition. So why go to all that trouble to get yourself a reservation at Sing Sing or some such place? I didn’t know but I could find out. All I had to do was go on convincing people I was a big wheel in what Ben called the organization. And maybe find myself floating out on the tide with the sewage that polluted Coney Island waters.

“You want to know what Becky told me? She figures you for the letter writer himself. It makes sense. Bert Archer gets ornery. He wants out. So what happens? You come along and Bert dies.”

I leaned across the bar and balled up the front of Ben’s T-shirt and pulled him toward me. “Listen, punk,” I said. “If you know anything else about Bert Archer and how he died, start talking.”

“Hey, go easy. I didn’t mean anything. I figured Bert found out Karen Tanner had gone along with the organization and he didn’t want any part of it. When he finally went to the cops he must’ve figured she’d get off with a light sentence or something. Only he was so naive you know what he did? He marched his story straight down to Billy Drake!” Ben rolled laughter around in his mouth. “Can you imagine that? Billy comes right back and tells Mr. Soolpovar and the rest of us. Naturally we tell the letter writer we’ve got a blabbermouth with us.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“The way I figure it, though, you’re not him, Mr. Frey. You’re not the letter writer. Maybe you’re his right hand man. You probably know who he is, but since he’s never come out in the open and shown himself, I guess he wouldn’t do that now.” Ben scowled. “The fact that he conducts all his business by mail means he’s someone we know only he doesn’t want us in on the fact he’s boss. I’m probably telling you something you already know, but the letter writer must be Mr. Soolpovar, or that there tangerine, Kellum. Might even be Karen Tanner. But it better not be Vito, nossir. Otherwise I’ve put my foot in something up to here.” Ben drew a line across his throat.

“You’ve left out two people,” I reminded him. “It could be either Mrs. Lutz or yourself.”

Ben laughed again. “But you’d know. You’d know and so would I. It’s got to be one of the others.”

“You’re quite astute, Ben.”

“Listen, I don’t want you to say anything you’d rather keep mum, but it isn’t Vito, is it?”

“Why don’t you ask Vito?” I said.

“Hey, now, wait a minute. I thought you said I was ready to move up and all.”

“I did. I didn’t say when. And moving up doesn’t mean horning in on the boss’ private business. You’ll be told what to do and when to do it.”

I left Ben with a bad taste in my mouth. Lovely characters at Tolliver’s, all of them — and not a one innocent. From Soolpovar through Kellum and on down to Vito and the Lutz’s there wasn’t a fragrant blossom in the bunch. Too bad about Sheila, though.

But it was Karen who left the bad taste in my mouth. From what I could gather Karen had taken over Bert’s business for him while he fought in Korea and had drifted right along with the tide at Tolliver’s, getting polluted with it. Karen was left holding the bag when Bert came back and she didn’t know what to do with it. If Bert sold out they might be suspicious of him and decide to do something about it. So he went to the cops — to Billy Drake. Great. It wasn’t bad enough I’d fallen for my dead best friend’s ex-fiancee. It now turned out she was responsible for his dying in the first place.

I took a long walk and didn’t go near Tolliver’s the rest of that day. Sooner or later I’d have to see Karen, but one part of me would want to kiss her and hold the firmness of her against me and murmur those nice things she insisted on while the other part would want to whale the tar out of her and curse and go off in a huff.

I took half a dozen ice cold bottles of High Life back to my room. By the time I uncapped the third bottle it had warmed to room temperature, so I smoked a few cigarettes and hit the sack, still stewing. I continued stewing all day Saturday.

Sunday morning I went down the hall to the communal bath and waited till the shower stopped hissing inside. Presently a small runty woman whose flaccid breasts revealed themselves wetly under a thin dressing gown emerged from the bathroom with a smile for all the world and mostly me. I wasn’t having any and it seemed to disappoint her.

“Foggy morning,” she said.

“Umm.”

“I haven’t seen you before, Mr.—”

“Jones. Willis Jones. I stick to my room where I am recuperating from a dangerous, contagious disease I contracted in the tropics.” I stuck out my hand to get it shook, but now she wasn’t buying. She backed off down the hall, grinning vacantly.

She hadn’t lied about the weather, though. An early morning fog had squatted with a thick white wetness on Surf Avenue, waiting for the sun to dispel it. I walked about aimlessly, feeling clean as the whistle everyone seems to polish, the Bandaids removed from my face, the aftershave lotion still stinging pleasantly. I figured I had some time to kill before I boarded a train for Port Washington and wound up at Tolliver’s before I realized it. My wristwatch said it was eight o’clock, far too early for anyone to be around.

Only Vito Lucca never seemed to sleep. There was his panel truck, idling at the curb, its parking lights making the mist sparkle with a million tiny leaping raindrops. Vito appeared suddenly out of the grayness, leaned in over the tailgate and straightened up with a cardboard carton. When he disappeared again I walked over to the rear of the truck and waited for him.

He returned without seeing me, reaching in for another carton. I let him straighten and then I bumped him. Surprise more than anything made him drop the carton. It landed at our feet with a great glassy clattering and sprinkled shards of amber glass over the sidewalk. Vito grabbed me and began to curse.

I pushed his hands away and put on my best I’m-boss-around-here voice. “Why the hell aren’t you more careful?”

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Frey. Listen, I thought…”

“I don’t give a damn what you thought. Do you go around breaking bottles regularly like that?”

“Have a heart, Mr. Frey. I’m the only one collecting empties, ain’t I? We always have enough, don’t we? This is the first time ever.” Vito brushed himself off and assumed his mantle of composure once again. “You just scared me, that’s all. I was sure nobody except Sheila was around.”

“You let Sheila watch while you bring in the empties?”

“She knows what’s going on, but… I wanted to talk to you about her, Mr. Frey. I hope I can lay my cards on the table. Sheila ain’t no hot pants like Allison Tolliver, but she’s got what it takes. It’s no secret I like her.”

“It’s no secret she likes you, either.”

“That’s just it. She’s got some fancy notions about honesty and things and doesn’t want me to stay in the business. She keeps threatening she’ll go crying to the cops.”

“Send her to Billy Drake,” I suggested, and smiled.

“She knows about Billy. Sheila’s got a good head on her shoulders. She isn’t willing to take risks to move up in the world, that’s all. What do you think I ought to do, Mr. Frey?”

I didn’t know what Vito should have done. But I knew what Sheila should have done — exactly what I had neglected to do. Hell, Billy Drake was a bad apple, but he didn’t personify the whole police force. Karen was right. They were prowling around every day, digging up facts. It got so there were as many blue uniforms around as proprietors’ aprons, and probably plainclothes men were meandering about with the crowds on Tolliver’s midway. So, Sheila should have gone to the cops. But Sheila was only a kid with mixed-up emotions. Someone with sufficient maturity to make decisions should have taken what he knew to the police. Someone named Gideon Frey. It had been nibbling at the back of my mind all day yesterday but it hadn’t taken a man-sized bite. A different kind of investigation by the police would uncover the moonshine machinery at Tolliver’s. Popcorn and taffy and chlorinated water teamed up to mask the odor of cooking mash, but there had to be a still and a bottling plant someplace on the premises. A few well-placed cops wielding fire-axes would find everything without any trouble. I was betting on the cellar, since it was the only place at Tolliver’s I hadn’t seen.

Then why hadn’t I taken what I knew to the police?

Damn it all to hell, I was in love with Karen, that’s why.

And didn’t want to implicate her. Lovely. Which meant I had to keep Sheila away from the cops, too, until I could make up my own mind.

“Be firm,” I told Vito in fatherly fashion. “Let Sheila know who’s boss. If she threatens you, threaten her back. She’s got a crush on you a mile wide. Tell her you’ll stop seeing her.”

“You can see it, huh? I mean, the way she feels about me?”

“Listen, Vito,” I said. I did not want anyone going to the cops until I decided what could be done about Karen. “We’ve been watching you. If you want to serve up wedges of pizza full time all your life instead of driving a pickup truck for us, just let me know.”

“Honest, Mr. Frey,” Vito pleaded. “I can take care of Sheila. She’s just got to learn a woman’s place….”

“Exactly. Don’t spare the rod.” What a father I’d make, I thought. “And take some, advice, Vito: if you have to choose between Sheila and the green stuff, well, there are other fish in the sea.” Take your own advice, Gideon Frey. I didn’t have to feel guilty about it, at any rate. If Vito decided to make a clean break with Sheila, it would do her a lot of good.

“You mean, get tough?”

“Real tough,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t let Sheila spill what she knows.”

“I won’t, Mr. Frey. No, sir.”

“Now clean up that glass before someone comes along.”

“Yes, sir.” Squaring his shoulders, Vito disappeared into the fog and swam back into view a moment later with a push-broom and a dustpan. I waved at him cheerily and went off toward the subway. I could catch a Long Island train for Port Washington at Atlantic Avenue.

First I told myself I was eager because Allison said she knew something about Bert. Then I told myself it was because Allison was Allison. Next I told myself it was because I was going to prove Allison didn’t mean a thing to me. I began to tell myself all sorts of things and finally decided to let Allison do the telling when I saw her. You had to feel sorry for her blind husband. He didn’t see a thing.

How right I was.

CHAPTER TEN

ALLISON MET ME at the Port Washington station in another Caddy, a convertible this time, powder blue with cream-colored leather fixings. Sleek.

Allison was sleeker. I caught my breath and for one long happy moment forgot about Bert, forgot about Sheila who I was trying to do a favor, forgot about Karen and what Mrs. McGarity guessed, even forgot about three years in the Army and how Allison ticked incorrectly. She was tanned to a kissable crisp. She wore red-gold hair in an upsweep and green eyes like emeralds against the tawny skin of her face. She’d supported her breasts and made an attempt at covering them with a halter of criss-crossed straps of white. Since the smooth skin of her chest and the dark, shadowy cleavage between her breasts and the rippling flatness of her belly below the criss-cross halter and above the trim white shorts was all of one coppery hue I had to assume she did her sunning in this halter or in no halter at all. Her thighs were broadened against the cream-colored leather of the Caddy’s front seat, with tiny blonde hairs on them catching the sunlight and gleaming with it.

“It’s good to see you, Gideon,” she said.

“It’s going to be a hot day.”

“We’re prepared for it at the Bluff. That’s our home, the Bluff. Trust Gregory to make a joke of his blindness so other people will laugh with him but not at him. We live on a cliff overlooking the sound and Gregory calls our house Blind Man’s Bluff. But let’s not talk about Gregory.”

“Let’s not.” Either the fog hadn’t reached out as far as Port Washington or it had already gathered in its last wraith-like tendrils and departed for the day. The polished powder blue of the Caddy reflected bright morning sunlight like a mirror.

Allison gunned the Caddy away from the station and waved at a few people in Port Washington’s sleepy streets. We climbed a hill and Allison watched me while I watched the scenery. We made a right turn at the top of the hill and headed east along the edge of the Sound on a two-lane blacktop road.

Allison removed her right hand from the steering wheel and took my hand and placed it down on her thigh. I lifted it up and began to feel foolish and let it rest there again. Her flesh was warm with the sun and rippled with hidden muscle every time she took her foot off the gas pedal to apply the brake on the curving road.

“I missed you, Gideon. You didn’t write, not once.”

“What the hell,” I said. “You got married.”

“That has nothing to do with it. I’ll tell you right now so you make no mistakes: if ever I had to choose between Gregory and you, I’d take Gregory, but that doesn’t mean we can’t…”

“Chrissake,” I said. “We’ve seen each other only once in three years.” I’d begun raising my voice. Allison always did that to me, made me feel confused and angry with myself. She knew it and it made her smile and lick the moisture from the hardly-seen blond fuzz on her upper lip.

“I just want you to understand, that’s all. Gregory tells me my collection of jewelry is worth a quarter of a million dollars. I’ve got everything I want, Gideon. Almost everything. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Not anything.”

“You already told me that.”

“I said almost everything. I’m going to be perfectly frank with you and if you get nasty about it that won’t matter because Gregory won’t believe you if you decide to tell him.”

“You ought to know me better than that.”

“I do, but just in case. You… think I’m not normal, Gideon. Maybe I’m not, but I’m me and I like to live for what I feel. Some people feel things and try to hide them or suppress them, but they’re stupid. They’re only going to live once and every day they don’t do what they want to do is one day less of life without living. Does that sound logical to you?”

“Sure.”

“Then, I live the way I want. If I’m not normal I don’t care. I make no comparisons. I… Gideon, I missed you.”

“You said that, too. I’m sorry if I sound like a wet blanket, Allison, but we can’t just take up where we left off three years ago.”

She ignored that. She said, “I miss a man’s eyes. You couldn’t dream what it was like. A man can caress you with his eyes, a man can make your limbs turn to water with his eyes. Remember the way you used to look at me, Gideon?”

“Me and everyone else. Stop making it personal, Allison.”

“Why do you make me… admit things? I never liked a man as much as I liked you, Gideon.”

“Fine,” I said. My hand on Allison’s tawny thigh had begun to sweat.

“I simply wasn’t made for one man. I don’t think any woman really is content with one man all her life, whether she admits it or not. But what Gregory represents is more important than anything else.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. She had this quirk, and she assumed it was part of all women, overt or otherwise. It had chased me into the Army and played hob with my male ego now. But the as-Allison-goes-so-goes-the-world attitude made me smile wryly. She probably thought all happily married women were hypocrites.

“Here we are,” said Allison.

You could tell it stood for millions. A fieldstone wall bordered the black-top road for several hundred yards, dipping away from the road and down a grassy hill toward the beach the blue waters of the Sound. A massive grillwork gate with, of all things, cupids perched atop it, stood ajar. We rolled through and the Caddy must have disconnected an electric eye circuit, for the gates swung ponderously shut behind us. Our tires churned a wake of dust and pebbles as we drove along a winding gravel path to Blind Man’s Bluff.

It stood on the edge of a cliff, all right. The house, a rambling many-winged structure of fieldstone and wrought-iron framed bay windows, nestled in a grove of shaggy, great-boughed oaks dappling the blue-green lawn with patchwork sunlight.

“You see what I mean?” Allison demanded. “I wouldn’t give that up for anything, but I’m beginning to think I can’ have my cake and eat it too. Here comes Gregory.”

Gregory Tolliver had heard the car approach and now walked out across the lawn toward us. In his right hand he carried a tall, frosted glass. His left hand held Shamus’ harness, the boxer growling and snuffling when he saw us.

“Did you find Mr. Frey, my dear?”

“Yes.”

“He certainly picked a fine day to join us out in the country, then. I hope you brought along swimming apparel, Mr. Frey.”

“Nope,” I said. “I can always go wading.”

“Then perhaps mine will fit.”

“Gideon is bigger than you, dear,” Allison said. Tolliver was a sturdily-built man in tennis shorts, with a thin, muscular body far better preserved than his gaunt face.

“Allison will work something out, I am sure, Mr. Frey.”

I was in for a memorable day and started to realize it when Allison worked something out. She worked herself out of the criss-crossed halter. She draped the white strips of cloth over the seat of the Caddy and looked at me and raised a finger to her lips for silence. Right then as far as I was concerned she could have her cake and eat it, at least for today. And I was right: Allison sunbathed, at least from the waist up, in exactly nothing. Tawny flesh and pink-brown of her nipples were almost the same color.

Allison smiled at Tolliver and said something about Tom Collins for all of us. I stared at her and while my tongue wasn’t exactly hanging out my eyes must have said they liked what they saw and there was her husband, standing there and not seeing. Damn.

Tolliver disappeared inside to get some drinks, but Shamus looked back at us and growled. I thought that dog was going to cause trouble. Shamus, a snooper all right.

We walked around behind the house where the trees were fewer and the sun stronger. Allison led me by the hand right up to the edge of the cliff and perched herself there precariously, dangling her feet over. A sturdy metal fence marred the view but you could still see the beach directly below and the pier which jutted out into the blue waters of Long Island Sound for about fifty yards and the large blue and white cabin cruiser moored at the pier’s end.

“The fence is for Gregory,” Allison explained. “If he wanders back here he won’t fall off. The electric eye which shut the gate as we went through is also Gregory’s idea.”

Leaving her tanned legs dangling out of sight, Allison stretched out, her bare back on the carpet-cropped grass, her arms lifted over her head. She squirmed herself into the sun’s direct rays and smiled with childlike contentment. She purred. Muscle rippled faintly where the flesh of her breasts jutted out from the smooth line formed by throat and chest.

I did some purring too, but I said, “Gregory will be out here in a minute.”

“So what? He’s blind, remember? It’s a hot day, Gideon. The least you can do is remove your shirt.”

There she went again, making me feel foolish. Men lolled around on beaches from here to Lower Slobovia with their shirts off. I slipped the blue and rust Basque shirt over my head and dropped it on the grass.

Then Tolliver came from the rear of the house. I still couldn’t grow accustomed to his blindness. I saw Allison, lying beside me and wearing nothing but a good suntan from the waist up and tossed her my shirt. She brushed it away and laughed and called, “Here we are, Gregory.” I Tolliver’s steps carried him to us unerringly. He wasn’t even led by Shamus although Shamus followed behind him, then growled, then leaped forward and snapped his ugly jaws over my Basque shirt and trotted it over to Tolliver. “Hey!” I said. “Don’t rip that.” Tolliver fingered the shirt, then held it out for me. “Warm?” he said. “Hot.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t bring bathing apparel. Now, if Allison were broad-minded enough…” Tolliver smiled. “I’m joking, of course.”

Could a man be so completely naive about the woman he married? I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, Allison didn’t have many guests. If I had been the first it might explain Tolliver’s attitude. It seemed a reasonable gambit to shove the conversation in Funland’s direction, so I said, “Do you have many guests out here at the Bluff?”

Tolliver set a tray down on the ground and Allison hopped, bouncing delightfully, to her feet and returned to my side with two Tom Collins. “Gregory doesn’t have many friends,” she told me blandly.

“You see, Mr. Frey, I prefer the company of younger people. As a general rule, we entertain Allison’s friends more than we do mine. I would rather be surrounded by talk of swimming and sunbathing than rheumatism and the gout.”

I lit a cigarette and flipped the match over the edge of the cliff. “Frankly, I sometimes still wonder how a man in your position ever got started with an amusement palace.”

“Allison regards it as a hobby,” Tolliver answered at once. “We visit Tolliver’s Funland several times during the season and… I don’t know if I should tell you this. You’ll pledge secrecy?”

“Boy Scout oath,” I said, and laughed.

“Well, we visit incognito. The concession people rent their places from my agent in Brooklyn. When we visit Tolliver’s we’re just two more customers, a blind man and his wife. Oh, they know there is a Gregory Tolliver, but they don’t know I’m their man. Your associates are a pleasant group, Mr. Frey.”

“Most of them,” I said. “I think one of them killed Bert Archer.”

“Yes, poor Archer,” Tolliver mused. “A terrible tragedy. Have the police uncovered anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“They decided it was murder at the inquest,” Allison reminded us.

“Their investigation isn’t breaking any speed records,” I said then sucked in my breath as Allison rolled over on her stomach, propping herself on her elbows, her breasts hanging like ripe, succulent fruit.

“You can hardly expect the police to advertise,” Allison pointed out.

“Mr. Tolliver,” I asked, trying my luck with a new subject again, “Does your agent in Brooklyn maintain a constant check on the activities at Funland?”

“No, not that I know of. Why should he?”

“I was just wondering. Then if some criminal activity were going on there, you wouldn’t know about it?”

“Probably I wouldn’t. This is all hypothetical, of course. There isn’t something you want to tell me?”

I considered. I closed my eyes and stopped looking at Allison and thought of Karen. “Hell, no,” I said easily. “I was only wondering.”

“Enough morbid talk for one day!” Allison cried, skipping to her feet. The way she bounced….

“What I had in mind,” Allison called over her shoulder as she headed for a long flight of stone steps carved in the face of the cliff and descending steeply to the beach and jetty below, “was a spin in the Allison I… I’m sorry, Gideon, it embarrasses me, but the boat was named for me, you see.

Coming?”

“Coming,” said Tolliver. With Shamus leading him he walked to where the steps began, then thumped Shamus’ rump and the dog trotted off in the direction of the cool shade near Blind Man’s Bluff. A wrought-iron railing guided Tolliver down the steps and by the time we reached the bottom Allison had already leaped aboard the cabin, cruiser which bore her name in large block letters on its prow. Presently the motor began to throb with a rich, steady humming and the boat bobbed up and down.

“She’s forty feet long and can do better than thirty knots,” Tolliver explained as we climbed aboard from the pier. Tolliver walked with sure, familiar steps toward the wheel and Allison backed out of his way before he could brush against her. “I pilot this ship, Mr. Frey,” he said. “So you and Allison can entertain yourselves back in the cabin or on the sundeck.” Lord, he was throwing us together.

“Come on,” said Allison, taking my hand. “I’ll get you some beer.”

The boat eased forward with a smooth surge of power as Allison led me back to the galley. Outside, we’d churned up a frothy white wake in the Sound. We were picking up speed.

“How does he know which way to steer?” I asked.

“I’m his eyes aboard the Allison I. All I have to do is warn him if any craft approaches. He knows the Sound. Besides, the neighbors know who’s piloting and keep clear of the Allison I. Now will you please stop standing way over there by the stove and come here?”

“That can wait. Your husband’s on this boat.”

“My God, Gideon. Don’t tell me you got wounded in the wrong place in Korea.”

“That’s nasty.”

“Damn you, Gideon. Either you come here or I’m going to scream and tell Gregory you… you attacked me.”

I laughed and then stopped. Allison had begun to scream without the slightest expression on her face.

“All right,” I hissed. “All right.”

“What’s the trouble?” Tolliver called from above. “What’s wrong down there?”

Allison came into my arms with enough force to thrust me back against the small electric stove. She ground herself against me and began to tremble. She called back, huskily, “Turn to starboard, dear, that’s all.”

The cruiser swung about sharply, hurling us across the cabin until Allison’s back struck the bulkhead. She let herself slide to the floor and didn’t leave go of me.

“Gideon,” she whispered. “Gideon, Gideon.” Her lips pouted, hot and avid, against my neck, my shoulders, my chest. I dug nails into my palms and said no over and over inside my head because I’d start the mad whirl with her all over again, but there was Allison clinging to me hot and wet in the warm, still air of the cabin and I sighed and clung back and every few minutes Allison would yell “starboard” or “port” or “steady as she goes” and I could hear Tolliver whistling a cheery sea ballad about a pirate ship whose hair hung down in ring-e-lets.

“I’ll turn on the air-conditioning,” Allison said, slipping away easily. “It will be cooler here later.” Damn her, she did just that. Then she went on deck and I called myself a jackass for each of Heinz’ fifty-seven varieties and said to myself it wouldn’t happen again. But I had a feeling all Allison had to do was crook her pinky.

I smoked a cigarette before following Allison. When I reached the sundeck she had found herself a white terrycloth robe with the word “hers” embroidered on it in maroon script. The white tennis shorts were on the deck beside her, but she’d wrapped herself from chin to knees in the robe and lay there with the sweat glistening on her face. “Relax, Gideon,” she told me. “Lie down.” I stretched alongside her and watched her make a production of ignoring me. Once or twice she called directions to Tolliver, and then the cruiser left the Port Washington Channel behind it and cut out into the wide blue expanse of the Sound and soon there was nothing but the water and the sky and Allison in her damned terrycloth robe.

Then Allison not in her terrycloth robe. She stood up and stretched her arms toward the smoky-hot blue sky. She’d draped the robe about her without using its sleeves and it fell away in a crumpled heap, like a large bathtowel. She stood there, poised on tiptoe and stretching up to bring down the sky around her, then pirouetted slowly toward the water and executed a graceful swan dive which could have got her a job at the Flushing Meadow Aquashow.

“Swimming?” Tolliver called. His blindness-keened ears had picked up and interpreted the sound of the faint splash. “Just Allison,” I said, and watched her surface. She shook her head and treaded water rhythmically with a bicycling motion as Tolliver cut the motor and turned the cruiser back toward her at my directions.

Allison bobbed up and down in the water so that one moment the red-gold hair upswept about her face was only visible and the next wet-sleeked shoulders and chest flashed into view. “It’s delightful, Gideon. Won’t you come in?”

I remembered swimming a few days back with Karen and the way she’d lost the halter of her two-piece bathing suit and what followed. I remembered a lot of fancy resolutions about women in general and Allison in particular. I remembered why I’d come out here to Blind Man’s Bluff and how my questions had gone not only unanswered but most of them unasked. And then Allison crooked her pinky.

Well, she smiled at me and kicked hard in her bicycle tread, clearing the water almost down to her waist, before she surface-dived and disappeared. “Nuts to you, Gideon Frey,”

I mumbled.

“What say?” Tolliver wanted to know, using the guide rail to walk back along the side of the cabin toward the sundeck.

“Nothing,” I said, dropping my trousers near Allison’s terrycloth robe and trying out a jacknife dive as Allison surfaced again. She had me coming and going. She knew I’d always loved the water. And other things.

I broke surface a yard from Allison and blinked the water from my eyes. She was treading water and smiling at me and drove her feet up against my chest, kicking off and back-stroking away from the cruiser. I followed her with a butterfly and we swam a wide circle around the cruiser. I didn’t do a very good job, what with watching Allison’s long legs and arms churn water in gorgeous precision, kicking up foam and spray about her nakedness and turning every now and then to look at Tolliver on the deck of his cruiser, because it seemed uncanny, him standing there and gazing out over the waters while his wife swam naked with a man. in his jockey shorts.

Tolliver had lowered a rope ladder over the side by the time we returned. Allison said, “you first,” and I didn’t feel her weight on the bottom rung of the ladder until I’d placed one foot on the cruiser deck. Tolliver came at me with the terrycloth robe, but I shook my head and then remembered he was blind and said, “It’s me. Allison’s on her way.” Then I called back over my shoulder, “Gregory has your robe for you, Allison.”

Allison climbed aboard dripping wet and shining. She turned her back to Tolliver and let him drape the robe across her shoulders, then skipped away toward the cabin and began rubbing herself dry.

A few minutes later, Allison donned her white tennis shorts again and another halter, also white, but not criss-crossed. She placed a ham sandwich in one of my hands and a glass of beer in the other. “There’s more of everything in the galley, Gideon.”

The cool water had quickened my appetite. Allison was back in the galley in nothing flat, making more sandwiches and uncapping more beer. I called “left” to Tolliver and then added “port” in nautical parlance as a motor launch rocketed by to starboard. Then I had myself another sandwich, a thicker one, and more beer. My appetite had been whetted by the Sound not only for food but for other things. I draped my hand across Allison’s bare shoulder as she sat down and smiled at me without doing any coaxing at all. I looked at Tolliver and felt like a heel, but only mildly. He’d done the marrying. If he were a license-carrying cuckold and wore a thin wedding band to prove it but no horns you could see, that was his worry.

“The sun is hot,” said Allison. “Too hot,” I agreed.

We headed for the cabin which slept eight, a double tier of three-quarter bunks on either side of a narrow companion-way done in red leather. A bas-relief of a bosomy nude hung on one wall and Allison said. “He’s got to see it, you know. His fingers.”

“His fingers,” I said, looking at her. Off came the second halter. Allison unzipped the shorts and stepped out of them as they fell to her ankles. She didn’t come to me. She didn’t want to, not yet. She stood there, neither demurely nor obscenely but in exactly the sort of posture she might have employed had she been fully clothed and showing off a new dress. Her eyes were big and very white and very green as she finally swayed toward me and met me with arms held stiffly at her sides, first contacting my lips with hers, warm and wet, then leaning forward against my chest, then the flat belly cool against me and the loins and the smooth line of thighs and never using her arms but swaying against me and leaning until we fell back on one of the three-quarter bunks without a sound except the gentle yielding creak of the red leather.

Far away I heard frantic shouting and the quick angry splintering of wood. Something shoved me forward and Allison on top of me and there was more shouting, some strange voices and Tolliver’s too. Allison leaped to her feet and secured the halter on her breasts. She climbed into the shorts and zipped them on the run. A moment later she had thrust my gray trousers within the cabin and I put them on and went out on deck.

Allison stood at the rope ladder, completely composed. The bow of a small motor launch was just slipping below the churning white water while Allison helped a middle-aged woman soaking wet and shaking all over, aboard ship. A man stood nearby, hands on hips, face florid, lips trembling so much he couldn’t talk.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Tolliver said. “We’ll pay for your boat.”

“We… might… have been… killed. Why couldn’t… you look… where you were… going?”

“It’s my fault,” Allison told the man quietly. “My husband is blind and I usually direct him. I was making some sandwiches you see.”

“A blind man oughtn’t to pilot….”

“That’s quite enough,” Tolliver said coolly. “We will pay for your boat. If there has been an injury, you may contact my lawyers. Now if you will tell us where we can drop you?”

“Glen Cove Landing,” the man said, still fuming. “I think I’m going to report this.”

“You can do anything you please, sir. But on my cruiser you’ll keep a civil tongue. Allison, see if you can get them something to eat.”

Allison’s eyes sparked hatred at the middle-aged couple. She looked at me and her eyes could talk better than any words. Later, they said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“MORE COFFEE?” Allison demanded, drooping the spout of the sterling silver pot to within inches of my cup. “Huh-uh.” I patted my stomach. “Full.” We had delivered the indignant couple to Glen Cove, then returned to Blind Man’s Bluff in the Allison I. By that time we’d all worked up more than adequate appetites for the shrimp cocktail and rare ribs of beef Allison had prepared. Even Shamus, who got the bones and was growling with them off in a corner of the large, mahogany-panelled dining room, seemed less ornery.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to catch a train back shortly?” Gregory said. “We have a schedule someplace….”

“I’ve already checked,” Allison told us brightly. “Gideon can take a midnight train to Jamaica and change for the Brooklyn train there.”

“That doesn’t give me much time for sleep.”

“Well,” Gregory chortled, “you’re younger than I am. People always say walk off a big meal, but that’s ridiculous. Do animals walk off their meals? They curl up and go to sleep. That’s what I’m going to do. You wake me at ten, Allison.”

Gregory stood up and Allison kissed him lightly on the cheek before he left the room. Shamus growled but remained in the corner with his bones, gnawing and snuffling.

Allison led me by the hand into a living-room which featured a huge, thirty-foot bay window on one wall overlooking the Sound, a fieldstone fireplace on the opposite wall and delicately wrought furniture which I think they call French Provincial.

“Sit down, Gid,” Allison said. “I’ll get you some brandy.”

I began to feel what it was like to be a millionaire, with a gorgeous female in black velvet slacks tight at the knees and ending just below them, like the toreadors wear, and a tight white sweater, serving me a snifterglass of Courvoisier brandy. So the female had a husband sleeping someplace else in the house. So the female was trying to make me but wouldn’t have to do much coaxing, not the way I felt. I started calling myself a louse but thought Gregory Tolliver was a big boy now and if he wasn’t able to protect his own interests, the hell with him.

Allison set some records in place and we had music. I thought briefly of Karen and Beethoven, then listened to the suggestive strains of Ravel’s Bolero, pulsing and throbbing and dancing on air. Bless Allison, she began to dance.

I swirled brandy and sipped it and watched. Allison bound me with the slow undulations of the dance, weaving it like a faraway spell, half a world distant from Blind Man’s Bluff. I stared and stared and didn’t say a word. Sweat was glistening on Allison’s face and dark-staining the armpits of her sweater as the last exotic note spun her to the wall. She reached up and touched something and the lights were snuffed out. I sat there, not moving, and heard a rustling sound and footsteps dimly on the thick carpet.

I could see absolutely nothing. This is how the house must have seemed to Gregory — blackness stretching out in all directions, a great yawning gulf of it extending infinitely on all sides.

Allison touched me, finger-caressing my face and I stood up so I could hold her and found what I was holding was naked and dancing against me with the unheard music, warm of shoulder but cool of back and flank, with trembling, avid lips and hands that kneaded the small of my back and a voice that whispered, so low I almost couldn’t hear it, “Don’t stop, Gideon. Don’t stop.”

Well, I hadn’t done anything. I only stood there, holding her because she’d come to me, and I had no intention of stopping. But Shamus came barking into the room, snuffling and pawing the carpet and then barking off, unseen in the other direction.

“Damn that dog,” cried Allison. “He’ll wake Gregory.” She pulled away from me and got the lights on. I squinted, then saw her crouching over a little pile of clothing on the floor in the center of the room.

“That son of a bitch,” she said.

Allison donned her toreador slacks, and that was all, except for sandals. “Shamus has the sweater,” she said. “He’s taking it to Gregory. He… he’s done this before….” And then Allison reddened. Gideon Frey, nth man in a long line of predecessors.

“Allison? Allison, are you in the living-room?” It was Tolliver’s voice.

Allison darted for the room’s smaller entrance and didn’t make it. Growling, Shamus barred her way until Gregory arrived. “Where are you, my dear?” He followed the sounds of Shamus’ growling, and I stood there holding my breath. His hands touched Allison’s bare shoulders and the skin of her throat and her breasts. Shamus had the white sweater clamped between his jaws.

“I’m not altogether surprised, Mr. Frey,” Gregory said. I didn’t answer.

Allison laughed coolly. “What are you talking about?” She turned to me and raised a finger to her lips. “Gideon isn’t here. Gideon was tired too, and went to one of the guest rooms for a nap. I’m alone. All alone.”

“All alone,” said Tolliver. “Shamus, find him.” The boxer stirred, flexing the corded chest muscles. I definitely did not want that dog leaping all over me. “I’m not sleeping,” I said. “I’m right here.”

“Down, Shamus,” Gregory ordered, smiling. He took the white sweater from Shamus’ jaws and handed it to his wife. “Get dressed, Allison. Undoubtedly, Mr. Frey,” Gregory went on with amazing objectivity, “you thought I was unaware of my wife’s affliction. But you must realize that a blind man is vouchsafed certain senses which a man who can see lacks.”

“Hell,” I said, “she’s your wife.”

“Gideon!” Allison screamed.

“If I am a cuckold, then I am a kind you have never seen before, Mr. Frey. I try to make everything in life a game. You may say I compensate in that small way for my blindness. Out on the Sound, Mr. Frey, I was aware of the other boat. I could hear it. I rammed that boat on purpose. A game, you see? Allison, go to your room. When it is time to take Mr. Frey to the station, I will call you.”

Still staring at Shamus, Allison said, “Yes, Gregory,” and departed.

“You realize the awkwardness of your position, Mr. Frey,” Gregory said.

“Allison’s free and twenty-one,” I pointed out.

“And there is a law in New York State against adultery. Oh, I will never shackle Allison here at my side. She is free to come and go, but there is this part of the game you should know. Had I permitted your little scene to continue, the rules of the game would have placed my honor on the block.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It should be perfectly clear. Is it clear to you, Mr. Frey?”

I said it wasn’t and forget it. I began to think Allison wasn’t the only queer duck around here. Her drake could have used a couple of years of heavy psychoanalysis to good advantage. And poor Allison, she must have known all about Gregory’s little game right along. Naturally, I couldn’t blame her for not telling me. The girl was trying. “Let’s drink on it, Mr. Frey?” I said sure but was itching to leave this booby hatch of a Blind Man’s Bluff as soon as possible. I watched Gregory pour a couple of snifter glasses of brandy and then drank with him. He smacked his lips politely and lit another cigar and called for his almost-unfaithful wife with complete composure.

Allison drove me to the station and we didn’t say a word until she parked the car. Then I patted her hand and said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

She stared straight ahead and I was sorry, so I kissed her and felt her cold in my arms and then responsive until she must have heard Shamus barking in her mind, all the way from Blind Man’s Bluff. She moved away from me and said, “You’ll miss your train.”

“There’s time. Twenty minutes.”

“Get out of here. Oh, get out.”

I chain-smoked in a no-smoking car on the Long Island Railroad all the way into Jamaica and got dirty looks from all the other passengers. The conductor stalked in angrily and walked right up to me and was about to point out the no-smoking signs clearly displayed on two walls of the car when he looked at my face and thought better of it and walked out the way he’d come.

By the time I got to a Brooklyn train and out of Jamaica I was glad nothing more than a couple of nude and semi-nude embraces had occurred between Allison and me. And by the time I boarded the Sea Beach express at Atlantic Avenue I was already itching for morning to come around so I could see Karen. This was the first time in all the years I’d known Allison that I felt anything like pity for her.

But there were others, it occurred to me at once, more deserving of pity. Bert Archer, for instance. And then, my mind going back to this strange day and the hope I’d originally had of learning something, I realized I hadn’t found out a thing. The puzzle was still as black as Gregory Tolliver’s sightless world. And I wondered if Allison had been holding something out on me.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I THREADED my way through the thinning crowds on Surf Avenue and almost found myself saluting a bright-looking young second lieutenant who was wearing a hundred-buck pair of pinks. Habit, mostly. But he also reminded me of Bert Archer and I wallowed in a funk again, ignoring the hawkers and garish lights and beer, taffy and popcorn and salt water smells.

And the other smells, less wholesome, at my hotel. The desk clerk wasn’t on duty, so I peered at the mail slots behind his desk and saw a slip of paper wedged into mine. Leaning over the counter, I plucked it out, unfolded it and held it under the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

MR. FREY: I DROPPED UP TO SEE YOU ABOUT SOMETHING IMPORTANT, BUT YOU WEREN’T HOME. I’LL BE BACK LATER TO WAIT FOR YOU. BEN LUTZ. P.S. IF I SHOULD MISS YOU AGAIN AND YOU SHOULD HAPPEN TO SEE BECKY BEFORE YOU SEE ME, PLEASE DON’T TELL HER I WAS HERE. B.

More meaningless intrigue? I shrugged and decided I’d wait up with a cigarette or two to see if Ben came back. I dropped the note on my dresser and groped for the light cord. I thought I’d left the room locked but wasn’t sure. Anyway, if the desk clerk had opened it for Becky, he could have opened it for Ben, too. On went the light, swinging back and forth because I’d given the chain a hearty yank, and shoving shadows back and forth across the room.

Ben had returned, all right. Ben was lying on my bed, but not waiting for me or anyone. Ben was stretched out on his back in a sopping mess of blood. The bedspread was full of blood and the cheap patterned rug on the floor. If that much blood had been taken from three men and not just one, all much bigger than Ben, they would have been dead. But I reached for his pulse automatically and verified what I already knew before reaction could set in and leave me feeling a little sick. Then I gagged and realized what I hadn’t realized before. The place smelled like a slaughterhouse. Still gagging but getting a cigarette lit I went down to the desk and picked up the phone and dialed the operator and asked for police. The sleepy-eyed desk clerk appeared from somewhere in back and said, “I’ll have to bill you for that call.”

“I want to talk to you,” I mumbled, “so don’t go away.” Then I heard three buzzes before a voice answered:

“Desk. Sergeant Iole.”

“This is Gideon Frey calling.” I gave him the Surf Avenue address. “There’s a murdered man in my room.”

I could almost see Sergeant Iole’s ears prick up. “Don’t touch anything. Just wait right there for us, Mr. Frey. A dead man?”

“Murdered,” I said, “unless he stuck a knife in his own back.”

There was a click. Sergeant Iole and his boys, or maybe just his boys, were on the way.

“Did you say… a dead man?” the desk clerk demanded.

“Yeah. Listen, someone gave you a note for me earlier tonight.”

The clerk examined the mail slot and then shrugged.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Did he come here alone?”

“All alone. Is he… the dead man?”

“Did he go out and then come back?”

“He went out, all right. I didn’t see him come back.”

“I didn’t see you when I came in,” I pointed out.

“Well, I might have gone in back for a while, but I didn’t hear anyone.”

“Listen, friend, a man’s been murdered tonight. Understand what that means?”

“I didn’t see him come back. I didn’t see anyone else come in. Murdered, right here in this hotel?”

I looked around at the paint peeling on the walls, at the stained, frayed rug, at the dirty counter top and the desk clerk with a thick stubble of beard on his face and bloodshot eyes and liquor on his breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Murder at the Waldorf-Astoria.” Then I went back to my room to wait for the cops.

The slaughterhouse smell was still there. Through the thin yellow shade, red neon glared on and off, on and off. I’d pulled the light switch mechanically when I went down to the desk, so the room was alternately bathed in lurid crimson and darkness. In the crimson light the blood on the bed was a pool of gleaming ebony black and Ben Lutz’s gaunt features stared straight up at the ceiling, the eyes wide but showing only a crescent of pupil where they had rolled up, the lips slack and pulled away from the teeth as if Ben had been on the point of screaming.

I sat there in the beat-up chair and stared at the body, thinking maybe it would convince me to leave cop business to cops. But Bert had been killed first and now Ben. Next time it could be Sheila or Karen or me and I still wasn’t sure why. I knew this much: it had something to do with the manufacture of home brew at Tolliver’s Funland, probably on a large scale since a lot of people seemed to be involved. But I thought that stuff was strictly of historical interest.

Then I got to thinking. Damn Allison Tolliver and Gregory Tolliver and the Long Island Railroad and points in between. If I hadn’t gone out to Port Washington today Ben Lutz would have found me at Funland. He’d be alive right now. Hell. If they were gunning for him they were gunning for him. If not tonight, tomorrow. Hell again, and damnation. Ben had left a note for me. Something important, he’d written, and signed his death warrant. Score another point for Gideon Frey. If I hadn’t acted like a big wheel for Ben, rolling along on the highway of no-shift cock-and-bull, he might still be alive.

The cops stalked in civilly enough, and each man went about his job as if he’d been trained precisely for it in a carbon copy of my third-rate hotel room. Shorty examined the corpse and vicinity. Freckles probed about the room for anything untoward. I could have told him he’d chalk up a big fat zero for the side of the law but decided to let him find out for himself.

An older man with the three stripes of sergeant on his sleeve questioned me routinely. The fourth cop was Billy Drake. Good old pretty boy had been notified since Homicide was horning in on his territory.

His job was a little different from all the others. He stood guard over nothing in particular and stared in the mirror. He frowned at himself, then let a smile curl his lips. He straightened his tie and tried the smile again, but saw my reflection watching him and flushed an angry, not an embarrassed, scarlet.

“Drake,” the sergeant said. “You go find a phone and call for a man from the M.E.’s office. It looks like murder, all right.” He turned a lined face on me and let me see how too much murder and too much crime and too much depravity had hooded his eyes and made the lips thin and cynical. “Did you know the dead man, Mr. Frey?”

“Casually. His name is Ben Lutz. Owns a bar a couple of blocks down on Surf Avenue.”

The sergeant merely grunted, but I was wrong about Freckles. He chalked up more than a big fat zero. He found Ben Lutz’s note to me on the dresser, read it, scratched sandy-colored hair and gave the note to his sergeant.

“You know the deceased casually, eh, Frey? See this?” The sergeant offered me the note, but I waved it away.

“Of course I saw it. How do you think it got here? It was waiting for me at the desk when I came in.”

“Then how come the dead man was here in the room?”

“He must have come back a second tune.”

“We’ll check with the desk clerk.”

“He didn’t see him come back, sergeant.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Hell,” I said. “It’s just a note.”

“In which Lutz said he wanted to see you about something important. Now he’s dead. What did you mean when you said you knew the deceased casually?”

“I had a beer in his bar every now and then. We…”

“Hey, wait a minute! Aren’t you the guy who said Bert Archer didn’t like steam baths? You turned up the day he was murdered. It must be pretty dangerous for people to talk to you, Frey. They get killed.”

I was about to invoke the famous Fifth Amendment because the sour sergeant had his own ideas on everything, when Billy Drake came back, peeked into the mirror and straightened his tie again. “A man’s on his way from the M.E., sarge. I also took the liberty to call the dead man’s wife.”

“Christ, I hope the doc gets here first. We’re liable to have a sick woman on our hands. You beat guys ought to wait for instructions. Suppose you run down now and bring the desk clerk up here.”

Drake departed. Shorty lit a cigarette and said, “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. Couldn’t be dead more than a couple of hours, four at the most.”

The sergeant scowled. “The M.E. will let us know. Ah, here’s our clerk.”

The clerk had small, darting eyes and deep scars on his face from a long-ago bout with acne. Lobeless ears, too. I began to hope the sergeant was an ardent believer in criminal types because then the desk clerk would divert some of his attention from me.

The clerk whined, “I can’t… look. Can’t we talk… someplace else?”

Shorty snickered and said, “He won’t bitecha,” but found an extra blanket in the closet and draped it over the corpse.

“Now then,” the sergeant began, “what happened tonight?”

“I can’t… well… at about seven o’clock — I know it was seven because I was setting my watch with Fulton Lewis, Jr. — this man comes in and asks for Mr. Prey’s room. I say Frey is out but he gets all excited and says he’ll wait. He leaves a note for Mr. Frey, then goes upstairs to Mr. Frey’s room.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, about an hour ago Mr. Frey comes down from his room and says there’s a murdered man in there.”

“Down

from his room? Then he was home all along?”

“That’s right, down.”

“I thought you said Frey was out earlier.”

“That’s right, too. The day clerk gives me a list of who’s in, who’s out.”

“Could Frey have come back without you seeing him?”

“I did,” I said. “He wasn’t at the desk.”

“Jeez,” said the clerk. “I go to take a leak or something, but I wasn’t gone long.”

“I want to point out one thing,” I told the sergeant, “Lutz left a note for me at the desk. You found the note in my room, right? I’d like to ask the clerk if he gave me the note.”

“I didn’t give you nothing,” the man admitted.

“Right. So I took the note. You see, sergeant. He wasn’t at the desk.”

“Yeah, Frey. Very bright. Real sharp.” The way he spoke, it wasn’t grudging approval. It was: we’ll bust that little alibi wide open later, not that it’s worth a hill of beans even if it stands.

So we bantered it about. We got no place in particular, but I liked the sour sergeant less and less with every word. I wasn’t sure who I’d rather slug, him or the preening Billy Drake. I was hoping I’d keep my temper in check until someone with a high school education or the equivalent took over, but I had my doubts.

And then Becky Lutz stormed in, panting and wheezing and undulating unprettily and without benefit of a brassiere under her print housedress. “They said my Ben’s been hurt.”

The sergeant cleared his throat and recited rapidly and with about as much emotion as a tobacco auctioneer in Greensboro, North Carolina, “I have something tragic to tell you, Mrs. Lutz, Please brace yourself. Your husband has been killed.”

Becky wailed and I ran to catch her as she fell and eased her down on the understuffed chair. She was trembling all over and her lips wouldn’t keep still as her lower jaw bobbed up and down on loose hinges.

“There now, Mrs. Lutz,” the sergeant said, still without compassion.

Drake filled a glass at my sink and set it against Becky’s lips, but she couldn’t drink. She was a needle trapped in one groove on a broken record and I turned away and wished I could plug my ears. “Ben Ben Ben Benbenbenben….”

“I wish the M. E. would get here,” the sergeant said uncomfortably.

“A funny thing,” the room clerk mused, groping for a way to take himself off the hook. “That woman’s been here before. I didn’t know her name then, but she visited Mr. Frey a couple of nights ago, stayed quite a while, but I ain’t gonna swear nothing went on that shouldn’t of.”

“God damn you!” I said. “Becky wanted to see me about her husband.”

The sergeant smiled for the first time. He had a fine set of small, even white teeth, like the enamel caps the leading men use in Hollywood. With teeth like that I’d have smiled more often. Billy Drake would have walked around with a perpetual leer. “I thought you said you only knew Lutz casually, Frey. Are you married?”

“No.”

“I am. I don’t like home-wreckers. I had you figured as a lady’s man from the start. It isn’t hard to see how maybe you spin a fast line or two for Mrs. Lutz and she falls for it, then maybe does something she regrets later and tells her husband about it. So he comes to see you, mad as hell and leaves a note because the clerk thinks you’re out. He goes upstairs to make sure. You have a fight and there it is.”

I should have kept my yap shut, but I said, “Then where’s the murder weapon?”

Freckles held a knife up for all of us to see. Pocket variety,’ but long, with a mother of pearl finish and a small button at one end to activate the switch blade. “Taped under the sink,” Freckles said. “Someone figured he could hide it there. Pretty good.”

“You didn’t have a chance to get rid of the weapon yet, Frey. So you hid it.” The sergeant clicked his teeth together hard and ground them and now I knew why they were so even.

I didn’t say a thing. I wished I could get out of there and go away and make believe I’d never served with Bert Archer in Korea. The late, lamented war, but it was following me all the way to Coney Island. Whoever had killed Bert and tried to kill me the day of the inquest and killed Ben Lutz, had now decided he didn’t have to kill me after all. Let the taxpayers do it.

“You’ll have a chance to make a call down by the station, Frey. You’re being booked on suspicion of murder.”

I laughed in his face and kept laughing until the look on his face said he wanted to pull my vocal cords out and stretch them till they snapped. Then I said, “You’ll never make it stick, not if your medical examiner can establish the time of death. You see, I was out at the Tolliver Estate in Port Washington until midnight, then caught a train. If you figure it out, you’ll find…”

“That’s not my worry, Frey. That’s for the Grand Jury. It slicks, brother.”

Maybe Becky had been able to listen, after all. The police wore uniforms. The police sergeant wore stripes. The police sergeant indicated I was guilty. Becky Lutz oozed up from the chair slowly, as if she wanted to leap at me but had neither the strength nor the coordination. She managed to circle my legs with her beefy arms before she fell, shapeless and sobbing at my feet. It made me look great. Casanova Frey, home wrecker. Of course, Becky would tell them later there was nothing between us, but she might spill what she knew about the doings at Tolliver’s Funland, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. What a grand old time to think about Karen. It smelled like love, all right, but I was in no mood to relish the fragrance.

They gave me a free ride down to headquarters in a green and white Plymouth coupe. Freckles did the driving up front and the sergeant sat in the back With me, prodding my ribs with a .38 Special. At headquarters a uniformed clerk took down data in a book and fingerprinted me and asked if I wanted to make a phone call, which I did not, not yet. They emptied my pockets and confiscated my belt and made me take off my shoelaces. All this went into a manila envelope and was filed in a drawer, appropriately with the F’s. Very efficient. Someone else gave me a rusty pail, a bar of soap and a surplus Army blanket with U. S. Medical Corps stamped on it in large, faded letters. My private room wasn’t much worse than my accommodations at the hotel, except it had a metal door, locked on the outside, and bars on the window. And now I was Gideon Frey, jailbird.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I WOKE UP IN the morning feeling still and tired, with a fuzzy tongue and eyes which wanted to stay shut. They gave me an individual serving of cold cereal, stewed prunes, toast and sour coffee for breakfast and then ignored me while in the tank next door the drunks queued up for dismissal.

But a while later a cop I hadn’t seen the night before opened the door of my cell. He didn’t say a word but led me through the corridor and out front where a tall, thin man in plainclothes said:

“All right, Frey. You’re free.” He tossed my manila envelope at me and stood by while I laced my shoes and put the junk back into my pockets. He muttered to himself when I counted my money.

“Find the murderer so soon?” I demanded.

“Don’t get so damn cute. After the M.E. established the time of death we verified your Port Washington alibi. We don’t like it, Frey. For the present we can’t do much about it, but Jet me tell you something, brother. Our men will be watching you. You so much as jaywalk and they’ll run you in.”

I shrugged and headed for the door. The way I wasn’t winning friends and influencing people I could have used a lesson or two from Dale Carnegie.

Karen was opening her place at Tolliver’s when I walked up behind her and said good morning. She pouted, “Oh, Gid — Gid, why did it have to happen?” In between deep drags on a cigarette she let me know she knew all about last night. Billy Drake told Soolpovar before Funland closed in the wee hours of the morning. Soolpovar called an informal meeting of the informal board of directors and I had been voted the man most likely to fail if I didn’t take my big nose elsewhere.

“But surely they don’t think I killed him.”

“They’re not sure. Billy Drake told them about a note Ben wrote to you before he died, and it’s got them all scared. They can’t figure you out. I can’t figure you out, either. And, Gid, I think you ought to know they found me listening in on their meeting.”

“Weren’t you part of it?”

“Me? Don’t be silly. I’m just Bert Archer’s girl friend. They never let me know anything. But I… listen, Gideon. Even when I was a kid I never liked people to help me. But now I’m afraid I need help. If you take advantage of me, I’ll… I’ll…”

“I sure will,” I told her. “I’ll take advantage of you. I’ll make you cook good food for me and get my pipe and slippers and if you look at another man I’ll kick the stuffings out of you.”

“I was so worried when you went away yesterday. You said it was about all this, but you didn’t say what.”

“Don’t have to worry about me, Karen. I can take care of myself.” I looked at her. “I’m crazy. I promised myself none of this stuff, not for a long time. Come here, Amazon.”

She came, all right. She almost bowled me over. She was tall and blonde and beautiful. She wore a sunbacked dress and wrapped bare bronzed arms around me and forced me against the wall, making small happy sounds in her throat which said she’d been waiting and hoping, but she wasn’t sure, and pressing against me in a curving bow of desire from high breasts to outthrust hips to long flanks and opening her lip: and covering mine with them and biting a little until I decided with Karen and me we’d never be sure who was doing the loving and who was being loved, so I pivoted and got her between me and the wall and all at once she went weak all over while I brushed my lips against her brow, her cheek and chin and neck and throat. I’d never felt desire like that for anyone, not even for Allison or Karen herself that time in Queens. It was like closing a door on the Whole world, so nothing but this woman and her body and her demand for your love mattered or existed. Then someone opened the door.

“Hey, Mac. Is this where they want the merry-go-round fixed? Ooops, sorry.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “That’s all right, though.”

“It is not all right,” Karen whispered savagely. “I’ll get you later.”

“The rest of your life. If you’ll marry me.”

Hey Mac waited while we went through the whole thing again. Then Karen told him, “They said something about the merry-go-round yesterday.”

“I knew this was the right place, Miss. Tolliver’s. I only said that so you’d know I was here and break up the clinch.”

“It’s all right,” Karen said happily. “He’ll marry me.” So there it was. Except that we still had a couple of murders on our hands and an unknown killer.

Presently the carousel purred and rumbled and soon began to spin on its futile, endless journey. Karen and I climbed aboard and she told me it was jamming above fifteen miles per hour yesterday. Out of sight in the engine room, Hey Mac sent us spinning along our way with the fierce, tossing, snorting, prancing medieval horses four abreast and the sign which didn’t follow us around but which said CATCH RINGS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

So I leaned from my saddle in the outermost row and caught Karen a brass ring. Hey Mac must have found the trouble without any delay, for we top-speeded around in our circular path and bobbed up and down like a run-about on gentle, unhurried swells.

“These rings!” I shouted to Karen as the organ gargled La Paloma. Hey Mac had decided upon a full-scale dress rehearsal. “They’re the trouble with us and everyone else in this crazy city.”

“What are you talking about? I thought it was very gallant of you to risk life and limb and lean recklessly from your saddle while charging full-tilt down the jousting field and…”

“Quiet, woman. I mean it’s a dirty city and an unhappy city. New York. The thing that amazes me about it most of all is how it manages to keep eight million people in its clutches. In the winter it’s raw and cold and in the summer it boils you. The streets are crowded and the people probably live ten years less than their neighbors on the farm and when they die their lungs are black with smoke and soot and all their lives they’ve been bothered by colds and contagious diseases swept around the city by subway, bus and trolley lines, like the plague. You know why they stay here?”

“Whoa! You’re way ahead of me.”

“The damned brass ring,” I said. “You can be happy out on the farm or selling household goods in Twenty Below, Nebraska. But you’ll never make a million bucks. That’s New York and its lure. The chance to pluck that brass ring for a free ride in life off every tall building but you reach for it at your own risk.”

And then Hey Mac had finished his work and slowed the merry-go-round to a stop. He came out from inside the organ and waved goodbye. It was like a signal. Vito Lucca opened his pizza joint and the Messrs. Soolpovar and Kellum walked up and stood there talking to him. Kellum still wore the marks of our fight, and I wondered if Karen had called the right pitch on him.

“Hey, Frey. Come here.” It was Soolpovar, jerking his head forward like a rooster when he spoke. “We’re all kind of worried about you, Frey. We can’t quite figure you out, see? Makes everyone uneasy. Why don’t you either lay all your cards on the table or… well, leave us alone.”

“I didn’t mean to worry anyone,” I said easily. “An operation this big has got to be surveyed and checked and kept in line occasionally, that’s all.” There I went again. It was the path I’d mapped out for myself and Newton’s second law of motion carried me along it. I spoke loud enough for Vito to hear me down by his pizzeria, and Sheila too, who had just come in and was talking to him.

“I see.” Soolpovar ran a small hand through short-cropped bristly gray hair. “What’s the verdict?”

I smiled blandly. “Still checking. I’ll let you know.”

“Were you checking on Ben Lutz?”

“Maybe.”

“Ben’s dead, Frey. Were you checking on Bert Archer, too?”

“He had nothing to do with this.”

“Yeah, but on his last day Ben Lutz went around telling everybody you were his friend. He said you were going to do great things for him.”

I perked my ears up at that. If Ben had gone around shooting off his mouth about any great plans he thought I had for him, that verified the motive for murder. Or did it? The kingpin in the illegal booze business knew his own position. He also knew I most certainly was not his lieutenant or even a not-so-reasonable facsimile thereof, so he knew I had about as much chance to elevate Ben Lutz in the organization as I’d have to restore the Third Avenue El after the city decides to tear it down. Then the boss didn’t kill him. The boss was probably laughing at me so hard in private he got a fit of the giggles every time he even thought of me. But if the boss did have a lieutenant, a sort of go-between who knew his identity and kept the others in line, maybe the guy got scared. Maybe Ben told a good story. Or maybe Vito Lucca, afraid to lose his glorified delivery boy’s job, held the answer.

“Listen, Frey,” Soolpovar informed me, “as a friend, let me tell you what we decided. Either you stop bothering us or else open up and let us know where you stand. You got to do one thing or the other.”

“Then listen to me. How do you expect me to play ball if you people clam up every time I’m around?”

“How do we know you’re not just a snooper? Even a cop, maybe.”

“You don’t. I have no suggestions. All I know is this: I was sent here to do a job, and from the looks of things I’ve found a dog-eat-dog mess without even scratching the surface.” This particular brand of lying was coming to me easy by now.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means the boss is going to maybe start the whole thing over with a new bunch of boys if he thinks you’re all leaping at each other’s throats.”

Soolpovar mouthed a four-letter word without expression, then said, “Who do you think you’re kidding? Starting this setup all over again would cost thousands. Try to find another place like Tolliver’s for it, too….”

Then he shut up. He thought he was talking too much because he still wasn’t sure if he could trust me as far as he could throw the merry-go-round, so I decided to put his mind at ease or put my neck in a noose or both. I said, “There are other places we can run a still.”

Soolpovar swallowed the bait but left his mouth unhinged

so he could regurgitate it at any time. The open mouth stood for awe. But the small, calculating eyes stood for suspicion. I was either going to receive an invitation to look at the still or a ride sans return fare, to the outskirts of town.

“Say, didn’t I tell you?” King Kellum asked with his out-of-kilter voice. “Frey isn’t fooling, Soopy.”

“No? Who cares what you think? All a guy has to do is knock the crap out of you and you’ll kiss his behind forever.”

“Say, listen. If you think I’m going to stand here and…”

“Cut it out,” I said. Kellum shut up. Soolpovar stared at me. “See what I mean?” I went on. “At one another’s throats, all the time. I hope I’ll be able to give the boss a better report on the still itself.”

“Near as I can figure, we’re maintaining maximum output,” Soolpovar insisted with a note of belligerence in his voice.

“You’ll have to show me.”

“Prove who you are.”

“Suit yourself,” I said.

“Listen, Soopy,” Kellum said. “Don’t get us all in hot water because you’re so suspicious.”

“You can’t blame Soolpovar,” I told Kellum. How do you know all this isn’t some kind of test to see whether you employ adequate safeguards or not? You can’t let anyone walk in and snoop around.”

“See what I mean?” Soolpovar demanded.

“But on the other hand, you can carry things too far. I’ve said all I’m going to say. Now you do the talking.”

I waited. Soolpovar stood there, tense, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Kellum looked like he’d run after it if I tossed a stick into the gutter.

It was Sheila O’Keefe, who’d been listening in with Vito, who offered to show me around the still.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SHEILA LED the way down a flight of stairs in a little closet this side of Karen’s penny arcade. Sheila opened the closet’s lock with a key. Kellum was reaching for a key, too, so more and more this figured for a community enterprise. Only I never suspected Sheila was a part of it.

The first thing that hit me on the dark stairs was the odor. The chief factor without which all the elaborate plans and scientific methods in the world won’t help at all in the successful operation of a still is location. Tolliver’s scored a hundred percent with its mixed stinks. Chlorine from the pool, Italian spices, taffy, popcorn, cotton candy, the huge doughnut machine — you name it.

“The masking odor is perfect,” Soolpovar said, following us down the stairs. Someone fingered a light switch and a couple of seconds later fluorescents flickered on.

I gasped. Machinery pumped and ground, mash bubbled sluggishly out of sight in two rows of huge cylindrical vats ten feet high and a dirty gray in color. I counted twelve vats in all, connected by piping, green-molded and studded with gauges. Three men in faded surplus Army fatigues surveyed us and nodded when Soolpovar said hello, then returned to their gauges and vats.

“Tolliver’s is ideal for another reason,” Soolpovar went on, “as you no doubt realize. Huge quantities of sugar are consumed upstairs in the making of cotton candy, and taffy. The same is true of all the water in the bathhouse and steam rooms. Only grain we got to obtain on the Q.T. Pretty neat eh?”

It was neat, all right. It was ne plus ultra as the Romans used to say. It was a million bucks worth of equipment.

“Funny part of it is,” Soolpovar continued his guided tour, “most people don’t realize bootlegging is a big-time business. A guy pays a fin for a bottle of good rye, most of it goes to the government. Taxes. Make it yourself, like this, you get a four, five hundred percent profit. The government was asking for trouble with taxes so high, they were asking for the bootleggers to get started again. The guy who signs the dollar bills in Washington finds himself short over a billion bucks a year, thanks to stills like these. A billion dollars. The last couple of years the T-men took over thirty thousand illegal stills, but we won’t get caught. The T-men don’t get a rumble from us. Nothing. You know why.”

I said I knew why and paused thinking Soolpovar would take up the slack. Sheila came to the rescue by saying, “Because the entire operation functions right here. We don’t have to depend on unreliable outside contacts at all.”

“Naturally,” I said. “Vito delivers, to your outlets, so there’s no middle man.”

“Vito don’t just deliver,” Soolpovar told me. “Vito also gets the bottles. You’d be surprised how many apartment superintendents will take two bits for a whiskey bottle if the bartenders we supply can’t keep enough bottles flowing back. And let me tell you something else, if you drink some of our stuff out of a Canadian Club bottle, brother, that’s what it tastes like, Canadian Club. We do the bottling here, too,” Soolpovar went on. “Inna next room. Labels we repair or get ’em made up for us by a guy out in Jersey. The only loose cog in the whole business.”

“He can be trusted,” I said. Obviously, I was supposed to know about such matters.

“That’s the boss’ business,” Soolpovar told me. He lit a cigarette and it glowed very white under the pale fluorescents as he dragged deeply. “And yours.”

“That’s right, Soopy. You know the boss is careful and that’s why I’m here.”

“Hell, we’re taking every precaution in the book. Them pipes you see run cold water through the mash vats, so the place don’t overheat. That little thing on the wall over there — see, it looks like a torpedo tube — opens on a pipe which dumps the used mash out into the Atlantic Ocean. I get a charge every time I read how Coney Island water is polluted. I’ll say polluted!

“And we keep up production, Frey. We’re turning out a thousand gallons of hundred and ninety proof booze a day, to be watered down and sold as the real McCoy. There’s nothing wrong with the stuff, either, and that gripes the T-men every time, let me tell you.”

I began to feel like the visiting executive at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Altoona, Pa. They conducted me next into the bottling room, where half a dozen men stood around and let the machinery do its work, the conveyor belts spinning endlessly around the bottle-racks, the six racks, one for each of half a dozen different brands of popular whiskey, depositing their bottles smoothly into place, the finished liquor pouring smoothly into the bottles “with hardly a drop wasted. A man could work up quite a thirst just watching it.

Soolpovar plucked one of the bottles off its belt before it reached the sealer and offered it to me. “Try some.”

I drank from the bottle. The label said Four Roses. That’s what it tasted like, Four Roses.

“How about that now?” Soolpovar demanded after I put the bottle down. “Any complaints?”

“Huh-uh. It’s good stuff.”

That finished the tour. Soolpovar spoke in low tones with a couple of the bottlers and Sheila went upstairs. Kellum stood close to me and right along he’d been smiling when I smiled, and scowling when I scowled. More and more Karen’s prediction made sense.

I poked around a while, looking for nothing in particular but trying to give the impression of careful scrutiny. That equipment could rival what some of the smaller legit liquor outfits used to turn out their aged brew. Someone was cleaning up like mad, although I guessed the people at Tolliver’s didn’t go unrewarded for their labors.

I decided to have a talk with Karen but couldn’t find her anywhere upstairs, so I left Tolliver’s to get a bite to eat, since Vito still hadn’t opened his pizzeria. My steps took me automatically to the Lutz bar until I remembered about Ben, who had wanted to tell me something and got himself killed instead. The bar was closed, anyway. If Becky were in the back somewhere, I didn’t want to disturb her.

I tried another bar around the corner and ordered a couple of hamburgers and a bottle of beer, then got to talking with the chunky, balding guy behind the counter. Yes, he knew about Ben Lutz. Terrible thing. No, he hadn’t heard how Mrs. Lutz was taking it. Yeah, he figured today was going to be another scorcher, too. I was from Tolliver’s. That’s nice. What did I have on my mind? Another beer? Sure. Has who been selling him something? Vito Lucca? Sure, he knew Vito. Good boy, what he means, clean-cut. Working all the time in the pizzeria, out of it, delivering, picking up, you know. What kind of deliveries? He didn’t want to be bothered, Mac. He hadn’t said a thing.

Well, he wouldn’t tell every Tom, Dick and Gideon about Vito’s deliveries, that was for sure. On the other hand, I could sop up beer at more Coney Island joints, especially on a hot day.

They knew Vito almost to a man. Industrious young guy, always on the go. They knew him in the red-mirrored joints on the boardwalks, and in the side street places which served beer on tap with a fresh smell that quenched your thirst before you even sipped the amber brew. And they knew him in the commercial joints where a guy doubled as a quick-order cook on the greasy, chrome-backed grill and bartender out in front.

Did that make Vito a big wheel? Vito Lucca, pizza specialist and boy genius of the new, scientific bootlegging. Not necessarily. Vito was the errand boy, and — because Soolpovar and the others might cherish anonymity — the contact man. Hadn’t Becky told me Ben had more contacts than Vito? Then she wanted Ben to take Vito’s place, which meant that as far as Becky knew Vito wasn’t top dog or even close.

This place-1 was getting had a name. Nowhere. Sure, the neighborhood bars carried on a brisk trade with Vito. Maybe they knew it was bathtub brew and maybe they didn’t. You hear stories about bootleg boys who claimed they got the stuff tax-free outside the country and then smuggled it in.

I wondered if I ought to place a call to the Treasury Men. But I thought of Karen and I hesitated. I had to give this thing a whirl myself, first. If the law got itself cheated for another few days or more that was the law’s problem. I had my own to think about. Name of Karen.

So it was back to Tolliver’s again, and I wasn’t the only one who had that idea. The joint was jumping. People drifted from one amusement to the next, some of them munching wedges of pizza from Vito’s place. But Vito wasn’t there. One of the kids who helped out with the summer crowd dished out the slices of pie, piping hot and in portions larger than Vito would have considered necessary.

When I discovered Karen still hadn’t returned, I figured I might as well cool off with a swim in the pool. I went upstairs, but no further. Vito, who sold pizza and also dealt in the illegal liquor traffic, was in addition a woman beater.

At least, a Sheila beater.

They stood at the top of the stairs shouting, and the last thing I heard Sheila say was, “You’re impossible!”—before Vito’s right hand darted out and struck her smartly across the cheek.

Sheila looked at Vito not with anger, but surprise. “I think it’s like you’re crazy,” she said. “You’re crazy jealous, that’s what,”

Vito tried again, but I moved between them and caught his forearm. “Someone your own size?” I said. “Your own sex?” And landed on the floor on my back. Great stuff. Gideon Frey to the rescue, hitting the floor with the base of his spine and seeing stars. Vito had used judo, and the way he stood waiting for me said he knew plenty more.

I got up and barreled in at him and landed on my back again. He moved so swiftly I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but I could feel it. This time I let Vito dance and strut a little before I climbed to my feet again.

Cocky-quick he danced toward me, then chopped with a judo cut. I sidestepped and drove my own left fist at his head. He cursed and I said “temper” and Sheila said wouldn’t we please cut it out before someone got hurt.

Vito had his own ideas for cutting things out. His foot blurred up out of nowhere and buried itself in the pit of my stomach. You know how it is. First you feel nothing. Then a numbness and a hard-to-breathe feeling starts down at your belt buckle and fills your whole body to exploding. You can’t stand any longer but that doesn’t matter because you can’t breathe. You fall and roll over, clutching your stomach and retching and when you get to feel, a little better you start wishing you could puke.

I just reached that stage and the stage where I began to think it would have been fine, just wonderful, yes sir, if I hadn’t decided to go for a swim this late in the afternoon when Vito launched himself down at me and panted something about minding my own business.

I did just that. My business right now was self-protection, and while I couldn’t do anything with my legs yet but thrash them, my arms were free. Vito struck my hands on the way down, outspread above my chest. I heaved back and his torso went out of sight over my head as he fell, but his head thudded against the boardwalk floor and this was one of those fights where as soon as he yelped and sounded like I’d hurt him some suddenly I could breathe again.

He was just climbing to his feet when I hit him. Low. Low enough for the referee to wonder if it had grazed the belt and maybe warn me about the round without actually taking it away. It was payment in kind. Vito gagged and Sheila yelled and I hit him again. Same place. Other hand. He had good, flat belly muscles. My fists didn’t sink in, but they hurt him plenty. He began to sag and his mouth hung slack so I brought a right back and down and up and almost got splinters at the lowest part of the arc and then clamped his jaws firmly shut with a sharp Castanet click that would leave him with loose teeth and sore gums for a week. Down he went, tumbling loosely, indifferent to the way the hard floor received him.

“Darn you,” Sheila raged at me. “What did you have to do that for? You never want to mind your own business. Look at him.”

Blood trickled slowly from Vito’s mouth. Sheila squatted prettily on her heels at his side and dabbed at his lips with her handkerchief.

“He’ll live,” I said. “I think you’re crazy, panting around after a guy who isn’t worth it. Vito’s no good.”

“What about me? You saw the way I could show you around downstairs. I’m as bad as Vito. I’m as bad as you are.”

“Tough girl,” I said. “You look like a kid and you’re afraid people will take advantage of you, so you got to act tough. All right, you know about the bootlegging, but you don’t have any part in the setup. The people at Tolliver’s have got to know if they stay here any length of time. You think your friends will pin a medal on you for that and say, hey, this Sheila, she’s tough?”

“He’s still bleeding.” She was dabbing at Vito’s lips with the reddening handkerchief and trying to listen to me. Creases of concern marred her forehead, but her eyes were watery as Vito opened his eyes, shook his head and muttered.

“I’m all right,” he said, pushing Sheila’s hand away.

He didn’t look all right. Only enough blood remained in his face to trickle out slowly through his battered lips. The way his teeth had been jarred together, he’d be eating mashed potatoes and strained prunes for a week.

“What about Gargantua here?” he wanted to know. “You can find time to fool around with more men at…”

“Vito!”

A sneer looked foolish on his battered lips. “Don’t Vito me. First Archer, then Kellum, then this guy…”

“Kellum!” Sheila shrieked. “The rest of it I won’t argue about, although it’s not true. None of it. But Kellum!” Sheila smiled at me and told me, “Maybe you should have poked him harder.” Women. “Me and King Kellum?”

“That’s just it,” Vito whined. “It’s bad enough if you fool around with ordinary guys, but that fruit is too much.”

“I was just talking to him, that’s all. You wouldn’t understand that, though, would you? A girl can’t even talk.” Sheila turned quickly away and lit a cigarette with her face to the wall, but I grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the hall which led to another flight of stairs and the bathhouse. “If he wants to think something like that is going on, we might as well give him a little circumstantial evidence.”

“But where are we going?”

“I said I wanted to talk to you.”

“Vito…?”

“Can take care of himself. Right, Vito-boy?”

But Vito only grumbled and propped himself up into a sitting position. We left him there and went down to the beach. The sun was a scarlet smear in the west and daylight was already following it in a quick retreat from the seashore. In an hour it would be dark.

I took off my shirt and spread it on the sand and told Sheila to sit down. While she smoothed out her skirt and tucked her legs under her sideways I looked around. Clouds and a cool salt breeze had chased most of the swimmers from the beach but fifty yards to our left and closer to the water a dozen kids — none of them a day over twenty, I guessed — had spread out three blankets and were waiting for nightfall. Even at this distance I could see some of the boys wore dog-tags around their necks, young soldiers showing off to their girls, who all wore their small, sharp breasts thrust high in tight sweaters, as if they belonged to a club and this was their badge.

“First,” I said, “a question which has nothing to do with you. Do you happen to know where Karen is?”

“No, I don’t. But Karen hasn’t been getting along very well with the people here lately.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I can’t put my finger on it. Little arguments, I guess. Mostly with Vito and Mr. Soolpovar. It was like they were telling her to mind her own business and she wasn’t buying. Listen, you probably know more about this than I do.”

I shook my head. “Tell me about Karen as if I don’t know a thing.”

“O. K.” Sheila looked at me strangely, as if she were thinking, he’s not Gideon Frey after all, he’s a Martian with four arms and green antennae on his head. “When Karen first got here to take Bert Archer’s place while he was in service, she didn’t know what was going on downstairs at all. When she finally began to get wind of it, she thought Bert had been ashamed to tell her. Brother, was she mistaken. You see, Bert Archer never knew about it, either. He was a naive kid. Probably if he stayed around a while longer he’d have found out about it, but before that could happen he was on his way to Korea. Anyway, Karen wanted no part of it, but she’d promised Bert to keep his interests going for him.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I figured this stuff got started after Bert was gone and Karen had a hand in it.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You knew when it started. You…”

“Go ahead.”

“Say, wait a minute! Then… then that means you’re not what everyone thinks. Hey, let me out of here!” Sheila stood up quickly, thighs flashing whitely in the gathering dusk as her skirt swirled. I grabbed her arm and pulled her down again, her knees digging a furrow in the sand.

“Let go of me. I’ve got to tell Vito. He thinks you’re from the boss.”

Sheila’s eyes swept over the sand quickly. Her best avenue of escape would be with the teen-agers, fifty-yards away. But even at this distance and in this poor light you could tell the boys were trying to see if the girls’ sweater badges covered padding or flesh and the girls were making a little like Vasco da Gama, too. Sheila flushed in virginal embarrassment and resigned herself to me.

“O.K., but you better make some sense about yourself after. As far as I could see, Karen didn’t want any part of what we were doing, but she didn’t want to implicate Bert, either. You see, it never occurred to her he was completely innocent.

“You can imagine how worried everyone was after Bert had died, since that would leave Karen free to tell what she knew. But suddenly Karen seemed to be playing along and giving more cooperation than she ever had before. First she had to worry about Bert Archer, then you came along and the same thing started all over again because we all thought you were from the boss.”

“What do you think now?” I asked Sheila.

“I don’t know what to think. If you were from the boss you would have known how long we’ve been operating and would have known everything started before Bert went into service and Karen had nothing to do with it. But if you’re just a friend of Bert’s, like you said at first…”

Sheila gazed out across the sand toward the dark, soft-hissing Coney Island surf. Light was fading rapidly, but the beach wouldn’t pull down any bright-sprinkled cover of stars tonight. Except for the lights from the boardwalk, it was now almost completely dark. “I had a man to worry about, too,” she said. She’d averted her face but I guessed she was pouting.

“Maybe you’re right about Vito. I — I’m beginning to think so myself. But you can’t end something like that overnight. Maybe it’s the old story. I’m just a kid and I wanted a man I could look up to and I thought Vito was like that at first and… You’re making me talk too much. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Shoot.”

“Just in case you didn’t know, the boss of our operations here is a pretty mysterious guy. He does business by mail, sending instructions either to Mr. Soolpovar, to Vito to Kellum or to me. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t know his identity.”

“Do you work for him?”

“No comment.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I’ve got to find out for sure where you stand first, that’s all. Anyway, I’ve got another question. How did Kellum break his arm?”

“That was a long time ago. Vito thought we were playing around. At the time I thought it was really something, the way a boy like Vito could take on a monster like Kellum and whip him. I was really impressed.”

“I whipped both the monster and the boy,” I pointed out. “What does that make me?”

Sheila giggled. “I guess I’ve changed. As near as I can see, it makes you a trouble-maker.”

“I’ve only just started,” I said. “If the cops aren’t getting anywhere, maybe I can help them.”

“Well, you can forget about them helping you. Billy Drake and a couple of others are paid off regularly.”

“I figured as much. Now I’ve got another question. If this boss gets in touch with you by mail, how do you get in touch with him?”

“We never have to.”

“All right. After Bert Archer was separated from service, did he find out what was going on?”

“I’m not sure.” Sheila wasn’t kidding. The question puzzled her all right. “But he did have a lot of fights with Karen. They were accusing each other of — something. I don’t know what. Probably, I’d say Bert found out.”

“Where do you fit in? I mean, you said you had a crush on Bert. You once asked me if it were possible for a girl to love two men at the same time, remember?”

“! — I didn’t hide what I felt for Bert. I’m not the type. But Karen wasn’t jealous. I’d only known him for a short time after he came back, until he got killed. But I don’t think Karen would have been jealous, anyway. Whatever was between them before Bert went away wasn’t there anymore, and it had nothing to do with what they were accusing each other of. Karen was only infatuated with him, that’s all. It didn’t last and she knew it but she wasn’t sure how to tell Bert.”

“Karen wouldn’t have told anyone that.”

“A girl knows without being told, Gideon. That’s…”

Sheila was interrupted by a scream. Something like a scream, but hardly human. An animal cry that they’d never permit on television because it would scare all the kiddies.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A FIGURE LUMBERED toward us in the darkness. It screamed again, a horrible sound which carried far across the almost silent beach and drowned out the giggles from the blanket fifty yards away, a sound compounded of terror and hate.

Something crashed flatly. A brilliant flash lit up the shapeless figure. Face distorted, hair disheveled, it was Becky Lutz. And she had fired a pistol.

“Lie flat!” I yelled at Sheila, and got down beside her. “You put that thing away, Becky,” I said. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“You killed my Ben.”

“I didn’t kill anybody. I want to find out who killed Ben as much as you do. Just take it easy, Becky.” I climbed to my knees and watched her. She was crazy-mad all right. Even if she had known I was out here on the beach, at this distance she couldn’t have been sure it was me. Dandy.

“I liked you,” she said. “I thought you could help Ben. Ben is dead, you know. The police said you killed him.”

“They were wrong. They let me go.” I stood up and took a step toward Becky. The pistol roared again. This time I was looking straight at the muzzle blast and it blinded me. If I hit the dirt again I figured I was a dead duck, so I kept walking.

“You put that thing away. Someone will get hurt.”

The gun blammed once more. Bless Becky, she couldn’t hit the side of an apartment house from the delivery entrance. But accidentally, she might hit something a lot smaller than that. Me.

The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Becky shrieked and I grabbed the pistol away from her.

Becky kept right on shrieking. “Help! HELP! You killed him. Help!”

I hadn’t been aware of it, but the teen-agers, six of ’em by latest unhappy count, had clustered around us while their girls stood in a group a few yards off, chattering. “What the hell you shooting that thing off, for, mister?” one of the boys demanded. “Don’cha know that’s dangerous?”

And another: “Lady, is he bothering you?” Considering what they thought to be the true state of things, that was the understatement of this or any other century.

Becky had resorted to her wail again.

“You give us that pistol, mister. Don’t want no trouble.”

It was getting to be an ugly situation. They’d crowded in close. Any moment, one of them might decide to out-hero the others and hurl himself at me. I’d gladly take them on two at a time if I had to, but six had altogether too many arms and legs to mess with.

I said, “Boys, you’re making a mistake.”

But Becky’s wail was far more convincing.

They began to close the circle. This close I could see that one of them had found a shiv, though God knows where he managed to hide it in his bathing trunks. They smelled so loaded if you shook them they might overflow. So it suddenly occurred to me the situation wasn’t one in which I might merely find myself mobbed. I might find myself killed.

Before Becky could repeat her wail I raised her pistol, a .32, and squeezed the trigger, praying it wouldn’t misfire again. It didn’t. It roared a pleasantly deadly sound and backed the circle up a few steps. When it roared a second time I found my weak spot. It was the hero with the shiv. It was why he carried the shiv. He was yellow.

I lunged at him and bowled him over but lost my footing in the soft sand and went down with him. He was yelping to beat the band and I felt his blade scrape against my chest, nicking the flesh and grazing the ribs.

People were shouting. Brave souls heading towards us from the boardwalk. In a minute the place would be crawling with cops and every last one of the six male and six female witnesses, stewed to their gills or not, would swear I had attacked Becky and I wasn’t sure that Becky would testify in my behalf or not. As for Sheila, she had decided to take a quick powder while Becky’s cannon was changing hands. I couldn’t blame her, but that left me without a witness for the defense. All this, of course, was secondary. Sort of like a man with six or seven bullets in his gut in an ambulance on the way to the hospital and wondering if he’d catch a cold or measles or something there.

I rolled clear and leaped to my feet and got a good rap across the bridge of my nose for the trouble. Hands tugged at my shoulder but I threw them off and broke away. I stamped down when something coiled around me ankle and heard a little-boy scream.

Then I was in the clear and running. Not toward the boardwalk and more trouble, if of a milder variety. I made for the ocean and kicked off my loafers along the way. I took a dozen running strides in and it was cold as the Bering Sea on New Year’s Day. I kept running, surface-dived and began to swim out, straight out and good riddance.

I’d lost Becky’s .32 in my haste, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted to get away and think. Things were buzzing around inside my head like flies around a Korean honey bucket. From one source and another I’d gathered odd scraps of information. Put them all together and maybe you had a killer. Maybe you had a headache and plenty of wild notions. I had to talk to Kellum. Once he would have clammed up, but not now. Now I’d knocked the stuffings out of him. The way his sick mind worked, if Karen knew her Freud and company, I was Kellum’s Marilyn Monroe. But I wasn’t the only one. For Vito Lucca had broken his arm. Hot damn, I was getting somewhere! Maybe Kellum was covering up for Vito. Kellum discovered the body. And maybe… but it didn’t make sense, none of it. It made so little sense that it filled my lungs with water. There I was, swimming out beyond the jagged stone breakwaters which batter the Coney Island tide before it can tumble on the beach, thinking up a storm. And coughing and gagging and cursing myself before I re-established the rhythm, and where the hell was I?

I

swam left around the breakwater and kept going, swimming an easy sidestroke parallel to the beach, a sidestroke which would not kick up enough of a wake to be seen from the sand.

Call the boss Mr. X. He ruled indirectly, holding his organization together loosely by means of the letters he wrote. Quite probably, he controlled things from afar but remained on hand incognito to guard his interests. Then Mr. X had two roles to play, the one by mail, the other directly. Perhaps someone had challenged the second role. Perhaps someone had figured he could take over on this end, not knowing that Mr. X’s lieutenant and Mr. X were one and the same man. Such a someone, thanks to Becky’s goading, might have been Ben Lutz, who got himself killed. But…

There was something else.I counted four more breakwaters spaced a couple of hundred hefty strokes apart and headed for the beach. Something Vito had said once. Something which might tie everything together if only I could remember it. Ever try to remember the name of a vague acquaintance? The more you try to think of it, the further away from consciousness you push it. This was like that. Vito had said something, something he didn’t know was important, something innocent, but something which might hold the answer to everything. Vito had said… Damn it, what had Vito said? He’d been giving me some cock and bull story about Sheila, telling me she was cold and distant and had some notions about honesty and all the while successfully hiding his own smoldering, unfounded jealousy. Well, partly. At that point, perhaps Sheila had wanted him to get out of the bootlegging business before it caved in on top of him. Anyway, he’d said something, made some comparison….

I

dragged myself up on the beach and sprawled out there, panting raggedly, realizing for the first time that rain had begun to fall, etching tiny craterlets in the sand.

And then I remembered. If Karen had been taken, I thought I knew where I could find her. The more I explored the angles, the more convinced I was she

had

been taken.

My trousers soaking wet and plastered to me, I headed for the boardwalk and under it. I walked through to the street, ignoring the curses as I almost tripped over a foursome of bare legs, two male and two female.

I’d swam far enough to come out on the block with my hotel, and even if the police had been summoned, they’d be in no hurry to look for me at home, not when I’d last been seen heading out in the general direction of the Ambrose Light. I drew some strange glances on the street but made it to the hotel, where I changed my clothing and was on my way out again in ten minutes. I had to hurry but I had to make sure. I found a phone booth in a candy store and called Tolliver’s, but Karen hadn’t returned. I called Karen’s apartment in Queens and cradled the earpiece after a dozen rings. Then I stepped out into the street and wished I’d picked some other candy store. Any other candy store.

Approaching me were Becky Lutz, calmer now but still wild-eyed, as unlovely a figure as I’d ever seen in the rain, and officer Billy Drake. It was Billy who saw me and pointed, but Becky who did the yelling. I whirled and started to run, but when Billy told me to stop his voice said he had me covered. I turned around.

He did.

“You’ve got a lot of answering to do, Frey.”

“Not now. Later. You won’t believe this, but it’s a matter of life and death. Be a good kid, Billy.”

“Sure, someone’s life and death, with you maybe holding a gun and doing the job. I’ve got to run you in, Frey. Man, they’re still looking for you out on the beach.”

“He killed Ben,” Becky said.

“I don’t think so,” Billy admitted — which made me feel a little better. “As far as we can see he has an airtight alibi on that.”

“Thank you very much,” I said sarcastically.

“You’re going to let him get away!”

“Not on your life, Mrs. Lutz. I only said—”

“But he killed Ben.” Becky’s eyes had grown big, but the pupils were pinpoints in a lot of white, as if she’d been mainlining. She stared at me and spoke to Billy and needed psychiatric treatment. Her husband had been murdered and maybe her subconscious told her she was responsible. Her goading had driven him inevitably to the edge of his grave, had motivated the hand which wielded the shovel which dug the hole. She knew it unconsciously and she struck back at her environment so she wouldn’t have to admit that fact to herself. It was ugly, but you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

Fat arms streaked out. Fat fingers clenched and twister!. Billy Drake stood there, stunned, pointing his empty fist at me. Becky held his revolver in both hands and stared at it, then at Billy, then at me.

“Now, Mrs. Lutz,” Billy said. He was more than alarmed. He was frightened. “You can’t take the law into your own hands.”

Becky was beyond logic, beyond reasoning. She was not taking the law into her own hands. She was a law unto herself.

“I’m asking you, Mrs. Lutz,” said Billy. “Please give me the gun.” A crowd had gathered, surrounding us on three sides, with the entrance to the candy store on the fourth. The proprietor, a small man with shell-rimmed glasses and a stained white apron girdling his ample middle, stood there wringing his hands.

Becky lifted the .38 with both hands, grasping the butt like it was the neck of a copperhead and she didn’t want it to turn around and sink its fangs into her. I began to back away and wished I had the gift of gab which often talks people more talented than I — or so you read in the lurid mysteries — out of man-sized jams. I said, “I was Ben’s friend, Becky. I wouldn’t do a thing like that. I didn’t kill Ben, but I think I know who was responsible.”

Maybe she didn’t hear me. Maybe she did but wasn’t interested. Either way, it was as if I hadn’t opened my mouth. “A knife you killed him with. You stuck it in his back and pushed and let him lay there, bleeding….”

It was Billy Drake’s revolver. Right then, Billy had made a pretty sorry spectacle of himself as a cop. The crowd had begun to circle us and had seen. Perhaps that passed through his mind, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what passes through a man’s mind when he decides to become a hero.

Becky’s fingers tightened. Becky sobbed. I couldn’t back off into the crowd because Becky might hurt an innocent bystander. I figured I’d rush her at the last possible instant and at least die trying.

Billy Drake stepped between us as I girded myself and Becky fired.

He fell slowly, not joint by joint but in a slow-motion, liquid movement. He rolled to the ground and you couldn’t tell where the bullet had gone in. He settled almost gracefully on his back. He folded his hands over his chest with easy grace. His cap had flown off and his blond hair was combed neatly in place.

“I asked you, Mrs. Lutz…” he said. Blood necked his lips and then welled from his mouth. He’d been hit in the chest.

There was no need to take the revolver from Becky. She let it fall and stood there staring down not at Billy, but at the gun which clattered to the pavement at his side. I could see how the one thing which stood out most to annoy you, his pride, had probably saved my life. And I could see how you couldn’t really blame Becky Lutz, although that didn’t help Billy. She had a debt to pay but it was up to the rest of the taxpayers to collect. So I stooped down while the first screams swept through the crowd and men began to shout in angry voices and picked up Billy’s .38 Special. Then I ran.

Someone tried to stop me, but I brushed aside the restraining arms and double-timed down Surf Avenue, half-expecting to hear the ambulance come wailing down the street and maybe save Billy and maybe not.

I knew where I had to go but not what I had to do, but Karen was there unless I had my signals crossed. I’d been wrong about Karen, so wrong it made me gnash mental teeth as I zig-zagged up the street, flitting among the size-changing shadows under Surf Avenue’s lampposts. You take a gal like Karen with all that pride of hers and a hot-headed dodo like me and nobody gets anyplace unless someone’s ready to sit down, keep his big yap shut and listen. That someone was me and I hadn’t done it.

Now Karen was in trouble.

I’d storm the pits of hell and kick sand in Cerebrus’ eyes if it would help Karen, but would it? I needed reinforcements, and if Karen knew her apples, I thought I’d be able to get some. Yeah, if she knew her apples. Fruit. Name of King Kellum. He could use his paws and that was one thing, but the fact that he owned a car made him about as valuable to me as the Chinese Reds were to the North Koreans after Nam II’s battered legions were down to a couple of scraggly regiments.

So back to Tolliver’s I went, hating every minute that ticked by, but realizing I might be trading minutes now for hours later and maybe for a life. Karen’s.

I found Kellum stuffing a limp slab of pizza into his mouth at Vito’s counter. Vito wasn’t around.

“Hi, Mr. Frey.” he said.

“Hi, yourself. I need a favor, Kellum.”

He looked at me with his big, brutal face, the expression showing nothing. “What kind of favor?”.

“I don’t have time to go into detail. I need you because you’re strong and know how to fight. I also need you because I’ve got to get someplace in a hurry and we could use your car. I better say first that it could be dangerous.”

“You haven’t told me enough.”

“Look,” I said, “this whole stinking business is going to come tumbling down so hard it will hit everyone concerned. You’re no exception. You’ve had it. You’ve been engaging in activities the T-men don’t exactly consider kosher.”

Kellum stared and stared, dropping the remains of the pizza to the counter. “What are you talking about? There’s no rumble…”

“Wrong,” I lied. “The T-men have been notified.” I spoke in an urgent whisper. Well, the T-men would be notified as soon as I could pause for breath. “They’re going to strike soon. Your best chance is to play along with me and turn in the brains behind the bathtub brew.”

“You mean Mr. Soolpovar? He ain’t here.”

I shook my head. “Let’s get going,” I said. “Are you coming or aren’t you?”

Kellum retrieved his pizza and stuffed it into his mouth. “How do I know you ain’t kidding me? How do I know you’re not giving me a test or something?”

I cursed him and told him to suit himself. I remembered what Karen had told me and realized maybe I’d gone too far afield. I swung my right hand, open-palmed, at his face and left the clear imprint of four fingers from eye to jaw. Then I turned and walked out of there.

First there was nothing, then a few random, self-directed curse words. Then Kellum had fallen into step beside me and said, “My car’s across the street in the lot.”

In a couple of moments we were skirting the pay toilet where someone had taken a pot-shot at me. There behind it was the kid and his stack of comic books. I would have sworn he was reading the same one. Kellum led the way to a pre-war Buick convertible and ground the starter half a dozen times before it kicked over and I stopped cursing. “Where we goin’, Mr. Frey?” Kellum demanded. “Port Washington,” I said. “Know how to get there?” As it turned out, I had to give him instructions. The convertible began to make noisy headway against a surprisingly cool wind, but as fast as the breeze dried sweat from my face, fresh droplets popped out. I might be wrong. I might be nuts. If Port Washington wasn’t the answer I’d drop a dime into the nearest phone, call the T-men, and pray.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT WAS AFTER TEN BY the time we reached the Sound. The night was moonless and shroud black, punctuated behind us by a pair of dim headlights which we lost as Kellum gunned his Buick up the hill toward Gregory Tolliver’s estate. As we reached the driveway I slipped the cylinder of Billy Drake’s .38 Special and made sure the one empty chamber hadn’t kicked back under the firing pin.

My brain was tied in little knots, tumbling back across the gulf of years which had done some healing but still left a deep scar of bitterness which had made me fight Karen every step of the way. I remembered a day, the first day I’d discovered Allison was like a bitch in heat. We were at the beach and swimming and having one of those grand old times which don’t mean much while you’re at them but which you remember with a desperate poignancy when you’re in Korea or someplace else where life is cheap and you can’t do the things you want. Well, we’d started talking about bathing suits. It was one of those years all the gals with appendix scars and a couple of spare tires of fat were worried about the Bikini. Funny part was, though, Allison steered the conversation to men’s suits. She didn’t like shorts, she liked trunks. She laughed and didn’t think it was fair gals should go around skin tight but not men. Gals liked to look, too, she said. Sure. Why not? Only the way Allison looked, the way she stared, the way her tongue darted out and licked vivid red lips as she watched the men parade by, sitting with her eyes almost on a level with those trunks she preferred to shorts was embarrassing. I told her, but she laughed and a little later a friend of mine sat down on the blanket with us and pretty soon Allison was pawing him and he was as hemoglobined as the next guy, but hell, I’d introduced her as my gal and he couldn’t figure it and started to squirm. So then I knew.

And now, after all those years, just like in the movies, our paths crossed again. Sure she could still stir me, but it was tempered with the knowledge of her affliction and how a man couldn’t live with her and it and keep his pride.

Great old Allison. The girl behind the man behind the gun. The girl behind the man behind the knife. The girl behind the man who drags people into steam rooms and suffocates them. It was a long way from Staten Island to Gregory Tolliver’s North Shore estate, but Allison wasn’t satisfied. Maybe, I thought as Kellum’s Buick triggered the electric eye which shut the gate and went up the winding driveway, maybe she was the same way about social climbing or money or power and all those things people want as she was about sex.

All that was grist for the T-man mill. Karen was something else again. I thought Karen was here and I’d fight to get her. But I almost got a kind of sadistic satisfaction thinking about how I was going to tell Allison off. She’d make promises and plead with me. She’s get down on those knees of hers and maybe grab hold of my legs and pant for me to please forgive her and at least let her go away and she wouldn’t cause any trouble again and I could do what I wanted with the still and all the other junk. And I’d laugh till she cried.

Gideon Frey, ex-G.I. Current occupation: sadist.

Somewhere, distantly, a dog howled. It was far enough away so you knew Fido wouldn’t be licking salt off your hand in a matter of seconds, but close enough so Fido could get there in a hurry if he had to. Well, the name was Shamus, not Fido, and if Shamus could understand those things, I had a hunch he’d get satisfaction from what was going to happen to his mistress. Definitely, I’d seen better friends than Shamus and Allison.

The howling made Kellum uneasy. He cleared his throat and pulled the car up toward Tolliver’s cut-stone mansion, guided by faint squares of yellow light which, as I recalled, were two living-room windows. He stopped the car, cleared his throat again, then lit a cigarette as Shamus howled at the moonless sky.

“Where the hell are we, Mr. Frey?”

“Gregory Tolliver lives here,” I grunted. “Mean anything to you?”

“Tolliver? The guy who owns, you mean the one who…?”

“Yeah, that’s who.” I was thinking, Gregory will take this hard. I don’t know what he saw in Allison, which may sound hypocritical, but there it is. He played games about everything, though, and maybe this was the biggest, toughest game of all. He’d married a nympho and now would discover her each and every breach of the moral code and confront her with the damning evidence. But Gregory had been blind in more ways than one. He plied Allison with jewels and furs and prestige, but she was running a thriving business of her own.

I stood up and stretched and checked the gun for the fifth time although I knew it was in fine shape. Shamus bayed again while I was squinting into the gloom for another car. I couldn’t see any, but that didn’t mean anything because Tolliver’s estate sported a three-car garage. It didn’t mean anything but it made me uneasy. I wanted to shout Karen’s name and hear her scream an answer. Brilliant. I shut up and headed for the house.

I turned around and barely could make out Kellum’s bulk in the night. “You stay-there,” I whispered. “If you just hear talking, stay put. If you hear a racket, come running.”

Shamus howled. Kellum’s bulk stirred uneasily. I knew I was taking a chance. Once I was out of sight he might decide to get back in the Buick and say goodbye to the North Shore. So I hissed, “I brought you along because I need help. Remember this, Kellum: you’re all through bootlegging. It’s just a question of time. The more you cooperate, the easier it will go on you.” Sure, Big Shot Frey talking. I had as much drag with the T-men as a counterfeiter passing a phony buck in Washington in payment for the guided tour of the Treasury Building. Only Kellum, I hoped, was scared.

“What kind of dog is it anyway, Mr. Frey?”

Kellum had an all-consuming interest. Well, I didn’t like the way Shamus was baying either, but it was nothing but nerves since I knew he wouldn’t sink his fangs into a slab of T-bone steak to help Allison.

“A toy poodle,” I said, “with a loud voice. Just shut up

and do what I told you.” I thumbed the revolver to full-cock and tried the door. Out here, they were expecting no one. The door opened in on well-oiled hinges, but I almost hit the ceiling when I saw my own image stalking grimly toward me in the hall mirror. Get a grip on yourself, Gideon Frey.

Up ahead, an oblong of yellow light flooded the hall from the living-room. I edged my way along the wall, back pressed against it, and peered around the door jamb. Three lamps were lighting the room partially, but unless someone were crouching in the shadows, it was empty.

I did some more exploring. The two guest bedrooms were dark. Someone had gathered wood for the dining-room fireplace, stacking it against the fieldstone wall on the hearth under a bank of recessed fluorescents which cast gaunt shadows of the heavy oak furniture. One small lamp atop a huge earthenware jug fought against darkness in the library. On the table next to it a braille book lay face up and opened.

The entire downstairs of Tolliver’s house was empty.

The wide stairs spiraled up and out of sight between the living-room and dining-room. They dissolved in darkness where they looped back toward their starting point but beyond that a vague yellow glow told of a lamp lit somewhere up ahead. Any minute I expected to hear Kellum’s car roaring away and I began to curse myself for not calling the police or the T-men or somebody before coming to Port Washington to make myself a hero.

The stairs creaked. It wasn’t me.

I was going to flatten myself against the wall and wait, then use my .38 as a club. Nerves. I chuckled. What’s the matter with you, Gideon Frey? The downstairs is empty and that noise came from below. Probably Kellum got a case of size fourteen cold feet outside, is all.

“Get back downstairs and wait,” I whispered. “What’s the matter with you?”

He didn’t whisper. He spoke in a normal conversational tone. He wasn’t Kellum.

“You’re silhouetted against the light, Frey. I can see you. You can’t see me. Drop it.”

I licked my lips and peered behind me. I squinted furiously and gazed upon a well of blackness. He sold pizza and he toted whiskey bottles. He was Vito Lucca.

“Drop it, Frey.”

I heard a click and wondered what the odds were of hitting him if I fired in that direction. The stairs creaked faintly again. He had changed his position.

“Be reasonable, Frey. How do you know I don’t have Karen with me?”

“Let her say something.”

He responded with a four-letter word and a second person pronoun. Then: “I’m dealing this hand, not you. I see you so good I can count the knuckles on your hand.”

Try locating a sound in pitch blackness sometime. All you wind up with is frustration.

“Go ahead, Frey. Drop it now.”

I had to. But I also wanted Kellum to know something was wrong. I was betting my life on the fact Vito could see me as clearly as he claimed and praying he wasn’t the nervous type. I squeezed the trigger, dropped the pistol, got deafened by the roar as it went off and hit the stairs on all fours myself. I waited for an answering explosion from Vito’s direction. When it finally came it was between my ears and not outside them. It shoved my teeth against the carpeted stairs and covered my brain, my eyes and everything with a thick black blanket. Good night, Gideon Frey.

When my own personal morning came around I was flat on my back. I was in a bedroom, small and square with the usual furniture and sailboats sailing up and down the walls. My watch told me I’d been out no more than half an hour, but someone was beating time to martial music inside my head.

Then I heard footsteps. John Philip Sousa switched from quick to double time. I got up fast and the band used my ear as a trumpet mute. My body called halt and I sat down again on the bed. When I looked up Karen was about to apply a dripping cloth to my head.

“Gid, I was so afraid. He dropped you in here all bloody, and didn’t say a word. I managed to drag you up on the bed and… how do you feel?”

“Lousy,” I said. “When I get that little slab of pizza I’m going to wring his neck.”

Karen did the wringing. She wrung the cloth out over my face and shoved me down on my back and placed the cloth against my temple.

“I think you need stitches.”

“It can wait.”

“It will have to. We’re locked in.”

“Listen,” I said. “Vito took you. Then what?”

“It was later on, after they let you see the cellar at Funland. I don’t know where we are. He just made me get in a car and drove off with me. He didn’t say anything.”

“How did he make you get in the car?”

“He said he was taking me to you. I believed him. After that he said nothing but kept on driving. It was dark by the time we reached here.”

“God, I was worried about you,” I said. “I still am. I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s going on at Tolliver’s. Where do you fit in?”

“I don’t fit in at all, stupid,” Karen protested. “I think I told you once I’d cooled off about Bert. But that had nothing to do with it, I still liked the guy. He was in trouble. I thought he was up to his ears in that mess at Tolliver’s. They were real sharp. I thought Bert was public enemy number one. Bert thought I was public enemy number one. Neither of us went to the police or anything. Vito had us over a barrel.”

“Vito isn’t the boss,” I said.

“Well, someone had us over a barrel. And darn you, Gideon, I still couldn’t go to the cops.”

“Why in hell not?”

“Because you’re in on this thing. Sometimes I wish men were never born, not men I could like and get weak all over, anyway.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it served the purpose. I went on laughing until Karen squeezed the wet rag over my mouth and made me gag.

“What’s so funny?”

“You were doing the same thing all over again, that’s all. I was trying to protect you after I found out.”

Karen should have known I was still weak, but it didn’t bother her. She leaped on me and I wasn’t sure if she was applying hold number five in a wrestling primer or demonstrating her affection, but she started kissing me and sobbing and when she began to blubber I did the holding and the kissing and then got up and lit a cigarette.

“We’re not exactly a couple of geniuses,” Karen snuffled.

I went to the door and turned the handle. Locked. I said, “Was there any rumpus downstairs after they brought me in here?”

Karen shook her head, knuckled her wet eyes like a little girl, kissed the tip of my nose and started crying again. “What are they going to do, Gideon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I—”

There was a scratching outside the door as someone sought the lock with a key. Karen tensed against me and our hearts did a quick, uneven dance together.

King Kellum’s battered puss was the best thing I ever saw in my life.

“Kellum,” I said, grinning. “You old son-of-a-gun. I knew we could count on you. How’d you manage it, old boy? Damn, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Kellum grunted and waved a pistol. Mine. Or Billy Drake’s that is. “Shut up and get back on the bed. Lay down. You too, Miss Tanner.”

“What the hell,” I said. Me and Sherlock Holmes. I was beginning to realize I couldn’t even hold his violin.

“You’re a dope, Frey. It wasn’t hard to see you hadn’t called the cops. Not the way you were sweating. But neither Vito nor me nor anyone else wants to spend some time in jail courtesy of you or Miss Tanner here.”

“Both of you,” I said. “You were both go-betweens. I should have realized Vito was right away. I should have tied him with Allison Tolliver sooner. He’d told me himself. He said Allison had hot-pants. Excuse me, Karen. I knew it was like that with Allison and it didn’t click when Vito told me. It meant Vito knew Allison.”

“Forget it,” Kellum told me. He could act, all right. He knew this place and he was only too glad to drive me here and wind things up. It was all planned. Maybe they figured I’d come back to Funland for one last look before I lit out.

“Goddam,” I said. “Vito took Karen here and you both knew I would follow.”

“If you put two and two together you’d follow,” said Kellum. “If not, what the hell. We could get you when we wanted.”

“You knew I wasn’t from the boss because the boss told you. That must have hurt.”

There was a knock on the door. “Hey, Kellum.” Vito’s voice, muffled. “The boat’s ready.”

I wished I’d never met Allison. I didn’t care if she was a nympho or cold as the outside of an igloo. She was going to have us killed, me and Karen. I wondered how she’d managed to get Gregory out of the way for the evening. Gregory hardly went anyplace.

I was down deep in a funk. I wasn’t wishing for much, not now, not when it didn’t look like anything I’d wish for would ever be granted. I wished I had a chance to tell off Allison, that’s all. She had plenty. She had everything a gal could want, at least a gal like her — except for eyes. She liked eyes to look at her. Aside from that, Gregory had placed the world at her feet. But it all added up to goodbye, Karen, and goodbye, Gideon.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THEY LED US DOWNSTAIRS, Vito first, walking backwards with what looked like a German Luger. Then Karen, then me. Kellum bringing up the rear with Billy Drake’s .38 Special.

At the bottom of the stairs, at the entrance to the dining-room, we met Allison. I sneered, but it was too dark. Vito stood at the foot of the stairs. Karen was on the second step, I was right behind her. I could feel Kellum breathing down my neck. They were going to take us out in the Allison I, a long way out, more than halfway to Connecticut, probably, and drop us. We were dead ducks and it was foolish to fade out without trying. If I dropped quick and whirled and grabbed Kellum’s legs, maybe. Just maybe he wouldn’t shoot anybody. But then there was Vito. Karen stood two steps above him. Lovely angle. She was athletic. She could kick him right in the teeth. We had to get coordinated, that’s all.

I whirled and dove at Kellum’s knees and yelled, “Kick him!” A gun roared and another. Something slammed against my shoulder and I thought I’d been hit, but it w«s Kellum, thrashing and kicking. I straightened up and heaved and saw him go over the bannister headfirst, waving his arms frantically and dropping the .38. A section of the bannister crashed down with him and on top of him and I dove after it, bringing my legs up under me. I landed that way, feet first, on his back. He made a loud gargling noise, the closest he could get to a scream under the circumstances. I clutched a chunk of bannister as big as a baseball bat and whacked him across the base of the skull with it. He clawed the carpet once, shuddered, and subsided. His skull looked oddly flattened in the half-light, and unless there was an awful lot of space between bone and brain he was dead.

I scrambled around the base of the stairs on all fours, climbed to my feet and saw Vito fighting a woman for the second time. He was doing all right but he’d done better the last time. He had Karen down on her back and he was choking her, but his mouth was a bloody ruin and a couple of teeth dangled loosely and bloodily from slack lips while he cursed.

The Marquis of what’s-his-name would have turned over in his grave, but our only audience was the Grim Reaper, still undecided which way to let his scythe fall. I called Vito’s name and he turned around. I brought my club up like a chipping iron, in a short, brutal arc. It caught Vito under the chin and smeared his face crimson as he twisted grotesquely and flipped over on his back. I’d made the decision for the guy with the scythe.

I wanted to go to Karen, but she could wait. Instead, I stalked toward Allison, dropping my club and flexing stiff fingers.

“They shouldn’t electrocute no-good whores like you,” I said. “They ought to tear you apart one limb at a time.”

Her mouth hung open. She stared at me and wanted to say something but the words wouldn’t come. She stared at the ruin that was Kellum and the worse ruin that was Vito and still she didn’t say anything.

“They’ll get you,” I said. “They can give you a trial and electrocute you or do whatever they want. But first I want you.”

Allison’s mouth opened and closed. She was talking. She thought she was talking, but the words didn’t come. I was going to beat her black and blue and then call myself a louse. It would be worth it.

There was barking close by. A door opened. A breeze stirred. Shamus pawed his way across the carpet, Gregory Tolliver’s restraining hand white on his harness. “Lucca?” Tolliver called, staring sightlessly. “Lucca, where are you?” Silence. Gideon Frey had struck out long ago as a detective.

“Lucca, is anything the matter? I heard shots.”

“Gregory!” Allison screamed. “Gregory, Gregory, Gregory… what…?”

Shamus growled, drooling spittle. The smell of blood got to him. Shamus strained at the harness and advanced, dragging Gregory a few steps down the hall toward us, then growled again. The blood was too much. Shamus broke loose in a quick angry streak of brindle fury. Allison whimpered and was borne to the floor. There was flashing white and flashing brindle and Shamus’ low, deep-throated growling. His teeth had found the side of Allison’s throat and he shook her around like a rag doll.

Karen screamed. Tolliver was yelling. I picked up the .38 Special and blew the back of Shamus’ head off. He yelped quickly and angrily and died, leaping off Allison as if he’d been shot from a cannon.

My stomach flipped up, then down. Not just what I’d eaten today, but what I’d had all week threatened to come up and spill out before it subsided, like a lead weight, down below my belt buckle. Skin and flesh hung in two loose, triangular flaps from Allison’s face and neck. She clawed at it feebly and whined.

I’ve never seen Tolliver’s face minus the composure, the smooth, sure poise. I saw it now. “I can’t see,” he wailed. “I can’t see!” He probably realized it for the first time in his life. He couldn’t see. It had never mattered before. It mattered now. “What’s happening? Where is everybody? Who’s here? Talk to me. I can’t see. Shamus. Shamus, boy. Where are you? Allison? Allison! I thought you… were staying in the city overnight. You said you were staying in the city overnight. You promised. I can’t see. Shamus? Shamus, heel. Heel, Shamus. Oh, my God, I’m blind. I’m blind!”

It was like a terrible revelation to him.

“The boat is ready, Lucca,” he said. “The boat is waiting. Take me to the boat. You have the Tanner girl and Gideon Frey? Good.”

“She’s not dead,” Karen told me. It had taken an effort to go near Allison. Karen’s face was drawn and white. “If I can stop this bleeding I think she’ll live.”

“Good,” I mumbled. Good. Bad. Indifferent. I didn’t care. But I knew. I knew. A blind man. You’d never think a blind man who had everything…. “Tolliver,” I said, “it wasn’t Allison. It was you. Of all the people involved only you could pay the bill.”

“Frey? I recognize your voice. What happened to Lucca? Where is everybody? Shamus, can’t you hear me?”

“Shamus is dead,” I told him slowly. Tolliver got down on the floor and began to feel around. He was going in the wrong direction, toward the wall, but I didn’t stop him. Vito had told me Allison had hot-pants, so I’d homed right in on it, thinking if Vito knew how it was with Allison and if Vito was a go-between, that made Allison top dog. It was crazy. It was like saying the batboy won the pennant for Brooklyn.

All Vito’s knowledge told me really, was that I’d find the boss, the letter writer, at Blind Man’s Bluff. And then I remembered Tolliver had said, that day in the rain before the inquest and again out here at the Bluff, that Allison was so interested in Funland, she ran things for him there, even drawing a personal income from it. That pointed the finger at Allison, but it wasn’t enough. I should have known it was Tolliver. A blind man, but capable. Somehow you just don’t think of a blind man as a puppeteer pulling the strings in a million-dollar criminal enterprise. So you settle on his queer, greedy — but innocent — wife. Well, at least it got me to the right place.

“You and the crazy game you made of life,” I told Tolliver, who had stopped at the wall and was turning around slowly, like a swimmer under water. “You didn’t need the money you made from the still.”

“I ran it right under their noses. I’d write letters and people would jump. You would appreciate my typewriter, Frey. It’s made for a blind man.”

“Only Kellum and Vito Lucca knew who you were,” I said. “The rest of them just got instructions. When Bert came back from Korea he was afraid to go to the cops because of Karen, but you wanted to scare him to make sure. You told Kellum to do the job, but he botched it. He locked Bert in the steam room and waited too long, and Bert suffocated.”

Tolliver was still on all fours. In another moment he would reach the dog’s body with his groping hands. Karen had taken off her blouse and crouched there, golden in the dim light, pressing the folded cloth against Allison’s face.

“When I remembered Vito had told me Allison was a nympho, that led me here,” I said. “But I should have realized a nympho isn’t good for much else. It had to be you. It wasn’t Vito who clobbered me out on the beach. It was Kellum. You told Kellum to try and scare me off. Then, when that didn’t work, it was Kellum who got scared. You didn’t tell him to kill me, but when it was time for the inquest he figured I must have known something for sure. So he took a pot-shot at me from the pay John.

“I don’t know about Ben Lutz. Maybe you had nothing to do with that.”

“Who is Ben Lutz?” Tolliver asked. His hands were inches from Shamus’ body.

“Then I was right about Ben. Vito killed him. At that time Vito still didn’t know I wasn’t what I claimed to be. I’d scared him into thinking his job was ready for grab. He was crazy jealous in other things besides love. When Ben went around shooting off his mouth about how I was going to move him up in the organization, Vito must have thought he could get two birds with one stone. Kill Ben, who might take his job away. And pin it on me, thinking maybe you’d have given him my job. Later on he must have asked you and probably realized he’d killed Ben for nothing, but Vito was like that.

“At first I thought Karen had been kidnapped to quiet her, to get her out of the way. But you really had Karen brought here as bait for me. Vito didn’t know I was a phony until after they showed me around the still. He must have called you, or maybe Kellum did. Anyway, you got Allison out of the way, but she came back earlier than you thought.

“I still don’t know what made you so sure I wouldn’t go to the police. You must have known how it was between Karen and me. You figured I wasn’t sure how she stood in all this, or maybe you figured I’d be afraid you’d kill her if the police came. And Kellum was going to take me here if I still hadn’t figured where Vito went with Karen.”

It was then that Tolliver’s hands found Shamus. They ran over the body slowly, the fingers like ten small, trembling snakes. They found the bloody head and held it. They clenched in brindle and crimson.

Tolliver stood up slowly, getting the toe of his shoe under Shamus’ body. The dead dog rolled over, legs straight up for a moment, then fell on its side.

Tolliver went outside, sure of himself, not touching the walls with his hands, not hesitating. But slowly. Karen looked at me but I shook my head and followed Tolliver.

He kept right on going and maybe I should have stopped him. He stood at the edge of the cliff behind the house, at a point where the water lapped deep and hungry a hundred feet below him. He climbed over the guard rail and hung that way, silhouetted by the moon which had finally broken through the clouds. He always lived by his own rules, I thought, and this was the end of his game.

He turned around and looked back at me once as if he could see, then dropped over the edge. When I reached the spot where he’d gone over, there was nothing but the water, hissing and frothing and claiming its own, far below.

I walked slowly back to the house. Vito was dead in there and Kellum. Allison would live if we called a doctor. It would be a living hell with the scar and all that unrequited desire. I was too tired to decide whether she deserved it or not, or whether the D.A. would indict a mixed-up Irish kid named Sheila O’Keefe when everything came out in the wash.

I found the phone and called the operator and got the police. They were on their way, I’d sleep on it before calling the T-men in the morning. Right here, right now, and I didn’t care if there were a dozen corpses in the parlor. If the cops would let me, which they wouldn’t.

I was low. Morbid. Feeling like you get to feel in Korea. Worse. I didn’t want Karen to see me that way and I thought some liquor might help. I tried a few stiff ones in the living-room and when that didn’t work tipped up the bottle and drank. That didn’t work, either. I gave it up as a bad job and sought Karen.

That’s the trouble with me. Stupid.

Can’t figure what’s good for what ails me. Karen’s medicine. My medicine, anyway. She was pale and haggard. She had fingermarks around her neck like a livid necklace, but she carfle to me as the police sirens wailed distantly and I didn’t feel so bad.

Morbid? Who was morbid?

We’d find ourselves a big chunk of time, all of time, and get lost in it together. We had a drink on it, too. This time it worked.

me with fair frequency. And that attitude on my part was like feeding him poison. Harry and Job were weaker stuff. They took it. But Bill didn’t. And because he was the man he was, he reacted in the way he did. Violently, but subtly.” Vickers shook her gently. “So you see, Cleopatra, it’s more my fault than yours.”

Content

Stephen Marlowe
CATCH THE BRASS RING

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN