The Brass Cupcake Read online

  Some of the jurors applauded involuntarily.

  The gaunt man said, “That is how we plan to locate the money. Mr. Bartells will help us look in all of the likely places, and warrants can be made out here to give us the right to search those likely places.”

  “You can come along,” the gaunt man said.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  We went to the bank first. The Assistant District Attorney was along, his red face shining with excited perspiration. We went to the safety deposit vault. The redhead handled the counter. He found the first box on the left, a big box near the wall.

  “Number six-thirty-three,” he called.

  The bank man checked the file. “John Guilfarr,” he said, a tremble in his voice. Papers were passed to the bank man and the box was opened.

  “Number four-eighty,” the redhead called over the roar of the counter.

  “Homer Stackson,” the bank man said.

  I wondered how Homer got cut in. I watched the box being opened. Poor Homer got only six fifties out of the take.

  The numbers were intoned and the names were called out. No Powy, no Gilman, no De Rider. But a very neat cross section of municipal big shots. An interesting list. A list to make wives cry and the kids wonder what the hell had happened to the old man. There’d be some plush homes for sale in Florence City. There would be a new political deal. All because you learn how a cat will jump when it smells raw kidney.

  Then the redhead went behind the tellers. The bank customers looked on curiously. The tellers were jumpy. The counter began to shout its head off at window three, over the cash drawer. The bank officer went through the deposit slips. One Nicholas De Rider had put $1,500 into his checking account that morning.

  It was a stupid thing to have done, but it turned out to be smart, inadvertently smart. It was laborious sorting out the treated money. The total came to $1,370. The rest had been paid out through the window. A few innocents were walking around with hot money—hot in a brand-new sense of the word.

  The next stop was headquarters. Powy was in. His face turned the color of damp ashes. He knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t get it through his head exactly what it was. The big iron safe in the corner of his office was supposed to be for police business. The counter roared and roared.

  He opened the safe and then decided that he shouldn’t have done it and tried to kick it shut. He missed and his foot slipped and he sat down on the office floor, looking like a pudgy gray child about to break into fat tears.

  Powy had done very neatly by himself. It was $80,000. Guilfarr was the big boy with $120,000. The remaining $100,000 had been scattered around.

  It was a painful job in headquarters. Gowan had his tiny amount in his desk drawer. Some of them had it on them. It was all taken and every man got his summons to appear.

  The one I liked best was Nick De Rider. He came swaggering down the corridor and stopped dead. “De Rider,” I whispered to the gaunt man.

  “You deposited fifteen hundred dollars of the insurance company’s money to your account this morning, De Rider,” he said.

  De Rider grinned. “You gone crazy? That was money I’ve been saving a long time.”

  The redhead had gone around behind Nick. He held the counter close to the seat of Nick’s pants, and when it roared, Nick jumped as if a bee had stung him. He turned around. “What the hell are you doing, fella?”

  “You’ve got radioactive money in your pants, De Rider. For your sake, I hope you haven’t been carrying it very long. You know how that stuff works.”

  Nick swallowed hard and his eyes went wide. “Jesus! That money? The money in the bundle?” He clawed the wallet out of his hip pocket and threw it away from him so hard that it hit the corridor wall and slapped to the floor. His voice was high. “I was carrying it around ever since Powy gave it to me last night. What’s it going to do to me?”

  The gaunt man shook his head and clucked. “That’s a long time, De Rider. With immediate treatment maybe we can save your manhood. But I don’t see why we should try. You don’t look like the sort who’ll co-operate with us.”

  Nick blubbered and looked about to fall on his knees and beg. He had his own style of guts. You could crack his knuckles with a sledge and he’d grin at you and tell you to go to hell. But this was different. This was a threat at the very core of his being.

  “Co-operate! Quick, what do you want? Anything you want. Only help me get treated quick.”

  They took him into an office and one of the gaunt man’s boys took the stenotype machine out of its case. Nick jittered on the chair.

  “A complete statement, De Rider. Everything. Not only this little caper, but all the rest of the dirt. Lavery’s payoffs. Everything you can remember and think of.”

  The words poured out of him so fast that the stenotype operator had difficulty keeping up. I knew some of the things, without proof. Others I hadn’t heard of before.

  And a prize tumbled out with all the rest of it. A glittering prize. “That Frey fella,” he said. “He didn’t have a gun. That made it a little tough. We took one out of our collection here afterwards, one we picked up with no number a couple years ago. When we told him to run he wouldn’t. I couldn’t do it with him standing there. The Chief took my gun and did it.”

  “Did he have his orders?”

  “I heard Guilfarr tell him before we left to make damn sure.”

  “We’ll have this typed up, and when you sign it we’ll rush you to the laboratory and counteract this radiation, if we can,” the gaunt man said.

  “I’ll sign it after. Honest!” Nick wailed.

  “We’ll do it my way,” the gaunt man said.

  After the statement was signed, the gaunt man said, “Thanks, De Rider. Now you can relax. That money isn’t dangerous. You could wear shorts made of it for the rest of your life and never miss a trick.”

  They’d taken his gun. He looked at the gaunt man with. a dull lack of comprehension. His eyes shifted to me and the hate flowed into them. A deadly and murderous hate.

  “You wise bastard,” he whispered.

  I was still wearing the special. I made the bad mistake of underestimating the speed of his reflexes. He hit me and the gaunt man in a flying block that drove us together out the doorway into the corridor, sliding across the tile floor. As I went through the door I swung my arm for balance and it hit the doorframe, numbing my fingers, sending the special flying.

  De Rider turned and half dived for the door, his eye on the weapon. I scrambled after him and got my hands on his ankle, trying to yank him back. But he had caught the edge of the frame in his fingertips. He pulled the two of us forward and grabbed the gun just as I tried to swarm over him and get hold of the wrist.

  He rolled and chopped me across the side of the head with the barrel. The whole world faded into swirling gray and I could feel my hands slipping off him. He was gone and I sat up and shook the mist out of my eyes. There was a wetness on the side of my face. The gaunt man was on his feet, his back against the opposite wall of the corridor. De Rider was in a crouch, balanced on his toes, the gun thrust forward, but for some crazy reason it wasn’t pointed at me, but at someone down the corridor, cut off from my vision by the edge of the doorframe.

  He backed up, one cautious step after another. His lips were pulled back from his teeth. “I don’t want to, but I will,” he said.

  “Drop it, Nick,” Harry said scoldingly. “Come on, boy. Be sensible.”

  “I’m telling you, Banson.”

  Harry came into sight, the Police Positive in his yellowish hand.

  “Stop comin’ at me!” Nick yelled.

  “Now, boy. No call to act like that.” My gun jumped in Nick De Rider’s hand. The little lance of muzzle flame was clearly visible. The shot slammed and rolled and thundered in the corridor. Harry stood his ground and fired calmly. The impact spun Nick around so that he was in profile to Harry. He lifted my gun again and Harry fired first. I knew by the w
ay Nick went down that Harry had done it exactly right, planting the slug low on the outside of the nearest shoe so that it swept both feet out from under De Rider. His head smacked the tile and the gun slid up toward Harry, spinning slowly, coming to rest with the muzzle pointed at the unconscious De Rider.

  Harry picked the gun up. He beamed at me. “Hi, there, Cliff! Know what I am? Acting chief. First official act. Tried to teach that boy to shoot a dozen times. He just never had the feeling for it, I guess.”

  I slowly got to my feet, dabbing at my face with my handkerchief. I froze there as we heard the hollow blam of another shot.

  “Busy day,” Harry muttered.

  It was Powy. He still looked like a fat gray baby. But the nipple of the bottle had been the blue steel muzzle of the gun that should have been taken from him. The gun was in his lap, wedged between the fat thighs, and the back of his head was a scattered substance that slid wetly down the plaster wall behind his desk.

  Al Case wandered in, a wide and happy smile on his face, mumbling, “AP, UP, INS, exclusives… awp!” The smile slid off his face like butter off a steak. He covered his mouth with his hand, turned, and fled. I couldn’t laugh at him. I was too close to following right behind him.

  By dusk most of it was cleaned up. Harry Banson had displayed a totally unexpected executive quality. Guilfarr had been tipped, and he was making his run for it. Full descriptions had gone out on the tape. It was a mad tangle at both headquarters and the courthouse. Lawyers shouting about their clients’ rights. Protestations of great innocence. “I tell you, Powy owed me a thousand bucks. Can I help it if the bastard paid me in that kind of money? Can I?”

  Harry strolled smiling and unruffled through all of it, showing his bad teeth, making phone calls, rebuilding the nucleus of a police force, feeding the right sort of tidbits to the press.

  The big black headlines had it in four words: “OFFICIALS COUGH UP SWAG.”

  There was nothing you could add to that. They had it and they had to cough it up, no matter how it hurt. The grand jury ate at the big table, hasty sandwiches, eating even while they were hearing testimony.

  Harry, seemingly in fifty places at once, cornered me on the courthouse steps. “You’re deputy chief, boy,” he said gently.

  “Just like that?”

  “You want it, don’t you? Come on over. I’ll swear you in. And say! Pinch me! Ow! Guess it’s for sure.”

  “Swear me in and don’t release it. I’ve got something to do that I can do as a cop better than as a citizen.”

  He swore me in with Al Case as a witness. Al was pledged to secrecy. I said the words. Harry frowned. “Al, how the hell much does a deputy chief get?”

  Al shrugged. “You should ask me!”

  “I got forty-five hundred when I was a lieutenant,” I said. “That includes the cost-of-living bonus.”

  “Give him fifty-five,” Al said.

  “O.K., Cliff. You’re my deputy. Here’s your first job: Close up the Kit-Kat.”

  “Can I come along?” Al pleaded.

  “Come on. We’ll do it now.”

  “How many men we taking?”

  “Just us, Al. You and me.”

  He swallowed hard.

  The lot was full of cars. My head itched where the doc had shaved it around the gash Nick had made. Larry Kreshak let us go right in. “He’s been sort of expecting you,” Larry said.

  Tony Lavery was in his bedroom tenderly packing a big wardrobe trunk with Havana stickers on it. He gave me a tired smile. “The clown prince,” he said.

  “Still clowning, too,” I said.

  Tony lit a cigarette. “For you, Al, I’m saying this. The management has been considering the closing of the Kit-Kat for some time. The decision was made three days ago to close”—he looked questioningly at me—“next Monday?”

  “Tomorrow, Tony. Close the tables tonight. Just food and liquor.”

  He sighed. “O.K. Have it your way. Tomorrow, Prince.”

  Al looked at me. “I should write it like he says it’s going to be?”

  “Why not? He’s all through here. They’re indicting him, but he’ll beat it because he doesn’t take silly chances. Let him save his face with his own outfit.”

  “Mix you guys a drink?” Tony asked.

  We named our choice and followed him out into the other room. He sipped his drink. “They’re sore at me, Prince. I’ve been on the phone.”

  “Is it your fault?”

  “Anything that goes wrong with the setup is the manager’s fault. Maybe I should have siphoned some brains into that crowd over there. Who cares? They’ll sell at a profit. There’s a good living here just in the food and liquor.”

  I looked at him. “Tony, you just don’t sound sore enough.”

  Surprisingly, he blushed. “I can’t seem to get sore. I’m quitting. I’ve got a pile. Know what I’m going to do?”

  “Those big damn shining buildings, Tony?”

  “If I can get in anyplace. First I got to get the high-school credits. Imagine that. Tony Lavery in high school.”

  I set the empty glass on the desk and stuck my hand out. He gave me a twisted grin and shook it. “You’re O.K., Prince. Just too damn Christer.”

  “Luck, Tony. Lots of luck.”

  “Tell your blonde to send back them clothes, Prince. Lucy thinks I gave ’em away.”

  I stood by Al Case out by the pool and I listened to the laughter of the women. A place kicks you and you want to kick back. You want to badly, and then when you get your chance, you’re a little sorry.

  “What makes you think he won’t open the table tonight?” Al demanded.

  “He said he wouldn’t.”

  “It beats the hell out of me,” Al mumbled.

  “What are you going to do now, Al?”

  “Turn in some stuff. Then see what makes over at City Hall. Then clean up some odds and ends. Coupla interviews. Biggest day since VJ day. I’m beat.”

  I let him off at his office, went back to my room, and phoned Melody. She was in.

  “I’m a little smarter than I was, Cliff. You were in on it, weren’t you? You helped sew them up. I can understand a little better now.”

  “What do you eat on picnics?”

  “Cold chicken. Mountains of it. Cliff, is there anybody around loose who wants to get even with you?”

  “How about this for a menu? A thermos of Martinis, a half bushel of cold chicken, a dozen bottles of beer.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “A small annex just west of heaven.”

  “Crowds of people?”

  “Us. Desolately alone. Like a shipwreck.”

  “Think we ought to interrupt this honeymoon long enough to get married?”

  “It’s a thought, sugar. Tomorrow’s Wednesday. Thursday I’ve got to get a haircut. Friday I’ve got to take a book back to the library. Monday suit you?”

  “Fine, unless there’s a good movie on.”

  “We’ll get back tomorrow in time for tests and licenses.”

  “Trapping, baby. Trapping.”

  I ate the last of my eggs and fell headlong into a dreamless sleep, blacker and more silent than any tomb.

  18

  SHE WAS IN holiday fettle. I found shade for the big basket of food and the trick container designed to keep the beer cold.

  She watched the launch swing away from the island and dwindle off toward the mainland, a dark line on the horizon. The air was cool but the sting had come back into the sunshine.

  She wore a halter and shorts. She turned to me accusingly and said, “Oaf! I heard you tell him to come back. I want to be shipwrecked for keeps. Forever.”

  “Would the food hold out?”

  “Don’t be so damn practical. Here’s a better question: Would you hold out?”

  “The implication is resented, madame.”

  “Shut up. Take me on a tour. I want to explore.”

  We left our swim suits, coats, shoes, and socks by the food. I
rolled up the cuffs of my blue jeans. A complete circuit was only a little more than half a mile, but it took a long time. Every shell had to be identified. I had to find her some scuttling white sand fleas. I found one nearly the size of a mouse, and it horrified her. She exclaimed with joy when a pair of porpoises rolled lazily not over fifty yards away. It was a day to be young and gay in.

  She found a place she liked, where the sand was clean and hard-packed.

  “Now build me a house,” she said.

  “I’ll build you a Martini.”

  “Fair exchange.”

  I lugged all the stuff over while she watched me, saying, “I always take a man on my picnics.”

  Her drink was half gone when the drone of the approaching launch separated itself from the deep voice of the waves against our beach. She jumped up and ran up the sand slope to where she could see.

  “Cliff!” she wailed. “We’re going to have people in our hair.”

  “Take a good look, chum.”

  As she shaded her eyes, I patted the right-hand pocket that held the Belgian automatic I had taken back from her when I had picked her up at the hotel.

  There was both anger and bewilderment in her voice. “It’s Furny! How would he… Cliff, you asked him to come!”

  “Guilty.”

  She ran back to me, sat on her heels, and stared into my eyes. “Why, Cliff?”

  “Because it will feel so good when he goes away.”

  “Tell me now. We haven’t much time. They’re getting close.”

  “Then there isn’t enough time.”

  “What are you going to do to him, Cliff?”

  “Now I go around doing things to people. What next?”

  She stood up and walked woodenly back up the slope. I heard Trumbull’s shout and she waved without enthusiasm.

  In a few moments he was ashore, towel and swim suit in his hand. As I came up he said, “I say, Mr. Bartells! This is damn decent of you.”

  “He’s a very decent sort,” Melody said coldly. “Good old Cliff.”

  Furny threw his head back and laughed. “You see, my dear, now you will simply have to listen to what I have to say.”