Collection of Stories
- Автор: Стерлинг Стюарт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Collection of Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Koski went in. There was no time for caution. If it had been the girl who’d phoned Bill’s father to come here, it meant the fireworks might start suddenly.
They’d already begun when Koski slid into the next empty booth. He couldn’t see either of them. The backs of the booths extended nearly up to the low ceiling. But he could hear.
Patty was in a cold rage. “You rotten, double-crossing fink!”
“I’m not denying anything,” Cale answered in a curiously flat, toneless voice.
“He’s dead! You killed him!”
“I wish I could say it wasn’t true.” The old man’s words came slowly, as if he was weighing each one carefully. “But it is.”
“If it wasn’t for your filthy two-timing, we’d be away on our honeymoon now. What’d you do with the money?”
“I put it out of your reach, Patty.” Cale seemed to be explaining something to a dull-witted child. “I never meant you to get your hands on it, you know. Any more than I intended you should get your claws into Bill.”
“Bill’s safe enough from me, at any rate.” She gave a sinister little laugh. “But if you think I’m not going to get that money, you’ve got another—”
“No, Patty. When you told me on the phone I’d better bring you something, or I’d be sorry, I knew what you meant, all right. So I did bring you something.”
Koski took three fast steps on the balls of his feet then. He had his hand on the barrel of Cale’s nickel-plated gun, pressing its muzzle down toward the beer mats on the table, before the old man stared up at him, thunderstruck.
Patty was quicker. She started to slither past the table, out of the booth.
Koski pushed her back, crowded in beside her, taking the gun away from Cale with no trouble.
“Hands on the table. Both of you. That’s right. Keep ’em there. Let’s put a few cards on the table, too, hah?”
Cale seemed too frozen with fear to open his mouth.
Patty sneered at him. “Can’t make a move without yawping copper, can you, murderer! Have to ring the blues in on everything — even your own son’s killing!”
The old man went deathly pale, leaned against the back of the booth, gasping.
“You’ve got him wrong, Miss Rondo.” Koski wondered why the near-gunplay hadn’t caused more commotion among the men at the bar. No one seemed to be watching them with any special interest. “Mister Telfer didn’t call the police in on this. He didn’t know I’d trailed him here. I expect he wouldn’t have liked it anymore’n you do.”
“Me?” She laughed, hysterically. “I’m glad you’re here! You must have heard him admit — what he’s done.”
“Yeah.” Now, out of the corner of his eye, Koski did catch a furtive movement of the loungers at the bar. He crowded against the girl so she wouldn’t be able to hamper his gun hand. “Mister Telfer admitted being in on a bad deal, all right. But it was a deal you cooked up.”
The group at the bar was splitting — three or four sidling and shuffling toward the booth to distract his attention, the others sneaking up behind him.
“You hooked the boy — a kid who never wised up to your kind. You got him to the marry-me stage, and when his father came around to break it up, you offered to give the boy the gate — if you got paid enough.”
The old man stared at him, awed. “I did. Yes. She wanted more than I could pay.”
Koski stood up abruptly, the nickel-plated gun in his left hand, his right hand in the gun pocket of his melton. He swiveled around, facing the three who’d idled up within a few feet of the booth behind him.
He said, “Something, boys?” They found business of pressing interest back at the bar, moved back hastily.
“She told you how you could get the dough for her, I expect, Mister Telfer.” Koski spoke to the old man, but watched the girl. She was staring at someone standing behind the garish jukebox. The lieutenant could only make out a shadowy figure there.
“He’s a liar, if he told you I framed that holdup, copper,” Patty cried scornfully. “It was Cale Telfer’s own idea. He told Eddie when to run the boat in an’ tie up, when the door would be unlocked—”
“That is true.” The old man struggled to his feet, in spite of Koski’s warning gesture with the gun. “But I had no intention—”
“No!” snarled Patty. “You’d no intention of bein’ on the up an’ up with Eddie, after you rigged the holdup with him. You held out the money, tipped off the guards, got Eddie killed—”
“How’d you know he was dead, Miss Rondo?” Koski shoved Cale back into his seat. The old man had blocked the lieutenant’s line of vision so he lost sight of that shadowy figure momentarily.
The girl didn’t answer.
The answer came, close to Koski’s ear. Close enough so he felt the cold bluntness of the automatic’s nose, before he heard the familiar nasal whine of Doojey Felch, saw the thin, wolfish face with the broken yellow teeth.
“I told her, Koski. I seen him die. I seen you kill him over there at Gowanus. It’d serve you right if Patty took that gun away from you right now an’ pushed the button on you. Patty was Eddie’s girl, Koski. They was goin’ on a honeymoon if you hadn’t lucked onto us out there in the Bay. If Patty was to grab your gun now and it was to go off—”
“If that was to happen, Doojie,” the heavy rumbling voice of Joe Mulcahey announced with matter-of-fact authority, “the first thing she’d have to do would be to comb your brains out of her hair! Stick your thumbs in your ears! In your ears, I said! Where I can see ’em! An’ keep ’em there!”
They waited on the sidewalk for the patrol wagon. Doojie Felch and Patty Rondo, handcuffed together, were facing the wall and leaning against it with their hands against the wet brick to keep them from falling. Steve Koski and Joe Mulcahey were watching the fog condense in rivulets, thick as mineral oil, on the windows of the cafe.
“I thought I told you to watch Negus and not let him off the oyster boat, you thick-skulled Hibernian!”
“He’s still there, Steve. I only came over here to show you the note he found in his pocket, whilst we was givin’ the pilot-house the up an’ down. Old Cale Telfer must have stuck it in there, unbeknownst, that time we were all millin’ around looking at those bloodstains on the deck.”
He gave Koski a slip torn from a Shoalwater Seafood’s memorandum pad:
Win—
The money’s in the lower right-hand drawer of my desk. I never meant it to get anywhere but in the firm’s bank account. I thought I was doing what was best for Bill, to go along with the holdup scheme and so get that witch out of the way. But what I did was send Bill to his death. So I can’t see any use to go on living myself. I’ll try to balance the books before I go.