The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

My phone rang.

“T. Skeat, private investigations, Skeat speaking,” I said.

“This is Angonides, Skeat. I’m at 3609 Columbus Avenue. Get down here right away.”

“What about?”

“I said, get down here right away. It’s a killing.” He hung up. I locked the office, put on an overcoat and caught the first taxi I could get.

It was a crummy address, in the heart of the brownstone-furnished-room neighborhood. There were cops in front of the place. They sent me up to the third floor.

Detective Lieutenant Angonides was waiting for me in the corridor. He handed me a dirty bit of paste-board.

“This your business card?” he asked.

I looked it over. “Of course it is. How’s it figure?”

“We found it in the hatband of the guy in there. Go on in.” The big Greek gave me a push that I didn’t like.

The little hall bedroom was full of people. An M.E. was mumbling to himself as he filled out his forms. Two photographers were yapping to each other about film grain. A fingerprint man was swearing at a uniform cop who had sat in his powder.

One of the people in the room wasn’t making any noise. He was lying naked on the bed. He was tied down with clothesline.

Somebody had tied him down, gagged him with paper toweling and slowly, nastily and completely had shredded him with the broken base of a beer-bottle. Blood soaked the dirty, rumpled blanket and pillow; blood stained the floor. It looked black and unreal under the photographers’ lights.

“Do you know him?” asked Angonides.

“Can you wipe the blood off his face?”

He looked at the photographers and they nodded. He wiped, standing at arm’s length.

“I know him,” I said.

“Name?” asked Angonides, taking out his note-book.

“I don’t know that. He’s just a nut who stumbled into my office last Tuesday. He said he had a secret to sell me for five hundred. I told him what he could do with his secret and he stumbled out again. That’s all.”

The big Greek closed his note-book with a snap and shoved it into his pocket. He began to bully me in a tired sort of way: “What the hell are you trying to tell me, Skeat? You got a client and didn’t even take his name?”

“I don’t take the brush-man’s name when he calls. This guy wasn’t even a brush-man. He was just a nut.”

“How about the card he had?”

“My cards are all over the city. That doesn’t mean a damned thing and you know it.”

“Maybe I do,” he said, and his head swiveled around to the stiff. He picked up the beer-bottle and hefted it.

The slashes on the body were none of them very deep and not one was in a vital place. He had died of shock and blood-loss. Some of the cuts were in exquisitely painful places — the inside thigh, soles of the feet and others — but I couldn’t guess whether those were part of the random pattern or intentional.

“The killer changed hands at least once,” said Angonides. “And he worked from both sides of the bed.” He studied the cuts, his brows wrinkled.

“What the hell,” I said, “you’ll trace him by his papers and then you’ll get his buddies and one of them’ll be the killer.”

“He didn’t have any papers except your card,” said the detective. “He was a skip.”

“How do you know?”

“He tried to lose himself. Five laundry-marks on his clothes, different one each week. Different restaurant every day. This is the third rooming-house we’ve traced him to. His trail’s so completely doubled back on and loused up that he’s been dropped from the books.”

“Then you’ll get a flimsy from some M.P.B. in Idaho or Maine and you’ll be on his tail.”

“If he’s a fugitive from justice. If he’s just on the lam from a mob — well, this means the mob caught up with him.”

The M.E. mumbled to himself and the photographers yapped at each other about photometers. The fingerprint man whistled “Annie Laurie” as he packed his kit. I felt sick. The blood on the stiff and the blanket and the pillow and floor stank hotly.

“Come down to Center Street with us,” said Angonides.

“That a request?”

“Yes,” he said, slowly and unwillingly. “You’re the one and only lead, Skeat. If you’re holding something out we’re going to get it, one way or another.”

“Don’t muscle me, George. You’ll be sorry if you do.”

“I’ve got to be sure,” he said, staring at me.

We rode down to Center Street in a squad car. In one of the old-fashioned paneled offices I filled out an affirmation repeating my story. Then Angonides and his boys politely and coldly ushered me into a basement room.

“This the place?” I asked, looking around. The walls were stone, the ceiling was low and ominous. There were no windows. In one corner stood a big, heavy chair screwed to the floor with angle-irons. There weren’t straps nailed to it; that wouldn’t have looked good.

One of the boys held me by each arm and Angonides went to a wall switch. The ceiling light clicked out and a photo-flood in a kid’s magic lantern went on. The detective lieutenant lowered it so it glared into my eyes. I closed them and the light went right through.

“You’ll never get away with this, George,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I’m going to try.”