The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Деминг Ричард
- Год: 2016
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- ISBN: 9781479423507
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
When the two detectives had departed, Sam Black said, “Now you ready to listen to my report?”
Ross said, “Go ahead.”
“A tall guy about thirty years old came in at eight. Had a brand new sunburn, a missing right earlobe, wore a two-hundred-dollar suit and a gun. He wanted upstairs, but I gave him the brush on general principles. He was looking for somebody, but he didn’t find him. He left just as Benny got off the elevator, and I’m pretty sure he spotted him getting off. He walked out not fifteen seconds ahead of Benny.”
Ross thought this over. “He fit Morton’s description of Big John Quinnel?”
“Not by three inches and sixty pounds. But hoods in Quinnel’s economic bracket don’t do their own gunning, do they?”
“Not likely. Maybe you’d better check up on Quinnel to see if your friend’s one of his gunnies.”
“Not me,” Black said. “I just quit.”
Ross’s eyebrows raised.
“This Quinnel is syndicate stuff,” Black explained. “But you haven’t got any sense. You’ll breeze in and start pushing him around just like you push around local hoods who step on your toes. You’ve got to be independent. You won’t tie in with Bix Lawson so we’d have an army of goons behind us. You’d rather pay three times as much protection and be on your own. Just so you don’t have to take orders from anybody. So what’s it get us? It leaves me and you all alone when the syndicate gets sore and decides to blow up the club. I’ll send you a card from Cuba.”
Ross glanced at his wristwatch. “Ten-thirty,” he said, completely ignoring his assistant’s outburst. “There’s still time to get started tonight. Morton said Quinnel’s staying at the Park Plaza. Get on over there and see what you can dig up.”
Chapter 3
It was two a.m. before Sam Black returned from his mission. He found Clancy Ross still awake in the front room of his apartment, which was on the third floor of the club.
Black said gloomily, “Big John’s been in town five days. Probably just vacationing, because he hasn’t had any conferences with local shots insofar as I could learn. Bix Lawson lives at the Park Plaza too, you know, but he hasn’t been to Quinnel’s suite or Quinnel to his, though they’ve had a few drinks together in the bar. The only visitors to Quinnel’s suite have been a succession of dolls. Usually in groups of three. Quinnel brought two bodyguards with him, and they’re all shacked up together in the same suite. It cost me twenty bucks to the bell captain to pry that much out. You can add it to my next pay check if either of us live till next payday.”
“See either of the two bodyguards?” Ross asked.
Black shook his head. “The bell captain told me a party had been going on in the suite since noon. Usual intimate size. Big John, the two bodyguards and three babes. Lieutenant Redfern and Sergeant Morton interrupted it for a time shortly before I got there, but were only upstairs about fifteen minutes. And nobody stirred out of the suite while I was there.”
Ross frowned at him. “Didn’t you ask the bell captain for descriptions of the two bodyguards?”
“Yeah, sure,” Black said reluctantly, and when Ross merely waited with patience, added in a resigned voice, “One of them is pale and skinny and answers to the name of Bugsy. But he’s registered as Earl Windt. The other is a tall, sunburned guy with a missing right earlobe. But his name’s not Larry Eaton. It’s Larry Horton. Probably a coincidence. There must be hundreds of tall, sunburned guys with missing earlobes.”
“No doubt,” Ross said, smiling slightly.
But there was no humor in the smile. It struck his assistant as anticipatory, and Black was afraid he knew what the gambler was anticipating.
“Listen,” Black said. “Benny was a nice guy. I liked him. But he was only here a month and he wasn’t much more than an acquaintance to either of us. If somebody bumped me, or Oscar the headwaiter, or one of the old-time housemen, I’d expect you to get mad. I’d get mad myself. But this is silly. Quinnel’s only got two guns with him, but just by lifting a phone he could probably have a hundred more in town within hours. We can’t fight a whole syndicate.”
Rising, Ross switched off the TV set. “Might as well get some sleep,” he said mildly. “Probably have a tough day tomorrow.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” Black said. “You’ve got a head like a brick. See you in the morning.”
By “morning” Black actually meant the next afternoon, as Club Rotunda didn’t open till four p.m., and the assistant manager customarily arrived only an hour beforehand. He had finished his usual check of the kitchen, bar and dining room before Clancy Ross came downstairs at a quarter of four.
When the gambler announced that he was going out and didn’t know when he’d be back, Sam Black went to the cloakroom and returned with his hat.
“I won’t need you,” Ross said.
“The hell you won’t,” Black told him. “If you insist on committing suicide, I want to be around to claim your body.”
“I’m only going down to police headquarters.”
“I’ll still go along. Maybe I’ll apply for a job on the force. Even big-time racketeers like Quinnel think twice before they bump cops.”
Chapter 4
Lieutenant Niles Redfern was working the four to midnight trick and had just arrived at his office when Ross and Black walked in. He told them that the lab report on Benny Stoneman showed five thirty-eight-caliber bullets in the stomach, all spaced so closely together a palm could cover them.
Ross asked, “Get anything from Quinnel?”
“I talked to him,” Redfern said. “He, two other guys and three women were having a party in his suite. They all swore it had started the previous noon and none of them had been out of the suite since. Which gave everybody alibis.” Neither Ross nor Black made any comment.
Lieutenant Redfern said he had also talked to the murdered bookkeeper’s widow, who was as beautiful as Ross had indicated. As a routine check the lieutenant had asked for an accounting of her movements, and her only alibi was that she had been home alone all evening.
The gambler asked, “Any suggestions from her about who might have gunned Benny?”
“One,” Redfern answered laconically. “She says he had a mistress.” Both Ross and Black looked surprised.
“Benny?” Black asked incredulously. “A dream of a wife and a mistress? Why the guy was at least forty-five and looked like Ichabod Crane.”
“He must have had something,” Redfern said. “His wife doesn’t know who the mistress was, but she’s sure he had one. From little bits of evidence like lipstick on handkerchiefs, always the same shade, and blonde hairs on his coat lapel. The wife’s a brunette.”
As this seemed to be all the information the lieutenant had, Ross and Black left. Outside, Black climbed into the right-hand seat of Ross’s Lincoln and watched with a scowl as his employer started the car.
Chapter 5
As they crossed the lobby of the Park Plaza toward the elevators, Ross and Black spotted two men and a woman coming from the bar. Both the men were huge without being fat. One, a stranger to Ross, was at least six feet four, with thick shoulders and a broad chest. He had a square, strong-jawed face with a blue-black chin, hairy eyebrows and thick, oily black hair.
The other man, nearly as tall and thick-chested, was Bix Lawson, local political boss and ruler of most of St. Stephen’s rackets. The woman, a sizzling brunette in her late twenties, looked vaguely familiar to Ross, but he couldn’t quite place her.
“Think that man with Lawson might be Quinnel?” he asked Black.
Black looked that way and shrugged. Just then a thin, pale-faced man who had come from the barroom a step or two ahead of the others and had paused to give the lobby a quick once-over, circled the group and placed himself protectively at the tallest man’s rear.