Grave Danger Read online

  Johnny Liddell waited until the cab was a block ahead, then kicked his motor into life and eased the car away from the curb and followed it.

  The cabby threaded his cab through the Drive traffic, started bearing east, and finally came to a stop on 110th Street in the middle of the block between Park and Madison. Liddell drove slowly by and marked the number in his mind. Reuter and the big man were too busy taking care of the luggage to pay any attention to a passing car.

  Liddell drove to the corner of Madison and pulled the car to the curb. “Take the car back to your place,” he told the redhead. “I’ll stake out here and wait until one or the other leave. Then maybe we can check on my hunch.” He took his shoulder harness and a .45 from the glove compartment, took off his jacket, adjusted the harness, and covered it with his jacket.

  Lucille wet her lips nervously with her tongue. “Do you really think he’ll have it with him, Johnny?” She put her hand on his knee. “If he has and you get it back, I’ll never be able to tell you how grateful I am.”

  Liddell grinned. “You can make a start any time you want to, baby.”

  After the car had melted into the downtown traffic on Madison, Liddell crossed 110th Street to a small confectionery store and bought a pack of cigarettes. He stood in front of the store, watching the doorway across the street through its grimy window. After about an hour he went outside and leaned against the far side of the building where he’d be invisible to anyone in any of the windows of the building Reuter had entered.

  The early heat of the day started to cool off as the shadows grew longer. Liddell was debating the advisability of waiting until evening and then, if necessary, forcing his way in and facing both men. He had almost decided upon it when the door across the street opened. The bodyguard stepped out onto the stoop and looked in both directions. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and stood smoking for a second. Then he walked down the steps and blended into the stream of whites, browns, yellows, and blacks that ebbs and flows the length of 110th Street twenty-four hours a day.

  Liddell waited until the big man had reached the corner of Park, then he crossed the street. He walked up the short stoop of the house from which the bodyguard had just come.

  The vestibule was small, foul-smelling, empty. Liddell looked around and scowled. There were no mailboxes, merely a few scribbled sex suggestions in crayon and pencil. Several were illustrated, but seemed impractical, if not impossible.

  Liddell pushed through the half-opened door into the hallway. Here an odor compounded of equal parts of Spanish cooking, inadequate toilet facilities, and unwashed bodies was almost gagging. As he walked in, an old man in a dirty undershirt came up from the cellar stairs at the back of the hall. He stared at Liddell suspiciously through a pair of small, old-fashioned metal-rimmed glasses. He took a short-stemmed pipe from between toothless gums and spat. His eyes never left Liddell.

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine. He’s a new tenant. Just moved in today,” Liddell told him. “He gave me the apartment number, but I’ve forgotten it.”

  The old man continued to stare and spat again. He gave no sign of having heard. Liddell reached into his pocket, brought out a bill, and folded it lengthwise. The old man dried the palm of his hand along the seam of his pants, reached out, and snagged the bill. “There’ll be no trouble, mister?” His voice was beery, coarse.

  Liddell grinned and shook his head. “No trouble. He’s an old pal.”

  “He’s in Two C.” He stuck the bill in his pocket and headed for the street. As soon as he had closed the hall door behind him, Liddell started up the grimy, uncarpeted stairs.

  Two C was the second door from the stair well. Liddell put his ear to the paper-thin panel but heard nothing. He tried the knob and found it locked. He could detect a faint rustle of motion from inside the room.

  “That you, Benny?” Reuter’s voice was muffled, cautious.

  “Yeah.” Liddell tried to sound gruff, raspy.

  There was the sound of a chain being taken off, a key turning in the lock. The door opened a crack. Before Reuter could get set, Liddell put his shoulder to it and pushed it open.

  The little man swore under his breath. There was a flash of steel and the tip of his knife jabbed Liddell right above the belt buckle. “How’d you get here?” he snarled.

  “I just followed the smell. You leave a stink a foot wide.”

  “You sure want it bad, sucker,” Reuter said. His tongue wet his purple-red lips and retreated back into his mouth. His sleepy eyes looked malevolent, lethal, half veiled by discolored lids. He looked beyond Liddell into the hall, satisfied himself that the private detective was alone, and motioned him into the room. He shoved the door closed with his foot and locked it with his hand behind him.

  “Nice of you to save us the trouble of looking you up. Now I won’t have to stay in this rathole any longer than it takes to get rid of you.”

  Liddell looked around the squalidly furnished room. “Not quite as fancy as the Settler Arms, is it, Reuter? But I figured you’d rather go on living in a rathole than to stop living entirely.”

  Reuter smoothed the hair back over his ears, using his fingers as a comb. “Speak for yourself, shamus. I expect to go on living. Too bad you can’t say the same.” He jabbed the point of the knife into Liddell’s back. “Get those hands up on the back of your neck where I can see them.”

  Liddell laced his fingers at the back of his neck and permitted Reuter to reach around him to relieve him of his gun. The man with the knife made the mistake of getting too close while he was doing it. Liddell pivoted at the waist, the point of his elbow catching the shorter man in the temple. Reuter staggered and tried to slash out with the knife.

  Liddell spun around, brought up his knee viciously, simultaneously chopping down at Reuter’s neck with the side of his hand. Reuter managed a choked grunt and dropped the knife. He stood swaying for a brief moment, then his knees folded under him. He went to his knees, fell over forward face first, didn’t move.

  Liddell replaced his .45 in its shoulder holster, picked up the knife that had fallen from Reuter’s fingers, and tossed it on the table. He turned the unconscious man over and went through his pockets. There was almost a hundred dollars in bills, a handful of silver, and an alligator wallet. There were no baggage checks or checkroom receipts of any kind.

  Liddell took Reuter’s key chain and turned his attention to the little man’s baggage. After fifteen minutes he knew that what he was looking for was not in any of the valises nor on the man’s person. He picked up Reuter’s knife and slashed the sides of the bags, slit their bottoms looking for a secret compartment. Finally he straightened up, raked his fingers through his hair, and looked around.

  The man hadn’t been in the room long enough to find any but an obvious hiding place, he realized. He checked the drawers of the bureau, felt on the top of closets, and stripped the bedding from the bed. The thing he was looking for was under the mattress.

  It was a thick briefcase. Using one of the keys on Reuter’s chain, he opened it and dumped its contents onto the bed. They consisted of Photostats of IOUs, letters from women turning over their jewels as “payment of my debt,” newspaper clippings of jewel robberies. Liddell whistled at the size of the racket and dumped the papers back into the briefcase.

  Reuter’s eyes opened and rolled back in his head. He seemed to have difficulty in focusing them. Liddell caught him under the arms and dragged him to a chair. Carl Reuter was no longer dapper. The thin, purple lips were now blue, the eyes watery, and the carefully combed hair hung lankly down over his face. He was sick. His head rolled uncontrollably from side to side. He seemed to lack the power to lift it.

  “Listen hard, Reuter,” Liddell told him. “You’re finished. I’m destroying these letters and the IOUs. Then I’m tipping the cops off to the racket you’ve been pulling. If you’re smart, you won’t be here when they come looking for you.”

  There was a light tap on the door. Lid
dell walked over and put his lips close to the door. “That you, Benny?” he whispered in a passable imitation of Reuter’s voice.

  The voice on the other side was urgent. “Yeah. Let me in.”

  Liddell carefully unlocked the door and waited until he detected signs of the bodyguard holding the knob on the other side. Then he yanked it open with all his strength and pulled the man on the other side off balance.

  Benny’s eyes popped when he recognized Liddell. He started to raise his hands, but his reflexes were too slow. Liddell hit him in the stomach with a straight left and slammed his right against the big man’s jaw. Benny reeled backward. Liddell hit him again with an overhand right that drove him still farther back. The low banister caught his back, gave way with a screech, and the big man disappeared into the well of the stairway.

  Heads popped out from doorways all along the hall and were withdrawn as though they were on strings. Liddell stood at the head of the stairs, looking down at the tangle of arms and legs that was the big man.

  He walked back into Reuter’s room and picked up the briefcase. The man in the chair stared his impotent hatred. Liddell grinned at him, walked down the stairs, and stepped across the unconscious bodyguard. At the bottom, he came face to face with the old man in the dirty undershirt. He had a bag filled with beer bottles in his arms. He looked from the unconscious man on the floor to Liddell.

  “You told me there wouldn’t be no trouble, mister,” he said reprovingly.

  Liddell grinned at him. “No trouble at all, Pop. It was a pleasure.”

  4

  JOHNNY LIDDELL PUSHED through the frosted-glass door that bore the legend Johnny Liddell, Private Investigations. A redheaded girl sat at a typewriter in the outer office, pecking at its keys, taking excessive care not to fracture the finish on her nails. Her hair was cut short, curled around her ears; she wore a sheer silk blouse that made no attempt to discount her obvious assets.

  She looked up as Liddell walked in and consulted the small baguette on her wrist with an annoyed frown. “You said you’d keep in touch,” she told him. “I’ve been calling every gin mill in town. It’s almost nine o’clock.”

  “You shouldn’t have waited, Pinky,” Liddell told her.

  “Now he tells me,” she groaned. “After I’ve gone and broken my date.”

  “Sorry, Pink. I’ve been up to my ears.”

  “In business, I hope,” she pouted. She reached over and picked up a penciled memo from her basket. “Some babe’s been calling you every hour on the hour.”

  “Lucille Hart?”

  The redhead nodded. “Sounds like she’s in a real fever to hear from you.”

  Liddell nodded. “Any other calls?”

  Pinky shook her head. “She kept the line so busy nobody else could have gotten through.” She sniffed. “What’s in the briefcase?”

  “Dynamite. Enough to blow a dozen screwy dames into a cell.”

  “Padded?”

  “Barred.” He held the briefcase up and glowered at it. “A little character named Reuter collected things. Letters mostly. I traded him for his collection.”

  “What’d you give him? A fractured skull?”

  “The X rays aren’t down yet.” He walked over to the door to his private office and pushed it open. “Give me a few minutes to clean this up and I’ll make up that dinner you missed. The Hart gal leave a number?”

  “Yeah. Want her?”

  Liddell nodded and walked through into the private office. He dropped the briefcase behind the desk and sank into his swivel chair. After a moment the telephone on his desk buzzed. He snagged the receiver and held it to his ear. “Lucille? Johnny Liddell.”

  He could hear the sharp intake of breath across the wire. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours, Johnny. Is everything all right?”

  Liddell picked a cigarette from the pack on his desk and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Everything’s fine, baby.”

  “You’ve got them?”

  “Sure. I told you to stop worrying, didn’t I?”

  The wire was silent for a moment. “Are you going to bring them over?”

  “In the morning.” He lit the cigarette and blew a stream of smoke at the receiver. “I can’t make it right now.”

  “I’ll be here all evening. It doesn’t have to be right now.”

  Liddell considered and dropped the decision. “Better make it the morning, baby. I’ve got a couple of odds and ends to clean up around here.”

  The voice on the other end seemed mildly disappointed. “If that’s what you want. I’m terribly grateful, Johnny.”

  “Forget it, baby. I’ll see you around eleven in the morning.” He dropped the receiver on its hook and leaned back.

  The redhead from the front office came stamping in. “Don’t call me odds and ends.”

  “If you persist in eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, you’re bound to hear unpleasant things about yourself. After all, Mrs. Hart’s a client.”

  “That’s another thing, bay-bee. What’s with this grateful routine? She gets a bill, doesn’t she?” She made a face. “I’m terribly grateful, John-nee,” she mimicked.

  Liddell chuckled. “You sound almost as though you didn’t trust me, Pink.”

  “That’s a coincidence. I don’t.” The redhead stalked to the corner of the desk and helped herself to a cigarette. “What did we do for her, anyway?”

  “I told you. She wrote some letters that mightn’t look good to a judge and jury — ”

  Pinky dropped into the armchair across from the desk. “She was probably just proving she could write.”

  “Lay off, Pink. It was just a business deal. We get the letters back and trade them to her for a check.”

  “From the sound of that drool of hers, it was more like monkey business. How come we never have any men clients that get that grateful?”

  Liddell leaned across the desk and held a lighter for her. “Maybe I should use a different deodorant.” He set the lighter down on the desk. “Don’t give me a bad time, baby. I’ve had a hard day.”

  “I’ll bet,” the redhead snorted.

  “Where do you want to go for dinner? How about a ride out to Tony’s Trouville, and — ”

  There was a sound of a closing door in the outer office. A moment later the door to the inner office opened, and two men stood in the doorway. Liddell’s hand streaked for the .45 in his shoulder holster and froze with the tips of his fingers brushing the butt. Pinky sat still, her cigarette halfway to her lips. Her eyes, like Liddell’s, were glued to the muzzles of the twin .38s that stared back at them unblinkingly.

  “Hope we’re not breaking up anything.” One of the men grinned. He was heavy set, thick in the shoulder. He wore a pearl-gray fedora, its brim pulled low over his eyes, a dark suit, dazzlingly white shirt, and dark tie. The .38 looked like a toy gun in his heavy hand. When he grinned, a gold tooth glistened in his lower jaw.

  The other man was slim and wore no hat. His hair, beginning to show signs of thinning at the temples, was light and wavy. He was pretty, in a weak, effeminate way. He ran to flashiness in his clothes, from the powder blue of his suit to the rainbow colors in his tie. The hand that held the gun also sported a heavy gold bracelet. He ignored Pinky and concentrated on Liddell.

  The heavy-set man led the way into the room and his partner took up his place beside the door. “Mind if we come in?”

  “Be my guest.” Liddell looked from one to the other but failed to recognize either. “What’s this all about?”

  “We’re just returning a call you made today. To a friend of ours,” Wavy Hair told him. His voice held the faintest trace of a lisp, was low, intimate, almost as though he were whispering. “You were pretty rough with our friend. We don’t like people to be rough with our friends, do we, Stanley?”

  The big man stuck his gun in the waistband of his trousers and shook his head. “No, Liddell, we don’t like it at all.” He walked over to the desk and stared down at L
iddell. “You know, Joey, I see a lot of these private-eye characters on TV. They’re real tough characters, Joey, real tough. Hah, Liddell?”

  Liddell stared up at him. “We get by.” The cigarette waggled in the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

  Stanley shuffled around the desk and grinned down at him. His heavy hand swung in a short arc and knocked the cigarette from between the detective’s lips. “You don’t want to smoke so much, pally. It’s bad for your wind.”

  Liddell struggled to get out of the chair, but was at a disadvantage, and couldn’t ward off the brutal chop Stanley aimed at the side of his neck. He grunted and sank back into the chair. The big man reached down and pulled him to his feet. Liddell stood swaying, his eyes glassy from the blow.

  “See what I mean, Joey? They’re real tough characters.” The big man chopped at Liddell’s neck again and knocked him to his knees. The gold tooth glistened in a pleased grin. “I like tough characters.”

  “Leave him alone, you’ll kill him!” Pinky screamed. She pulled herself out of her chair and started for Liddell.

  The big man caught her by the arm and swung her around. “Hey, I like babes with spirit.” He pulled her against him brutally and sought her mouth with his. She threw her head back and tried to twist away. His lips missed her mouth and settled for the hollow of her throat.

  Pinky got the flat of her hands against his chest and pushed with all her strength. He let her get an arm’s length away, then reached out and caught her blouse at the neckline and tore it away. Her breasts spilled out as she struggled to get away from him. He slid his arm around her and bent her backward.

  “Cut it out, Stanley,” Wavy Hair snapped. “That’s not what we came for. Take care of Liddell and let’s get out.”

  Stanley covered the girl’s mouth with his and straightened up. “That was real nice, baby. Let’s do it again sometime.” He stared at her nakedness and reached over and grabbed her breast.

  “I told you to cut it out,” Joey disapproved.