Detective Ted Cuneo turned to Johnny in the back seat of the cab, after the first fifteen blocks of the ride to Spanish Harlem had been covered in silence. His tone was puzzled. “You're quite a ladies' man, Killain. This Spanish girl-”
“I know her brother,” Johnny cut in.
“-and Turner's receptionist,” the detective continued, unheeding. “You know her brother, too?” His teeth showed whitely against his sallow face. “I might have to ask you for the formula. I haven't seen two back to back like that in years.”
The balance of the ride was made in silence. They pulled in behind another cab in front of the dingy tenement, and Johnny looked out at Rick Manfredi, who was turning from halfway across the sidewalk to study them. The gambler had a long box under his arm, and his eyes flicked from Cuneo to Johnny. His expression darkened angrily, and he strode toward the cab as Johnny got out on the street side and walked around it. “I don't want you around here, Killain!” he said sharply.
“He's here because I brought him here!” Cuneo bristled immediately.
Manfredi shifted his attention to the detective. “I already told you I don't mind your scratching over my back yard, Cuneo, but I don't want you bugging the girl.”
“What the hell are you, a protective association or something?” the detective demanded.
The gambler shifted his box from one arm to the other, ignoring Cuneo's remark. “I'll go with you,” he said flatly.
“You're not going anywhere!” Cuneo's temper was growing short. “Take a walk till you're sent for, sonny!”
Manfredi's voice was steady. “I'm her fiance, Cuneo. There are times you can push me around, but this isn't one of them. Make an issue of it and I'll promise you a wasted trip.”
Cuneo glared at him, undecided, glanced at Johnny standing silently to one side and abruptly started for the iron steps. “Be my guest,” he threw over his shoulder. “All I want right now is to get home to dinner.”
Johnny followed him, and the gambler fell in behind. They mounted the five flights in silence and waited while Cuneo knocked on the door of 5-B. He knocked again more sharply when there was no response and whirled on Manfredi. “So she took a runout!” he grated. The gambler looked surprised, but Johnny pointed silently to the stairs. Cuneo's mottled color faded a little as he listened to the ascending footsteps, and in seconds Consuelo Ybarra's shawled head and shoulders appeared around the final turn as she climbed to the fifth-floor landing.
She looked windblown and breathless. “I 'ad a call to go out,” she managed to get out, and fumbled in her bag. “The key-”
Johnny was startled at the difference in her looks when she got the door open. The first time he had seen her she had been twenty-five and looked eighteen. She looked thirty-five now; the old-womanish shawl blotted out the youthful sheen of her hair, and there were deep lines about her mouth and eyes.
He pushed inside with the rest, and the girl waved them to the room beyond as she pulled off the shawl. “I will take off my coat-”
Rick Manfredi snapped on the light in the semidark inner room and opened the long box he was carrying. He removed two dozen red roses from the swaddling tissue and arranged them in the crook of his arm, a complacent little smile on his round, smooth face. He moved forward to catch Consuelo's attention as she entered. “For you, querida,” he said quickly, and presented his arm with a flourish.
The girl appeared not to have seen the roses as she stood before him with hands knitted in a fold of her skirt. “My Uncle Terry is dead,” she said quietly with an expressionless face. The gambler looked shocked. Ted Cuneo looked puzzled and glanced at Johnny, who kept his attention fastened upon Consuelo Ybarra. “I am jus' from the hospital,” she continued in the same quiet tone. “He spoke to me before he- died.” Rick Manfredi paled, and stood in sudden awkwardness with arm still extended. “He tol' me how you changed the round with Gidlow.” The dark eyes burned upward at the gambler. “An' how you had him beaten when you found out that he knew. You meant to kill him then, and you finally succeeded!”
“No!” Manfredi cried out hoarsely as the girl's hand flashed upward like lightning from its hiding place in her skirt. The glinting metal in her hand slashed him from eyebrow to jaw-line, and he screamed as his arms jerked upward with a reflexive movement that sent the roses to the ceiling. He staggered back a pace as the knife whipped across his face again, and the roses fell on them both. With a guttural sound the gambler brought his hands down in clenched fists upon the girl's head, and she wobbled and fell back against the wall on her knees. The wall held her cruelly upright as the crazed man slammed maniacal punches into the beautiful face, which disappeared in a crimson smear before she pitched forward.
Johnny's hard hands on Rick Manfredi's shoulders jerked the gambler over backward so violently the back of his head hit the floor first. He rolled and rolled like a stricken animal, blood spurting between the hands that were holding the gaping face. A pale-faced Detective Cuneo put himself belatedly in motion and tried to ignore the sounds from the floor as he grabbed up the telephone.
The overpowering scent of crushed roses filled the room.
Johnny swung up into the seat beside the driver as the second ambulance pulled away, and the man behind the wheel glanced sidewise at him curiously. “You there, Jack? Lovers' quarrel?” He shrugged at Johnny's silence. “How's it look, Pauline?” he called over his shoulder.
“Plastic surgery for both,” the woman intern's voice replied matter-of-factly. “This one's not quite as bad as the man.”
Ahead of them the traffic thickened in front of their blinking red light, and the siren steadied down to a prolonged wail.
CHAPTER XV
Johnny bounded up on an elbow from shattered sleep at the piercing ring of the phone. His closed-eyes grab for the lamp switch knocked the telephone to the floor, and, muttering impatiently, he hauled in on the dangling cord until the receiver was in his hand. “Yeah? Whatisit?” His voice was a sleep-thickened rumble.
“Killain?”
“Yeah.”
“Get over to my place.”
Tiny hairs stiffened on the back of Johnny's neck; he came awake all over. The voice at the other end of the line had the hollow, deadened tone of a man past the last milepost of terror. “Who is this?” he temporized. He knew who it was.
“Munson. Get over to my place.”
“You mean right now?” Johnny squinted at the alarm's luminous dial. 9:00 p.m. “Why?”
“Get over to my place,” the voice said for the third time. Johnny could hear the ragged breathing.
“Where are you?” he asked finally.
“My place-Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Get over here.”
“Okay, okay.” Johnny tried to hang up the phone twice before he remembered that the base was on the floor. He dredged it up, cradled the receiver and restored the phone gingerly to the night table. He fumbled the bedside lamp on, listening again in his mind to the stark voice on the telephone. It didn't sound any better in the light than it had in the dark.
He dressed quickly, then paused, sitting on the edge of the bed, a shoe in his hand. Al Munson. What circumstance could reduce Al Munson to the function of a wrung-out automaton? Johnny stared at the wall reflectively before he put on the shoe.
On the street he started for the cab stand at the corner, and changed his mind. He hailed the first cruising cab that came by, instead. “Fifth and Sixty-eighth,” he told the driver. No sense riding right up to the door on a white horse; a look at the ground first cost nothing.
From Fifth he walked up Sixty-eighth on the wrong side of the street and, when he spotted Fifty-two, ran a wary eye on the cars parked out front. All empty-unless someone were crouched down on a back seat or the floor. He skimmed the street with a practiced eye; pedestrian traffic was light.
He studied the building from across the street. It didn't look quite as prosperous as its neighbors, or as the address would indicate. No canopy. No doorman. A self-service building, from the look, Johnny decided. Self-service elevator, direct-line phones. He stood in a doorway for five minutes, getting steadily more chilled, and no one entered or exited from Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Johnny stamped his feet impatiently. He wasn't finding out anything here, and he wasn't dressed for outside work.