"This is a two-way deal, remember?" "Yeah, I remember."
Downstairs, I stood in front of the building a minute. I took the time to stick a Lucky in my mouth and even more time lighting it. I let the flare of the match bounce off my face for a good ten seconds, then dragged in deeply on the smoke and whipped it back into the night air. The guy in the doorway of the apartment across the street stirred and made a hesitant motion of having come out of the door and not knowing which way to walk. I turned east and he made up his mind. He turned east too.
Halfway down the block I crossed over to make it a little easier on him. Washington didn't discount shoe leather as expenses so there was no sense giving the boy a hard time. I went three more blocks closer to the subway station and pulled a few gimmicks that had him practically climbing up my back.
This time I had a good look at him and was going to say hello to add insult to injury when I caught the end of a gun muzzle in my ribs and knew he wasn't Washington at all.
He was young and goodlooking until he smiled, then the crooked march of short, stained teeth across his mouth made him an expensively dressed punk on a high-class job. There was no hop behind his pupils so he was a classy workman being paid by an employer who knew what the score was. The teeth smiled bigger and he started to tell me something when I ripped his coat open and the gun in the pocket wasn't pointing at me any more. He was half spun around fighting to get the rod loose as the side of my hand caught him across the neck and he sat down on the sidewalk with his feet out in front of him, plenty alive, plenty awake, but not even a little bit active.
I picked the Banker's Special out of his hand, broke it, dumped the shells into the gutter and tossed the rod back into his lap. His eyes were hurting. They were all watered up like he was ashamed of himself.
"Tell your boss to send a man out on the job the next time," I said.
I walked on down the street and turned into the subway kiosk wondering what the deuce had happened to Washington. Little boy blue back on the sidewalk would have a good story to take home to papa this time. Most likely he wouldn't get his allowance. At least they'd know a pro was in the game for a change.
I shoved a dime in the turnstile, went through, pulled the sheet out of my pocket, glanced at it once and walked over to the downtown platform.
Chapter Six
Something happens to Brooklyn at night. It isn't a sister borough any more. She withdraws to herself and pulls the shades down, then begins a life that might seem foreign to an outsider. She's strange, exciting, tinted with bright lights, yet elusive somehow.
I got off the Brighton Line at De Kalb and went up to the street. A guy on the corner pointed the way to the address I wanted and I walked the few blocks to it.
What I was looking for was an old-fashioned brownstone, a hangover from a half-century past, that had the number painted on the door and looked at the street with dull, blank eyes. I went up the four sandstone steps, held a match to the mailboxes and found what I wanted.
The name CARVER and TORN were there, but somebody had drawn a pencil through the two of them and had written in BERNSTEIN underneath. All I could do was mutter a little under my breath and punch the end button on the line, the one labeled SUPER. I leaned on it until the door started clicking, then I opened it and went in.
He came to the door and I could almost see his face. Part of it stuck out behind the fleshy shoulder of a woman who towered all around him and glared at me as if I had crawled up out of a hole. Her hair was a gray mop gathered into tiny knots and clamped in place with metal curlers. She bulged through the bathrobe, trying to slow down her breathing enough so she could say something. Her hands were big and red, the knuckles showing as they bit into her hips.
Dames. The guy behind her looked scared to death. She said, "What the hell do you want! You know what time it is? You think..."
"Shut up." Her mouth stopped. I leaned against the door jamb. "I'm looking for the super."
"I'm the..."
"You're not anything to me, lady. Tell your boy to come out." I thought her face would fall apart. "Tell him," I repeated.
When men learn to be men maybe they can handle dames. There was something simpering in the way she forced a smile and stepped aside.
The boy didn't want to come out, but he did. He made himself as big as he could without it helping much. "Yes?"
I showed him the badge I still had. It didn't mean a thing any more, but it still shined in the light and wasn't something everybody carried. "Get your keys."
"Yessir, yessir." He reached up beside the door, unhooked a ring and stepped back into the hall.
The dame said. "You wait a minute, I'll be right..."
He seemed to stand on his toes. "You wait right there until I come back," he told her. "I'm the super." He turned and grinned at me. Behind him his wife's face puffed out and the door slammed.
"Yessir?" he said.
"Berga Tom's place. I want to go through it."
"But the police have already been through there."
"I know."
"Today I rented it already."
"Anybody there now?"
"Not yet. Tomorrow they're supposed to come."
"Then let's go."
First he hesitated, then he shrugged and started up the stairs. Two flights up he fitted a key into the lock of a door and threw it open. He felt around for the light switch, flipped it and stood aside for me.
I don't know what I expected to find. Maybe it was more curiosity than anything that dragged me up there. The place had been gone over by experts and if anything had been worth taking it was gone by now. It was what you might call a functional apartment and nothing more. The kitchen and living room were combined with a bathroom sandwiched between two bedrooms that jutted off the one wall. There was enough furniture to be comfortable, nothing gaudy and nothing out of place.
"Whose stuff is this?"
"We rent furnished. What you see belongs to the landlord."
I walked into the bedroom and opened the door of the closet. A half dozen dresses and a suit hung there. The floor was lined with shoes. The dresser was the same way, filled to the brim. The clothes were good, fairly new, but not the type that came out of exclusive shops.
Stockings were neatly rolled up and packed into a top drawer. Beside them were four envelopes, two with paid-up receipts, one a letter from the Millburn Steamship Line saying that there were no available berths on the liner Cedric and how sorry they were, and the other a heavier envelope holding about a dozen Indianhead pennies.
The other small drawer was cluttered with half-used lipsticks and all the usual junk a dame can collect in hardly any time at all.
It was the other bedroom that gave me the surprise. There was nothing there at all. Just a made-up bed, a cleaned-out closet and dresser drawers lined with old sheets of newspaper.
The super watched me until I backed out into the living room, saying nothing.
"Whose room?" I jerked my thumb at the empty place. "Miss Carver's."
"Where is she?"
"Two days ago... she moved out."
"The police see her?"
He nodded, a fast snap of the head. "Maybe that's why she moved out."
"You going to empty this place out?"
"Guess I got to. The lease is up next month, but it was paid in advance. Hope I don't get in trouble renting so soon." "Who paid it?"
"Tom's name is on the lease." He looked at me pointedly.
"I didn't ask that.
"She handed me the dough." I stared at him hard and he fumbled with his pajamas again. "How many times do I have to tell you guys. I don't know where she got the dough. Far as I know she didn't do any messing around. This place sure wasn't no office or that nosy old lady of mine would've known about it."