He chuckled some more and pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
“The fella with me was Ormiston, who is one of the best shots in our outfit, so I changed seats with him and when you turned off on Crescent Heights I told him to let you have it close enough to look good without mussing up the car too much.”
I said, “Oh,” again.
“Then a couple blocks further along Ormiston jumped out and hailed a cab, and when you came along he tailed you to the drug store and went into the next booth and heard you call Myra Reid and Amante. I’ve been following your leads ever since — that’s all I had to go by. I’ve had men tailing your men — the two you’ve had on Bergliot and Axiotes—”
I cleared my throat and tried to look intelligent, interrupted: “And me?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh — and you.”
I felt like two cents but there wasn’t anything I could do about it but laugh with him. I said: “The least you can do, under the circumstances, is come up and have a drink.”
Harry was waiting. He yelped: “Hollberg has a fifty-fifty chance.” He turned to Delavan. “Your boys lost ’em.”
We told him we’d found ’em and I sketched the business at Axiotes’ for him.
The three of us had quite a few drinks. Delavan called up his headquarters and said he was cleaning up some very important evidence in the Kiernan case and he didn’t leave till about one-thirty.
Harry and I had a nightcap and talked it all over and then I went to bed and had a beautiful dream. It was mostly about the expression on Amante’s face when he heard the news.
Dutch Treat
Lefty Bowman and I played Spit-in-the-Ocean to see who’d take whose vacation when. I won, or maybe I lost — I forget which. Anyway, I took the last two weeks in July. I spent a week in Bermuda and a couple of days in Havana, got back to town on the twenty-ninth. The Old Man met me at the dock and on the way uptown told me all about the Castell business.
It was the biggest lick of its kind in twenty years. On the night of the twenty-first a collection of unset emeralds had been stolen from the safe of Castell Ltd, in London. There wasn’t anything to work on, or if there was Scotland Yard hadn’t found it; the stones had simply disappeared. The insurance company that carried the policy had offered a reward of twenty thousand pounds and its American office had called in the Old Man the day before I got back.
It seems someone in the London office had a big highly polished hunch the stuff had been rushed to the States, and a half-dozen assorted English sleuths were on their way to New York.
Our firm — the Old Man was it, Lefty and I just worked for him — handled more insurance cases than anything else and had a pretty swell reputation — as reputations of confidential investigating outfits go.
When the Old Man stopped for breath I suggested that he get to the point — what angles did we have to work on? He said there weren’t any angles. I asked him if he meant we were to go to work with nothing but the fact that somebody in England had a hunch a million dollars’ worth of stolen emeralds were somewhere in America, and he said yes.
I told him what I thought, and he asked since when did we need facts to work on? We’d find our own facts.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get a lead. I went to the branch of the insurance company and talked to a British gent named Wister who had less to say, for his size, age, and weight, than any insurance man I ever saw. I called up a few people who might have bright ideas where anything as hot as the Castell stuff might be, if there was enough money in it. Maybe a thirty-three and a third percent split on twenty thousand pounds wasn’t enough money; none of them had anything to say, and said it very emphatically. I got down to the Immigration Bureau at about four-thirty and after wading through several acres of red tape I got a list of everyone who’d come in from England during the past few days. There were two names in the lot that meant something — maybe.
One of them, Lina Ornitz, ran a restaurant on upper Broadway. She’d been born and raised in London, spent most of her mature life in one or another English prison. In the year of 1932, in her badly preserved late fifties, she’d married a Russian with a couple of thousand dollars and they’d come to New York and opened the restaurant. There hadn’t been a reputable British crook in the last thirty years that Lina didn’t know and have some kind of line on. And she’d been visiting England! She’d left New York on the tenth of July and returned on the twenty-eighth.
It was a little after seven when I got off the subway and walked up Broadway to the restaurant. Ornitz was sitting behind the cigar counter. He grunted, “Hello, Mister Keenan.” He weighed about two-ninety in his sock feet and didn’t stand around more than he could help. I asked for Lina.
He said she was home, he expected her in a few minutes.
For eleven years I’ve made it my business to know people like the Ornitzes — know them pretty well. I said I’d go on over to the flat. They lived about a block and a half away, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
Ornitz said: “Maybe you’ll miss her.” He picked up the telephone. “I’ll see if she’s left.”
I sat down at the counter and ordered a bowl of cold borscht and he dialed a number, waited a minute, said:
“Hello, Lina... Mister Keenan is here to see you... Uh-huh — how long?... All right, I tell him.” He hung up. “She’s leaving now. She’ll be here in a couple minutes.”
I finished my borscht, waited. I told Ornitz I’d heard Lina had been away and he beamed and told me how good business had been and how Lina had been able to afford a trip back to England to visit her folks. I’d already figured out that on the ship she’d crossed on she couldn’t’ve had more than six days in London. When I asked Ornitz how long Lina had been away he grinned and said: “Not even three weeks. She got homesick.”
We talked about this and that for another ten minutes. Lina didn’t show. I finally said: “I guess she got stuck. I’ll go on over and see what’s keeping her.”
Ornitz shrugged, mumbled something about the undependability of women. I paid my check and went over to the flat. I knocked several times but no one answered so I tried the door, pushed it open, yelled, “Hey! Is anybody home?” There was still no answer; I crossed the living room to the kitchen. Lina Ornitz was lying face down on the kitchen floor with the handle of an ice pick sticking out of the left side of her back, a little below the shoulder blade.
She was very dead. I called Nick Moore at the precinct station and called Ornitz and told him something had happened and that he’d better come home. Then I looked around.
The back door was unlocked, led to a rickety stair, an alleyway running to the street; there was a half-full flask of Chianti on the kitchen table, one stained glass; there were a dozen or so telephone numbers scrawled haphazardly in pencil on the wallpaper around the telephone. I made a list of all that were legible.
I’d just finished a swift but fairly neat check on the contents of most of the drawers and closets when Ornitz puffed in. I sat him down in the living room and broke the news as gently as I could. I was getting into my stride on who’d want to liquidate Lina, why she’d gone to England, and a few leading questions like that when Nick Moore wandered in with a plainclothesman and a cop.