Hot Red Money Read online

  “Naturalized?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were were you born?”

  “Palmyra, Syria.” Khaled looked at the stenographer. “Do you want I should spell that, too?”

  “I’ll tell you what we want you to spell.”

  “I thought maybe Palmyra was a little place you wouldn’t know.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t,” May said. “Have you ever been in trouble before?”

  “I’m not in any trouble now.” Abul Khaled pointed to Lieutenant Hutchinson. “He says a man climbs out of my can and gets himself killed in the alley. So he climbs out, and another man with him walks out the door. Maybe they met and tried to kill each other. How do I know? There are eighty people in here and they all are sailors and look just alike to me. Let them come in again tomorrow, and I wouldn’t know if I’d seen them before.”

  “You’d better come down and look at the dead man.”

  Abul Khaled shrugged. “Can you make me?”

  “Once we prove he was in here, we can make you. I think we’re going to prove it right now.”

  Lornegan and the two waitresses came back in the front door. One of the girls was crying. Both had glistening plastic slickers on, and raindrops shone in their hair.

  “Both the girls identified him,” Lornegan said. “He was sitting at that table there. He had ordered a raki, and hadn’t finished it when the other man came in—the bum.”

  “Did the Medical Examiner get there yet?” Captain Knox asked from his chair.

  “Yes, sir. Dr. Weissberg. It’s murder all right. We can take him away.”

  “So now you can come down to the morgue tomorrow, Abul Abulbul Amir,” Lieutenant May told Khaled. “You’ve helped us so much that we want to be nice to you. You’ll find the atmosphere more pleasant there—cooler than in here.”

  Captain Knox stood up. “Get that man from the Bureau of Criminal Identification in here, Lornegan, and see if he can lift some prints from both the chairs at that table. I’ll leave it with you, May; I’m going home.” He went outside and got in his car.

  At the entrance to Emergency, in St. Vincent’s, on Seventh Avenue, he parked and went in.

  “Captain Knox. Homicide West,” he told the intern on duty. “You brought in a man a couple of hours ago, unidentified. Found in an alley on Charlton Street. Could I have a look-see?”

  “Surest thing.” The intern looked through some papers and picked out one. “He’s in detention. There’s an officer with him, but he’s out like a light.”

  “Serious?”

  “Concussion, but not too critical, I’d say. He’s under sedation. If there’s no post concussion syndrome, or subdural hematoma, by morning he should be okay.”

  The captain went in with the doctor and spoke to the patrolman who was sitting with the unconscious man back of a screen. He took a quick look at the bandaged head, then leaned closer and looked again.

  “Know him, Captain Knox?” the doctor asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I thought there for a minute you did.”

  “So did I, but I was mistaken. You’ll have to keep him tabbed John Doe until he comes around in the morning.”

  The captain went out and got back in his car. He knew this case was going to be sticky—but not how sticky. He’d have to get to Maury quick in the morning. They were very old friends, but Maury would nail his hide to the mast if he let it leak to the other papers that that bum in detention was the G-S Syndicate writer, Maury Morel.

  Chapter Four

  Maury woke up early with a headache beating dully inside his skull, and a taste of black Mississippi mud permeating his mouth and tongue. He stared blearily at the white screen surrounding his bed, and enclosing him in intimate confinement with a uniformed policeman. The officer was dozing beside him, somehow managing to keep his balance on a rigid white metal chair.

  Gingerly, Maury explored his bandaged head, and quickly moved his hand away. His brains were a mess of scrambled eggs, functioning without coherence in a dozen different directions. He raised himself on one elbow and looked at the brown blanket covering him. It had letters on it—upside down: St. Vincent’s Hospital.

  God knows, he’d been on a few good brawls in his lifetime. Blanked out on a few. There was that bad couple of nights with that Reuter’s correspondent in Washington. Started out at the Press Club, and got them tossed out of a sub-committee meeting. Those Englishmen—what the hell was his name? Didn’t matter—they were all alike, weaned on Scotch whisky at the age of two months. Drink you under the bleeding table. Hollow legs and all that sort of thing!

  Maury had forgotten Anne, left her parked in the bedroom at the Statler Hotel. She hadn’t forgotten him. He found that out when the District cops picked him up the following night, still going strong with his potted companion in some bar.

  At least he hadn’t waked up in an alky ward with a gendarme nursing him and a beard as thick as the ghost of G.B.S. sticking all over his face and chin.

  A nurse came back of the screen. She was carrying a basin of water, soap, washcloth, and a towel, which she set on a stand beside the bed.

  “Well, how are we feeling this morning?” she asked brightly. She went to the foot, pulled out a crank, and wound up the bed to a sitting position. A neat little chick with real blond hair visible under the severe cap.

  “We?” Maury moved his eyes to the patrolman. “Does that include him? He’s not with me!”

  The patrolman sat up straight in the chair. “Is he awake?” The question pointedly ignored Maury.

  “Just sleep-talking.” Maury shut his eyes and rested his head back against the pillow to close out the world. When he opened his eyes again the patrolman was still there. Standing up, now.

  “He’s awake, all right,” the nurse said with a smile.

  The patrolman said, “I’ve got to make a telephone call,” and vanished around the edge of the screen.

  “No sense of humor,” Maury declared gloomily. “No sense of humor at all. Imagine our lives and property being dependent on the likes of him.”

  “Well, how do you feel, now that your guardian has gone?”

  “I feel like.…” He started to say: “Somebody sapped me with a blackjack,” but stopped. A thick dark curtain beclouding his mind had been drawn aside with a single sweep bringing past events into clear sharp focus. The hints he had picked up most accidentally a month before while working on another story. The very disgruntled wife of a man, whom Maury knew was an active Communist party member, had spilled her insides out over a bottle of sherry wine. She thought her husband was making contact with a man known to her only as “Pringle,” who was a clever, fanatical, hard-working Communist spy.

  Beshara Shebab. The recording machine. The Beirut Café the night before. Beshara Shebab with that knife in his back, lying in the rain in the alley. “Turlock—Amity Rest,” Shebab had gasped. Was the Lebanese alive or dead? Dead most likely. The chances were that the cop was here because the bum, who was really Maury Morel, had a lot to explain about Beshara’s murder.

  The cute little nurse was talking again: “Come now. You’re going to be okay. Wake up and wash your face and hands and I’ll get you some breakfast.”

  “I’d rather have my clothes, such as they are, if I’m free to go.”

  “You’re not supposed to get out of bed until the doctor sees you. Do you want me to send the orderly?”

  “No,” Maury said. “If you’d fix me a couple of Bloody Marys—two vodka to one tomato-juice, and plenty of Worcestershire, I’d be able to travel on my own.”

  “Sorry, but our alderman keeps this ward dry.” She looked at him closely and shook her head. “You may be a tramp, but you certainly don’t talk that way.”

  “It’s a long story, lady,” Maury said, “and a tear-jerker. Sometime when you have an evening free—”

  “I’ll spend it home with my husband and children.” The nurse laughed and went away.

  Maury fell to thinking,
rather ruefully, about Anne. She couldn’t spend time home with her husband and children, since there were no children. Not even a husband, most of the time. Was she happy?

  That was a question that he couldn’t answer, a question that had started plaguing him many years before. Anne knew his convictions and just how strong they were, but she could have no conception of the bind that he’d finally gotten himself in. The hell of it was he could never tell her. Once it leaked out that you weren’t exactly what you seemed to be, your usefulness ended for everyone. Just let the Old Man, B. Franklin Jeffers, develop an inkling that Maury Morel might have any other purpose in life than dying for good old G-S Syndicate, and the Old Man would have a convenient lapse of memory. He’d forget that he hired Maury nearly a quarter of a century before because of Maury’s fiery writing in the liberal papers. That writing, accepted in the depression, would be just plain Red and radical if published today.

  Breakfast came. Maury toyed listlessly with a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. He was trying to assure himself that a cigarette wasn’t really an essential means of starting a day, when the silver-haired, crinkly-eyed, massive head of Captain Ben Knox appeared around the edge of the screen. It was followed instantly by the captain’s tall muscular uniformed figure.

  “Oh, no, not you!” Maury groaned and put a hand to his forehead. “Not the four-star commander of Homicide West in person! Just tell me who I killed last night and I’ll come quietly. In the meantime, give me a cigarette.”

  Captain Knox grinned, but his gray eyes stayed sober. He knocked out a smoke from his pack against his hand, and held his lighter for Maury, watching steadily as Maury drew in the first gratifying lungful.

  “That’s all I want you to do, Maury—come quietly. You’ll have to pass a couple of doctors to see if you should be committed to Matteawan, but they only know you as John Doe. I dropped by last night and took a look at you. I’ve fixed it so you’ll get out without any fuss, if they find you’re okay.”

  “I have a headache, that’s all. I wonder if they found my stiletto in my clothes last night.”

  Knox snorted. “You’ve knifed a lot of the force in your time, but it’s always been in print. I hope we’ve seen the last of that sniping.”

  “I have a squeamish sensation that I’m being threatened.” The cigarette was making Maury feel better.

  “Save the mark!” Knox said. “I’m keeping this quiet just because I love you, but any more snide remarks in the Globe-Star and every other paper in the country will have it. From this time forth your moniker down at headquarters is ‘Killer Morel.’ Now get up, and if you haven’t got a brain clot, I’ll drive you down to your apartment.”

  “I’m still suspicious of this coddling, Ben. What do you want from me?”

  “Information, naturally. I want your story, Killer, and you’d better make it a good one.”

  Maury swung his long bare legs over the side of the bed and said, “Oh, go to hell!”

  Sometime later, when he checked out his clothes, he found that the tape recorder was missing. He told Knox about it on the short ride down to Morton Street.

  “But I never had the thing turned on. The joke’s on them.”

  “Is it?” Knox looked sideways at Maury’s head. “Some fun. Ha-ha. The greatest help the department has are you cub jokers playing detective. Whoever conked you was after something more than that tape recorder.”

  “I’ll make a note of that, Ben. That’s clever as hell.”

  “They knew who you were, in spite of that TV ad beard that you’ve sprouted on your pan.”

  “How does that figure?”

  “Wait until you see your apartment.”

  “What do you mean? Have you been there?”

  “No, but I phoned Lornegan, who’s carrying this case, after I recognized you last night. He’s been there, and has a man on duty there now. Don’t you ever lock your front door?”

  “I didn’t last night.”

  “Why not?”

  “In case anything happened. I didn’t want the key found on me.”

  “So you expected something to happen. Is that it?”

  “Quit riding me, Ben.”

  “So something happened and they didn’t find the key. Doesn’t make any difference, I guess. They’d have gotten in anyhow. You just made it easier for them.” Knox drove half a block in silence, then asked: “Where’s Anne?”

  “San Francisco, with her folks.”

  “Right now,” Knox said, “that’s a good place for her to be. You should join her, if you’re asking me.”

  “I didn’t ask you anything, except to quit riding me. I’m a sick man. Can’t you see?”

  “That sticking plaster showing under your hat looks better than the white turban, but I can still see.”

  Captain Knox parked his car on Morton Street. He and Maury walked across the courtyard together. The rain of the night before had quit. The day was sunny and cool.

  Knox rang Maury’s bell. A patrolman let them in, and Knox told him he could go.

  Maury paused inside the door, muttering imprecations at sight of the chaotic jumble of the place Anne liked to keep so clean. Every book had been taken from the bookcases and tossed on the floor. The drawers of Maury’s secretary-bookcase were pulled out and empty, their scattered contents adding to the litter. The hall closets had been emptied, and piled up clothes were blocking the passageway from living-room to bedroom.

  In the bedroom, Maury’s steel filing cabinet had met the same fate as his secretary-bookcase. Folders and papers blanketed the floor.

  Maury gazed awhile at the devastation, rubbing his chin. “Looks like hurricane Edna passed through. Thank God they didn’t steal my cigarettes.” He took a fresh pack from a carton on the dresser and slowly tore the cellophane.

  “What did they steal?”

  “How the devil would I know? Most of my material that means anything is in my files at the office.”

  “You must have some idea, Maury.”

  “Too many ideas. Go in and make some coffee, Ben, while I phone the office. Then let me get a shower and a shave and I’ll talk to you.”

  “Phone the office now,” Knox said. “I want to hear.”

  “Have it your way, Cossack.” Maury dialed, asked for the City Desk, and after a short wait got Hal Gow, the City Editor, on the phone.

  “Maury, Hal. That assignment you gave me a month ago on the hot red money blew up in my face last night. … Yeah. It’s turned into a homicide case. … Yeah, homicide. … I met that character, Beshara Shebab, in the Beirut as arranged. … Did Dykes pick up anything from headquarters about a knifing in an alley? Charlton Street, in back of the café? … He did. Good. Here’s a beat: Beshara Shebab is more than a defecting seaman. He had to slip out of Lebanon in a hurry, deckhanding on a freighter, to duck the Reds. His father is a Director, and principal shareholder in the Banque du Shebab-Syrie. Hot stuff, eh? Well, give it a play.”

  Maury lit another cigarette from the butt of the first and used his free hand to fan the smoke away.

  “Identification? Certainly there isn’t any more than what he told me. Listen, Hal, just say identification was made through the intelligent efforts of Captain Ben Knox, Head of Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, who dug up a confidential informant. What about the bum that was found with Shebab? Say he’s dead, or unconscious, or being held incommunicado as a material witness, or anything you and Dykes can cook about him, so long as you keep him under wraps. Why? Because the bum was me. Sure, I’m okay. Safe as a church. Acting Captain Knox is here in person guarding me.

  “You might mention that this clever piece of detective work should get Knox a permanent captaincy. Just kill anything about the bum being me. I’m following this up, personally, Hal, and any leak will ruin me. Don’t start hollering until you hear from me. Okay? ’Bye!”

  Maury hung up. “That’s all there is, Ben, there isn’t any more.”

  Captain Knox took one of Maury’s cigarettes, lit it
, and said: “Confidential informant, huh? Fellow, aren’t you nice to me with your permanent captaincy? Are you leveling with me?”

  “You heard me. How long would I have a job if I handed Hal Gow some phony story?”

  “Longer than I will, if you’ve steered me wrong. I have only your say-so that this DOA is Beshara Shebab, the noble son of some Beirut rich man.”

  “Send his prints to the Central Intelligence Agency. They’ll tell you about his old man in Beirut.”

  “And then what do you want me to do, Maury? Come clean.”

  “Everything you possibly can to nail the guy who murdered Shebab, and conked me. Keep the District Attorney and his sleuths out of my hair. In other words, you never heard of me.

  “Also, pass the word to Lornegan, and his partner, and their precinct lieutenant that all of them might get a boost upstairs if they wanted to forget me.”

  “That isn’t going to be any pushover, and you know it,” Captain Knox said doubtfully. “But if you could give me a little more information, just a lead, say—”

  “Okay. I’m after something called Pringle—”

  “Something?”

  “A Commie underground apparatus—a plan, maybe—a contact man. They have names for all those things as well as people. That’s all I know about it—but I think he’s a man and a spy.”

  “That sounds like one for the Feds, Maury.”

  “And that’s just where I’m going. But first I want a couple of days to make just one more try.”

  “You’d better make it fast, Maury, or I’ll be head of the Homicide Squad on Welfare Island.”

  “They haven’t got one there,” Maury said.

  “That’s what I know, old pal,” Knox said. “Good-by!”

  Chapter Five

  Maury watched through the slatted blinds until Ben Knox’s lithe figure had crossed the courtyard and vanished from his sight out on Morton Street. The key was still on the table where he had left it the night before. He made sure that the apartment door was locked—this time a little late, he thought.

  He wanted nothing more than to go to bed. His head still ached and his stomach was on edge, but the time for sleeping was certainly not now.