Part 16 (1/2)

Already my vision had dimmed; grayness swam before my eyes. I clasped my hands together, banged them up against Quinn's wrists - but his grip stayed firm. He was faster than I'd thought, and also he was not merely fat and flabby but fat and d.a.m.ned strong. I could feel myself getting weaker.

I slapped my hands against his face, got one thumb in the corner of his mouth, the other in one of his eyes and shoved, twisted, tried to pull his head apart. He yelled and jerked his head back, and his grip on my throat loosened.

On my knees I swayed forward, vision still blurred, but I could see Quinn's white throat swimming in the grayness around me. I threw my right hand forward, not in a fist but with the knuckles jutting out. The blade of knuckles mashed into his throat and he reeled backward, a harsh grating sound coming from his mouth. He was in pain, dazed, and I had time to set myself, slam my open right hand under his chin and hard against his throat. His red eyes nearly closed, he sagged limply. I slammed him again. That did it. He crumpled to the floor.

He was out, but I wanted him out for quite a while. I found the sap I'd dropped, moved back to Quinn, and swatted him in the middle of his forehead. His head wiggled a little; the rest of him didn't. I rolled his bulk aside, got my .38 off the carpet, then leaned over the open safe. It was about a foot and a half square, and I could see money, papers, a couple of portfolios down inside it.

I pawed at it, hauled the entire contents out and threw aside the stuff obviously useless to me, like the jewelry and money. There was too much of the material to carry under my outfit, so I had to check it right here and now for the most important items. In the first ten seconds I found one beauty. It was a letter to Quinn from John Porter, the minor city official - with a spotless reputation - whose name had been mentioned to me by Pinky, the same Porter I'd seen at the meeting with Quinn earlier today. The whole letter was interesting, but particularly one paragraph which said, ”After all, we agreed on 500, so in the last six months you've saved 1200 by sticking me. Maybe times are tough, but I got to pay my income tax too - that's a joke.”

The tone of the letter seemed more plaintive than angry, but I was quite sure it had made Quinn more angry than anything else. Mrs. Quinn, during our talk in the Lantern, had told me K. C. Flagg had been stuffing into his own pockets chunks of Quinn's payoffs to ”The Boys” in town, and that when Quinn found out about it he'd stormed over to the Whitestone and had it out with Flagg; in addition she had told me her hubby learned of Flagg's thieving ways when one of the short-changed boys wrote Quinn a complaining and not-too-prudent letter. Jay, too, had told me much the same story.

I had no doubt that the letter in my hand was the same one to which Mrs. Quinn had referred, the one which gave Quinn his first knowledge that he was being cheated by his bagman, K. C. Flagg. Cheated in this one case - probably only one of many - out of $200 a month.

So that made the date on the letter especially interesting. It was dated the 23rd of November. Which meant it would have been delivered to Quinn on the 24th. And K. C. Flagg had been shot to death on the 24th of November.

The letter put some unsightly spots on Porter's spotless reputation - but it could ruin Quinn. Means and opportunity were easy; here was motive, in black and white.

I looked quickly through some of the other papers. There were a couple of the small tapes used for dictating machines, and I put them in my pile of stuff-to-take, just on general principles, along with a spool of regular recording tape. Several of the letters and papers looked extremely intriguing, and damaging to various and sundry characters, but I wasn't interested in those items at the moment.

Maybe I didn't have enough yet, but I had plenty to satisfy others besides myself of Quinn's guilt. I grabbed a handful of miscellaneous papers, added my Porter letter to the stack and stuffed the crumpled wad into one of my coat pockets, under the clown suit. The one large and two small tapes I wrapped in more of Quinn's doc.u.ments, and jammed that into the other pocket.

Then, as I started to toss a letter - or what looked like a letter - aside, my eye fell on the name ”Semmelwein.” I blinked, grabbed it again, started reading. It was four sheets clipped together, handwritten in a small script. The name of Ira Semmelwein was there, but only incidentally. It told a story, named names - a lot of names. I wanted to get the h.e.l.l out of here, but I took time to skim the four pages until I knew what I'd found. And next to the letter from Porter, this was the prize of the package. It was a suicide note. And it was signed, ”Raleigh Prentice.”

Raleigh Prentice, the wealthy and respected businessman who, on that night four years or so ago, had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It had been an open-and-shut case of suicide, but no note had been found. I remembered, too, however, that Prentice had arranged to meet a man at his home that night, but had killed himself just before the man arrived. The man - Frank Quinn.

So there had been a suicide note. And it had been found, not by the police, but by Frank Quinn - when he'd been in the Prentice home that night immediately after Prentice's death, ”comforting” hysterical Mrs. Prentice, phoning the police.

There wasn't time to digest all the note said, but in it Prentice confessed to being a sham, a fraud, a thief. He, in collaboration with several other men, some of them city officials, had paid - and received - graft and bribes, milked corporations, profited illegally from munic.i.p.al construction; they had skimmed the cream from contracts to build bridges, schools, roads, using inferior materials and pocketing the money thus saved. There was a long list of specific crimes, and the names of Raleigh Prentice's partners in corruption were named.

Among them were John Porter, Ira Semmelwein, James H. Trout, Phillip Brenmount - every one of the men I'd seen meeting with Quinn today, while watching on my television screen. All of them, and four or five others, a couple of whom I knew were dead now. Plus the name K. C. Flagg. So here in my hand, and then quickly added to the other material in my pockets, was the answer to what it was that had given Quinn his sudden boost up the crime ladder four years ago. This letter, written by a man who was going to kill himself because of what he revealed in it, was in the hands of a man like Quinn, a blackmail weapon of immense power. Obviously Quinn had used it well, and undoubtedly added other weapons of his own as time went on.

I had enough now. With this to support what I knew but hadn't been able to prove, it was more than enough.

I put my .38 back in its holster and got to my feet, and my eye fell on the phone on top of Quinn's black desk. I grabbed it, reached for the dial so I could put in a fast call to the police and get a dozen radio cars on their way out here. Right now was the time when I wanted lots of policemen around me - and there was sufficient, and legitimate, reason for calling them. The papers I had in my pockets - and a dead man in a clown suit. But there wasn't any dial on the phone.

I had the receiver at my ear and heard Nevada's tw.a.n.gy voice saying, ”Yeah? Yeah? Frank?”

I almost slammed the phone back on the hook but I stopped in time. That might be just enough to cause Nevada to send some of the hired hands up here checking. Instead, I said in a thick slurred voice, ”Hiya, pal. Gimme Oakridge 2-2348. Somebody heisted my dial.”

”You better get the h.e.l.l out of there,” Nevada said. ”You ain't supposed to be in there. Frank around?”

”He's out. Gimme Oakridge 2-2348. Wanna talk to Mabel.”

Nevada told me to go get another drink instead, and I let him talk me out of phoning Mabel. I hung up, sweating, then got Quinn's key, went to the door and unlocked it. For a moment I paused there, then with a last look at the havoc I was leaving behind me, I went out into the hall.

As I closed the door, I thought I heard something thump, either inside the room or nearby there in the hall. But a costumed man and woman were just coming up the stairs and looking toward me, so I stretched my painted grin even wider and walked toward them. Music floated up from the band below. The costumed couple grinned back at me and waved and pointed and did everything except dance a jig. They were drunk enough for eight people. I did a little dance step myself as I pa.s.sed them, and the guy roared with happiness and fell flat on the floor.

I started down the stairs. Everything looked about the same as it had when I'd come up. There was a lot of color down there, people dancing, spinning about, guests in bright outfits standing in groups and talking. For that moment I thought I'd make it. I had lost most of the buoyant, practically invincible feeling I'd had a few minutes earlier, but there was still some of it left, and I actually felt that I was going to be able to simply stroll out of the house and away.

I got almost to the bottom of the staircase.

There were only a few steps to go, and I was eyeing a group of four men nearby, just off the edge of the dance floor. Two of them I knew well, too well. They were Hal the Cad, whom I'd sent to Q on that one-to-ten burglary rap, and Tight-Pants McGoon, the ape whose skull I had opened with a garbage can. The third man was the bullet-headed killer, Jim Lester, and the fourth guy looked like a hired gunman, too. The thought had just entered my mind that it was going to be a nice feeling to get about ten miles away from such as these, when there was an unintelligible shout from the head of the stairs behind me.

The four men jerked their heads around to look past me, at the floor above. I could see almost every head in the place swing toward whoever had yelled. I knew who it was before I looked, but I looked anyway. He was leaning weakly against the banister at the head of the stairway. He didn't have a gun, but one hand was raised so he could point a finger at me. It was Barracuda. His mouth was red and puffed, and some of the blood had dropped down onto the long, black gownlike outfit that covered his clothing completely.

One of the four men near me said, ”It's Hacker. Look at his mouth. What the - ”

”Stop him!' Barracuda - or Hacker - shouted, his voice hoa.r.s.e, twisted as it pushed through his puffed lips. ”Stop him, kill him!” He pointed that accusing finger straight at me and yelled, ”Kill that clown!”

When I looked at the gathering again, almost all of the heads were turned toward me. Nearly two hundred pairs of eyes stared at me. The band stopped playing suddenly. I knew it was a forlorn, a dismal hope, but I tried to stretch my painted grin wider and hop clownlike down the last few steps, but the cause was long lost. And I knew it. I knew I wasn't going to make it.

In the silence Barracuda yelled again, harshly, ”Kill that clown! It's Sh.e.l.l Scott!”

Eighteen.

My name hit that gang of thieves and cutthroats like a bomb.

That name had been the center of attention for hours, for days, to most of these hoods. Many of them had been ordered to hunt for me, find me, kill me; they knew a price of ten thousand bucks was on my head; I had clanged up against a lot of them in the past, and in just the last three days I had built in several of them a hatred amounting to mania. The friends of Turkey Grant, whom I'd shot on the Freeway - and the pals of Papa Ryan. Fargo, with his own peculiar reasons, not to mention his split eye; Blister, breathing through his mouth; Shadow on crutches . . . Hal and McGoon and Speedy and more, many more, too many more.

The silence held for half a second, then was broken by a great hiss, like wind rising, the sucking of air into many throats, a collective gasp. And then the growl, the harsh, growing, ugly sound of a crowd, a mob, a murderous mob. It was an animal sound, half growl and half whine, the volume rising suddenly to a blood-curdling roar.

It happened in seconds after Barracuda's cry. And I didn't hesitate. Even as his words stopped bouncing off the walls and the crowd started to roar I spun around and sprinted up the stairs toward Barracuda.

Somebody behind me was almost as fast. A shot cracked out and a bullet plucked at my clothing like Death's fingers. But then I was almost up to Barracuda, and any more shots might have hit him instead of me. With that thought in mind I ducked under Barracuda's reaching hands, wrapped my left arm around his waist and yanked him toward me as I drove my right hand into his gut. I kept my hand open, fingers jabbing stiffly, and in the right place the blow would have killed him. But it bent him forward, air exploding from his lungs, and I grabbed him, wrestled him up onto my shoulder.

In the exertion, I felt my ta.s.seled clown cap pulled off. It fell, a bright spot of color, to the steps. I knew that my blasted white hair, now that it was uncovered, was probably just as bright as the cap. Behind me, I heard a couple of yells from men who thought they recognized me. One of them shouted, ”It's Scott, all right! I'd know that - ”

But I missed the rest of it. At least there weren't any more shots; Barracuda over my shoulder was a temporary s.h.i.+eld. If we had been standing still, my colorful clown costume against his somber black would have made an easy target - but I was moving.

I ran with him, hardly noticing his weight, toward the room where Quinn and the dead man lay. Heavy feet pounded up the stairway behind me. The door to Quinn's office stood slightly ajar. I bent forward and hit the door, let Barracuda fly off my shoulder and crash heavily against the floor inside the red-and-black room while I grabbed under my coat for the .38.

With the familiar b.u.t.t of the Colt in my fist I swung around, raising the gun. Two men were at the head of the stairs. Bullet-headed Jim Lester was a step in the lead, a big revolver in his hand, and even as I spotted him he blasted one shot at me.

But just one.

I knew I'd be dead in ten seconds if I didn't stop those b.u.ms who were running up here at me, and because it was Jim Lester, and because he was shooting at me besides, I didn't even have to think about what I was going to do. I was already aiming at his chest when his gun blasted at me, and I squeezed the trigger gently, thumbing back the hammer and getting off a second shot moments after the first one.

Both of them hit Lester, the first one stopping him, and the second spinning him a little to one side. He staggered and the man alongside him - it was Hal the Cad - let out a yell, turned and jumped about six steps down the stairs. That wasn't enough for me. I knew the others would be coming up again too soon if I didn't scare h.e.l.l out of them and slow them down. I had a clear shot at Hal's legs, but he was moving fast and it was plain luck that I hit him. If I hit him. His right leg crumpled, though, just as my gun cracked, and he rolled end over end to the foot of the stairs.

Jim Lester was still turning around, easily, almost gracefully. The gun dangled from his fingers, then dropped. He stepped forward, got his foot on the first step as if he were going to walk down them. But that was the best he could do. It was queer the way he fell. His arms dropped first, hands dangling at his sides. Then he toppled forward like a tree falling. He landed heavily, and stuck there, feet on the second or third step, his face pressed against a step lower down. He didn't roll any farther, just lay there. He didn't move.

That would hold them awhile. But it didn't much matter. It wasn't going to be any help to me. I'd had it. I'd really had it, and I felt cold all over. Mentally I cursed myself for an idiot, a brainless slob, for coming here in the first place. There wasn't a chance I could get out. Nearly a hundred bloodthirsty gunmen all dying to kill me, and an electrified fence around the place. I swore. It was that blasted woman that got me into this. That Doris Miller. It's always a woman, I thought miserably.