Collection 1983 - The Hills Of Homicide (v5.0) Page 10

  Then I began to remember a few things I’d forgotten. There had been some shakeups in the mobs, and Altman, a boy from the old Alberta section of Portland, had suddenly emerged on top. He was now a big wheel.

  So Rocky didn’t work here anymore. I climbed into a cab and gave the cabbie the address of Rocky’s rooming house. He turned his head for a second look. “Chum,” he said. “I’d not go down there dressed like you are. That’s a rough neighborhood.”

  “You’re telling me? Let her roll, Ajax. Anybody who shakes me down is entitled to what he gets.”

  He was disgusted. “Big talk won’t get you no place. All men are equal at the point of a gun.”

  “Not quite. When somebody tries to make it with a gun, he has already admitted he hasn’t the guts to make it the honest way. Whether he realizes it or not, life has already whipped him. From there on, it’s all downhill.”

  “Sometimes I figure it would beat hackin’, but I don’t know.”

  “A while back, somebody took an average of all the boys in for larceny. The average sentence served was four years, the average take was twenty-one bucks.”

  “I’ll stick to hackin’.”

  The rooming house was a decrepit frame building of two rickety stories. The number showed above a doorway that opened on a dark, dank-looking stairway. The place smelled of ancient meals, sweaty clothing, and the dampness of age. Hesitating a moment, I struck a match to see the steps, then felt my way up to the second floor of this termite heaven.

  At the top of the stairs, a door stood partly open, and I had the feeling of somebody watching.

  “I’m looking for Rocky Garzo,” I said.

  “Don’t know him.” It was a woman’s husky voice. I could picture the woman.

  “Used to be a fighter,” I explained. “A flat nose and a tin ear.”

  “Oh, him. End of the hall. He came in about an hour ago.”

  My second match had flickered out, so I struck another and went down the hall, my footsteps echoing in the emptiness. The walls were discolored by dampness and ancient stains, no doubt left by the first settler.

  A door at the end of the hall stared blankly back at me. My fist lifted, and my knuckles rapped softly. Suddenly, I had that strange and lonely feeling of one who raps on the door of an empty house. My hand dropped to the knob, and the door protested faintly as I pushed it open. A slight grayness from a dusty, long-unwashed window showed a figure on the bed.

  “Rocky?” I spoke softly, but when there was no reply, I reached for the light switch. The light flashed on, and I blinked. I needed no second look to know that Rocky Garzo had heard his last bell, and from the look of the room he had gone out fighting.

  He was lying on his right cheek and stomach and there was a knife in his back, buried to the hilt. It was low down on the left side and seemed to have an upward inclination.

  The bedding was mussed, and a chair was tipped on its side. A broken cup lay on the floor. Stepping over the cup, I picked up his hand. It wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold, either.

  His knuckles were skinned.

  “Anything wrong, mister?” It was the woman from down the hall. She was behind me in the light of the door, a faded blonde who had lost the battle with graying hair. Her face was puffed from too much drinking, and only her eyes held the memory of what her beauty must have been.

  She was sober now, and she clutched a faded negligee about her.

  “Yeah,” I said, and something of my feelings must have been in my voice, for quick sympathy showed in her eyes. “The Rock’s dead. He’s been murdered.”

  She neither gasped nor cried out. She was beyond that. Murder was not new to her, nor death of any kind. “It’s too bad,” she spoke softly. “He was a good guy when he had it. In fact, he was always a good guy.”

  My eyes swept the room, and I could feel that old hard anger coming up inside me. Rock had been a good guy, one of the best. There had to have been two men. No man fighting with the Rock ever got behind him. He must have been slugging one when the other stepped in from the hall with the shiv.

  “You’d better leave, mister. No use to get mixed up in this.”

  “No, I’m not getting out. This boy was a beat-up ex-fighter and he’s been murdered. Maybe he wasn’t in the chips. Maybe he wasn’t strictly class, but he was my friend.”

  She was uneasy. “You’d better go. This is too big for you.”

  “You know something about this?”

  “I don’t know anything. I never know anything.”

  “Look”—I kept my voice gentle—“this man was my friend. You’re regular. I saw it in your eyes; you’re the McCoy.” I waved a hand at Rock. “He was one of the good ones. It isn’t right for him to go out this way.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not talking.”

  “All right. You call the cops. I’ll look around.”

  She went away, and I heard her dialing the phone. I looked at Rock. He was a good Italian boy, that one. He came from the wrong side of the tracks, but he never let it start him down the wrong streets. He could throw a wicked right hand, that one. And he liked his spaghetti.

  “Pal,” I said quietly, “I’m still in your corner.”

  Without touching anything, I looked around, taking in the scene. One hood must have circled to get Rock’s back to the door where the other one was waiting.

  When you knew about fights, in and out of the ring, and when you knew about killings, it wasn’t hard to picture. Rock had come in, taken off his shirt, and the door opened. He turned, and the guy circled away from him. The Rock had moved in, slugging. Then the shiv in the back.

  But those knuckles.

  “You put your mark on him, Rock. I’ll be looking for a hood with a busted face. The left side for sure, maybe the right, too.”

  The woman came back to the room and stood in the door. “I’ve been trying to place you. You used to work out at the old Main Street Gym, and Rock talked about you. He figured Kip Morgan was the greatest guy on earth.”

  She looked down, twisting her fingers. Her hands once had been beautiful.

  “Listen,” she pleaded. “I’ve had so much trouble. I just can’t take any more. I’m scared now, scared to death. Don’t tell anybody, not even the police, but there were two of them. Both were well dressed. One was tall with broad shoulders; the other was heavy, much heavier than you.”

  The siren sounded, then whined away and died at the foot of the steps. Detective Lieutenant Mooney was the first one up the steps. “Hi,” he said, then looked again. “You, is it? Who’s dead?”

  “Rocky Garzo. He was a fighter.”

  “I know he was a fighter. I go out nights myself. Who did it? You?”

  “He was my friend. I came out from New York to see him.”

  They started to give the room the business, and they knew their job, so I just stepped into the hall and kept out of the way. What little I had I gave to Mooney while they were shaking the place down.

  “If you want me,” I said, “I’ll be at the Plaza.”

  “Go ahead, but don’t leave town.”

  A glance at my watch told me it was only forty minutes since I’d left the Crystal Palace, and I was ten minutes late for my date. The cab took ten more getting me there, but the babe was patient. She was sitting over coffee and three cigarette stubs.

  “They called them coffin nails when I was a kid,” I told her.

  She had a pretty smile. “I thought you had decided not to come. That man I was with was harder to shake than the seven-year itch.”

  “If you can help me,” I said, “it would mean a lot. Garzo was my pal.”

  “Sure, I know. I’m Mildred Casey, remember? I lived down the block from Rock’s old man. You two used to fix my bike.”

  That made me look again. Blue eyes, the ghosts of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and shabby clothes. An effort to be lively with nothing much to be lively or happy about, but great courage. She still had that, with a fine sort of pride.
There was hurt in her eyes where her heart showed, eyes that had kept looking at men wondering if this was the right one.

  “I remember,” I said. She had been a knobby-kneed kid with stars for eyes. “How could I forget? It was your glamour that got me.”

  She laughed, and it was a pretty sound. “Don’t be silly, Kip. My knees were always skinned, and my bike was always busted.”

  Her eyes went from my face to the clothes I was wearing. “You’ve done well, and I’m glad.” If I do say so, they were good. I’d always liked good clothes, liked the nice things that money could buy. Often they hadn’t been easy to have because I also liked being on the level. Two of the boys I’d grown up with had ended in the chair, and another was doing time for a payroll job.

  “Kid”—I leaned toward her—“tell me about Rock. You’ve got to think of everything, and after you’ve told me, forget about it unless you talk to the police.”

  Her face went dead white then, and her eyes grew larger. She took it standing, but I knew she understood. In the world where we’d grown up, you didn’t have to draw the pictures.

  “Rock worked at the Crystal Palace only three weeks. He was a good waiter, but after his first week, something was bothering him. He talked to me sometimes, and I could see he had something on his mind. Then, one night, he quit and never even came back for his money.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “Nothing, really. After a rather quiet evening, some people came in and sat at one of Rock’s tables. Horace, he’s the blond boy, made quite a fuss over them, but nothing happened that I could see. Then, all of a sudden, Rock went by me, stripping off his apron. He must have gone out the back way.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  Milly hesitated, concentrating. “There were four in the party, two men and two women. All were well dressed, and the men were flashing big rolls of bills. One of the men was larger than you. He wore a dark suit. A blond girl was with him, very beautiful.”

  “The big guy? Was he blond, too? With a broken nose?”

  She nodded, remembering his eyes. “Yes, yes! He looked like he might have been a fighter once.”

  For a moment, I considered that. “Have you ever heard of Benny Altman?”

  Her face changed as if somebody had slapped her. “So that was Ben Altman!” She sat very quiet, her coffee growing cold in front of her. “He knew a friend of mine once, a girl named Cory Ryan.” She thought for a minute, then added, “The other man was shorter and darker.”

  She reverted to the former topic. “If you want to know anything about Ben Altman, ask Cory Ryan. He treated her terribly.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She went to San Francisco about two—maybe it was three weeks ago. I had a wire from her from there.”

  “Thanks. I’m leaving now, Milly, and the less you’re seen with me the better. I’m in this up to my ears.”

  “Be careful, Kip. He was always bragging to Cory about what he could do and how much he could get away with.”

  We parted after exchanging phone numbers, and then I caught a cab and returned to the Plaza. Some of my friends were around, but I wasn’t listening to the usual talk. The story would break the next day about Garzo’s murder, but in the meantime I had much to do.

  The one thing I had to begin with was Rock himself. He had always been strictly on the level. I knew that from years of knowing him, but the police would not have that advantage. At the Crystal Palace, he must have stumbled into something that was very much out of line. The arrival of Ben Altman must have proved something he only suspected. I might be wrong about that, but Altman had certainly triggered something in Garzo’s thinking.

  During the war and the years that followed, I had seen little of my old friends on the Coast, so I knew little about the activities of Garzo, Altman or any of the others.

  “What are you so quiet about?” Harry asked. Harry was the bartender, and he had been behind bars in that part of town for nearly forty years. There was very little he didn’t know, but very little he would talk about unless he knew you well, and that meant no more than four or five people in town.

  “Remember Rocky Garzo? He was killed tonight. I used to work out with the guy.”

  “Isn’t he the brother of that kid that was shot about a year ago?” Harry asked. “You know? Danny Garzo? He was shot by the police in some sort of a mix-up. Somebody said he was on the weed.”

  On the weed…the reefer racket…Ben Altman…things were beginning to fall into place. I left my drink on the bar. I wasn’t much of a drinker, anyway, and I had some calls to make.

  Bill would be on the job at the News office. As expected, it was on the tip of his tongue. “Danny Garzo? Eighteen years old, supposedly hopped up on weed and knifed some guy in a bar and then tried to shoot it out with the police. He was Garzo’s brother.”

  “What do you know about Ben Altman? I hear he’s a big man in the rackets now?”

  “Brother”—I could fairly see the seriousness in his face—“if you want to live to be an old man, forget it. That’s hot! Very, very hot!”

  “Then keep your eyes and ears open, because I am going to walk right down the middle of it. Incidentally, if your boys haven’t got it already, Rocky Garzo was murdered. They just found the body.”

  Rocky’s brother, high on marijuana, got himself killed when, according to the report, he had gone off his head and started cutting people. Marijuana was tricky stuff. The strength could vary from area to area, and nobody knew what they were really getting until it was used.

  Rock Garzo had loved his brother. I remembered the kid only as somebody who played ball in the streets, a dark-eyed, good-looking youngster. Evidently, Rock had started out looking for the source of the weed. His looking took him to the Crystal Palace, and then Altman comes in, recognizes Garzo, and has a hunch why he’s there. Maybe more than a hunch. Maybe he had come there to check on something, a tip, maybe, that Garzo was asking questions or showing too much interest. Garzo leaves at once, and a short time later he is dead.

  Maybe that was right and maybe wrong. If I could tie it to Altman, I’d have something. If I had the right hunch, I had another hunch that Mooney wouldn’t be far behind me. It was a job for the law, and I believe in letting the law handle such things. However, if I could come up with some leads because of the people I knew—well, it might help.

  For two days I sat tight and nothing happened; then I ran into Mooney. He was drinking coffee in a little spot where I occasionally dropped in.

  “What happened to the Garzo case?” I asked him.

  His expression wasn’t kind. “I’m on another case.”

  “You’ve dropped it?”

  “We never drop them.”

  “I think Rock had something on Ben Altman. I believe Rock was playing detective because of what happened to Danny.”

  “Who are you? Sherlock Holmes? We thought of that. It was obvious, but Altman has an alibi, and so have his boys. The worst of it is, they are good alibis, and he has good lawyers. Before you arrest a man like that, you’ve got to have a case, not just suspicion. It looks like Altman; it could have been Altman. We would like it if it was Altman, but we’re stuck.”

  “Foolproof, is it?”

  Mooney studied me over his coffee cup. “Look, Kip. I know you, see? I know you from that Harley case. You have a way of barging into things that could get you killed. I like you, so don’t mess with this one. And don’t worry about Ben Altman. We’ll keep after him.”

  They would keep after him, and eventually they would get him. Crooks sometimes win battles, but they never win the war. However, I had to be back in New York, and I did not have the time to waste, and the old Rock had been a friend. I like to finish them quick, like Pete Farber.

  How about Pete Farber? Did he have an alibi? Or what about Candy Pants, the blond headwaiter?

  Then I remembered Corabelle Ryan, Milly’s friend, who had known Altman. How much did she know?


  One of the greatest instruments in the world is the telephone. It may cause a lot of gray hairs in the hands of an elderly lady with nothing else to do; still, it can save a lot of legwork.

  A few minutes on the telephone netted me this. Cory was still, apparently, in San Francisco. Milly had not heard from her again. No, she had no address except that Milly had said she would be at the Fairmont for a few days.

  The Fairmont had no such party registered. Nor had anybody by that name been registered there. The mail desk did have a letter for her, but it had been picked up. The man picking it up had a note of authorization. She remembered him well—a short, dark man.

  “Cory,” I muttered as I came out of the booth, “I am afraid you did know something. I am afraid you knew too much.”

  * * *

  WHEN IT WAS dark, I changed into a navy blue gabardine suit and a blue and gray striped tie; then I took a cab to the Crystal Palace. I knew exactly what I was getting into, and it was trouble, nothing but trouble.

  Horace was nowhere in sight when I went in, nor was Pete Farber. I got a seat in a prominent position, ordered a bourbon and soda, and began to study the terrain. If all went as expected before the evening was over, they would try to bounce me out of there.

  The door from the office opened, and Horace emerged, talking to Farber. They both saw me at the same moment. As they saw me, the door opened, and two men walked in. Between them was Milly.

  That did not strike me at first, but the next thing did. They did not stop at the hatcheck counter.

  Now no nightclub, respectable or otherwise, is going to let two men and a woman go back without checking something without at least an attempt. The girl just looked at them and said nothing. That meant they were employees of the place or somebody close to the management. That last was the order I bought.

  Particularly when I took a second look at Milly’s face. If ever I saw a girl who was scared to death, it was Milly Casey. They started past me, headed for the office, and I knew Milly was in trouble.

  Behind me, I heard a grunt of realization and knew Pete Farber was coming for me. The moment needed some fast work. Just as the two men came abreast of my table, I got up quickly.