Tough Bullet Page 3

  I walked back to the hotel. I walked slow, thinking. When I opened the door to my room, Basso, Captain Ned Basso, was waiting for me with a gun in his hand. I wasn’t careless. I unlocked the door, and when nothing happened I kicked it open. There was nobody behind the door, nobody facing it that I could see.

  There was a closet, a big one, and Basso came out of that while I was pouring a drink, and put the gun on me. It was a short gun, big calibered, what they call a detective special. Basso told me to stand where I was. I didn’t think Basso was fast with a gun, maybe not even a good shot even when he had it out. But, Lord, I was tired, not wanting much of anything except sleep and then more sleep. After I slept I wanted to think. Think mostly about my eleven thousand.

  “Sure,” I said to Basso.

  “Hands up high,” Basso said. “Move and you’re dead.”

  I looked at him. “Not me, captain. I’m still.”

  Basso said to drop the guns, to kick them out of the way.

  “Good man,” Basso said. A thought came to him, or maybe he just said it that way. “You took a long time getting back from Gertie’s. I’ve been waiting nearly an hour.”

  “I walked,” I said. “Was I supposed to hurry?”

  There was a creepy feeling moving up my spine, a feeling that I was walking the wrong way in quicksand.

  “I wonder you came back at all after what you did to Gertie,” Basso said, holding the gun steady on my belly. There was nothing in his face to prove he didn’t believe what he was saying. But then a New Orleans city detective would know a lot about lying. “Why’d you have to kill her like that? You must be a real animal, cowboy.”

  I still had the glass in my hand. Basso told me to put it down real careful. Before I did, I finished what was in it.

  “What about Gertie?” I bluffed. “Somebody kill the old gal?”

  Basso didn’t think much of my bluff. “You sit in that chair, cowboy,” he said.

  Everybody from Texas gets called cowboy, and I was sick of it. “The name is Carmody,” I said.

  “I already know that,” Basso said. “And I know about the Flynn Brothers, too. They didn’t call the law on you, but word gets around. Especially to me. But we’ll get back to that later. The manager here fetched me on the telephone. Said you accused him of robbing you. Said you acted real tough about it. I was in his office talking to him when headquarters rang up and said Gertie’d been beaten to death. It appears like Gertie’s head black woke up right after you did the job and ran out of there. The description he gave fits you like a noose—the scar, the nick in the ear.”

  I looked at Basso, trying to figure his part in this. Sure he was crooked as they come, but that didn’t mean he was mixed up in Gertie’s murder. Some crooked lawmen are very good at their job when they get around to it.

  “Now, captain,” I said. “Why would I want to kill Gertie? It could be I don’t even know the lady.”

  Basso sat down on the edge of the bed, far enough away to make it hard to rush him. Basso was thick-bodied without being fat, and the only place the soft living showed was in his jowly red face. The face was a smooth pink, like an undercooked ham. It was the face of a man accustomed to hot towels and barbershops. It was the face of a man with a brute temper who had learned to control it over the years.

  Basso pushed his thick lips together and blew a breath at me. I guess he thought I was wasting his time. There was no tone in his voice. It came out slow and heavy.

  “You killed her because you figured she robbed you. Don’t tell me you weren’t there all last night. The black says you were. The manager and the guard say you got real tough about the money. That would be the Flynn money. It all fits together, Carmody. Maybe Gertie rolled you for the strongbox key, maybe she didn’t. The point is—you figured she did. You went back there this morning. First you beat the black over the head with the same gun you used to kill Gertie a little later.”

  Keeping me covered, Basso picked up the .38 with some of the houseman’s blood still on it. “This gun,” he said, “you should have kept going when you got out of there. Now you aren’t going any place but the Parish Prison.”

  “How do you know the houseman didn’t do it?” I asked him.

  I don’t know why I said it. I just said it. “Or somebody else. A madam like Gertie could have a lot of enemies.”

  Basso shook his bullet head at me. “You did it, Carmody. It couldn’t be anybody else. And you’re going to swing for it. Just get up slow and easy, and put your hands behind you.”

  I tried something else. “What about the money?”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  Basso’s heavy face didn’t change. “That doesn’t mean a thing to me. Maybe Gertie didn’t take the money. That doesn’t say you didn’t think she did. That you didn’t kill her.”

  Holding the gun steady, he reached into his back pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs. Handcuffs clinking in a lawman’s hand is one sound I don’t like. I turned around like I was told, and he went behind me. I didn’t move till he snapped the handcuffs around one wrist. I have thick wrists, and he had to squeeze a bit. I grabbed the cuffs and turned on him. The gun went off, and I slammed him across the side of the head. The gun fired again, this time into the floor. I wrestled the gun out of his hand and beat him over the head with it. It seemed to be my day for beating people over the head. Basso grunted, and I let him fall to the floor.

  I left the .38 with the blood on it. I took Basso’s gun, a Smith & Wesson double-action .45 with a shortened barrel, and the other .38. There was no chance that the two shots from Basso’s gun hadn’t been heard, and I had to get out of there fast. I ran to the top of the stairs and a man in a derby hat hollered at me from the lobby to stand still. He fired two shots that whanged against the brass stair-rail. A single shot from the .45 scared him back behind a pillar, and I ran back along the upstairs hall looking for the fire stairs.

  I knew there would be another man waiting in the alley. If he expected me to be careful coming out he was wrong. I came out that door so fast I nearly fell over my feet. He had his gun out, trying to point it. I fell and rolled as the gun went off. The bullet ricocheted off the brick wall and went back at the detective. It didn’t hit him. My bullet hit him low on the arm, and I put another one in the other arm. It would have been easier to kill the son of a bitch, but there was no point in making the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Force any madder than it was now. Before I left the detective with his two broken arms I grabbed the bowler hat off his head and tried it on for size. It wasn’t a bad fit—a bit tight—but after I ripped out the sweatband it was better, and I didn’t feel like a fool—I didn’t have time to feel much of anything—when I ran to the end of the alley and then slowed down to a more or less casual walk about where the alley opened into Mount Royal Street. A hat like that would have gone better with a handlebar mustache. I didn’t know how much good it would do me: it was the best I could think of at the time.

  Captain Ned Basso’s short-barreled Smith & Wesson .45 was in my coat pocket, and I had my hand on it. I stepped lively out of the alley. There was a small commotion in front of the main entrance to the Hotel Lafitte, but I kept going like a man with important business on his mind. Nothing gives a man away as much as trying to walk in one direction while looking in the other, so I didn’t do it. I walked away from the hotel along Mount Royal; expecting a detective’s bullet in the back with every step, but no bullets came, no hollers either, and when I came to the first saloon I went into it.

  I don’t know what they called it, and I never did learn the name, but it was a saloon and it was close by, and I went inside. That was a gamble, naturally, like most other things a man does when he’s on the dodge, but it’s been my experience that usually the law thinks in long-distance terms: it doesn’t come looking too close to what it calls the scene of the crime. Of course, if you forget bending the handcuffs over Captain Basso’s head and shortening both arms of t
hat detective in the alley, I hadn’t committed any kind of crime, by my way of thinking, in New Orleans.

  I told the bartender a beer and then a whiskey. The place was crowded pretty good for so early in the morning, and I had to shove a bit to make room at the bar. The saloon was on Mount Royal Street and that should have made it an inch or two better than the dirty dives in the Irish Channel, but didn’t. It was what they call ether-beer and the whiskey that went with it was worse than the beer because you could tell the water that watered it wasn’t even clean water in the first place.

  I decided to stay with the beer. I put my foot on the rail and told the bartender to sell me a cigar. The cigar cost more than it would have in El Paso, where they have to carry everything a long way. While I was smoking it, and it was burning down to the end about fifteen minutes later, a lot of trough-fed fellers who looked like city detectives, with rippled necks and bulge-bellies, charged by outside. One of them, a big Irish bastard with a face redder than his hair, stopped and came back and looked inside, then decided he was on the wrong track, and trundled his lead-loaded ass after the rest of them.

  A tall geezer who seemed to know everybody walked into the saloon. He had a shiny rubber collar, glazed white and dirty, and a tie with snail tracks on it, and there was a small disagreement with the bartender about putting his morning whiskey on the slate. All newspaper reporters run off at the mouth; this one did.

  The bartender still didn’t want to extend his credit. “I suppose you don’t want to know about Gertie neither,” the newspaperman bragged. “Your friend and mine—Queen Gertie,” the reporter said. The cigar in his face was cold and short, but he tried to puff on it. He opened his coat, dug his thumbs inside his vest holes and snapped his gallowses. The son of a bitch smiled what he thought was a mysterious smile.

  I guess it was the smile got him the whiskey. The pen pusher snapped the glass of rotgut against the back of his throat, wiped his cigarette-yellow mustache, and tried to weasel a second drink out of the bartender.

  The bartender shook his head. “Come on, chum—what about Gertie? Don’t tell us she’s dead—we know that.”

  A man at the bar bought the reporter another drink. The news hack liked having an audience. “A dastardly deed,” he announced. “I have just telephoned the terrible details to my newspaper. The good lady was beaten to death—her skull crushed by the savage blows—blood everywhere. The work of an inhuman monster, in my opinion.”

  I ordered another beer and sipped it. I didn’t think there was anything new to be learned from the booze-sucking reporter, but I didn’t want to get back on the streets just yet.

  The bartender drew a beer and shoved it at the reporter. “That’s the limit,” he said. “Now get on with the story or get the hell out of here.”

  “They say some cowboy did it,” the reporter said. “That’s what my good friends in the Metropolitan Police tell me. Some cowboy named Cassidy or Cafferty. No, it was Carmody. He killed poor old Gertie. Thought she’d taken his bankroll. But they’ll catch him, mark my words. They got the whole force looking for him now. Dear old Gertie will be sorely missed.”

  “Not by me she won’t,” the bartender sneered.

  The man who bought the reporter his second drink resented that. He called the bartender a no-good son of a bitch. The bartender took an ash club from under the bar and showed it to him. He tapped it on the wood to show how nicely it bounced. Some of the drinkers sided with Gertie’s protector, some with the bartender. I figured it was time to get out of there before they started taking the place apart.

  The first thought I had was to get the hell out of New Orleans. After what I’d done to Basso and the detective in the alley, and especially after what they said I’d done to Gertie, every bull in New Orleans would be looking to kill me. But I’d been hunted before by city police, and I figured I could get out of town, if that was what I wanted to do. Out of New Orleans was sure as hell where I wanted to be, but I wasn’t going to run, not yet anyway. Lawmen all over wanted me for a lot of things, and I’d done most of what they wanted me for, but I wasn’t wanted anywhere for beating an old woman to death—nowhere except New Orleans, that is. I’d killed men and robbed banks and other places where they keep money, but there were people who took my word when I gave it. I didn’t figure my word would be worth much if I got the name of a woman-killer, and the New Orleans law made it stick.

  I walked out of the saloon and climbed aboard a horse trolley going in the direction of North Franklin Street. How to clear my good name— isn’t that a laugh—was something I hadn’t figured out yet. I hadn’t figured it out even a little bit. All I knew was, the whole thing was tied in with Gertie’s place. At least, I thought it was. The law might still be watching the place, and they might not. There was nothing I knew for sure. Sam Nails, the big black houseman had some interest for me. So had Minnie Haha, so-called. So had Captain Ned Basso. It could be any or all of them, or it could be somebody I didn’t know, hadn’t met, might never meet. I went back to North Franklin because it was the only place I could think to start.

  I was getting to know that part of town, and I got off the trolley four blocks from Gertie’s place and walked the rest of the way. The only law I spotted was an old beer-fattened uniformed bull swinging his club. The bowler hat must have made me look like a potato-eating citizen; he didn’t even look at me. Gertie’s place looked quiet, all the shades pulled, no sign of a detective watch inside or out. Just to be sure, I went into a saloon across the street and down a bit, but from where I could sit at a table and drink whiskey and watch the cathouse through the open door.

  Chapter Four

  I gave it some time. I drank whiskey and watched the locked-up whorehouse and thought about my eleven thousand and wondered how in hell I was mixed up in this. It was a fancy saloon, with waiters. “Terrible, ain’t it?” my waiter said when he brought the second drink.

  I nodded.

  “The man did that should be lynched,” the waiter said.

  “I say he should be castrated and burned,” I offered.

  I gave the waiter money, and he went away. Three drinks used up thirty minutes, and I thought I might as well get started. There was still no sign of any law, and in a way that made sense. Old Gertie would be in the City Morgue by now and there wasn’t a whole lot more the law could learn by poking around in her room. And, unless I was way off in my reckoning, they’d be looking elsewhere for me. That was how I figured it. I didn’t figure it for sure. I knew they might be waiting right inside the front door, waiting to kill me.

  I walked down the street from the saloon, then crossed it. I hoped I looked something like a city detective in that hard, curve-brimmed hat. I crossed the street, and nobody shot at me. Up the steps I went and pulled the bell.

  The door was heavy oak with a peephole set at eye-level. I set myself so the hard hat was about all somebody inside could see. A quiet clicking sound told me the peephole was open. The voice inside was black and maybe it belonged to Samuel Nails.

  “Detective Fitzpatrick,” I mumbled, trying to speed up my slow Texas talk.

  I guess the hard hat fooled him. It was Sam Nails, not looking overcome with grief, and I lined up the heavy Smith & Wesson with his heart, not wanting to drag it out if I had to kill him. There was a bandage wrapped around the big houseman’s head, and I guess his head hurt pretty bad, because it took him a while to see who I was. I got ready for a rush, but he didn’t do anything but smile at me, and that was something I didn’t expect.

  “Back off,” I said. “Back off, then stand still. One move you’re dead.”

  When I put a gun on people I don’t try to scare them; I show them the gun and tell them the facts. After that they can decide whether to be scared or not. One thing was sure—the big black wasn’t scared. But he did what he was told: he backed off. And he smiled.

  I knew the law could have set up Nails to answer the door. The law could be waiting at the top of the stairs or in Gertie’s offic
e off the hall. But the house was quiet and hot and silent; a stand-up clock ticked, and that was all.

  I backed Nails into the waiting room where the customers on a normal business day picked the girls they wanted to have. Nails sat down when I told him to, still showing all his sugarcane teeth in a mad dog grin.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” the big bastard asked.

  I didn’t mind him being brave. I just wasn’t in the mood for any smart talk from a foxy black. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him. I don’t like to call any man a dirty name unless it gets me what I want to know, if it riles him up enough to say what he’s hiding, if it knocks him off balance. I called Mr. Nails a dirty black. I said he was a dirty black, that I meant to beat the shit and the truth out of him.

  Mr. Nails dropped his eyelids over his eyes, and that was all. The smile stayed where it was. Nails didn’t have much accent of any kind but now, when he answered me, his deep voice sounded like a blackface funnyman in a minstrel show.

  “Beggin’ you pardon but thass all Ah is—a pore humble black ugly black, massa,” Mr. Samuel Nails told me. “Now I jus’ ast the gemmen wus dey sumpin’ Ah could do to hep?”

  I tried again. “That sound more natch’rel,” I said.

  “You white son of a bitch,” Mr. Nails said, all the calm gone out of him, and all the country black accent. “You murdering white bastard son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t repeat that in Texas,” I said, feeling better. “I don’t mind especially, but other folks might.”

  That was supposed to bother him some more. It did. He got so mad that some of the country accent came back. “You’re not in Texas now, Carmody. Maybe it’s time you went back there.”

  That told me something—not much. “You don’t want to see me caught and hung, Mr. Nails? The feller that killed your friend and benefactor?”

  No more smiles from Mr. Nails. “Gertie was white like you. I don’t see I owe that woman a thing. You want to kill her—that’s your business. The police don’t want me—they want you.”