Tough Bullet Read online

  “I think they want you,” I said, trying something out. “I think you killed her. Anyway, you could have killed her. Did you kill Gertie, Mr. Nails?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Carmody,” the black said in a bland voice. “You can beat it out of me, and I’ll still say no. Least of all, you can try to beat it out of me.”

  I said I wouldn’t try—I’d do it.

  “No, sir, Mr. Carmody, you won’t,” Nails said. He put down his arms. I didn’t tell him to put them up again. I wasn’t sure he’d do it, even with the gun on him, and I didn’t want to press the point just yet.

  “I still think you did it,” I said.

  Nails smiled again. “That’s just talk, Carmody. Texas talk. A white woman gets herself murdered, so naturally a black man did it. That might work in Texas, but this is New Orleans. It’s not much better, just a little, just enough to make a difference. The police know I didn’t kill Gertie.”

  I asked him how they know.

  “Because you did it,” he said.

  “This is getting us no place,” I said. “Tell me something, you think Minnie Haha might have something to do with it? Maybe Minnie resented all those bulls Gertie set to riding her. She seems kind of refined for a whore.”

  Nails’ eyelids dropped again; his face stayed the same. I didn’t know how to take him. That he wasn’t afraid of me didn’t have to mean anything except that he was big and tough and smart, and had been hiding it for a long time. Maybe he didn’t think he had to hide it from me, because I was worse off than he was.

  “What about Minnie?” I asked. “You think maybe she was the one stole my key and took the money?” I had tried throwing a scare into Nails and hadn’t done so good. Maybe I’d do better later, if nothing else worked. Now I tried money. I told Nails I was fixing to get the eleven thousand back. I said I didn’t care how many people I had to shoot to do it. “You talk straight,” I said, “and you can name a price.”

  “Sorry I can’t help you, Carmody,” Nails answered, the same wide grin on his black face. “Like the man said, I just work here.”

  I held the Smith & Wesson steady on his heart. “Get up,” I told him.

  Nails took his time, but he did it. “You ain’t going to beat me twice,” he said, arms loose by his sides.

  “Sure I am,” I said. “And you’re going to take it. Come on over here, Mr. Nails, and we’ll see if maybe you won’t change your mind.”

  I told him to turn around. There were better ways of making him talk, but there wasn’t time. Nails stood with his back turned to me, heavy and solid. I hit him across the kidneys. I hit him as hard as I could with the heavy .45. It should have bent him over with pain. All he did was grunt. The next time I hit him in the same place he didn’t even grunt. When I hit him again he cursed. That was better.

  “Let me know when you get tired,” I said.

  Hitting a man in the same spot can numb the pain after a while. Few things hurt worse than having your ear slapped against the side of your head with a gun barrel. That’s what I did to Nails. The big bastard had a skull like iron. There was a clunking sound and his ear began to puff up. I reached out again to hit him on the other ear, and quick as a mountain lion his left hand clamped around my wrist, and he tossed me over his hip in a forward wrestling pull. It was like being hit in the side with a tree. The gun was still in my hand when I hit the floor. I don’t know why it was; every bone in my body felt like it was jerked loose from the other. Anyway, it didn’t do me any good. Nails kicked it out of my hand before I could get set to shoot him. My goddamned wrist felt broken, and a fierce pain ran clear up to the shoulder. Nails came at me with another kick, this time aiming for the crotch.

  After a kick like that a man is finished for a while. Nails didn’t get to land it. I got out of the way fast, backing off from the big bastard. He came at me again while I was reaching for the .38 in my coat pocket, and there wasn’t time to get the gun out. I don’t know where Nails learned to handle his fists, but he was good. While I was blocking one punch, he rocked my head twice with his left hand. I kept trying to back away, but he came after me, and finally there was no more room to go anyplace. The door to Gertie’s office was closed, and my back was against it.

  I could hear my breath rasping in and out of my chest. Nails’ grin stayed big and wide no matter how hard my fists smashed him in the mouth. There was blood on my right fist, and most of it was mine—from the torn knuckles. Grinning, Nails stopped blocking the punches I fired at him. He just took them wherever they landed, grunting when the hurt was bad but laughing all the time. Nails had height and weight on me, and reach, and all that long-buried hate for whites and for himself, too, put a driving force into those thick arms and rocky fists. I tried to knee him between the legs, but he blocked it. I swung my fist sideways, like an axe, and if his neck hadn’t been short, the powerful shoulder muscles reaching up to support his bullet head, the blow could have broken his Adam’s apple and killed him.

  I knew I had to get at the .38 or he’d kill me. My hand went into my pocket and took hold of the gun. I didn’t bring it out fast enough, and Nails’ huge hand clamped on to my forearm, the fingers digging in deep. He hit me high in the chest with the other hand, the hardest blow he could deliver, and the door to Gertie’s office broke off the hinges and hit the floor with me on top of it. Nails jumped after me, but his foot caught on the bottom of the wrecked door, and fell to one side of me. The fall didn’t bother him at all. But it lost him time. I had the .38 out when he rolled on top of me, using his weight to crush the fight out of me. The big bastard nearly got me again. He caught my wrist just as I pressed the muzzle of the .38 against his heart. There was no feeling in my hand, and in another second the wrist bones would snap. I didn’t feel my finger squeezing the trigger. It must have, because there was a dull, muffled sound, like when you use a small dynamite charge to kill fish the easy way in a deep pool, except it was a smaller sound than that—much smaller. A .38 doesn’t make much sound compared to a .45. When it’s dug into a man’s chest it makes hardly any noise at all. Even so, it killed Sam Nails instantly. The huge black body quivered just once, a great shudder like a horse dying, and then I was lying under close to three hundred pounds of dead man.

  It took some work to roll Nails over on his back. The hole in the front of his black coat was small, with hardly any blood yet, and when I got him off me he didn’t look dead. The grin was still on his face when he died; now it was turning into a dead man’s grin. You can tell after you’ve seen enough of them. I didn’t look at Nails right away, because I didn’t—I couldn’t— get up. It was a while before I was able to get up, and after I was up I had to hold on to the back of a chair.

  The top of Gertie’s desk was rolled down. I rolled it up and found a half-full bottle of brandy. A glass sticky with stale brandy stood beside it. I bypassed the glass and drank from the bottle. Any kind of brandy isn’t my drink—too sweet and smelly—but Gertie’s brandy sure as hell felt good once it reached my belly. On top of the saloon slop already down there, it buzzed in my ears before it made me feel better. It had to work hard to make me feel better just then. Here I was with the pie knocked out of me, standing over a dead black man I’d just killed, with my eleven thousand still gone and no more likely to come back than five minutes before, and the whole New Orleans Police Department still looking for me, and I knew as much, which was nothing, as I’d known when I walked into Gertie’s bedroom and got my boots bloody.

  Lord knows I didn’t want to go through the dead man’s pockets. I wasn’t just battered and still hungover; what I was, was tired in the head. Most of all, what I wanted was to dodge on out of New Orleans and put as much distance as I could between me and Whoreville on the Big Muddy. Another drink got me back on the track, and I dug through the dead man’s pockets. Nothing but some keys and a five-dollar bill and a clipped-out newspaper ad for a Chicago mail order divinity school turned up. The ad said anybody could get a doctor of divinity degree, complete with s
crolled parchment, regardless of race, original religion, or lack of formal book learning. The ad didn’t exactly fit with Mr. Nails’ old job with Gertie. Or maybe it did.

  What I didn’t find was my eleven thousand dollars or any part of it, or any sign that the dead man had anything to do with taking it. That made me want another drink, but I let it go, and went upstairs to have another look through Minnie Haha’s room. I didn’t know how much time I had. Captain Basso and his bulls might be on their way, for all I knew. Gertie might have a partner I didn’t know about. They might come one at a time or all together.

  Minnie’s room was the same, dark and quiet, and it didn’t stink of heavy, cheap perfume like the rest of the house. There was perfume in the room; it was light and easy to take. Except for the clothes in the closet, there was no sign that anybody lived or worked there. A real neat room, elegant and nice, not like a whore’s room at all. Not like anybody’s room, I decided after looking around. Either the room had been cleaned out, by Minnie or someone else, or else I wasn’t looking hard enough.

  I sat on the edge of the big bed, thinking. There were no photographs, books, or keepsakes of any kind that I could see. Some people have no use for clutter, but I knew that everybody keeps something. like a detective in a dime novel, I pulled out all the drawers from a dresser and looked inside. There was a big brown envelope lying on top of the plywood divider between the drawers. There were three letters inside, all addressed to Miss Frances Verrier, c/o General Delivery, G.P.O., New Orleans.

  I wondered how Miss Frances Verrier got to be Minnie Haha. Naturally, the Minnie Haha was Gertie’s idea, not a bad one either, if you ran a whorehouse, but that didn’t explain a thing. The letters were postmarked St. Phail, La., a place I didn’t know, and they were from Minnie’s brother George. The letters whined a lot and more or less said the same thing. Life hadn’t been going good for Minnie’s brother—I still thought of her as Minnie—or so he said. He said it a lot. It took him pages to say it. Most of the land had been grabbed by the sheriff for back taxes and if the big house didn’t get repairs soon the roof would fall in.

  I didn’t know George Verrier, and I didn’t like him. The son of a bitch kept asking if, for God’s sake, Minnie couldn’t raise some money in New Orleans. On toward the end of each letter George said he hoped the city doctors could help Minnie with her “terrible affliction.” He had a lot to say about hard times, not much about Minnie’s “affliction,” and I wondered what in hell it was. I didn’t think it was what Gertie said it was, because I knew Brother George would never talk about something like that, in person, or in a letter.

  I put the letters back where I found them and tried to put some of the pieces together, that is, if the pieces had anything to do with me. Minnie wasn’t Minnie. She was Frances Verrier, from St. Phail, Louisiana. She was from good family, and she had a “terrible affliction” and a weak-kneed brother named George who kept asking for money to save the old plantation. Brother George didn’t mention any plantation, but I thought of it that way. It had to be some kind of rundown plantation, the way he wrote.

  My head hurt. Just because the old Verrier place was going to wrack and ruin didn’t have to mean that Minnie clipped my eleven thousand to save it. The “terrible affliction” was what interested me. I don’t know why, but somehow it didn’t sound like consumption or any other sickness I could think of. It wasn’t working in a whorehouse either. One thing was plain—Minnie didn’t enjoy her work. Sweet Savior! How my head hurt!

  I heard the front door click open three floors below. It was that quiet in the house. Right after the click came a scream. I went out of there fast, soft-footed on the thick carpet, down the stairs, the Smith & Wesson in my hand. From the second floor I could see down into the lobby. What I saw was Minnie Haha—Miss Frances Verrier—looking at Sam Nails’ body in Gertie’s office. Then she heard me, and then she ran for the front door. I could have shot her. There was no point in that. I yelled at her, and she didn’t stop. The front door slammed open and stayed open. Two jumps took me down to the first floor, and I went down the front steps even faster.

  There was no sign of her in the street.

  Chapter Five

  Out in the street, I kept going. The waiter who had served in the saloon and another man came out and looked after me. A horse trolley rattled past as fast as a horse car can go, and I ran after it and climbed aboard. After about ten blocks I got off it and went into a saloon. The waiter looked like what they call a police buff. Unless I was wrong, he’d be on the telephone to the police right about then.

  I nuzzled a beer until I heard the next trolley. The man on the trolley told me I had to change to another car to get to the Irish Channel. There was an old West Texas stage robber named Gordy Hindman who ran a saloon there and might still be alive. Hindman was too old or too old-fashioned to make the switch from stages to trains when robbing the puffers became the new thing to do. Hindman always worked alone, and I guess one man has a hell of a time robbing a train all by his lonesome. Hindman was still wanted for four or five killings, and the last I’d heard of him he was running some kind of saloon in the Channel and going by the name of Corley Harkins. I wasn’t any kind of friend, but I knew him—and he owed me a favor. More than ten years before I had saved his life in Hank Tuttle’s Perfect Palace Saloon in El Paso when a bunch of drunken blue bellies decided to celebrate the Fourth by kicking him to death. I wouldn’t have looked to press the favor if I wasn’t in trouble. I wouldn’t even have thought of the old thief if I wasn’t in trouble. And I knew goddamned well the favor might not mean a thing to him, not with the kind of trouble I was in.

  I didn’t get to change trolleys right away because the one I was on was held up by the one in front. Detectives in the same kind of hard hats I was wearing were dragging the men passengers off the first trolley and looking them over good. They didn’t bother my trolley at all. The law, most of it anyway, and it’s something for which I am thankful, is like that. It gets a fact and holds on to it, tight as the grip of a Gila monster, such as, for instance, I was supposed to be on that first horse trolley, so, naturally, I couldn’t be on the trolley behind it, or any other trolley in the City of New Orleans.

  I guess Captain Basso might have thought of that, but that crooked bull wasn’t there. I had the feeling he’d be coming after me once his head felt better; he wasn’t there at the time. They let us go on after a while, and I changed cars at Loyola Street and Jackson Avenue, and rode the Jackson Avenue Street line down to Constance Street, and got off. More or less, the Irish Channel was between Constance Street and the river. Sideways, the Channel ran east from Louisiana Avenue. I knew that much from old stories. There were a lot of wild stories about Micktown, and I knew some of them. What I didn’t know was where Corley Harkins, to name him new, had his place, if he had a place, if he was still among the living.

  A rat-faced bastard in a dirty shirt, with a toothpick in his mouth, told me he never heard of no Corley Harkins. The jasper with the toothpick was standing on the corner of Jackson and Annunciation, and the toothpick was just front, because he had no teeth to go with it. The son of a bitch had an Irish accent and the temper to go with it, and knowing about things like that from experience and hearsay, and being on the run, I didn’t attempt to teach him better manners. I think he wanted me to try. Soaked in water, which would have been a new experience for him, he must have sunk the scales at all of a hundred-forty, and he still wanted to pick a fight.

  That’s what the Channel was like—that and the two saloons on every block on both sides of the street. I walked around, up one street and down another, thinking maybe I could find Hindman-Harkins place of business. I didn’t find it. I walked along St. Thomas Street, along Corduroy Alley, which is supposed to be the toughest part of Irishtown, and that’s hard to argue with or to go against, because it’s all—or it was—a dirty, stinking hellhole. I passed places called The Pride of Erin, Corny Kelleher’s Keltic Kitchen, The Shamrock, Robert Emmet�
��s, Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s Beer Parlor & Dance Hall, Vincent Edward McGovern’s Olde Irishe Tavern, Malachy MacBrien’s Trinity Gardens, and, of course, Mike Murphy’s. I didn’t think any of them belonged to Corley Harkins, but, then, I had no way of knowing.

  An old woman with a red nose and a shawl I asked and got told I ought to be ashamed of myself, bothering decent folk, and me a strong, young feller ought to be doing something. I didn’t know what something better was in the Channel; maybe it was knocking somebody on the head and taking his poke.

  You know what I did, finally? I did what any hayseed does in the big city—I asked a policeman. The bluecoat wasn’t more than three quarters drunk, and there were buttons missing off his uniform, top and bottom, but I guess the whiskey was flowing right that day, because the old thick-bodied bull didn’t try to hold me up for anything bigger than a cigarette before he accepted one of Gertie’s cigars instead and told me I could find Mr. Corley Harkins, Esquire— that’s what he said—at the Patrick O’Paso Saloon on Claffey Street.

  The bull was at peace with the world, and he told me Patrick O’Paso’s served the best drinks in the Channel, hardly a trace of water in the whiskey, and the free lunch didn’t stink worse than a soldier’s socks.

  The bull looked at me, but I guess he didn’t see me any too well. “I have me doubts that Corley Harkins is Irish a-tall,” he said, and that was pretty powerful praise from a lawdog with a brogue as thick as mulligan stew.

  I found Claffey Street, and I found Patrick O’Paso’s Saloon. The street was more like an alley, and the saloon wasn’t much to look at. Not much, anyhow, for a man was said to have taken such heavy money from the stage lines all over the southwest, over such a lot of years. Business was good when I went inside, the tables crowded with spenders and girls in tights helping them spend. I just about had to fight my way to a place at the bar, but the barkeep at my end smiled quick at me when I did find a place; and he drew me a beer even faster when I said a beer was what I wanted.