in my nostrils. There was another door at the end of the passage. I felt the comforting hardness of the Luger in my pocket before pushing my way through the door. The bar was half empty. Some guy was seated at the piano in one corner, thumping out a tuneless rhythm on the keys, head dropping forward as if he was drunk or half asleep.
The barman gave me a funny look, sizing me up with his eyes. I could almost hear his brain ticking over. Maybe he recognised me, maybe not. But there wasn’t any doubt he was in the pay of the big boys, and would report anything unusual, no matter how trivial it might seem.
‘Looking for somebody, friend?’ asked the barman too casually, ‘or are you just down for the drink?’
‘Both,’ I said. I knew better than to enlarge on that. Either he would shut up like a clam, or slip off at the first opportunity and phone someone in the Organisation that there was a guy there asking too many questions about the wrong things.
Somebody crushed into the seat beside me. I knew better than to turn round right away. The barman moved away and the voice beside me said:
‘Hello, Johnny. Glad you decided to come.’
I looked round, forced evenness into my voice. ‘Tony Vitelli. I thought I recognised the voice over the phone, but I couldn’t be sure.’
He sat huddled up on the bar stool, staring straight ahead of him into the mirror at the back of the bar. A short, suave guy, well-dressed, but not flashily so like most of the others. From the outside, you’d have taken him for a regular business guy, the kind you meet in the middle of Los Angeles any day around five, going back to a respectable suburban home, a wife, and a couple of kids.
That was on the outside. On the inside, he was a professional killer who had learned his business the hard way in Detroit and Chicago. I knew his past record; arrested twice on suspicion of murder, more times than I could count for illegal possession of dope. But none of the charges had ever been made to stick, and all of that was pretty old stuff from a few years back.
‘Tell me about yourself, Tony,’ I said easily.
‘You in on this case about Caroline Lomer,’ he said. ‘This Federal guy Grenville is pretty sure that it’s a mob slaying, and he’s put you onto the scent to try to smoke out the killer. Right?’
‘Could be. Don’t tell me that the Organisation has given you the job of seeing that I’m kept out of the case?’
The drinks came and I sipped mine slowly. Vitelli threw his over in a single gulp, turning the empty glass over slowly in his hands. If he had felt the insult, he gave no sign, his features never changed, his eyes never wavered.
‘We used to work for the same people, Johnny,’ he said thickly. ‘But that was a long time ago. Things have changed since then. You made the right move at the right time, when Clancy Snow and Dutch McKnight were rubbed out. It isn’t so easy for guys like me. I want to make a little more than salary and cakes, but they’ve got so much pinned on me they’ll never let me off the hook. If they don’t get me themselves, they’ll see to it that the cops get a full dossier on my past, and there’s enough in that to burn me ten times over.’
‘So where do you come in now? What was all that talk over the phone? If you’ve got any information, you’d better let me have it before any of your friends find you.’
Of course, I knew what was coming. Get mixed up in a dirty deal and you meet dirty people.
‘Sure, Johnny. But what’s in it for me? Can you put in a word with this Federal friend of yours, try to get me off the hook if I give you this information?’
‘So that’s it.’ I looked him straight in the eye. A dangerous man in spite of his outward appearance of respectability. A changed guy? A solid, dependable citizen ready to take his place in society? Somehow, I didn’t think so. There was more to this than showed on the surface, but I was damned if I could see it. I fingered the gun in my pocket, saw his glance stray downward, a little muscle twitching in his cheek.
‘You’ll do it for me, Johnny. After all, we’re old friends.’
Like hell we are, I thought savagely, but I didn’t say it out aloud. Tony Vitelli was my only lead, and whether I liked him or not, I was stuck with him if I wanted to get anywhere with this case.
‘I can’t do that, Tony, and you know it,’ I said steadily, watching him narrowly. I saw the sudden stiffening of his face, the sharp movement of his fingers on the polished top of the bar. He seemed to be taking a tight hold of himself, trying to make a decision. In the past, as one of the right-hand men of the big bosses, he had been in the position of giving orders and knowing that they would be carried out to the letter, that if he said someone had to die, then the guy was knocked off and few questions were asked, even by the cops.
‘O.K. Johnny, I guess I made a wrong pitch asking you to come along.’ He slid off the bar stool, moved away.
I didn’t know what was in his mind. All I did know was that here was the only lead I had, and I was determined not to let it slip through my fingers. If I hadn’t been nervous about the men I was dealing with, I may not have been so quick to be rough with a man like Tony. There were a lot of ideas churning away inside me—the memory of a woman lying slain on a lonely sidewalk, the big men hiding in a net of treachery, and vice, fear, tension, and disgust.
Reaching over, I took Tony’s left hand in my right, pressing down hard on his thumb, twisting him round until his wrist was jammed hard against his shoulder blades. He hadn’t made a sound. None too gently, I propelled him from the bar, towards the corridor leading out to the back. I knew it was unoccupied unless they had shifted some of their hirelings into it during the few minutes I had been talking in the bar.
‘This isn’t going to get you anything, Merak,’ he mumbled as I pushed him through the swing door, into the passage.
‘Maybe not,’ I said, shoving his head forward. The barman watched us out of the corner of his eye, but he wanted no part in this quarrel. He knew better than to get mixed up in anything like this which was not his concern. He might get in touch with some of the big men, but not right away, and by the time he contacted them, I hoped to be a long way away.
By the time we reached the end of the corridor, he was making little hurt noises in his throat. I located the gun in his hip pocket and slipped it into my own. Obviously he had come prepared to bargain the hard way if things had gone against him. It still didn’t look like a trap, but I couldn’t be sure and I didn’t want to wait around long to find out. That was why I had to have the answers to my questions—and fast.
‘Going to talk, Tony?’
He tried to nod his head against my arm. Watchfully, I let him free.
‘That’s better. Just what is your connection with this murder? It wouldn’t have been you who pulled it off, would it, Tony?’ It was a definite possibility. It bore the same kind of handmark as some of his past handiwork, but somehow, I doubted it. He gave the orders instead of carrying them out.
‘I work for Callen, you know that, Johnny,’ he said thickly. ‘You don’t have to be so tough.’
‘Then don’t be tricky, Tony. You make me jumpy.’ Harry Callen ran a big advertising agency in uptown Los Angeles, and had a finger in more than a dozen motels strung out along the major highways in the state. All in the open and perfectly legitimate. Behind the scenes, he headed a gang of thugs who managed the protection
