I get the hiccups and when I get them I go on forever.”
He came around into that narrow space between the cars and he put his arms up at his sides. Gibby ran him over.
I don’t know whether I had been expecting a gun or just hoping for one. This was one of those limbs Gibby goes out on and when you’re out that far, brother, look out. You had better be right. This character did have all kinds of rights and Gibby was walking over every last one of them. He didn’t find a gun. He didn’t yield an inch. He wasn’t letting them see it was bothering him. I hoped vaguely that I was managing to play it as deadpan. I had a feeling anyone could have seen how much it was bothering me.
“No gun,” Gibby said. “What’s the setup?”
“Setup? We’re friends. We spot his car in traffic. You’ll give us that. It’s no trouble to spot. We want him on a party we’re having, so we pick him up. I know we’re double-parked, but it’s only for a minute and since when is the DA’s office handing out the traffic tickets?”
Gibby looked to the big boy. He was still hanging on to his package and he hadn’t found his voice. He had to try twice before he made even the husky whisper come.
“They’re my friends,” he said. “We’re going to be late for the party. The dames, they’ll get sore we keep them waiting.”
“Okay,” Gibby said, stepping back out of it. “Have fun.”
“We can go now?” It was the man who hadn’t bothered to yell for his rights who did the speaking.
Gibby nodded.
“Thanks,” the man murmured with only the smallest edge of sarcasm on it. He slid back behind the wheel and put his foot on the starter again. “See you,” he said to the man he was leaving with us.
With a wave of his hand, he pulled away. He was carrying New York plates. Gibby wrote down the number.
The man who had the Cadillac keys shook them and made them jingle. “Brother,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You nearly tore that one.”
Gibby looked at him coldly. “Feel like talking?” he asked.
“Only to ask how come you didn’t smell the liquor on his breath,” the man said. “How far do you think he can drive with all that liquor in him before he’s pinched or even has an accident? This isn’t the first time we’ve talked him out from behind the wheel. You don’t know, but I do. He can be stubborn. Stubborn, and how. He’s all right now. I’ll put the Caddy in the garage for him and I don’t turn up with the keys till he’s slept it off. What did you think we were doing? Kidnaping the little fellow?”
“I didn’t like his looking so yellow,” Gibby said, “and getting much yellower the minute he saw you.”
“It’s an old story with him. He isn’t pretty when he’s drinking.”
The man got into the Cadillac. He was all affability now. He even asked if he couldn’t drop us off somewhere.
We weren’t going anywhere just then. I shook myself to get some of the creep out of my flesh. “It’s a good thing they were that nice about it,” I said. “There’s the time you really went overboard.”
He talked right past my words. “They didn’t look like male nurses,” he said. “Even working in pairs, male nurses should be bigger.”
“They said they were his friends and so did he,” I said. “You went over both of them and no guns. What’s wrong with believing them?”
“They didn’t look like friends,” Gibby insisted. “When two men close in on a third that way and crowd him that close, they’re letting him feel that they’ve got guns on him and he hasn’t got a chance.”
I didn’t even attempt to argue that the thing hadn’t looked that way. Just on the way the men had closed in on either side of Yellowface, on the way they had moved with him to the curb, on the way they had taken him to the car, it could have been a Police Academy demonstration of how a pair of gangsters might pull off a snatch out in the public street. I stuck with the point I could make. Appearances had been deceptive. It hadn’t been at all as it had looked. Gibby had checked and neither of the men had been carrying a gun.
Ramming his hand into his pocket, Gibby shouldered in tight against me. A lightning-fast jab caught me in the side just at that soft place between the rib cage and the hip bone. I have seen men who’ve been shot and the bullet’s point of entry was just there. It’s a bad place. They get it there and they don’t survive it. Furthermore they don’t die quickly or easily.
“Am I holding a gun on you?” Gibby asked.
I laughed at him. “That was your thumb, kid,” I said. “You aren’t carrying a gun.”
“Suppose you didn’t know I’m not carrying a gun, would you be all that sure then?”
“Completely sure. I know you. If you had a gun on you, you wouldn’t be playing games with it.”
“Suppose that hadn’t been your old pal, Gibson. Suppose it had been one of those friends of the Jerk spelled backwards, how certain would you have been then?”
“I would have been in a cold sweat.”
“And the big guy was in just that.”
I’d known he would be building to that and I was ready for him or I thought I was.
“Not at the end there,” I said. “Not after you had checked on the both of them and found no guns. He couldn’t have been afraid of a thumb in his gut. He’s too big a guy for that.”
“If he believed me,” Gibby muttered.
“Why wouldn’t he believe you? Would you go looking for concealed weapons, find them, and then change your mind?”
“That’s what keeps me thinking there was something funny about all that,” Gibby said. “The two who had every reason to make an ugly fuss over my stepping in and crowding them like that were really docile about it. Since when do we get to throw our weight around that way and all we have to say is DA’s office and we get all that respect for it? They were too good-natured and they hardly looked at my credentials. I could have done it just as well on my driver’s license. I could have been Joe Doak, practical joker, and done it on a traveling salesman’s business card. And the boy they were pushing around, he didn’t look at all. Couldn’t he have been worrying about some really fancy trick, all four of us out to take him together?”
I was about to take the line of least resistance by reminding him that we already had a murder we were working on, but by that time Gloria’s mamma had tired of staring balefully through the shop window. She came over to the curb and joined us there.
Gibby took her by the arm and we went into the shop. He asked the woman in there whether she had any more red nightgowns like the one she had just sold. The woman went into a quick song and dance about how very special those nightgowns were. It was the build-up for asking such a price as wouldn’t often be named in a place like that.
I think Gibby, for a while at least, would have played it along as though we were merely shopping, but Gloria’s mamma gave the show away.
