I were at the theatre last night,” St. George explained. “We dropped into the Stork for an hour or two and then I took her home. We had a nightcap and I left. When I got back to my place Kyle called me. She’d found the case missing from a drawer in the vanity. Then she got this call.”
“What was said?” I asked her again.
“Not much,” she answered. “The man on the wire told me he had my diamonds. He said I could have them back”—her eyes plunged into mine—“if I got in touch with Barney Glines.”
I don’t know how long I just sat there, I don’t know what kind of expression I had on my face. I do know it was completely silent in Archie St. George’s office. And I do know she had been given a hell of a fine reason not to like me.
Archie coughed and the spell was broken.
“How,” I asked her, “would getting in touch with me help you? Did this man on the phone explain that?”
“He said ‘Barney Glines’ and hung up. Then I called Archie. He said you were a private detective . . .”
“I said you were the lad all the insurance companies hired,” St. George interrupted. “I said . . .”
“Did you say that I wouldn’t touch the ransom racket?”
St. George shrugged. His handsome face was bland. “Kyle’s in trouble,” he said smoothly. “She’s my client and she wants her jewelry back without any splash. She asked me to get you over here, Barney. That’s all I can do about it.” He stood up, got out a cigarette case and walked to her. She shook her head and he lit one for himself.
“Well?” he asked. “What about it?”
Kyle Shannon was watching me and I knew she hadn’t changed her mind about me as a bag-man for some mob. I could convince her by standing up, grabbing my hat and walking out. That would leave me wondering why some punk thief thought he could drop my name into his lousy arrangements. It’s fine to be a boy scout, but only when you’re twelve years old.
“How is it supposed to work?” I asked her.
“You mean you’re in?” said St. George.
“I’m in,” I agreed. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t you know?” the girl asked, her voice cynical.
I sighed. “As naive as it sounds, no, I don’t.”
Archie said, “I imagine they’ll call Kyle again. She’ll tell them it’s all set and they’ll contact you. Wouldn’t you say that’s how it works?”
I stood up. “Yeh. I’d say that’s how it works.” I took my hat from the tree in the corner. “When I hear I’ll give you the word.”
“Better call me, kid,” Archie said. “I’ll take care of everything from Kyle’s end.”
It was nicely put. He was her agent. That made me the mob’s. I left his office and walked across town to my own.
THREE
THE DOOR reads: Barney Glines, Investigations in two neat lines. The door opens on an office ten feet by fifteen feet at sixty cents a square foot in a building that’s been just west of Madison Avenue on 49th Street for the last thirty-five years. That makes it four years older than me but some mornings I wonder.
I opened the door and went over to the desk. I sat down and looked hard at the telephone.
“Ring, you son of a bitch,” I told it.
The telephone rang.
“Glines?”
“Yeh.”
“There’s something for you at the desk of the Leewood Hotel. That’s 45th off Broadway.”
The receiver clicked softly and he was gone. See? It’s simple. Why does everybody think it’s hard to make a million dollars in this business? All you have to do is open an office and pay your telephone bills. And do things that make your stomach crawl.
I told the hackie that took me to the Leewood Hotel to wait. I walked into a foyer that held four chairs, a couch, a table, a sand-filled urn for butts and a seedy, threadbare rug that had been an ugly red fifteen years ago.
On the couch sat a sailor and a Broadway chippie who couldn’t have been fifteen and could have been twelve. On one of the chairs was an old man studying the Green Sheet before he donated two more bucks to a bookie. On another chair was a bookie. On the third was a whore who got her legs crossed and uncrossed twice in the time it took me to pass her. The fourth chair held a hatchet-faced character who stared through my beltline from beneath his pearl gray Adam with the upturned brim.
The thing to do, of course, was to pick him up, carry him into the john and bounce him around until he came up with the right answers. That’s the way I used to play this game. But this was a different league with different ground rules. And a girl named Kyle Shannon.
The desk clerk was a third-stage consumptive. Sick eyes turned to me vacantly out of a face that was little more than a transparent covering for his skull.
“Is there something here for Barney Glines?” I asked him softly.
He seemed to be thinking it over, getting the words in place. “You got some identification?”
I gave him a card that had my name on one side and my picture and thumb print on the other. He held it on the tips of his fingers and turned it backward and forward. Then he reached under the desk and handed me an envelope.
He moved away from me quickly as I tore it open and read the brief note. This was the jungle, and none of the cats was curious.
“Go sit in the lefthand phone booth,” was the message.
Silly? For you and me, maybe, but not for them. They wanted a look at me, for one thing. That’s so they’d know me if anything went wrong. Chances are I had even been photographed by this time. They also wanted me out of my office and on a phone they knew wasn’t tapped—at least not tapped by me. There was also the psychology of having me jump every time they said jump.
I went to the lefthand booth, closed the door, sat down, lit a cigarette and waited. It took five minutes for the phone to ring.
“I’ll give it to you once, Glines, so open your ears. Get twenty grand. Twenty. Small bills. Nothing higher than a twenty. Twenty tops. Put it in a briefcase. A black briefcase. Check the briefcase in the Long Island Terminal at Penn Station. Long Island Terminal, Penn Station. Put the check in an air mail envelope. Air mail. Leave the envelope with the night clerk of the Hotel Barnet. Night clerk. Barnet. 33rd and Seventh. Pick up the envelope he will have for you.” He stopped the monologue for a brief pause. He said, “Don’t be a wise guy. You’ll get killed, Mr. Glines.”
Click. Gone. Phone call from a stranger. So was hatchetface gone from his spot in the lobby. But that had been a stupid play. I’d pick out that punk again from the thousands who looked just like him. And take him off the junk for three hours, let him miss just one needle, and he’d spill his guts
