Doorway to Death

“Mornin', Joe.”

“You!” It was an epithet the way it was uttered as the red-faced man's head jerked up and focused on Johnny. “I want a few words with you right now!”

“You expect to enjoy yourself while you're havin' 'em, furl your sails a little,” Johnny suggested. He seated himself comfortably as he eyed the irate lieutenant. “You'd have a little trouble bustin' me back to a post, Joe.” Detective Rogers' expression as he sat down across from Johnny was carefully blank.

“You can skip the wise remarks. I want a straight answer from you. Have you had anything to do with this Myrna Hansen, the telephone operator?”

It surprised Johnny. “I had a little talk with her,” he said cautiously.

The lieutenant's hands came up from his lap and gripped the edges of his desk, hard. “You had a little talk with her,” he mimicked heavily. “She's only a certain witness and a possible confederate to some of these goings on, but you had a little talk with her.” He raised himself up in his chair, and the angry face was dark red. “Just who the hell do you think you are? This is a police investigation. I don't want you-”

“Ahh, knock it off, Joe,” Johnny interrupted him. “You talked to her for two hours, and you got a big, fat nothing. I just tried to throw a little scare into her, that's all.”

“God give me strength.” The lieutenant looked up at the ceiling before again boring Johnny with his eyes. “Did it ever occur to you that just possibly we might know what we're doing? We wanted to know where that woman went, whom she contacted. You had your little talk with her and scared her underground. My man lost her yesterday afternoon and hasn't seen her since.”

“The people she's been playin' with, you'll be lucky if you don't find her underground,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “Or she'll be lucky. Personally, I couldn't care less; in my book she's been livin' on borrowed time a while already, the way she operates. Are you listenin' today, Joe, or just talkin'? I got a couple of things.”

The big man glowered at him silently, and Johnny shifted his remarks to Detective Rogers. “I was just stuck up at the door of that apartment where you have the stakeout. Gun-in-my-ribs said, 'Get into the second cab at the cab stand.'”

“Where the hell was Mulleavy while all that was going on?” the sandyhaired man demanded sharply.

“Mulleavy your man? He was at the head of the stairs, watching.”

“Oh, great-!”

“I'm kiddin' you. He didn't have time to blow his nose. I didn't even know he was there, so when I took out the guy in the doorway I had just started to lug him down into the basement for a private interview when Mulleavy declared himself in. Said private interviews were verboten.”

Lieutenant Dameron broke his silence, the backbone gone from his voice. He sounded tired. “Mulleavy followed orders, but I almost wish he'd been out for a beer. That's an unofficial wish.” Thick fingers drummed on the desk.

Johnny returned his attention to the lieutenant. “I remember way back at the beginnin' of all this, Joe, you stood up on your hind legs and told me you got answers. You sure as hell haven't gotten many from the people you've talked to so far, and there's been quite a few. What goes?”

The lieutenant slumped down in his chair and passed a hand over his eyes. “Well, let's take it by the numbers. Max's boys were a couple of professional hoods; you never figure to do much with them. I had hopes for that coked-up redhead; he should have told us everything he'd ever known in his life when his skinful wore out. He got a real weird reaction when it did, though; he went right from a human clam to a whistling scream. The docs took him away from us.” He straightened in his chair and looked over at Johnny. “Then there was Rieder, the cook at the hotel. I don't feel too good about that one. I felt safe; Doc Greenstein had knocked him out with a needle, I had a man at the door of his room, and Jimmy on the way over to kneel on his chest and get a few answers. But with all that, he still went down the drain. Literally, by God. Now there's this one you knocked over today. He able to talk?”

“When they tape up his ribs.”

“Put that at the top of your list, Jimmy. Not that it'll do us any good. This is another hood.” The gray eyes ranged Johnny speculatively. “How'd you like the cooperation we got from your boss last night?” Johnny was silent. “Well? Did he give you a reason? He couldn't have given you one that made sense, because there isn't any. I don't forget things like that, Johnny.”

“He's a businessman, Joe. He can't-”

“Businessman, hell! This is Dameron you're talking to. Willie inherited a few dollars, and all his life he's been the playboy of the western world, except for that little party overseas. He's been-”

“Ahhh, chop it!” Johnny snapped. “All that crap is between you and him. All I know is that if I'm in a thirty foot circle and I need a man at my back, Willie's the man. Where the hell do you get off runnin' him down? Why don't you make your own move instead of askin' him to do something you're afraid to do yourself?”

Detective Rogers interposed himself smoothly between the acrimonious raised voices. “You said you had a couple of things, Johnny. You only mentioned one.”

“Yeah.” Johnny looked over at the poised notebook. “You got room for hunches in that thing?” Swiftly he outlined the history of the Mullers as he knew it up to the telephone call from the housekeeper. “I don't know why they look out of line to me, but they do.” His eyes came back to the silent lieutenant. “I don't know a thing, Joe, but I tell you I can feel it.”

Lieutenant Dameron considered the busily writing detective. “Well, Jimmy?”

Detective Rogers looked up from his notebook. “Let's run through it again. The woman checked in at the hotel- let's see, that would have been the second day after Max ran out of gas in the alley. She takes all her meals in, sees no one, and calls no one, but Johnny here is watching the register for European check-ins because we think this whole thing has something to do with contraband being brought in on boats, so he gives her a second look. He established little except that she was in Italy a few years ago, that she's Viennese married to a German, and apparently hasn't always led the sheltered life. This morning her husband shows up at the hotel and checks in alongside. Oh, yes, and inquired for a Mr. Samud, apparently unregistered.” He looked up from the notebook spread open on his knee. “That's it?”

“That's it,” Johnny admitted. “You want I should walk out to the sidewalk before droppin' dead and save you the trouble of cleanin' up here? If I'd said it out loud to myself like that before I came over here, I probably would've saved myself the trip.”

Lieutenant Dameron stared down at the top of his desk. “We can watch them, of course,” he said slowly. “Hell, we must have a man over there now for practically every room in the place. We can watch them, but can you blame me if I ask why?” He pulled at an earlobe exasperatedly. “On the other hand, I've seen these 'feelings' of yours before. You used to be able to smell trouble at two hundred yards, upwind.”

“Joe, just as sure as I'm sittin'-”

“Just a goddamned minute, everyone.” The sandyhaired detective was staring down at the notebook on his knee. He stood up quickly, covered the bottom half of the exposed page with his palm and laid the book on the desk before his superior. “Look at that.”

The lieutenant leaned back first to look at his assistant, as though trying to analyze the repressed excitement in his voice, and then down at the indicated five printed block letters. “Samud? That's the party this Muller asked for when he checked in today, according to Johnny. So?”

“Try it backward,” Detective Rogers invited. His hand moved off the bottom of the page to reveal another set of printed letters.

“Backward? D-U-M-A-S-? Dumas? Say, Dumas-!”

“Sure. The west coast import who caught the cleaver in the kitchen that night.” The detective paced rapidly up and down in front of the desk. “Lieutenant,” he said excitedly, “we've been blind. I can write you a whole new script.” He halted in his pacing and faced them, an arm in the air and an index finger extended like a schoolmaster. “What's bothered us the most about this whole operation? Frederick. In an overall action with a highly professional gloss, he has all along had the look of an amateur. We haven't been able to make him as a pro, and the man that's at the wheel of this thing has to be a pro. It doesn't make sense, otherwise.”

He directed the pointing finger at Johnny. “That's where we went wrong. Dumas was the pro. Dumas was the boss. Frederick was brought in by him for a specific job, probably to provide cover and act as clearinghouse for whatever their traffic may turn out to be. That's not important. The important thing is that the whole affair hinged on Dumas.”