seem to.
“We get one once in a while,” he conceded. “You can’t help it. He didn’t look like it to me, though. Soft looking.”
“Maybe I got a bum steer,” I said. I described George Anson Phillips to him, George Anson Phillips alive, in his brown suit and his dark glasses and his cocoa straw hat with the brown and yellow print band. I wondered what had happened to the hat. It hadn’t been up there. He must have got rid of it, thinking it was too conspicuous. His blond head was almost, but not quite, as bad.
“That sound like him?”
The carroty man took his time making up his mind. Finally he nodded yes, green eyes watching me carefully, lean hard hand holding the card up to his mouth and running the card along his teeth like a stick along the palings of a picket fence.
“I didn’t figure him for no crook,” he said. “But hell, they come all sizes and shapes. Only been here a month. If he looked like a wrong gee, wouldn’t have been here at all.”
I did a good job of not laughing in his face. “What say we frisk the apartment while he’s out?”
He shook his head. “Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it.”
“Mr. Palermo?”
“He’s the owner. Across the street. Owns the funeral parlors. Owns this building and a lot of other buildings. Practically owns the district, if you know what I mean.” He gave me a twitch of the lip and a flutter of the right eyelid. “Gets the vote out. Not a guy to crowd.”
“Well, while he’s getting the vote out or playing with a stiff or whatever he’s doing at the moment, let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”
“Don’t get me sore at you,” the carroty man said briefly.
“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all,” I said. “Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.” I threw my empty beer can at the waste basket and watched it bounce back and roll half way across the room.
The carroty man stood up suddenly and spread his feet apart and dusted his hands together and took hold of his lower lip with his teeth.
“You said something about five,” he shrugged.
“That was hours ago,” I said. “I thought better of it. Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”
“Say that just once more—” his right hand slid towards his hip.
“If you’re thinking of pulling a gun, Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it,” I said.
“To hell with Mr. Palermo,” he snarled, in a voice suddenly furious, out of a face suddenly charged with dark blood.
“Mr. Palermo will be glad to know that’s how you feel about him,” I said.
“Look,” the carroty man said very slowly, dropping his hand to his side and leaning forward from the hips and pushing his face at me as hard as he could. “Look. I was sitting here having myself a beer or two. Maybe three. Maybe nine. What the hell? I wasn’t bothering anybody. It was a nice day. It looked like it might be a nice evening —Then you come in.” He waved a hand violently.
“Let’s go up and frisk the apartment,” I said.
He threw both fists forward in tight lumps. At the end of the motion he threw his hands wide open, straining the fingers as far as they would go. His nose twitched sharply.
“If it wasn’t for the job,” he said.
I opened my mouth. “Don’t say it!” he yelled.
He put a hat on, but no coat, opened a drawer and took out a bunch of keys, walked past me to open the door and stood in it, jerking his chin at me. His face still looked a little wild.
We went out into the hall and along it and up the stairs. The ball game was over and dance music had taken its place. Very loud dance music. The carroty man selected one of his keys and put it in the lock of Apartment 204. Against the booming of the dance band behind us in the apartment across the way a woman’s voice suddenly screamed hysterically.
The carroty man withdrew the key and bared his teeth at me. He walked across the narrow hallway and banged on the opposite door. He had to knock hard and long before any attention was paid. Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
“Pipe down, but soon,” the carroty man said. “Too much racket. I don’t aim to ask you again. Next time I call some law.”
The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: “Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?”
A chair squeaked, the radio noise died abruptly and a thick bitter-eyed dark man appeared behind the blond, yanked her out of the way with one hand and pushed his face at us. He needed a shave. He was wearing pants, street shoes and an undershirt.
He settled his feet in the doorway, whistled a little breath in through his nose and said:
“Buzz off. I just come in from lunch. I had a lousy lunch. I wouldn’t want nobody to push muscle at me.” He was very drunk, but in a hard practiced sort of way.
The carroty man said: “You heard me, Mr. Hench. Dim that radio and stop the roughhouse in here. And make it sudden.”
