Augie Feldman’s rooming house was on the lower side of town in a neighborhood of 1890 houses, huge, gloomy old hulks, that had been converted from once magnificent private homes. I rolled the car to a stop. Beside me, Dominick stirred ponderously, breathing through his adenoids. “There’s Boudreau,” Dominick said.
We got out of the car, drifted to the shadow at the far side of the sidewalk. Boudreau said, “He’s still in there. Room 10. Upstairs.”
“Cover us from here,” I said.
The front door creaked and the stairs sighed. Dominick and I stopped before the door of Room 10. We each put a hand under our coats against the pressure of our guns, and I palmed the knob and slammed the door open.
The room smelled. It looked fly-specked and scaly in the light of the one naked bulb. Augie Feldman reared up on the bed, a racing form and pencil in his hands, a cigarette dangling from the middle of his mouth.
I looked at him and remembered him as he had once been, prosperous, sure of himself, heavy on the dough. This quaking, gaunt hulk with the thinning grey hair, slack jowls and fear-haunted eyes was certainly a different man. The big-time bookie was long gone.
He swung his feet to the floor, picked up the overflowing ashtray from the straight chair beside the sway-backed bed and made haste to wipe the ashes, with his palm, that had spilled on the hard bottom of the chair.
“Hello, Steve. Sit down, sit down.” He pushed the chair toward me. I pushed it back. I watched a nervous tic develop in his left eye as he sat on the edge of the bed and stared up at us. The room was hot, close, unpleasant. I said, “What was she doing here in the early hours of morning, Augie.”
“You mean Melissa,” he whispered.
I waited. He said, “She was around here asking about Roy Meek. She knew how it had been between me and Meek once.”
“And how long was she here?”
“Not long.” The pouches under his eyes looked heavy and purple. He looked; at his hands. “She left about three o’clock this morning, said she was going home.”
“You’d better come along and tell it to Maxie.”
His gaze darted from Dominick to me. He licked his lips. “I’ll get my hat.”
We went out of the house with Augie between us. I put him in the back seat of the car between Boudreau and Dominick. When we got back to Maxie’s apartment building I got out of the car with Feldman and prodded him across the sidewalk. I would take him up alone. Dominick and Boudreau were both good men, but in a case like this Myart said you could never know for sure, you couldn’t be too careful who came into the penthouse.
At the top, Feldman slouched out of the elevator like a man sapped of strength and will. Myart met us in the living room. He looked at Augie with those narrow black eyes and said, “Take him in to Maxie.”
* * * *
I opened the door to the den, shoved Augie in. Maxie was standing beside the couch, spread-legged, face slick, a near-empty rye bottle in his hand.
Augie stopped at the sight on the couch.
“Melissa,” Maxie hissed.
Augie’s face seemed to crumble and freeze that way, a thing of grey disjointed angle and shadow.
He stumbled across the room, mouth working, and slipped to his knees. A dry sob racked at his throat.
“You did it!” Maxie said.
Feldman didn’t say anything, just stayed there with those dry sobs tearing at him.
“Damn you, talk when I speak to you!” Maxie said. He swung the rye bottle. It hit Augie across the bridge of the nose, brought blood, knocked him over on his back.
I bent over him. “You knocked him out, Maxie.”
Maxie wiped his hand across his slack lips. His eyes were burning. Swaying on his feet, he said, “Drag him out in the living room. Then go down and bring up Georgie. If anybody can make him talk, Georgie can. And I want to watch it.”
I dragged Feldman out, Maxie shuffling along after me. He closed the door to the den. Myart’s gaze flicked at Maxie, darted to me. “He wants Georgie,” I said.
“Georgie’s covering the service stairs,” Myart said. “In the basement.”
I rode the elevator down, all the way to the basement. I stepped out in the warm, dry, heavy shadows. My feet scraped and sent echoes over the cement floor.
I moved back toward the service entrance. “Georgie?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t see him. I opened my mouth to say his name again; then I saw him. Georgie was a big mass of flesh near the dark yawning mouth of the service stairs. I dropped to one knee beside him. He was breathing, but as unconscious as a guy could get, a lump like a golf ball on the side of his head. I felt it then, the faint, cold draft of an open window.
I spun around fast, wanting to get the wall at my back, my hand dipping toward my gun.
“Do it and die,” a voice said.
I saw his face, hovering there in the shadows beside a boiler. He came toward me, a big gun stuck out in his fist. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I tried to tear my eyes from his face and couldn’t.
“You’ll take me up, Hilliard,” he said, mouthing the words thickly. “You’ll take me right up to Maxie.”
“Listen, Meek, you can’t do it! You’ll never get out of the building alive.”
“Do you think I care?” Roy Meek said. He was doped to the gills, the rims of his eyes like frozen trickles of blood. But maybe he wouldn’t have needed the drug anyway.
“Do you know what it was like?” he whispered. “The same cell every day,
