Cash My Chips, Croupier Read online

  PIERS MARLOWE

  CASH MY CHIPS, CROUPIER

  Complete and Unabridged

  To

  my Friends in

  Hereford

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  Micky Perran never quite knew how he came to be involved in the mess, or so he claimed, but then everyone who was on a nodding acquaintance with Micky, and that took in a lot of people from Aldgate Pump to Chiswick Flyover, accepted him as a devious and calculating liar when it suited him to be. Which, brought to the boil and rendered down, meant that Micky was much like the rest of us. In the Italian Mohair suits for which he had a low-tension passion he looked a human being, he even behaved like a reasonable facsimile of one when he hadn’t a glass in his hand. So of course he had his quota of human failings. About the human virtues one could never be quite sure. It paid to hold something in reserve when dealing with Micky, even when talking about him.

  As near as Micky ever came to pin-pointing how he became involved was to admit that possibly an extra glass of daiquiri was responsible. Not that it made him drunk, as he was very quick to make clear, for where liquor was concerned Micky Perran was a man with a powerful pride in his capacity to achieve, and he disdained to consider the hoary maxim that pride goeth before a fall.

  ‘I have lead-lined guts,’ he once stated in that level tone of his that never suggested to a listener that he could be boasting, ‘and there is an in-built gyro compass in my head that keeps my wits at a fairly consistent level — but has no depressing effect on my thought processes. So the demon rum is no one I have to wrestle with, even in a fixed fight.’

  But that extra glass of daiquiri, as dangerously smooth as warm linseed oil and as potent as triple-distilled cognac, certainly delayed him.

  And that was enough to get him involved.

  To a point beyond safe extrication.

  Had he walked out of Marmaduke’s Red Ace five minutes earlier he wouldn’t have seen that little rodent Cuzak and become excitedly curious. Because he knew, like so many others in the dangerous know, that Cuzak meant Bandelli. And about Bandelli he had never heard or seen enough to satisfy his curiosity.

  And the reason for that was simple.

  Micky Perran wanted to continue breathing, which is well nigh impossible when one of Bandelli’s knife artists has demonstrated his skill as a chiv expert on your windpipe.

  He had had one run-in with Bandelli, from which he had walked away on his own feet, backwards, with a blue-steel Beretta in his not too steady right fist. Bandelli had let him because he too is human, at least when it comes to leaking blood when his hide is punctured by a steel-jacketed slug.

  Moreover, Bandelli had done nothing about it. That is, not openly or demonstratively. But Micky knew Bandelli could be biding his time, which could be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on whether one is superstitious or not. Most times the question arose in his life Micky tried not to be, but he didn’t always make it. Especially not in the case of Bandelli, who had a memory like a cribbage board, with every item pegged to provide an impressive total score.

  As a matter of fact, Micky didn’t so much as know that Bandelli was interested in the Marmaduke clubs until that night when he dallied to sip the extra daiquiri.

  There are six Marmaduke clubs, as most of Central London, including New Scotland Yard, knows very well.

  The Marmaduke Red Ace and the Marmaduke Black Ace.

  The Marmaduke Red King and the Marmaduke Black King.

  The Marmaduke Red Queen and the Marmaduke Black Queen.

  That was the half-dozen, dotted about Mayfair and parts of its fringe areas, with not a Jack or a Joker in the entire hand. Just who Marmaduke was or had been, if he had ever really existed, no one seems to know, not even Detective Superintendent Frank Drury, who hated Bandelli’s guts, or his partner in his official life of criminal catching, Detective Inspector Bill Hazard, whose personal opinion was that Bandelli was born without guts and with a heart that it would be a crime for any heart surgeon to graft surgically into the chest of any nice normal person who happened to be close to death because a mere pump was worn out.

  But Micky Perran dallied with his extra daiquiri, then left the bar and collected his hat and coat, and walked out of Marmaduke’s Red Ace just as the car that made the rounds each night to collect the take warped towards the kerb like a battleship pulling into drydock. There was another car up the street and a third bringing up the rear. They were spaced at action stations, like covering destroyers.

  Out of the car making the collection stepped Cuzak, and that was when Micky Perran knew. He managed to fade fast into the street shadows, which was an accomplishment he had acquired years before, but he remained to watch Bandelli’s extended right hand move unhurriedly from that braked car towards the club entrance. Micky made no movement to draw attention to himself. He was content to be part of the Damsel Street scenery. He felt that last shot of West Indian rum beginning to do its stuff and reminding him of something he had temporarily forgotten.

  Trouble is like bananas. It comes in bunches. And there was Toni Cuzak, beating across the pavement to the Red Ace’s entrance to prove it, with two car-loads of armed muscle men blocking Damsel Street as though an emergency had occurred. For Micky perhaps one had, but he didn’t debate the possibility too closely. He was already uncomfortable enough.

  Cuzak walked into Marmaduke Red Ace with a black soft leather bag, zipped and locked, and he trod like a character who owned not only the building, but the freehold of the pavement leading to it. When one was Bandelli’s right hand one could take a lot for granted without troubling about being over imaginative. Cuzak went into the club. He was gone sixteen and a half minutes by Micky Perran’s watch, the minute hand of which had never crawled so slowly. When he came out he didn’t drag his small feet getting to the collection car. He came up to it fast, the door swung open as the engine started up, the bag was passed inside, and then Cuzak stood back and the door slammed.

  The cavalcade moved off as though controlled by a remote radio switch, the two gaps between the cars closing before they reached the far end of Damsel Street and turned right. Probably headed for Marmaduke Black Queen, the next on the collection rota if one went by proximity and a London street map.

  At least, that was Micky Perran’s passing thought as the cars’ tail lights vanished. He wasn’t the only one interested in that processional departure from Damsel Street. Toni Cuzak remained at the kerb until they had gone. He turned about, threw a quick glance up and down the street, it seemed an almost nervous reaction to his sudden isolation, and then hurried back to the entrance and passed inside.

  Micky Perran realised his neck was damp under its collar. He pushed his moist shoulder-blades from the wall against which they had been pressed and took a few cautious deep breaths to help regulate his breathing. He didn’t wish his departure from Damsel Street to be a hurried retreat. He wanted to feel he was leaving in his own good time and when he felt like it. That way his self-respect didn’t suffer from fresh lacerations, and Bandelli had no fresh reason, even though unknown to him, to alter the position on the private cribbage board in his mind of the telltale peg.

  Telling himself not to be so damned fanciful, Micky stepped away from the wall and dipped a hand into his coat pocket to collect a cigarette. He didn’t get a smoke going because it was already too late. Trouble was upon him. Though, to be
honest, she was not easily recognisable as herself.

  She appeared under the club’s cluster of porchlights and stood for a moment or two as though undecided what to do now she had reached the street. That brief spell of indecision was long enough for Micky, his attention trapped, to register recognition of a Marmaduke Red Ace girl croupier. He had seen her around the casino floor, had once watched her rake in the few coloured chips he had tossed on her table. But he didn’t know her name or what perfume she used, what her favourite tipple was, or where she had her pad. So to him she was a stranger.

  All he knew about her he could see from where he was watching her across the pavement of Damsel Street. She had good bone structure, eyes in which a susceptible male could easily find himself out of his depth and delightfully drowning, and legs that could have earned her a comfortable living modelling the sheerest nylons.

  She overcame her indecision and started walking. There was a puff of breeze down the street, and he suddenly knew she had a preference for Sortilège. He decided it was a perfume that suited her because, all pieces added, she was bewitching, especially in black with a dull expensive sheen and low cleavage, with a few diamonds exploding in fire against her creamy flesh.

  The puff of wind died. Micky remained halfway between the wall and the kerb, watching her and thinking sexy thoughts, the cigarettes he was holding forgotten. He was startled when she glanced over her shoulder back at the club entrance, for it was a fearful glance, and without being told, he sensed that she was forcing herself to come to a difficult resolve.

  She began running up the street away from where Micky Perran stood. Her high heels clattered like castanets held in hands that had lost their sense of rhythm.

  Micky’s glance raced beyond her, and he knew she was making for the glass obelisk of the phone kiosk with the low-wattage bulb burning in it. She had to make a call that would not have been safe to make inside the club. And she had to make it in a hurry.

  To make it at all left her scared, but her sense of urgency was greater than her fear.

  Micky’s alert brain ticked out the details as though it was a computer that had been fed a card of coded information. But the computer whirred to a halt when a fresh shadow appeared under the porchlights.

  It was Cuzak, who came barrelling out of the club, to pull up short and stare to where her fast-tapping heels dragged his gaze. His right hand came out of his pocket and pointed at her.

  At least, the gun it was grasping pointed.

  ‘Hey, Sandra!’ he called in a voice that churned loose gravel chips like a cement mixer that has run dry.

  She heard him, so did most of Damsel Street that wasn’t drunk, drugged, or dead. But she was a committed female with no time for second thoughts or secondary fears. She knew where she was running to and what she was running from. What she didn’t know, as Micky realised, was what was threatening to stop her in her high-heeled tracks, because she wasn’t pausing to look back.

  ‘Sandra!’

  Cuzak sounded mad. There was naked menace in his throaty shout. He moved after her, coming closer to Micky, who caught his muttered, ‘The dumb bitch!’

  Those three words activated Micky like a time bomb that has been switched on. The finger Cuzak had over the gun’s trigger might squeeze hard enough to release a slug. She could die because Cuzak couldn’t control his temper.

  Micky covered the few feet of pavement separating him from Cuzak in a flying leap, and the angry man with a gun knew nothing until Micky’s stiff right hand came against the side of his neck in a hard nerve-shattering chop. He released a bitten-off groan that became a hissing sigh and collapsed in a huddle on the pavement. Micky bent down and grabbed the gun and felt a touch of ice between his shoulders when he found the safety was off. He snapped it on and dropped the gun in his pocket, then dragged the ungainly Cuzak towards the wall and left him in a patch of shadow. He looked at the girl in the phone booth, about to pick up the receiver, and decided he had to be thorough. He dug for the gun he had pocketed and clipped Cuzak with the blue-black barrel just above and behind the right ear. He reached the phone kiosk as she was dialling, wrenched open the door, and smacked the flat of his hand down over the receiver, cutting the connection.

  ‘Why, you — you — ’

  ‘Save it,’ he said shortly, wrapping his fingers around one of her arms and pulling her out of the glass box. ‘Cuzak was close to putting a bullet in you.’

  He felt her shiver in his grasp, but there was no break in her voice when she asked, ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Asleep on the pavement. You’d better get back inside or it could get real rough.’

  She tore her arm free of his grip.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘We haven’t got time to be formally introduced,’ he said harshly, ‘so don’t waste seconds you can’t spare.’

  ‘I had a ten minute break.’

  ‘You’ve used it up. Get inside.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m coming in after you. I don’t want Cuzak coming to and seeing me. If I try running I might not make it. So inside.’

  ‘But — ’

  ‘Inside.’

  She ran back the way she had come and Micky Perran’s mouth burned like a desert at high noon. He was suddenly aware that what he knew about her could be written on a piece of confetti. He wondered whether the hell he had been a fool and tried not to decide on an answer that would make him feel inclined to punch his own head.

  He turned to look at the shadowed huddle that was Cuzak pushed into the angle of wall and pavement. At that instant undipped headlights swung a broad blade of searching light across the top end of Damsel Street as a car turned and nosed into it. Micky knew, without waiting to go through a recognition test, that it was a police car.

  Maybe she had dialled 999 before he slapped down the receiver and the call had been traced. That would be consistent with the kind of luck that had been running for him recently.

  He lost no more time in futile speculation of the kind that threatened to form ice between his toes. He dived for the shadows beyond the club’s porch-lights, hoping sharp eyes in the car coming down the street had not sighted him.

  The dark saloon was about halfway down Damsel Street from the top end towards the coloured glare of Marmaduke Red Ace’s porchlights when Inspector Bill Hazard leaned forward in his seat and grunted.

  ‘See him?’

  Superintendent Frank Drury, lolling back against the upholstery beside his assistant, said, ‘See who?’

  ‘Look — there he goes. He’s run doubled up into the Red Ace.’

  Hazard sounded like a man who felt himself cheated. Drury, who knew he could trust his assistant’s twenty-twenty vision, pushed himself off the upholstery and said, ‘Pull into the kerb, constable.’

  The driver of the police car eased to the left and braked. Before the car had stopped Hazard had the door open and was leaping for the pavement. By the time Drury crossed the pavement in his wake the inspector was lowering Cuzak’s head.

  ‘Our timing’s way off,’ he said. ‘Someone’s bumped Toni Cuzak. He’s warm and has a damned lump over his left ear, but I’d swear that didn’t finish the hard-headed bastard.’

  ‘Turn him over and try the other side,’ Drury told him.

  Hazard didn’t make much of the task, for all Cuzak was a chunky bulk of man.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he grunted. ‘There’s a bigger bump above the right ear. It was a hard blow because it burst the skin. There’s blood among his hairs.’

  He held up the fingers of his right hand, holding the left side of Cuzak’s face with his left hand. Before Drury could speak the inspector reacted again with surprise.

  ‘Hey, he’s leaking into my left hand!’

  Drury produced a pencil-ray torch, shone it over Cuzak’s left cheek, and a thin stream of blood seeped from his ear.

  ‘Two bumps on the head, but a thin blade pushed into his left ear took him off Ban
deli’s payroll, Bill. He’s really dead?’

  ‘He’s not breathing and his pump’s shut down.’

  ‘All right, leave him. I’ll phone in for an ambulance and the technical crew.’

  Bill Hazard stood up, wiping the dead Cuzak’s blood from his hands with a fresh handkerchief and staring at the body. Drury walked to the police car, climbed in, and grabbed up the radio telephone. A couple of minutes later he was back beside his assistant, accompanied by the car driver, who draped an overcoat over the corpse.

  Drury caught the inspector’s arm and walked with him towards the entrance, in front of which he stopped to ask, ‘What did this doubled-up character look like?’

  Hazard shook his head. ‘He was not much more than a shadow. He darted from where I found Cuzak, head lowered and his back towards us, and ran into the club.’

  He stared at the glass reflecting the porchlights as though hoping to find it had retained an image of the man who had passed beyond the door.

  ‘How tall?’

  Hazard’s broad face screwed up. ‘It’ll only be a guess.’

  ‘All right, guess, Bill. But make it an intelligent guess,’ Drury reminded him.

  Hazard gave his superior a quick-sliding glance and looked away, still frowning.

  ‘I’d say five-eight to five-ten. Not really short, not really tall.’

  ‘Like a few million others in London,’ said Drury without inflection. ‘I’d say now we start guessing.’

  He took his hand from Hazard’s sleeve, but was stopped from going inside the Red Ace by Hazard saying, ‘There was one thing. Just an impression.’

  ‘I’ll settle for an impression,’ Drury told him. ‘You don’t impress easily, Bill.’

  Hazard felt he ought to accord the sally a grin, but he knew anyone other than Drury would have been puzzled by the grimace into which his broad features were contorted.

  ‘I have an idea that he favoured his left side.’

  ‘You mean he limped?’