Cash My Chips, Croupier Page 5

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’ll take Scotch with ginger ale.’

  ‘I don’t waste money on soft drinks.’

  ‘Soda?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Very well, water.’

  ‘Good. I’ll join you. Maybe we can repair the damage done to your palate.’

  She shot him a swift glance, but decided there was no more to the words than what they said. She sat down near the door, one leg crossed over the other, her bag propped on her knee, and she stroked the frame. He walked to a cabinet, opened the doors, and started to build a couple of drinks in mini tumblers with heavy bottoms. He looked at her, thought of the gun a few inches below the stroking fingers, and frowned at the thoughts these movements evoked. He walked out to a kitchen and came back with a bone china jug half filled with water. ‘Sorry, no ice.’

  ‘You’re making me used to disappointments,’ she said.

  He didn’t like that. He thought it wasn’t fair, especially as he was the one dangling on a string, but he said nothing, though the look he gave her left nothing to her imagination. She returned it with a speculative look of her own, while still giving the impression that her attention was not entirely in the room.

  ‘Say when.’

  He poured a half-inch of water into a tumbler and she said, ‘When — very when.’

  He took her the drink, and she avoided his close glance as she accepted the glass. He didn’t like that either. He thought she was edgy and holding something back, and whatever it was he was left with a feeling that it could be important.

  Anyway, he was right.

  He sloshed water into his own glass and had brought it to his mouth when the doorbell rang. She was on her feet before he overcame his surprise.

  ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘No one comes calling at this time in the morning,’ he said, sounding as confused as he felt, and wondering if it could be the police and then deciding no for a couple of reasons he thought were obvious.

  He took a couple of swallows of his watered whisky and then he heard voices.

  Hers said, ‘Everything as it should be, Pat?’

  A man’s voice replied with. ‘Sure, I just waited till you showed, then followed you up. I’d checked the address in a phone book, so I knew the flat number and the floor.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ she said, friendly like to this invisible stranger. ‘Come in and have a drink.’

  Micky strove to control his anger. He didn’t like the newcomer’s Irish brogue, and he didn’t like the way she was handing out invitations to consume his booze, which had been no gift, but had cost him hard and relatively hard-to-get cash now the shutters had been put up for him along Fleet Street and its news-hungry tributaries.

  She came back into the room, still carrying her glass in one hand, with her bag tucked under the arm, and trailed by a brawny character with a small green tweed hat thrust over the dark curly hair on the back of his head. He appeared to be bursting out of his two-piece ready-made suit and his white nylon shirt was not that day’s issue, Micky decided. He didn’t have to come to a decision about the pea-green tie. It was of some thick weave, probably Donegal, decorated with what could have been food stains. He didn’t think that even Donegal weavers could have contrived that frightful result unaided.

  ‘Micky, meet Pat.’

  Micky’s caution slipped. ‘I’m not sure I want to. Who the hell is he, anyway?’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Pat, quite unabashed, and Micky feared this character had a pelt as thick as a rhinoceros — if pelts were what rhinoceroses carried to hold their bones in position. ‘I hear you’ve got a drink for me.’

  ‘Scotch only.’

  Pat plastered a broad grin over his square slab face with colour over the cheekbones.

  ‘That’ll do fine,’ he said, exaggerating his bog accent and dropping his head over one shoulder. ‘I never carry patriotism to ridiculous limits.’

  Micky poured him a drink and held up the jug of water inquiringly. Pat shook his head with vigour.

  ‘Never,’ he said. ‘It took long enough to get the water out of it. Why put it back?’ He took the whisky handed to him, tossed it off in one vigorous swallow. ‘That’s better. A man needs a snort after hanging around a draughty street corner.’

  Micky pointedly refused to take back the emptied glass. He sat down and said, ‘Sandra, I think you’d better explain.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’ she asked sweetly to cover the insolence of the question.

  ‘To start with, why this invasion?’

  He watched Pat cross to the liquor cabinet and pour himself unasked a generous refill of Scotch. Rolling some on his tongue, as though to capture the taste, he swallowed, nodded approvingly, and topped up his glass.

  ‘Not a bad drop at all,’ he said patronisingly. ‘I’ve drunk better, but I’ve also drunk a hell of a lot worse.’

  He crossed to a settee, sat down, in the middle of it, and spread his knees wide, a man lounging and comfortably at his ease. His stupid tweed hat that was about two sizes too small for his head remained perched over his crisp curls and presumably forgotten.

  Whoever Pat was he was working hard to register a simple soul.

  Far too simple to be credible.

  Micky dragged his outraged glance away from the man to stare questioningly at the woman, who had finished her glass of whisky and was staring at the dregs in the bottom of the tumbler as though the amber drops fascinated her.

  She said, ‘This is about the best place I know to put that hundred and forty thousand pounds for the time being.’

  Micky looked in Pat’s direction again. The stage Irishman overdid his being at ease. He sighed as he relaxed, opened his mouth, and blew whisky-laden breath at a small moth that had appeared from the defeated shadows.

  ‘What hundred and forty thousand pounds, for God’s sake?’ Micky Perran asked testily, thinking of her nonsensical words about him being a rich man and wanting a woman like her. Her way of funning, but it had a rough edge.

  ‘In that bag.’

  She put down the empty tumbler she was holding and pointed to the soft leather black bag.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Micky. If he hadn’t had that last daiquiri he wouldn’t be in this living nightmare, feeling angry and frustrated and also cheated, all at the same time. ‘You’re saying Toni Cuzak was killed for the cash?’

  She was smiling. So was Pat. Both were looking at him.

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. Cuzak set up the steal, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I saw him hand the bag back to the car.’

  ‘Correction, Micky. You saw him hand a bag back to the car. The difference is very important. It adds up to a hundred and forty thousand pounds.’

  ‘Then who bumped him off?’

  She said as her smile wilted, ‘I still think you did, that’s the real reason we’re here. If you could remove Cuzak you could have fixed to remove us. We don’t want to be removed. Now don’t say that sounds unrealistic, Micky.’

  Micky Perran finished his drink. Some niggling sixth sense warned him to play this damned cool. If he came out with a full denial he could be in trouble. Now they were two to one. Obviously she had taken no notice of what he had told her earlier about what had happened outside the Red Ace.

  She knew better.

  Doubtless this Pat character did, too.

  He wondered, on the fringe of his mind, if Superintendent Frank Drury could be added to the number, and decided it was impressive enough without the Yard detective.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s keep it realistic. How did you contact Pat?’

  She came and sat on the arm of his chair and leaned close. Then she pressed one of her breasts against his arm, rubbing gently.

  ‘As if you didn’t know.’

  He had to reach back, but he came up with it.

  ‘When you stopped for petrol, then said you were going to the ladies’.’ He space
d the words evenly and tried to sound dull.

  He must have succeeded for she reached back, breaking contact between them, and stared at him with eyes wide.

  ‘Of course. I took the ignition key. If you’d grabbed the bag you wouldn’t have got far. So you came for the ride, and now we’ve got to make plans. But first you level with us, Micky. All about Cuzak and how you had him fixed.’

  He opened his mouth, not because he had words to deliver, but because he felt suddenly stifled. He felt even more stifled when her red mouth descended over his. He stopped breathing altogether until her sharp teeth bit his underlip. He closed his eyes to prevent her seeing his real reaction. When he opened them Pat was at the whisky bottle again and Sandra was repairing her smudged lipstick.

  Chapter 4

  Mario Bandelli sat in a silk-striped chair that had graced a salon in eighteenth-century France and the thundercloud on his face became darker as he concentrated on the knowledge he had learned from a couple of phone calls.

  In one corner of his compressed mouth was the stringy ruin of a fat Havana cigar. His teeth still worked at it as he fumed in silence, watched from ten feet away by a very thoughtful Cathy Manning. She knew this was a time to say nothing. Soon Bandelli would talk, and he had to be left to let the words flow without interruption.

  He had learned bad news. What she didn’t know was how bad. It was the detail she was anxious to acquire. Bad news for Bandelli normally meant money trouble, and that in turn usually checked out as an absence of cash he had considered on its way to his bank account.

  ‘A hundred and forty grand. That’s what they took. And Toni, the rat, was in the steal. He had to be. It couldn’t have been done without him. Impossible.’

  He switched to a sibilant flow of vituperative Italian, and as he pushed the words past the remains of the ruined cigar he apparently came to a decision. From the unchanged expression on his face it was not one he had arrived at happily. But Mario Bandelli had a considerable personal asset built into his character. He was a man who congenitally preferred sooner rather than later.

  He stabbed a finger at the watchful woman, and at arm’s length it became steady as a piece of sculpted stone, a detail of his threatening stance she did not miss.

  ‘Now this is what you do.’

  His voice was one she knew only too well. There was neither appeal nor argument against the words delivered by it. She listened to his instructions and then rose. He scowled at her.

  ‘For God’s sake show some feeling,’ he complained. ‘I’ve been taken for a hundred and forty grand, and you look about as excited as a six-foot nympho who’s found an impotent dwarf in her bed.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ she said flatly.

  ‘I’m not making jokes,’ he shouted.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ she said. ‘But you’re forgetting something, Mario.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not my hundred and forty grand.’

  She went out and slammed the door, just in time to avoid his jumping her with his fists balled for the kind of action she preferred to miss. She collected her coat and handbag, left the flat and took the lift to the corridor three floors down. She made sure it was deserted before walking to the service stairs. She went down one flight and halted before a locked service door, which she opened with a key she took from her handbag. It was on a ring with a red plastic tag. She locked the service door behind her before hurrying down another flight of bare concrete steps to the basement, and with another key on the ring with the red tag she unlocked another door, which she did not bother to lock after passing into the underground corridor beyond. She hurried to the end of it and climbed a flight of stone steps. The second key she had used unlocked the stout door which slid in a groove with remarkably little noise when she tugged it sideways.

  On the other side of that door was a narrow passage opening from the courtyard behind the flats. When assured that Bandelli’s recent visitors from Scotland Yard had posted no stakeout to watch the block of flats she pulled the door shut after her, again without locking it, and hurried down the passage.

  Three minutes later she was two streets away and feeding a coin into a public telephone in a kiosk shaded by a badly pruned plane-tree that looked as though it had a form of forest eczema. She spoke to a man she called Harvey, who responded to her call in a sleepy tone which he shed as soon as she stated he was wanted at nine sharp the next morning by Bandelli at somewhere she called the warehouse.

  ‘What the hell’s busted loose?’ he demanded in a rough-edged voice, which had a rising inflexion.

  ‘Toni’s been chilled,’ she said dispassionately.

  ‘That all?’ It was a genuine inquiry, not a sarcastic aside, as the change of tone informed her.

  ‘What more do you want?’ she said.

  ‘There’s always a reason. Mario didn’t tell you to ring me because he doesn’t know the reason.’

  She allowed Harvey full marks for shrewdness and almost full marks for knowing Mario Bandelli.

  She said, ‘A hundred and forty grand is missing.’

  His fierce whistle made her tug the phone away from her ears.

  ‘Why, that’s the very sum — ’

  Before he could complete she broke in. ‘Not over the phone, Harvey. Just be on time at nine o’clock — with the others.’

  She put down the instrument and cut the connection. Then she took another sixpence from her handbag and rang another number. She didn’t have to look it up because some time back she had received a call at Bandelli’s flat and the man at the other end had told her the number and whose it was, which had made her laugh with real amusement.

  When Bandelli asked her who was calling she had said simply, ‘Wrong number.’

  When she heard Micky Perran’s voice asking, ‘Who is it?’ she didn’t tell him, but said, ‘Just tell Sandra I want to speak to her.’

  ‘How do you know she is here?’ Perran demanded.

  ‘Questions, questions,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s full of questions. Look, tell her she’s wanted on the phone, that’s all.’

  But she had said too much to a man with a sharp ear and a trained memory.

  ‘You’re Cathy Manning,’ Perran cut in. His mind was suddenly whirring like a dynamo. ‘You and Sandra — you knew she was coming and you put me in that room so that — ’

  That was as far as Micky Perran got before the phone was snatched from his hand by Sandra, and the Pat character who had approved his whisky grabbed his arm and drew him into another room.

  ‘Why don’t you do as you’re asked instead of getting clever, Micky boy?’ asked the Irishman with the door closed on the conversation of the two women on the telephone.

  Perran tried to snatch his arm free of the other, but Pat’s grip hardened as his fingers sank into the muscle of Perran’s arm.

  ‘You were waiting for this call. Both of you,’ Perran said accusingly. ‘Why the hell here?’

  ‘We told you, Micky boy. We want to know why you fixed Toni. That’s very important because murder is something we hadn’t considered, and now we have to. See?’

  ‘No, I don’t see. All I see is — ’

  Again he was interrupted, this time by Sandra’s reappearance as she came back into the room and closed the door.

  ‘Bandelli’s seeing Harvey at nine o’clock,’ she said, sharing her news between the two men.

  ‘That’s bad,’ Pat muttered, frowning. ‘We ought to beat it fast.’

  ‘When we go we take him with us.’ Sandra nodded towards the perplexed Micky Perran. ‘And I’ve got an extra piece of news for you, Micky,’ she went on, waving to Pat to remain silent when he would have spoken. ‘At Bandelli’s I dropped the top from your book matches on the fire escape. A hint for that big nose from the Yard, Chief Superintendent Frank Nosey Parker Drury. But Cathy found it, and she managed to stop Bandelli from seeing it. She thought it was too soon to toss you to the wolves. In fact, you might not have to be tossed away at all, Micky. But
that depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On you, entirely on you, Micky. You double-crossed Toni Cuzak. We don’t have to be clairvoyant to read that. But someone reached you. You didn’t dream it up on your own. It wasn’t just luck that put you with a knife in Damsel Street. It was planned. All right, who did the planning?’

  Micky Perran swallowed hard. He looked from the woman as she stopped speaking to the scowling Pat, who stood with knotted fists, looking like a man spoiling to use his knuckles against a face he disliked. It came to Perran that this was no time to admit a too-simple truth that would never be believed because, for the moment, simplicity was strictly out of fashion. He couldn’t win a smile of approval by admitting he had dallied over a last daiquiri and had not done so with a switch-blade in his pocket. Because it wasn’t as simple as that. It was as complicated as that. The difference was past belief by the pair watching him like hungry hawks.

  He fell back on bluff to improve on complication for its own sake.

  He said cagily, ‘You won’t like it,’ and felt in his pocket for the book matches he had picked up in the Red Ace. The top was torn off. He turned the matches over in his hand with an air of exaggerated caution, as though fearful that they might burst into flame.

  ‘We’ve no choice, Micky,’ she said.

  ‘Mean you’ve got to like it?’

  ‘I mean we’ve got to know.’

  Pat took a couple of steps nearer and his left hand unfolded and he ground his right against the open palm. His eyes were almost screwed into the back of his head.

  ‘Very well,’ said Perran, and hesitated. He wasn’t at all sure that he was being smart, nor could he read aright the meaning of that grinding right fist of Pat’s. At least, he told himself he couldn’t read the grinding aright, because he hoped he couldn’t. He was becoming confused, and that was a bad sign.

  He wanted a drink.

  And that, in such a moment, was anything but a good sign.

  ‘Who?’ said the girl.

  So he said the name he had just heard for the first time only minutes before and spoken by her.

  ‘Harvey.’

  He was aware of two things simultaneously. Sandra’s scream of shocked surprise and the opening of Pat’s eyes.