Tweak the Devil's Nose Read online

  Richard Deming

  Tweak the Devil’s Nose

  A Murray Hill Mystery

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Vice Cop

  Also Available

  Copyright

  For Alys, who watched over my shoulder

  1

  There are two reasons I like El Patio Club as an occasional dining spot. It serves the finest food within a fifty-mile radius, and its proprietress is Fausta Moreni.

  It is also the last place in the world you would expect to witness a murder, though this was not a factor in my preference when I passed up three alternate dining places I like in favor of El Patio on the July evening Walter Lancaster was assassinated.

  Actually it had been the scene of a murder once before, but that was back in its days as a gambling casino, when its atmosphere was more conducive to homicide. Since Fausta had taken it over, eliminated the gaming tables and built it a reputation based on food, it had become the quietest supper club in town.

  El Patio was originally named, I imagine, by someone who liked the sound of the words but knew no Spanish, for there is nothing within sight of it even faintly resembling a courtyard. It is a huge gray stone building of two stories, from the outside resembling a prison. But inside it is magnificent. Three enormous rooms run nearly the width of the building from front to rear. As you enter through the heavy bronze double doors (a holdover from its casino days when the place sometimes had to be barricaded against invading cops) you find yourself in a cocktail lounge so glittering you automatically brace yourself to pay double the normal rate for drinks.

  To the left of the cocktail lounge an archway leads to the ballroom, where a five-dollar cover charge gets you a table, authorizes you to watch a floor show so sedate it would pass the scrutiny of a Methodist convention, and permits you to dance on a floor actually large enough to accommodate the usual crowd. It is the only night club I have ever been in which offers the twin innovations of entertainment, without smutty jokes and naked women, and sufficient room to dance.

  To the right a similar archway leads to the dining room, billed by Fausta as “The Dining Place of Kings” ever since a deposed monarch stopped for a sandwich when he was motoring through the city a few years back. It is the dining room which brings Fausta her fortune. Not that she loses on either of the other rooms, for both draw as well as can be expected in a town which does not particularly go for night-club life. But seven nights a week the dining room is packed to the walls.

  Yet oddly enough the club is out of the way and inconvenient to reach. Isolated in the center of a three-acre patch of ground at the extreme south edge of town, and on a secondary highway, you would hardly expect it to draw the crowds it does, for though its location was logical for a gambling casino, it is about as poor as can be imagined for a night club. But in this case the old adage about a better mousetrap worked out. Customers — not the fickle night-club crowd which makes new clubs boom the first month and then suddenly deserts for a new attraction, but a solid clientele which sticks year after year — book reservations weeks in advance and come from as far as fifty miles away to keep them.

  I had no reservation, however, for when you start out for dinner as late as I did this particular night, you are not likely to have trouble finding a table anywhere. It was just nine thirty when I drove between the two stone pillars marking the entrance to El Patio’s drive. The drive, which runs past the club’s front entrance, then angles left alongside the building to a parking lot at the rear, separates El Patio from a heavily treed parklike area some hundred yards square. This area offered excellent cover to the assassin.

  Had the taxi driver who pulled into the drive immediately ahead of me behaved as drivers familiar with the place do, possibly I would not have been involved in the murder at all, but apparently he was a new driver and did not know procedure. Instead of continuing back to the lot, turning around and returning to the entrance with his nose pointed toward the highway, he slammed on his brakes in front of the steps leading up to the bronze doors, jumped out and left his cab in the center of the drive, blocking traffic both ways.

  Behind him I slammed on my own brakes just in time to avoid collision, then accidentally let my toe slip off the clutch, which caused the car to jolt forward and gently clang bumpers. This happened because I operate both foot pedals with my left foot, my right being an intricate contrivance of cork and aluminum below the knee.

  Shortly after the war the Veterans Administration gave me a specially built Olds in return for the leg I left overseas, a sedan with the foot brake on the left and with an attachment which caused the clutch to disengage when the brake pedal was pushed halfway down. But when I finally traded it in on a 1951 Plymouth, I could not afford the special attachments. Consequently when I brake, I turn my left foot sidewise, hitting the brake with my heel and the clutch with my toe. I have gotten pretty good at it, but this time I slipped.

  The cabbie, a cocky bantamweight with a strut like a Prussian sergeant major’s, stopped halfway up the steps, ran down again and anxiously stared at his undamaged bumper.

  Then he inquired belligerently, “Whyn’t you learn how to drive?”

  “Whyn’t you learn how to park?” I countered, mimicking his tone. “Pick either side of the drive you want and I’ll take the other.”

  “Yeah?” he asked. “I gotta customer, Bud. I’ll move when I finish loading.”

  As he started up the steps again, I got out of my car, swung open the driver’s door of the taxi and climbed in. The motor was running, and I had pulled the cab forward and to the right so that it was flush against the shrubbery edging the driveway before the cabbie realized what was happening.

  “Hey!” he yelled, starting down again.

  By the time he reached me I was out of the cab and had slammed the door. Near the left rear fender he stopped me by planting both hands on hips and halting directly in my path. He was only about five feet six and weighed possibly ninety-nine pounds, but his chin was thrust out and his expression said he could handle any two guys my size.

  Grinning down at him, I tried to step around, but he moved his body to block me again. At the top of the steps I was conscious of the uniformed doorman watching this maneuvering with interest, and I began to grow a little irked. I suspected if I tried to push the bantam taxi driver aside, he would swing on me, and I had no desire to fight a man half my size. At the same time I do not enjoy being shoved around even by midgets.

  I was saved from a decision by the big bronze doors opening and a man in white Palm Beach stepping out. Immediately the doorman clapped his hands and called, “Taxi for Mr. Lancaster!”

  As the man descended the steps the little cabbie said darkly, “I’ll see you again, Buster,” and moved to open the rear door of the taxi.

  I grinned at him again, took a step toward my own car just as the white-suited man passed between me and the cabbie, then half turned to glance back at the man as something familiar about his appearance struck me.

  At that moment a gun roared so close to my ear it started bells ringing in my head.

  The taxi driver, whose back had been turned while he opened the d
oor, twisted around to gape at his customer. All three of us — the doorman, the taxi driver and I — stood transfixed as the man in white slowly spun around and collapsed on his face. The cabbie recovered first. He gave me a horrified look and dived in front of his cab out of the line of fire.

  It did not occur to me at the moment that he thought I had fired the shot at him, missed and hit his customer.

  As the little cabbie tried to dig a hole in the gravel drive, I swung toward the bush from which the shot had come. It was a dark night, I was unarmed and I had no intention of trying to grapple with the gunman, so I made no attempt to rush after him. But I did listen, and I could hear the rustle of fallen leaves as someone moved hastily toward the highway.

  Swiftly I ran toward my car, leaped in and threw it in reverse. My intention was to back the approximately fifty yards to the drive entrance, swing my lights along the edge of the parklike area where it touched the highway, and attempt to get a glimpse of the gunman when he reached the road. But I was foiled by another car swinging into the drive just before I reached the stone pillars.

  Braking, I attempted to honk it out of the way, but the driver failed to get the point and simply sat there. Finally I jumped out, shouted, “Emergency! Back out and let me pass!”

  So what did the guy do? He got flustered and killed his engine. At the same moment I heard a car spin its wheels as it roared away from about where I figured the assassin would have come out on the road.

  Giving up, I told the driver behind me to forget it, drove back and parked behind the In the interval a number of people had come out of the club. At the top of the steps I spotted the vivid blonde hair of Fausta Moreni, flaming like a pink beacon in the light of the neon sign over the door. Surrounded by customers, she calmly listened to the doorman’s excited story.

  Standing over the crumpled white figure next to the cab, a forty-five automatic in his hand, was Marmaduke Greene, affectionately known to his friends as “Mouldy” due to a mild but persistent case of acne. Seeing me return, the cabbie had crowded behind Mouldy’s wide back.

  “That’s him!” the cabbie hissed in Mouldy’s misshapen ear. “Look out! He’s got a gun!”

  Mouldy Greene’s flat face registered amazement. “Manny Moon?” he asked over his shoulder. “The sarge tried to use a rod on a little punk like you? And missed on top of it?”

  He shook his gun at me friendlily. “Hi, Sarge. What’s new?”

  “Put it away,” I told him, eying the automatic warily. Mouldy is not the safest person in the world to let handle a gun, sometimes forgetting what he has in his hand and preoccupiedly squeezing the trigger.

  “Sure, Sarge.” Obediently he tucked it under the arm of his dinner jacket.

  During World War II Mouldy Greene had been the sad sack of my outfit overseas. Every outfit had at least one: a well-meaning bungler with a talent for fouling up every detail he was assigned, but for whom you developed veloped the same sort of exasperated fondness a mother feels for an idiot child.

  Immediately after the war, while El Patio was still a gambling casino, the underworld character who owned the place hired Mouldy as a bodyguard. He must have been hard up for strong-arm men, for while Mouldy looks tough, having a build like a rhinoceros and a face nearly as flat as the top of his head, he has a mind like a rhinoceros too. He proved just as efficient a bodyguard as he had a soldier, managing to be leaning against El Patio’s bar when a business rival put a bullet through his boss’s head.

  Fausta inherited Mouldy when she took over El Patio, and while she had no compunction about instantly firing the other gunmen and bouncers inhabiting the place as members of the club’s staff, it would have taken a harder heart than Fausta possessed to cast Mouldy out into a competitive world. She tried him as a waiter, bus boy and even as head waiter before she gave up in despair and created a special job for him.

  Mouldy was official customer greeter for the establishment. Evenings he stood just inside the main entrance with a hideous smile on his face, calling celebrities by their first names (generally the wrong ones), familiarly slapping barebacked dowagers on the back and in general acting the part of the genial host with earthy informality. The customers loved it once they got over the initial shock, and in the public mind he had become an institution.

  Now he casually collared the miniature cabbie, held him with his feet dangling six inches off the ground and asked, “What about this guy, Sarge?” The “Sarge” was a holdover from Army days, and I had given up trying to break him of the habit.

  “Put him down,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything.”

  Stooping, I felt for pulse in the prone man’s wrist, but found none. He was lying on his chest, both arms flung forward, and there were bloodstains immediately beneath each armpit, indicating the bullet had passed entirely through him from right to left.

  The man lay on one cheek, a thin, austere-looking face turned in the direction of the club entrance. In the dim light cast by the neon sign “El Patio” immediately over the bronze doors, I again thought I detected something familiar about his appearance, but it eluded me. I was sure I had never seen him before, but almost equally sure I had seen his picture somewhere.

  “Know who he is?” I asked Mouldy.

  “Butch here?” He shook his head. “First time he’s dropped in.”

  “Then how do you know his name’s Butch?”

  “Huh? Oh, I call ‘em all Butch when I don’t know who they are. Sounds better than just ‘Hey you!’”

  Ordinarily I know better than to ask Mouldy anything at all, but it had been some time since I had seen him and I was a little rusty.

  To the little cabbie, who had again dodged behind Mouldy as soon as his collar was released and was still peering at me apprehensively, I said, “Shut off your motor and prepare to stick around. The cops will want you as a witness.”

  As an afterthought I told Mouldy to keep track of the little man until the police arrived.

  Then I walked over to the steps, which were by now packed by at least twenty people. Others, still half inside, held wide the big double doors, and behind them crowded a solid pack of customers straining to see what was going on. For some reason, possibly because the doorman, like the cabbie, had the impression I was the one who had fired the shot and had passed his opinion along, no one but Mouldy had ventured farther than the lowest step.

  The manner in which the crowd seemed to shrink back as I neared substantiated this guess.

  I had never thought my experience as a first sergeant during the war would be of any value in civilian life, but after all the intervening years I finally found a use for one thing I had learned. Summoning up my old parade-ground voice, I boomed, “Everybody back to their tables! ON THE DOUBLE!”

  The whole crowd jumped like people do after a thunder crash. Then they meekly turned and filed back inside, leaving only Fausta and the doorman on the steps. The doorman eyed me nervously and seemed inclined to follow the customers inside where there were no homicidal maniacs running loose.

  Fausta turned her big brown eyes on me. “What happened, Manny?”

  “In a minute, Fausta,” I said. I looked at the doorman, an imposing figure in the maroon uniform of a Central American general. “Seems to me you called yonder corpse by name. Who is he?”

  He swallowed, finally got out, “Mr. Walter Lancaster, sir.”

  My hair nearly turned white. Being innocently involved in a murder is bad enough. Having one witness, and possibly two, convinced you are the killer is even worse. But when the victim is the kind whose assassination will cause deep-seated political repercussions and make headlines all over the country, you are, to put it mildly, in an unpleasant spot.

  Walter Lancaster was lieutenant governor of our neighboring state, Illinois.

  2

  At twenty-seven Fausta Moreni is one of the richest women in the city, but when I first met her during the war she was a nineteen-year-old penniless refugee from Fascist Italy, frightened and alone
in a strange country. Most of America’s Italian immigrants have come from Sicily and southern Italy, but Fausta was from Rome. While she is as dark-eyed as her southern countrywomen, her skin is a creamy tan instead of the sultry olive possessed by most southern Italian beauties, and her hair is a gleaming natural blonde.

  Fascinated partly by her Latin explosiveness and comic-opera accent, and partly by what I took to be her defenselessness in an alien land, I went overboard for her like a moonstruck teen-ager in spite of having attained the sophisticated age of twenty-four. All during the war I carried her picture in my pocket and a vague plan for a vine-covered cottage in my heart.

  But when I finally returned from overseas plus a long period in a V.A. hospital, nearly five years had passed and Fausta had outgrown my mental image. Only traces of her accent lingered, and in place of a naïve and dependent teen-ager I found an assured young career woman well on her way to parlaying her culinary genius into a fortune. When I recovered from the shock, I found I was just as much attracted to her as ever, but I no longer felt like much of a catch.

  Fausta insisted it made no difference who had the money, the husband or wife, but it did to me. I will not try to defend my position. I admit I am pigheaded, arrogantly proud, unrealistic and all the other things well-meaning friends, including Fausta, have told me I am for refusing to marry the girl. But that is what I did.

  We seldom see each other any more, but I have never been able to get very excited over any other woman, and Fausta has never indicated matrimonial interest in any of the numerous men who chase her. Though long ago we tacitly dropped the subject of marriage, it pleases her to pretend she pursues me hotly, and to go along with the game I make a pretense of trying to struggle off the hook.

  We waited in Fausta’s office for the police to arrive. Before phoning, I had Fausta announce to the crowd what had happened and request that no one leave until released by the police. To insure compliance she posted waiters at the front door and each of the two side entrances with instructions to be firm.