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“Jasper’s ordinarily quite reliable as a guard, so I assume these unpleasant individuals came in the front. They caught me dab in the middle of the dance floor. I’m afraid they took my revolver,” Tabby said calmly.
“Put the gun down or I shoot her right now,” Scott said. “Nobody named Jasper or anything else is coming to help you.”
The goon with bad teeth had come in after him. Also visibly armed. And wearing Tremain’s blue muffler. Two men with weapons drawn, plus the one on the floor who already was shifting to grab my ankles and bring me down if I tried anything. Behind me, Tremain was in desperate need of medical care. The gun poking into the ribs of a woman who’d helped me was the decisive factor.
“Okay, Frank. Anything you say.”
Stooping carefully, my free hand raised in reassurance, I placed my .38 on the floor. The man I’d surprised when I came in snatched it gleefully. Getting to his feet, he reclaimed his own weapon from the back of my waistband.
“How the hell did she get past you?” Scott snapped.
“She didn’t. There’s a place back there that opens like the one we’ve been using.”
The light from the single overhead light wasn’t great, but it was enough to see Scott’s face color.
“Walk away now, Frank, before you make a worse mess for yourself,” I said. “That woman you’re threatening is pals with the mayor and sits on more civic boards than you have fingers. Hurt her and they’ll be hunting you from here to kingdom come.”
All the antagonism toward me he’d been hiding showed in his smile.
“Is that the best you can do? It’s all I would have expected when Loren first hired you. Now that I’ve seen how effective you are, I’m disappointed you’d resort to fairytales.”
“Then maybe you should consider I might be telling the truth. She owns this building.”
“And I would like to know how you discovered the mechanism that opens the panel and figured out how to use it,” Tabby demanded.
Scott sneered without even glancing at her.
“I made pocket change delivering flowers when I was a kid. I brought some here one day and a big blond guy showed me.”
Tabby looked devastated.
“Look, she only came down to let me in. I had no idea she’d stick around. She doesn’t know anything, not even who you are. Let her go.”
“Ah, but the two of you, nuisances though you are for making more work, will help sell the idea Gil’s death is an accident — an ugly end to a promising life. Who knows when or why he started using heroin again? When he doesn’t show up for work, his concerned employers hire you to find him. You do just that, but something goes wrong. He’s hopped up on drugs... maybe jumped you to rob you... shoots you and your friend with your own gun. After which he collapses, having taken too big a dose.”
The rage I’d felt when I saw the drug paraphernalia multiplied beyond measure. Gil Tremain had endured beatings and, by the looks of it starvation, rather than give up information to a traitor. Now his name would be disgraced in the ugliest way imaginable, his daughter left to believe the last thing he’d want her to believe about him.
“Why, Frank? Just tell me why you hate him so much.” I could guess, but I needed time to clear my head. I needed time to think.
“I got tired of hearing how he walked on water. Tired of Loren never taking my advice on anything even though we were partners.”
“So you decided to give him a heart attack. With the phone calls, and taking Gil and his calculations and finally the snake.”
“I didn’t take the calculations. He hid them. He heard me talking to someone and began to mistrust me. I could tell. The mule-headed idiot won’t tell me what he changed or where he put them. It’s his own fault it ends like this. He could have died quickly. Painlessly. Without disgrace.”
But he would have been disgraced in his own eyes, and his daughter would have believed that he was a dope fiend.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t.
My eyes searched desperately in the small space for something — anything — I could use as a weapon. Three men with guns. Against Tabby, me, Tremain. The latter tied in his chair and too weak to move if he could.
“Arnold. Take care of Miss High Society.”
Scott shoved Tabby toward the gap-toothed thug. The burly, unshaven specimen hooked an arm across the front of her shoulders and pulled her against his body. It immobilized her more than Scott’s way had, but Arnold’s gun was pointed forward and five inches from the side of her head rather than pressed to her skull.
“If you try anything smart, your friend gets it. Understand?” Scott brushed past me.
“If you shoot either one of us here, your tale about Tremain shooting us will be hard to swallow. Traces of blood where they shouldn’t be and missing where they should be. Then the cops discover you played poker with Benning, and how he conveniently disappeared the same time Tremain went missing.”
“You won’t take a chance on it.”
“How did you get him to meet you down here?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He was smug beyond fear. As if to emphasize my helplessness, he seized Tremain’s chin. He put his own face close.
“Time to say good-by, Gil. I won. We may not make that fat deal, thanks to you, but sooner or later I’ll see the same flaw you did in our original calculations. Meanwhile C&S will keep on making dandy profits and I’ll get my share. Loren will be oh, so glad I’m there to steady the ship. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even woo Lucille again. And since Miss Sullivan here worked so hard to find you, it seems only fair that she put the needle in your arm.”
I stared at him in loathing.
“I won’t.”
He leveled his gun at me.
“You will, or Arnold twists Miss High Society’s arm from the socket. He’s remarkably useful. Even knows a vacant lot where we can dump bodies without being noticed, just like he knew where to buy the treat you’re going to give Gil.
“Go on.” He motioned me toward the little round table against the wall. “Strap first. Pick it up.”
I stared at a leather strap I hadn’t noticed before. I stared at the table holding it and the needle and other items. Was the table light enough I could swing it up and knock Scott’s gun from his fingers? He was barely an arm’s length away.
I raised my eyes in hopes I’d catch Tabby’s. I never had a chance.
“Coppers! Coppers!” a voice screeched through the open door to the bar.
Jasper’s voice.
In the split second Scott and his two henchmen froze in confusion, Tabby gave what resembled a bow. The man who’d been imprisoning her catapulted over her head to land on his back. My fingers closed on the empty syringe. I drove it into Frank Scott’s cheek.
As he howled in pain I rammed my shoulder and the full force of my body into his side. I went down with him. One of his hands had grabbed at the source of the pain in his cheek — the needle — but the other still held a gun. I caught his arm with both hands and smashed his wrist against the floor as he began to hit ineffectually at my head. From elsewhere in the room there was a shriek, a male shriek, then a shot. I slammed Scott’s wrist down again and he lost his grip on the gun.
Once my fingers were in possession of it, I rolled to my feet. Unable to see behind him, and unsure what was happening, Scott made the smart decision to go motionless. I blinked once to make sure I wasn’t imagining the tableau that met my eyes.
Tabby Warren stood straddling the gap-toothed thug who had been her captor a moment earlier. She was leveling his own .22 automatic at him. She held it very nicely, one hand supporting the other.
Sprawling with his back to the wall, in almost the exact spot I’d forced him to sit, was Scott’s other lackey. A throwing knife like I’d seen at carnivals lodged in his inner thigh.
“One acquires unusual skills growing up on the vaudeville circuit,” the socialite said noting my expression.
Then, soundless as a cat, one of Nico Caras’ men stepped through the opening behind the bar.