A little man with a leather cap stuck on the back of his head came down the stairs and went out. The spring bell on the door was still jingling when Basso walked in. When Basso walked in anywhere the floor shook under his two hundred and fifty pounds, and he looked more like a bull than a man. A bull in a loud suit walking on its hind legs. The biggest and toughest bull in New Orleans.
There was an old punch bell on the desk. Basso didn’t use it. He kicked the front of the desk with his double-soled boots. I could imagine some of the other things Basso kicked with those boots. When all the yelling didn’t wake up the clerk, Basso went behind the desk and rocked the fat man’s head with some pretty good slaps.
I wanted to be sure. I didn’t tell Basso to put his hands up until he turned his back, and he sure as hell didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t see the red in his face, but the color ran around the sides of his bull’s neck.
“Put your right hand behind your head, then drop your gun with the other hand,” I told him. “Don’t hurry—nice and slow. Then take off that coat and drop it. After that turn around all the way. Then take two giant steps toward the stairs.”
It looked like this was my day for short-barreled Smith & Wessons. Basso carried it in a shoulder holster, and there were no other guns in sight when he took off the coat. His meaty face wasn’t just red when he turned around; it was close to purple. I guess it was kind of hard on him, the meanest bull in New Orleans, being taken twice in the same day, by the same man.
Putting the boots to any kind of lawman is one thing I like to do. “We keep this up, chief, you’re going to run out of guns. I sure hope you don’t have to pay for them yourself.”
The red stayed in Basso’s face, but his eyes were cold, his voice, too. “You better kill me now, Carmody,” he said. “Because if you don’t I’m going to rip out your guts.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys,” I said. “You think the whole world wets its pants when you walk by. Maybe you’re pretty good beating up sneak thieves and sick whores. Now me, I think you’re just a thief who doesn’t have the guts to do it out in the open. Like the rest of us thieves.”
I didn’t expect Basso to grin. “That’s because I’m smarter than you are,” he said. “You aren’t smart at all, cowboy. Or you’d be long gone from New Orleans.”
I grinned back at him, “Let’s go on up to Minnie’s room, and we’ll talk some more. Start climbing those stairs.”
I kept well away from Basso. He didn’t like it when I wouldn’t let him get out of the way after he knocked on the door. Nobody shot through the door, and I told Basso to break it down. One kick from the double-soled boots did the trick.
The room was dark and hot and the man lying on the floor with a knife in his chest wasn’t making any noise. The window shade wouldn’t go up. Basso ripped it down, scattering dust. Basso felt the side of the dead man’s neck and straightened up.
“How long?” I asked him.
“Hard to say, maybe an hour. Did you do it?”
“Come on, Basso.”
“All right,” Basso said. “I guess you didn’t do it.”
“And I didn’t kill Gertie.”
Basso looked at me. “That’s what you keep saying. If you didn’t, then who did?”
“Maybe you did, Basso. You knew about me the minute I hit town. Got a telegram from Hot Springs describing me. Knew about the eleven thousand. Tipped off Gertie and got me robbed. Then you double-crossed Gertie, killed her or had her killed, and rigged it so the mountain would fall on me.”
“You ought to be a detective,” Basso said. “A detective in the Ladies Auxiliary.”
I kept the gun on him while he went through the dead man’s pockets. I knew it was George Verrier before Basso found a wallet and said that’s who it was. The face was dark, like Minnie’s, and the features were the same. George was wearing an old-fashioned ruffled shirt of the kind you hardly ever see any more. It hadn’t been washed lately, and the cuffs were frayed.
“You know who he is?” Basso asked.
“You’re off duty right now, officer. I’ll ask the questions.”
Basso paid no mind to that. Acting tough was a habit hard to break. “For Christ’s sake, cowboy, do you know him or not.”
“Maybe,” I said. “No reason to tell you.”
I didn’t know whether to believe Basso when he said, “Maybe you didn’t kill Gertie. And, for Christ’s sake, don’t keep saying I did.”
I asked him why not.
Now Basso was hedging again. “Because if you killed Gertie, there was no reason not to kill me when you had the chance. They couldn’t hang you but once.”
“Not good enough, Basso. Maybe that explains why I didn’t kill her. But what about you?”
Basso gave up trying to fool me. Least I think he did. “No reason for me to kill Gertie,” he said. “None at all. I own Gertie’s—she just worked for me. We got along fine. I get along fine with everybody. A lot of people all over town work for me. We get along fine. That’s the way business should be, profitable and peaceful. No holding out, no double-dealing. Why, man, I get a cut of just about everything but the Sunday collections. I let that go; I’m not greedy. Why in hell should I risk everything to get a lousy eleven thousand dollars?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds sensible enough the way you tell it. Supposing you’re out of it—what about Gertie? Maybe she got tired of working for wages?”
Basso moved his strong brown teeth like grindstones. He was impatient, or acting that way. “Gertie worked for me for close to eleven years. She got a percentage of the take and never pulled down less than two thousand a month. Gertie was worth more than you stole in your whole life.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “What happens now?”
Basso took his hands down. I told him to put them back where they were. I asked him the same question.
“Nobody messes with Ned Basso,” he said. “That goes for you too, cowboy.”
I sure as hell was messing with him, but I didn’t press the point.
Basso said, “It took me fifteen years to get this town the way I want it. I run things my way, and when I say something I make it stick. Everybody’s got their hand out—the Mayor, the City Council, the Chief of Police. They got their business interests, and I got mine. Gertie was one of them, and I aim to do something about it. If I don’t the whole thing could fall to pieces.”
“Which makes you an honest crook,” I said. “Business as usual is what you want?”
Basso grinned. “Somebody’s got to pay for Gertie,” he said. “You would have done fine.”
“You think Minnie Haha did it?” I asked him. “She did run away. And now there’s her brother.”
“What brother?”
“The dead man on the floor.”
“Oh,” said Basso. “On the floor.”
“Not on the ceiling, officer.”
“You got a big mouth, cowboy,” Basso said. “Someday it’s going to get you in a lot of trouble.”
I was thinking. “How did Gertie know who I was?”
“Because I told her,” Basso answered. “On the telephone. I had a man watching you from the minute you got into town. He telephoned me and said you’d gone into Gertie’s place. I telephoned Gertie and told her you were a bad lad from out West. To knock you on the head—to kill you, if that didn’t work. I mean, if you tried to burn the place.”
On the face of it, Basso’s story made some sense. Looking at him it was easy to believe he had a heavy interest in every dirty business in New Orleans. Of course, he’d listened to so many smooth stories in his time that making one up for me would be no trouble at all.
Basso said, “I know what you’re thinking, Carmody. You’re thinking you could ruin me with what I just told you. Don’t you believe it. What could you do—tell the Chief of Police? I got enough on the chief to hang him—and not just in a manner of speaking. Now you want to deal with me or not?”
“Answer this first,” I told him. “I crippled a city detective, killed the black and two of Corley Harkins’ gunmen in the Fenian Hotel. All in self defense, naturally. Where does that leave me, even if I didn’t kill Gertie?”
“Shooting that detective was bad business, Carmody. I guess he’ll be all right. The others— well, I’d say we can file it under Miscellaneous. Soon as the Gertie killing is cleared up you can get the hell out of my town.”
“With my eleven thousand,” I reminded him.
Basso was all crook. He grinned. “Filing things under Miscellaneous costs money, cowboy. Fifty-five hundred, to be exact about it. That’s the deal. The only one in town.”
It was something to think about. There was only one thing that said maybe I should deal with Basso. Like him or not, and I didn’t, the man looked like a professional. A professional lawman and a professional crook. Most of the time you can’t trust lawmen with sticky fingers. In a pinch some of them turn out to be more lawman than thief. Or they get scared and try to double back and prove they were true-blue fellers after all.
Basso wasn’t like that. He wasn’t just a crooked bull; he was a businessman. I like to do business with a man who knows his business and wants to protect it.
“Here’s your gun back,” I said, tossing the second Smith & Wesson his way. He caught it easily with his left hand. Looking at me, he checked the loads and spun the chamber. He hefted the short-barreled .45, looking to see how I took it. Finally, the gun went into the shoulder holster.
“Okay,” he said. “First you talk. Don’t hold back, cowboy. It wastes time. You want that money, and I want you gone from New Orleans. What about this dead man?”
I told him about the letters I found in Minnie’s dresser. I said that George there on the floor was having trouble keeping his head above swamp water. Kept asking if Minnie could send money to save the family honor. And he wasn’t at home to receive my telegraph message.
“You think Minnie and George killed Gertie?” I asked Basso. “George was in town on some kind of business. Could be that Minnie saw a clear chance to get hold of some big money. Enough to send the tax collector packing. The guard at the hotel did say a man and a woman opened my strongbox.”
Basso took off his hard hat, touched his bandaged head, gave me a mean look, and put the hat on again. It was kind of embarrassing to see the bandages. Basso said, “The guard said a young woman and a big heavyset man probably older. George here looks about twenty-four. Not tall and thin as a rail. Anyway, how would Minnie know about the eleven thousand?”
“Maybe Gertie told her,” I suggested.
Basso shook his head. “Not Gertie. Gertie never gets friendly with the girls.”
I had a thought. “Would she tell Sam Nails? Would she have?”
“It’s possible,” Basso said slowly, eyeing me hard and not just because of the hurt in his head. “Yes, sir, it’s possible she did. That buck’s been with her a long time. As long as I knew her. Longer than that, I’d say. Got him out of the Parish Prison. Something like that, the best I remember.”
“Well?” I said.
“That’s all wet, Carmody. The black didn’t do it. Gertie was good to that boy.”
“And they say Abe Lincoln liked actors.”
Basso got up and walked around, and he had to step over the dead man to do it. Every time he turned his back on me I got ready to shoot him. But Basso was the kind of man who did one thing at a time. He was thinking now; maybe he’d try to kill me later. He stepped back over the dead man and put his wide backside on the edge of the bed.
“It’s still all wet,” he said, not as sure as the words meant to be. “Now if Gertie was twenty years younger and it was rape along with murder—sure it could be the black. And even that won’t wash. You ever hear of a houseman in a cathouse having to rape anybody? Gertie had plenty of colored girls for customers liked dark meat.”
I thought this new team of detectives, Carmody & Basso, was taking too long to come to the point. Any kind of point. “What’s all this bullshit about rape? Why couldn’t Samuel J. Nails decide to snag that eleven thousand for himself? The big bastard was smart. I know that and don’t tell me he wasn’t. Gertie could have told him—you said so yourself. They’d been together a long time, and she could have mentioned it. The way you see it, she was good to Nails. Gertie saw it that way, too. But what about Nails himself?”
Basso said, “The black always looked okay to me. He had money in the bank. Some money. Not a lot. Enough for a black. I checked on him myself a while back. I tell you, the black was doing fine.”
I wasn’t one bit sure that Nails killed Gertie. I said to Basso, “What were you doing when you were forty?”
Basso didn’t put anything together, but he answered. “The same as now,” he said. “Chief of Detectives.”
“You weren’t a forty-year-old towel boy and bouncer in a whorehouse. That’s what Nails was. Nails was forty, give or take some.”
“For Christ’s sake, Carmody, where you from anyway? Nails was a black!”
I started to put a smoke together. Basso said he didn’t want one. Didn’t smoke or drink. I began to wish I hadn’t given back his gun. “All right,” I said. “You’re the detective.”
Basso took out a toothpick and chewed on it. It was a gold toothpick attached to his watch chain by another smaller chain. He snapped at the gold toothpick like a dog on a rat hunt.
I waited.
Finally, he said, “Could be. You never know in this job. Times change—maybe. The black could have done it. You were out cold, first in the whore’s bed.”
Basso put a mean grin on his face. “You were out, not able to do a thing. I guess you aren’t so tough.”
No answer was called for.
“Then the black carried you to that other room where you woke up. You slept there most of the night. That gave the black all the time he needed to kill Gertie, before or after the money was taken from the strongbox. The shotgun guard said he didn’t get a clear look at the man who came in with the woman. Just he was big, older than the woman, and with a big hat down over his face.”
“Minnie?” I asked
“Sure looks that way, Carmody. She was there and the black was there. Gertie, say, told the black about the money, about you. What bothers me is why this woman, whore or not, would team up with a black? The black was doing all right for himself and the whore, the way you tell it, wasn’t interested in a goddamned thing. Just lay there like a dog in a basket. Why would they all of a sudden up and kill Gertie and rob you?”
“Gertie was handy—that’s all. What they really wanted was the money. I was handy, too. They figured—somebody figured—how to take the money and sic the whole New Orleans Police Department on poor old Carmody. The law would kill me or catch me or I’d run back to Texas and keep going. The law would have me down on the books for a killing and they’d have the money. Only they robbed and framed the wrong man.”
His feet clear of the floor, Basso tapped the dead man in the side of the head with his boot. Nothing mean was in the way he did it. Basso had seen a lot of dead men on dirty floors. The Chief of Detectives was thinking hard. He tapped while he thought, and not being dead long enough to stiffen up, George Verrier’s head rolled a bit.
“Why would she kill her own brother?” Basso wanted to know. “That is, if he is her brother, and she is mixed up in this, and if she did kill him. What about that, Detective Carmody? I know, I know. George here wanted some kind of share of the money, and the whore killed him. Her own brother.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Basso stood up and groaned. “We’re not doing any good holding a wake over this dead meat.”
“What’s the plan?” I enquired.
“Plan!” Basso was fed up. “The plan, cowboy, is to get the hell out of here.”