The fella I needed to find was a mole named Hally Thersis. In his younger days, Hally had his hand in just about every game on the West Side. He carried the bag for a number of small-time bosses, broke a few fingers and a few windows when little shows of force were called for, and generally hooked lowlifes up with whatever they might be looking for. Strictly two-bit stuff, but the kind of thing that gets a man’s name known with a certain element. Hally was climbing up there in years these days so the rats that slunk around the canal neighborhood took him for harmless. I guess that made him easy to talk to because they seemed to drop secrets on him most of those fellas wouldn’t have trusted their own mothers with. Which was fine with me because Hally, in my experience, never minded making a few extra bucks selling an earful of gossip now and then.
I had the cabbie wait for me outside the Cain Building while I grabbed the pictures off my desk, the enlargement of Mr. Dapper and the two other decent prints, for good measure. I settled into the back seat and told the driver I wanted Parnassus Street. The fella raised his eyebrows at me in the mirror but pointed the taxi in the right direction anyway.
He didn’t bother with the usual cabbie chitchat and that suited me fine. I busied myself studying the photos again in the islands of light the streetlamps threw down between rivers of dark. Yellow light spilled through the cab’s windows and I saw Mr. Dapper’s ice-cool gaze, pointed right at the camera like he’d known I was snapping his picture, and wanted me to know he knew. Even now I didn’t like looking into those dead black eyes—not haunted, like my client’s, just cold and hard and mean. A shark’s eyes, soulless and predatory. I shuffled the photo back under the stack while we sank into darkness. When we emerged again, I was looking at one of the blurred images, the unrecognizable women clustered around the sharper shape of Mr. Dapper. I could tell the form on the far left belonged to the sallow gent who’d reminded me of an undertaker, sitting there mostly ignored by the strange harem. Rumbling into the next oasis of light, I looked at the last picture in the stack, the one that showed the girls most clearly and Mr. Dapper hardly at all. And there … I waited out another plunge into darkness, and rise into street light glow … I saw my client, entangled in the moment, a butterfly in a spider’s web. Something about the image stuck in my mind, something I could almost cull even from that shadowy image. I felt it as strongly as I’d felt that other instinct while I watched my client in the hotel … And both things dangled there just outside my mind’s grasp. I was letting other thoughts distract me, letting my feelings tangle up my thinking and it was getting in the way of doing my job.
I thought again of Cass, warning me not to touch this case, but pushed the memory aside. Cass was sweet, and a damn fine secretary, but she tended to get a little carried away with that “sixth sense” she claimed to have. Still, I got the feeling that the sooner I put the mysterious Miss Gray and all the rest of it behind me, the better for everyone.
I reached up to claw away the itch that’d suddenly sprung up in that scar of mine, but it wouldn’t go. I opted to try ignoring it.
Shadows washed over the photos in my hands then ebbed away again like an over-eager tide. What the hell was it about those shots, anyway? I knew some secret sat there in plain sight for me, but I couldn’t grasp it. If I could just catch hold of that loose strand of detail, who knew what I’d unravel? But I groped and plucked and came up empty-handed. I figured I might as well stash the damn things away and let it go for now, think about other things awhile. Instead, I went right on staring at those photos until the cab nosed up against a garbage-strewn curb and the cabbie mumbled, “Here y’are.”
I stuffed a couple of bills in the hand he flopped back toward me and told him to keep the change, then climbed out and slammed the door behind me. The damp gray stink of the canal mixed with a belch of exhaust as the cab roared away. Apart from the retreating rumble of the taxi, the place was quiet as a tomb. I ambled down Parnassus—hardly a street, really, more of an unglorified alley with a name and a couple of three-stool coffee counters tucked away here and there.
I found Hally right where I expected to, in a dingy little automat called the Delfy Café, as if the name could class the place up. The old fella sat slouched in a corner booth, steaming up the window with his sour breath. He hardly bothered to look up when I slipped onto the patched-up vinyl bench across from him, just went on prodding at a flat and soggy-looking wedge of cherry pie. He dragged one pulped fruit out of the mess, leaving a sticky red snail-trail behind it, then poked it into his mouth and chewed a minute, like an old dog with a chunk of rawhide.
“I still don’t know why you like this place so much, Hally,” I said, by way of greeting. “The food here makes army slop look like dinner at the Ritz.”
He chewed a minute more, swallowed pointedly, then tipped back his little brown pork pie hat and nodded at me.
“Long time no see, F. O.” Hally referred to nearly everyone by their initials. Guess it was left over from his numbers-running days and all the accounts in the black books. “I’m guessing you didn’t come here to catch up on old times, huh? I’m guessing on accounta you never do.”
“You see right through me, Hally.”
Hally grinned at that, showing uneven teeth the color of old newsprint, now caulked together with muddy red-black cherry sludge.
“You want … lemme see, you want …” He rolled his eyes up like the answer might be scribbled on the water-stained ceiling, poked his pink tongue out the side of his mouth. “You want ol’ Hally to maybe name a name for you, huh? Am I right?”
“Yeah,” I said. He always was.
“I always am,” he said, and dropped me a wink, his face a crumpled-paper mess of wrinkles.
“You have a gift, Hally.”
He nodded as he excavated another cherry-corpse from the ruin of his dessert and sucked it off his fork and chewed.
“Let’s see just how gifted you are,” I said, shuffling the enlargement of Mr. Dapper to the top of the stack. “Can you put a name to this face?”
I slipped the photo onto the table next to his half-empty coffee cup.
Hally dropped his fork.
He looked up at me, all hints of joviality erased from his features, his face the color of pigeon’s feathers. He pushed the picture back at me without looking at it again.
“No. I dunno that man. You maybe should ask someone else. Or maybe don’t ask anyone, you wanna be smart.”
“Don’t try to play me, Hally. You don’t have the touch anymore.”
Hally glowered at me. “I mean it, F.O. Let it go before it burns ya.”
The man was genuinely scared, which struck me as both unsettling and distinctly interesting.
“I’ll make it worth your time if you give me a name. Say—double my usual contribution …”
“I dunno this fella’s name, and you don’t wanna know it either. So take a hike.”
“I have to track him down, Hally. There’s a lot at stake here.”
He’d forgotten all about his pie and coffee. “You go deaf, F.O.? Walk away from this and don’t sneak no peeks over your shoulder as you go. ’Cause otherwise I’m sayin’ this could get ugly for you, I mean like you ain’t seen ugly.”
I leaned back, draped an arm along the back of the bench.
“Didn’t I see you cutting cards with Nikki Scoda down at the Dark Horse the other night?”
Nikki “Six-fingers” Scoda was another small-time hoodlum leftover from Hally’s day, but unlike Hally, he’d never gotten out of the life, at least not as far as I knew.
“You must be thinkin’ of some other fella,” Hally said, his face set like old plaster.
“Associating with known felons, gambling … those are both violations of your parole, aren’t they?”
“The cops ain’t gonna bust me for nothin’ like that. Look at me, I’m an old man.”
“Say I happen to mention what I saw the other night—”
“You didn’t see nothin’ on accounta I wasn’t there,” Hally broke in.
I ignored him. “—to my friend Detective Snider in the vice squad, he’ll have you back behind bars before you can finish that coffee there.”
“Like hell,” Hally said, but all the bluster had gone right out of his voice.
“A fella your age,” I went on, “won’t do too well in the clink. So the way I see it, it’s pretty easy for you. You give me a name and maybe a little direction and walk away a somewhat richer man, and I keep my mouth shut next time I see Detective Snider. Or, you keep your mouth shut, and I give my pal a call and you wind up back in the hoosegow for a while, scraping to make bail—if you last that long. Your choice.”
Hally picked up his fork, tapped it loudly on his plate, then dropped it again. He looked out the window, looked at the half-dozen other booths around us, all dead-empty. A vague shape moved somewhere behind the wall of food-slots, dropping an egg salad sandwich into one nook, a slab of chocolate cake into another. Apart from that we were alone.
Hands shaking, Hally picked up the prints and flipped through them, wincing.
“You didn’t hear this from me, no matter who asks,” he whispered, glowering at me.
“I was never even here,” I assured him.
“That man,” he jabbed a finger in Mr. Dapper’s direction, “he’s real bad news. They call him Mister Radamanthus—always Mister. He ain’t a fella you wanna get feelin’ insulted, you hear what I’m sayin’? I hear he’s a lieutenant in the Tartarus Syndicate. The tall fella with him,” now he indicated the undertaker, “is Myles Ferryman, I think. He ain’t nobody, just Mister R’s favorite lapdog. I don’t know who them girls are, but that fella, he’s always got a bunch of ’em flocking around him. If he ain’t too busy to be bothered, I mean.”
“Mmm,” I said, nodding. “And you know all this how?”
“Could be a did a few things for the Tartarus crowd, back in my youth. Odd jobs, is all, ya know. Radamanthus was already making his bones, even though he was hardly more than a kid.”
“You’re saying he’s older than you?” I asked, not able to keep the doubt out of my voice, and not particularly trying.
Hally scowled at me, then dropped his skinny shoulders in a shrug.
“Some folks get old graceful, and some of us don’t,” he said.
I thought of Mr. Dapper’s good looks—mature, but also strangely ageless—and cold fingers crept up and down my spine. “It’s obviously not clean living,” I said.
Hally snorted. “Next to him, I’m clean as hospital sheets.”
“Oh, you’re an angel,” I said. “So, tell me about this Tartarus Syndicate. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of ’em.”
“Nobody knows squat about ’em,” Hally said. “Not even me, F.O. Only that they been around a while and even the bosses are nervous about ’em.”
“You said Radamanthus is a lieutenant. So who runs the show?”
Now I saw Hally get tense all over again. His eyes kept taking inventory of the automat. Checking for flies on the walls, I guess. When he didn’t find any, he said, “I only hear whispers, okay, so don’t quote me on nothin’, but the way I hear it, the big man is someone they call Mister Menace. Don’t ask his other names, I don’t know ’em. Just Menace. I ain’t ever seen him or heard what he looks like, so don’t ask that either. All I know is his name makes some pretty mean fellas break out in a cold sweat, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“What’s their game, this Tartarus bunch? Numbers, booze? Girls?”
“Maybe all them things. Maybe none.”
The idea that this Tartarus crew might be running call girls made sense for a second, then didn’t. At least three of the women draping themselves all over Mr. Dapper in those pictures weren’t working girls. Too well coiffed and dressed and made up. Too much life in their eyes.
“Anyone who knows is too scared to say,” Hally went on, “and anyone who says don’t really know. Way I hear it, Mister M’s muscle don’t use guns ’cause bullets get the job done too quick. He likes ’em to use knives … likes to make his enemies bleed. It’s sorta how his goons sign their work, I guess you could say.”
“Thanks Hally,” I said, sliding out of the sticky booth. “You’ve been a real help.”
“Walk away from this one, F.O.,” Hally said again, but softly now. “I’m tellin’ you.…”
“Thanks for the advice.” I tucked the photos away inside my coat and tossed a few more bills on the table next to his coffee cup, then pushed through the door and into the dark of Parnassus Street.
Last I saw him, Hally was sitting in the automat, staring at his thumbs, his coffee and pie completely forgotten on the table in front of him.