Lucky Stiff - Craig Rice (good book club books .TXT) 📗

Ordinarily, John J. Malone preferred delicate-looking girls, with dainty, birdlike appetites. Possibly a hangover from the days when he was putting himself through night law school by driving a taxi. In those days a girl who said, “I’m not hungry, thank you, I’ll just take a cup of coffee,” was a rare jewel to be treasured. Or possibly it was because, in his later, and more affluent days, he liked his girls to pay attention to him, and not what he was feeding them.

This morning, though, he enjoyed watching Anna Marie at her breakfast. She’d been eating prison breakfasts for weeks now, and the little lawyer knew exactly how much graft was being collected from the food allowances. And even without the graft, oatmeal was a hell of a thing to face when you first woke up in the morning.

He managed, surreptitiously, to slide five of the pancakes onto her plate, and three onto his own. Most of the little sausages landed beside the five pancakes, and the sirup jug was pushed over to her side of the table. He watched, happily, while she wiped up the last drop of sirup with the last square inch of pancake. He gave her most of the scrambled eggs, and felt a warm, purring sensation when she piled gobs of marmalade on the biscuit. Finally, when she accepted most of the apple pie, and sighed over her coffee, his happiness was complete.

A fly would have starved to death on what was left on the table when breakfast was over.

Malone had been keeping the rest of the beer—he’d served some of it with the scrambled eggs—cool under the coldwater tap in the bathtub. Now he poured out two glasses, gave Anna Marie a cigarette, and said, “Well? Who framed you? Or is that what you want to find out?”

Anna Marie took a long, slow drag on her cigarette and said, “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have started out by haunting you.” She gazed through the smoke and said, “I’m sorry I said that, this isn’t any time to be funny.” She paused. “What’s more, I’m sorry I played that trick on you last night. I just couldn’t resist—” She paused again. “And I’m sorry—oh, well, the hell with it.”

She put down the cigarette and picked it up again. “I had to have someone to help. I couldn’t manage a thing like this by myself. You were—the only person— Well, if I’d had you at the trial, none of this would have happened. I was worried once, and I wanted—but they all kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, Anna Marie, we’ll get you a good lawyer,’ ‘don’t worry Anna Marie, we’ll fix everything.’” She shook her head. “And then all of a sudden it was over, and—”

“Never mind,” Malone said hastily. “That was yesterday.”

“And there’ll always be a tomorrow,” she said automatically. She paused, stared at him, and suddenly laughed. “Every now and then I go on talking as if I were dictating something to sell to a confession magazine.”

“And every now and then,” Malone said, “I start answering as if I were reading one.” He bit the end off a cigar. “There are certain things you want to do.”

She nodded, and the “Yes” was a whisper.

Malone blew a shred of tobacco off his lip and reached for a match. “Why?”

“Well, because—” She looked up at him. “Are you my lawyer, or aren’t you?”

“At least that,” Malone said. “Unless I have been dreaming.”

To his amazement, she blushed. Becomingly, too. He finally managed to get his cigar lit, and sent up a smoke screen between them.

“Revenge can be a lot of fun,” the little lawyer said slowly, “but it can be a lot of trouble, too. Sometimes it’s better to forget all the hell you’ve been through and pick up life at the beginning of the next chapter, and follow it through to the to-be-continued.”

“A lovely sentiment,” she said. “I wish I agreed with it.” Her lips were pale under the make-up. “It isn’t revenge. Not for me, I mean. Sure, it was a bad few months, but I’m alive. And Big Joe—”

Malone looked tactfully away, in spite of the smoke screen. A moment later he said, “Look out for that cigarette. Do you want to set the hotel on fire when it’s the only home I have?”

She picked it up from the corner of the rug, brushed at the ashes with her fingertips, and said, “Sorry. Listen, Malone. Big Joe Childers had his failings, but he was a good guy. You know, a good guy. He was a crook, all right, sure, but he was one of the most honest crooks I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. He wanted to live a long time, just like everybody wants to live a long time. Just like you want to, and I do.”

“Ike Malloy killed him,” Malone said, trying to sound disinterested.

Anna Marie jumped up from her chair. “Look, when some guy kills another guy, you don’t arrest the gun he used, do you? Ike Malloy was a weapon, that’s all.”

“A very nice piece of reasoning,” Malone said approvingly. “You have the makings of a lawyer.” He glanced at her and added, “Though it would be a great pity for you to waste yourself on a legal career.”

He picked up the newspaper and looked at it for a long time. “There are a few interesting facts about Ike Malloy’s confession.”

Anna Marie lifted a questioning eyebrow.

“It seems,” Malone said, “an inquisitive cub reporter named Griggs got to the hospital about two jumps behind the ambulance bringing in Ike Malloy. It took him a little time to get to Malloy’s room, because the press was definitely not invited. He got to the door just in time to hear Malloy demanding that the police take down his confession that he’d killed Big Joe Childers. But Ike Malloy’s lawyer was informing the doctor and the policeman in charge that his client was obviously delirious and in no condition to talk.” He paused. “Odd, isn’t it, that his lawyer would be there, handling things.”

“Go on,” Anna Marie said through tight lips.

“Another item in the paper,” Malone said, “states that one, Albert Griggs, reporter, is in St. Luke’s Hospital recovering from head wounds received in an attempted holdup in an alley leading from his newspaper’s parking lot.” He laid down the paper for a moment. “They certainly were anxious to make sure that Ike Malloy’s confession never saw daylight.”

Her lovely mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I damned near was a real ghost.”

“You can say that again,” Malone said with feeling. “And the only reason you aren’t is that this Griggs guy had sense enough to phone his paper from the public telephone in the hospital lobby before Ike Malloy’s boss’s hired hands kicked him out. Because the city editor got right on the job, and Captain von Flanagan, of the Homicide Bureau, was at Ike Malloy’s bedside in fifteen minutes.”

She sighed. “That was close.”

“Ike Malloy told the whole works,” Malone said. “Names and details. Von Flanagan checked fast. The two guys who drove Malloy to the saloon and waited outside, with the engine running in their car, broke down and talked. So did the waiter who let Malloy in the back way. In fact, Malloy only omitted one important detail.”

“I know,” she said. “He didn’t tell who hired him.”

“But,” Malone told her, “the newspaper story does name the lawyer who said Malloy was in no condition to talk. He gave a statement later, by the way, to the effect that he had sincerely believed his client was out of his head, and that he was only anxious to protect his client from, quote, injudicious questioning, unquote. You can disbar a man for that, nor even publicly state that he’s one of the damnedest liars since the snake in Eden.”

“His name?” Anna Marie asked.

“Jesse Conway,” Malone said.

There was a silence. Malone lit a cigar and looked thoughtfully at Anna Marie.

“I know a lot of people,” Malone murmured. He might have been talking to himself. “You’d be surprised at some of the people I know. I’m surprised myself, now and then. I knew Ike Malloy, for instance. In fact, I was best man at his sister’s wedding. Ike was a good, honest guy who obeyed orders and never killed anybody he wasn’t told to kill. I know a lot of other people, including a couple of guys who could kidnap anybody you cared to name, and who could—using methods I wouldn’t care to discuss—get information out of a mummy.”

He paused, gazing at the end of his cigar. “I even know Jesse Conway. He used to be a pretty good lawyer. He used to be a pretty good guy, too. But something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. He has plenty of money, but damned few clients. And he’s gone soft. Soft, and worried.”

Anna Marie said nothing. She was remembering Jesse Conway helping her into the taxi last night.

“Unless I’m very much mistaken,” Malone said quietly, “it would take those guys I mentioned about five minutes to pry all the information you need loose from Jesse Conway. If you want it