The Hour of the Cat by Peter Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

sensible, which is probably the way you feel about Mrs. Babcock. Always hate to lose a customer.”
    Above her head, an elaborately framed painting of a beach at night, silver moon penetrating the clouds, shining across sand and angry sea, a pathway of light, looked like a candidate for the wall of some museum or movie lobby, except there was something foreboding about it, threatening, as though a body were about to bob to the surface. He’d seen it before. But where?
    â€œAnother?” Without waiting for an answer, she got up, took his glass and went over to the bar. She put more Scotch in the glass; quick spray of soda. She handed him the drink. “What say we get to what really brings you here?”
    â€œWhich is?”
    â€œElba Corado. I told her to look you up. Said you were an ex-cop who wasn’t also a crook or an Irish son-of-a-bitch. Best of all, you know the homicide routine. She told me she’d used my name. I figured you’d be here before long.”
    â€œYou seem to know a lot about me.”
    She went to the window, leaned back against the radiator cover and motioned with her head toward the street. “First time I looked out and saw you sitting there, I knew you were a tail. I watched you scribbling away in your notebook as Clem arrived and left. It wasn’t hard to figure. Jimmy confirmed it for me.”
    â€œJimmy?”
    â€œThe elevator boy.”
    â€œLikes to play both sides.”
    â€œHe’s got six kids. Plays any side that pays. Do you blame him?”
    â€œYou didn’t let Babcock know?”
    â€œClem didn’t hire me to be a private eye.”
    â€œDon’t tell me Jimmy recommended me for the Corado case.”
    â€œNo, Lenny Moss did.”
    He had to give it to her: She knew how to keep a conversation going. “I don’t know any Lenny Moss.”
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œThat Lenny Moss got dead a while ago. If you were one of his girls, sorry to say I got no recollection.”
    â€œSorry for who?”
    â€œWhoever.”
    â€œI wasn’t Lenny’s girl. We grew up together in Brownsville and hung out in the same crowd on Rockaway Avenue. My mother worked with his in the needle trade. He was Lenny Moskowitz back then. Tall, handsome, and wild. We did a lot of partying together, then Lenny went away to jail. After he got out, I didn’t see him again for awhile, not until he was arrested again and put on trial.”
    â€œWhich trial?”
    â€œThe last.”
    â€œI testified at it.”
    â€œI know. His mother had nobody to go to the trial with her. She asked me.”
    â€œLenny was a second-rate shtarke and a first-rate stupe . Let himself go to the chair for a crime he didn’t commit.” He could have added “third-rate pimp,” but didn’t. He searched his memory for some image of Roberta Dee. Not a trace of her but the trial was still there, fresh and vivid.
    â€œLenny knew he was a dead man,” she said. “So he made a deal. If his mother were taken care of, he’d take the fall. He did, she was.”
    â€œAsk me, it was a lousy reason to let himself be electrocuted.”
    Brannigan had been put on the case on orders from the department’s higher-ups. A deal had already been cut. In the wake of the general strike by the garment workers in ’26, “Little Augie” Orgen had battled Legs Diamond for control of the industry’s protection racket. Arnold Rothstein tried to broker a peace but just when it seemed ready to take, Orgen had two of Legs’s men machine gunned on 14th Street. A professional tommy-gun job, combination of blunderbuss and Waring blender, ten rounds of .45 caliber bullets at a velocity capable of penetrating a quarter-inch of steel that blew Legs’s men through the plate-glass window of Brookstein’s Shoe Emporium and covered the display of suede and patent-leather footwear with a shower of blood.
    The