Murder for Madame by Lawrence Lariar

Author:Lawrence Lariar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2018-11-29T13:59:46+00:00

CHAPTER 17

There are certain faces that cannot be erased from memory’s index.

These are the extremes, the characters who are patterned out of a special mold, the people who exist as master types, the very tall and the very short, the very fat and the very thin, the pinheads and the squareheads, the men with lumpy noses and the women with lumpy derrieres. You see them in the movies and on the stage—the Edward G. Robinsons and Humphrey Bogarts, the Marjorie Mains and ZaSu Pittses—and their images register against the soft wall of your intellect and remain fixed and remembered forever. You see them on the streets, sometimes, in the tide of pedestrian traffic. You see them, too in the police line-ups—the Jake Defores and Buggs Genottis. You may have observed one of these characters for only a short interval, but you can never forget the way his maggoty eyes faltered under the lights, or the trick cut on his square cheekbone, the knife slash that went strangely white as he stood there, and the contrast of the whitish skin against the high-blood pressure crimson of his jaw. You would never forget the sound of his name as the police sergeant hoarsed it from out of the protective darkness.

Sailor Schenk! Sailor Schenk, because of the shape of that scar, a macabre caricature of an anchor, where no anchor should ever be etched.

“Sailor Schenk,” I said. “It’s a small world.”

He blinked his eyes at me, showing me his jittery shock and surprise. He had the befuddled stare of a punchy fighter. The scene before him would take time to filter through his optics and register against the dimmed mirror of his brain. He stood flatfooted, his short legs spread, his right hand stiff as it held the automatic aimed at my eyes. He did not move a muscle in his body. But there was a small and twitchy tic working up close to his right eye, above the anchor, on again and off again, in time to the rhythm of his pulse-beat. Recognition crawled slowly into his eyes. And he did not like me, suddenly.

He said, “I know you, don’t I?”

“We’re old friends, Sailor.”

“From where?”

“We met at Boyle’s, remember? The room with the lights, down at Headquarters. You were doing a single up on the platform the last time I saw you. Something about a loft robbery down on the river. Lieutenant Boyle was sure you had your nose in that one.”

“Now I got you,” he said. “The private dick.”

How could he ever forget me? Lieutenant Jeff Boyle was one of my oldest friends on the force, and one of the smartest. He was the top man in Safe and Loft, a razor-brained student of crime, the sort of detective the writers like to put down in fictionalized yarns. Because Boyle could break a man into small and undignified slices simply by engaging him in polite conversation. He had chewed the sizzling fat with Sailor Schenk—and after that, the sailor spent three years at Ossining.

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