Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 9 by Marvin Kaye

Author:Marvin Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, mystery magazine, short stories, detective
ISBN: 9781434446152
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

UP TO NO GOOD, by Laird Long

It was a busy night at the old hotel, two guests checking out permanently …

I was the outside woman, stationed in the lobby behind a newspaper to keep track of any unusual comings and goings. While my partner in the PI biz, Reg Wyant, was the inside man, up in Tommy O’Halloran’s room on the seventh floor of the old brownstone residential hotel.

Tommy O’Halloran was Ma Bennigan’s kept man, her intimate friend outside of marriage. There was a brewing war between the four major factions that controlled the city’s underworld, and Ma didn’t want any collateral harm coming to her loved one. So she’d hired Reg and I to act as bodyguards/watchdogs for the sveltely-built O’Halloran.

It was a nice, easy assignment the first day and night. The following night, things went a little sideways.

I was ensconced in one of the armchairs in the lobby, when I eyeballed Tess Orlov flouncing through the front doors of the hotel. Tess was the mistress of the head of one of the other crime families, as beautiful as Tommy was handsome.

I watched her sashay over to the ancient elevator, press the button. Surprised and suspicious as I was at her appearance, I still wished her luck, knowing from frustrated personal experience that that particular lift, an old cage model, was as slow as molasses in January. And it was January.

Tess waited and waited, glancing at her watch, before the feeble bell finally dinged and she pushed the grate open, stepped inside, shut the grate and slowly rose. At 9:15.

She was back down and out of the elevator at 9:30. Just missing Julie Deng by a minute or so. Julie was a ranking lieutenant in another crime family. She slipped through the hotel front doors and sailed up the stairs at the rear of the lobby.

I lost interest in the news of the day in the paper, as I tried to figure out the current events here and now. But I had little time for the skull-session, before Julie Deng was back down the stairs and out the doors. At 9:35.

My gut senses really churned when Sollie DiPietro lumbered into the lobby not five minutes after Julie had left. Sollie was a well-known collector/enforcer with the fourth largest crime family that fed in the city’s underbelly. He hit the elevator button and stood there, scowling. Then he rabbit-punched the button for action.

He went up at 9:40, came down at 9:45—via the stairs.

It was too much coincidence for one evening. I beeped my partner’s number on my cellphone. No answer. I buzzed Tommy O’Halloran’s room phone. Ditto. I climbed the stairs up to the seventh floor three at a time.

My partner and Ma Bennigan’s lover were as dead as Jimmy Hoffa up in Room 705. A silencer-equipped .32 lay on the floor next to their bodies.

I could’ve called the cops, should’ve called Ma Bennigan. But I knew my tuchus was on the line if I didn’t at least round up the murderer, and quick.

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