Win, Place, and Die! by Lawrence Lariar

Author:Lawrence Lariar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2018-11-29T14:14:01+00:00

CHAPTER 13

I pushed the convertible faster. The highway was a gray ribbon winding among the low hills of Long Island. The road glistened and glimmered in the rain. The dashboard clock stood at 8:15. I would be in New York in an hour or so. The sound of the tires was a dull and endless murmur, a monotone of hissing; a reminder that the sleek car was making good time, sixty-five and heavy on the road. It could do better than this. I stepped on the gas and the convertible leaped ahead. Traffic was light and I wove in and out of the advance guard of cars easily. Anxiety pressed me forward. It would be my first step in the right direction, this quick ride into New York. I was experiencing the initial thrill of the chase, a gambit I had written about often. The detective moves with a sure step once he has found a workable lead.

I entered the polished maw of the Midtown Tunnel and arrived in New York as a distant clock chimed nine. I crossed the almost deserted avenues to Fifth and sailed downtown to Greenwich Village. It was a quiet street that housed The Famous Cellar. It was a dark and dirty street, behind the mien wall of Bohemia, on the West Side of the district, an area of old and fading tenements and dismal warehouses and the smell of bad food and ancient garbage.

I detoured from the night club because of the hour. I had much time to kill. A few blocks away, I recalled an Italian bistro where I had eaten before. I bought a few evening papers and gave myself up to a dinner of minestrone, spaghetti, demitasse, and a perusal of all the stories on the Jake West case.

The report on Nickles Shuba was featured by all the newspapers. It was glamorized, of course, by the tabloids, which built a giant fantasy out of the case, decorating their pages with intimate shots of Buffo, the Blackburns, Lisa Varick, Larry Seff, and a host of others. A sob sister cried prosy tears over the fate of Nickles Shuba, who was built in her imagination as a handsome young man with great ambitions for a career in harness racing, cut down in the green years of his youth, and probably destined to remain a permanent mystery in the puzzling case that has the police baffled. There were the usual statements by MacGruder (optimistic and yet cautious, with an eye toward saying everything and yet nothing, propagandizing the law and its faithful henchmen, and promising to close in for an arrest soon); plus a further statement from the Commissioner’s desk (artfully praising MacGruder and his men, wrapping the entire police department in a garb of holy efficiency, and backing up his faith in all police in a windup of stereotyped clichés); plus a further statement by the District Attorney of Nassau County (clichés of a higher type, legal and containing more syllables)—and an additional

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