Martinis and Murder by Henry Kane

Author:Henry Kane [Kane, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4039-4
Publisher: Prologue Books
Published: 1974-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

WHAT Patrick Rafferty was to law and order, Augie Piazza was to a very select clientele.

I walked along the streets of the lower east side and I loved the sights and the smells; north to Kenmare and east to the Bowery and across the Bowery to Delancey Street and east along Delancey Street with its babel of tongues and its dry-goods stores and its egg creams and its pants shops.

I turned left at Clinton and went into a store bearing the gilt-lettered legend: A. PIAZZA, B AIL BONDS, N OTARY PUBLIC.

The store was large and dim and almost bare of furniture and cool and damp. It had oak benches along its walls and, in the rear, three oak desks alongside one another in a parallel haphazard line.

Seated behind one desk was a pale young man with black eyes and a pearl-gray felt hat. Seated on top of the same desk with his legs crossed and his small feet encased in very shiny yellow shoes was another pale young man with black eyes and a pearl-gray felt hat.

“Yeah?” questioned the man on the desk, discouragingly.

“Augie in?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Just tell him Peter Chambers, if you please. He’ll know.”

The pale young man hesitated for a moment, then he leaped lightly off the desk and clicked his shiny shoes up a flight of wooden stairs which was part of the gloom in the extreme rear. I sat on a bench and smoked. The man behind the desk inserted a toothpick between his teeth and tipped his hat forward over his eyes and slid down in his chair.

Presently footsteps tapped down the stairs.

“He says to go up to the office. Watch your step on them steps, bud.”

“Thanks, bud.”

The office was a room with a creaking wooden floor and a dozen large green filing cabinets and a big green safe and a window with bars and a kneehole desk.

Augie Piazza met me with stuck-out hand.

“How’s it, Petie?”

“Hello, Augie. How’s biz?”

“No squawk.”

Piazza was a tiny man and very thin. His black hair, well greased, was combed across his head from an extreme side in the manner of a man attempting to befuddle his mirror in the matter of his growing baldness. He was swarthy, with small regular features and shrewd, expressive, constantly moving, bright black eyes.

“Sit down, Pete. Have a seat.”

I put my hat on one of the green filing cabinets and I sat down and I said, “I need a little information, Augie. About two hundred fifty dollars’ worth.”

“Always trying,” Augie said. “No, sir. You ain’t coming all the way down here without even a telephone call for no two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of information. Not you.” “No?”

“Not you. Maybe to spend a grand. That’s possible.”

“A grand for what?”

“For whatever you come for.”

“Same old Augie,” I said. “I don’t have time to bargain. Maybe you don’t have information that’s worth a thousand dollars.”

“If I ain’t, I don’t charge.”

I said, “The guy’s name is Andrew Grant. And how are you fixed?”

“Look out, Mister Pete.”

“Do I get information?”

Augie took his feet off the desk.

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