Die, Little Goose: A Bret Hardin Mystery. David Alexander
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die,
little
goose
A Bart Hardin Mystery
by
David Alexander
WILDSIDE PRESS
Die, Little Goose
Copyright © 1956 by David Alexander, renewed 1984.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
TO A NICE LITTLE GOOSE
I KNOW NAMED ALICE
one
“Seven and crap,” the stickman said. “Pay the line and pass the dice. Next shooter!”
The floating crap game operated by Moe Selig, Broadway’s gambling czar, was being held that night in the cavernous recesses of a garage on West Fiftieth Street near Ninth Avenue. The place was shadow-haunted except for one small island lit harshly by a two-hundred-watt ceiling bulb. On the edge of the light pool, almost blending into the encroaching shadows, nine tense and sweating men squatted on their haunches, peering intently at the rough crap layout that had been chalked upon the cement floor. The atmosphere of the garage was as stifling and moist as that of a fetid cave, but the temperature was ten degrees lower than the 90 still being registered by street thermometers at ten-thirty in the evening. It was July and it was the thirteenth day of the worst heat wave in the history of New York City.
The stickman rolled six dice to Bart Hardin, a rangy man in his early thirties who served as managing editor of a sports and theatrical journal called the Broadway Times when he wasn’t trying to beat an overlay at Belmont Park or fill an inside straight in stud or make Little Joe the hard way in the floating game.
Bart Hardin was not handsome, judged by the usual standards, but physically he was the kind of man who commands attention. There was a lean, hard look to him and a peculiar intensity, the intensity of the compulsive gambler. His short-cropped hair was so light it seemed silvery in contrast to the bronze pigmentation of his skin. His nose had been broken and it made a serpentine curve in the middle of his face that relieved the sharp, jutting angles of jaw and cheekbone. He had been born on Broadway, above a flea circus and fun arcade on Forty-second Street, where he still lived. He had never left Times Square except to serve two hitches in the Marines. He knew the Big Street in the way a card sharp knows a marked deck, and his familiarity with its denizens made him an odd mixture of toughness and tenderness, cynicism and naïveté. He could spot a phony at fifty paces—and he was generally regarded as the softest touch on Broadway.
Hardin went through the crapshooter’s ritual of weighing and pairing off the dice that had been thrust to him across the cement. He chose two, rolled the four others back to the stickman. He clutched the dice in a big fist and rattled them close to his ear, trying to “listen to his luck” before he made a bet. He had come into the game an hour and a half earlier with what was left of the three-hundred-dollar weekly salary he had received that afternoon. Taxes, social security and other pestiferous deductions had already accounted for a chunk of it and another fifty had gone to an old actor named James Lennox. Lennox, who was in his middle seventies, had been a friend of Hardin’s father and he had been existing on relief until Bart hired him as his “secretary” and paid him out of pocket. The old actor could neither type nor take shorthand, but Hardin claimed it was worth half a yard a week just to look at an honest man on Broadway.
There was coarse money piled in front of Hardin now, more than fifteen hundred dollars. On his last previous roll he had let six hundred lay after a couple of “naturals,” thrown Eighter from Decatur as his point and come up double-four.
As Hardin hesitated, the stickman grew impatient. “Name the bet, name the bet,” he urged. “You can’t get faded unless you name your bet. If you don’t lay it down, you can’t pick it up, and speculation is the life of trade.”
Hardin was counting five hundred off his pile when there was a sudden interruption. A stocky figure lumbered out of the surrounding gloom, breathing heavily. It was Eddie O’Grady, a Broadway character known as the Old Top Sarge, who had been a hero of World War I and now served as lookout for Selig’s gambling enterprises.
Selig’s face was pasty and moist in the glaring light as he leaned forward and stared at the lookout. He said, “Don’t tell me it’s the Law. I paid off plenty for the juice on this floater and there ain’t no stinking flatfoot slipping me the Double-X.”
Selig had been content to take the house percentage and let the stickman, one of the Syndicate’s expatriates from Vegas, run the game, but now he was tense.
The Old Sarge said, “It ain’t Law. It’s some guy downstairs in the alley that wants to see Bart Hardin.”
Hardin looked up at the Old Sarge, a sheaf of money in his hand. He said, “Who is it?”
The Old Sarge heaved heavy shoulders. “He didn’t give no name. A young character and kind of skinny.”
“He say what he wants?”
The Old Sarge shrugged again. “He’s a friend of your secretary’s, he says. He wants to tell you something, he says. He wants to tell you he just killed his wife.”
Selig grinned unpleasantly, revealing yellow teeth. “Nice chums you got, editor,” he said. “Only I wish you wouldn’t make social appointments at the floater. The floater is supposed to be kind of private.”
Hardin tossed the two dice back to the waiting stickman. He pocketed the money in his hand, scooped up the bills on the floor in front of him and stuffed those in his pocket, too. He said, “Pass the dice.”
Selig said, “It’s real lucky for you this jerk chilled his doll. Just at the right time, too. You’re taking off with a bundle, Hardin.”
Hardin made no answer. He buttoned the sweat-soaked collar of his shirt, slid his knit tie into place. He took a heat-rumpled raw-silk jacket off a peg on the wall where garage workers hung their overalls. He donned the jacket and followed the Old Sarge down a long ramp to the first floor of the garage. As he descended he could hear the dice rolling again and the muttered imprecations of the shooters. Murder was a minor distraction in the dedicated lives of gambling men, he thought.
The Old Sarge clicked back heavy bolts on a sliding steel door, cracked the door open a foot. He said, “I made him wait outside in the alley.”
Hardin nodded and squeezed through the door. The areaway was lighted by a blue bulb over the door that cast an unearthly glow into the massed shadows. The humidity was wet wool on the city now and it held the city’s million smells like a stagnant crucible. Even the stench of the garbage that burned eternally on the Jersey flatlands across the river was a part of it.
A slender, nervous young man stood just outside the door. He reeked of alcohol. He was many pounds underweight for his height and his dark eyes seemed bright and feverish even in the wan blue light. But in his own peculiarly intense way he was handsome. Hardin recognized him as a night-club dancer known as Adrian Temple. He and his crippled wife Daphne lived in the room next to James Lennox at the relatively luxurious theatrical lodgings to which the old man had moved when Hardin hired him.
“How did you know I was here?” Hardin asked the young man.
Temple said, “Old Jim Lennox says you spend most of your evenings at the Sligo Slasher’s bar across from the Garden. I went there. The little man who runs the place told me I’d find you here.”
“Why did you want to see me?” Bart asked.
“I’ve killed my wife, Hardin. I’ve murdered Daphne. I want to confess.”
“I’m neither a policeman nor a priest,” Hardin said. “Why confess to me?”
“I can’t stand physical pain, Hardin. I’m a coward about that. I’ve always been, ever since I was a kid. That’s why I couldn’t go