I blinked. “You arranged it so I could get away from my apartment this morning?”
He shrugged. “Not before it began to get light— we didn't want to lose you in the darkness.”
“And you followed me here and set up the ambush?”
“That's about the size of it.”
“I guess I didn't make it very easy for you.”
Garnett relaxed a bit. He got out his pipe and tapped the bowl on the heel of his hand. “Do you think you've learned anything, Coyle? The next time you might not be so lucky.”
“The next time?”
“You knew from the first that Storch was just a hired hand. You don't think he'll be the last, do you?”
Maybe next time it would be someone smarter, more subtle. The kind of killer that nobody looks at the second time. One of those nice soft-spoken fellows who remind you of the corner grocer or the mild little man who teaches your class in Sunday School. Until he whips out a switchblade and empties your life in the dirt of some dark alley.
“You look worried,” Garnett said, looking mildly pleased. “That's good. Maybe now we can start working together.”
CHAPTER SIX
I spent most of the morning closeted in an interrogation room with Garnett. Around noon, Lavy came in with two of the local sheets and we looked at the headlines. Garnett got a picture on the front page, along with one of Storch. Lavy made the inside with a nice half-column.
I looked at the sergeant. “The papers make you boys look pretty good.”
Lavy gave me a cold, toothy smile. “How did we look to you this morning, Mr. Coyle? When Storch was about to set fire to your girl friend?”
Lavy knew how to use a needle, and I had it coming. “I'm sorry, Sergeant. I don't know why I said that.”
“Because you're scared.” Garnett sighed. “But we're doing everything possible; there's a policewoman with the Kelly girl and a pair of plain-clothes men watching the apartment. We've also put two men to watching you around the clock. You and the girl are safe. If the pay-off man is who you think it is, we'll have a line on him pretty soon.”
And I had an uneasy feeling that getting a line on the pay-off man, as Garnett called him, wouldn't be as simple as the lieutenant seemed to think. Garnett watched me closely as he methodically filled and tamped his pipe. “You don't think much of cops, do you, Coyle? Especially local cops. You don't much like the notion of leaving your life in our care, do you?”
“I don't like the notion of leaving my life or Miss Kelly's inanybody's care, Lieutenant. However, you did save our lives this morning, and I'm grateful.”
Garnett smiled vaguely and lit his pipe. “But it was dumb luck that we happened to tumble to Storch's play? That's the way it looks to you, isn't it? Lavy, bring me the package on this case.”
The sergeant turned and left the room. Maybe three or four minutes passed and Lavy came back with a thick folder of material. Garnett emptied the folder on the table and began sorting through it. “Here are police reports on Charlie Roach and Orlan Koesler. Here are their Service records, and yours, too. Here is a report from the Immigration people; they've started sifting the records of every German to enter this country since the war. Then it occurred to us that Storch's pay-off man might be in the country illegally, so we've contacted the civil and military authorities from the Ubach area and they've started independent sifting operations at their end.”
I sat up a little straighter and stared at the impressive collection of cablegrams, photostats, Army records, and police reports. I took a closer look at Garnett and Lavy, and began to get a fresh picture of the local police. From a shabby desk of a second-class police station in an unimportant place like Plains City, its arm reached across oceans and into confidential files of foreign countries. That was something to think about.
Garnett fanned the material on the table, then he stacked it neatly and put it back in the folder. He looked at me and said wearily, “You impressed, Mr. Coyle?”
“I guess I am.”
“Good. I want you to think enough of us to co-operate when the time comes. But most of this,” patting the folder, “is routine stuff and the chances are a thousand to one that nothing will come of the Army or Foreign investigations. Right here's where we'll find the answer. If the man we're looking for is German, we'll find him. We're getting the word to every person of German extraction—a break has to come soon.”
“And if it doesn't?”
His eyes narrowed. “Strain a little, Coyle. Try to trust us.”
“You said a minute agoif the man is German. Do you have any reason to doubt he's who I think he is?”
Garnett hesitated. “No. But I've got a hunch he's in Plains City, whoever he is. I can feel it.”
“Feel it?”
The lieutenant glanced at Lavy. “Over the years, a cop, if he's serious about his job, grows a set of antenna. You can't see them, but they're there, testing and feeling for danger wherever he goes. I feel it now, in the air all around you, Mr. Coyle.”
“Have you got a plan?”
“Sort of, when the time comes. We can count on your co-operation?”
“Yes.”
He sat back and sighed and closed his eyes. “Take him home, Lavy, and see that he gets some rest.”
“What about Miss Kelly?” I asked.
“Trust us, Mr. Coyle. Just trust us.”
Lavy nodded, and I followed him out of the interrogation room and out of the building. The sergeant drove me by the Palmer, where I checked on Jeanie and picked up the M.G. Jeanie was still sleeping off a pill that the doctor had given her. There were plain-clothes men at the front and back of the building and a policewoman in the apartment. I prowled the place for several minutes, making sure there were no loopholes for a killer.
“Trust,” Lavy said dryly. “It's a wonderful thing.”
I got in the M.G. and drove to my apartment.
The wartime landlords had had a nice thing going. They cleared out broom closets, moved in Murphy beds and a few pieces of attic furniture, and called them apartments. They nailed shelves on the walls, hooked up hotplates and called themefficiency apartments. Hang a curtain in front of the “kitchen” and board up a corner somewhere—two rooms and bath.
That was my place. It was an address for personal mail, in case I ever got some, and a place to sleep. Sergeant Lavy followed me in and looked around in mild surprise.
“That speed shop over on Harrison,” he said, wiping his steel-rimmed glasses on a clean white handkerchief. “Doesn't that belong to you?”
“Me and the bank.” I went to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of milk. I looked at the apartment and grinned sourly. “They don't make them like this any more. You want some milk?”
Lavy shook his head and began to prowl the place. He looked at some racing trophies that crowded new laundry for space on top of a bureau. He moved in closer to read the inscriptions.
“These yours? I mean, did you win them racing?”
“Some of them. The others belong to my wife...” I caught the mistake, but correcting it was awkward. “Belonged. She's dead now.”
I could almost hear the gears grinding as he added odd pieces of information in that policeman's brain of his. “I remember now. About a year ago, wasn't it?”
“... Yes.”
“Sure,” Lavy went on, inspecting more trophies. “A good-looking girl. Her picture was in the papers, and I never forget a...” Then he looked up and saw my face.
“She wasn't so pretty when they pulled her out of that Jag,” I heard somebody saying. “She looked like a little old woman, very old and shrunken. She was burned black. All her hair was gone.”
The surprise outburst brought hot spots of color to the detective's cheeks. “Sorry, Coyle.”
I walked over to the window and looked out at what I could see of the city.
“We make quite a pair,” I said. “Seems like one of us is always being sorry about something.”
He shrug
ged.
I said, “Kick something out of the way and sit down. How long do you usually have to wait before Garnett's antenna gets down to cases?”
Lavy grinned but said nothing. We sat peering through the sooty window. Out there somewhere was a man with just one burning thought in his twisted brain: To kill Jeanie. To make me drink from his own cup of gall. And then kill me.
I said abruptly, “You want some coffee?”
Lavy grunted. “All right. My relief will be coming on in another hour. You know Sergeant Woodstock?”
“I don't think so.” I got up and snapped on the light, then found the coffeepot and began drawing the water. Lavy got up, stretched, yawned, and said:
“Woodstock's a good...” He turned toward the door and there was that look in his eye. Suddenly he was all cop. He grabbed inside his coat and came out with the police special, then he padded quickly to the door and jerked it open.
He shot me a quick look, slipped through the door and was gone. But only for a few seconds. Then he was back.
“Nobody out there,” he said angrily. “Lord knows where he is now, or when he came.”
I didn't know what he was talking about.
He kneeled and picked an envelope off the floor, holding it very carefully by its edges. “Must have slipped it under the door while we were sitting here.”
He reached for the phone and started to dial, and while he dialed he swore steadily under his breath. “I must be getting senile, letting him shove this thing under my nose that way. Next he'll be slipping hand grenades in my pockets.”
While Lavy ranted, I stared at the envelope. That infantile, back-slanted scrawl was the same that had been on the other warning note. It gave me a crawling feeling to know that the man who hated me so bitterly had been just on the other side of that door. A person who could hate that hard and that long—it didn't seem possible that I wouldn't have known somehow that he was there. They say a combat soldier develops an instinct for such things. I had felt nothing. If he could come up on me that way, I could imagine how little trouble he would have with Jeanie.
Lavy got his number and extension and was almost shouting. “I want to talk to Garnett.” He listened for a few seconds. “No, somebody else won't do. Find Garnett; I'll hang on.”
I reached for the letter, but Lavy jerked it away. “The lab boys have to see it first.” He waited, drumming his fingers on the table. Then, briskly, “That you, Lieutenant? Lavy. Look, he's been here... Yeah. Anyway, the handwriting's the same. Slipped a letter under the door.”
There was another wait while Lavy listened, his ears glowing like neon. “I know,” he started, “but I didn't figure...” That part of the conversation was severed abruptly. Lavy mopped his brow with his white handkerchief. “Yes, Lieutenant. I'm holding it for the lab. Yes, Lieutenant, I understand.”
The sergeant hung up and sighed. “Garnett's on his gunpowder diet again. Look, I've got some things to do. You sit tight. Okay?”
I nodded.
“A squad car is on the way and the lieutenant will be right behind. Don't let anything happen to that letter.”
Lavy went out of the room and down the stairs and started knocking on doors to see if anybody had spotted the man with the letter. I knew before he started that it was a waste of time.
A police sedan swept into the street without sirens. A few minutes after the first sedan a second car braked at the curb and Garnett spilled out and pounded up the stairs. He came into the apartment with Lavy and another plain-clothes man at his heels.
The lieutenant went directly to the telephone table and glared at the envelope. The new cop, a long, hungry-looking gaffer wearing a baggy gray suit and a red plaid vest with spots on it, shambled across the room and nudged the letter with his finger.
“Nothing,” he sighed. “I'll run it through the mill, but don't get your hopes up.”
“Can you open it now?” Garnett asked.
The lanky cop shrugged. “Sure. What the hell, it's a blank, anyway.” He took the envelope by one corner and slit it open with a penknife. He emptied the enclosure on the desk, unfolded it and held it down with the knife blade and a fingernail. I moved in beside Garnett and read:
Executioners are expendable. Live your little time in fear. Justice will be done.
Garnett fixed me with a slitted gaze. “'Executioners are expendable. Live your little time in fear.' Do you make anything of that?”
The lines of the note became blurred and I looked away. “No, I don't think so. Just a little touch of sadism that he couldn't resist putting in.”
“What about the last sentence?”
“Justice will be done.” I thought about it. “It sounds stilted. Maybe the kind of thing a foreigner who wasn't too familiar with our language would say.”
“Maybe...” Garnett patted his coat pocket, found his pipe and clamped the bit between his teeth. “Maybe stilted is the word for it, but it's the cold, thought-out tone of the thing that bothers me. This boy is out to get you, Coyle.”
“That, “I flared, “seems fairly obvious.”
“I mean, not just kill you, the way he handled Roach and Koesler—he's out to really make it hurt. When he slipped this note under the door he could just as easily have handed you a bomb, if all he wanted was to see you dead.” Garnett rubbed the cold pipe bowl along his nose. “I'm afraid you pegged it right from the first. It looks like he's not too interested in killing you right off, nice and clean.”
“I told you,” I said tightly. “He wants to get me through Jeanie.”
The lanky cop carefully folded the note and slipped it back into the envelope. “Nobody cares what a lab man thinks,” he said idly, “but I'm going to tell you, anyway. This joker's past due for a rubber bedroom. If he's a foreigner, he's not in this country legally—we got enough crackpots of our own without lettin' them in from other places. Now, for that stilted phrasing that somebody mentioned— there are just two kinds of people that always have that jargon at the tips of their tongues. Lawyers and preachers. What you want to look for is a disbarred lawyer or an unfrocked preacher.” He smiled smugly at all of us. “Well, good day, gentlemen.”
“You geniuses kill me,” Garnett said coldly.
“There's a thought.” He smiled again all around and shambled out of the room.
Lavy moved heavily to the window and stared out at the hazy city. Then he turned with a suddenness that made Garnett blink. “Lieutenant, where would you likely find a disbarred lawyer or unfrocked preacher?”
Garnett took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. I could hear it crackle. “Lavy, can't you recognize a gag when you hear one?”
“I don't think he meant it as a joke, Lieutenant. What he said started me thinking about Horner Street—skid row. All the misfits. The grifters, the down-and-outers, the mission bums...”
The telephone jangled. I grabbed it and a woman's voice said, “Mr. Coyle? This is Corporal Jansan...”
“Who?”
“Corporal Elizabeth Jansan, the policewoman with Miss Kelly. May I speak to Lieutenant Garnett?”
Suddenly my mouth was dry. “Has anything happened? Is Miss Kelly...”
“Miss Kelly is fine, Mr. Coyle.”
The lieutenant grabbed the handset. “That you, Liz? Garnett.” He listened, his face a mask. “All right, Liz,” he said finally, “I'll be right over.”
“What is it!” I yelled.
“Calm down,” Garnett said flatly, “before you rip at the seams. Nothing's happened—that is, nothing important.”
“That policewoman didn't call just to pass the time of day.”
He peered thoughtfully into the bowl of his pipe. “All right. The boys over at the Palmer Apartments picked up a skid-row bum. He had one of those letters on him. Like yours. Only this one was addressed to Miss Kelly. It was a threat against her life. But his luck's about to run out, Coyle. Now he's putting time limits on his killings—for Miss Kelly it's twenty-four hours. And he'll try to br
ing it off, if he's as crazy as we think he is. That's when we come down on him.”
I heard the words, but I couldn't believe them. “You said theycaught him.”
“I said they caught a skid-row bum. He claims a man gave him ten dollars to deliver the two notes. All he had on him was nine dollars and twenty cents, and a muscatel breath. It figures; this bum has been a Horner Street character for fifteen years. We're holding him on an open charge, but his story will hold up.”
“Thenyou buy it. I want to see this bum for myself.”
Garnett sighed.
“But I'd like to talk to Miss Kelly first, just to be sure she's all right.”
“It's your phone.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was seven o'clock when we got back to the interrogation room. We were just getting settled when a jailer brought in a boozy little down-and-outer wearing an oversized sweater rolled up at the sleeves, bilious green shirt with something at the neck that might have been a tie. His pale, bleary eyes looked as though they hadn't focused sharply on anything for a long time. He oozed an alcoholic sweat, peering at Garnett and Lavy and me.
“Meet Milton Ainsworth,” the lieutenant said dryly. “Milton's been on the Street for ten, fifteen years. That right, Milton?”
Milton shuffled uneasily. “Somethin' like that. I forget, exactly.”
“You ever been in trouble, Milton?”
Another sad, uncomfortable shuffle while he tried to collect his bleary thoughts. “Well, maybe. Now and again I land in the tank, I guess.”
“We're talking about big trouble, Milton. Armed robbery, burglary, assault.”
The little bum wiped his eyes in fuzzy amazement. “Me, Lieutenant? You talking about me?”
I looked at Garnett and said wearily, “All right, you've made your point. He's just the messenger boy. But who paid him?”
Garnett lit his pipe and purled contentedly. Then, almost gently, he said. “Try to remember, Milton, back to when the officers picked you up at the Palmer. You remember that?”
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