He found a parking space now two blocks from headquarters and walked back. It was not quite night; one out of three or four cars passing hadn't turned their headlights on yet.
After five o'clock, headquarters always took on for Dougherty the harsh surrealistic pregnant look of an IRA armory. He went up the slate steps and through the rotting doors and down the green antiseptic-smelling hall. When he at last came into the crowded wooden office of the lieutenant, he felt as he always did when in this building in the evening: like an unambitious Javert, a dull Maigret.
The lieutenant looked like Eisenhower, except that he never smiled, and when he did open his mouth for some other reason his teeth were yellow-brown and rotten and separated by wide gaps. He pointed to Dougherty to sit down and said, “I did what you said to do on the phone. Now fill me in.”
Dougherty filled him in, telling him in flat monosyllables what had happened, giving no reasons or explanations this time through but merely chronicling the events, as though reporting the plot of some movie he had seen.
When he was done, the lieutenant said, “All right, I see why you didn't try to take him; that was smart, that makes sense, in your own home and all. But why give him the list? It's legit, the real list?”
“Yes. I didn't have another list of names handy. Besides, since he knew the girl himself he would naturally expect to know at least a couple of the names on any list of her friends I showed him.”
“Did he say he knew any of them?”
“No, of course not.” But that was the wrong way to say it; the lieutenant looked offended. Hurriedly, Dougherty went on, “I figured it was best not to ask him, not agitate him.”
The lieutenant nodded and mumbled something, then said, “Why give him a list at all? Why not tell him the list is here, downtown, you can't remember the names?”
“This way,” Dougherty said, “we've maybe got some leads to him. We know for sure nine people he's interested in. He naturally knows we'll be looking for him to come around one of those people, but if he's in that much of a sweat to get their names that he'll come around to my house and brace me for them, I figure he's in a sweat enough to try to get past us to the people themselves.”
“Why? What's he after?”
“I'm not sure. This whole thing has to connect with the stadium robbery some way. I'd say this guy Joe was in on the robbery and staying with the Canaday woman till the heat was off. It would be my guess that whoever killed the Canaday woman took something of Joe's away from the apartment and it would probably either be something that would expose Joe's identity or prove his connection with the robbery, or it was his share of the loot itself.”
The lieutenant said, “Ah. Somebody robbed the money from the robber. That would make him boil, wouldn't it?”
“It would explain why he's so on the prod.”
The lieutenant nodded. “So he'll have to go after the people on your list. If he wants his money back.”
“If it is the money. It could be something else, something incriminating.”
The lieutenant waved an impatient hand. “Whatever it is, he wants it back in a bad way. You were smart, Dougherty.”
Dougherty smiled, but inside he was cringing. He couldn't help himself, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him he promptly remembered that the lieutenant hadn't finished high school. It was an odd fact he'd learned nearly by accident several years ago, before he was even in plainclothes. He never thought of it other times, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him, told him he'd done a job well, he'd been thinking on his feet, gave him any kind of praise at all, some nasty voice within Dougherty's mind promptly spoke up and sneered, “Not even a high school diploma.”
The lieutenant was saying now, “What you ought to do, you ought to get together with Robbery Detail, whoever's working the stadium job, tell them what you've got, then start running the mug shots. How's he compare with the composite drawing, by the way?”
Dougherty shrugged. “The way they always do. If you see the guy first, then you can see where the drawing looks like him. But if you see the drawing first, you can't see at all where the guy looks like it.”
“Then get together with the artist, whatsisname, get together with him, help him make up a new composite.”
Dougherty took a deep breath. “Lieutenant,” he said, “I'd like to get switched off the Canaday case.”
“You'd like to what?”
“Have somebody else take that over for me, will you? Put me on temporary loan with Robbery Detail.”
The lieutenant's eyes narrowed and his mouth opened. Now he didn't look like Eisenhower at all. “You got a bee in your bonnet, Bill?”
It was a rare thing for the lieutenant to call him Bill; it usually preceded a chewing-out. Dougherty said, reassuringly, “I don't want to be the Lone Ranger, Lieutenant, honest to Christ, I'm not the Robert Ryan type.”
“You just want to be in on it.” When the lieutenant was being sarcastic, he wanted the world to know about it; he carved his words out of blocks of wood and bounced them off the floor.
Dougherty let the sarcasm thud by. “That's right,” he said.
“I want to be one of the people that runs him down.”
“You don't care who bumped poor little Ellen Canaday.”
“Not for a minute.”
It almost looked as though the lieutenant would smile. Instead he opened his mouth and rubbed the side of his forefinger against his top front teeth, a rotten habit he had. “Go ahead,” he said. “Go on home and get some sleep for a change. When you get back here I'll have the paperwork through on you.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“You think you'll find him again?”
Dougherty smiled in anticipation. “I'll sure as hell look,” he said.
3
Kifka lay like a Teuton prince on a hill of pillows. He was in Unit One at Vimorama, the only cabin there equipped with a telephone. Janey, in an excess of zeal, had glommed the keys from Little Bob Negli and rifled the pillows from all the other cabins, heaping them up in a white slope against the headboard of the bed Kifka was arranged in till he was lying more on pillows than on bed, and he looked like a madam in an albino whorehouse. He felt like a turtle on its back, waving its legs and unable to turn over.
Only two things were within reach: Janey and the telephone. He was occupied with both, grasping Janey to him with his left hand and holding the phone to his ear with his right. Into the phone he said, “Buddy, if I wanted to tell a story I'd sell it to the movies. Answer the question or don't, it's up to you.”
The telephone said, “Face it, Dan, I'm curious. Ellie's just killed a couple days ago, now you call up about her, naturally I want to know what's going on.”
“Nothing's going on.” Kifka rubbed Janey against his bare chest and winked at her. “I want to know who knew Ellie, that's all. Who do you know that knew Ellie that I don't know, you know?”
Janey made a face and whispered, “No new new no.” Kifka pushed her face down into the pillows.
The telephone said, “When it's all over, for Christ's sake, then tell me, all right? I mean when it doesn't matter any more.”
Kifka said, “Sure.”
“All right,” said the telephone. “Let me think.”
Kifka played with Janey.
The telephone said, “How about Fred? Fred Whatchamacallit, Burrows. You know Fred?”
“Yeah. I already know him.”
“Oh. Well, how about women? You want to know girls that knew her?”
“Anybody.”
“Rita Loomis. You know her?”
“No. What's her address?”
“Uhhhh, Carder Avenue, I don't know the number. She ought to be in the book.”
“Right.” Kifka poked Janey and motioned at the pad and pencil over on the dresser. “Rita Loomis,” he said. “Carder Avenue.” Janey went over reluctantly and wrote it down.
Janey stayed at the dresser the rest of the conversation and had two m
ore names to write down before she was done, one with an address and one with a phone number. Then Kifka hung up and she said, “How much more of this, Dan? Can't you put that silly phone down for a while?”
He shook his head. “No.” He felt time crowding in, too much time. It was yesterday afternoon that Parker had been ambushed outside Ellie's place, and since then there hadn't been a sign of the bird they were after. Last night they'd all moved out here and Kifka had started his phone calls while the others had gone snooping around after the people Kifka turned up. The nine on the cop's list they weren't bothering with yet, hoping they wouldn't have to. Around midnight last night they'd packed it in, and started again this morning. Now it was almost noon and nothing was happening. Kifka was getting irritated and impatient, and Janey was getting worse.
She said, “You could take five minutes away from the phone, Dan.”
“Parker's right,” he said. “I'll never get over this virus with you around.”
“Body heat,” she said. “It's got to be good for you.”
“Sure.” He made his voice sound aggravated, but he was pleased by Janey. She was an odd thing to happen to Dan Kifka and he was having trouble getting used to it. Kifka was a big blond-haired heavy with two assets: strong arms and an ability to drive. He pushed a hack sometimes for bread and butter, and took what other jobs came his way, punching heads if he was paid to, driving for operations like the stadium heist. He was thirty-four and used to the idea of who he was, and not expecting anything like Janey to come waltzing into his life.
The way it happened, he was driving the cab at the time, and a fuzzy-faced youth with a nasal condition and Janey had flagged him and given him an address out in the suburbs. All the way out they argued back there, the two of them, sniping at each other, the youth injured in a haughty way and Janey coldly furious. While the cab was stopped at a light, she finally threw him out, pushing the door open, pushing him on out onto the cobblestones, chewing him out the whole time. The youth ended in a paroxysm of snippishness, slammed the cab door, and stalked off into the night. The light changed and Kifka turned his head and said, “You want to wait for him, lady?”
“Lady” was inaccurate. She was a girl, not a lady, young and tender as garden vegetables. She was wearing a pink dress with a lot of crinolines and petticoats and doodads and gewgaws, and she was enough to make strong men chew carpets. She said, “I wouldn't wait for that twerp if he was my Siamese twin. Drive on!”
He drove on, and three blocks later she said, “Stop at a nice bar, I want a drink.”
The customer is always right. He stopped at a neighborhood-type tavern and she said, “I don't go in these places unescorted. Come with me.”
He said, “You see how I'm dressed?” He meant wrinkled trousers and a brown leather jacket and a Humphrey Pennyworth cap.
She said, “So what?” and that was the end of it.
In the bar, over a glass of sauterne, she became a compulsive talker, telling him her own life story and everything she knew about the kid who'd just walked out on her. There was nothing special about either; both of them college kids from one-family houses, on their own in a city bigger than their home towns.
What he was, after just a little bit of it, Kifka was bored. She paid for her own sauterne, glass after glass, but meanwhile he wasn't picking up any fares, so it was still costing him money. Eventually he figured the one sure way to get rid of her was make a pass, so he did, and forty-five minutes later they were in bed together at his place.
It had been going on for eight months now, with time out for her summer vacation from college when she'd gone home for three months. Kifka had figured that was the end of it right there, but come September and there was Janey again, twitching her rump with pink impatience.
At first he'd kept his own life story to himself pretty completely, but gradually he got so he trusted her more, and by now she knew everything there was to know about him.
Except how to cure him of a virus.
“Body heat,” she said, getting it all wrong.
He pushed her away and said, “One more phone call, all right? One more guy on the list and I'm done.”
“If you promise.”
“I promise.”
But just as he was reaching for the phone it rang. He picked it up and it was Abe Clinger checking in, saying, “Scratch two more off the list. Bill Powell and Joe Fox, both covered for the time.”
Kifka repeated the names for Janey to cross off on the main list, and then he said, “Abe, we're running out. We got to go to the cop's list now.”
“I anticipated,” Clinger said. “Believe me.”
Kifka gave him two names and addresses, and Clinger gloomily repeated them to make sure he had them right, and then they broke the connection.
“One phone call, you said,” Janey reminded him.
“That wasn't it.” He shoved her back and dialed another number.
The voice that answered was fuzzy with sleep, wanting to know what time it was. Kifka told him it was practically twelve o'clock noon, and the voice said, “Man, I was up till all hours last night. This crazy cat just back from Mexico, he dropped around, we talked the night away; I don't think you know him.”
“Never mind do I know him, did he know Ellie Canaday?”
“Sure! Hell, they used to go together, you know what I mean?”
Kifka held a hand up in the air for Janey to start paying attention. Carefully he said, “What's this guy's name?”
4
Abe Clinger was a businessman, not a crook. It was his nature to be a businessman, and only the force of circumstances had him temporarily playing the part of a crook, a temporary condition that had lasted now about twelve years.
Television was to blame. Television was a blot and a rotten thing, ruining the eyes of young America, an insidious monster in living rooms all across the nation, showing sex and sadism, people smoking and holding glasses full of beer, destroying the livelihood of honest businessmen trying to make an honest dollar even with the minimum wage going all the time up up up and taxes getting worse every year. Even with government intervention and payments for workmen's compensation and social security and all the rest of it, it might have been barely possible to keep an honest man's head above water, except for the rotten box, television.
Abe Clinger had owned a movie theater. But a movie theater, the real thing, with a kiddie matinee on Saturday with twelve cartoons and a Western and a chapter, and beautiful dinnerware given away to the ladies on Wednesday evening, and always a double feature plus cartoon plus newsreel plus coming attractions, changed twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday. A nice friendly neighborhood theater that was like an institution almost, like the branch of the public library or the post office substation, a part of the neighborhood.
Until television.
Then, to make matters worse, when he burned the theater down for the insurance he did several things wrong and he got caught. His wife of twenty-six years, when she learned he'd borrowed to the hilt on his life insurance and was also letting it lapse because he was going to jail, divorced him. His two sons looked at him with disgust and reproach, said, “Pop", in long-suffering voices, and went away to change their names.
But in jail he met a couple of people who made a new life possible for him, and when he got out on parole after spending the minimum time behind bars he was pretty sure he would never be bankrupt again. There was always work in the armed robbery line for a man who looked like a businessman or a bookkeeper or a general manager or whatever in the office-type the job might require. Carrying guns always made him nervous nevertheless, and he was yet to fire one of them, but he understood it was necessary in this trade, like being a Democrat in his previous occupation. Still, the new line of work had its advantages, like no employees and no overhead and no long hours, and his blonde was a hell of an improvement over the former Mrs. Clinger, and generally speaking he had no complaints.
Except he was not a detective. Snoopyfooti
ng around after people's whereabouts was not his line of work, and not about to be.
So why? Parker and Kifka and the others were all doing it, working away at this like it was a sensible job of some kind instead of craziness. Pete Rudd last night had made an excellent amount of sense, but the others all talked him out of it, and if the truth be known, Abe Clinger wasn't in all that much of a hurry to kiss the money good-bye either. As he'd said last night, twenty thousand dollars is twenty thousand dollars.
So here he was, walking down a cold street with a gun in his pocket, playing detective like Lloyd Nolan in all the second features he used to show, looking for somebody to ask stupid questions, carrying a clipboard for a prop.
This was an apartment-house block, a long block used up on the right side by four massive-shouldered brick apartment houses, the front all acne'd with air conditioners. The one Clinger wanted was third, with a fine old stone arch over the entrance, the building number carved into the keystone of the arch, the whole thing looking like an ad for Pennsylvania.
There was an elevator, slow, trembling, painted red inside. Clinger rode it to the seventh floor, found the door he wanted, and rang the bell. He was no longer self-conscious about giving the spiel, he'd already done it eight times in other doorways. This time, of course, was the first time with someone from the policeman's list, but if there was one person he looked not a bit like, it was Parker, so what was to worry?
A young man in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt opened the door and stood like his skeleton was disjointed at the hip. He said, “Yeah? Something?”
Clinger held his clipboard and ballpoint pen very prominently in front of him. He said, “Are you the man of the house?”
“Yeah?”
Apparently it wasn't just a question, but also the answer. Clinger said, “If you have a minute, I represent Associated Polls. We're running a little survey. This shouldn't take up much of your time at all.”
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