“But of course,” she said gravely, and missed the first three times she tried to rehook the chain-latch bolt, her movements all in slow motion. She finally managed it and preceded him inside. His uneasiness increased when he got his first good look at her. She was in her stockinged feet and a shapeless purple dressing gown that should have made her look like a hag. Instead it made her look like a very attractive gypsy, Johnny thought. “Sit down,” she invited him with a wave of her arm, which nearly overbalanced her, and collapsed herself into a chair beside a table prominently furnished with a bottle and glass, each half empty. “Mus' make yoursel' at home.”
The liquor had tripled her tongue to the point where her speech, ordinarily quite good, was more accented than Manuel's. She pulled herself up out of the chair in sections and weaved unsteadily to a wall cabinet, from which she removed another glass. She returned to the table and sloppily poured him a drink. She pushed the overfilled glass in his direction, picked up her own and stared over its rim at him, her eyes narrowed with the intensity of her thought.
“Confusion everyone,” she toasted finally, “an' hell damn hell.” She giggled triumphantly, threw back her head, tossed down her drink, coughed, gasped and sank down into her chair. Her eyes watered and ran copious tears.
Johnny picked up his drink and sniffed at it. “What the hell kind of wild moose milk is this?” he demanded disgustedly. “Tequila?”
“Mescal,” she said in a faraway tone when she could get her breath. “National drink. Smooth's mother's milk. Good for babies. Something matter with me. Can't drink it.”
“You drank half a bottle of this—this antifreeze?”
“Cer'ainly. Felt fine, till 'bout ten minutes ago.” She hiccuped gently, cocked her head on one side and looked at him sleepily. “You're the bigges' theeng—”
“Never mind that,” he said harshly. “I came over here to ask you something.”
“Okay. All right. Yes.” She re-enacted the complicated maneuver of rising from the chair, then turned her back to him. Before he realized her intention she had slipped out of the dressing gown with a movement of her hands and a shrug of her shoulders. Beneath it she was wearing the stockings and a white blouse that failed to cover her rib cage—and the rest was Consuelo Ybarra. Johnny felt his eyes bulge as he stared at the soft lamplight polish on the dusky ivory tints of her buttocks.
“What the hell you doin'?” he demanded huskily. “You came to ask,” she said in surprise over her shoulder, then smiled and gestured at herself coquettishly. “All right. Yes.”
“I didn't—” he began, and swallowed it as she turned. She moved toward him, stumbled, fell up against him and threw her arms convulsively around his neck. She was shivering as though with a chill, but Johnny's hands had come up instinctively and filled themselves to overflowing with flesh that was far from chilled. He couldn't see her face, but he could hear her panting.
“Hurt me!” she urged throatily, and moved in his hands. Her dead weight hung suspended from his neck, and her body writhed ceaselessly. “Hurt me!” she demanded despairingly. “Your hands. Your—belt.” Her voice roughened in a hoarse gasp. “Do—something!”
He almost fell getting her through the doorway.
He was on his way out when he remembered. He walked back in beside the bed and, after the first glance at the face on the pillow, avoided looking at it. It was far more naked than the body. “Manuel had a twenty-five caliber Spanish automatic,” he said roughly.
“Si, pis tola.”
She might have been a thousand light-years distant.
“Where is it?”
“Bureau—bottom drawer.” Her voice had no resonance. “I hid it.”
He crossed swiftly to the bureau, stooped and dredged ruthlessly amidst the welter of flimsy underwear. His probing hands touched something hard, and he removed it, unwrapped the tightly folded pink slip to its hard core and looked down at the toylike, pearl-handled weapon in his hand. So Manfredi hadn't killed Hendricks. Check that, Killain. He didn't kill him with Manuel's automatic.
He rolled the little handgun back up in the slip and thrust it back in a corner of the drawer.
He returned to the bed, but she spoke before he could. “Don't talk. Go.”
He was surprised to find that it was daylight when he reached the street. Where he had been it had been night for some time.
CHAPTER XIII
At the apartment Sally greeted him with a quizzical expression as he slipped out of his coat in the hall. “Well, man?” she queried, hanging up the coat in the closet. “You said afternoon. Where I come from we'd call this evening.”
“I said 'maybe,' too,” he pointed out. “Congress is just gonna have to legislate a few more hours into the day.” He walked into the living room and dropped down in his armchair with a sigh.
“You sound as though it'd been a hard day at the office,” Sally jeered, the corners of her generous mouth curving upward. “What held you up?”
“The alarm didn't go off,” Johnny told her blandly.
“That's the trouble with those strange bedrooms,” she answered thoughtfully. “The alarm never does act like your own.” The smile expanded as she sat down on the arm of his chair. “I wonder why no one's ever done a thesis on that interesting subject?”
“Hush yo' mouf, Ma,” he directed her amiably. “You know I always trot right along home to you.”
“With your shirt tail out,” she gibed, and burst out laughing as he looked down instinctively. She tangled a hand in his thick, unruly hair. “Mr. Killain, you are really something.”
He pulled her from the chair arm into his lap, sliding an arm about her. “You're not so bad yourself, midget.” The little silence was comfortably unstrained.
“I had a telephone call,” she said finally.
He tried to see her face as she lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder. “Who from?”
“He said it was Mr. Quince.” Her head came up and the brown eyes met his steadily. “But it wasn't. It was the fat man who came over to the hotel that night with the other man.”
“Al Munson,” Johnny grunted. “What'd he want?”
“When he thought he'd convinced me he was Mr. Quince, he asked me what my next move was going to be.”
Johnny sat quietly, but he could feel muscle tension deep within himself. “So what'd you tell him?”
“I told him nothing had changed since you talked to him, and that the status was quo.”
Johnny released a little breath. “I could get you a job in the State Department tomorrow on the strength of that answer, Ma. That was a little bit of all right.”
“You should never try to fool a telephone operator about a telephone voice,” Sally said complacently.
“I wonder how they found out it was Quince doin' the bloodhound bit,” Johnny mused. “'Course, I guess if Turner thought it was important enough to find out what was goin' on in that office, he could spread enough grease so there wouldn't be too many secrets.” He looked up at Sally, who was studying his face. “I was over there today, Ma. Turner's. They're waivin' all claims. You're an heiress.”
“What's the catch?” she asked warily.
“No catch. They just decided for good an' all they can't stand the noise that goes with puttin' in a claim check. Turner laid it on the line. He's ready with the damnedest story you ever heard if the Internal Revenue boys get back to him, but he'd much rather they didn't. By inference, if they don't, what's left is yours.” He grinned at her. “That leaves Turner worryin' about a double cross. He had a man on me today I gave a hot-foot, an' the call to you was just another checkup. Maybe he'll sleep tonight after the answer you gave him.”
“Do you think I should keep quiet?” she asked in a small voice.
“I sure do,” he replied promptly. “I'm a practical man, I hope. Even after the chop you should wind up with a little better'n forty grand. That'll keep me in a lotta bourbon.”
“Yes, but what do you really think?”
she persisted. “Morally, I mean.”
“Who's got morals? Not me. Not you, in this case, or you're outta your mind. Internal Revenue is gettin' theirs, aren't they? The only way they could get more is penalties on Turner if they could get him on criminal intent, but his gimmick's so good he'd keep 'em tied up in the courts for years if they went after him. I doubt they could get a conviction.”
“What was this gimmick?” she asked with interest.
Johnny ran through the story Turner had given him for her. “Thinkin' it over afterward, though, it seems to me that the real hook in Internal Revenue's mouth is that just as long as those checks are outstanding, uncashed, there's quite a point involved as to whether they're actually income at any level. The legal eagles would have a field day.” He jabbed her lightly in the ribs with his left hand, and pretended to wince. “Those bones, Ma! At least you can pad them a little with the forty big ones.”
“I could get Charlie a nice stone,” she said wistfully, and dropped back down on his shoulder. “Charlie—” Her muffled voice died away.
Johnny sat in silence. It seemed like such a long way back to the towheaded, crew-cut fighter, but the whole thing had springboarded from that fixed fight. Whoever had fixed the fight originally had probably had Charlie Roketenetz killed. On the other hand, regardless of who had fixed it in the first place, when Rick Manfredi had refixed it he could easily have decided that it was the best part of wisdom to do the same thing. And, if he had used Jake Gidlow as his intermediary, that would account for what had happened to Jake.
The second telephone call from Gidlow's room was the key to the whole thing. The police had the answer, but they were surely taking their time about doing anything about it. There had to be something funny about that telephone call, the deep, dark silence that persisted about it. The police...
Johnny sighed without realizing it, and Sally's head lifted again. “I forgot, Ma. I got to run over to the precinct station house.”
“For what?” she asked in alarm.
“Just to look at a few pictures,” he said lightly. He smiled a little unwillingly as a thought occurred to him. “'Course, there could be stereophonic sound to go with 'em if Cuneo's there.”
“You won't be long?”
“I shouldn't be. Throw a few eggs at the fryin' pan in about an hour, okay?” He picked her up and sat her back down on the arm of the chair. “You be good till I get back.”
Her indignant sniff followed him out to the hall closet, from which he retrieved his coat.
He ran lightly up the worn white steps of the weather-beaten red brick building and turned left inside after nodding to the incurious uniformed patrolman at the inner door. He walked briskly on oil-darkened wooden floors to a head-high desk presided over by a burr-headed man whose red hair was laced with gray.
“The name's Killain,” John told him. “I'm supposed to look at pictures in your file.”
“Pictures we've got,” the man behind the desk agreed. “What classification? Breaking and entering? Armed robbery? Safe cracking? Using the mails to defraud? Shoplifting? Bank robbery? Arson? Pickpocketing? The confidence game?” He ticked them off rapidly on his fingers. “If the offense was sexual, that's a different department.”
“Assault,” Johnny informed him. “A piece of pipe.”
A pencil poised over a notebook. “Time and location of assault? Investigating officer?”
“This mornin', in back of the Cortez Apartments. Cuneo investigated it.”
The pencil pointed back down the corridor through which Johnny had just come. “Gilligan's your man. Second door back that way.” His hand was groping for the phone as Johnny turned away from the desk.
Behind the second door Johnny found a room cluttered with small desks, large filing cabinets and a cheerful, blue-eyed extrovert in a pin-stripe suit. “Sit down, sit down,” the extrovert invited hospitably, eying Johnny and pointing to the largest desk. “I'm Gilligan.” He attacked the files energetically, dumped a big double handful of file cards on the desk before Johnny and returned to the cabinets for more. “The desk said you wanted the heavy characters.” He looked over at Johnny fleetingly. “You must have a hard head if you're still walking around after tying into a piece of pipe.”
“I got just the back of his hand when he flew. A friend of mine got the load.” Johnny looked dubiously at the pile of cards and lifted off the top one. He studied the picture in the upper left corner and the neatly typed information beneath —name, known aliases, last address, arrests, convictions, known associates and technique. “How the hell do they stay outside when you've got them under the gun like this?” he asked in surprise.
“Not all of them are out,” the bustling Gilligan informed him, returning with another stack of cards. “Once they're in there, they stay in until the undertaker seals up the casket.” He pulled up a chair opposite Johnny, put his feet up on the next desk and slid down onto the final eighth of his spine. “If you've any questions, fire away.”
Johnny turned cards silently. For the first few he glanced through the typewritten information on each one, but after a dozen or so he turned cards and just looked at faces. A man would be hard put to imagine this many lowering countenances in the city, he reflected, with a single common denominator—menace.
He looked up suddenly from one card to find the shrewd blue eyes across the desk steadily upon him; while appearing to be in a soporific trance, Gilligan had not missed an expression upon Johnny's face during the card-turning. Johnny grinned at him and flipped a card into his lap. “Thought you said you retired 'em when the undertaker got them. Jigger Whelan's not around any more.”
“That right?” Gilligan squinted at the card. “Whelan. I don't remember. What happened?”
“He lost a right-of-way argument with a hit-and-run artist a month or so ago. Jigger was on foot.”
Gilligan nodded and made a pencil notation on the card. “It takes us a little longer to catch up with that kind of exit. We don't expect it of our clients.” He smiled faintly, and Johnny returned to the diminishing stack.
A door at the side of the room opened, and Detective James Rogers entered. He looked tired, and his suit was in need of pressing. He nodded to Gilligan and addressed Johnny. “I heard you were here. Step across the hall before you leave and see the man.”
“He wants his shoes shined, maybe?” Johnny inquired.
“Don't go giving me a harder time than I'm having where I just came from,” the sandy-haired detective warned him. “I could always lose my temper.”
“Maybe you don't lose it in the right places,” Johnny suggested. “Sympathy's in the dictionary. Right next—”
“I know what it's right next to,” Detective Rogers replied wearily. “Just walk across the hall like a good little boy when you're finished here.” The hazel eyes considered Johnny bale-fully. “Remind me to talk to you sometime, too, about using my name to get a private eye off your back, will you?”
“You'd be surprised the influence you have, Jimmy.”
“Over some people, maybe.” The slender man's tone was ironic. “We'll be expecting you.”
Gilligan looked at Johnny curiously when Detective Rogers had departed. “I wouldn't think there was much of a future butting heads with Rogers,” he said mildly.
“He discounts the source,” Johnny replied briefly, and resumed turning over cards. When he finally reached the bottom of the stack, he stretched lengthily and looked up to find the blue eyes questioning him. He shook his head negatively. “He's not in there.”
Gilligan looked disappointed. “You sure you'd know the man?”
“That man I'd know,” Johnny answered softly.
Gilligan's glance at him was sharp, but he picked up the cards without comment. “They're probably waiting for you,” he said from the file. “You'd better get on over there.”
“Isn't it funny that everyone's in a hurry but me?” Johnny remarked, but rose reluctantly from his chair and moved to the door. After the da
y he'd had he didn't particularly look forward to locking horns with Joe Dameron. In Johnny's present razor-edged near-depletion, he knew his own temper well enough to know that the infighting could get out of hand quickly.
He knocked on the door across the hall and, when he heard nothing, knocked again. He tried the door when there was still no sound from inside. It was locked, so Johnny turned and walked back to the squad rooms where a plump detective with round eyes known on the Broadway perimeter as Owly sat by the phones.
“I was supposed to see Dameron,” Johnny said to him.
“They just went out, him and Rogers,” Owly replied.
“I can just barely stand missing him,” Johnny said with relief. “Just barely. See you later. He knows where to find me.”
On the street he looked up at the leaden skies. It was blusteringly cold, and it looked like more snow. It suited his mood. He set off toward the hotel.
Johnny gave a dum didididada dum dum knock upon the door of Stacy Bartlett's apartment and shoved the corsage box he carried behind his back. He was early, and, as a moment passed with no response, he speculated uneasily upon the possibility of having caught her in the shower. He was relieved when the door opened. “H'ya, kid,” he greeted her lightly, and maneuvered inside with his box still behind him. “All set to paint the town red, white and purple?” She walked ahead of him into the living room. “Your—” He broke off as he caught sight of her averted face, creased with tears, and eyes reddened and swollen. “What the hell's the matter, Stacy?” he demanded, his voice rising.
“N-nothing.” She turned her back to hide her face.
“Nothin'!” he snorted. “You look like it's nothin', all right.”
“D-don't look at me,” she pleaded. “I sh-shouldn't have let you in until I p-pulled myself together.”
“Somethin' wrong at home?” he asked quickly.
“N-no.” She knuckled her eyes frankly, took a deep breath, faced about and tried to smile at him. “Aren't I an awful b-baby?”
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