“I thought he might have mentioned something that...”
“Why? ’Cause I’m his long-lost brother? Bullshit. I mean, what kind of nerve is that, will you tell me? Fifteen years! He didn’t even invite me to his son’s confirmation, Mark, my nephew By rights, I shoulda been godfather, am I right? My only brother? His only son? Ralph shoulda asked me to be godfather Instead, he doesn’t even invite me. Then he comes here and wants seventy-five hundred bucks. I told him to take a walk.”
“How long was he here?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes? Who knows? As long as it took to say Hello, I need seventy-five hundred bucks, goodbye.”
“Just like that, huh? After fifteen years?”
“What’d you want me to do, hold a parade?” He shook his head. “It was raining, I called a taxi for him. This was around eight-thirty last Sunday night. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“When you say you called a taxi...”
“I phoned one of the cab companies, right.”
“Which one?” Reardon asked.
“Who remembers? I’ve got a dozen cards by the phone.”
A call to the local police put Reardon on to the capital’s equivalent of New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. It was called the Hack Office here in Washington, and it was located in room 2077 at 300 Indiana Avenue. But a phone call there netted only a tape recording saying that the office was closed on weekends and holidays. Reardon bought himself ten dollars’ worth of change in a tobacco shop, closeted himself in a phone booth with the telephone directory’s Yellow Pages open to Taxicabs, and began dialing every cab company in the city. Allied and Capitol and D.C. Express — the same question to each dispatcher — Dial and Globe and Mayflower — “Did you make an eight-thirty pickup last Sunday night at the Café de la Dame in Georgetown?” — Metropolitan and Omega and Potomac and finally, at a place called Regency Cab, he spoke to a dispatcher who seemed to remember a call from Georgetown around that time last Sunday night.
“Hold on a second, willya?” he said.
Reardon waited.
“This woulda been the fourteenth, am I right?” the dispatcher said.
“Last Sunday night, right,” Reardon said. He could hear papers rustling on the other end of the line.
“Today’s... what’s today?”
“The twentieth.”
“So that would’ve been last Sunday, right?” the clerk said.
“Right,” Reardon said patiently. “Last Sunday. The fourteenth.”
“Right,” the dispatcher said. “Pickup at the Café de la Daine, right?”
“Right.”
“To National Airport, right?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Reardon said.
“Right,” the dispatcher said. “So let me see here. It musta been raining last Sunday, we got a lot of calls here. Was it raining last Sunday?”
“Yes,” Reardon said.
“Which is why we got so many calls.” the clerk said. “Sunday, Sunday,” he said, riffling through the records, “Sunday, the fourteenth, right? Here we are.” He ran his finger down the page. “De la Daine, Sunday, the fourteenth. Here it is, right. De la Daine to National. Eight-thirty P.M. pickup. Two passengers.”
“Do you have the passengers’ names?” Reardon asked.
“Do they list passengers’ names in New York?” the dispatcher said.
“No, but...”
“Not here, neither,” the clerk said. “All I got is a pickup at the restaurant, a deposit at National. That’s what the man on the phone gave us.”
“Who was driving the cab?” Reardon asked.
He found the driver at a little past noon in the company garage on H and Third. He was eating a sandwich and sipping a Diet Pepsi. He told Reardon he always brought a sandwich from home, ate it here in the garage before he started his tour. He told Reardon he worked from one in the afternoon till ten at night. He didn’t like to work past ten because that was when the monkeys came out. The monkeys liked to hold up cab drivers here in D.C. The cabbie had a wife and three kids, and he didn’t want no monkey hitting him on the head with a lead pipe.
“Do you remember this particular call?” Reardon asked. “The Café de la Daine?”
“I get a lot of calls there,” the cabbie said. “Nice restaurant, though I never been in it.”
“Last Sunday night, around eight-thirty.”
“It was raining last Sunday,” the cabbie said.
“That’s right.”
“I’d have to look at my manifest,” the cabbie said. “Under Title 15, we gotta keep a manifest shows all our pickups and deposits.”
“Do you still have the one for last Sunday?”
“Oh, sure. What I do, I usually throw them away at the end of each month. I figure anybody’s gonna make a complaint, by then they’da made it. So let me take a look, huh?”
He looked at the manifest. Reardon watched his finger running down the list of calls.
“Yeah, here it is. Café de la Daine, eight-thirty pickup. Yeah, I remember it now,” he said, nodding. “But only because of the Arab.”
“What Arab?” Reardon asked at once.
“Guy with a beard and this long white sheet, you know, and this thing on his head — what do you call those things they wear on their heads, the Arabs?”
“A turban?”
“Yeah, a turban.”
“What about him?”
“He was one of the two guys I picked up at the restaurant.”
“And you drove both of them to National Airport?”
“Straight to National. It’s a ten-minute drive.”
“What airline?”
“Eastern.”
“Thanks.” Reardon said, and went immediately to the pay phone on the garage wall. He knew the number of the Café de la Daine by heart; he’d dialed it often enough from New York. He recognized D’Annunzio’s voice at once.
“Café de la Daine, good afternoon.”
“Mr. D’Annunzio?” he said.
“Who’s this, please?”
“Detective Reardon.”
“Yes, Mr. Reardon?”
“I’m sorry to bother you again, but I wonder if you can tell me...”
“Mr. Reardon, we have a very busy lunch hour here. Can you...?”
“Would you remember if there was an Arab in the restaurant last Sunday night?”
“A what?”
“An Arab. Man dressed in Arab garb, white robe, white turban. He would have taken the same cab your brother did.”
“Oh, yes,” D’Annunzio said. “He was here for dinner.”
“What was his name?” Reardon said.
“I don’t know. He was here with Senator Bailey.”
“Senator who?”
“Bailey. Thomas Bailey.”
“Thank you very much,” Reardon said.
But, of course, both the Senate and the House had adjourned for the holidays sometime last week and even if this had not been a Saturday, the offices on Capitol Hill would have been empty.
As, in fact, they were.
Dead end.
In a strange city.
Reardon got the hell out of it on the next shuttle.
He was back in the squadroom by three-thirty that afternoon, and by four o’clock he had learned that Senator Thomas Bailey was one of the senators from Connecticut, and he had further learned where he lived and what his home phone number was. This last piece of information had come from a man in Albany who used to be a D.A. in New York, and who now worked under Commissioner Condon in the Division of Criminal Justice Services. Albany was a very political town, and Reardon figured it would not hurt to call his old D.A. drinking buddy at home, see if he could give him a lead on the senator. It took him twenty minutes to get back to Reardon.
At a little past four. Reardon dialed the senator’s number in Norwalk, Connecticut. A woman answered the phone. Reardon identified himself as a working New York City detective and asked to speak to the senator, please. Bailey came onto the phone a moment later.