The door opened, breaking into his reverie. Captain Clark, of Traffic, was in the doorway. Reardon put aside any further thoughts of Jan; to think of his lovely Jan while looking at Clark’s sour bulldog face, with its usual expression of belligerence, somehow didn’t seem fitting. Clark looked around the room.
“Nothing on the so-called missing car,” he announced to nobody in particular, and dragged a chair around to face Tower. He sat down and stared at the head of Homicide. “That’s if the thing is missing in the first place.”
Tower frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said,” Clark said, his chin thrust out. He was looking at Tower but his words were obviously intended for the lieutenant at Tower’s elbow. “Mike Holland went out on a toot to celebrate his retirement, forgot all about the dinner you people were throwing for him until it was too late, and then, when he finally remembered, he didn’t have the guts to call himself, so he got a pal to do it for him.” He shrugged. “And the pal thought he had a sense of humor—”
“So where’s his car?” Reardon demanded.
Clark disregarded him.
“When Mike sobers up sometime today, he’ll call up or show up all embarrassed, and in the meantime we’ll have wasted the time of dozens of men, and put God knows how many patrol cars out of service—”
“So where’s his car?” Reardon repeated.
“How the hell do I know where a drunk stashes his car?” Clark said angrily. He snorted. “This town has a million bars and nine tenths of them have parking lots!”
“No way,” Reardon said stubbornly. “The footmen have been checking parking lots. Anyway, Mike was sober on that tape. I heard it. It was no gag.” He remembered something else. “And he was in pain. I could tell by his tone of voice, even if he didn’t say anything.”
Clark looked at the ceiling in supplication. “Even if he didn’t say anything!”
Gentry cut in quickly. Roy Gentry was the head of Laboratory Services and probably knew more about drunks than any other man in the room. The result of the bag tests ended up in his lap, and any blood or urine analyses for alcohol were part of his responsibilities. Gentry was also a conciliator by nature, possibly because he was tall and thin and craggy, and in college somebody had told him he looked like the young Lincoln. If so, it was a Lincoln with spectacles that always appeared to be on the verge of falling from the large thin nose.
“Captain Clark might have a point,” he said in what he obviously hoped was a compromising manner. “I would judge it rather hard to determine if a man is drunk or sober merely by listening to a tape recording of his voice. Oh, of course,” he went on in a manner that surprised no one in the room, “if he was really drunk, where his speech was visibly — I mean, well — where it could be heard to be...” He trailed off.
“Anyway,” Clark said, as if he wanted to make clear he neither needed nor wanted Gentry’s half-hearted support, “how do we know when that tape was recorded?”
“You mean, Mike Holland might have made a recording ahead of time, saying he was kidnapped? On the offhand chance he might have a few drinks too many on the night of his retirement dinner and forget to show up?” Reardon stared at Clark. “What goddamn kind of sense is that supposed to make?”
“Now, let’s not get excited—” Captain Tower began.
“Let’s not get excited?” Reardon turned to look at his superior in astonishment. “A cop is kidnapped — kidnapped! — and everybody here talks as if the whole thing was a gag of some sort! What do you mean, let’s not get excited? I figure on getting goddamn excited!”
“Nobody is talking as if it’s a gag,” Captain Tower began, but this time it was Clark who interrupted.
“Let him get as excited as he wants,” he said in a half-amused tone. He turned to Reardon. “Just answer me one question, Lieutenant — who in God’s name would want to kidnap Mike Holland? Why? What would anyone gain? The man has no family, and if he had any money other than his paycheck, I don’t know about it, for one.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Reardon said quietly, “Damned if I know. But we’ll know when that tape comes.”
“If it comes,” Clark began, and then stopped short as the door opened again and Chief of Police Alex Boynton strode in in his usual hurried manner. Boynton had only been promoted a short time, but the change had been one that the huge majority of the men at the Hall favored. He walked to the head of the long table, looked about in the silence that had fallen, and then nodded abruptly, sitting down.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said in his deep voice. “Let’s get started. Who’s first?”
Clark spoke up. “I was saying, Chief, that this whole thing sounds to me as if it could be a gag—”
“You didn’t hear that tape and I did,” Reardon said, and then was rapped to silence by Boynton.
“Let’s take it one at a time,” Boynton said. “All right, Lieutenant. You were the one who reported it. Let’s start with you.”
“Yes, sir.” Reardon hitched his chair a bit closer to the long conference table and paused to collect his thoughts. Getting excited and talking off the top of one’s head might be all right with a man like Captain Clark, but Boynton was a different matter. “Well, sir, as you know, last night we had scheduled a retirement party for Mike Holland, and he didn’t show up. We were waiting for him at the restaurant when there was a call for me, and the caller said that Mike had been kidnapped. He played a tape with Mike’s voice on it for proof. Mike said something like — he was talking to these men — Listen, you dumb baboons, I’m a police officer. I’m a cop. Who in the name of sweet Mary and Jesus is going to give a plugged dime for an old cop? Or words to that effect—”
“A good question,” Clark said, and grinned.
Boynton took one look at Clark and the traffic officer subsided, but there was a twinkle in his eye in appreciation for his own wit. Boynton turned back to Reardon.
“Go on.”
“Yes, sir. Well, we all know that ‘sweet Mary and Jesus’ was a favorite phrase of Mike’s. And he hadn’t been drinking, not a drop, I’d swear it. Anyway, I asked this character on the phone what he wanted, and he said the demands would be on a tape sent here this morning in the first mail, addressed to me. He said—”
“Why you?” Boynton’s deep-set eyes were watching Reardon steadily.
“Sir?”
“I said, why would he address the tape to you?”
“I don’t know, sir. He knew my name and he knew I was in charge of the dinner. I’m just reporting what the man said. We tried to trace the call, but Marty’s Oyster House — the restaurant the affair was being held at, sir — only has the one phone, and the nearest outside phone was a block away and out of order. The man said he’d put it out of order, which means he knew the area pretty well—”
“It also seems to mean he was an amateur,” Boynton said.
“Sir?”
“He seemed to do a lot of talking. Unnecessary talking. However.”
“Yes, sir.” Reardon frowned, recalling something else. “There was something odd about that call, sir. If he had called from his home, or a house, he would have been taking a big chance of having the call traced. But at the same time, I have to doubt he would have made the call from a public booth.”