Lazaretti stared at him, his eyes hopeless. Reardon was sure he could not understand.
“Ah, well, the hell with it,” Dondero said, dropping the matter as well as the small man’s arm. He went back to Italian. “We’re not here to give you lessons in English. We’re here to get answers to questions. Let’s skip the preliminaries and get down to the nitty-gritty. Who in this town do you know who is so interested in getting you sprung from jail?”
The little man looked up, surprised. Dondero frowned. Either the little character was honestly startled by the question, or he had to be the best actor to come out of the old country since Vittorio De Sica.
“Pardon?”
“You heard me,” Dondero said. “Somebody in the town wants you out of jail, and he isn’t being subtle about it, either.” He frowned and looked at Reardon, returning to English. “Which brings up an interesting question — how come this little monkey isn’t out on bail? Or if he couldn’t raise it, how come the character who’s got Pop Holland didn’t spring for the bail and take Tiny Tim, here, home under his arm?”
“He’s up for extradition when, as, and if he gets out of here after his trial,” Reardon said, surmising. “They seldom set bail for foreigners up for extradition because they probably figure a large number of them wouldn’t show up at the dock.”
“True,” Dondero conceded, and went back to Italian. “Like I was saying, somebody wants you out of jail very badly. Who? Take a guess if you honestly don’t know.” Dondero had a feeling he was whipping a dead horse, but he had to keep trying. He reached for the small man’s arm again and squeezed. “Try talking.”
Lazaretti looked bewildered. For the first time he became almost voluble.
“I don’t know a soul in this town. Nobody—”
“No? How about your friend? The guy you were trying to carve up with your shiv when you got picked up?”
“He... I... I don’t know him...”
“Oh, come on,” Dondero said disbelievingly. “You come over on the same plane from Rome, you come out here in the same plane” — it was a guess, but Dondero was suddenly sure — “you leave New York the same day, holding hands, and you don’t even know the guy?”
“I... I don’t know anyone out here.” The prisoner looked up, convinced Dondero had done his worst. “Anyway,” he added bluntly, “they cannot hold me for what I did. What did I do? A fight! Americans do not take such things seriously. I will be free very soon.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Dondero said, and smiled wolfishly.
“What do you mean?” The prisoner thought he might see an answer and it was an answer he did not like. “What did he do? This man, to get me out of prison?” His hands came up expressively, palms out. “I am not responsible! I am not responsible!” He frowned at Dondero. “What did he do, this man?”
“I’ll ask the questions. Let’s start over. Why are you here in San Francisco?”
“I told you!”
“What did you tell me?”
“I... I came to visit. Just to visit. Many people come to visit, do they not?”
Dondero looked at Reardon. “Jim, don’t you have something else to do? This looks like it may take some time.”
“Don,” Reardon said coldly, “you’re going to get in one hell of a jam if you rough up this prisoner. You—”
“You ought to be getting hungry around now,” Dondero said, quite as if Reardon had not spoken. He sounded quite concerned. “Why don’t you run down for a sandwich? Or, wait a second — Pop’s Chevy ought to be in the garage by now. Didn’t you say you wanted to see it as soon as it came in?”
Reardon looked at him a long moment and then sighed.
“All right, Don. Just don’t get your butt in a sling. None of these characters are worth it.”
“I’ll be as careful as a mother with her first-born.”
Reardon looked at him and then shook his head. “All right. I’ll be down in the garage when you’re done. Or back in the office.”
“I’ll try not to keep you waiting,” Dondero said with satisfaction, and turned back to the prisoner as Reardon closed the solid door behind him. Lazaretti stared at the closed door with widening eyes and then turned to stare at Dondero’s hard, smiling face.
“Now,” Dondero said pleasantly, “where were we?”
Saturday — 2:15 P.M.
The sandwich Reardon had sent out for — or, rather, the portion of it he had eaten — lay in his stomach like sautéed concrete; the waxy cardboard taste of the coffee remained with him even though most of the indescribably terrible liquid had been assigned, together with its leaky container, to his wastebasket. The awful excuse for a meal had only one redeeming grace; it made him look forward even more anxiously to whatever restaurant Jan would choose for their evening repast. After which—
He brought his mind back to business and punched the button for the elevator at the fourth floor. As if it had been waiting for him, the doors slid back and he walked in, pressing the button for the basement garage. He rode down in silence, got out at the lower floor, and walked the long distance to the large caged area at one end of the huge underground room, his footsteps echoing hollowly from the concrete floor. The cage was the storage area for the cars awaiting or undergoing inspection from any one of the Accident Prevention Bureau teams. Lieutenant Frank Wilkins, of the APB, was there beside the old Chevrolet, busily taking notes, a cigarette hanging from one lip, its ash dribbling on his lapel. His men were all over the car, calling out their findings; the trunk was open and a man was bent inside carefully passing a hand vacuum cleaner over all surfaces. The side door on the driver’s side was also open and a man there was shoving the rear seat cushion back in place; to one side on the floor of the garage were two small, carefully marked bags with material the vacuum cleaner had picked up in both the front and rear seats.
Wilkins looked up from his notebook at Reardon’s arrival, dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it, and nodded pleasantly. Lieutenant Wilkins had been Sergeant Wilkins until a few months before, but the change in rank had not changed him in the least. He was a thickset man approaching fifty, with a rather high-pitched voice and a flattened nose that gave his face a permanently sneering look, but which was actually the result of having his face smashed in by a frying pan years before while trying to break up a family fight. The fact was that Frank Wilkins was the mildest and most co-operative of officers, and was also excellent at his job. Reardon smiled at him and glanced at the notebook in Wilkins’ hand.
“Anything of interest?”
“Only fingerprints are those of Pop Holland, which we figured anyway. Stuff in the bags will go to the lab; have a better idea about those when we get through,” Wilkins said. “Right now we have blood on the top of the front seat, passenger side. My guess is they cut Mike. Maybe he was giving them a hard time, or something.”
Reardon looked through the open front car door. The man who had wrestled the back seat cushion back in place was now delicately shaving samples from a brownish stain that covered the top of the front seat back, and which trailed down the seat cover in ragged tailings. As Reardon watched, the man neatly tipped the shavings into an envelope, closed it, and began to write on it. Reardon looked at Wilkins.
“A lot of blood?”
“No. Nowhere near enough to indicate anything serious.”
“What about the mileage?”
Wilkins frowned. “What about it?”
“I mean — anything to indicate how far he’d gone?” Even as he asked the question he realized how stupid it was.
Wilkins smiled. “You tell me what it was before they picked him up, and I’ll give you a rough idea.”