Reardon became aware he was being addressed. He looked up.
“Yes?”
The counterman was eying him with curiosity. “You buying, mister, or just window-shopping?”
“Oh.” Reardon came down to earth. “I’m buying.” He surveyed the wealth of succulent viands spread out in the various hot trays, trying to make up his mind. He’d had beef the last time he’d been here, that time with Porky, and it had been very good. And speaking of Porky, the ribs looked inviting. But he’d been eating a lot of fatty foods lately, and Jan had this thing about cholesterol, so maybe—
“Hey!” The counterman was frowning at him. “What do you want, Mac? A estimate?”
“No, I’ll have the fish—”
Reardon stopped, wrinkling his forehead, as the word triggered an entire series of tiny electronic flashes in his brain. Fish, by God! Of course! That was it! The counterman paused in the process of transferring a fillet onto a plate and peered at his customer wonderingly, disturbed by the sudden grimace that crossed the other’s face.
“Hey, Mac, you all right?”
“Fish, by God!” Reardon said triumphantly, and abandoned his tray, moving toward the open door of the Joynt at a half-trot.
The counterman stared after the running figure a moment with a puzzled frown; then he shrugged and slid the fillet back to join its brothers in the hot tray. “Three-dollar bill,” he said to no one in particular, and then whistled shrilly for the busboy to come and remove the deserted tray before it interfered with normal traffic.
Monday — 3:10 P.M.
The narrow half-twisted and falling-apart dock lay under the hot September sun like a long wounded wooden animal, resting before resuming its struggle to straighten itself out. Reardon, walking its precarious length and trying to avoid the rotting planks, paused at the end, pleased to have made it, and looked down at the broad-beamed little fishing boat bobbing placidly there. Across the bay the hills of San Lorenzo and Hayward could be seen, shimmering through the afternoon haze, small buildings dotting their sides. But here, south of Burlingame, hidden in the reeds, one might have been on a deserted island. A bluebottle fly approached to appraise the interloper; Reardon brushed it away impatiently, studied the deserted deck a moment, and then raised his voice.
“Dondero!”
There was a faint echo as his voice came back to him from across the water. He wondered if his hunch might have been wrong after all, and then called again.
“Hey, Dondero!”
Dondero’s tousled and sleepy head appeared in the shadowed square that marked the small companionway. He yawned deeply, grinned at Reardon in a slightly embarrassed manner, and scratched at the T-shirt that covered his hairy chest.
“Hi, Jim. You woke me up.” He looked down the dock toward the land. “No escort?”
“I figured without an escort you’d confess faster,” Reardon said, and added more soberly, “anyway, when you told me about this fishing boat, you asked me to keep it to myself.”
“So I did. I didn’t feel I wanted every cop in San Francisco figuring this would make a dandy place for weekend picnics, for him and his fourteen kids,” Dondero said. He looked toward land again, studying the Charger parked all alone on the jetty. “Still, under the circumstances, there was a good chance you’d purposely forget. However...” He yawned. “Well, now you’re here, come on down and have a beer.”
“You bring them up,” Reardon suggested. “It looks warm down there.”
Dondero looked at him a long moment. Then he said, “Yeah, it’s warm down there, all right. And I’ve got a machine gun all set up down there for snooping intruders. Sure you want to drink on duty?”
“Just get the beer.”
“Right,” Dondero said, and disappeared from view. He reappeared a moment later with two cans of beer, each dripping with sweat. He handed one to Reardon, swung himself up to seat himself on the rickety dock, and looked up. “Hold up on the handcuffs until I get this down, will you?”
“I don’t know.” Reardon sat down beside the other man and pulled the tab free from his can. The cold liquid felt and tasted good going down. He took another protracted drink, rested the empty can on his knee, and looked at Dondero evenly. “I ought to arrest you for stupidity, if for nothing else. Going to tell me about it?”
Dondero grinned a bit sheepishly and shrugged.
“What’s to tell? Two o’clock tomorrow morning, if everything works out, the man lets Pop Holland go, and I go back into circulation.” He took a draught of his beer and stared across the bay. “Oh, I expect I’ll get my share of flak for pulling the guy out of the cell block, but I figure the brass won’t be too hard-mouthed about it if Pop’s okay and it all works out.”
Reardon set his empty can to one side. “And if it doesn’t work out?”
“Why shouldn’t it work out?”
“I mean just what I said. Suppose the chief, and the Board of Commissioners and even Captain Clark — God save the mark! — are right, and the brilliant Sergeant Dondero is wrong?”
“Wrong in what way?”
“Wrong in every way,” Reardon said firmly. “For starters, suppose the guy doesn’t let Pop go?”
Dondero shrugged. “Why shouldn’t he? But supposing he don’t — what have we lost? What difference does it make if this Lazaretti is walking the streets? If we want him back, when the man gets through with him, he’ll be easy enough to pick up; and if he’s blown town, so much the better. There’ll be one less so-called tough guy around to make trouble. So what’s the problem?”
Reardon figured Dondero was certainly innocent. Not, he reminded himself, that he had ever had any doubts, even before the telephone call he had received at Tommy’s Joynt.
“The problem is—”
“The problem is,” Dondero interrupted, “that all you guys think Pop’s dead and I released a prisoner for nothing. Then where does that leave Sergeant Dondero? In the soup, I admit.” He shook his head. “Only I don’t think Pop’s dead. I think Pop’s very much alive, and I’m damned if I’m going to sit around and watch him get hurt, Board of Commissioners or not. Not when all it takes to get him free is to trade off a midget meathead like Lazaretti. It’ll work out, Jim. Don’t worry.”
“No,” Reardon said quietly. “It won’t work out.”
Dondero frowned. “You sound like you know something I don’t.”
Reardon nodded somberly.
“Yes, I do. I know that Lazaretti was fished out of the bay early this morning, about six. Somebody did a job on him with fire — matches, a lighted candle — undoubtedly to get him to talk about something, but whether or not he talked before he died we don’t know.”
Dondero was staring at him, his beer forgotten.
“As a matter of fact,” Reardon continued, his tone without expression, “the consensus down at the Hall is that you were the one who was holding those matches—”
“What!”
“That’s right,” Reardon said in the same even tone. “They think that since you were unable to get the information you wanted from Lazaretti up in the ‘conference room,’ you took him outside and worked him over. They figure he died on you, most likely before you could get any useful information from him, so you dumped him in the bay and now you’re on the run.”
Dondero had been listening unbelievingly. Now he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“They got to be crazy! They got to be completely out of their so-called minds!” A thought came to him. “You don’t think any nutty thing like that, do you, Jim?”
“No,” Reardon said quietly, “I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. I had a call while I was having lunch — or about to have lunch, now that I remember — and it was from the man who’s holding Pop. He admitted to having knocked off Lazaretti—”