“Say, now—”
“The police will be checking you sooner or later. You go back to that bar after you found out it was gone?”
“Yeah, sure, that’s where I called from. The guys were with me. The bartender knows me too.”
“You’re all right then. The car’s around the corner but I’ll have to turn it over. They’ll probably hold it for a day or two until they get you squared away.”
“Well for crying out loud, my heap in a murder case. Isn’t that something?”
I had opened the door. I took two singles out of my wallet and tossed them on his dresser. “Gas,” I told him.
“Say, you don’t have to do that. Thanks. Who’s the girl, anyhow? She good looking?”
“Aren’t they always?”
Seabiscuit opened the stall across the way again as soon as I started out. I turned and winked at her. She slammed the door and something fell inside the room.
Young Moss was grinning at me. “Mishugganah,”he said. He had a good smile and he was a nice healthy kid who had most likely never seen the inside of a squad room in his life. It would have been no trouble to hate him for it.
“See you, Mr. Fannin. Thanks again. Boy, wait’ll I tell my old man.”
I went along the corridor and out into the lobby. The Chinese girl was coming back. She had dumped her plant and was carrying a man’s suit about Moss’s size on a cleaner’s hanger. I waited until she went past.
“Say, uh, just out of curiosity, you think maybe you could tell me why all Chinese girls wear dresses with—”
She had stopped and turned toward me. “Yes?”
“Never mind. I was being silly.”
I was grinning at her and she looked at me vaguely. Then she smiled. “It’s out of deference to old custom, obviously. Why, don’t you approve?”
She had a voice like a small bell tinkling under water. I told her I approved in spades and she laughed. I went out of there wondering if Moss’s old man knew about that personal valet service. In my day at school I’d had to room with a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound reserve fullback named Irving.
I took my time walking back to the Drive. I supposed I’d expected exactly what I’d gotten from Moss. I knew I’d expected it. I didn’t have a gun. I’d walked in on two of them already that morning, and I wouldn’t have rapped on the door to the vestry at St. John’s Cathedral without the Luger if I’d seriously thought I might run into a third.
I cut through Central Park and made it across town in the MG without getting squashed by any of the large economy-size models. It was just 7:42 when I swung off Lexington toward my apartment building. I didn’t go all the way down the block. I didn’t go down the block at all. I jerked the car over to the side just after I made the turn and pulled in at a fire plug. I sat there for a minute, watching him.
Anybody could stare at the house. At least a dozen other people were doing it, either at the building itself or at the three squad cars parked out front. Most of them were clustered on the other side of the street but there were also two or three near the door, talking to the plain-clothes cop on duty who wouldn’t be telling them anything but to move along. But the one I cared about was a good hundred yards up from the others, standing alone almost directly across from me.
He was wearing a brown tweed sports jacket that Brooks Brothers had never been ashamed of, and the lizard briefcase under his left arm would have gone for close to a hundred dollars in any shop on the same avenue. In the light of day the crewcut took ten years off his age, even with the gray at the temples. His tie was Countess Mara or Bronzini and every bit as sleek as the stained one he’d probably tossed under the bed a few minutes after I’d seen him that morning.
I was over there next to him before he noticed me, and then his head did an almost imperceptible nervous shudder before he turned fully. But if it should have been an ace of a hangover there wasn’t any other sign of it.
“You selling many of those policies?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It is insurance?”
“Why, yes, only I don’t seem to recall—”
“Must have been at the lodge. I’ll tell you though, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Maybe you’re right. Fellow shouldn’t go round with such inadequate coverage, certainly not a family man like myself. I’m afraid I’ve misplaced your card, but if you could spare another I’d—”
“Why certainly/’ I stood there while he slipped a calfskin wallet out of his jacket and fumbled in it. “Spragway,” he was saying. “Ethan J.” I’d already looked at him so I let him look at me while I read the card. It listed a Lexington Avenue agency address in one corner and a Park Avenue home address in the other. The home number would be only two or three blocks from where we were.
“I’m frightfully sorry, but I don’t seem to recall your name at all.” He had decided to frown slightly.
“Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes.”
“How curious. Just like the philosopher.”
“Doesn’t bother me if he doesn’t mind. Something going on down the block there?”
“Evidently. Well, yes, good to have seen you again, Hobbes. Afraid I’ve got to be running.”
“You didn’t notice anything when you passed here last night?”
“Last night?” Spragway frowned fully now. “Here? What makes you suggest that I—?”
“Come off it, mister. You were here all right, drunk as an owl. A little before four. I asked you if you noticed anything.”
He got indignant. “My good man, if I happened to come down this street last night, or for that matter any night, it would be because I live only two blocks away — as you saw on my card and which, it strikes me now, is no business of yours. I am not accustomed to being called an alcoholic. Good day, Mr. Hobbes.”
He turned on his heel and I let him go, the only insurance man in captivity who ever let a prospect slip by without taking an address and phone number. I supposed a respectable drunk would have a lot of practice deliberately not remembering people he’d met when he was boozed up. Even one whose eyes were perfectly clear four hours later and whose breath smelled of nothing stronger than Ipana.
I stood there sucking air through my teeth and thinking about nothing while he disappeared around the corner.
CHAPTER 10
The plainclothes dick in front of my building started toward me with an expression of bored annoyance when I eased the MG between two of the squad cars, all three of which were double parked. He reached the curb being so weary of the stupidity of the unenlightened masses that it was killing him.
“This look like a parking field, Mac?”
“I could have sworn.”
“Move it! Move it!”
“How you going to watch it if I do that? Its evidence. I was even thinking maybe we ought to wrap it in tissue paper or something.”
He grimaced sourly. “Funny man. They been biting their nails upstairs there, waiting for all the jokes. Lets see it, huh?”
I showed him the wallet. He glanced at it and then nodded.
They had cleaned up the blood, or probably they’d let the superintendent do it after they’d gotten their pictures. A well-clipped poodle was sniffing at the sawdust. He went off, limping a little in the left forepaw.
The door was wedged open with a folded tabloid. BERRA HITS TWO, YANKS… something or other, it said. When I turned at the top of the stairs I could see that the apartment door was open also. There was another detective in the hall, a gaunt, underfed younger specimen of the breed with a neck as long as a beer can.
“Fannin,” I told him.