Harry could feel the sweat forming on his upper lip; he was sure Sumner could see it, beads of it glittering against his already forming five-o’clock shadow, which on him always began to appear midmorning. He had spent time in the army when he was young. He had been had up on a shoplifting charge, nothing very serious, but the judge had given him the option of Borstal or the ranks. It was a period of his life he did not care to dwell on. There had been a sergeant who was the bane of his life — what was his name? Mullins? No, Mulkearns, that was it. Little stub of a fellow, built like a barrel, with slicked-back hair and a Hitler ’tache. He was a bully too, like Sumner here, the same dirty, gloating smirk and the same air of enjoying himself hugely at others’ expense. You say these here spuds are peeled, do you, Clancy? Well, now you can get going on peeling the peelings. Oh, yes, Mulkearns and Carlton Sumner were of a type, all right.
“We could run a feature, maybe,” Harry said, though it sounded unimpressive even to his own ears. “The increasing instances of violence in the city, gangs on the rise, Saturday night drunkenness, the youth running wild…”
He let his voice trail off. Sumner, lounging on the chair, had put his head back and was gazing at the ceiling, slack-mouthed and vacant, the cheroot in his fingers sending up a swift and, so it seemed to Harry, venomously unwavering trail of steel-blue smoke. Then he snapped forward again, straightening his head with such suddenness that a tendon made an audible click in his thick, suntanned neck. “No no no,” he said, with a broad gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing aside a curtain of cobwebs. “No: what I see is a front-page splash. ‘JIMMY MURDER: NEW DEVELOPMENT.’ Run it across eight columns, top of the page. A photo of Jimmy — what was his name?”
“Minor.”
Sumner frowned. “Sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it, ‘Jimmy Minor’? If he’d been a kid it would be fine—‘Little Jimmy Minor,’ like ‘Little Jimmy Brown.’” He brooded. “Still, run a nice picture of him, with something in the caption like ‘Our man, brutally slain.’ Right?”
“Right,” Harry said, trying to sound in forceful agreement. He fingered a sheet of copy paper on the desk in front of him. “But,” he said, “this ‘new development’—what would that be?”
Sumner looked at him, his cheeks and even his eyes seeming to swell and grow shiny. “What do you mean?”
“Well … there haven’t been any developments.”
“There must be developments. There’s always developments. Even if there’s not, the cops pretend there are. What do they say? ‘Following a definite line of inquiry.’ Get onto that detective, what’s-he-called, and make him give you something. If he says he has nothing, invent it yourself—‘love tangle clue to killing,’ ‘mystery woman seen in vicinity of the crime,’ that kind of thing.”
“But…”
“But what?”
Harry heard himself swallow. “It’s not really … We can’t just…”
“Why not?” Sumner’s mustache was twitching again. Was he trying not to laugh? The missus was right, Harry had to acknowledge it: Sumner was no newspaper man. He was just amusing himself here, making Harry peel the potato peelings. Harry shifted in his chair.
“We can’t just invent things, Mr. Sumner. I mean, there’s a limit.”
Sumner, gazing at him, slowly shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harry,” he said, in almost a kindly, almost an avuncular tone. “There are no limits, except the ones you impose on yourself. That’s a thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in business. There’s no limits, there’s no line that can’t be crossed. You take a risk? Sure you take a risk. Otherwise you’re not in the game at all.” He stubbed the remains of his cheroot in the ashtray on the desk and got to his feet, brushing his hands together. “The mystery woman,” he said. “That’s the line to follow.”
“But—”
“There you go again,” he said, smiling genially, “butting the buts.” He winked. “Cherchez la femme—there’s always a broad, Harry, always.” He began to turn aside but a thought struck him and he stopped. “He wasn’t queer, was he, our little Jimmy Brown?”
Harry was about to reply, but paused. Here was a way, maybe, to get Sumner to back off. No paper was going to splash a story if it involved a nancy boy getting done in. Even Sumner would know that. “We’ve no reason to think he was that way inclined,” Harry said carefully. “On the other hand—”
“Good,” Sumner said briskly. “Let’s get going, then.”
Harry’s spirits sank. No good resisting; Sumner would not be deterred.
“There was a woman there, that night,” Harry said, tentatively.
“Oh, yes? Who was she?”
“Secretary, lived nearby. She was the one that found the body.”
Sumner showed his teeth again in a big, benign smile. “See?” he said. “I told you: there’s always a broad.”
“Trouble is, she was with someone. Her boss.”
“Her boss? Wasn’t it the middle of the night when the corpse was found? What the hell was this secretary doing with her boss at that hour”—he laughed coarsely—“taking dictation?”
Harry shrugged. “I don’t think we can call her a mystery woman.”
“Sure you can! Or make the boss a mystery man. ‘RIDDLE OF COUPLE ON RIVERBANK.’ It’s perfect.”
“The thing is—”
Sumner made a sudden lunge forward, planting his big hands on the desk in front of Harry and looming at him menacingly. Harry could smell the lingering mundungus stink of his breath.
“Harry, look,” Sumner said. “Do this — do it for me, if you like. Find the girl, talk to her, talk to her boss—”
“He won’t—”
“He will. You’ll make him talk. I bet he has a wife, and if he has I bet she didn’t know about little Miss Secretary being out with him for a midnight stroll and stumbling on a body and the cops coming and taking down her particulars — yes? All anybody needs is a little persuasion, Harry. Lean a little on the two of them and they’ll sing like songbirds.” He smiled, those white teeth genially agleam. “You’ll see — you’ll see I’m right.” He straightened, and turned and went to the door, then paused again. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, glancing up at a corner of the ceiling, “I’m really getting to like this business. I should have gone into newspapers years ago.”
He nodded then, and went out, whistling. Harry sat for a long time gazing stonily at the door. “Noospapers,” he said, with deep disgust, spitting out the word.
7
McGonagle’s had a new barman, a cocky young fellow with a quiff. His name was Frankie—“like Frankie Sinatra,” as he was fond of telling anyone who would listen. He was all energy, diving and dashing about behind the bar like an acrobat, tossing tumblers from hand to hand and operating the beer pulls with a fancy flick of the wrist. He had a smart mouth, and made wisecracks, addressing the older customers facetiously as Your Honor, or Squire, or Captain, depending on what he thought they looked like. More than one of the regulars had complained about him to Paschal, the manager, but Paschal had told them to have a heart, that Frankie was only a young fellow and would soon settle down. Quirke, however, was inclined not to have a heart in the matter of Frankie, for he did not like the look of him at all, and not just the look of him, either. Quirke scowled when he came near. He found particularly irritating the way the young man had of throwing up his chin and yanking his fake bow tie to the end of its elastic and letting it snap back with a sharp smack. No, as far as Quirke was concerned, Frankie was exactly what McGonagle’s did not need.