Tony said, “I’ll give you good odds I go to trial on that murder, Captain. And better than even money I get a conviction. Send those papers over right away, will you?”
Carol asked, “A phony?”
Tony was solemn. “Planted bridge-work, sure. Most likely the Headquarters boys have something on the dentist who helped ’em plant the stuff and check the records. The woman who made the identification was probably paid.” He scowled from Silk to Butch, back to Carol. “They must want to keep us away from this thing pretty badly, to run a risk like that.”
Butch thrust out his heavy underjaw. “You ain’t gonna let ’em get away with nothing as raw as that!”
“No,” Tony said evenly, “we’re not. Since somebody wants so badly to have us look the other way, we’ll go into the Prosser business to the exclusion of everything else, time being. Butch?”
“Statistical Section ready for assignment, sir.” The big man showed his teeth in a grin.
“You go after Prosser’s Cadillac. Here’s the data.” Tony gave him the memorandum. “Never mind getting out hot car descriptions on it. I have an idea it might still be here in town. Maybe that’s one of the reasons they want to sidetrack us, temporarily.”
Butch gave a mock salute. “How’s for hitting the petty cash for a little beer change? Sometimes these grease monkeys around the garages squeak better when they’re oiled with brew.”
“Take ten bucks. And stay sober. Silk?” Tony turned to the map.
“Way ahead of you, sir.” The ex-confidence man was delighted to show off his ability to anticipate Tony’s next move. “You figure those birds must’ve stopped overnight somewheres between Norristown or Newark or Buffalo and here. Right?”
“If you could only read a juror’s mind as well as you read mine, you’d be a great help in a trial, Silk.” Tony shook his head in amazement. “You hit it first pop out of the box. What I hope to find is that they all stayed in the same town, the night before they drove on toward Vulcan City. I don’t need to tell you how to go about digging up that information. Hop to it.”
Chapter IV
The two men left Jim’s private office. Carol said, “Everyone’s being so cagey and smart, about assignments, let me try to be a brain.”
He laughed. “You couldn’t guess yours if I let you ask twenty times twenty questions. Look at this.”
From a small wooden box he pulled a tissue-wrapped packet. Inside the paper was a glass slide, three inches by two. Stuck on top of the slide a small, torn fragment of greenish-yellow paper with a line of printing just visible against the discoloration.
She read:
— inks with grace
come in this place”—
He asked, “Recognize it?”
“No. Should I?”
“Not necessarily. If you’d spent as much time bar-hopping as I have, you probably would. It’s part of a couplet you sometimes see on placards hanging up against the back-bar mirror:
He who drinks and drinks with grace
Is always welcome in this place.
“Oh, yes.” She remembered. “But what’s the connection between this” — she pointed to the slide — “and a bar sign?”
“Sometimes they print those cute verses on cocktail nankins.”
“That’s what it is. Coarse paper. A bar napkin. But where—”
“From a dead man’s stomach, Carol.”
“Ugh!” She shuddered.
“Yes. This is absolutely all the medicos came up with after the post mortem. They didn’t see any significance in it, but they sent it over from the morgue, anyhow.”
“You mean the man ate it?”
Tony regarded it stonily. “Possibly as a means of letting the authorities know where he was being kept prisoner, where he expected to be tortured and killed. That would indicate a victim with a high degree of intelligence and plenty of imagination. Not many crooks have both. I’d say it was more likely he’d been fed a sandwich because his hands had been tied, and the person who did the feeding was a bit careless, shoved some of the paper napkin in the victim’s mouth along with the sandwich.”
“Nobody can say you haven’t plenty of imagination!”
“Until someone comes along with a better suggestion, I’ll let it ride.” He slid an arm around her shoulders. “All you have to do is find out where they have cocktail napkins like that.”
“But,” she protested, “I might have to visit every single joint in town.”
“Under those circumstances,” — he pulled her to him, tightly — “you’d better take twenty dollars from petty cash...”
The imposing white limestone building that was the Vulcan First National Bank dominated the center of town as its influence dominated the commercial life of the city. It stood like a monument to financial integrity in the heart of the downtown business district, its freshly sanded exterior an aloof rebuke to its grimy red-brick neighbors, its partition-free interior an open invitation to public scrutiny.
Tony Quinn sat behind one of the low, bronze railings, waiting for the return of the assistant cashier. Like the bank building, Charles Drummond had impressed the district attorney as tall, pale and freshly-scrubbed. He was coming back now from the president’s cubicle with the slow, deliberate pace of one accustomed to allow subordinates to wait on him. His suit was gray, his shirt was white, his necktie drab. His black shoes squeaked when he walked.
“Now then, Mr. Quinn.” he said. “How can the bank be of service to you, sir?”
“A man by the name of Prosser came in here a few days ago to cash an extraordinarily large check. Do you happen to recall the occasion?”
“God bless my soul, I should say so.” Drummond took off his spectacles, began to polish the lenses with a little rectangle of pink fabric. “Two hundred thousand dollars. Yes, indeed. I trust you are not suggesting there was anything amiss with that transaction?”
Quinn laid his cards on the table. “Just inquiring. Prosser seems to have disappeared right after he got that money. His wife is worried about him, asked us to look into it a bit.”
“I don’t understand. Do you mean he ran away from her?” Light gray eyes regarded Tony Quinn uncertainly.
“That’s one of the possibilities. There are others. Did he seem under any strain when he came here to cash that check?”
“Offhand, I shouldn’t have said so. He sat right in that chair for forty-five minutes it took me to get the information I needed from his bank in Buffalo. He seemed quite at ease, though of course I couldn’t tell how his actions might have differed from those under any other circumstances. He talked business with Mr. Wizlow most of that time — something about the purchase of property for a drive-in theatre out on the road to Akron, I believe.”
“Would that be John Wizlow, the junk dealer?”
A pained expression came into the assistant cashier’s eyes. “Mr. Wizlow used to be in the scrap metal business. Of late he has made investments in... ah... a good many other enterprises.”
“So I understand.”
John Wizlow was well-known to the public prosecutor’s office. There were half a dozen unsuccessful presentments against him on file in Quinn’s own desk. In certain sections of the city he was known as Jack-the-Wrecker, a nom de crime gained during the period in which he had been reputed to have knocked to pieces and reassembled for sale some ten thousand stolen cars and trucks.
“I hear about some of those other enterprises every few days,” Quinn commented.
Drummond said stiffly, “The bank has nothing to do with any of his ventures. But Mr. Wizlow carries a large checking balance here. If it had not been for his introduction of Mr. Prosser, we would not have considered cashing paper for any such amount, naturally. It was absolutely necessary to be sure of the payee’s identity, you see.”