I heard a dry, inarticulate croaking noise on the wire, and I saw Pat Reel’s face slowly congest with blood until it was the color of fresh beef liver. His big hand shook the phone savagely.
«So it’s Mister Big Chin!» he blared. «Well, listen here, saphead, you know something? Your stiff is right here on my carpet, that’s where he is…. How did he get here? How the hell would I know? Ask me, you croaked him here, and lemme tell you something. It’s costing you plenty, see, plenty. No murder on the cuff in my house. I spot a guy for you and you knock him off in my lap, damn you! I’ll take a grand and not a cent less, and you come and get what’s here and I mean get it, see?»
There was more croaking on the wire. Pat Reel listened. His eyes got almost sleepy and the purple died out of his face. He said more steadily: «Okay. Okay. I was only kidding…. Call me in half an hour downstairs.»
He put down the phone and stood up. He didn’t look towards the bathroom door, he didn’t look anywhere. He began to whistle. Then he scratched his chin and took a step towards the door, stopped to scratch his chin again. He didn’t know there was anybody in the apartment, he didn’t know there wasn’t anybody in the apartment — an4 he didn’t have a gun. He took another step towards the door. Big Chin had told him something and the idea was to get out. He took a third step, then he changed his mind.
«Aw hell,» he said out loud. «That screwy mug.» Then his eyes ranged round the apartment swiftly. «Tryin’ to kid me, huh?»
His hand raised to the chain switch. Suddenly he let it fall and knelt beside the dead man again. He moved the body a little, rolling it without effort on the carpet, and put his face down close to squint at the spot where the head had lain. Pat Reel shook his head in displeasure, got to his feet and put his hands under the dead man’s armpits. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the dark bathroom and started to back towards me, dragging the body, grunting, the cigar butt still clamped in his mouth. His creamy-white hair glistened cleanly in the lamplight.
He was still bent over with his big legs spraddled when I stepped out behind him. He may have heard me at the last second but it didn’t matter. I had shifted the gun to my left hand and I had a small pocket sap in my right. I laid the sap against the side of his head, just behind his right ear, and I laid it as though I loved it.
Pat Reel collapsed forward across the sprawled body he was dragging, his head down between the dead man’s legs. His hat rolled gently off to the side. He didn’t move. I stepped past him to the door and left.
THREE
GENTLEMAN OF THE PRESS
Over on Western Avenue I found a phone booth and called the sheriff’s office. Violets M’Gee was still there, just ready to go home.
I said: «What was the name of your kid brother-in-law that works on the throw-away paper down at Bay City?»
«Kincaid. They call him Dolly Kincaid. A little feller.»
«Where would he be about now?»
«He hangs around the city hall. Think he’s got a police beat. Why?»
«I saw Matson,» I said. «Do you know where he’s staying?»
«Naw. He just called me on the phone. What you think of him?»
«I’ll do what I can for him. Will you be home tonight?»
«I don’t know why not. Why?»
I didn’t tell him why. I got into my car and pointed it towards Bay City. I got down there about nine. The police department was half a dozen rooms in a city hall that belonged in the hookworm-and-Bible belt. I pushed past a knot of smoothies into an open doorway where there was light and a counter. There was a PBX board in the corner and a uniformed man behind it.
I put an arm on the counter and a plainclothes man with his coat off and an under-arm holster looking the size of a wooden leg against his ribs took one eye off his paper and said, «Yeah?» and bonged a spittoon without moving his head more than an inch.
I said: «I’m looking for a fellow named Dolly Kincaid.»
«Out to eat. I’m holdin’ down his beat,» he said in a solid, unemotional voice.
«Thanks. You got a pressroom here?»
«Yeah. Got a toilet, too. %Vanta see?»
«Take it easy,» I said. «I’m not trying to get fresh with your town.»
He bonged the spittoon again. «Pressroom’s down the hall. Nobody in it. Dolly’s due back, if he don’t get drowned in a pop bottle.»
A small-boned, delicate-faced young man with a pink complexion and innocent eyes strolled into the room with a halfeaten hamburger sandwich in his left hand. His hat, which looked like a reporters hat in a movie, was smashed on the back of his small blond head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie was pulled to one side. The ends of it hung out over his coat. The only thing the matter with him for a movie newshawk was that he wasn’t drunk. He said casually: «Anything stirring, boys?»
The big black-haired plainclothes man bonged his private spittoon again and said: «I hear the mayor changed his underpants, but it’s just a rumor.»
The small young man smiled mechanically and turned away. The cop said: «This guy wants to see you, Dolly.»
Kincaid munched his hamburger and looked at me hopefully. I said: «I’m a friend of Violets’. Where can we talk?»
«Let’s go into the pressroom,» he said. The black-haired cop studied me as we went out. He had a look in his eyes as if he wanted to pick a fight with somebody, and he thought I would do.
We went along the hail towards the back and turned into a room with a long, bare, scarred table, three or four wooden chairs and a lot of newspapers on the floor. There were two telephones on one end of the table, and a flyblown framed picture in the exact center of each wall — Washington, Lincoln, Horace Greeley, and the other one somebody I didn’t recognize. Kincaid shut the door and sat on one end of the table and swung his leg and bit into the last of his sandwich.
I said: «I’m John Dalmas, a private dick from L.A. How’s to take a ride over to Seven thirty-six Altair Street and tell me what you know about the Austrian case? Maybe you better call M’Gee up and get him to introduce us.» I pushed a card at him.
The pink young man slid down off the table very rapidly and stuffed the card into his pocket without looking at it and spoke close to my ear. «Hold it.»
Then he walked softly over to the framed picture of Horace Greeley and lifted it off the wall and pressed on a square of paint behind it. The paint gave — it was painted over fabric. Kincaid looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He hung the picture back on the wall and came back to me. «Mike,» he said under his breath. «Of course I don’t know who listens or when, or even whether the damn thing still works.»
«Horace Greeley would have loved it,» I said.
«Yeah. The beat’s pretty dead tonight. I guess I could go out. Al De Spain will cover for me anyway.» He was talking loud now.
«The big black-haired cop?»
«Yeah.»
«What makes him sore?»
«He’s been reduced to acting patrolman. He ain’t even working tonight. Just hangs around and he’s so tough it would take the whole damn police force to throw him out.»
I looked towards the microphone and raised my eyebrows.
«That’s okay,» Kincaid said. «I gotta feed ’em something to chew on.»
He went over to a dirty washbowl in the corner and washed his hands on a scrap of lava soap and dried them on his pocket handkerchief. He was just putting the handkerchief away when the door opened. A small, middle-aged, gray-haired man stood in it, looking at us expressionlessly.
Dolly Kincaid said: «Evening, Chief, anything I can do for you?»
The chief looked at me silently and without pleasure. He had sea-green eyes, a tight, stubborn mouth, a ferret-shaped nose, and an unhealthy skin. He didn’t look big enough to be a cop. He nodded very slightly and said: «Who’s your friend?»