“Wait for Jordan?”
“Wait till he comes back,” he explained.
I looked from one to the other. “Back from where?”
They exchanged glances, and George reluctantly said, “Albany.”
I nodded. “So you tried Masetti, and he wouldn’t go for it. So now Jordan’s trying to talk business with the boss of the outfit, what’s-his-name.”
“Bruce Wheatley,” piped Dan through his smile, eager to help.
“He’ll be back by four, Tim,” said George. “Will you wait till you talk to him?”
“Why?”
I swear to God, I thought Dan would split his head in two with that smile. “He’ll be able to straighten it out, Tim,” he said. “I know he will.”
“It’s only four hours,” said George, hopefully.
“A lot could happen in four hours,” I told him.
“Please, Tim,” wheedled Dan. He was sweating, and growing greener by the minute, and he looked now like a beardless Santa Claus whose reindeer have just conked out at thirty thousand feet. And the smile was like a saber cut with teeth.
I chewed on my lower lip, thinking it out. I didn’t particularly want to blow the whistle on this whole crowd. They were crooks, admittedly, but they kept a clean well-run up-to-date town, and I didn’t see where their replacements, after a clean-up, would do much of a better job. If there was a way I could avoid blowing the whistle and still get the son of a bitch who had tried three times to kill me and succeeded instead in killing Joey Casale, I would very gratefully take that way.
So I finally nodded and said, “All right. Four o’clock. At his house.”
Now George was smiling as much as Dan, and they were both talking at the same time. “Fine, Tim.” “Good boy, Tim.” “You won’t regret it, Tim.” “I knew you’d listen to reason, Tim.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I still may go to Masetti at four-thirty.”
Sixteen
The first thing I needed was food. I stopped in at the City Hall Diner, next door to Hutchinson’s Auto Dealers, and had two cheeseburgers and three cups of coffee, and refused to talk about last night’s explosion with Charlie, the counterman.
The next thing I needed was a shave and a change of clothes, and after that I needed wheels. So I grabbed a cab and headed home, and I refused to talk about last night’s explosion with Barnie, the cab driver.
The apartment looked just as bad as the descriptions had led me to expect. I took one look at the former den, and carefully closed the doors on it. Somebody was going to pay for that, God damn it, and if the somebody had to be all of City Hall, that was just tough.
It was while I was shaving that I figured out where and how the guy would try next. He had to keep trying, he had to get me before four o’clock. I finished shaving, changed my clothes, got screwdriver, pliers and hammer from the tool drawer in the kitchen, half-filled a metal pail with water, and went downstairs.
I walked around the building to my Ford, put everything down on the ground, and very cautiously opened the hood. A shoebox, sealed shut with masking tape, was sitting on the block. A ragged hole had been punched in the top, and a couple of wires came out through the hole and went over to the terminals of the battery. Cute.
I went to work with the screwdriver, got the wires loose from the battery, and with all the care in the world lifted the shoebox out of the car. I turned, like a man balancing full coffee cups, and slowly lowered the shoebox into the bucket of water. Then I stood and looked at it, j while bubbles streamed up through the wire-hole.
While I was standing there, I had a visitor. Bill Casale, old Joey’s oldest grandson, a big and lumbering twenty-four-year-old, two months out of the Army. He was wearing Army khakis and a white T-shirt, he was smoking a cigarette, and he looked sore. It occurred to me all at once that the Casale family, for lack of a better target, might decide to blame me for what had happened to its patriarch. After all, he had been killed by a guy who was trying for me.
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“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said.
He pulled a wrinkled envelope out of his hip pocket and held it out to me. “The family’s hiring you,” he said. “To find the old man’s killer. When you find him, you let us know.”
I looked at the envelope, and saw a hint of green behind the white paper. I could picture the family meeting — last night or early this morning — and the hat being passed, the collection taken up, Bill sent to give me the money, to be sure the Casale family got the man who had murdered old Joey, so he wouldn’t be allowed to throw himself on the much tenderer mercies of the law.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said again. “I can’t do it.”
He studied me for a minute, and then shrugged and dropped the envelope on the fender of the Ford. “You just let us know,” he said, and walked away.
I stared after him. Everybody pushing me, everybody shoving me. I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t like it a bit.
I didn’t open the envelope. I just stuck it into the glove compartment of the Ford, slammed the hood, put the bucket of water and bomb on the floor in front, and drove very slowly downtown. I went to Police Headquarters first, left the bomb for the lab to look at, and drove on over to the office.
Seventeen
The burglar alarm wasn’t working. The first thing I noticed were the new scratches in the wood of the door, around the lock. I looked down at that for a few seconds, then raised my hand with the first key, planning to unlock the alarm box.
But I didn’t have to. The metal front was scratched, bent out slightly by the lock. I pulled on it, and it opened.
The wiring inside was a mess. Wires were showing that were usually behind a metal plate, and there was a lot of electric tape wrapped around wires here and there, done slapdash, hurriedly.
Somebody had cut me out of the system, rewired so the alarm wasn’t hooked up any more. If they’d just cut the wiring, the alarm would have sounded at headquarters. But they’d kept the circuit closed by adding wiring and simply having the juice bypass my alarm.
I didn’t waste time trying to unlock my door. I just pushed on it and it curved noiselessly back, and I went on in.
The filing cabinet had given the guy a lot of trouble. It was dented and battered, and the face had been knocked off the combination lock, and finally the guy had managed to slam the drawer-faces in far enough to insert a jimmy or a crowbar, and he’d literally torn the thing apart. The smashed drawers lay around on the floor, emptied, the remaining files strewn all over the place. It looked like Fifth Avenue after a confetti parade.
I sighed with relief, congratulating myself for having sense enough to move any of the files that might have proved useful to my caller. He’d undoubtedly tried here first. Not finding anything, he’d gone on to my place and torn that up. He still hadn’t found anything, so he got mad and threw a grenade in the window after he saw me come home.
Now, if I only knew which of those files I’d moved was the one he’d been after...
The phone jangled, catching me off balance. I stared at it stupidly, and after a while it stopped, but I knew it was just inhaling, getting ready to jangle again.
In the interval, I took a second to wonder why he hadn’t ripped the phone out here, as he’d done at my apartment. I supposed he hadn’t been mad enough yet to wreck things for the sake of wrecking them.
Then the phone started again, and I stepped over a twisted drawer and picked it up.
It was Cathy, and she was screaming. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling and calling.”