Harcum had married early, a mousy little girl even less attractive than he, and gradually she had faded into the background of his life. Three years ago, she’d died — of neglect, I think — and today’s blonde was the first indication that he had some sex life in him yet.
He mumbled a bit in embarrassment, now, and sat down behind his desk. “Model from New York,” he said, not looking at me. “Met her when I was down there on vacation last month.”
“You don’t have to explain her to me,” I told him. “That’s a natural phenomenon. I’m here about last night.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked relieved at the opportunity to change the subject, and spent a couple of minutes fussing importantly through the jumble of papers on his desk. Then he looked up and said, “Tell me about this guy Tarker.”
“Who?”
“Tarker,” he repeated. He checked the paper he was holding, and said, “Alex Tarker. The dead man.”
“The guy who tried to kill me, you mean.”
“Of course that’s what I mean. Tell me about him.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Where you knew him from, what he had against you—”
I shook my head. “You’ve got it wrong, Harcum. I never met him before last night.”
He frowned, with all his chins. “You must have known him from somewhere. Or why else would he shoot at you?”
“There was nothing personal in it,” I explained. “He was doing it for money.”
His frown deepened, and he fastened on me a bad imitation of a gimlet eye. “Did he say so?”
“Harcum,” I said impatiently, “the guy was a professional. Take my word for it. Also, I never saw him before in my life. I— Let me see that sheet you’ve got on him.”
He hesitated, wondering if his professional dignity would be lessened by my looking at his official documents, and finally handed it over, grudgingly. “Just came off the teletype fifteen, twenty minutes ago,” he said.
It was that poor-quality yellow paper they use on teletypes, and the information was typed in huge capital letters, with no punctuation marks. It said the dead man was one Alex Tarker, a minor hood with arrest records in New York and Miami and Baltimore and one or two other places — mostly for assault, with or without a deadly weapon — and a couple of convictions, both of them dating way back. His home base seemed to be New York. The New York cops knew him better than they wanted to know him, but they didn’t want him for anything in particular at the moment.
Harcum interrupted my reading, saying, “Are you sure you didn’t know him from the Army?”
“Marines,” I corrected him. “There’s a difference. And yes, I’m sure I didn’t know him from the Marines. Besides, that was fifteen years ago or more. And besides that, for the fortieth time, he was a pro. He was hired, by somebody here in town—”
He shook his head violently, jowls a-waggle, and said, “I don’t like that, Tim. I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t much care for it myself.”
“No one in this town would do a thing like that,” he said firmly. “I’ve sent a request to Washington for this man’s military record. If he was in the Marines with you—”
“He wasn’t,” I snapped. I knew what Harcum was doing, and why. He knew he didn’t have a chance of finding out who had hired Tarker, so he was busily looking for an out. On the one hand, he had the successful murder of an unknown hood from downstate. Nobody in town knew this hood or cared about him one way or the other, so there’d be no squawk if he came up with nothing on that score. On the other hand, he had the attempted murder of a prominent local citizen, namely me. For that, he had Tarker. Tarker had done the attempting and was now dead. Case closed.
Harcum liked it when he could close a case without having to do much of anything. The only thing that could cause him any trouble in this mess was the finding of the guy who had hired Tarker. That would be a real problem, so he was doing his best to make believe it didn’t exist.
And I was doing my best to make sure it did exist. “Somebody hired Tarker,” I said. “The same guy who killed him.”
“Why, Tim? For God’s sake, why?”
“Citizens for Clean Government,” I said.
He frowned some more. “You’re complicating things, Tim,” he said sourly.
“No, I’m not. I’m simplifying things. You don’t have to send to Washington or New York or anywhere. The guy who hired Tarker is right here in town, probably somewhere in this building.”
“I wouldn’t go making any wild accusations if I were you, Tim,” he warned me.
I shook my head and got to my feet. “You’re an ostrich, Harcum,” I said. “You’ve got a murder to solve, and you’re wasting all your energy trying to make believe it isn’t there.”
“We’re working on it,” he said defensively.
“Who’ve you got on the case?”
“Hal Ganz. He’s my best man, Tim, you know that. He went to police school in Albany and everything. I put my best man on it.”
“Sure.” I went over to the private door, unlocked it, pulled it open, and glanced back at him. His forehead was lined and lips pursed, and he was gloomily studying the teletype sheet. “By the way,” I said, “what’s that blonde’s name?”
“Sherri,” he said, and looked embarrassed again.
“S-h-e-r-e-e?”
He shook his head, and spelled it out for me. “She’s all right,” he added defiantly.
“I’m sure she is. But I’ve got some advice for you.”
“What?”
“Have steak and raw eggs for lunch.”
Six
I went downstairs to Police Headquarters, which, with the town jail, takes up the full basement of City Hall, and asked for Hal Ganz, but he wasn’t around. I had to get on over to the hotel anyway, so I told the desk man not to bother looking for Hal, and I strolled out, around to the front of the building, and through the park to DeWitt Street.
The Winston Hotel is in a compromise location, midway between downtown — three blocks of DeWitt Street, including the Western National Bank and City Hall Park — and the railroad station, down State Street.
I waved at Gar Wycza again, still faking traffic control at the corner of DeWitt and State, and went on down State toward the hotel.
I walked into the lobby a couple of minutes before twelve, and Ron Lascow, looking like a suit ad in Esquire, got up from the lobby sofa and came over. “I think I saw our man go into the bar a couple minutes ago,” he said. “Intense type, carrying a briefcase.”
“God bless reformers,” I said. “The bad people know he’s here.” I filled him in on my conversation with Dan Wanamaker, finishing, “I’m going to their goddam meeting at three.”
“You told Wanamaker you were going to meet Masetti today?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“And did you happen to mention my name in passing?”
“I think so,” I said. “Sure, I did. I told him you and I were going to talk to Masetti.”
“I somehow wish you hadn’t bandied my name about like that, Uncle Timothy,” he said. “If it gets around that little Ronnie is chatting with the enemy, the boys may think I’m no longer trustworthy.”
“If you tell them you’re going to talk with the enemy,” I said, “you’ve got nothing to worry about. But if you don’t tell them, and they should happen to find out later on—”
He nodded. “I learn, Uncle Timothy,” he said. “You are absolutely right.”
“And the Hotel Winston bar isn’t the most private place in the world,” I added.
“True, true,” he said. “And, speaking of the bar, let’s go there.”