Fosting knew what he was doing when he attached me to her for information. I scribbled in my prop notebook while she filled in the background.
It was an unusual background. Law degree. FBI before Vietnam. G-2 during that war. He had come back to his hometown in late ’77 just as the merit system went in. And he had become a rookie cop. With his talents, he passed the competitive examinations with a rating and performance record that got him up to sergeant in the middle of 1978, lieutenant by the spring of 1979, captain by Christmas of 1979. Oddly, the other men on the force didn’t resent his extremely rapid rise. When the Chief died, his grading was tops, and he moved into the hot spot.
I asked a few questions, scribbled down the answers.
“How come you know him so well, Janet?” I asked.
I saw the faint blush. She spun her Coke glass in a wet pool on the black marble tabletop, making a pattern of interlocking rings. She watched those rings as though they were very important and said, “My dad was a policeman for years. I was in business school when Dad was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 1977. Chief Fosting, then a rookie, took an interest in me and saw that there was enough money for me to finish the course. Then he helped me get a job.”
“Nice guy,” I said casually.
“It’s stronger than that!” she snapped. “He’s — he’s a wonderful man. I respect him and admire him more than any man I’ve ever met. He’s fair and honest and...”
I grinned at her. “How long have you been in love with him?”
For a minute I was afraid I had gone too far. Her face got white and her lips were firmly compressed. She had been calling me Tom, as per agreement, but she said, “Mr. Quinn, I hardly think that your job gives you any right to—”
“Hey, wait a minute, Janet!” I said. “I was just kidding. Take it easy. He’s a nice-looking guy and I thought you two maybe had some arrangement.”
Her anger faded. She looked rueful. “You know, he doesn’t even know I’m alive. As a woman, I mean. I’m just an efficient piece of office equipment. Sorry I flared up. I guess — well, I guess I am in love with him.”
There was no reason under the sun why her words should irritate me. But they did. It was certainly none of my business who she was in love with.
To cover up, I asked quickly, “Where does he live?”
“In a little room in the Stanley Hotel. It’s a horribly bare little room. He doesn’t seem to care about his environment. He’s so wrapped up in his work.”
That gave me a jolt. Fosting right in the same hotel with me. It might be a break.
“Any wine, women and song?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I sometimes wish he’d — well, get out sometimes. He looks so tired. But he says that there’s too much for him to do.”
“You live with who?” I asked.
She tilted her head to one side. “What has that got to do with your write-up, Tom?”
“I just wondered who you’d have to call to tell them I was taking you to dinner.”
“Are you?”
“You heard the Chief’s orders, Janet.”
Her smile was a little-girl grin. It wrinkled her nose and made me want to kiss her. “Okay,” she said. “Chief’s orders. If you must know, I live all by myself in an apartment complex for singles on Maple Terrace. And now you can take me back there so I can change.”
I compromised by putting her in a cab and promising to call for her in an hour.
Chapter Two
Juggernaut
I found myself singing in my shower, and wondered why. I picked the answer up an hour later.
Funny how it happens to you. You think you have the world cased, have yourself all set from here on in. And then somebody throws a blond monkey wrench into the machinery. I decided that I was silly to keep the car out of circulation. So I took it out of the garage and called for Janet.
Janet came down looking like one of the girls they should put on magazine covers and don’t because they can’t find them often enough.
“Yours?” she asked when I opened the car door for her. When I told her it was, she said, “Writing must be pretty profitable. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”
The steak house she suggested was fair, and, over the coffee, in order to make my story look good, I hauled out the notebook again.
I asked her to describe each of his movements on an average day. The guy was a bear for punishment. To the office by seven-thirty, on foot. Half an hour for lunch. Usually not through until nine. I casually worked in the idea that, since he had clamped down so hard on gambling, he must fear personal reprisals and go around with a bodyguard.
She laughed at that one. “Heavens, no! Jim — I mean Chief Fosting has put the fear of God into all the sneaking little men in this town. He’d consider it beneath his dignity to go around with a guard.”
I smiled. “Maybe I hadn’t ought to put that in the article. It might encourage somebody to potshot him.”
“I think he’d like them to try. He carries his own revolver and he’s an expert shot with it.”
That was an important fact to file away. Not that I was going to gun him down. I had better plans.
I folded the notebook, slipped it into my side pocket. “Working day over?” she asked.
“No. Not by a long shot. Now you’ve got to give me some of the local color. I can’t write a good chapter on Fosting until I know what the city is like. Where do we go from here?”
“I’m going to demand overtime!”
“Am I that bad?” I asked her.
“You’ll do, Quinn,” she said softly.
Some dregs of a long-forgotten conscience stirred me. Maybe some of it showed on my face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
I smiled. “Where do we go?”
“There’s one place I’ve always wanted to go,” she said, “and I’ve never had an excuse before. But this could come under the heading of local color. I want to go to the Key Club.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is it?”
She had a pixie look in her eyes. “A disco where they gamble upstairs,” she said in a conspiratorial tone.
“Hey, I thought your boss closed those all up!”
“He did. All of the ones inside the city. This one is over the line.”
From the way the place was running, I knew that the fix was in, but good. Thus the peephole setup to get to the upstairs games was just so much thrill for the suckers, plus insurance against somebody knocking the place off with profit in mind.
It was a penny-ante outfit, with a dapper male cashier dispensing chips at the one, five, ten and fifty levels. There weren’t many fifties in play. I tried to stake Janet, but she shook her head, took a twenty out of her purse and bought twenty one-dollar chips. I did the same.
They were getting a college crowd at the place, plus the old-lady business, plus the beer-salesmen set. There was a bar in the corner.
Roulette, birdcage and the crap tables were getting a decent play. Janet stared around like a school kid in the principal’s office. The sign near the birdcage said that they would take a maximum fifty-dollar bet with a limit of six doubles. Thus the most that could be placed on a number on one turn of the cage was thirty-two hundred. Not good and not bad. The limit on doubles made the house percentage high enough to keep it honest.
I don’t know why I felt so proud to be with Janet Calder. She made all the other women up there look like harpies. She was like a fresh breeze blowing through the stale smoke.
She settled for the crap table. When I saw that the table posted no limit, I knew that the house had it gimmicked. With the education Chowder gave me, it didn’t take long to figure it out. They were set up to handle a routine switch of the dice, and they were playing on an oilcloth surface. That spelled trippers. It is the simplest dice fix.