Greeley couldn’t locate Brown any more that night. Brown must have started already. Joe went after two of them on his own hook, and had the satisfaction of eliminating two of the six names pretty conclusively. For the present anyway, unless a dead-heat developed later on. Both had firearms but neither was a .45. Both were willing to admit they hated Big Bill — too willing to admit it, for present purposes — but they were able to lay it on the line and show they hadn’t been anywhere near Russell Street that night.
It was the milkman’s hour by this time, and still no Brown. Joe was ready to cave in by now himself, so he went home and got a couple of hours sleep before he went ahead. He stretched out fully dressed on the sofa in the living room with an alarm clock under the pillow, in order not to disturb his wife, who had been asleep for hours. By six he was up again.
He thought he might be able to catch Brown on the fly by stopping off at his house on the way down to headquarters, but he’d missed him again. Brown’s wife was up already and came to the door instead. She was a tall, stately red-haired girl with an air of breeding. Brown had done himself up right in that direction too.
“He hasn’t been home all night,” she said. “Phoned about one this morning not to expect him. He’s working on a case and” — she shrugged charmingly — “I’m practically a grass widow.” She was holding a vest folded under her arm. “I’m amusing myself sewing buttons on his clothes.” He could tell she was nutty about the guy, though. “It’s great fun until you come up against one that’s missing and can’t be matched.”
“Is there one you can’t match?”
“On this. Funny little leather-covered things. What’s the matter? You look sick.”
His shoulder slumped wearily lower against the door frame. “I am sick, Mrs. Brown. Sicker than I’ve ever been in my life before.”
“Can I get you something?”
He mumbled something that sounded like “Sorry I disturbed you,” and suddenly the doorway was empty.
He was standing on a corner, then, somewhere near there, thinking, “I’ve got to save somebody’s life! Somebody whose name isn’t down on that list. He wouldn’t have turned it in if it was. Somebody who’s going to be arrested, who’s going to try to bolt at some dark place along the way, and who’s going to be shot dead in ‘self-defense.’ Who, though? How am I to know who?”
Then he was at an open directory, tracing a rubbery finger that wouldn’t hold steady across William Francis Xavier Nolan, who’d paid to have all four names listed in full.
It was still only a little after seven when Joe got out of a cab in front of the house. It was a four-story limestone dwelling, and the shades were still down on all the windows. He kept his finger on the doorbell until a half-dressed secretary of some sort opened the door.
“I’m from police headquarters and I’ve got to see Mr. Nolan.”
“You can’t at this time of the morning. He’s been up half the night. He’s just lost his brother, and—”
“Don’t try to keep me out of here. I’ll take the full responsibility. It can’t wait, I tell you.” Joe’s face was too white and strained not to be convincing.
The secretary gave in. “Have you caught the man yet? Is that what it is?”
He was led up to the second floor, motioned to wait outside a big pair of double doors. He kept pacing back and forth wondering, “What am I going to say to him? How am I going to put it?”
He still didn’t know, when the doors slid back once more and the secretary gestured with a thumb. Big Bill’s bedroom was fantastic, but Greeley didn’t give it half an eye. He got a blurred impression of a canopied bed, a grand piano, a tiger-skin rug, a nightstand with a pearl-handled revolver and a memorial light flickering dimly before a picture of Jerrold Nolan.
Big Bill was sitting up under the canopy in candy-striped pajamas, shading his eyes as remembered grief came flooding back on him from the night before. Greeley just stood there in considerate silence.
“Well, what is it?” Nolan roared finally. “Did you get hold of Schreiber like I suggested?”
That name wasn’t down on Brown’s list. So that was who it was.
Greeley spoke with difficulty — after that. “I’m assigned to the case with Brown. If you’d mind giving me a few details—”
Big Bill’s face got purple with fury. “I gave Brown all the details! Get them from him! Don’t you even know your own job? Do they have to send every piddling dick in the division into my bedroom in the middle of the night? You ought to be demoted, whoever you are! What’s that?” He scanned the list. “Where’s Schreiber? Why isn’t his name down here? He’s the most important one of the lot. None of these others count! We eliminated them one by one! He’s the one was heard to say publicly that he’d get even with me. There’s been bad blood between us for years! I told Brown all that. I gave him all the details and documents in the case the last thing last night.”
Greeley said in a peculiarly muffled voice, “Yes sir. Brown’s — after him right now.”
“Then what do you want here?” Then, noticing that his caller was already easing the doors shut after him, he boomed, “In my day a detective used to have brains!”
“He used to be straight too,” said Greeley inaudibly.
It took him an hour, in the Yorkville sector, to locate Gus Schreiber’s whereabouts. An earlybird bartender, opening up his tavern, finally admitted knowledge of where Schreiber lived. Greeley went over on foot. Then as he rounded the corner, he stopped dead, a few doors down from the address the barman had given him. Something about it suggested it had been there for some time past, and was going to stay there for a long time to come.
He was too late. The cat-and-mouse play was already in full swing.
He turned and went back the way he’d come. He went midway up the next block over, to a point roughly approximating the location of Schreiber’s house. He went into a flat there, and out into the back yard, and climbed the fence over into Schreiber’s back yard. He knocked on the rear door until a typical German hausfrau came to open it.
“Lemme in,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to Schreiber. Don’t be afraid. I’m a detective.”
He thrust his way in without waiting and went up the basement stairs, beating the rain off his hat. The woman was crying now and jabbering behind him. In a back room on the main floor he found a corpulent man with a napkin tucked around his throat drinking coffee with a number of assorted kids.
“Are you Gus Schreiber? Headquarters. I’ve got to talk to you. Get your family out of here.”
The former district-leader stood up, eyes bulging with wrath. “You got a warrant to come in here? Then scram! This persecution stops or I kill somebody!”
“Now wait a minute. I had to do this. If I waited until I caught up with you outside the house, it would have been too late. You own a gun?”
Schreiber nodded belligerently.
“What caliber is it?”
“Forty-fife.”
“I was afraid of that,” murmured Greeley. “Where is it?”
The question seemed to infuriate Big Bill’s enemy. “You ask me where is it? Nein, I ask you where is it! I ask you why it was taken away from me!”
“Who took it?”
“Von of your people! I drink a little too much beer von night. He is in there with me, he sees it on me, he says, ‘You better let me have that before you get into any trouble with it.’ They have told him who I am, how I have said I will kill that Nolan the day I see him, for what he has done to me.”
“Why didn’t you go around to claim it?”