Which was the very first sticking point, even before my absurd promise to Ross. I hadn’t called Ken and Chuck, the deputies in L.A., once I’d figured out the truth, because I’d wanted to give Ross a chance first to get out from under. It had grown from there, each step temporary, each one seeming like the right thing to do at that particular time, until by now I’d dug myself a hole that was going to be very tricky to get out of.
What if I told the whole story — or as much of the confusing mishmash of a story as I knew — to Sergeant Shanley, here in New York? One of her first moves would be to get in touch with Ken Donaldson and Chuck Nulty out in Los Angeles, and that would put their noses out of joint a whole hell of a lot. I’d lied to them, I’d stymied their investigation, and now I was going three thousand miles away to tell the truth to cops in New York. There were a number of serious legal difficulties Ken and Chuck could make for me if they wanted to, and they would definitely want to.
So. At each stage along the way there’d been a different answer to the question, “Why didn’t he call the police?” and now we’d probably reached the most ridiculous reason of alclass="underline" I wasn’t telling the police the truth because I hadn’t told the police the truth.
And Sergeant Shanley, in her own way, was as sharp as Ken and Chuck. She said, “The house has been empty how long?”
“About two months.”
“And you just came back to New York last night?”
“Yes.”
“Was this a spur-of-the-minute trip,” she asked, “or planned?”
“Planned for about three weeks,” I told her. “I’m involved in a lawsuit, and I had to come back for the defendant’s discovery proceeding.”
“What lawsuit?”
So I told her about the unauthorized use of Packard in drawings of my own recognizable person, and our ongoing suit, and she wanted to know everything I knew about the comic book company. Clifford took notes while Shanley kept watching my face both during her questions and my answers. Finishing with the lawsuit, she said, “I understand you were a cop yourself once, out on the island.”
“Mineola, year and a half, mostly auto patrol.”
“So how does this thing look to you?”
“You mean the coincidence?”
She grinned. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but there was a buoyancy and a quickness to her that were appealing. She said, “The day you come back to town, this one house in the whole block is hammered.”
“The comic book company didn’t send people to hit me, if that’s what you think.”
She raised an eyebrow. “They didn’t? You’re sure?”
“They aren’t a fly-by-night outfit,” I said. “They’ve been around for years. They’re very cheap and schlock, bottom of their market, but they’re businessmen, not mafiosi. At any one time they’ve probably got two or three ongoing suits; they settle as late as they can for as little as they can. What we’re doing here is tying them up and costing them money and letting all the other schlock outfits know we won’t be messed with.”
“So it’s just a coincidence, is that right?”
I shook my head. “You’ll have to ask the guys that did it.”
She didn’t like that answer; it smacked of the smartass. Compressing her lips, she said, “How many people knew you were making the trip?”
“Dozens. Household, friends, agent, lawyer, I don’t know how many people. It wasn’t a secret.”
She nodded, thinking it over, and then said, “How long you plan to stay?”
“I have a seat on the one P.M. flight back.”
That startled her. “Today?”
“The only reason I have to be here is to be questioned by the other guy’s lawyer.” I looked at my watch. “Forty minutes from now.”
“Where?”
“Graybar Building, next to Grand Central.”
“We’ll get you there,” she promised. “If we needed you, could you stick around a little longer, a few more days?”
“If absolutely necessary,” I said. “But I’d rather not.”
She nodded, and finally glanced at Clifford, who closed up his notebook. Shanley said to me, “If you don’t mind, while I make a couple phone calls, I’d like you to go over the house with Clifford, see if anything’s been taken or tampered with.”
“I haven’t noticed anything missing.”
“Or tampered with,” she repeated. “This floor and your office are clean, but we don’t know what those clowns had in mind, do we? Maybe all they wanted was to rig a booby trap somewhere.”
“Oh.” That hadn’t occurred to me.
“So let Clifford open everything first, all right?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Clifford rose, so I rose. Shanley said, “Okay if I use your phone?”
“Of course.”
Clifford led the way out of the room and up. We started at the top of the house and worked our way down, Clifford being brief but efficient. On the way up he’d murmured, “I used to like your show,” and I’d said, “Thank you,” but that was the extent of our chitchat. And from top lumber room to bottom lap pool, we found nothing. The mess the invaders had made on the ground floor, the few drops of blood from the dying man (who’d done most of his bleeding internally); that was it.
Shanley was off the phone when we met her again in the living room, Clifford looking at her and shaking his head. Shanley said to me, “You got a limo coming?”
“I was planning to grab a taxi over on Sixth.”
“We’ll drive you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“That way we can talk in the car and you won’t be late.” She gave me an opaque look and a flat smile. “And if anything occurs to you,” she said, “we’ll be right there.”
28
Shanley knew something was wrong, that was clear enough. I could tell she believed I was probably in a position to give her more than I had, but she didn’t push it. They had other lines they could work from; the corpse of the one invader, whatever fingerprints the others might have left behind, whatever trail through backyards and other buildings they’d made in their getaway, whatever witnesses might come forward who’d seen them either coming or going. She didn’t have a handle on my back, and she knew it, so she wouldn’t waste time or embarrass herself by trying to get me to tell her things I apparently wanted to keep to myself.
But if she ever did get a handle on my back, I could expect Sergeant Maureen Shanley to give it one hell of a yank. That was understood.
Their car was a battered and rusty pale green Plymouth Fury, unmarked on the outside but with police radio and other equipment on the inside, including a red flasher that could be suction-cupped to the roof when needed. It wasn’t needed this time, we making good time up Madison Avenue and around Forty-sixth Street to Lexington and down to the Graybar Building. The sky was dirty white with unfallen snow, but the streets were mostly clean. Shanley drove, with me beside her and the silent Clifford in back, and she assured me they’d keep a policeman on the door of my house until my guy Walter had come to repair the damage.
Both sets of lawyers, mine and the comic book people’s, had offices in the Graybar, my guy Morton Adler on the twenty-third floor and their firm on twenty-nine. I met Morton in his office, and while we waited for an elevator I told him about the attack on my house during my absence last night and the cops’ suspicion that the comic book people might have been behind it. Morton expressed amusement his usual way, by smiling shyly at the floor and nodding several times, and then the elevator came and we joined the three widely various people already in it, and rode on up.