Paula was too surprised to scream, or move; she stood with her hands to her mouth, her great eyes fixed on Green in startled amazement.
Green mumbled, “Sorry,” shortly, stooped and swept Sallust’s slight figure up into his arms and moved towards the door. “Come on,” he grunted over his shoulder, “and make it snappy.”
She followed in stunned silence; at the door he turned and jerked his head at her coat and she took it up from a chair and put it on like a somnambulist motivated and moved by something unknown, something irresistible.
The bleak Greenwich Village street was deserted; Green carried Sallust across the glistening sidewalk and put him in the car, hurried around to climb in behind the wheel. Paula stood hesitantly on the sidewalk; the cold air had brought back her momentarily dimmed senses and she reflected that it was not too late to scream, reflected further, after glancing up and down the street, that it was more or less useless. She got into the car and closed the door, put her arm around Sallust and waited.
Just east of Eighth Avenue, Green slowed and pulled over to the curb to allow two speeding police-cars to pass, then turned and watched them skid to the curb outside the building where the Sallusts lived.
He grinned at Paula. “My timing wasn’t so hot,” he observed. “The Law was about three minutes less efficient than I figured.”
She turned from watching the men swarm out of the cars and run into the house. Her inclination to scream was definitely gone; she tried to return his smile.
“What is it all about?” she whispered. “I don’t understand...”
“Neither do I yet.” He let the clutch in and the car rounded the corner, whirred north on Eighth Avenue. “I’m sorry I had to resort to that to get your brother out, but I thought he got a raw deal before and I want to do what I can to prevent his getting another one. After five years on the inside he shouldn’t mind a sock on the jaw if it saves him even one night in the cooler.”
Green’s apartment was on East Sixty-first; the elevator boy helped him with Sallust, who was beginning to stir and moan feebly; Green explained that he was very drunk and when they reached his apartment on the top floor they put Sallust on one of the divans in the huge living room. The elevator boy went away.
Green turned to Paula. “He’ll be all right in a little while,” he said. “The main thing is that he’s not to show up outside of this place until certain matters — I’m not quite sure what, yet, so I can’t tell you about them — are straightened out. Do you trust me enough to help, and to see to it that he stays here?”
She nodded.
Green smiled slightly. “Your word?”
She nodded again, returned the faint shadow of a smile.
He went towards the door. “I’ll be back or give you a ring as soon as I can. Make yourself at home. If you get hungry or thirsty try the icebox.”
He went out and closed the door.
Downstairs, he admonished the night clerk. “There’re a man and woman in my apartment and I want them to stay there. I think they will, but if they get tough call Mike and let him handle them.”
The clerk nodded; he was accustomed to more or less curious orders from Mister Green. Mike was the janitor, a husky Norwegian who had performed odd jobs of a strong-arm nature for Green upon more than one occasion.
Green turned in the doorway. “And if they make any telephone calls, keep a record of who they call and what they have to say.”
The clerk nodded again. Green went out into Sixty-first Street and walked to a drugstore.
At eighteen minutes after two the phone on Blondie Kessler’s desk jingled cheerily for the tenth time in twenty-five minutes.
He whirled from his typewriter, picked up the receiver and yelped: “Hello.”
Green’s voice hummed silkily over the wire: “How many more identifiable pieces have they dug out of Tony’s? And how’s that red-hot Kessler theory coming along?”
Kessler scowled sourly into the transmitter.
“That Kessler theory is holding its head up and taking nourishment very nicely, thank you!” he barked with elaborate irony. “We found a chunk of the fuse with a foundry label on it, a place in Jersey—”
Green interrupted: “Don’t tell me. Let me guess... Sallust used to work there, or anyway, he used to live in Jersey, or maybe he went to Jersey once to visit his aunt.”
Kessler snorted: “All right, all right. I say Sallust is a cinch for this job, you say not. I’ll bet — I’ll bet you fifty dollars.”
Green snapped: “Bet.”
Kessler cackled shrilly. “The clincher is that Sallust and his sister took a powder about a minute and a half before the boys in blue swept in. Their next-door neighbors heard them go out and from the timing it looks like it was a tip.”
Green sighed. “Maybe I’m the bedbug, after all,” he murmured. “And how about my first and most important question — what else have they dug up?”
“Nothing more that they could make sense of. They’ve got a lot of arms and legs that might have been Gino or Costain or who-have-you.” Green’s voice droned on: “I’m still curious about whether Gino and Costain got to Tony’s before the fireworks. Has anybody tried to locate them?”
“Uh-huh. Gino was supposed to leave for Boston on a late train, after he went to Tony’s. A business trip according to his wife. She don’t know whether he reached Tony’s or whether he made the train or not. She’s going nuts. Then I reached Costain’s girl and she said Lew started for Tony’s about midnight, said he was going to stop by a couple places first. She hasn’t heard from him since. She’s jumping up and down and yelling and screaming, too, and calling me back every two minutes.”
There was silence for several seconds, then Green’s voice concluded dreamily:
“Don’t forget, Blondie, that Lew Costain has, or had, more enemies than any other picked dozen highbinders in this town. Maccunn had one, or at least you’re trying to hang his chill on one. Whether Costain reached Tony’s or not, he was headed there, and in some strange way that seems more important to me than the fact that Sallust wanted Maccunn’s blood. With all due respect to the Kessler theory, of course... And don’t forget the fifty...”
The phone clicked, an electric period.
Kessler looked like he was going to take a large bite out of the transmitter for a minute, then he hung up slowly and turned back to his typewriter with enormous disgust.
Haley, the City Editor, was working feverishly, trying very hard not to whistle. He, for one, had hated Maccunn as a slave driver, and now it looked like he’d be moving into the big oak-paneled office on the seventh floor and be writing M.E. after his name.
He looked up as Kessler hung up the receiver, yelled: “Anything new?”
Kessler shook his head. “Nothing new, only that guy Green is losing his mind.”
Solly Allenberg, short and fat, was sitting in his cab near the corner of Forty-ninth and Broadway, when Green crossed the street to him.
Allenberg stopped short in the middle of a yawn and his face lit up like a chubby Christmas tree.
“Hello, Mister Green,” he croaked heartily. “Where you been keeping yourself?”
Green leaned on the door.
“I’ve been around,” he said. “How’ve you been doing Solly? How are the kids?”
“Swell, Mister Green, just swell. The wife was asking about you just the other night. I told her—”
Green interrupted quietly: “Lew Costain’s been murdered.”
Solly’s thick mouth fell open slowly. “Murdered? What the hell you talking about?”
Green’s head bobbed up and down.
“He was at Tony Maschio’s tonight when the firecracker went off — he and Gino...”