As we walked toward the door, Franklin must have stepped on a button under the carpet, the door buzzed open. He said, “I'll expect a call from you—soon.”
“Yeah.”
The hallway was empty and we walked—or floated— past the offices, nodded at the cute receptionist, and took the elevator to the street. I was drinking with one of the biggest mobsters in the city—that old merry-go-round was getting up speed.
8
When we hit the sidewalk Bobo said, “Hal, I am ashamed of what happened....” Martinez couldn't take liquor and he spoke thickly, like a real lush.
“Forget it, you've stepped in for me plenty of times.”
“Funny office, funny drink.”
“And a not-so-funny 'Cat',” I said. “Soon as my head settles down, I have to do some real good thinking.”
“Lot I fail to understand and it's not the drink,” Bobo said. “What you got on Franklin?”
“That's what I have to think out. Whatever I have—I don't know what it is.”
“Like holding the tiger by the tail. A difficult situation,” Bobo said in solemn-drunk talk.
“Look, go home and sleep it off. I'm going back to the office for a moment. See you in the morning.”
“Hal...” Bobo hesitated. “I... eh...”
I took out my wallet, still had seventy bucks of Will's money. I gave Bobo two tens, walked him to the subway.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the office door. I didn't make it. I sat down and banged away at the rubber pad, but it was hard to think. In a vague way things were starting to take shape but I was a long way from putting the pieces together—or from having all the pieces. The phone rang again. Curly Cox asked, “Hello? Boss? Me and the other guys ain't got no more cards to stick in the doors tonight. Called you earlier but no answer. Told Anita about it yesterday and... What's with this Anita?”
I told him I'd ordered some and would pick them up from the printers, and that he and the others should drop in around midnight to get them.
I had to hustle down to the printer before he closed at five, then, having nothing to do, I dropped in on Saltz, to see what he knew. He greeted me with, “Deadeye Dick, the famous two-bit private investigator. Suppose you got the case solved?”
“Have you?” He sure irritated the hell out of me.
“Been talking to a couple of stoolies. They claim the word is Anita was shaking down somebody—somebody important.”
“That's a crock of slop; Anita never knew anybody important. And she wasn't a shakedown artist. She was a kid.”
“Is that why she's a dead kid, because she never knew nobody important?”
I said, “You're crazy if you take a stoolie's word that she was shaking down any...”
Saltz laughed in my face. “Darling, you're not even a two-bit detective. How the hell do you think the police work? Let me give you a little course in scientific detection —more cases have been solved by tips from stoolies than by all the laboratory methods ever invented. Maybe in the movies they look through a microscope and come up with the answers, but in real life—a dick is only as good as his list of stoolies. Sure, a stoolie is the worst kind of a rat, but if you squeeze him, all the grapevine gossip comes out, and that's what you work on. But, of course, you wouldn't know that.”
I shrugged, kept my trap shut. I wouldn't touch a stoolie with a fifty-foot pole.
Saltz brushed his hair with his hand. “Here's something else, I'm going to fool around one more day, then I'm cracking down. Somebody isn't talking enough!”
“Meaning me?”
“Could be. I've talked to her folks, former schoolmates, and always end up with the same stupid spiel—'Anita was just a kid.' You don't have to be over twenty-one to be a crook. And no matter how they do it in Hollywood or in books, in life nobody murders without a damn good reason. I'm going to find that motive!”
“I'm all for it. Did you trace the cab that picked her up?”
Saltz nodded. “Nothing there. Driver claims she only took the cab far as 59th Street. Probably took the bus across town. What you been doing all day, bird-brain?”
“Nothing much,” I said, weighing my words. “My office was ransacked early this morning; nothing missing or...”
“Why didn't you tell me that?” Saltz roared.
“Don't crowd me, that's what I'm doing—now. Rest of the day I spent on another case,” I lied. “By the by, the police ever have anything on a Marion Lodge, also known as Mary Long? She was a call-girl a year or two ago. Dead uncle's estate is looking for her, she came into some property.”
Saltz grunted a few words into his desk phone, then took out a package of mints, tossed one at me. “You stink like a saloon. Looking for the killers in a bottle?”
“Never tell where they might be?” I said, chewing on the candy. We didn't speak for a few minutes, Saltz staring at me as though I wasn't there, then he said, “Darling, I find out you're holding out on me, I'll give you a chance to try your judo against a couple guys with rubber hoses. Remember that.”
His heavy neck would be almost perfect to try out my new hold. I didn't know why I disliked the jerk, but I sure did. I said, “Have to ask the professor what to do in a case like that.”
His phone rang. He listened for a moment, then hung up. “A Marion Lodge was arrested for hustling in 1950. Released on a thousand-dollar bail. Case dismissed without coming to trial.”
“Why?”
“Usual reasons—witnesses changed their minds, refused to talk.”
“What was her home address?”
Saltz shook his head. “Knock off. That was two years ago or over, she wouldn't be there any more.”
I got up. Saltz said, “Keep in touch with me.”
I said I would and at the door he said, “This might interest you, couple thugs tried to burglarize Anita's folks' home this afternoon. Old man scared them off with a shotgun blast. Interesting?”
“Another piece for the jig-saw. Interesting to you?”
“Saltz and Darling, the TV quiz kids! Get out of here.”
9
Outside I called Thelma Johnson and she still hadn't heard from Will. I stopped for gas, drove out to Queens, getting hooked in the late traffic. I'd seen the Rogers once or twice when Anita had worked late and I'd driven her home. Mrs. Rogers was a heavy woman in her late forties who worked in a local bakery. Rogers worked in a gas station, was thin, the quiet type: spoke with stilted words as though his choppers were false and he was afraid they'd . drop out if he opened his mouth too wide.
They lived in one of the cheap-looking bungalows that mushroomed up all over Queens and Long Island immediately after the last war, and sold for about three times what they were worth. When I rang the bell he opened the door, dressed in a faded pair of coveralls. We shook hands and he said, “Glad you came out, Hal.”
He led me to the kitchen where he was boiling hot dogs, had a bottle of beer working. “Emma is staying at her brother's. Upset, of course, and then today this robbery.... Eat supper with me.”
I speared a frank, wrapped a slice of bread around it, poured myself some beer, asked about the robbery. The old man had taken the day off, to be around Mrs. Rogers, and shortly after eleven in the morning he'd heard a noise at the rear porch door, saw two men trying to jimmy the door. He couldn't describe them except that they looked “rough.” He'd taken down a shotgun from the wall, slipped in a shell... they took off when he fired. He showed me where most of the porch door was ripped away. “Aimed high. I know, at fifteen feet I could have splattered them with a shotgun, but... after what happened to Anita, I didn't want to hurt nobody. Too much hurting and killing in this world.”
We finished the franks and a few more bottles of beer as I asked about Anita's boyfriends... could be I was going off half-cocked about the importance of the sliver of rock in all this. Rogers said, “Hal, Emma and I made a mistake, although I suppose it wasn't our fault—we had Anita late in life. As a result, when she grew up we were both too old to give her much companionship, and maybe she wasn't too happy at home, that's why her drive to... Well, now that she's gone I feel like my own life is done, empty.”