“Mr. Heller,” he said in his gruff, businesslike way, “don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not lately. I need a favor.”
“Always a pleasure to accommodate a taxpayer.”
“Can you give me Joe Costello’s unlisted number?”
“Any special reason?”
“I’m thinking of sending him flowers.”
A long pause. Then: “Stay on the line. I can get that for you.”
About a minute later, he kept his promise, and then I was dialing my buddy Joe at home. It rang a long time. I was hoping to rouse Costello himself, but the voice... “Yeah? Hello?”... was female and sleepy and properly irritated.
“Mrs. Costello?”
“Yes?” It sounded like she wasn’t sure.
“Sorry to call at this hour, but it’s important. Could I speak to your husband?” I had cooked up a reason for bothering Costello about being questioned at Police HQ on the cab-driving shooter. Which was basically true.
But she said, “He’s still at work,” and hung up.
The Tic Toc stayed open till three A.M., and it was just past that. When I called their Yellow Pages number, somebody was still there, cashing out or cleaning up. A male, probably the bartender, said, “I think he’s over at Ace Cab, workin’ on the books. He’s a night owl, Joe is.”
I got out of bed and into a Playboy-approved ensemble — sports shirt by Viyella, navy slacks by Corbin, and sports jacket by Cricketeer, one size up to allow for my holstered nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol by Browning.
I felt good. As refreshed as if I’d just had eight hours of sleep and not twenty minutes of brooding. I snatched up Sandy’s pack of Chesterfields and the book of Coral Court matches on the coffee table. I only smoked in combat and certain civilian situations mirroring combat. So somebody was in trouble.
Maybe me.
I sucked smoke into my lungs and held it there and embraced it like an old friend I wasn’t afraid to hug just because we were both real men. I dropped the pack of smokes in my left-hand pocket, the matches, too. In my right-hand pocket I slipped a spare magazine of nine-millimeter cartridges.
Heading back into St. Louis on a morning that still thought it was night, I kept the Cadillac’s front windows down, letting the smoke out and the warm wind in. It rustled my hair like Stan the Man with a Little Leaguer visiting Musial and Biggie’s with his dad. Right now, the city was just a stray scattering of insomniac windows, neon signs and the dark husks of sleeping businesses; occasional headlights ahead and behind reminded me I wasn’t the last man on earth.
At this hour, empty taxis slept shoulder to shoulder in the smallish parking lot in front of the dingy white-brick vertical building with ACE CAB COMPANY on its picture window at right and two closed garage doors at left. As before, I parked across the way in front of the Swiss Chalet-style shopping arcade. My jacket was unbuttoned. When I reached the other side of the street, I tossed the butt sparking into darkness to sizzle in a gutter, then slipped the slumbering nine mil quietly from its cradle, ready to wake it up.
No one was around in the parking lot and no sounds emanated from behind the twin closed doors of the double-bay garage. I moved quietly to the big picture window. The switchboard where a good-looking dye-job redhead had been seated on my previous visit was just her empty chair now. At left, however, that burly natural blond dispatcher was sitting at his microphone like a disc jockey waiting for a song to be over; his big wall-mounted map loomed before him, with only a small scattering of magnetic pins dotting it in these wee-small skeleton-crew hours.
He was snoozing in his tilt-back chair, or anyway loafing, arms folded. I hadn’t been able to place him in the alley — the one time I’d seen him was five years ago, after all — but that glimpse of the shooter behind the cab’s wheel who leaned over to fire a round into Sandy’s head finally sealed it.
If the EMPLOYEES ONLY door was locked, I would have to shatter that picture-window glass with a gunshot; but it opened just fine.
As I went in, the blond turned in the swivel chair and his eyes got big and his mouth, too. He was in a white shirt with a black bow tie and navy slacks and his cabbie cap was on the desk. Here’s the cute part: a revolver was angled in it, a small .32 Remington, pre-war I thought. Didn’t figure this for the gun he’d used at Musial’s.
But he’d brought a pistol to work, so he must have known the coming hours might not just be another day at the office. His fingers were almost on the gun when I slapped him with the nine mil barrel, hard, along the right side of his face. It bloodied the ear and ripped the cheek like a red Christmas package a kid was getting into, and then he slid from the chair, hitting his head on the edge of his desk, and folded up like a big stillborn fetus on the wooden floor.
He’d made just enough noise going down for me to pause a few seconds with the nine mil in hand, ready for anything. Beyond his dispatcher’s workstation were double doors open onto the adjacent repair garages, one big room despite the overhead door above each of two bays. No one seemed to be in this area, its lights off, though a mid-’50s Chevy sedan with Ace Cab markings was on the nearest of two lowered hydraulic lifts.
Nothing but silence followed. From the cabbie cap, I collected the revolver, a .32, and emptied the cylinder of bullets onto the floor and tossed the little gun out the door into the parking lot, where it skittered away on the cement. I knelt and checked the blond — he wasn’t dead, because the red juice in him was still flowing, making a puddle actually; but he was out colder than Jersey Joe after Marciano finished him.
In the recess between the dispatcher’s area and the switchboard, between men’s and ladies’ rooms, an edge of light ran along the bottom of the closed unmarked door. I went into the little office and found the proprietor of the Ace Cab Company indeed hunkered over a ledger book. But also on the beat-up old desk was a .38 long-barreled revolver, a Smith & Wesson Police Special. I crossed the short distance, plucked the gun from his desk and dropped it into his metal wastebasket. The metal-on-metal made a satisfying clunk.
His smile was as immediate as it was nervous. As always, he was sharply dressed, a black sport shirt with a white-and-pink diamond pattern. His sandy, curly hair was combed over and his hooded blue eyes looked bloodshot. “How did you get past Howie?”
“Is that his name?” With the hand that didn’t have a Browning in it, I pulled up a chair opposite him and sat, hefted the pistol. “Love tap with the barrel of this. He may live.”
“Hope he does,” Costello said, “or I’ll never hear the end of it. My wife’s nephew. Kind of late to be calling, isn’t it, Nate?”
“Or early. Of course there’s no tomorrow for Sandy O’Day. You heard about that?”
He nodded and put on a sad face that wouldn’t have convinced a six-year-old. “I did. Hell of thing, in this day and age. Too bad. She was a good kid. Good earner in her day, and did very well for us out at Carr’s.”
“Your nephew was the shooter.”
“No, that can’t be,” he said, waving it off, the gold-set diamond on his hand catching the meager overhead light and winking at me. On the wall, in the framed photos of Joe and his late partner at Ace, Leo Brothers seemed to be winking at me, too, as he grinned at the camera.
“I saw him shoot Sandy, Joe,” I said. “I didn’t mention it to the cops. Or that he jumped me in the alley alongside the Tic Toc. I mean, we’re friends here, right? So how about you cut the bullshit.”
I put the nine mil on the desk. Close to me. But right there on the desk. He couldn’t keep his eyes off it, a man trying not to look at his wife’s sister’s tits. I got out the Chesterfields and shook one loose and lighted it up.