‘He used my weakness,’ Dougherty said to himself. In his own personal soul, in the part of him that wasn’t a policeman, he hated Joe for that and would pursue’ him more for having done that than for anything involving the stolen gate receipts or the murder of Ellen Canaday.
He found a parking space now two blocks from headquarters and walked back. It was not quite night; one out of three or four cars passing hadn’t turned their headlights on yet.
After five o’clock, headquarters always took on for Dougherty the harsh surrealistic pregnant look of an IRA armory. He went up the slate steps and through the lotting doors and down the green antiseptic-smelling hall. When he at last came into the crowded wooden office of the lieutenant, he felt as he always did when in this building in the evening: like an unambitious Javert, a dull Maigret.
The lieutenant looked like Eisenhower, except that he never smiled, and when he did open his mouth for some other reason his teeth were yellow-brown and rotten and separated by wide gaps. He pointed to Dougherty to sit down and said, ‘I did what you said to do on the phone. Now fill me in.’
Dougherty filled him in, telling him in flat monosyllables what had happened, giving no reasons or explanations this time through but merely chronicling the events, as though reporting the plot of some movie he had seen.
When he was done, the lieutenant said, ‘All right, I see why you didn’t try to take him; that was smart, that makes sense, in your own home and all. But why give him the list? It’s legit, the real list?’
‘Yes. I didn’t have another list of names handy. Besides, since he knew the girl himself he would naturally expect to know at least a couple of the names on any list of her friends I showed him.’
‘Did he say he knew any of them?’
‘No, of course not.’ But that was the wrong way to say it; the lieutenant looked offended. Hurriedly, Dougherty went on, ‘I figured it was best not to ask him, not agitate him.’
The lieutenant nodded and mumbled something, then said, ‘Why give’ him a list at all? Why not tell him the list is here, downtown, you can’t remember the names?’
‘This way,’ Dougherty said, ‘we’ve maybe got some leads to him. We know for sure nine people he’s interested in. He naturally knows we’ll be looking for him to come around one of those people, but if he’s in that much of a sweat to get their names that he’ll come around to my house and brace me for them, I figure he’s in a sweat enough to try to get past us to the people themselves.’
‘Why? What’s he after?’
‘I’m not sure. This whole thing has to connect with the stadium robbery some way. I’d say this guy Joe was in on the robbery and staying with the Canaday woman till the heat was off. It would be my guess that whoever killed the Canaday woman took something of Joe’s away from the apartment and it would probably either be something that would expose Joe’s identity or prove his connection with the robbery, or it was his share of the loot itself.’
The lieutenant said, ‘Ah. Somebody robbed the money from the robber. That would make him boil, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would explain why he’s so on the prod.’
The lieutenant nodded. ‘So he’ll have to go after the people on your list. If he wants his money back.’
‘If it is the money. It could be something else, something incriminating.’
The lieutenant waved an impatient hand. ‘Whatever it is, he wants it back in a bad way. You were smart, Dougherty.’
Dougherty smiled, but inside he was cringing. He could’t help himself, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him he promptly remembered that the lieutenant hadn’t finished high school. It was an odd fact he’d learned nearly by accident several years ago, before he was even in plainclothes. He never thought of it other limes, but whenever the lieutenant complimented him, told him he’d done a job well, he’d been thinking on his feet, gave him any kind of praise at all, some nasty voice within Dougherty’s mind promptly spoke up and sneered, ‘Not even a high school diploma.’
The lieutenant was saying now, ‘What you ought to do, you ought to get together with Robbery Detail, whoever’s working the stadium job, tell them what you’ve got, then start running the mug shots. How’s he compare with the composite drawing, by the way?’
Dougherty shrugged. ‘The way they always do. If you see the guy first, then you can see where the drawing looks like him. But if you see the drawing first, you can’t see at all where the guy looks like it.’
‘Then get together with the artist, whatsisname, get together with him, help him make up a new composite.’
Dougherty took a deep breath. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I’d like to get switched off the Canaday case.’
‘You’d like to what?’
‘Have somebody else take that over for me, will you? Put me on temporary loan with Robbery Detail.’
The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed and his mouth opened. Now he didn’t look like Eisenhower at all. ‘You got a bee in your bonnet, Bill?’
It was a rare thing for the lieutenant to call him Bill; it usually preceded a chewing-out. Dougherty said, reassuringly, ‘I don’t want to be the Lone Ranger, Lieutenant, honest to Christ, I’m not the Robert Ryan type.’
‘You just want to be in on it.’ When the lieutenant was being sarcastic, he wanted the world to know about it; he carved his words out of blocks of wood and bounced them off the floor.
Dougherty let the sarcasm thud by. ‘That’s right,’ He said.
‘I want to be one of the people that runs him down.’
‘You don’t care who bumped poor little Ellen Canaday.’
‘Not for a minute.’
It almost looked as though the lieutenant would smile. Instead he opened his mouth and rubbed the side of his forefinger against his top front teeth, a rotten habit he had. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Go on home and get some sleep for a change. When you get back here I’ll have the paperwork through on you.’
‘Thanks, Lieutenant.’
‘You think you’ll find him again?’
Dougherty smiled in anticipation. ‘I’ll sure as hell look,’ he said.
Three
Kifka lay like a Teuton prince on a hill of pillows. He was in Unit One at Vimorama, the only cabin there equipped with a telephone. Janey, in an excess of zeal, had glommed the keys from Little Bob Negli and rifled the pillows from all the other cabins, heaping them up in a white slope against the headboard of the bed Kifka was arranged in till he was lying more on pillows than on bed, and he looked like a madam in an albino whorehouse. He felt like a turtle on its back, waving its legs and unable to turn over.
Only two things were within reach: Janey and the telephone. He was occupied with both, grasping Janey to him with his left hand and holding the phone to his ear with his right. Into the phone he said, ‘Buddy, if I wanted to tell a story I’d sell it to the movies. Answer the question or don’t, it’s up to you.’
The telephone said, ‘Face it, Dan, I’m curious. Ellie’s just killed a couple days ago, now you call up about her, naturally I want to know what’s going on.’
‘Nothing’s going on.’ Kifka rubbed Janey against his bare chest and winked at her. ‘I want to know who knew Ellie, that’s all. Who do you know that knew Ellie that I don’t know, you know?’
Janey made a face and whispered, ‘No new new no.’ Kifka pushed her face down into the pillows.
The telephone said, ‘When it’s all over, for Christ’s sake, then tell me, all right? I mean when it doesn’t matter any more.’
Kifka said, ‘Sure.’
‘All right,’ said the telephone. ‘Let me think.’
Kifka played with Janey.
The telephone said, ‘How about Fred? Fred Whatchamacallit, Burrows. You know Fred?’
‘Yeah. I already know him.’
‘Oh. Well, how about women? You want to know girls that knew her?’
‘Anybody.’