He opened his mouth and gawked and said: “The mister?”
I said: “Yeah! Mr. Bastard!” and jerked my thumb back over my shoulder toward the inside office and Crandall.
Chapter Twelve
Len Macintosh was waiting for me when I got back to the hotel. Sitting in the lobby and smoking his sissy cigarettes. He climbed up out of his chair, met me, and said:
“Hi there! I’ve been waiting.”
“Long?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A couple of hours, I guess. I’ve got to take you in.”
“Why you?”
“The beef was outside City limits. It’s a County case. Get it?”
I said I understood. I turned around and we went outside and started down the street.
He said, in a conversational tone: “You know Kirby and I never did like some people in this town, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“I’ve got a notion this charge would be dropped if you left town. It’s just a notion of course.”
I said: “That’ll be the day.”
“Well, hell, what can I do? I get told what to do, you know that.”
“Sure, I know.”
“If you’d only keep out of sight,” he said, plaintively. “Now if you hadn’t just come walking into the lobby like that, I wouldn’t have seen you. You make it tough on a man.”
I said: “I’m going to make it tough on a man before I leave town. I’ll promise you that. If it’s the last crying thing I do on this earth I’m going to make it tough on a man. I’ve run into some cute capers in my life but this one here has got anything beat I ever saw. It’s unique. It’s so fool-proof there’s a hole in it and I’m going to find that hole.”
“Why d’ya mean, Connell?”
We were about three blocks up from the hotel by then. I said: “It’s this. The bigger and better a frame is, the more people there are in it. The more chance there is somebody forgetting to do or say the right thing. Now there’s murder, assault, blackmail, and a few other things in this. Maybe coercion. I know for sure there’s another attempted murder in it because I was just about the victim. This beef last night was a frame on me; you know that.”
“I work here, Connell!”
“I know it. I don’t blame you.”
“Kirby and I were talking. D’ya think there’s a chance of... well...” he coughed... “well, your doing anything?”
I said: “I’m getting ideas, if that means anything.”
“D’ya think that girl getting knifed ties in with the rest of this? Kirby does and always has. That’s why he’s been sort of... well, you know.”
I said: “Don’t say it. I know. You mean you and Kirby can’t go ahead with me unless you’re sure you can make it stick. I don’t know that the murder ties in, but everything else has and maybe that does. I’ve got the rest of the frame figured but I’ll admit the murder doesn’t fit in. I may be wrong on what I think, I’ll admit it. But if I haven’t walked into as pretty a frame here as there ever was, I’m not the picture in it.”
He coughed again, said: “Now we’re coming to a side street. I don’t suppose I’d happen to notice if you just sort of walked down it. I can’t help it if you escape, can I? But for Christ’s sake, tell that partner of yours to take your baggage down the back way at the hotel. Everybody ain’t reasonable like I am. And when you check in the Palace Rooms, which is two blocks over and in the middle of the block, don’t tell Maude I sent you. Out loud, that is. And for Christ’s sake keep out of the Three C Club and away from the police station. There’s always phones and I suppose either Kirby or I could break away from the desk if we had to do it. Now here we are at the corner.”
I said: “What’s the name of the cop that took Free and Wendel to the airport?”
“Ziggy Hunter.”
“What kind of a Joe is he?”
Macintosh spit on the sidewalk and didn’t say anything. I said: “Okey, keed! I’d see that Ziggy took his vacation or something. I’ve got to be out on the street sometimes and he’s against us.”
He nodded and started walking away. His peaked, cocked-up shoulders were swinging and he was whistling: “When I Leave This World Behind.” It was the first time I’d heard the tune in ten years or more.
I’d stayed in rooming houses before and for two reasons. Lack of money for one, and working at the screwy private cop business for another. But the Palace was a bit different. It wasn’t bad and it wasn’t good, but a room there cost as much as you usually pay in a first-class hotel. And they didn’t want their money in advance and that’s a rule in all of them. I just said something to the landlady about a man named Macintosh mentioning the place and I was in with no questions asked about baggage.
This landlady was a hard-looking baggage but she looked smarter than a whip and she proved she was when she looked at me and said with a straight face: “Don’t believe I know him. But a lot of people check out after the first night here.”
She showed me my cubby hole, said: “The phone’s outside in the hall. If you’d like anything to eat, and it’s too hot to go out or anything, give me a ring and I’ll send out for you. If it’s anything I can cook in my own place, I’ll do it here. I’m always glad to make an extra dollar.”
I said: “This will pay for rent,” and gave her a twenty. Then I gave her another one and said: “And this will pay for what I send out for. It’ll be used up by the end of the week, of course, but I like to keep ahead.”
She said: “Thanks, mister,” and clumped away.
There’s places like that in a good many towns. If the town is closed for gambling there’ll be a big open game running in the upstairs parlor. There’s always back and side doors and there will be as many cops in the place as there are hustlers. The cops come in broke and go out with money; the hustlers come in with money and go out broke. A place like that is a necessity. A town is run the way the people want it run, not the way the law says it should be run. There has to be a common meeting ground for the law and the outside-the-law crowd, and it’s usually some back-street spot that’s not too bad and not too good.
A place like that is appreciated. The cops leave it alone and the sporting crowd do the same. They both have to; neither side can afford trouble there. And it’s usually run by some smart old gal who knows enough to keep her mouth shut if she should happen to see something she shouldn’t. I’d known what I was running into when Macintosh had cracked about it and I wasn’t disappointed. I got outside and to the phone and got Lester... and he was frantic. He said, with his voice trembling so that I could hardly understand him:
“My God, Shean! Where are you? Don’t come home. There’s a policeman in the lobby waiting to arrest you. He came up here and told me that.”
I said: “Okey, kid, I saw him. All he was trying to do was have you go out and find me and keep me away from there. No cop likes to have a prisoner escape on the street in broad daylight.”
“What happened, Shean?”
“Nothing much. We’ve lined up with the cops, is all. That is, some of them. Get my stuff together and bring it to me. Out the back way and to the Palace Rooms. 217. Got it?”
“Well, yes. Are you going to stay there?” I laughed and said I didn’t know; that I might be in jail almost any time. Then he said: “What about the car?”
“You’d better bring is over near here. Don’t park it by the place, because somebody might see it. Leave it on the next block and remember where, so you can tell me.”
“All right, Shean. Right away.”
I hung up and went back inside the room and rang the bell for the landlady. She came up and I said: