“Thanks, Frank. The usual post office box?”
“The same,” Bukvic said. He looked past Mike. “Sorry, Mister.”
“Me, too,” Ross said, and walked out of the bar with Mike Gunnerson right behind him. At the curb Mike stepped into the street and waved down a cab. The two men climbed in; Gunnerson leaned forward, giving the driver an address unfamiliar to his companion. Ross looked at him.
“Russ Jennings’ pad,” Mike explained.
“Will he talk?”
“To me, he will,” Mike said confidently.
“Shouldn’t we have called?”
“Better this way,” Mike said cryptically. “This way we find him home.”
The drive was finished in silence; the cab pulled up before an apartment house on Central Park West in the high eighties. The men climbed down, Mike paying, and walked into the lobby. The building had obviously seen better days; the marble table set beneath the large but flaking mirror was stained and cracked; the lobby was otherwise bare and hadn’t been painted in many years. Mike led the way past the tiny self-service elevator and took the steps two at a time.
The second-floor hallway was lit by a small bulb hanging unshaded from a cord; graffiti decorated the wall, illegible in the gloom. The dirty broken-tile floor was littered with cigarette butts. Ross wrinkled his nose.
“It looks as if your friend Russ isn’t doing so well.”
Mike looked over his shoulder, his face blank.
“Don’t worry about Russ Jennings. He could buy and sell both of us a few times over. Two things: One, this is still a good mailing address. Out-of-town agencies go for the Central Park West bit—”
“And two?”
“Two, Russ Jennings probably has the first dime he ever stole. He’s a miser.”
He paused before a door and rapped sharply. There was silence. Mike rapped again, louder this time. There was the sound of movement behind the solid panel; a cautious voice spoke.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Mike Gunnerson, Russ.”
“Just a second.” There was a hesitant pause. “How do I know it’s Mike Gunnerson?”
“How the hell do I know?” Mike asked cheerfully and turned to Hank Ross. “A character,” he said. “Funny thing, he’s not a bad investigator. Barring being a bastard filled with more than his share of the milk of human larceny.”
There was the rasping sound of a bolt being withdrawn, followed by the scrape of a second; the men in the hallway could next hear a heavy bar being removed and apparently tilted against a wall. The door finally swung away from the sill the length of a safety chain. A suspicious eye surveyed the two men, after which the door closed again to permit the chain to be removed. At long last the panel swung back to admit them. Mike walked in, surveying the protection with honest wonder.
“What’s the matter, Russ? Somebody after you?”
Jennings was busy replacing the hardware.
“Nobody’s after me,” he said sourly. “What’s the matter? You just move to this town? This neighborhood’s changed. And I don’t bulk as big as you.”
It was an understatement. Jennings’ five feet six barely came to Mike’s shoulder, and his scrawny body looked as if it hadn’t had a good meal in years.
“So why don’t you move?”
“You got any idea the rents those thieves are asking over on the East Side?” Jennings led the way into the living room. He pointed to a sagging sofa and sat down in a straight kitchen-type chair. The windows were without curtains or drapes; old-fashioned shutters were closed and barred. Jennings looked uncertainly at the two men.
He said, “Sit down.”
Ross tried the sofa and almost fell through; he was saved by a broken spring. He struggled to the edge and sat there. Mike Gunnerson preferred the arm of the sofa; it wiggled under his weight, but held.
“All right,” Jennings said. “I know Mr. Ross, at least by sight. Well, what brings you two out slumming? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to tout me on a pad in the high-rent district.”
“No,” Mike said. “It wasn’t.” He leaned forward. “Russ, some time ago a man named Raymond Neeley came to you and wanted to hire you to do a job for him. Right?”
Jennings’ face could have been carved from stone. He sat motionless, his small hands on his thin knees. He said, “You’re telling it.”
“What did he want?”
There were several moments of silence. Through the closed shutters came the normal sounds of the neighborhood; a child screaming, the screech of skidding tires, a derisive hoot from some boys in the street, and the distant wail of a siren. Then Jennings shook his head.
“You know better than that, Mike. That’s a confidence between me and my client.”
“I know,” Mike said sympathetically. “And you don’t want to go down to the morgue and ask his permission to divulge.” His voice lost its false humility, becoming harder. “Stop the crap, Russ. This is old Mike asking, remember? The guy you owe a few favors to, like not breaking your back for trying to steal the Webley account from me? What did you think, I didn’t know? All right, now, let’s take it from the beginning without the violins in the background. What did he want?”
“There are people who would rather—”
“Russ,” Mike said, his voice deadly serious, “I’m going to ask you one last time and then I’m going to lose my temper. As for the people you’re talking about, I know them, too, and they won’t save you from getting set on your ass if you don’t open up. Like you say, I bulk larger than you. Now, what did he want?”
Russ Jennings tried to look unhappy, but he was only weakly attempting to calculate how he could possibly make a profit without getting hurt. At last he decided it would be risky at best with Mike Gunnerson, and the unhappiness became real. Mike nudged him verbally.
“Well?”
“He wanted me to trace some dame,” Jennings said sullenly.
“Whose name was Grace Melisi?”
“If you know, what are you asking for?”
“Practice,” Mike said coldly as Hank watched entranced. “What did he give you for starters?”
“She had a sister in Albany. That’s where she came from originally.”
“Albany, New York?”
“Is there another one?” Jennings asked, disgusted.
“Several. And?”
“And what?”
“Russ,” Mike said, “if I’ve got to drag this out of you like pulling teeth, I’d just as soon pull teeth. Don’t sit there and act like you’re getting paid by the word—”
“I ain’t getting paid at all!”
“You’re so right,” Gunnerson said. “Did you find her?”
“I didn’t even start looking,” Jennings said. “Neeley was a policy peddler at the time; I knew that. And he’d been in a jam before with the top boys about some clip he tried to swing outside of school without nobody knowing—”
“Except you knew.”
Jennings looked scandalized. “Me? I never! Well, sure, later, when it was in the papers about him getting shot, I could put two and two together. I ain’t exactly stupid, you know.”
“That’s what everybody keeps trying to tell me,” Mike said, “but I’m not sold yet. So?”
“So I went upstairs and asked if the deal was kosher, and the answer was ‘No.’ So I dropped it.”
Mike frowned across the room at the little man sitting rigidly on the kitchen chair.
“Why did he want to find her?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Why don’t you call your doctor, because you’ll be needing him shortly?” Mike said. “It’s answer period, Russ.”
“Well,” Jennings said grumpily, “it was a dumb question. You know about the deal. He wasn’t going to measure her for diamonds.”
“So when you dropped it, who did he go to?”