The king smiled suddenly. “But if I decide he isn’t lying, it will be hard to find him in this city. Your twenty-four hours may pass, and then an endless row of days.”
Daniels walked to the door and flung it open. “I want Michael for murder. If I don’t get him, I’ll hound you to death. Your people will be arrested for vagrancy and fraud, your women for fortune-telling, your children for truancy and delinquency. I’ll get enough on every mother’s son of you to keep you in jail for a long time, and it’ll happen so fast you won’t have time to steal a gallon of gas to get out of town.”
The king bowed graciously. “We have been plagued by experts before, Lieutenant.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Daniels warned. He slammed the door and stormed down the stairs to the street.
When he got back to the squad car, Daniels was still fuming with rage.
Pete turned in his seat and grinned. “What’s the matter, Lieutenant? They lift your badge?”
“Very funny,” Daniels groused. “Let’s get uptown. I want another look at that shop.” He knew the Gypsies, knew they were constitutionally opposed to believing anything a policeman said, but if he could find some supporting evidence that Michael had been in Sonya’s store late on the afternoon she was killed, King Georg would be forced to accept Raynor’s identification.
The store, a narrow and poorly ventilated room, was in the basement of a drab building on a side street. Three steps led down to it from the sidewalk. To the right of the door was a dusty, flyblown window which was protected by iron bars. A little light, barely enough to see by, filtered through the dirty pane and showed up the dinginess of the place.
A cheap imitation Persian rug, perhaps a vivid red in its heyday but now a muddy brown and worn down to its burlap backing, covered the floor at the front half of the store. Two chairs and a sagging sofa, all wicker and all painted black, were placed without plan on the rug.
This was the waiting room, Daniels knew. The mitt-reading and the reading of the Tarok — the special Gypsy cards — went on in back, behind the ugly, faded curtain which divided the room in half.
He stood a moment near the door, then crossed the room to a wicker table against the wall. A glass bowl, half filled with tiny balls of paper, stood on the table, and Daniels reached into the bowl to pick out a ball. He unrolled it slowly, then smiled grimly as he read the number 8 on the slip of paper.
“Lucky number,” he told himself. The customer came in, fumbled around for his lucky number and crossed Sonya’s palm with two-bits in silver. No more than twenty-five cents if the price scale on the sign in the window meant anything. Sonya gave bargain rates. A half dollar for a palm reading, a half dollar for a look at the cards.
But the balls of paper in the bowl were covered with a layer of dust. Business must have been slow in the lucky number department.
Daniels heard the shuffle of feet on the steps and he turned toward the door. A big, burly man in a blue uniform came into the room.
Gus Raynor, the cop on the beat. Raynor had been pounding sidewalks for twelve years, thanks to a surly, fiery disposition which kept him at continual loggerheads with his higher-ups, and he carried his bitterness with him as he trudged his daily rounds.
“That you, Lieutenant?” Raynor asked, peering into the gloom.
“Come on in, Gus, I’m trying to get the feel of this place.”
“Filthy hole,” said Raynor. He stepped toward the lieutenant. “Been in back yet?”
“I was just headed there.”
Raynor took out his flashlight and led the way to the rear. He put the beam on a red-covered table where a deck of cards lay. “Do you think she saw her future?”
“I hope not,” said Daniels. “Where did you find her?”
Raynor put the light on the floor. “Right there, next to the chair. I figure she was sitting at the table — her chair backs up to the curtain — when she got it. Then she fell to the right and—”
“You’re positive you saw only one man come in here?”
“Just this Michael.”
“How can you be sure it was him?”
“He came around all the time to see her and I always kept an eye on him. I don’t trust any of these Gyps, but him especially.”
“You came on duty at four and saw Michael about five-forty. Were you watching this place all that time in between?”
Raynor coughed fitfully to cover his confusion. “Well... yeah. I mean, no, not exactly. Maybe I went around the block a couple of times.”
“So someone else could have been in here while you were gone?”
“Listen, Lieutenant,” Raynor said in a rasping voice, “don’t try to mix me up. Sure, somebody else could have come in. But I saw Michael leave. No more than two minutes later I came by and saw the front door opened. Sonya was usually closed up for the night by that time so I thought something was funny.”
“You came in then and found her?”
Raynor nodded. “And she was bleeding like a stuck pig. She couldn’t have been slugged more than a couple of minutes before.”
“All right, Raynor,” Daniels said, “but Michael says he wasn’t here.”
“He’s a liar! I saw him.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Good Lord, Lieutenant!” Raynor bellowed, shaking his head in bull-like anger. “Since when does a cop have to prove he saw something?”
“You never had much dealing with Gypsy thinking,” said Daniels.
He left the store and started across the sidewalk to the car, but suddenly he swerved and walked down the street to a small grocery store which was wedged in between two old brownstones.
The storekeeper, a small, weary woin her middle fifties, was sitting on a stool behind the counter.
“Good evening,” Daniels said. He showed her his badge.
“About that fortune teller, eh?” the woman asked, her eyes sparkling with curiosity. “Too bad.”
“Her place looked dusty,” Daniels said, taking a box of crackers from the counter. He gave the woman a dime. “Did she do much business?”
“Not much. I always wondered how she paid her rent.”
“She didn’t.”
“I figured that. Oh, I’d see people go in every once in a while. Not many, though.”
“I guess women go in pretty heavy for that stuff,” Daniels said idly.
“They eat it up. But most of her customers were men.” The woman tried to put a leer in her voice.
“Men? Well, well.”
“Sure, mostly men. Then there was this young Gypsy fellow. He came around a lot. Michael, I think his name was.”
“She was going to marry him,” Daniels said indifferently, “but they called it off.” He laughed. “So I guess Michael wasn’t around much lately.”
“He was, too,” the woman snapped. “He was in there the afternoon she was killed. Yesterday afternoon. I was arranging vegetables in the window and saw him running out of the place.”
That, thought Daniels, settled that. Hiding his quickening interest, he said, “About what time?”
“Five-thirty, I’d say.”
“Uh-huh. Did you see anyone else?”
“None after Michael — except Raynor, of course.”
Something in her tone of voice brought Daniels’ senses instantly alert. “What about before?”
“Just that man — the one who goes in every day. I asked Sonya once whether he was buggy. You know, getting his palm read all the time. She laughed and told me he came in every day for his lucky number. Every day without fail he pops in — five-thirty exactly — and stays a minute, then he’s right back out again.”
Daniels fumbled a cracker and dropped it on the floor. “Can you describe him?”
“Short and thin. Never wears a hat but his suits must run him over a hundred dollars. Thick blond hair and a sharp nose. Oh, he wears glasses.”