“She used to work here as my secretary.”
“And your checkbook said, ‘I love you.’ Which still doesn’t explain where Winnie gets her dough if you’re not around any more.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Mr. Smith.”
“There’s no need to.” Cellini started out and Lansing took his arm in a brotherly fashion, telling him to drop around if he ever wished some real good investment tips. They passed into the outer office and Cellini noted a large safe built into one of the corners. “Is that the one Legg cracked?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Smith.”
“I thought the door was blown off.”
“Of course, but the safe manufacturers have been in since. They put on new hinges and repaired it.”
“All right.” Cellini walked out, past the balustrade, into the reception-room. Waiting in one of the club chairs was Howard Garrett, Jimmy Legg’s mouthpiece in court that morning.
“Surprise,” said Cellini. “Are you here to return what your dead client stole — or to split the loot with Lansing?”
Garrett examined his fingernails, studied the ceiling, and gave no indication that he had heard. Cellini shrugged and walked out of the Lansing Investment offices.
A stout woman worked a vacuum cleaner over the carpeting of the hallway. Cellini could see her key-ring, hanging from the keyhole of a broom closet farther down the hallway. As he passed by the closet, his hand reached out and silently and quickly transferred the ring of keys to his own pocket.
Cellini Smith phoned Ira Haenigson and asked if they had located Manny Simms and his Tommy. They had not and he returned to his car and headed for the Greek’s gin-joint to get Mack.
The gargantuan bookie took his liquor well. With another eight or nine drinks fermenting in him, his neck was redder and his voice hoarser but he showed little other effect.
Cellini straddled a stool and poured for himself. The bookie asked what was cooking. “I just checked with Haenigson,” Cellini replied. “They haven’t caught up with Simms yet.”
“That’s good,” said Mack. “Simms is our meat. What else you been doing?”
“I dropped up to see one of your customers — the president of Lansing Investment.”
“What’s he got to say?”
“He called my client a peccadillo and he showed me the safe that Jimmy Legg cracked.”
“What about it?”
“Plenty,” said Cellini. “Legg never touched that safe. The manufacturers were supposed to have put on new hinges but the ones I saw there aren’t new.”
“That’s a laugh. We go nimrodding through Legg’s dump looking for the stuff he stole and then you find out that he never even cleaned the Lansing safe.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Mack stared accusingly at his drink. “I don’t catch.”
“I just said that our defunct friend didn’t crack the safe Mr. Lansing showed me.”
“Oh. I see it all now, Cellini. Like hell!”
The Greek said, “Thees shootings and the drinks are bad combination,” and left to service a couple at a back table.
“Either Legg made a haul,” Cellini said, “or he didn’t. In either case, Lansing is not dishing out with information so I’d like to check just how phoney that investment company of his is.”
“Check how?” asked the bookie.
Cellini took from his pocket the keyring he had lifted. “One of these fits the Lansing office and you claim you were pretty handy with safes.”
“I begin to catch,” said Mack slowly. “All right. I’ll play along.”
“Fine. Let’s go out and get something to eat. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill.”
The Greek came back and Mack asked to borrow his museum-piece Webley.
“No, no. I need it to geeve that man shootings.”
“Come on. He’s after us — not you.”
The Greek acknowledged the point and gave in. Cellini and Mack had another brace of drinks and left.
Mack banged long and hard on the rear service door of the Tower Building. After several minutes, the night watchman opened it, a cautious hand over the revolver on his hip.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the watchman after he had identified the bookie’s big figure. “Can’t let you in. We’ve been having us a robbery. Besides, I’m broke.”
“You’re passing up a sure-fire thing, Harry,” said Mack persuasively. “It’s for the seventh, tomorrow.”
Mack pulled the Pacific edition of the Chicago racing form out of his pocket and beckoned the watchman to a transom light two doors down. Despite himself, the watchman followed the bookie and read the form over his shoulder. It never seemed to occur to him why they could not read the form by the overhead light of his own door. He was absorbed.
With his shoes in one hand, Cellini Smith silently left the shadows of the building and slipped through the door just a few feet behind the watchman’s back.
He could spot no immediate hiding place so he padded up the rear stairway and lay down flat on the first landing. After a few minutes he heard the watchman come in, lock the door, and move down the hallway. He waited another minute, then let in Mack.
Noiselessly, they mounted the eight flights to the darkened offices of the Lansing Investment, found the right key on the chain, and entered. Cellini locked the door from the inside. They waited some time before they felt assured nothing stirred in the hallway or adjoining offices, then snapped on a desk lamp.
Cellini led the way inside the railing. “There,” he said in lowered tone. “That’s the strong-box Lansing claims Legg cracked.”
Mack dropped on his knees before it. The safe was large and imposing and of recent vintage.
“Four tumblers,” the bookie muttered. “No ordinary chrome steele either. Work on it all day with an acetylene torch and get no place. I guess you’re right, Cellini.”
“About what?”
“Them hinges are the originals. Jimmy Legg didn’t blow this baby. I’d think twice before trying it myself. She’s probably wired from the back and if you’d try moving her to get at the wires the alarm would sound off.”
Cellini nodded with satisfaction. “That’s the way I figured. Now let’s try to find the box that Legg did crack. We’ll start with Lansing’s office first.”
They switched off the desk lamp and went into Lansing’s office, closing the door before snapping on the lights.
They did not have long to search. Behind a Currier and Ives print they found a small wall safe. Its door was glossy and untarnished, as if new.
“This is the baby all right,” said Mack. “Just about Jimmy Legg’s speed, too.”
“Think you can manage it?”
“Sure. And I don’t need soup. All I want is a needle.”
“A needle?” repeated Cellini, puzzled.
“Yeah. An ordinary sewing needle. Maybe we can find it in a secretary’s desk.”
Mack went out and returned a minute later. “Here it is. It’s a little thick but maybe it’ll work.”
He clenched the needle by its eye between his front teeth and placed the point over the lock, his forehead touching the safe. Then he began to turn the combination slowly, feeling every tremor through the highly sensitive nerves of his teeth.
Cellini watched with interested admiration as the bookie grunted through clenched teeth each time he felt a tumbler slide into place. Here was no need for wires or pliers or even nitro. Mack’s kit was a sewing needle.
Finally, the bookie stood up and let the needle fall from his mouth. “That does it.”
Cellini went to open the safe door when Mack’s voice halted him. “Not so damned fast.”
Pointed at him was the Webley the bookie had borrowed from the Greek. “What’s eating you?” asked Cellini quietly.