O’Hara lit a cigarette, peered a little owlishly at Tony through the smoke cloud. “O.K., kitten. I’ve been wondering how Miller could fall out of a car that would be moving at least thirty-forty miles an hour and come up practically intact. Want to call that Bakersfield hospital for me and get an exact list of Miller’s injuries?”
“The office has that report. Brush burns on the left knee, left shoulder and face, a sprained left wrist.”
“Another thing I’ve been wondering. Why didn’t those guys just stop their car, back up and grab him again?”
“According to the story he told,” Tony said, “the motorist who found him was only a short distance behind. It scared them off.”
Clancy said brightly: “Did I ever tell you about when I was working for the Wichita Eagle and I was throwed out of a car in a traffic crash and came up standing, just in time to get a shot of both drivers sailing through the air? Did I ever tell you?”
“No,” said O’Hara.
“You wanta hear?”
“No.”
“O.K. Let’s have a drink.”
“Yes.”
Tony said: “Ken, I’ve got to get back to the office. Promise you’ll go home and get some sleep and then we’ll figure what to do.”
“Sure,” said O’Hara.
“Sure what?”
“Sure I’ll figure what to do.”
Tony shook her head hopelessly, patted O’Hara’s hand, went out without looking back.
The waiter came and took their order for more drinks. An hour later O’Hara squinted at Clancy. O’Hara wasn’t seeing double; there was only about one-and-a-half of the little man.
O’Hara said: “Let’s go out and ring doorbells, Clancy, specifically Mr. Miller’s doorbell.”
“Do we go out there and whap him, pappy? Or what?”
“Suppose,” said O’Hara, “I was to suddenly find out that I’d sent the wrong plate in from Alkali City, Clancy? Suppose I was to call on Mr. Miller and tell him about my mistake and say that the picture shows him to be in such a position in his chair that his ankles couldn’t have been taped to the legs? Suppose I told him I was sore at the way the Tribune had kicked me around and that if I could get together with his pals, I’d consider selling the picture?”
“What picture?” said Clancy.
“Oh, nuts — let’s go.”
They took a cab, partly because O’Hara didn’t like to drive when he had that much Scotch aboard and partly because he couldn’t recall at the moment where he had left the coupe.
Two blocks from the Diplomat, O’Hara stopped the cab and paid it off. He took Clancy into a diner and had three cups of black coffee for himself. Clancy disapproved. He said drinking coffee was a bad habit; he’d known a guy on the Washington Post who gave up liquor and started drinking coffee and was dead in three months.
“He walked in front of a sightseeing bus,” Clancy explained.
“What did that have to do with coffee?”
“If he hadn’t given up liquor,” said Clancy, “he would of, at that hour of the evening, been at the Press Club bar, licking up highballs safely out of the way of traffic.”
They walked to the Diplomat and O’Hara parked Clancy in the lobby. The coffee had brought O’Hara pretty well back to the point where he was walking on the ground; seen from that vantage point, his idea of running a bluff on Miller about a non-existent picture seemed a little thin. But it might get a reaction and he couldn’t think at the moment of a better idea. He took an elevator to seven and rapped on the door of 763. He rapped again.
There was movement inside and then the door came open a cautious four inches. Rex Miller’s bony, earnest face peered at him.
The face drew down into a frown. “Well, O’Hara, what do you want, coming here?”
“Talk to you.”
“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”
“You could be wrong, couldn’t you?”
The look in Miller’s eyes said he didn’t think he could be wrong. In the room the telephone began to shrill. The sound pulled Miller back a little from the door involuntarily and O’Hara used the moment to shove the door wider and walk in. When it was done, Miller lifted his shoulders resignedly and crossed the room to the phone.
He uncradled the instrument, said: “Yes?”
O’Hara watched him. He thought the pale bony face went a shade more pallid.
Miller said: “No... No I tell you... Damn it, I’m busy. I’ll call you back.” He slammed the phone down, faced around. “Well?”
O’Hara had swiftly discarded his idea of talking about a fictitious picture. He said: “Look, Miller, I was a dope. I’m sorry. I apologize. Isn’t the apology and the retraction enough without a libel suit?”
Miller sneered. “Crawling now, are you? No, O’Hara, I’ll get a judgment that’ll take the gold fillings out of every tooth on the Tribune.”
For five minutes O’Hara crawled. It did no good. He finally slapped his hat on, and said: “O.K., if that’s the way you feel.”
“That’s how I feel and it’ll cost the Tribune half a million.”
O’Hara went out, closed the door in a quiet, dejected way and then took long, fast strides to the elevator bank. The elevators didn’t give him a break; it was two minutes before a down-car stopped and another three minutes before he hit the lobby. He angled across fast to the switchboard room and leaned on the railing there beside Mrs. Van Druten, the gray-haired and dignified head operator of the Diplomat.
He said: “Van, if there’s a call comes through from 763—”
Mrs. Van Druten said: “The call is through, O’Hara. And you smell like a distillery. Why don’t you ever buy me a drink?”
“I’ll buy you a million. What number did 763 call?”
“I can’t give out that information. Anyway, I couldn’t stand a million drinks, O’Hara, and you couldn’t buy that many. And I can’t give you that number.”
Mrs. Van Druten lifted a stack of telephone tabs, began to sort them. One slipped from her fingers and drifted out over the railing to the floor. She said: “O’Hara, be a gentleman and pick up that tab for me.”
O’Hara picked it up and engraved a phone number on his memory. He handed the tab back and said: “I’ll make that two million drinks.”
He went back to the lobby and stepped into a phone booth, got on the line with a telephone company special agent whom he knew.
When he finally hung up, he had the information that the telephone number Miller had called was listed to a residence, that of one D. Birkall, at an address on West Seventh.
O’Hara jotted the number down and went out to look for Clancy. Clancy had done his disappearing act again and O’Hara shrugged. He didn’t feel like nursing Clancy now, anyway.
Chapter Five
Knives and Knaves
The address turned out to be a three-story brick structure between loft buildings. A store window at the ground floor had a “For Rent” sign in it. At one side of the show window was a plate glass door that apparently gave access to a stairway leading to apartments on the second and third floors. The windows were dark.
Dusk was settling down as O’Hara dismissed his cab at the nearest corner. He strolled in the gray light toward the three-story building. He gave the plate glass door a quick try as he passed and found that it was locked.