“I’ll tell you this just once,” he grated. “Forget the Harvey Costain case. It’s police business, not yours. And stay away from Gail Tremaine. Get that? I mean way away. Show him out, Eddie.”
Crum pushed himself up out of the chair. I sat still. One of the phones on the desk rang sharply, briefly. Gannon looked at it, but didn’t touch it, or move.
I said: “I’d kind of like to have my gun back.”
“The police are looking for an automatic thirty-eight,” he said heavily. “This gun is a thirty-eight.”
“Let’s go, friend,” Eddie Crum purred. The phone rang again. Gannon picked it up this time, and grunted into the mouthpiece. Crum touched my arm. I got up and followed him to the door.
When I looked back, Gannon was doodling with the letter opener and listening and not talking. He didn’t look up at me. I stepped into the hallway and Crum followed me and the door clicked shut. We went along past the heavy oak doors to the stairs, down them.
In the bar lounge, by the street door, Eddie Crum said: “I know how you feel, friend. She works here. I see her every night.”
“You will get your face shot off,” I told him.
“Hell, I mean that I see her around, at work.”
“You will get your face shot off,” I growled.
“I know my business,” he purred, grinning. “So long.”
The sad-faced barman had three customers, a long-jawed guy with teeth like a horse and two giggling dames, years too old for their clothes. One of the dames hiccoughed and then belched loudly. Her friends almost fell off their stools laughing, so she did it again. The barman looked disgusted.
“So long,” I said, and left.
At the drive-in restaurant, I had more coffee and then got my car and drove back to the office.
An hour of staring at the wall above my desk fed me up. There hadn’t been any mail when I got back, around mid-afternoon, no messages under the door, and nobody called me up.
I found an old pipe and blew the dust out of it and filled it up with tobacco, just for the hell of it. I sat there and smoked until my tongue got as raw as an open wound packed with salt and laid the pipe away. After that, I just sat there.
The traffic signal down on the corner whirred and clinked with monotonous regularity. A leather-lunged news vendor with rusted steel vocal chords bawled faintly in the distance, making the same noises over and over again. Traffic growled both ways along the boulevard. And nobody called me up.
Finally, I tapped the office bottle, with discretion, shut the windows, set the spring lock and let the door slam shut after me.
The afternoon sheets had more about Costain than the earlier editions, but they followed the usual pattern. They hinted, without naming names, that some prominent film folk with shady pasts and underworld connections might soon be dragged into the case. The police hinted, without naming names, that they already had a dozen suspects rounded up for questioning and the confessions would be rolling in before sundown. That would be in about two and a half hours, according to my strapwatch.
I re-read the story when I got up to the apartment and had my hat and shoes off and was sitting in a chair by the radio. I didn’t see my name anywhere, nor Gail Tremaine’s. There was still nothing about Tony Zarsella’s valley joint, and only a repeat on the previous mention of the Club Borracha — Costain had been seen there, around seven in the evening, but had left.
Knuckles hit the hall door, lightly. I crawled down off the ceiling after a while and stood flatfooted in the middle of the room. I was fresh out of guns. A key tickled the lock, the door opened. A tired looking maid with straggly gray hair poked her face in and said: “Oh, excuse me. I’ll come back.” She shut the door before I could open my mouth. Then the telephone rang.
I crossed the room to answer it.
“Dillon?” a voice asked. The voice with the nasal twang.
“All right,” I snarled. “Who’s bunions did I tramp on now?”
“Your own, sucker,” the voice twanged. “Too bad for you.”
“That’s not what your boss told me just now,” I growled.
“Huh?” This startled explosion of breath didn’t seem to make the voice sound any different, or give me any new ideas about it. “Think you’re smart, huh? O.K., wise guy. Now the cops get the gun.”
“Can’t we talk this over,” I asked. “Can’t I meet you somewhere?”
“Break it up,” the voice sneered. “You were warned what would happen if you got too nosey. So you got too nosey. So now the cops get the kill gun. Your gun.”
“Oh, hell, I already told them about that,” I yelled, and hung up.
I was in the bedroom stuffing what I thought I might need on a short trip into a traveling bag when the phone rang again. I let it ring several times and then lunged into the living room and grabbed it.
“Central Homicide,” I said, in a gruff tone.
“Ha-ha-ha,” a voice laughed — the same voice.
“Ha-ha, yourself,” I grated, and hung up again.
It let go almost immediately and kept on ringing. I got into my shoes and finished packing in nothing flat and got out of the apartment. As I prowled down the hall toward the elevator, the distant, muffled, insistent peal followed me. The closing elevator doors stopped that. I punched a down button.
Chapter Five
The Face on Page One
A man with a tired sour expression turned the hotel register around and pushed a pen at me. I wrote a phony name and address and pushed a five dollar bill across the desk. He gave me fifty cents in change and slapped a desk bell.
Two crusty old codgers were deep in a checker game at a table against one wall of the narrow lobby. The desk bell woke them up. One of them looked at me in an annoyed way and made a move.
A pimply, hungry-eyed kid in a hop uniform two sizes too small for him minced out of the men’s room and picked up my bag. The deskman tossed a tabbed key at him. He speared it and stepped into a two-by-four elevator cage ahead of me.
We got off on five, the top floor, and went along a dim, narrow hallway with worn linoleum and smelling of hidden food and cheap disinfectant. The hop keyed his way into the last room at the back and switched on a light.
The room had a bed, a chair and a dresser and not much else. There was more worn linoleum, a brown and yellow checked pattern, on the floor. The bed frame was iron painted white. The chair and the dresser looked as if they might have been white at one time. A single window, closed at the moment, looked on the gray waste of an air shaft. On the wall above the bed was the picture of an Indian sitting on a horse. The horse looked all fagged out and the Indian was dying on the horse’s neck, as if the air in the room had gotten them both.
The hop dropped my bag and hung in the door-frame, staring at me. “Anything else, mister?” he asked, in a tight, foxy voice.
“You could open a window,” I said. “Or isn’t that allowed?”
He looked as if he had been stabbed in the back by a trusted friend as he dragged his feet to the window and heaved it up. Garbled voices and the clatter of dishes and a burned grease smell wafted into the room from the air shaft. I put the four-bit piece into his thin hand.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
His eyes narrowed. His mouth twitched. I fished out a ten dollar bill and folded it over twice and poked it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “That’ll buy me two bottles of liquor, if they’ll sell it to you,” I said.
“One, if I buy it for you,” he said.
“One, then, with ice and some soda.”
He grinned a tight, pimply-faced grin at me and went out. I locked the door and hung my hat and coat on the chair and switched out the light. For the next quarter hour, I smoked and lay on the bed and listened to the clatter in the air shaft. Noises came and went. A radio blared for a while and was cut off. Snores drifted across the shaft. The drone of a vacuum cleaner floated up from below. A dish crashed and a woman’s voice swore hoarsely. The snoring ceased abruptly but the cleaner whined on. I got up and tamped out my cigarette in an ashtray on the dresser and lay down again.