“I feel real bad about this, John,” he rumbled.
“Not half as bad as I do,” I muttered, bleakly.
“I mean, about me bopping you last night,” he said. “Then later, about the boys picking you up at the hospital. Those were Tony’s boys.”
I sat there and stared at him.
“That horn blast did it,” he explained. “Some of the boys should’ve been out with the cars all the time. On account of the rain, they weren’t. Anyhow, it must’ve been when you let the guy’s head hit the horn. A couple of the boys jump out to see, is it trouble. It is. It’s murder. A car steams away. Yours, but we don’t know it then. Two of them tag you to the hospital and phone back. Tony tells them where to take you and hold you so’s you won’t call no law until he decides what to do.”
“Oh, brother,” I said, softly. “That beats all.”
“Uh-huh. Tony decides he don’t want a murder in his back yard and says move it. I argue with him. He’s boss, he says, and move it. It’s somebody else’s trouble. He isn’t having any of it. He figures that the law can work just as well starting from scratch in an empty lot in town as they can from his place. So the boys move Costain and turn you loose. That’s all.”
“Well, I feel a little better.” I grinned stiffly at him. “You know what’ll happen if the cops pick me up and I tell my story.”
“I told Tony last night he was compounding — it’s dynamite.”
“Just tell him now he can pry me loose. It’s his worry now.”
“His worry, but your neck,” Mazonik growled. “Like the dame?”
“The torcher?” I shrugged. “Too much else on my mind to know.”
“Yeah,” he grunted. He rubbed his jaw again, said: “She like you?”
“No.” I chain-smoked a light onto another cigarette and crushed the old stub in a dish. He pulled his lower lip out, folded it over the upper one, held it there with the ball of his thumb and dusted the joint with his eyes.
The clock on the wall behind the counter said eight-fifteen. Buck Tooth was cleaning out the cash register. That meant closing time. The chef was heaving empty milk cases out a back door. A couple of late customers were still stoking themselves at the counter. Outside the front window, traffic seemed to have livened up a bit.
“This Keever,” Mazonik said, in a moment. “He sounds tricky.”
“He’d skin himself, if it meant money to him,” I said.
“Yeah. He pegged you plenty fast. You check him any?”
“No,” I said. “I was hoping you had, one time or another.”
He shook his head slowly again. “This is a big town, John. Guys like him, they come and they go. You can be in police work damn near all your life and still not know even half of them.”
Just then a prowl car swung in and parked, out at the curb. I froze. One of the men in it got out and came into the restaurant and sat down at the counter up front, near the cash register. Mazonik looked where I was looking and back at me and grinned.
“Even cops have to eat,” he said, chuckling softly.
“Have fun,” I said, bitterly. “I don’t feel good.”
His grin faded. “Can’t blame you,” he said quietly.
“What was the trouble between Zarsella and Gannon?”
“Trouble?” He frowned. “Hell, don’t make too much out of that. Both of them guys are too smart to pull a killing like this — trouble or no trouble.”
“Don’t stall me,” I said brusquely. “If you know and don’t tell me, there are other ways of finding out. I think there was some kind of trouble between Gannon and Costain, too. Gannon is soft on the girl. She works for him. The torcher.”
His frown deepened. He chewed his lip and didn’t say anything.
“Gannon practically kidded around with me this afternoon,” I said. “Either to pump me, or just to have fun. I went there to pump him, of course, but the kidding stopped when I mentioned the girl’s name. He warned me to lay off her — and he didn’t mean just professionally.”
“It does sound kind of funny at that,” he admitted. “What then?”
“Nothing. He had his right bower show me out — and kept my other gun.”
“How’d he sound, him and his hard boy? Their voices, I mean. Anything like this voice on the phone? I guess you could spot the killer that way, maybe — if you could hear him, not on the phone, and recognize him.”
I shook my head. I told him what I thought about voices over telephones, that they could be disguised and didn’t mean anything. He nodded, twisted his face again, closed a big fist up tight, stared at it, opened it slowly, looked at me.
“I’ll tell you the truth, John,” he said. “Tony never mentioned why he left Lew Gannon. Not to me. You can believe it or not, but we never have talked about it. I figured it was none of my business. I never asked him nothing.”
“Better begin now, then,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’ll prod him, sure.”
“If the cops get me, I talk, see?”
“Hell, you couldn’t prove nothing.”
“With the torcher to back me, yes.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe you got something.”
The first prowlie finished gobbling and went out and his partner came in and sat on the same stool. His glance met mine, casually, switched to the bill-of-fare chalked on a blackboard under the clock.
“With the heat on me like this, I’m handicapped,” I said. “But I can still get around, with luck, and pick up a nugget or two that’ll make your old pals down at headquarters listen without laughing in my face.”
“Your luck won’t hold forever,” he said. “Got any ideas?”
“Not any good ones,” I said. “The killer could be Gannon — or his smoothie, Eddie Crum, with Gannon behind him. All I need to do is prove that Costain had double-crossed Gannon, or that Gannon hated Costain’s guts on account of the girl. Knocking him off out at Zarsella’s joint would be just one way of eliminating the old competish — good business — two birds with one slug, as the guy says.”
“That would kind of put the girl in the middle, wouldn’t it? She was with him. If Gannon was soft on her, like you say, he wouldn’t put her in the middle of nothing like that. Now, this house dick might. Keever. He took you, boy. Don’t overlook him.”
“I won’t overlook him. And I’m not going to overlook your boss, either. Competition works both ways. Tony Zarsella may be a fat clown and a soft touch to you, but he’s been around a long time. He’s hooked his fat fingers in plenty of deals that wouldn’t look good in the morning papers. Hell, Costain might even have been blackmailing him.”
He didn’t like that. He stared at me — a hard stare, developed in the years he walked behind a badge, and before, in the ring, and before that fighting older tougher kids for the right to peddle papers on the busy corners. I met his gaze, squarely. I had been raised in a logging camp myself.
“The killer could be somebody you ain’t even thought of, yet,” he growled.
“Could be,” I growled back at him. “In fact, it could even be you.”
Movement and sound went on around us. Headlights out on the street, going both ways, and the swish of tires on pavement. Feet scuffing sidewalk and faces floating past the front windows. Inside, there was the coming and going behind the counter and the rattle of closing-up chores. The prowlie on the front stool was shoveling in the last of his pie.
“Figured out my motive?” Mazonik asked stiffly.