Kerr lifted his eyebrows, went to the door. At the door he turned, said, “Maybe a drink might oil things up. What’ll you have, Lieutenant?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be like that. What’ll it be?”
“Well... hell, make it sherry and bitters.”
“O’Hara?”
“You can make mine an old-fashioned.”
“Nothing for me, please,” Davenport said.
Kerr went out. O’Hara slumped in the big, leather chair by the desk. Shuford watched him sulkily. After a moment Davenport took the detective’s arm, moved him off to a corner of the office. The Councilman talked in a low voice, with movements of his eyebrows, his hands. Shuford said only a little and that little very stubbornly.
He was still looking stubborn when Kerr came back, carrying a tall, curved glass of buttermilk. Inez Dana, wrapped in a huge shawl and nothing else, came in after him.
Kerr said, “I’ve explained things to Miss Dana, Lieutenant. She, like me, believes it would be foolish to sign a complant.”
Inez Dana looked frightened. She batted her brown eyes at Shuford who had become a photograph of indignation.
He growled, “She can talk, can’t she? Where do you get off telling her what to say?”
Kerr shrugged, stood out of the way.
Shuford said, “Do your own talking, Inez. You’re going to sign a burglary complaint against this guy, aren’t you?”
Inez Dana paled, shook her head very slowly.
“Listen, baby,” Shuford said, almost pleadingly, “I caught this guy prowling your place. You gotta sign a complaint against him — it’s burglary.”
The girl didn’t look at O’Hara, at any of the others. She moved close to the bulky lieutenant, said, “Please, Otto. If I do what you ask, I’ll have all the papers down on me. I — we don’t want that, do we? Think of my career, please!”
A waiter came in with a tray that held sherry and bitters, an old-fashioned. He saw Shuford’s red, raging countenance, put the tray down on the desk in a hurry and got out.
Shuford suddenly banged his fist on the desk. He said in a choked voice, “All right, Inez, I get it. You think you’ll lose your job if you press charges against this guy. So run along, you’re out of it. Go on, run along.”
Still looking scared, Inez Dana turned, went out the door, trailing a corner of the voluminous shawl after her.
“Maybe I’m dumb,” Shuford said viciously toward Kerr, with a sidewise flick of his eyes to include O’Hara. “I can’t figure why you guys are so anxious to front for this punk of a news-hound and I’m not going to bother to guess. But dumb or not, I’m a copper and I don’t scare. I’ve got plenty of evidence to back up a burglary charge against O’Hara and I’ll sign the complaint myself. How do you like that, O’Hara?”
“Not much,” O’Hara admitted. He reached over, got the old-fashioned from the tray. He put half of it down his throat, didn’t like the taste of it a great deal and set the glass back on the tray.
“And you won’t like it a lot more when you’re standing in front of a judge,” Shuford clipped.
He looked as though the prospect had put him in a better humor. He picked up the glass of sherry and bitters, drained it at a gulp, snapped to O’Hara, “Come on, then. I’m taking you in — complaint or no complaint.”
A shiny new sedan with a police sneak license on it was in the parking lot. Shuford wedged under the wheel, motioned to the seat beside him. He scowled at O’Hara.
“And no capers, Irish.”
The detective and O’Hara rolled out of the parking lot, rolled past O’Hara’s coupé. He caught a glimpse of Tony Ames in the dark interior and then they were on their way.
Shuford’s driving was cautious even when it wasn’t raining. He sirened his way, always, even on routine errands, and sometimes when he was in a particular hurry he got up to forty. But at forty he made more siren noise than most police drivers made at seventy. He pulled the siren cord as he turned into Palms Boulevard and kept its eery scream going as he ambled along through the rain at thirty-five.
O’Hara hummed a tune that was no tune, wondered how long it would take him to pull wires that would change Shuford’s mind on the pinch, wondered also what to do with the prints meanwhile. If Shuford insisted on booking him at the Westwood station, he’d be searched in the desk sergeant’s office and he didn’t want to let Shuford or even Blane know about them until he’d had a chance to use them as pressure on Davenport.
After a while, under cover of his floppy trenchcoat, he managed to slip them from beneath his vest. He rammed them down behind the seat cushion. He was still humming. The portion of the old-fashioned he had swallowed was throbbing along in his veins. He began to feel soothed and comfortable and unworried.
Shuford yawned, said, “Will you skip the music? What have you got to sing about?”
“I don’t know,” O’Hara said. He yawned, also. “I just feel like singing, that’s all. Say, Otto, are you really nuts about this Dana girl?”
Shuford yawned tremendously. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m a friend of yours, you poor mugg.”
“You can’t gab your way outa this.”
“Let it go,” O’Hara shrugged. He slid down in the seat, drowsily comfortable.
The police car veered to the left, cut across the white center line of the boulevard. Shuford’s hand came off the siren cord. He swore dully, hauled the car back to the right. The car began to slide off toward the right. This time Shuford didn’t pull it back. His foot slid off the accelerator.
The car kept going off to the right. One front wheel mounted the curb, seeming to take a very long time to do it. O’Hara groped for the steering wheel but his hand didn’t seem part of him and, anyway, he couldn’t find the wheel. The car went on across the sidewalk. There was a telephone pole directly in front of the radiator and the car finally plowed into the pole in what seemed to O’Hara a very leisurely fashion.
He saw Shuford pitch over the wheel, smack the shatterproof windshield with his forehead and then slide back into the seat. The shock tumbled O’Hara downward and forward, wedged him against the instrument board without apparently hurting him.
He yawned, said to himself, “Funny, very funny.”
Then a part of his brain, but only a part of it, came alive and he knew it wasn’t funny. He crawled up to the seat, managed to open the door and get out into the cold lash of the rain. The wetness on his face revived him a little and he weaved around, fighting drowsiness and trying to get a hand into his pocket. He got the hand in finally, pulled out cigarettes. He got one lit after a struggle against the rain, against the lethargy that was overpowering him.
When he had a hard, red coal glowing at the end of it, he stiffened himself, suddenly jammed the coal against the back of his left hand.
Fine wires of pain shot up his arm, kept on traveling to his brain, cleared mist out of it. The tide of drowsiness receded and he began to swear vividly and with feeling. The rubber went out of his knees and cold, damp air, flooding into his lungs, felt refreshing, delicious.
He started to walk away from the police car and then turned on his heel and went back. Poking his head in, he saw Shuford. The detectives head lolled back against the seat and rasping snores came from his gaping mouth. O’Hara grinned sleepily. He found the packet of prints back of the seat, put them under his belt again and went away.
He walked toward the city, toward a spot three blocks away where lights blazed against the rainy darkness. When he was a block from the wrecked car, he heard the squeal of brakes behind him. Looking back, he saw a light-colored car had stopped by the police car. He still had his head turned over his shoulder when a man got out of the halted machine, walked in front of the lights. The man was big and thick-shouldered and even at that distance O’Hara could see that his profile against the car lights was almost flat, exactly like the gorilla who had held O’Hara up.