Carlin heard him out, said sarcastically: “Real open and above-board today, aren’t you?”
“Well, there ain’t nothing to be close about.” Slabbe shrugged. “Tommy Rex ought to be still down in the Carleton Arms Hotel lobby. I got Charlie Somers on him, but you can’t figure Tommy did this. Gage just put him in town at two-thirty and had an eye on him all the time.”
Carlin leered at Gage. “You’ve got a crust, blitzing in our town. Gimme your gun.”
Gage handed it over. Carlin broke it, looked at it, swung the cylinder back into place, put it in his pocket.
Gage said mildly: “I’ll take a receipt for it, Officer.”
Carlin’s eyes glittered on Gage, taking him in piece by piece. Slabbe pushed Gage into a chair. “The guy’s pooped, Pat,” he told Carlin. “He’ll stick and make his statement. I’ll make mine later, huh? I gotta see a guy.”
Carlin’s lips twisted. “You gotta see a guy,” he mocked. “Did I ever see you right after a kill when you didn’t gotta see a guy!”
“I’ll level,” Slabbe said openly. “I’m going to look up Whitey Fite again. How he got to know that Pola Velie was here didn’t seem important before, but now it does. Who he saw her with and when is important, too. When she was killed might mean something. Who this Nikki Evans is we gotta find out.”
“Finished?” Carlin purred. He said over his shoulder to the assorted cops who had accompanied him: “Everybody understand how this investigation is going to be run, now? Inspector Slabbe will be glad to answer your questions.”
His dark eyes pinned Slabbe. “Siddown!”
Slabbe blew a bubble with his gum that burst with a flat little cracking sound, sat down on a chair by the telephone, looked at the instrument speculatively, then put it to his ear and gave the number of the Carleton Arms Hotel. He asked for the house man, McPhail.
“Barney,” he said, “is Charlie Somers still there?” Then he jerked the phone away from his ear, held it at arm’s length — it was spitting furious static. A word here and there remotely resembled McPhail’s normal voice and said: “No headaches, you promised... guy pulled a gun right in our lobby... shot at the guy your guy was watching... hell to pay... my job... just lucky they didn’t kill somebody!”
Slabbe shot questions sharply, listened, hung up again. Lieutenant Carlin hovered over him, challenging him to hold anything back. Slabbe didn’t. He tongued his gum out of the way into a cavity and explained: “Happy Lado, it looks like, went straight from here to the Carleton Arms lobby and took a potshot at Tommy Rex. He didn’t connect and Tommy sloped out with Happy still chasing him.”
Carlin’s thin nostrils flared. “My God, the Rotary and Kiwanis and the Citizens’ Committee use that hotel for meetings and dinners. They’ll crucify the whole department! Gimme that!” He snatched the phone, called the radio rotunda at the City Hall. “Railroad stations, airport, ferry slips!” he barked. “Get the staties to bottle the highways! I know you already done it! Do it again!”
Al Gage hissed at Slabbe. “How good is that Charlie Somers you have on Tommy?”
Slabbe winked. “He didn’t pull any miracles this week, but he gets by. Catch yourself forty winks, cousin. Carlin’s got great faith in letting guys loose and shadowing ’em. He’ll do it to us when his fuse burns out. While we’re waiting we can learn something, maybe.”
Slabbe waited till Carlin was dealing out orders to his squad, then slid out of his chair as unobtrusively as a man of his bulk could do and stepped into the kitchenette of the apartment. He scowled when he saw that a cop was posted there, but grinned when he saw that there was beer in the refrigerator. He uncapped a couple of bottles and went back and gave one to Carlin. Al Gage had closed his eyes and was breathing heavily.
Carlin took the bottle Slabbe proffered, sneered at Gage: “These slick Zenith guys! Gotta sleep on schedule or they’re no good.”
Slabbe said: “Whitey Fite will talk to me, Pat.”
“He’ll talk to a hose, too.”
“So maybe he will, but that’ll take longer. Lemme go to work.” Slabbe put the telephone to his ear, gave the same four numbers he’d given earlier at his office and said the same words four times: “Tell Whitey Fite I want him.” He hung up, warned: “Don’t horn in now and scare the kid. I gotta hunch he might know something about this Nikki Evans’ connections. He said he saw Happy and Silk and Pola get off a train from St. Louis at ten this morning, and if he knew Pola came here, which he did, it must be he tailed her from the station. He gave me the information pretty cheap, too, so maybe it was because he figured I’d be back for more.”
“Just the same, stick around,” Carlin ordered. “When Whitey gets to your office, if he does, I’ll want to be in on it. Here comes the M.E.”
Slabbe thought that the medical examination was worth something, and he hovered beside the medical examiner interestedly. “What killed her, doc?”
“Have to post her to be sure,” said the man with the black bag. “Heart conked, probably.”
“Uh-huh,” Slabbe mused. “How long ago?”
“Two hours at least. It’s four-thirty. She was dead at two-thirty for sure, maybe earlier.”
Slabbe looked at Carlin’s brooding eyes. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he said.
As if this remark reminded him of it, Carlin probed a vest pocket for a long, thin cigar and canted it under his bony nose, waited for Slabbe to continue.
Slabbe said: “Happy and Silk were coming out of here when Gage and I arrived. If they killed Pola and she’s been dead at least two hours, that means they hung around that long after giving it to her. I don’t buy that. It wouldn’t take ’em two hours to case this apartment, so they weren’t here that long. They didn’t kill her.”
Carlin’s angry teeth on the cigar told that he was thinking this over, though he protested: “It don’t follow. They could have killed her, beat it, and then come back for some reason.”
“Name it,” Slabbe requested.
“Go ’way,” Carlin growled.
Slabbe said, “I’ll just do that,” and strolled out into the kitchen again. The cop was still on the door, but now he’d seen Slabbe take beer to Carlin once and talk chummy, so when Slabbe casually unsapped another bottle of beer and said, “Convoy this to the Lieutenant,” the cop practically touched his visor and did so. Slabbe rambled on out the back door.
As he’d expected, Abe Morse was in the vicinity waiting for him, but making himself inconspicuous. The slender little man caught Slabbe at a corner, trotted along like a blue-serge-clad terrier beside a gray mastiff.
He said in his quiet voice: “Happy caught a cab while I was chasing him. I got the number and—”
“No good now,” Slabbe cut in. “Happy went to the Carleton Arms and blasted at Tommy Rex and they both chased off. Our hope is that Charlie Somers sticks with one of them. Take a look.”
Slabbe fished in his pocket, brought out the photograph he’d snicked off Nikki Evans’ dresser. The man in the picture was short of forty, with a high forehead, even teeth, small ears set a trifle high, sleek black hair with touches of gray at the temples. The flourishing handwriting at the bottom of the picture said: “To Nikki, one swell kid. Max.”
Slabbe asked Abe Morse: “Make him?”
“Gimme a second,” Abe said, and took the photograph from Slabbe, held it at his side as he walked, and from time to time jerked it up in front of his gimlet eyes as if it were a shot glass. He looked at the street, at the sky, at the sidewalk. Then he’d try to catch himself unawares and jerk the picture up again. His quiet, narrow face registered nothing, but he muttered: “I seen this guy somewheres, and in town. He ain’t been around long or a lot or I’d have him right off.”