Over a Manhattan her coolness melted a trifle, particularly after Dan made a point of apologizing for his frankness. It was a somewhat oblique apology, however.
“I shouldn’t have sounded off the way I did about young Robinson,” he said. “It’s none of my business whether the guy you love has all of his marbles or not.”
“You just don’t understand Gene,” she told him. “You’re like his father. Gene has the soul of a poet.”
Fancy grunted and changed the subject, not trusting himself to comment on Gene Robinson’s poetic soul without starting the argument all over again.
“The witnesses at the trial have all been pulled into cover,” he said. “There isn’t a chance in the world of breaking open the Saunders killing again, so I’m trying something else.”
“What?”
“You’ll be better off not knowing. But the wheels are in motion. At least I think they are. I’m banking on Big Jim’s having had my phone tapped. If he did, I expect to be neck deep in trouble by tomorrow at the latest. And I want to be left in it. Don’t try to help me out by hiring lawyers or any such thing. Just sit tight and watch.”
She frowned puzzledly. “Why, Dan? I’m not afraid. You said I could go along for the ride.”
“The ride just ended. From here on all you could do is foul things up. Be a nice girl and stay away from me awhile, eh?”
“If that’s what you want,” she said slowly. “Is that all you asked me here for?”
“Not entirely. I was bored. There isn’t a thing I can do until Big Jim makes the next move, and I figured I might as well kill time with a beautiful girl as on my back in a hotel room.”
She made a face at him, but her facial muscles got out of control and reduced if to a grin.
From the cocktail lounge they moved into the dining room for lunch, where by tacit consent they kept conversation away from both Big Jim Calhoun and Gene Robinson. At twelve forty-five she left him to return to her beauty shop.
“Good luck, Dan,” she said softly, putting her small hand in his enormous one.
He grinned down at her. “Thanks. But I’m banking on a little more than just luck.”
As he recrossed the lobby after escorting Adele to the street and putting her into a taxi, he was stopped by Billie, the bellhop.
“There’s two plainclothes cops waiting in your room, Mr. Fancy,” the boy whispered.
“Thanks, kid.”
As he neared the door of 512, Dan began whistling. Making an unnecessary amount of noise when he inserted the key in his lock, he pushed open the door and stepped in. His eyes widened in simulated surprise when he saw the two men in the room.
Lieutenant Morgan Hart sat in the chair by the window with a snub-nosed thirty-eight leveled at Dan’s stomach. The thin, sharp-nosed man who had tailed Dan to Larry Bull’s house leaned negligently against the wall with both hands in his pockets.
“Drop your gun gentle, Fancy,” Lieutenant Hart said quietly.
“Sure,” Dan said.
Carefully he drew the weapon from under his arm, using only an index finger and thumb. With exaggerated daintiness he laid it on the carpet.
“This an arrest, or just a killing?” he asked.
“An arrest. But we’d be glad to make it a killing, if you want to resist.”
“No thanks. What’s the charge?”
“Homicide.”
“Anyone I know?”
The thin lieutenant scowled at him. Rising, he dropped his Panama hat over his gun and urged the big man out of the room. At the doorway he stooped and pocketed Dan’s .45 automatic. The hat-covered gun never varied from its bearing on the big man’s nose as the trio rode down the elevator, crossed the lobby and entered a squad car at the curb. The skinny, sharp-nosed man drove, while Lieutenant Hart sat in the back with Dan.
“You don’t really need that gun,” Dan remarked. “I wouldn’t make a break because I’m curious to find out your intentions.”
The lieutenant said nothing, but he did not put away the gun. The grim manner in which he continued to eye Dan caused a tremor of uneasiness to run through the big man, for Morgan Hart’s expression resembled nothing so much as that of a hired killer about to practise his profession. Fleetingly Dan wondered if perhaps he had mis-estimated Big Jim, and instead of being framed he was simply going to be murdered.
Then he decided that Big Jim would be guilty of nothing so crude, and settled back to await developments.
They were not long in coming. Swiftly the car drove toward the center of town. Near the hub of the shopping district it slowed to cruising speed and drifted with the traffic. Repeatedly the sharp-nosed driver glanced in the rear-view mirror, apparently awaiting some sign from the lieutenant. Finally, in the center of a block in which traffic whizzed in both directions and the sidewalks were crammed with pedestrians, Morgan Hart gave a slight nod.
Immediately the driver slammed on his brakes, and almost before the car stopped moving he had flung open the right-hand door and thrown himself to the sidewalk amidst startled pedestrians. Standing in a crouch, he drew a gun and fired over the top of the car.
Simultaneously Lieutenant Hart flung himself out of the back door and winged a bullet into the upholstery immediately beneath Dan.
Grasping the door handle on his own side, Dan threw his shoulder against the door and sprawled headlong into the street. Two more shots crashed, one nicking the asphalt on either side of the car.
Traffic from both directions screamed to a halt, leaving a wide path between Dan and the mouth of an alley across the street. Like a harbor of safety the alley beckoned, but to reach it Dan would have to traverse a wide street while two men with pistols potted at his back. Even as he hit the street on all fours, his mind was racing, and he found time to be amazed at Big Jim’s audacity. Picking the center of town with a hundred witnesses to stage a killed-while-escaping act was a stroke of genius, for even the governor would be impotent in the face of the testimony of so many disinterested witnesses.
That he would never make the mouth of the alley across the street was a certainty. With split-second decision he bounced erect, slammed shut the car door through which he had just tumbled, jerked open the driver’s door and slid under the wheel.
Racing around either side of the car toward the point they expected to find Dan, and not expecting the maneuver, the two detectives were caught off balance. The motor was still running, and when Dan threw the car into low and gunned it, Morgan Hart was behind the car and the thin-nosed man was in front of it. The latter leaped backward in terror as the hood shot toward him, stumbled over the curb and fell flat. Then Dan was racing through a red light and was cut off from possible fire by the stream of traffic which immediately began to flow in the cross-street behind him.
Dan estimated he had at least five minutes before Lieutenant Hart could get a general alarm on the air, and he resolved to make the most of each minute. The shipping dock area along the lake front would be his best bet, he decided, for there he could probably find a cheap hotel which made a point of not asking its guests questions. Opening the siren wide, he headed in the general direction of the dock area at seventy-five miles an hour. At the same time he switched on the radio so that he would know the exact moment his squad car ceased to be a haven and became a target.
His guess was optimistic by two minutes. He had roared a little over three miles across town and was passing through what seemed to be a second-class residential district when the radio suddenly intoned: “Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Be on lookout for squad car number two seventy-six. Repeat car two seventy-six. Last seen at Fourth and Locust heading at high speed toward lake front. This car has been stolen by Daniel Fancy, who is wanted for murder. Fancy may have abandoned car and may now be on foot. He is six feet four inches, two hundred and seventy pounds, suntanned, has blue eyes and iron-gray hair. He is wearing a gray suit and no hat. This man is a cop-killer and may be armed. Take no chances with him.”