Jill said, “Mrs. Penner, I’m Joe’s sister. Joe called me, he’s in Arizona and he had to leave New York in a hurry.”
“Cop trouble?”
“He didn’t say. Mrs. Penner—”
“There was cops came around right after he left. Showed me their badges and went pawing through everything.” She paused. “They don’t look like cops, not them. But they show me their badges and that’s enough. I don’t like to stick my nose in.”
Jill said, “Mrs. Penner, you know Joe was in business here. There was a lawsuit and he had to leave the state to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t police trouble.”
“So?”
“He called me yesterday,” she went on. “There were some things of his, some things he had to leave here, and he wanted me to get them for him.”
“Sure.”
“If I could just—”
The screen door stayed shut. “As soon as I get that eighty-five dollars,” she said. “That’s what he cost me, that eighty-five dollars. There was no lease so that’s all, just the eighty-five, but I want that before he gets his stuff.”
Jill didn’t say anything. Dave took out a cigarette and said, “You can hold the furniture for the time being, Mrs. Penner. In fact I think Joe would just as soon you kept the furniture, and then you can go on renting the flat furnished. It’s worth more than eighty-five dollars, but just to make things easier you could keep the furniture for the rent you missed out on.”
He could see her mind working, balancing the extra five or ten dollars a month against the eighty-five dollars Corelli had cost her. She looked as though she wanted a little more, so he said, “Unless you’d rather have the money. Then I could have a truck here later this afternoon to pick up the furniture.”
He could imagine her trying to explain that to the Haases. Quickly she said, “No, it’s fair enough. And easier all around, right?”
“That’s what I thought. Now if we could see Joe’s other stuff, his clothes and all. You kept everything, didn’t you?”
She had everything downstairs in large cardboard boxes. Suits, ties, slacks, underwear. Corelli had had an extensive wardrobe, sharp Broadway suits with Phil Kronfeld and Martin Janss labels in them. There was one boxful of papers. Dave took the carton and carried it out to the car. Jill waited in the car, and he went back to the house and told Mrs. Penner he would send somebody around for the rest of the stuff, the clothes and everything. “Today or tomorrow,” he said.
That was fine with her. He got into the car and drove off.
At the Bascom Building, in Hicksville’s business district, Jill waited in the car with the box of papers while he went inside and managed to get into Corelli’s office. This was easier, because they hadn’t moved him out for nonpayment of rent. He had been gone for three months but they had left his office as he had left it, the door locked and everything undisturbed. He found the superintendent and told him he wanted to get into Corelli’s office, and the old man said he had to have the key or written authorization.
Dave gave him a story off the top of his head — that Corelli had sent him down to pick up copies of a contract, that it would only be for a minute, and that he didn’t want to take the time to get a written authorization from Corelli. The super didn’t believe it but he just nodded, waiting. Dave gave him ten dollars and the super made the bill disappear and took him upstairs and unlocked the door for him. He seemed to be doing something he had done before — for the men who had been looking for Corelli.
“Don’t be long now,” he said. “And lock the door behind you, hear?”
He wasn’t long. The office was a cubbyhole, one window facing out on the main street of Hicksville, a single dark-green filing cabinet, a cheap oak desk, a standing coatrack. The wooden desk chair was padded with a cushion that smelled slightly of old rubber.
There were three drawers to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held a half-full bottle of Philadelphia blended whiskey. The middle drawer was empty. In the top drawer there was a disorganized pile of contracts and invoices and letters. The letterheads, as far as he could see, were of various companies in the building trades. He shuffled all the papers into a moderately neat pile and stuffed them into a brown manila envelope.
The desktop was free from clutter. There was a thick layer of dust across it but nothing else. In the top drawer of the desk he found a box of paper clips, a year-old copy of Argosy folded open to an article on skin-diving paraphernalia, a memo pad with no entries in it, a Zippo cigarette lighter initialed “J.C.,” a four-by five-inch glossy print of a girl in panties and bra, a pigskin address book, and a packet of contraceptives. He added the address book to the manila envelope and closed the drawer. In another drawer, far in the rear, he found an unloaded gun and, behind it, a nearly full box of cartridges.
He picked up the gun, then stopped and glanced automatically at the window. No one was watching him, of course. He hefted the gun and felt its weight. He hesitated just a moment, then tucked the gun into his pants pocket, the right-hand pocket. He put the box of shells in his left-hand jacket pocket, stopped, lit a cigarette, and checked the one remaining drawer in the desk. It was empty, and he closed it and straightened up.
Outside, it was getting ready to rain. He got behind the wheel and Jill asked him if there had been anything important in the office. He told her he didn’t know yet, that they would have to see. She said she had forgotten how to get back to the city and asked him if he remembered the route. He started the car and told her that he remembered the way.
Chapter 6
The gun was a Bodyguard, by Smith & Wesson. It was a five-shot revolver that took.38-Special shells, and it was hammerless, so you didn’t have to cock it — a pull on the trigger would fire the gun. It had a two-inch barrel, it was black, it was steel, it weighed a pound and a quarter. The grip was textured, and formed to fit the hand.
The purpose of the gun was implicit in its design. Because it was short-barreled, its accuracy was somewhat limited; it would be a poor bet for target shooting or long-range plinking. The short barrel meant that it was designed to be carried easily on the person, probably concealed. The absence of a hammer facilitated quick draws; a hammer might catch on clothing, might leave the gun snagged in a pocket or under a belt. The gun had been made to carry, to fire easily and quickly, to shoot ammunition that would kill a man with a well-placed hit. It was a gun for killing people.
Now, it was unloaded. He sat on the edge of the bed in their hotel room and held the gun in his right hand, his hand curled around the butt, his finger just resting lightly upon the trigger. The box of shells was on the bed beside him. He opened the box and loaded the gun, putting shells in four of the five chambers. He rotated the cylinder so that there was no cartridge under the hammer and so that nothing would happen if the trigger was pulled accidentally.
He looked up. Jill’s eyes were on the gun, and they were nervous. She raised her eyes to meet his.
“Dave, do you know how to use that?”
“Yes.” He looked at the gun again, set it down on the bed beside him. He closed the box of ammunition. “In the army. They taught us guns. In basic training. Mostly rifles, of course, but there was a brief course on handguns.”
She didn’t say anything. He picked up a stack of papers and ruffled through them. They had gone through everything in less than an hour, finding almost all of Corelli’s papers less than useless. The business papers might have been clues to something, but they couldn’t tell — they were just various bills and receipts and letters relating to Corelli’s construction business. He had evidently been something of a middleman in construction, setting up jobs and parceling them out among subcontractors.