“They’re animals.”
“Then they’re professional animals. An amateur could have killed me by accident, would have cracked a rib or two, anyway. But they were perfect. They knew just what to do and they did it.”
She shuddered. I put an arm around her and she turned to me and hugged me. I saw a drop of wet saltiness running down one cheek, wiped it up with a finger.
“Hell, you were right.” She looked at me. “When you said you could cry on cue,” I explained.
She looked away. “Just shut up,” she said. “Or I’ll hit you in the stomach. At least I get a chance to play nurse. You’re going to bed now, Ed.”
“Like hell I am.”
“Ed—”
“I couldn’t fall asleep if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Things are coming to a head, Maddy. A whole slew of two-legged bombs are running around waiting to go off.”
“And you want to be blown up?”
“I want to be there. I want to watch the explosion, set off a bomb or two of my own.”
“You should go right to sleep.”
I shook my head, which was a mistake. It ached. “I wouldn’t stay here anyway. I was letting them come to me, Maddy. It made sense before. Now I’d rather be a moving target. I have to start things on my own.”
“Then go to a hotel. In the morning—”
“The morning’s too late.”
She sighed. It was a long and very female sigh. She really wanted to put me to bed and tuck me in and listen to my prayers. The mother instinct dies hard.
“All right,” she said sadly. “Where are you going to start?”
“Probably with Armin.”
“Armin?”
“The little man who was waiting for me last night. Mr. Neatness and Light. His name’s Peter Armin and he’s staying at a midtown hotel. I think he’ll be glad to see me.”
“Why him?”
“Because I know where he is. Because I know who he is, as far as that goes. And because I think he’ll help me.”
“Why should he?”
I stood up. “Because I may be able to help him,” I said. “Say, you didn’t come up with anything, did you? About Clay?”
She looked stunned. She made a small fist out of one hand and used it to tap herself on the jaw. Then she sat there shaking her head from side to side at me.
“I completely forgot,” she said. “God, I’m stupid. How can I be so stupid? I was so busy listening to you and all that I forgot all about it.”
“All about what?”
“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “I chased all over town looking for that director, Ed, and I couldn’t find him. Nobody knew just where he was. He’s a periodic drunk or something and he was missing his period. Or having it.”
I waited for her to get to the point. If I knew who Clay was, I didn’t necessarily have to bother with Armin. Because Clay was the boy I needed, the missing factor in the equation.
He had the briefcase.
“So I couldn’t find him,” she was saying. “But I got hold of another guy, one who collects fists of angels so hard-up producers can hunt up soft touches. He had the list for ‘Hungry Wedding’!”
“And Clay was on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“There was no Mr. Clay,” she said. “But then I got the bright idea that Clay could be a first name instead of a last name. So I went through the list again and found a man named Clayton. That’s his first name. They didn’t have his address.”
I let out a lot of breath. “That has to be him. What was his last name?”
“Just a minute. It’s on the tip of my tongue, Ed. It was something like Rail but that wasn’t it. Kale? Crail? Oh, damn it to hell—”
“Maddy—”
“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. I wrote it down, for Pete’s sake. I’m just so darn mad that I couldn’t remember it. Just a minute — it’s somewhere in my purse.”
I waited while she rummaged through a purse and kept saying darn it. Then she managed to find her wallet, took it out and managed to find a slip of paper. She looked at it and smiled proudly at me.
“This is the one,” she said, very positively. “No address, just the name.”
I told her to read it.
“Clayton Bannister,” she read calmly. “Does that mean anything?”
Eight
The human equation picked itself up, dusted itself off and crawled furtively into the woodwork. I wanted to get down on all fours and crawl after it. Everything had worked out so neatly, so flawlessly. Bannister and Armin wanted the briefcase and Clay had the briefcase and—
Sure they did, London.
I told Maddy all about it and watched her eyes bulge.
Two suspects had turned into one, with Clay and Bannister the two sides of the same damn coin.
“Then,” she wanted to know, “who has the briefcase?”
Briefcase, briefcase, who’s got the briefcase. “It’s a good question,” I told her. “We’ll have to find out. Now.”
I grabbed a jacket and a hat and we got out of the apartment. I locked the door and pitched a key under the mat for Cora. Then we left the building.
She wanted me to buy her dinner but I managed to talk her out of the idea of a real meal. Instead we found a deli with a pair of formica-topped tables in the rear. A moon-faced man with bushy eyebrows brought us pastrami sandwiches on fresh rye and two bottles of cold Dutch beer. The apron covering his beer belly was spotless, probably because he didn’t wipe his dirty hands on it.
Every once in a while an indefatigable cockroach scurried across the floor at our feet. Even this couldn’t spoil our appetites. We wolfed down the sandwiches and swilled beer and got out of there.
“Now I put you in a cab and send you home,” I said optimistically.
She wasn’t having any. “I’m going with you, Ed.”
“Don’t be—”
“Silly? I’m not being silly.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Oh? What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Darn it, Ed—”
“One of two things could happen or both,” I told her. “You could get hurt or you could get in the way. I don’t want either one. Therefore—”
“There’s another alternative, Ed. I could be of help. To tell the truth, I don’t see how you get along without me. You may be a brilliant detective but you forget the elementary things.”
“Like what?”
“Like Clayton Bannister,” she said. “God, you didn’t even look him up in the phone book. You know his full name and you leave it alone.”
“He won’t be listed.”
“Are you sure? So sure you won’t take the trouble to look?”
Arguing with Maddy was like swimming in a vat of mercury. There was no future in it. We ducked into a drugstore and I went through the Manhattan and Bronx books, the only ones on hand. There were twenty-one Bannisters in Manhattan and nine in the Bronx and none of them was named Clayton. One guy was listed as C Bannister and Maddy wanted me to call him. I told her he lived on Essex Street and our boy wasn’t going to turn up in a Lower East Side slum.
So she made me call Information and check on the possibility of a Clayton Bannister in Brooklyn or Queens. The operator was a good sport. She checked. No Clayton Bannister in Brooklyn, none in Queens. Not even one on Staten Island.
So I won the battle and lost the war. I couldn’t get rid of Maddy. She had to come along, had to help me find Armin.
We used the drugstore’s back door in case one of Bannister’s little men was doing a shadow job. We wound up in an alley, followed it to the nearest street and caught the first cab that came by. We hopped into the back seat and I felt like the all-American folk hero, with an arm around Maddy, a hand on the Beretta in my pocket. All I needed was a hip flask.