She nodded. “Will you be gone long?”
“Can't tell. I'll see you at work tonight, anyway.”
“Johnny, please be careful-”
“Sure, ma. Sure.” He finished dressing with Sally forlornly trailing him around the apartment; he left hurriedly before she could tie him up in further conversation. On the street he whistled for a cab going in the opposite direction, and it made a sweepingly illegal U-turn and came back and picked him up.
At the precinct stationhouse he ran up the worn white stone steps of the old red brick building and nodded to the incurious uniform at the door. Inside he turned left on oil-darkened wooden floors and walked down a narrow passageway that widened into a large room whose front section was taken up by a massive desk, head high. Johnny returned the inquisitive stare of the white-haired figure enthroned behind the desk.
“Yis?”
“Lieutenant Dameron.”
“And who wants to see him?”
“Killain.”
“What about?”
“The lieutenant might tell you if you asked him.”
Thin lips tightened as the old man picked up the phone. “Sweeney, Lieutenant. A fresh moose by the name of Killain says-” He broke off to listen, leaned forward in his chair, and replaced the phone silently. “Inside. Second door on the left.”
He knocked on the second door on the left, and a chair scraped noisily inside and a bolt snicked back in the lock before Jimmy Rogers opened the door. Johnny stood on the threshold and looked in at the blackboard walls and the battered desk and mismatched chairs. A single desk lamp illuminated the gloomy room.
“Come in, come in!” Lieutenant Dameron barked irritatedly from the interior shadows, the big body sprawled loosely in a swivel desk chair. He beckoned with the half-filled glass in his hand.
“You boys afraid of a raid?”
A chair was kicked in his general direction. “Don't like to be interrupted when I'm drinking. I've given the dear taxpayers their dollar's worth today.” The red-faced man nodded to the chair. “Park it.”
Johnny remained standing. From the looks of the half-empty bottle on the desk and the overflowing ashtrays this war council had been a lengthy one. “I came by to see if your offer to sign up was still good, Joe.”
Lieutenant Dameron set down his glass and leaned forward over his desk to look at Johnny more closely. “You're serious?”
“Yeah.”
A five second pause. “Say please.”
Johnny focused his eyes on a point two and a half feet over the lieutenant's head. “Please.”
Lieutenant Dameron grunted in surprise. “Down on your knees, Jimmy. The world is positively coming to an end within the next twenty minutes, I'd say.” He leaned back in his chair, picked up his glass, and took a swallow from it. “I'm a little curious over this switch.”
Johnny remained silent, and the frosty gray eyes studied him carefully above the rim of the glass before switching to the watching Detective Rogers.
“Jimmy? What do you think?”
“He's already given us about all we have to date, if you look at it one way,” the sandyhaired man said mildly. “And knowing him, I don't think he'd walk in like this empty-handed.” He grinned at Johnny. “Course, as to why, that's your problem, Lieutenant. I imagine you'll get the due-bill later.”
The gray eyes came back to Johnny. “All right,” the lieutenant said suddenly. “Against my better judgment, but all right. We've been sitting here getting knots on our head. You got anything for the pot?”
“I've got a candidate good for a laugh, anyway.”
“I could stand a good laugh right about now.”
“I think it's Fearless Freddie.”
“Freddie? You mean the manager, Frederick? Is he the one you were hinting at the other night when you called me and asked me if I'd checked out the help?”
“He's the one. I got to admit he's not much of a candidate, for looks.”
The ruddyfaced man tipped back in his chair, forehead creased. “You can play that contract vulnerable, redoubled. Still… Jimmy, what did we turn up on him?”
Detective Rogers spread his hands widely. “Almost nothing, literally. Hotelman all his working life, never in any trouble, unless you call a divorce trouble. I went through his folder from end to end.”
“You got a picture in that folder?”
Lieutenant Dameron's eyes swiveled from Johnny to Rogers and back again.
“No picture,” the slender man admitted.
The lieutenant's voice was mild. “You think we should have a picture, Johnny?”
“I'll tell you why I think so. This week there was a guest at the hotel who knew Ronald Frederick when he managed a hotel in the south. She went by the office and sent her name in, but he was too busy to see her, even to say hello.”
Jimmy Rogers shifted in his chair. “So we could have a bogus Frederick? I'd have to say possible-”
“-but not probable,” Johnny finished. “I know.”
Lieutenant Dameron's heavy voice broke the little silence. “Do you have anything substantial on him, Johnny?”
“I know he got his feet wet. After the fracas in the kitchen the other night, I followed him upstairs and listened in on him. He was shook, but good. He called someone and resigned from the human race, most especially from the information furnishin' branch of it.”
“Maybe we're getting somewhere,” Lieutenant Dameron said thoughtfully. “Any chance he made you listening in?”
“No way he could.”
“Who'd he call?”
“Didn't mention names,” Johnny said. “I had the switchboard alerted, but the gal missed it somehow.”
“Why did you call me that night asking if I'd checked on him?”
“Because after he'd listened to you buildin' me up in his office that afternoon, he popped up to my room on the late shift and bummed me for a drink. He sat in my place and apologized almost on his knees for taking me strictly for an oversized rigidity before on the strength of what he'd heard around the hotel. He asked about four dozen questions, gave every sign of a man about to hurdle the gap with some kind of proposition, and then said goodnight and tiptoed down the hall.”
Johnny looked around for the chair he had ignored originally and sat down in it. He looked from one to the other of his silent audience. “There's one more thing. When he backed off that night on the proposition-if he ever actually was goin' to make one-it figured that if he was in the chain of command he'd turn in a bad report card on me, in which case I was due to hear a noise.” He smiled and leveled a finger at the lieutenant. “I came out of the phone booth after callin' you, Joe, which wasn't ten minutes after that happened, and I was spread all over the sidewalk. So did he have a goon squad in his pocket waitin' for me? Or didn't he have anything to do with it at all? I haven't been able to make up my mind.”
The lieutenant nodded slowly. “I heard about that sidewalk caper, second or third hand. Fact is, I had a little talk with the party who thought two or three whacks with a gun butt would stop your clock, even temporarily.”
“It damn near did, mister. I thought his friends got him away.”
“They did, but the doc they took him to got palpitations. He didn't report it officially, you understand, but he reported it.”
“You got 'em everywhere, haven't you, Joe?”
“You were spread all over the sidewalk.”
“Yeah. I almost quit on Freddie then, because my first reaction was that it happened too quick for him to have had much of anything to do with it. I'll admit, Joe, for a while I thought he might be your original walkie-talkie.”
“My original walkie-talkie seems to have dismaterialized.”
“Permanently?”
“No body. Yet.”
“Cement takes care of that.”
“It does. I think, though, that someone, scared him.”
“Seems to be a well organized crowd, Joe.”
“Too damn well organized. That's why I can't see Frederick. He doesn't look like he could organize the ladies' aid society.”