“Why ‘particularly now’?” I asked.
He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. “I don’t want to believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe it. But there’s a leak somewhere. Stuff that’s coming to me from confidential sources is getting out.”
“That’s impossible,” Kathy said quietly.
She’s the one who handles everything. Information comes to Mike from every conceivable source; from people he pays and from people who volunteer it. It comes from hat-check girls and society matrons, from bartenders and bank presidents, from punks and chiselers and ministers and statesmen. Some of it is usable and some of it isn’t. Some of it is fact and some of it is just plain filth. But all of it is on file.
To protect himself, Mike makes a record of every piece of information that comes his way, the exact hour and minute and place where he received it, and whom it came from. There’s material in that file that would blow thousands of people sky-high if it was ever released. The file was kept in a modern vault in his office off the library.
I don’t think the vault could be broken into. It certainly never had been. It was never left carelessly open, Kathy had access to it. I had access to it. Kathy knew everything that was in the file. I could find out if I wanted to. There was just us.
“All right, all right; stop looking sore,” Mike said to me. “If I can’t trust you and Kathy I’d better blow my brains out. But there has been a leak, all the same.”
“Look,” I said. “A guy gives you a piece of information. It gets out somehow. He blames you. But maybe he told other people, or maybe someone else knew.”
“Of course,” Mike said. “I figured that angle, Vance. I figured it had to be that way. Stuff has been getting out and I have been blamed for it, but I shrugged it off. Then last night I got it between the eyes from Joe Ricardo.”
Joe Ricardo is what the newspapers like to call an “Overlord of the Underworld.” He’s a smooth, tough guy who, so far as I know, has been able to keep clean of the law — but he’s not to be fooled around with, all the same.
“Ricardo has heard the rumor that I was leaking stuff,” Mike said. “Get this — he heard I was using private information for purposes or blackmail. He thought if the racket was big enough, he could give me protection. For a price, naturally.”
“Mike, how absurd!” Kathy said.
Joan just sat there, looking down at her hands.
“Ricardo framed me,” Mike said evenly. “He rigged up a story. It was an item on Ed Johnson, the producer. He and Johnson are friends. You know the item, Kathy. It’s in the file — about Johnson and Ricardo’s girl.”
Kathy nodded.
“Johnson was approached yesterday with a blackmail demand on the basis of that item,” Mike said.
“By whom?”
“A phone conversation. A man. Johnson couldn’t identify the voice. But you see where that leaves us? They planted the story with us to see if it would leak, and it did.” He looked around at us. “How?”
I didn’t have an answer. Neither did Kathy or Joan. It wasn’t possible.
“My whole life, my whole career, depends on my handling the information I get with integrity,” Mike said.
“The leak isn’t here,” I said. “The leak is at the source somewhere.”
“We have to prove that, Vance. We have to prove it or we’re in bad trouble.” He pushed back his chair. “And we aren’t going to do it sitting here.”
Then I remembered McCuller and Rand. “You’ve got to see those guys in the library,” I said. “A homicide dick and an assistant D.A.”
“What about?” Mike asked.
I took a deep breath. “It seems somebody caught up with your ex-son-in-law last night.”
“Waldo?”
I could see it all flash behind his eyes — the anguish Erika’s unhappy marriage had caused him, the way he hated Waldo Layne’s guts.
“I don’t know any of the details,” I said.
I saw Kathy look from Mike to Joan. Joan was staring down at her hands, motionless, almost as though she’d heard none of it.
Mike put out his cigarette in the ash tray on the table. “Let’s go talk to them,” he said. He started toward the door, and then turned back to Kathy, whose face had suddenly gone very white. “Find out where Erika is,” he said. “I’m worried about her.”
As nearly as I can make out, Waldo Layne had always been a heel. He grew up in a family with money, and he never went without anything he wanted until he was a grown man. He went to the best schools and to a famous Ivy college. He was an athlete of sorts, and might have been really good if he’d had the proper temperament. But he was a show-off from the word “go.” Once he intercepted a forward pass and ran 40 yards for a winning touchdown against Princeton. He would describe the play in detail without any encouragement whatsoever. Some remote disability kept him out of the Army. Then his family lost all their money and Waldo was on his own. He fiddled around, trying to be an actor, but he didn’t have the talent for it. He finally wound up being a kind of glamor-host for a night spot on the East Side. He carefully cultivated women with money.
It was in his capacity as host at the night spot that he met Erika. Mike took her there one night on his rounds. I don’t know what she saw in Waldo. She could pick and choose her men. Waldo had something for her, that’s all. The marriage came as about the biggest shock Mike ever had. He and I had gone to Chicago to cover a political convention, and when he came back Erika and Waldo met us at La-Guardia with their little announcement. Mike never showed them by the turning of a hair how he felt, but he took it hard when I was alone with him.
Waldo had no money. Mike put up the dough for a charming little apartment on the East Side. Waldo gave up his job and tried to chisel his way into Mike’s act. On that Mike wouldn’t give an inch. The truth was he couldn’t have anybody on his staff he couldn’t trust. Nobody trusted Waldo. He would turn up from time to time with items for Mike, obviously expecting to be paid for them. They were rarely usable, and, besides, every cent Waldo spent came indirectly from Mike.
It lasted about a year, until Erika began coming home in a state from time to time, once with a black eye. Waldo was drinking and he had begun to chase around after other dames. The marriage came to a breaking point and Mike whisked Erika out to Reno, where she got a divorce. Since then she’d been living at home again, and Mike was relatively at peace. He was never happy when she was very far out of his sight...
In the library it was Rand who told us what had happened. McCuller seemed satisfied to sit back and let the assistant D.A. do the talking. Waldo was living in a cheap theatrical hotel just off Broadway. About 3 in the morning the hotel clerk got a phone call from a woman, who wouldn’t give her name, saying there was something wrong in Waldo’s room. The clerk and the house detective went upstairs, and found Waldo lying on the floor with a bullet hole between his eyes. There was no gun, and the homicide squad hadn’t turned up anything in the way of a clue.
“The Wakefield hasn’t a very savory reputation as a hotel,” Rand said. “Layne could entertain anyone he chose at any time of day or night, as long as his bill was paid. Of course the management denies this, but it’s true. We figure the woman who made the phone call was someone who came to see Layne early this morning, found him dead, slipped away, and phoned from outside. We haven’t any kind of a lead to her.”
Mike stood during the whole recital, his hands locked behind him. His face was frozen in a fixed expression of detachment, almost as if he weren’t listening. But when Rand finished he spoke.