“Did you hear what happened to Rick Sheridan?” the girl asked.
It was, perhaps, a notable question because all the people who had made all the phone calls during the evening had always-asked: “What happened to Paul Cordell?”
Amanda Kent, Jericho had heard, had been desperately in love with Rick Sheridan. To her Paul Cordell was a nobody, a zero.
To Jericho, Greenwich Village was a small town in which he lived, not a geographical segment of a huge metropolis. He knew the shopkeepers, the bartenders and restaurant people, the artists and writers. He knew the cops. He knew the waterfront people who lived on the fringes of his “village.” The ships and the men who worked on the docks had been the subject matter of many of his paintings. He ignored the new drug culture. He walked the streets at any time of day or night without any fear of muggers. He was too formidable a figure to invite violence.
A little before two o’clock on the morning of Amanda Kent’s phone call Jericho walked into the neighborhood police station and into the office of Lieutenant Pat Carmody. Carmody, a ruddy Irishman with a bawdy wit when he wasn’t troubled, was an old friend. On this morning he was troubled. He was frowning at a sheaf of reports, a patrolman at his elbow. He waved at Jericho, gave the patrolman some orders, and leaned back in his chair.
“I expected you’d be showing up sooner or later, Johnny,” he said. “Young Sheridan was a friend of yours, I know.”
“More than a friend,” Jericho said. “A protégé, you might say. He mattered to me, Pat. What exactly happened?”
“He was painting a portrait of Paul Cordell, J. C. Cordell’s son,” Carmody said. “Damn good from what’s there left to see. You remember the rumble between J. C. Cordell and Reno Roberts?”
Jericho nodded.
“Ever since Roberts’ son was shot by Cordell’s watchmen, Paul Cordell has had a bodyguard — followed him everywhere, like Mary’s little lamb. He was a lamb this afternoon, all right, while Paul sat for his portrait. Wandered off to pour a couple. Hell, there hadn’t been any trouble for two years. Anyway, someone persuaded Sheridan to open his studio door and whoever it was blasted Paul Cordell and him. No witnesses, nobody saw anyone. No one admits hearing the shots. Lot of neighbors at work that time of day. Clean hit and run.”
“And you think it was Roberts’ man?”
“Who else?” Carmody shrugged. “Roberts bided his time, then ordered a kill. Like always, when there’s trouble on the waterfront, Reno was at his house on the Jersey coast with a dozen people to alibi him. Not that he would pull the trigger himself. He probably imported a hit-man from someplace out of the city, somebody who’s long gone by now.”
“No solid leads?”
“You mean something like fingerprints?” Carmody made a wry face. “Nothing. No gun. Meanwhile the town is starting to boil. J. C. Cordell isn’t going to wait for us to solve the case. There’s going to be a war, Cordell versus Roberts. There’s going to be a lot of blood spilled unless we can come up with the killer in the next few hours.”
Jericho pounded on the door of Amanda Kent’s apartment on Jane Street. He could see a little streak of light under the door. Amanda, he told himself, would not be sleeping this night.
She opened the door for him eventually and stood facing him, wearing some sort of flimsy negligee that revealed her magnificent body. Amanda was a model, and stacked away in Jericho’s studio were dozens of sketches of her body, drawn when she had posed for him professionally.
Amanda’s physical perfection was marred now by the fact that she was sporting a magnificent black eye.
“Mr. Jericho!” she cried, her voice muffled, and hurled herself into his arms.
He eased her back into the apartment, her blonde head buried against his chest. The small living room was something of a shambles — liquor glasses and bottles upturned on a small coffee table, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, sketch-pad drawings scattered everywhere. Looking down over the girl’s shoulder Jericho recognized Rick Sheridan’s distinctive technique. Rick had evidently made dozens of drawings of Amanda’s perfections.
Jericho settled Amanda on the couch and passed her the box of tissues on the coffee table.
“What happened to your eye?” he asked.
She gave him a twisted little-girl smile. “I bumped into a door,” she said.
Her face crinkled into grief again. “Oh, God, Mr. Jericho, he was so young, so great, he was going so far!”
“I haven’t come here to join you in a wake,” Jericho said. He was remembering that after you had savored Amanda’s physical perfection you were confronted with a very dull girl who delighted in cliché and hyperbole. “Why did you call me, Amanda?”
“Because I thought Rick’s friends ought to know what happened to him,” she said. “The radio and television are only talking about this gangster who was killed — as if Rick hadn’t even been there. I thought his friends—”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Jericho said. “It wasn’t a gangster who was killed, it was a gangster they think did the killing.”
“Only Rick matters to me,” Amanda said. “Oh, God!” She looked up at him through one good eye and one badly swollen one. “There’s no reason any more for it to be a secret, Mr. Jericho. You see, Rick and I were having a... a... thing.”
“Lucky Rick,” Jericho said. “But spare me the details, Amanda. If you were that intimate with Rick you might be able to supply some information. Who would have wanted to kill Rick?”
Her good eye widened. “Nobody! It was this Cordell man they were after, wasn’t it? Rick was shot because he could identify the killer. Isn’t that the way it was?”
“Maybe,” Jericho said. He appeared to be looking away into the distance somewhere. “But there’s a chance it may have been some other way, doll. Did Rick have a row with anyone? Was there some girl who was jealous of the... the ‘thing’ you and Rick were having?”
“I was everything to Rick,” Amanda said. “There hadn’t been any other girl for a long, long time. Rick didn’t have rows with people, either. He was the kindest, gentlest, sweetest—”
“He had the makings of a great painter,” Jericho said. “That’s the tragedy of it.”
There was the sound of a key in the front-door lock. Jericho turned and saw a huge young man carrying a small glass jar in a hamlike hand.
“Oh, gee, you got company,” the young man said. “How are you, Mr. Jericho?”
Jericho searched for the young man’s name in his memory and came up with it. Val Kramer. He had grown up in the Village and was close to being retarded. There had been moves to exploit his size and extraordinary strength. Someone had tried to make a fighter out of him, but he proved hopeless. Much smaller but faster and brighter men had cut him to ribbons.
He’d been tried as a wrestler, but he was no actor, the key to success in the wrestling game, and his only thought was to crush and possibly kill his opponents. He couldn’t get matches. He was now, Jericho remembered, a kind of handyman and bouncer for a rather disreputable saloon on Seventh Avenue.
“I couldn’t find a meat market open noplace, love,” the giant said to Amanda. He grinned shyly at Jericho. “For her eye, you know.” He advanced on the girl, holding out the glass jar. “Friend of mine runs a drug store on Hudson Street. I got him up and he gave me this.”
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
Jericho saw what it was. There was a wormlike creature in the jar. Long ago leeches had been used to bleed people — the medical fashion of the time — and particularly to suck the black blood out of bruised eyes.
“You must put this little guy on your eye,” Val explained to Amanda, “and he sucks out all the blues and purples.” He was unscrewing the lid of the glass jar, fumbling with his clumsy fingers for the slimy slug.