“Yeah, I will,” O’Brien said. Into the phone he said, “I’ve got two red VWs, Bert, a sixty-four and a sixty-six. You want them both?”
“Shoot,” Kling said.
“The sixty-four was stolen from a guy named Art Hauser. It was parked outside eight-six-one West Meridian.”
“And the sixty-six?”
“Owner is a woman named Alice Cleary. Car was stolen from a parking lot on Fourteenth.”
“North or South?”
“South. Three-o-three South.”
“Right. Thanks, Bob,” Kling said, and hung up.
“And ask her to come home to me,” Mrs. Blair said.
“Yes, I will,” O’Brien said. “If I see her, I certainly will.”
“That’s a nice picture of Penny, don’t you think?” Mrs. Blair asked. “It was taken last Easter. It’s the most recent picture I have. I thought it would be helpful to you.”
O’Brien looked at the girl in the picture, and then looked up into Mrs. Blair’s green eyes, misted now with tears, and suddenly wanted to reach across the desk and pat her hand reassuringly, the one thing he could not do with any honesty. Because whereas it was true that he was the squad’s runaway expert, with perhaps 50 snapshots of teenagers crammed into his bulging notebook, and whereas his record of finds was more impressive than any other cop’s in the city, uniformed or plainclothes, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for the mother of Penelope Blair, who had run away from home last June.
“You understand—” he started to say.
“Let’s not go into that again, Mr. O’Brien,” she said, and rose.
“Mrs. Blair—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Mrs. Blair said, walking quickly out of the squadroom. “Tell her to come home. Tell her I love her,” she said, and was gone down the iron-runged steps.
O’Brien sighed and stuffed the new picture of Penelope into his notebook. What Mrs. Blair did not choose to hear again was the fact that her runaway daughter Penny was 24 years old, and there was not a single agency on God’s green earth, police or otherwise, that could force her to go home again if she did not choose to.
Fats Donner was a stool pigeon with a penchant for Turkish baths. A mountainous white Buddha of a man, he could usually be found at one of the city’s steam emporiums at any given hour of the day, draped in a towel and reveling in the heat that saturated his flabby body. Bert Kling found him in an all-night place called Steam-Fit.
Kling sent the masseur into the steam room to tell Donner he was there, and Donner sent word out that he would be through in five minutes, unless Kling wished to join him. Kling did not wish to join him. He waited in the locker room, and in seven minutes’ time, Donner came out, draped in his customary towel, a ludicrous sight at any time, but particularly at 3:30 A.M.
“Hey!” Donner said. “How you doing?”
“Fine,” Kling said. “How about yourself?”
“Comme-ci, comme-ca,” Donner said, and made a seesawing motion with one fleshy hand.
“I’m looking for some stolen heaps,” Kling said, getting directly to the point.
“What kind?” Donner said.
“Volkswagens. A sixty-four and a sixty-six.”
“What color?”
“Red.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes.”
“Where were they heisted?”
“One from in front of eight-six-one West Meridian. The other from a parking lot on South Fourteenth.”
“When was this?”
“Both last week sometime. I don’t have the exact dates.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who stole them.”
“You think it’s the same guy on both?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s so important about these heaps?”
“One of them may have been used in a bombing tonight.”
“You mean the church over on Culver?”
“That’s right.”
“Count me out,” Donner said.
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a lot of guys in this town who’re in sympathy with what happened over there tonight. I don’t want to get involved.”
“Who’s going to know whether you’re involved or not?” Kling asked.
“The same way you get information, they get information.”
“I need your help, Donner.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry on this one,” Donner said, and shook his head.
“In that case I’d better hurry downtown to High Street.”
“Why? You got another source down there?”
“No, that’s where the D.A.’s office is.”
Both men stared at each other — Donner in a white towel draped around his belly, sweat still pouring from his face and his chest even though he was no longer in the steam room, and Kling looking like a slightly tired advertising executive rather than a cop threatening a man with revelation of past deeds not entirely legal. They stared at each other with total understanding, caught in the curious symbiosis of law breaker and law enforcer, an empathy created by neither man, but essential to the existence of both. It was Donner who broke the silence.
“I don’t like being coerced,” he said.
“I don’t like being refused,” Kling answered.
“When do you need this?”
“I want to get going on it before morning.”
“You expect miracles, don’t you?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Miracles cost.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five if I turn up one heap, fifty if I turn up both.”
“Turn them up first. We’ll talk later.”
“And if somebody breaks my head later?”
“You should have thought of that before you entered the profession,” Kling said. “Come on, Donner, cut it out. This is a routine bombing by a couple of punks. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
“No?” Donner asked. And then, in a very professorial voice, he uttered perhaps the biggest understatement of the decade. “Racial tensions are running high in this city right now.”
“Have you got my number at the squadroom?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Donner said glumly.
“I’m going back there now. Let me hear from you soon.”
“You mind if I get dressed first?” Donner asked.
The night clerk at The Addison Hotel was alone in the lobby when Carella and Hawes walked in. Immersed in an open book on the desk in front of him, he did not look up as they approached. The lobby was furnished in faded Victorian: a threadbare Oriental rug, heavy curlicued mahogany tables, ponderous stuffed chairs with sagging bottoms and soiled antimacassars, two spittoons resting alongside each of two mahogany paneled supporting columns. A genuine Tiffany lampshade hung over the registration desk, one leaded glass panel gone, another badly cracked. In the old days The Addison had been a luxury hotel. It now wore its past splendor with all the style of a dance-hall girl in a moth-eaten mink she’d picked up in a thrift shop.
The clerk, in contrast to his antique surroundings, was a young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a neatly pressed brown tweed suit, a tan shirt, a gold and brown rep tie, and eyeglasses with tortoise-shell rims. He glanced up at the detectives belatedly, squinting after the intense concentration of peering at print, and then he got to his feet.
“Yes, gentlemen,” he said. “May I help you?”
“Police officers,” Carella said. He took his wallet from his pocket, and opened it to where his defective’s shield was pinned to a leather flap.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m Detective Carella, this is my partner, Detective Hawes.”
“How do you do? I’m the night clerk — my name is Ronald Sanford.”
“We’re looking for someone who may have been registered here two weeks ago,” Hawes said.