“Well, he caught it this time,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “Looks like he’ll be out of circulation for a while.”
The three of them took the elevator down together. Danny went through with his formal arrest, while Sanger kept sniveling and wanting nothing except a hospital. As for Mitch, he was busy batting a bunch of ideas around in his head, and chiefly where was Borsky.
The clerk, whose name was Vince something, was about as awake as he was ever going to be, and that was halfway back to last Tuesday. He swore he’d been on the job every minute and that nobody had come into the hotel during the last hour or so.
Mitch shut him up fast. “I did,” Mitch said.
So it was pretty clear that anybody could have come in and out of the hotel any time after midnight. The question was whether Borsky had, and why he’d left his door unlocked.
Mitch couldn’t see Borsky leaving the hotel and walking around town for the fun of it, particularly if he needed protection, so he was either hiding out in the hotel somewhere, or else he was gone, and for good. But either way, somebody was loose with a hammer and wasn’t using it to drive in any nails.
A lot of times you don’t really figure things out, you just go ahead and do something, and then later on it adds up and you find out why you did it. That was how it was now when Mitch asked for a list of all the single dames who were registered in the hotel. While he was waiting, Mitch called home and told Amy that everything was okay but he probably wouldn’t be back until some time tomorrow, tomorrow being today, if she knew what he meant. After that Mitch began making his calls to the list Vince handed him, and Mitch came out with the same question each time, until it got kind of monotonous. “Is Bill there?” he kept asking.
On account nobody likes the phone to wake them up around three or four in the morning, everybody didn’t exactly cooperate. A couple of females, they just cursed him out. A few of them said, “Bill? Bill who?” Two of them got real mad and said, “There’s no Bill here, never was, and never will be,” and then slammed down the receiver. One dame, she just kind of whistled and then cut him off, but in the end Mitch had six names checked off. He looked at them for a while and then for no reason he knew of he crossed out two of them. After that he went upstairs to 807.
Borsky must have emptied his pockets and gone to bed last night, and then for some reason got up later on and dressed. Mitch could tell all that from the rumpled bed and from checking on Borsky’s clothes and from the pile of stuff he’d stuck in the night table, like his wallet and a little book of addresses and some bills and other stuff. There were some professional cards with the name Vladimir Borsky engraved on them, and then there was another card that said, “In case of accident please notify.” The name to be notified was Mary O’Shaughnessy, along with her address and phone number, so Mitch went and called her.
She started off in a voice, while it was maybe a little sleepy, it made you want to get over there and see what she was like. Mitch could kind of see her singing some good old Irish songs while Bill played the piano, and that was how they must have got started. But after Mitch explained who he was and what he was after, her voice sharpened up like a chain saw and he had to hold the receiver back from his ear on account he was afraid he’d break an eardrum.
“Calling me up three o’clock in the morning!” she yelled. “You’re a no-good cop and you use the phone to ask dumb questions on taxpayers’ money, and they ought to dock your salary, which you’re probably not earning in the first place. And where Bill O’Shaughnessy is, with his high-sounding Russian name and they ought to send him there and he’d find out he’d ought to kept the name he was born with, and it’s a good Irish name and what’s better? And who the hell are you and what did you say your name was?”
“Taylor.”
“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself, waking me up in the middle of the night. Is that all you got to do? Getting respectable people out of bed at three in the morning and bothering them with all those dumb questions about my husband, and he ought to be tied up on the back porch and fed bread and water. Where did you say he was?”
“I’m trying to find out.”
“If you know Bill O’Shaughnessy and got half the brains you were born with, you’ll go down to the nearest brothel and you’ll find him trying to get them at half price, or maybe on sale at two for one, and you’d better stop bothering me or I’ll get you fired. Who did you say you were?”
Mitch hung up. Borsky had his problems all right, but they had nothing to do with Mitch. He’d found out what he wanted to know, so he put the door on chain and lay down on the bed and went to sleep.
Borsky showed up around nine the next morning. His right-hand thumb had a bandage on and he looked kind of tired, but then he always did. Except for the thumb and he hadn’t shaved, everything seemed okay.
Mitch gave him the silent treatment, and Borsky frowned, cleared his throat, and looked in the closet and then in the night table, and you could tell he was unsure of himself and trying to make up his mind what this was all about. He finally hit on what to say.
“Anything happen?” he asked.
“Not much.”
That stopped him. He cleared his throat again and finally decided to come out with his end of last night’s business.
“I got scared after I called you,” he said. “I figured I was a sitting duck. I was alone here, anybody could come in, and I didn’t know how long it would take you to get here. I heard noises out in the hallway and I thought I’d better beat it and let you handle things.”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
“You see, things have been piling up on me. My wife, these threats, my concert coming up tonight — I had to be alone. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Mitch didn’t answer.
“I found an empty room down the hall, so I went inside and locked the door and went to sleep. I just woke up. Anything happen here?”
“Who is she?” Mitch asked.
“She? What do you mean?”
Mitch picked up the list of names he’d weeded out and tried the first one. It was the Eberly female, and he read off the name. “Adele Eberly. She the one you slept with?”
That did it. Borsky kind of sucked in his breath and acted like he’d been caught snitching a can of beans in a supermarket. “How’d you know?” he asked.
“I got ways,” Mitch said, using his standard answer.
“Adele wants to marry me, if she can get a divorce. She saved me last night.”
“She leave home for you?” Mitch asked. “Her husband — is he the guy that’s after you with a hammer?”
“That’s right.” Borsky held up his hand as if he remembered it for the first time. “I hurt my thumb,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight. I can’t play like this. Maybe my thumb’s broken.”
“Get hold of a doc,” Mitch said, thinking of how Amy would feel if the concert got canceled. “He’ll fix you up.”
“I don’t know. Not with a thumb like this.”
Mitch grabbed the guy by the shoulders and shook him. “Look,” Mitch said. “You’re going to play tonight. I don’t give a damn if that thumb kills you or if you never play again, but you’re going on tonight and you’re going to be good, and if you try to welch, you’ll get the kind of cop-beating you hear about. I never done it, but it would be a pleasure to try, so you and me are going to see a doc.”
“I’ll just stay here and rest up,” Borsky said.
“The hell you will. You got to do something for that thumb, and I know the guy who can do it.”
He called the dispatcher and got hold of Doc Sapaniel, who was the police surgeon, and Mitch explained the situation and asked who the best man in town was, and Sapaniel said it was Benjamin Farmer, he knew all about thumbs, he handled fighters at ringside, you could bust a thumb or a whole hand, and in the time between rounds he had you fixed up and back in there punching.