“You called Lucy Mencken this afternoon, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“We’ve got a tape of the whole telephone conversation.”
“It must have been three other guys,” Torr said.
“Where are the pictures?”
“What pictures?”
“The pictures you were using to extort money from Lucy Mencken.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did you follow me the other night?” Hawes asked.
“I didn’t follow nobody any night.”
“You followed me and hit me. Why?”
“I hit you? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Where are the pictures?”
“I don’t know anything about pictures.”
“Were you and Kramer partners?”
“We were friends.”
“Did you kill him to get him out of the set-up?”
“Kill him! Holy Jesus, don’t tie me into that rap!”
“Which rap do you want, Torr? We’ve got a lot of them.”
“I had nothing to do with the Kramer kill. So help me Jesus.”
“We can make it look pretty good, Torr.”
“You ain’t got a chance.”
“Haven’t we? Try us. What’ll you go for? Extortion or homicide?”
“I stopped for a brew,” Torr insisted.
“We’ve got your voice on tape.”
“Try to make that stick in court.”
“Where are the pictures?”
“I don’t know anything about pictures.”
“Why’d you follow me?” Hawes asked.
“I didn’t follow you.”
“The tape said you’d be wearing a brown sharkskin suit. It said you’d be reading the Times. Guess what you’re wearing, and guess what you were carrying.”
“It ain’t admissible in court,” Torr said.
“Who were the big marks?” Meyer hurled.
“I don’t know.”
“Kramer’s bank account had forty-five grand in deposits. Was that only half of it, Torr? Did the total amount to ninety grand?”
“Forty-five grand?” Torr said. “So that’s—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s what?”
“Nothing.”
“Was Lucy Mencken paying more than the five bills a month?”
“Is that all she—?” Torr stopped abruptly.
“Hold it,” Hawes said.
The other men looked at him.
“Hold it a minute.” The light of pure inspiration was on his face. “This son of a bitch doesn’t even know how much Lucy Mencken was paying! I’ll bet he doesn’t even know for what she was paying. You didn’t know there were pictures, did you, Torr?”
“I told you already. I don’t know nothing about it.”
“You son of a bitch,” Hawes said. “You’ve been conducting your own little investigation, haven’t you? You’ve been following the bulls of this squad to get onto Kramer’s marks!”
“No, no, I—”
“The only thing you knew was that there were marks. And with Kramer dead, you figured to latch onto them. But you didn’t know who or how much.”
“No, no, I told you—”
“You followed us to Lucy Mencken and then called her to say you were taking over from Kramer. She was so scared she automatically assumed you knew all about the pictures. That was when she began snooping around, trying to locate them. Kramer was something she knew how to deal with. But you told her there’d be changes, and she didn’t know how far you were planning to go—and so she made a last try to get those photos.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“When you followed me the other night, you were looking for more of Kramer’s marks.”
“You’re crazy.”
“How does this sound, Torr? You knew Kramer had a sweet deal, and you wanted it. You were tired of being a laborer, earning whatever the hell you earned a week. You wanted the big loot. Kramer probably talked a lot about big living. You were green with envy. You got a rifle, and you got a car. And then you—”
“No!”
“You killed him,” Hawes said.
“I swear—”
“You killed him,” Carella shouted.
“No, for Christ’s sake, I—”
“YOU KILLED HIM!” Meyer bellowed.
“No, no, I swear to God. I followed you, yes, almost every one of you, yes, I hit you the other night, yes, I tried to get in on the Mencken squeeze, yes, yes, but Jesus Christ, I didn’t kill Kramer. I swear to God, I didn’t kill him.”
“You tried to extort money from Lucy Mencken?” Hawes asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“You hit me the other night?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Book him for extortion and felonious assault,” Hawes said.
Torr seemed happy it was all over.
16.
IT SEEMED EVIDENT at this point that Lucy Mencken and Edward Schlesser, the soda-pop man, had no further worries. Neither did the third, eleven-hundred-dollar mark who had contributed monthly to Kramer’s checking account. Extending this further, now that Kramer was dead and the sham extortionist Torr exposed, the big mark had nothing to fear, either. The big mark who had furnished Kramer’s apartment, bought his cars, and paid for his clothes, and then swelled his bank account to $45,000 was off the hook. Kramer was dead. No one had inherited his lucrative racket.
Everybody should have been extremely happy, and perhaps they all were. Everybody but the cops.
Kramer was dead, and someone had killed him, and that spelled homicide. And the cops still didn’t know who or why.
Every post office in the city had been checked, as well as every bank. Unless Kramer had kept a box under an unknown alias, it seemed fairly certain the documents were being kept elsewhere. Kramer was a precise man who kept bills going back as far as last September. It did not seem likely that he would have been sloppy in the matter of keeping important papers and photographs. But where?
His apartment had been searched by a crew of four detectives who worked for two days going over every inch of the place. Nancy O’Hara’s presence did not help the search. She was a mighty pretty girl, and cops are human. But the search was nonetheless a thorough one, and it turned up neither the missing documents nor a key to a possible deposit box somewhere in the city.
“I don’t know,” Carella said to Hawes. “The whole goddamn thing seems to have bogged down.”
“He’s got to have them someplace,” Hawes said.
“Where? He doesn’t belong to any clubs.”
“No.”
“He hasn’t got a summer place, just that one apartment.”