“Tell him to come out here, then,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to him.”
“He said no,” Bill told me doggedly. “This is family business, and you stay out of it.”
And the hell I would, too. I made a big show of reluctant departure, then scooted back down the alleyway to the street, Bill watching me every minute. I turned the corner, went back into the office building and said to the girl, “Mike sent me for a grammit.”
“A what?”
“He told me where it is,” I said, barreling around her desk. “Upstairs in the second flotsam on the right.” I left her gaping at me, went through a door, down a hall, and up a flight of stairs.
I knew these buildings. I probably knew them better than Mike Casale did. He’d only been occupying the place for nine years, and before that it had been empty, and a bunch of car-parts-stealing kids had used it as a base. They’d had hub caps and mufflers and tail pipes hidden all over the place. Fred Hutchinson, of Hutchinson’s Auto Dealers, had hired me to stop the thievery, and as a result of it I’d been all through these four buildings many times.
On the second floor, I turned right and found the wall I wanted, blocked by three high stacks of cartons. I was alone up here. It looked as though the whole crew was next door, tying the knot in the rope.
So I moved the cartons, which took a few minutes I didn’t want to spare and most of my energy as well, and then I poked and pried at the plasterboard that covered the entrance.
Here on the second floor, there was an old enclosed walkway between the two buildings. It had grown too rickety to be safe, way back before the war, so both entrances had simply been covered with plasterboard and the walkway forgotten. This is where the kids had stored a lot of their loot.
By walking very slowly and carefully, precisely in the middle of the walkway, so my weight would be on the main beam, it was just barely possible for a chunky type like me to get across to the other building and lean against the plasterboard over there. Which led me to a dark, dusty, debris-filled, abandoned little storeroom with a solid and very securely locked door. All that physical labor for nothing.
No, not exactly. For I heard Mike Casale’s voice, saying, “...then you guys with Sal go through those ground-floor windows around on the west side and...”
The voice was coming from my right. I headed that way, covered my hand with black crisscrosses by touching a ventilator grill, and said, “Damn!”
Mike’s voice said, “What? What the hell was that?”
Not only could I hear him, he could hear me. And this, come to think of it, might be even better than face-to-face contact. No chance of his tying me up and leaving me here while he and his army went off to raise hell at City Hall.
“Mike!” I shouted.
“Who the hell is that?” he demanded. “Where are you?”
Another voice, fainter, said, “It’s coming from the ventilator, Mike.”
“There’s somebody in the building!” shouted another voice.
“Mike,” I hollered, “this is Tim Smith. I want to talk to you.”
“Find that stupid bastard,” said Mike.
“That’s it, Mike,” I said. “Waste your time. I want to talk to you, and I don’t talk until everybody’s in that one room.”
“Where the hell is he?” cried a voice. “He can see us, for God’s sake!”
Just go on thinking that, buddy, I thought happily, and said, “Let me know when you’re ready to listen, Mike.”
“Come out here and talk face to face, Tim,” he snapped.
“Sure,” I said, and laughed at him.
“If it’s about Ron Lascow,” he said, “you’re wasting your time.”
“And you’re wasting your lives,” I told him. “Ron didn’t kill Joey.”
“How come he’s in jail for it?”
“He’s the fall guy.”
“Crap.”
“You don’t want to make a mistake, Mike,” I said. “You want to be sure you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing,” he said.
“You ought to listen to me, Mike. I know more about this than you do.”
Another voice — Mike’s brother Sal, I thought — said, “We can’t move till after dark anyways, Mike. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
“It won’t make any difference,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. “He’s just covering for Lascow. They’re buddies.”
“I wouldn’t cover for a guy who’d tried four times to kill me,” I said.
“All right,” said Mike. “I’ll listen. Come on out here and talk.”
“I’ll stay here, Mike, if you don’t mind. I trust you, but I think you’ve got some firebrands there.”
“Say what you’ve got to say, then,” he said grumpily. “And don’t stall around forever.”
So I leaned up against the wall, my mouth inches from the ventilator grill, and hollered for a while. I told them that Ron was being framed, and I told them why. I pointed out that the first attempt on my life had been made the night before Ron had even heard about the CCG, and that he and I had talked to the CCG representative together, and Ron had known he had nothing to fear from me.
When I was finished, there was silence for a minute, and I suddenly had the fear they’d all left while I’d been talking, that I was now all alone in this building, shouting out a long story with nobody around to hear me.
Then Mike said, slowly, “How do I know you’re right? You sound fight, you got a good line, but how do I know?”
So he was still there after all. “Because,” I told him, “this is my business. Because I’ve been looking for the killer for the last two days, and if it had been Ron I’d have known about it long before this. And because you know how I felt about your father.”
Another long silence, only this time I could hear the faint buzz of whispering. Then Mike came back. “All right,” he said. “You’ve made your point.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
“One thing,” he said. “We’re still holding the rope. You point the finger, he’s ours.”
I really didn’t care whose he was, so I wasn’t about to argue the point. But there was a way I could now kill two birds with one stone. I wanted Mike to know for sure he could depend on me, and I wanted a side man I could trust more than Art and Ben. So I said, “I tell you what, Mike. You give me Bill, there. He can travel with me, see what I’m doing. And the minute I know for sure who it is, I’ll give him the word. All right?”
The conference was briefer this time, and then Mike said, “You’re on.”
“My car’s in front of your office,” I said.
Twenty-One
Art was alone in the car when I got back. I slid in behind the steering wheel and said, “Where’s Ben?”
“I sent him for some cigarettes.” He grinned and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Lighting one, he said, “I wanted to say one or two words to you in private.”
“What kind of words?”
“Words that wouldn’t get back to Jack Wycza.”
“Such as?”
He seemed to think it over for a minute. At last he said, “I like you, Mr. Smith. I’ve heard some about you, before this, and I like what I heard. Shifty but honest. Everything’s going to get jounced around in this town, but I have the feeling you’re going to come out on top.”
“I hope so,” I said.
He glanced out the window. “I wouldn’t trust Jack Wycza very far if I were you,” he said.
“I don’t intend to.”
“It would probably help if you had somebody close to him, to let you know what’s going on.”