“Granted.”
“So if you hear of the vice boys pulling any raids on joints around town, try to find out if any of their high-roller arrests had at any time been patrons of Sharron’s shed. How’s that?”
He was rocking again. “Fair enough. I’ll do what I can.” An eyebrow went up. “Now, how about the potshot taken at you? You’re sure it was Dekkert?”
I laughed long and loud. “Natch, chum. Who else but? That punk is laying for me.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
I shrugged. “Make him sweat. Then when I get ready, I’m going to take him down. All the way. As much for what he’s put poor Poochie through as for the shot he sent in my direction.”
Pat looked at me very seriously and spread his hands on the desk. “How can you be so sure it was Dekkert?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
He shook his head slowly. “You could be treading on some mighty sensitive toes here, Mike. After all, you have got yourself a reputation and not a nice one at that. You stand up in front of the wrong judge with one of your self-defense ploys…”
“That’s pleas, Pat.”
“…and you’re going to take a long, hard fall. Say what you will about Dekkert-and I’ll say the same and worse-but he is a cop.”
I blew a half-hearted Bronx cheer.
“Suppose,” Pat went on, “the murderer knew of your antagonism for Dekkert, and used that to remove you both? If Dekkert is not the murderer… and there’s no reason to think he is anything but a bent small-town cop with a grudge against you… then the real murderer could kill you, and suspicion would be thrown on Dekkert. The real killer could take a shot at you and miss, safely knowing you’d go after Dekkert without looking around for anyone else.”
I gave that one some thought. That adding-machine mind of Pat’s again had come up with an analysis that certainly sounded logical enough. But hell, who else but Dekkert would make a sucker play like that? So far I hadn’t garnered anything around Sidon that was worthwhile shooting me over, just some nosing around.
Pat knew enough to let me sit there and mull it over for a while.
Then he said, “After the body was discovered, did the police get over to Sharron Wesley’s place very fast?”
“No. I drove up there immediately. Took fifteen minutes or so getting there, and I fooled around for at least half an hour. After that I was at Poochie’s maybe fifteen minutes before the shot was fired at me, then I carried him back to my car. In all that time there was no sign of the gendarmes.”
“Unless the guy that shot at you was one-like Dekkert, for example.”
“Roger, pal. Now you’re seeing things from my point of view. To me it looks like the local boys didn’t bother going out to Sharron’s, because they knew just what to expect there. According to the leads I got, the entire political regime of Sidon had their fingers in that pie.”
Pat was nodding. “And they couldn’t go out to that casino to investigate without risking exposure of a racket they were into up to their own necks. I get the picture.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a little slow, Pat, but I knew you’d catch up.”
That made him laugh, and he was still grinning as he said, “Okay, Mike, I’ll get some men to work on this end. Suppose I call you tomorrow and let you know what I find out.”
“Fine,” I said, getting up to go. “You can reach me at the Sidon Arms. If I’m not there give the message to Velda. But don’t leave anything pertinent-just say I should call you back.”
“Got it. The walls have ears and eyes.”
“Yeah, and one of these days I’ll give those walls a nice new paint job. Guess what color.”
“You do know I’m a cop, right?”
We grinned at each other, shook hands, and I walked out.
I left the heap in the usual garage and walked the half block to the Hackard Building. Getting in the building required a key that only long-time tenants possessed. There was nobody manning the visitor’s book on Sunday and the lobby was so dead, I was almost surprised tumbleweed wasn’t blowing through.
I took the elevator up to the eighth floor where we kept a two-room suite of offices, and I was fishing out my keys when I noticed the lights on and shadows moving behind the pebbled glass that said HAMMER INVESTIGATING AGENCY.
My keys wouldn’t be needed-the door was a little ajar already. I put them back in my pocket and got the. 45 in my mitt and thumbed the safety off and went in fast and low.
But there were two of them, one going through the filing cabinets to the right, and that gave him the chance to hammer me on the back with clenched hands, sending me face down, hitting the wood floor hard with the rod spilling from my fingers and skittering under Velda’s desk, spinning like a deadly top. Somebody clicked off the overhead lights, and with no windows in the reception area, shadows draped everything and all I could make out as I rolled onto my back were two shapes in baggy suits and hats, one at my right, coming at me with clawed fingers, and the other at the left, going through Velda’s personal filing cabinet, pausing to reach under his arm and that meant a gun would soon be belching flame, and in the wrong direction. I spun to my right and with an underhanded swing jammed four stiff fingers into the belly of the guy who’d slugged me, and he folded up like a card table, only card tables don’t vomit all over the floor when they go down.
The other visitor’s rod was halfway out now, a revolver, and I threw myself at him, in a wild tackle that took him down, bone-jostling hard. The fingers of both my hands found his throat and his face was just a shadowy, reddening, tongue-bulging blur as I strangled him and battered his skull into the floor in fury-fueled overkill and before I could kill the bastard, I got clouted on the back of the head, maybe with a gun butt, and fell with limp, lazy, painless ease, floating down headlong into the temporary death that was unconsciousness.
When I came around, my first thought was to keep my head down, because the Japs were out there, maybe twenty yards away, just waiting for the right target to pop up like at an arcade. I would wait till somebody laid down some covering fire and then and only then I would make a break for it, fleeing from the fox hole into the jungle with a grenade ready to toss back in their goddamn laps and let those evil assholes laugh that off.
But I wasn’t in the jungle. I was on the floor of my office, the reception area. The place had been given a thorough, professional shakedown-only the two drawers they’d been rifling when I’d come in were still sticking out.
Velda would make an inventory that would say whether anything had been taken, but I felt I knew what this was about.
I sat on the couch. It stunk in there. A modern art masterpiece on the floor was where the one guy had puked. My hand found the knot on the back of my skull, but my fingers carried back no blood. They could have killed me, easy, but hadn’t. Absent-mindedly, I got up, knelt down like a kid looking under his bed for his missing dog and retrieved my. 45.
Gun holstered, I sat back down. My head hurt but it wasn’t pounding. I was lucky. And I was almost glad it had happened.
Because now I knew this led back to the city. Now I knew somebody had been called, and that somebody had sent that pair around to check up on my office and see if I left anything of interest lying around.
After I mopped up the vomit, I went into the inner office, opened some windows, and did what I’d come for originally. I called four stoolies around town and asked them what they knew about the gambling operation out on Long Island, outside little Sidon.
Nobody knew anything, but they’d poke around for me.
The headache was getting worse and I washed down half a dozen aspirin with some bourbon. Then I did what any brave, two-fisted detective would do in this situation.
I took a nap on the couch.
I woke around nine and fifteen minutes later I was down on the street, heading for the garage. But a cab cruised by and I impulsively hailed it.