CHAPTER ELEVEN
By the time I rolled into Sidon, it was damn near midnight. The long day was getting to me again and I’d almost nodded off a couple of times behind the wheel, thanks to the endless gray ribbon of highway cutting down the Island.
Best thing now was to sit down with Velda, compare notes and make a game plan for tomorrow. With what I’d learned in the city, and whatever she picked up at that roadhouse, we’d be ready to head down the home stretch.
But at the Sidon Arms, when I called her room from the house phone, I got no answer. That didn’t raise a red flag, since I’d dispatched her to gather intelligence at the hotel’s cocktail lounge and that jive-jumping roadhouse. So it would be no surprise if she got back well after midnight.
I was heading up the stairs with the intent of hitting the rack good and hard when a hoarse male voice called out: “Mike! Hold up there!”
I turned and saw Doc Moody, looking desperate and disheveled, stumbling out of the bar, trying to work up some speed. He was flushed and his hands were clawing at the air, like he was trying to climb an invisible ladder.
He met me at the bottom of the stairs, his white hair askew, his eyes wide and red behind the wire-rim glasses. Not surprisingly, he smelled like he’d fallen into a beer vat.
“Poochie’s gone, Mike! Gone! They grabbed him!”
Moody wasn’t slurring-in fact he was over-enunciating-and he was more upset than drunk. But he was drunk enough.
I could have slapped the old fool, but instead I kept my head and said, “Slow it down, Doc. Come on. Let’s sit over here and you tell me all about it.”
I walked him over to a threadbare couch and we sat. A droopy potted plant next to him seemed to eavesdrop.
His voice was breathy and rushed. “Mike, I just stepped out for a minute… just to… just to run an errand…”
His breath made evident just what kind of errand he had run.
“I’ve been keeping Poochie in my little spare room… nice little quiet room… and he’s hardly stuck his nose out. He’s been scared, Mike. So goddamn scared of Dekkert and his bunch. I told him he could listen to my radio, he could go fix himself food in the kitchen, any time he wanted, but no, he’d just stay in that little spare room. I’d take his meals in on trays and-”
“Doc, skip the crap. What happened?”
He was shaking his head, close to hysteria. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back. Waiting and watching.”
From the hotel bar.
“The point, Doc. Get to the point.”
“About…”
He looked at his wrist watch and did a comic routine, trying to make his eyes focus, that would have been a riot if this were goddamn burlesque.
“…about an hour ago. Little more. I come back from that… that errand? I come back, gone an hour, maybe two, and that little spare room, it was topsy-turvy. Everything turned upside down. And he was gone! Poochie was gone.”
Damn.
I asked, “Did the room look like it had been searched? Drawers sticking out, closet in disarray? Were they looking for something?”
“No! They were looking for Poochie! The mess was from a struggle. From them taking him. Mike, there was blood on the floor.”
“How much blood?”
“Drops. Just drops. They didn’t beat him or kill him at my place, I don’t think… they just, just took him…”
“Who took him?”
He shook his head, ashamed. “I don’t know. It has to be the police, doesn’t it? Dekkert and his thugs?”
I nodded glumly.
The red rheumy eyes were full of tears. “Mike, I’m sorry, Mike… I let you down. I didn’t mean to let you down…”
“It’s all right,” I said. “You just go on home. No more drinking, Doc, not tonight. Just go home, get some rest. I’ll let you know tomorrow how it came out. I’ll want you clear-eyed then, okay?”
“Yes, Mike… yes…”
He was sitting there when I left, just a dejected slumped shape in a rumpled suit, with his white hair ruffled, his glasses crooked on a blood-shot nose that was a sorry beacon in his grooved yet puffy face, while his red eyes stared into nothing.
If anybody was to blame here, though, it was me. Me for entrusting Poochie’s care to an old rummy like the Doc, and not keeping closer tabs on both jailer and his charge. Not that I’d had a lot of options in Sidon among people I could trust.
But another on that short list was Big Steve.
I flew out of the front door of the hotel into a night that had turned chilly with breeze enough to make me tug down my hat and turn up my collars. It was like winter was changing its mind about letting spring take over, and summer was out of the question.
What was good about the temperature drop was how it woke me up, slapped me to alertness, not that the Doc’s news about Poochie hadn’t already done that. I crossed a street devoid of traffic and headed for the diner on the way to the police station. I got out the. 45, flicked off the safety and racked one into the chamber. The idea was to see if Big Steve wanted to back my play-I wasn’t sure how many cops would be on duty at the station, and I planned to go in there hard and heavy.
That Pollack hated the corruption in his town, and I would bet my back teeth he had a weapon handy to take to the party, whether a sawed-off or a baseball bat. And he had sons, sons as big as he was, who might wade in with me.
I would be checking every alleyway as I went, but my idea was that right now Poochie would be in a back room of the Sidon station, getting the classic Third Degree treatment, rubber hose and all. I would feed that rubber hose to Dekkert, and kick Chiefie’s ass to Kingdom Come…
But as I neared the diner, which blazed with lights indicating it was still open, despite the hour, I saw through the long wide windows two figures in blue uniforms seated at the counter, the only customers. I saw Big Steve, too, down the counter, minding his own business, wiping away with a rag.
And even turned away from me, those two blue backsides could only belong to Sidon’s top-ranking excuses for police-Chief Beales and Deputy Dekkert.
That stopped me so cold in my tracks I damn near fell on my face. It was highly unlikely these two exemplars of the law would have grabbed Poochie from the doc’s, then gone to the diner for a bite while letting somebody else handle the back-room interrogation.
What the hell?
Wind whispering in my ears but not making its message plain, I eased the. 45 back under my arm but left the coat unbuttoned as I went up the couple of steps into the box-car diner. I settled onto the stool next to the chief, with Dekkert next to him.
As if I didn’t notice who my counter mates were, I called out, “So this is a twenty-four-hour joint, huh, Steve?”
Big Steve gave me a grin that lifted his black handlebar mustache halfway to his eyes. As he turned to wring out his rag in the sink, he said, “Open till midnight, Mike. Not closing for another five minutes. Fix you up with a burger or a dog maybe?”
“I’ll have a slice of that apple pie and some coffee.”
“Comin’ right up, my friend.”
Both Chief Beales and Dekkert were giving me frozen sideways glances. Theirs were the kind of open-yapped expression the driver of a car wears when he sees the truck about to hit him head on.
“Gentlemen,” I said with a friendly nod. “Little late for the town’s top cops to be finishing up a shift, isn’t it?”
Neither said a word. They still just looked at me, Beales with popping eyes in that fat thick-lipped face of his, bullet-headed Dekkert staring out of eyes like small black buttons sewn on his face. Funny-seeing me made Beales turn red and Dekkert white, almost as white as the half-dozen bandages that seemed haphazardly applied to that once handsome face his blobby nose had ruined.
Those bandages were smaller than when last I’d seen Dekkert, but still a nice reminder of what I’d done to him in that alley. And later at the police station.
As genial as Fibber McGee, I said, “I was just on my way over to the station to report a crime.”