As I slowed down just short of the Sheridan, it pulled next to me and the man next to the driver waved me over to the curb. I pulled into a loading zone just across the street from the hotel and climbed out of the car. The blue sedan double-parked next to me and emitted its spare passenger at the same moment.
The sedan bore nothing to identify it as a police car, but the man who got out immediately flashed a badge. He was a middle-aged heavy-set man with a bull neck and a face nearly as flat as Mouldy’s Greene’s.
“If Inspector Day set you on my tail, he didn’t tell you to get in my hair,” I snapped at him. “Check with Day later, if you want, but don’t try to stop me now.”
One or two passersby had stopped to gape at us curiously. The bull-necked man paid no attention to them, but held his coat wide so they could not fail to see his badge, and suddenly drew a short-barrelled gun with his other hand.
“Get in the back, Buster,” he ordered.
“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I’m on my way to prevent a murder witness from getting killed. Come along if you want, but if you delay me, Warren Day will have your scalp.”
There was a click as the hammer of the short-barrelled gun drew back. And a sudden thinness about the man’s lips warned me he would have no compunction about squeezing the trigger.
A trigger-happy cop, I thought with a sense of shock. The guy wants an excuse to shoot somebody.
Opening the sedan’s rear door, I got in the back.
As the heavy-set man climbed in next to me, still holding me under his gun, I said, “Don’t blame me if you end up walking a beat.”
“All right, Slim,” my arrester said to the thin-faced man behind the wheel, and the sedan moved away with a purr of power.
It was not till then that I got it.
“Oh,” I said, glancing down at the cocked gun. “I forgot you could buy tin badges in a dime store.”
“You catch fast, Buster. Just hold still now.” His left hand reached across and patted me beneath the arms and at the waist. “No artillery, huh?”
“I didn’t realize anybody was gunning for me,” I apologized. “I’ll start wearing some tomorrow. What did you do with Miss Moreni?”
“Something happen to Miss Moreni?”
The way he asked it made me think he actually didn’t know. There was a note of doubtfulness in his voice, and had it not been for the cocked gun pointing unwaveringly at my stomach, I might have gotten the impression he was upset at the thought of anything happening to Fausta.
As the car moved forward again, he said, “Speak up, Buster. What gives with Miss Moreni?”
It was my turn to regard him thoughtfully. “You really don’t know?”
“Buster, we sat in front of your apartment house since six A.M., and we’d have grabbed you when you came out at eight if Slim hadn’t gone to sleep when he was supposed to be watching. By the time he woke up you were pulling out of the garage and there was nothing we could do but tail you. Ever since we been parked across from Police Headquarters. We don’t know from nothing about Miss Moreni.”
I asked, “Why are you interested?”
His expression grew irked. “I’m going to ask once more, Buster, then put a slug in your guts. What’s with Miss Moreni?”
It did not seem to me that suppressing the story was worth a slug in the guts so I told him.
By now we were driving through Midland Park, presumably in search of a quiet spot where they could dump my body, or give me a going over, or do whatever else they had in mind. My stocky seat-mate surprised me by suddenly ordering the driver to turn around.
Nosing onto a bridle path, Slim expertly backed the cat and headed it back the way it had come.
“Hold it,” the heavy-set gunman said before the car started forward motion again. Then to me, “All right, Buster. Out you go.”
I looked at him without understanding, but when he waggled his short-nosed revolver at me, I opened the door on my side and climbed out.
“Push it shut again.”
Pushing it shut, I stared at him through the window.
“Keep your nose clean, Buster.” As the car shot forward, I heard him say, “Back to the Sheridan. And don’t spare the horses.”
They had left me approximately a mile inside the park on the road going past the Art Museum. I started to walk to a bus line.
When I got off the bus across the street from the Sheridan, my watch told me it was exactly thirty-two minutes since my heavy-set friend had abandoned me in the park. I saw no sign of the blue sedan, but my Plymouth stood where I had left it in the loading zone, unchanged except for a bright pink ticket attached to the windshield wiper.
A crowd was gathered on the sidewalk outside the Sheridan, and a uniformed cop tried to stop me from entering the Lounge.
“Sorry, sir,” he said in the mechanical manner of one who has been repeating the same phrase over and over. “There’s been an accident and the bar is closed.”
Just beyond the cop I saw the straw-hatted figure of Warren Day, an unlighted cigar in his mouth thrust upward at an angle as he peered down sourly at a sheet-covered figure lying on the floor. I was conscious of a number of other people wandering around the barroom, but Day was the only one I really saw before my eyes touched the motionless figure, and after that I couldn’t even see him.
I said, “I’m with Inspector Day,” and when the cop didn’t move aside at once, put my hand against his chest and pushed.
“Hey!” he said, staggering back.
“Take it up with the inspector,” I snarled at him, strode over to the sheet-covered figure and glared down at it.
The inspector watched silently as I fell to one knee and tenderly lifted an edge of the cloth. The body beneath the sheet was as dead as a body can get. Lips were drawn back in a grimace of agony and the face had a faintly bluish cast.
But it was not Fausta. It was a man I had never in my life seen before.
Dropping the sheet, I slowly rose and looked at Warren Day. He simply looked back at me, not even scowling for a change. Then he jerked his head sidewise at a corner of the room.
Turning, I saw one of the most welcome sights I have ever seen. Seated at a table with her back to me, calmly smoking a cigarette, was Fausta, and hovering over her in the belligerent manner of a mastiff guarding a bone was Mouldy Greene.
A half-dozen quick steps took me to the table. Sinking my fingers in her blonde hair, I jerked back her head, leaned over and planted a solid kiss on her lips.
“That’s for nothing,” I growled at her. “Scare me like this again and I’ll beat hell out of you.”
She looked up at me from round eyes, for once startled into quietness. Then she touched her lips where mine had bruised them and a wicked expression grew on her face.
“You kissed me,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Mouldy, did you see?”
“Yeah, I saw. Where you been, Sarge?”
“Later,” I said. Rounding the table, I sat across from Fausta. “Let’s have the story, Fausta. All of it, including who the dead man is.”
Warren Day pulled out a chair and wearily sat down also.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s have it. All I’ve been able to figure out so far is the dead guy is one of the waiters.”
X
Fausta’s story was brief and not very enlightening. In response to my supposed request, she had arrived at the Sheridan just before ten, dismissed her cab and asked the head waiter for me. The head waiter informed her Mr. Moon had phoned he would be a few minutes late and left instructions for her to take a table for both of them.
At ten in the morning a table was no problem, for the cocktail lounge was built to accommodate two hundred, there were less than thirty customers in the place, and half of these were at the bar. Fausta chose the corner table where we were sitting now.