Now he casually collared the miniature cabbie, held him with his feet dangling six inches off the ground and asked, “What about this guy, Sarge?” The Sarge was a holdover from army days, and I had given up trying to break him of the habit.
“Put him down,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything.”
Stooping, I felt for pulse in the prone man’s wrist, but found none. He was lying on his chest, both arms flung forward, and there were bloodstains immediately beneath each armpit, indicating the bullet had passed entirely through him from right to left.
The man lay on one cheek, a thin, austere looking face turned in the direction of the club entrance. In the dim light cast by the neon sign “El Patio” immediately over the bronze doors, I again thought I detected something familiar about his appearance, but it eluded me.
Then I walked over to the steps, which by now were packed by at least twenty people. Others, still half inside, held wide the big double doors, and behind them crowded a solid pack of customers straining to see what was going on. I had never thought my experience as a first sergeant during the war would be of any value in civilian life, but after all the intervening years I finally found a use for one thing I had learned. Summoning up my old parade ground voice, I boomed, “Everybody back to their tables! ON THE DOUBLE!”
The whole crowd jumped like people do after a thunder crash. Then they meekly turned and filed back inside, leaving only Fausta and the doorman on the steps. The doorman eyed me nervously and seemed inclined to follow the customers inside where there were no homicidal maniacs running loose.
Fausta turned her big brown eyes on me. “What happened, Manny?”
“In a minute, Fausta,” I said. I looked at the doorman, an imposing figure in the maroon uniform of a Central American general. “Seems to me you called yonder corpse by name. Who is he?”
He swallowed, finally got out, “Mr. Walter Lancaster, sir.”
My hair nearly turned white. Being innocently involved in a murder is bad enough. Having one witness, and possibly two, convinced you are the killer is even worse. But when the victim is the kind whole assassination will cause deepseated political repercussions and make headlines all over the country, you are, to put it mildly, in an unpleasant spot.
Walter Lancaster was lieutenant-governor of our neighboring state, Illinois.
At twenty-seven Fausta Moreni is one of the richest women in town, but when I first met her during the war she was a nineteen-year-old penniless refugee from Fascist Italy, frightened and alone in a strange country. Most of America’s Italian immigrants have come from Sicily and southern Italy, but Fausta was from Rome. While she is as dark as her southern countrywomen, her skin is a creamy tan instead of the sultry olive possessed by most southern Italian beauties, and her hair is a gleaming natural blonde.
Fascinated partly by her Latin explosiveness and comic opera accent, and partly by what I took to be her defenselessness in an alien land, I went overboard for her like a moonstruck teen-ager in spite of having attained the sophisticated age of twenty-four. All during the war I carried her picture in my pocket and a vague plan for a vine covered cottage in my heart.
But when I finally returned from overseas plus a long period in a V. A. hospital, nearly five years had passed and Fausta had outgrown my mental image. Only traces of her accent lingered, and in place of a naive and dependent teen-ager I found an assured young career woman well on her way to parlaying her culinary genius into a fortune. When I recovered from the shock I found I was just as much attracted to her as ever, but I no longer felt like much of a catch.
Fausta insisted it made no difference who had the money, the husband or wife, but it did to me.
Though long ago we tacitly dropped the subject of marriage, it pleases her to pretend she pursues me hotly, and to go along with the game I make a pretense of trying to struggle off the hook.
When I hung up after having called Inspector Warren Day, Fausta said in a small voice, “Tom says you shot that man, Manny.”
“Tom?”
“The doorman. He said he saw it.”
“He saw an optical illusion,” I told her. “I never commit my murders in front of witnesses.”
Her brow puckered in concentration. “I could tell him not to say anything in front of the police, but he told it in front of all those customers on the steps.” Then she brightened. “I was outside when the shooting happened. I had just left the side door from the ballroom and was walking around to the front entrance for a breath of air. I will say I stepped out to meet you and we were making love in the bushes when the shot sounded. Then the police will think it must have been another person he saw.”
“I didn’t shoot the guy,” I said irritably. “Someone fired from behind a bush right next to me. Incidentally, I came out here for dinner, but once the cops get here it may be hours before I get a chance to eat. How about rustling up a fast sandwich?”
“Food!” Fausta said. “You shoot a man and it makes you hungry! I should think instead you would want to kiss me good-bye before they take you off to jail.”
She looked at me expectantly and I said, “Roast beef, if you’ve got it. And a cup of coffee.”
“You are a corpse yourself,” she said without heat, and lifted her desk phone to order.
II
I was munching on the sandwich when the police arrived. I took my sandwich in one hand and my coffee in the other and followed Fausta out to the dining room.
We arrived just as Inspector Warren Day, trailed by his silent satellite, Lieutenant Hannegan, and two uniformed cops, entered. Day’s spare figure, attired in a shapeless seersucker suit, halted just inside the archway. Ducking his skinny head to peer over thick-lensed glasses, he slowly swept his eyes over the assembled hundred or so diners until all conversation stopped. Then he suddenly jerked off his flat straw sailor to disclose a totally bald scalp.
In a booming voice he announced, “I’m Inspector Warren Day of Homicide! Anybody here know anything at all about this?”
When a half minute had passed without any volunteers stepping forward, he said, “You’ll find a cop at the door with a half dozen note pads so several of you can write at once. Sign your names, addresses and telephone numbers and go on home.”
Then, belatedly realizing there were probably innumerable influential people in the crowd, he turned on a fierce smile which apparently he meant to be ingratiating. “Sorry if anyone was inconvenienced,” he said grudgingly. “We got here as fast as we could.”
As the crowd began to file past the inspector and his party, Day turned to snap something at Hannegan. The inscrutable lieutenant merely nodded, never being one to waste words where a gesture would serve, and left the room. I guessed Day had instructed him to repeat the performance in the other two rooms.
Then the inspector began to work his way through the crowd toward us. But halfway he stopped and grasped a dinner-jacketed man by the sleeve. The accosted man, a handsome fellow of about thirty, shrugged off the inspector’s hand impatiently.
“Not so fast!” Day roared, then said something to one of the uniformed cops with him.
Scowling at the man belligerently, the cop dropped a meaty hand on his shoulder and pushed him over toward, the far wall, where he fixed him with a watchful eye and simply waited.
“Who’s that?” I asked Fausta as the inspector again began his approach.
“Barney Seldon.”
“The gangster from across the river?”
“I believe Mr. Seldon is a businessman,” she said with odd primness.