The Lieutenant grabbed.
I turned to Reed. “You’ve heard about Miss Mantell?”
“Yes.”
“Mixed up with your kidnapping.”
“Yes, so the Lieutenant told me.”
Suddenly I couldn’t hear too well. I said, “Pardon?”
“Yes,” he said. “So the Lieutenant told me.”
I tightened my face at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Little hard of hearing.”
“I said, ‘So the Lieutenant told me.’ ”
I’d heard about as much as I wanted to hear. I jumped him. I didn’t wait. He was big, and I wanted the first punch, and I got the first punch, but he took it standing up, and then he let loose a few of his own. From the corner of my eye, I saw Parker jump up, and I heard him roar: “Here. Stop it. Break it up. What the hell is going on here?”
By then we were mixing it like a couple of wild preliminary pugs. I slipped by a couple of lefts, but he punched too hard on one of them, and he was wide open, and I was in perfect position, and I came up with one off the floor, with all of my weight behind it, and it caught him clean on the button. His feet left the floor going up, and his head caught a corner of Parker’s desk coming down, and he went into a deep freeze, and he was going to stay frozen until someone warmed him up.
“Man, you’re nuts,” Parker roared. “This time, you’ve really gone and done it.”
“Precise moment,” I said.
“That’s assault and battery, and this guy’s important. You’ve popped your cork this trip, fella.”
“Precise moment,” I said.
Parker bent to him. “Here. Help me get him up. You’ve flipped your wig, pal.”
“Stay away from him, Louie.”
Parker peered up at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Precise moment,” I said.
“What the hell is this mumble you’ve gone into?”
“Greek philosophy. I’ll come to it. In due time.”
“What’ll you come to first?”
“A couple of answers to a lot of questions that you and I have been throwing about, Lieutenant.”
He straightened up. “Like which?”
“Like... why I was shot at in that graveyard... and shot up in my apartment. Like... why Sandra Mantell was killed. Like... why she called me in the first place. Like... why that gun had fingerprints...”
“Okay. Okay. One at a time.” Parker had lost interest in the stiffened Abner Reed.
“Let’s take the last one first, Lieutenant. Fingerprints on a gun. A guy dropping it when he collides with a dame. Does that sound like a professional?”
“No.”
“If it rules out a professional... what does it rule in?”
“An amateur.”
“Very good, Lieutenant?”
“So...?
“Let’s do it right side up now. Here’s a guy, Abner Reed — married himself a large hunk of dough — but he can’t reach too much of it... because she’s... frugal, that’s the word... frugal.”
“So...?”
“So... on the suggestion of a friend of his — Miss Sandra Mantell — and you’ll find, I’m sure, with a good deal of digging — that those two had a close sub rosa association—”
“Never mind what I’ll find out. Let’s get this over with first.”
“On her suggestion — for a hunk of the proceeds — they figured out a beauty. The guy would kidnap himself. Remember Uncle Harry? The first call? Whom did he talk to? Abner Reed, nobody else. Remember the wife, Florence Reed? Whom did she talk to the next morning? Abner Reed, nobody else.”
It was beginning to come to Parker. “Yeah,” he said, “Yeah...”
“He knew his wife. He knew how much in love she was. He knew she’d pay, and play ball. Which she did.”
“Which explains the shooting at the cemetery too.”
“Of course. He played it alone. And I had heard his voice. I was a loose remnant. So he brought a gun with him. Knock me off, and it’s all clear. He missed, so he tried again, at my apartment, and that time, he almost made it.”
“Yeah,” Parker said. “And then, when he had this appointment with Sandra, and he wouldn’t pay...”
“She called me, and she knew whom to call, because she was in it from the beginning, and they had picked me. She called me...”
“But he’d followed her home, and when he heard what she was up to, he finished her off. Cleared the last loose remnant.”
I shook it off. “Precise moment,” I said.
“What the devil is this ‘precise moment’ pitch you’re on?”
“A fragment of time in connection with a fragment of space... creates the precise moment.”
Parker scratched a stubby finger against his crew-cut. “How’s that?”
“I came here with the little black book. It undoubtedly contains nothing more than the names of her boyfriends, but that doesn’t matter now. I came at that fragment of time that Abner Reed was here, occupying this fragment of space.”
“Meaning?”
“If both wouldn’t have coincided, perfectly, this guy’d be off for a year in Europe, and by then, that voice would no longer be fresh in my memory, and your Abner Reed snatch would have gone down in the books as another unsolved crime. Ecstatic and catastrophic.”
“Wha’...? What’s that last?”
“From my Greek philosopher. Ecstatic for us, catastrophic for him. Bye, now. I’ve got a date.”
“That good, huh? Who’s the date?”
“The Greek philosopher.”
His forehead creased into many wrinkles. “Greek philosopher? Not you. You’re a guy for dames.”
“Bye, Lieutenant.”
As I went for the door, and he bent to the stricken Abner Reed, I could hear him mumble: “Oh, that Peter Chambers, go figure that guy, unpredictable Peter...”
Graveyard Shift
by Steve Frazee
Dozing in front of the microphone in the radio dispatcher’s office, Joe Crestone blinked groggily when one of the heavy side doors downstairs whushed open and then started rocking back to center. Since midnight the building had been dead still.
The footsteps swung out briskly on the tiles of the lobby. They made quick taps on the steel steps leading up towards the dispatcher’s room. Crestone was wide awake. The clock on the radio reeled up another minute. It was 2:17. He swung his chair to face the counter.
She was close to six feet. Her hair was dark, her eyes soft brown: She wore a fur jacket and under that a green woolen dress caught high at her neck with a silver clasp. Her smile was timid. “I–I thought Mr. Walters would be here again.” She studied the work schedule of the Midway police department on the board.
“He’s got the flu. It was my day off so I’m sitting in for him.”
“I see.” She stared at the maps on the wall. “I–I just don’t know exactly how to start it.”
She was white and scared. Crestone let her make up her mind. On the model side, he thought, the kind who pose in two thousand dollar dresses. Plenty of neck above the silver clasp, more gauntness in her face than he had observed at first.
“Hit and run deal?” he asked, eyeing her sharply.
Before she could answer, state patrol car 55 checked in from Middleton, eighteen miles north on Highway 315. A woman dispatcher in Steel City read a CAA flight plan to Bristol for relay to Cosslett. Webster came in with a pickup-and-hold on a 1949 blue Chev with three men. Crestone sent out the information on the pickup-and-hold.
When he swung to the log sheet in the typewriter at his left, she asked, “Do the state cars patrol the old highway from the boarded-up brick works east toward Steel City?”