“What else on Billings?”
“Briefly, his last address was a midtown hotel and the name a phony. He was traced back through two others, but no further.”
“Source of income?”
“His latest room had an assortment of bum dice and new-but-marked decks of cards very cleverly packaged and stamped. He was a sharpie. A few receipted bills and match covers placed him working cheap places around here and in Jersey.”
“Ten years,” I said. “All that time under my nose and I never got near him.”
“Be happy, chum.” He flipped his pages over and scanned them, picking out pieces of information. “One thing more. I found a couple of shills he played with before he died. He was talking about having a roll waiting. He was going into big time. Nobody paid any attention to him right then.”
I thought a moment, remembering how Billings operated in the Army. “Was he flush when he played?”
“Those shills said he always had enough risk capital to entice some nice fat bankrolls.” He looked at me and put his notes away. “Now let’s hear what you have to say,” he said softly.
I shook my head at him. “This is stupid. Everything’s doubling back. It starts and ends too fast. You sure you got everything on Billings?”
“Yeah.” I waved the waiter over for a beer and then knocked half of it off in a long pull. “I’m going to guess a little bit here, but see how it works out.
“Billings was a funny guy. He used to say he’d wait for the big one to come along if he waited all his life. He foxed me out of ten grand in the army and when I got out of the guardhouse, he’d been discharged. He hung onto that roll and used it as sucker bait for his rigged games. I doubt if he took anybody for too much. That would have spoiled it. Those games were listening posts waiting for that big one. All he’d bother to make would be living expenses.
“Then a guy named Juan Gonzales, who was a small time pay-off man for a friend of mine, must have sat in, saw the roll and talked up horses. He even got Billings passed into the rooms. Matter of fact, the night he was killed he had twelve G’s on him.”
Art let out a slow whistle. “He was clean when he was found.”
“Nobody would let that lay around, kiddo. It could have been a motive for his death.”
“For twelve G’s he could get a firstclass ride in this town, not just a plain mugging.”
I said, “Now listen... this Juan Gonzales had been killed a couple weeks earlier. Before he got it he was talking big money to his common-law wife, then he got scared spitless for some reason, showed up with ten grand, handed it to her and went out and got bumped.”
“I remember the case. Front page. He had just...”
“That’s the guy.”
“In other words, your point is that in either case the motive could possibly be robbery.”
“Yeah, only it isn’t. First because I’m in and next because there’s a lid on the deal. It’s real stupid. Everything doubles back. You sure you have everything on Billings?”
“He was buried at the city’s expense and the only bunch of flowers came from the Lazy Dazy Flower Shop. The graveyard attendant remembered the name. If you want him exhumed, dig him up yourself.”
“Sure.” I threw a buck on the table. “Keep in touch.”
My watch said 9:55 and I was tired. I found a cab outside, got off at my corner and started up toward my apartment.
The first pitch came from Pete-the-Dog who sold papers with a broken-throated growl. It came again from Mamie Huggins who waited until I passed by to put out her garbage and it came again by low whistle from the shadows across the street.
Two of them. Unknowns. They were waiting in my apartment.
I came through the back way Papa Manny always used when the police raided the old love factory he ran. I picked up the .45 from the shelf, cocked it under my arm so the click of the hammer was inaudible and stood there in the dark until my eyes were used to it.
One stood looking out the window. The other sat right in front of me and he was the one I put the cold snout of the gun against. I said, “Be at ease, laddies. You move and you’re dead.”
I stepped inside and prodded my boy. He got up obediently and walked to the wall. The other one got the idea and did the same. They both leaned against it while I patted them down and waited while I flicked on the light. Then I dumped the shells from the Cobras they carried in belt holsters and laid them on an end table. They both were too mad to spit.
The guy from the window I knew. I had met him a few days ago up in that apartment far above the city. The other was a new face. That one looked at me coldly, then to the gun. “You have a license for that?”
I grinned at him. “Let’s say a poetic one, cop. I signed a piece of paper up there the boss man says allows me certain liberties.”
“There’s only one copy and it can be torn up very easily.”
“Not for a simple fracture like this, you slob. Now knock it off. If you’re so damn dumb you can’t break and enter without being spotted you ought to join the fire department.”
The other one said, “Lay off, Ryan.”
“Okay,” I said. “So let’s hear what’s going on and get out.”
He hated me silently and then put on his blank face again. “To be simple about it, we’d like a progress report.”
I said, “Nobody told me anything about this junket. I got sent off cold. What do you expect from me?”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“How did you contact Billings?”
“We didn’t. He came to us. He had something to sell.”
“Like what?”
“We don’t know. It was international in scope and big enough to cause a muss in this country. Our people overseas picked up information that there was trouble in high places. It was from there that we found out that Billings was a key figure.”
“Somebody has quite an organization,” I said.
“It’s as big as ours.”
“Go on.”
“Billings apparently overplayed it. He wanted to sell what he had. We decided to go along. We assigned four men to keep him protected... top men, I might add. They worked in teams of two and both teams were killed. Four good men, Ryan, highly trained, killed like rank amateurs. It was Billings who found the last team. He called and said he was getting out and that was when he told us about you.
“He got out, all right. He was as cute as you with a trick dodge. He didn’t last very long, though. He caught it that night.”
“Nothing was in the paper about those boys getting killed.”
“That was easy enough to fix.”
“Yeah.” I walked across the room and pulled a cold beer from the cooler. “Tell me... Billings wasn’t dead when he was found. What did he say?”
I watched their faces. They couldn’t help it, but their eyes touched, briefly.
“Okay, Ryan, you’re sharp. He wasn’t dead. He said it was Lodo. That’s where we got the name. We have nothing else on it.”
They didn’t know and I didn’t tell them that another dead man had known Lodo. How many more?
I said, “One more thing... was any money found on Billings?”
His voice was a little too flat. “What do you mean?”
“The police reports say he was clean. It earmarked a robbery.”
“So?”
“What happened to the twelve grand?”
My friend held his mouth tight. “How did you know about that?”
“I get around.”
Before he could answer, it came to me. It was all backwards and wrong, but it could make sense to them. I said, “If you’re thinking I sold him something for twelve grand, you’re gone, man. You just loused your picture up. Now I’m reading you R5-S5. You pigs conned me into taking on a kill job with hopes of hanging me. All this while I had in the back of my mind I was doing something that could make you idiots look jerky and because you asked me to at that. In fact, a couple of times I caught myself enjoying doing something straight for a change. Brother, what a sucker I was!