No, Murray wasn't dead. The city was big enough to hide even him. He'd show sooner or later. Pat would have covered that angle, and right now there'd be a cop watching every bus terminal, every train station. I bet they'd see more rats than Murray trying to desert the sinking ship.
The rain had turned into a steady drizzle that left a slick on the pavement and deadened the evening crowd. I turned north with the windshield wipers clicking a monotonous tune, and stopped a block away from Lola's apartment. A grocery store was still open, and the stack of cold cuts in the window looked too inviting to pass up. When I had loaded my arms with more than I could eat for a month, I used the package to shield my face and walked up to her place.
I kicked the door with my foot and she yelled to come in. I had to peek around the bundle to see her stretched out on the couch with her shoes off and a wet towel across her forehead.
"It's me, honey."
"Do tell. I thought it was a horse coming up the stairs."
I propped the package in a chair and sat down on the edge of the couch, reaching for the towel. She came out from under it grinning. "Oh, Mike! It's so good to see you!"
She threw her arms around my neck and I leaned over and kissed her. She was nice to look at. I could sit there all day and watch her. She closed her eyes and rubbed her hair in my face.
"Rough day, kid?"
"Awful," she said. "I'm tired, I'm wet and I'm hungry. And I didn't find the camera."
"I can take care of the hungry part. There's eats over there. Nothing you have to cook either."
"You're a wonderful guy, Mike. I wish..."
"What?"
"Nothing. Let's eat."
I slid my arms under her and lifted her off the couch. Her eyes had a hungry sparkle that could mean many things. "You're a big girl," I said.
"I have to be... for you. To the kitchen, James." She scooped up the bag as I passed the chair and went through the doorway.
Lola put the coffee on while I set the table. We used the wrappings for plates and one knife between us, sitting close enough so our knees touched. "Tell me about today, Lola."
"There isn't much to tell. I started at the top of the list and reached about fifteen hock shops. None of them had it, and after a few discreet questions I learned that they never had had it. A few of the clerks were so persuasive that they almost made me buy one anyway."
"How many more to go?"
"Days and days worth, Mike. It will take a long time, I'm afraid."
"We have to try it."
"Uh-huh. Don't worry, I'll keep at it. Incidentally, in three of the places that happened to be located fairly close to each other, someone else had been looking for a camera."
My cup stopped half-way to my mouth. "Who?"
"A man. I pretended that it might have been a friend of mine who was shopping for me and got one clerk to remember that the fellow had wanted a commercial camera for taking street pictures. Apparently the kind I was after. He didn't look any over; just asked, then left.."
It was a hell of a thought, me letting Lola run head on into something like that. "It may be a coincidence. He may have shopped just those three places. I don't like it."
"I'm not afraid, Mike. He..."
"If it wasn't a coincidence he might shop the other places and find that you were ahead of him. If he guessed what you were doing he could wait up for you. I still don't like it."
She became grim then, letting a shadow of her former hardness cloud her face for an instant. "Like you said, Mike, I'm a big girl. I've been around long enough to stand any guy off if he pulls something on the street. A knee can do a guy a lot of damage in the right places, and if that doesn't work, well... one scream will bring a lot of heroes around to take care of any one guy no matter how tough he is."
I had to laugh at that. "O.K., O.K., you'll get by. After that speech I'll even be afraid to kiss you good night."
"Mike, with you I'm as powerless as a kitten and as speechless as a giraffe. Please kiss me good night, huh?"
"I'll think about it. First, we have work to do."
"What kind, I hope... ?"
"Look at pictures. I have a batch of pics Nancy had tucked away. They're pictures and I paid for them, so I'll look at them."
We cleared the mess off the table and I went in for the box. I took them out of the box and piled half in front of Lola and half in front of me. When we took our seats I said, "Give every one a going-over. They may mean something, they may not. They weren't where they should have been, that's why I'm thinking there might be something special in the lot."
Lola nodded and picked a snapshot from the top of her pile. I did the same. At first I took in every detail, looking for things out of the ordinary, but the pictures followed such a set pattern that my inspection grew casual and hurried. Faces and more faces. Smiles, startled expressions, deliberate poses. One entire group taken from the same spot on Broadway, always the same background.
In two of them the man in the picture tried to shield his face. The camera was fast enough to stop the motion, but the finger on the shutter trigger was too slow to prevent him getting his hand in the way. I went to put one back on the discard pile, looking at it again carefully and put it aside instead. The portion of the face that showed looked familiar.
Lola said, "Mike...
She had her lip between her teeth and was fingering a snap. She turned it around and showed it to me, a lovely young girl smiling at a middle-aged man who was frowning at the camera. My eyes asked the question. "She was one of the girls, Mike. We... went on dates together."
"The guy?"
"I don't know."
I took the snap and laid it face down with the other. Five minutes later Lola found another. The girl was a poetic creature, about thirty, with the statuesque lines of a mannequin. The guy she was with could have been a standin for a blimp. He was short and fat, in clothes that tried to make him look tall and thin and only made him look shorter and fatter.
"She's another one, Lola?"
"Yes. She didn't last long in New York. She played it smart and married one of the suckers. I remember the man, too. He runs a gambling joint uptown. Some sort of a small-time politician, too. He used to call for her in an official car."
It was coming now. Little reasons that explained the why. Little things that would be big things before long. My pile was growing nicely. Maybe every picture on the table had a meaning I couldn't see. Maybe most were just camouflage to discourage hasty searchers.
I turned the snap over, and lightly pencilled on the back near the bottom was "See S-5." There was more to it than the picture, evidently.
Could it be nothing more than an office memo... or did Nancy have a private file of her own?
My breath started coming in quick, hot gasps. It was like seeing a half-finished picture and recognizing what it would be like when it was finished. If this was an indication... I pulled the remaining photos closer and went to work on them.
The next one came out of my deal. I got it because I was lucky and I was hating some people so damn hard that their faces drew an automatic response. The picture was that of a young couple, no more than twenty. They smiled into the camera with a smile that was youth with the world in its pocket and a life to be led. But they're weren't important.
It was the background that was important. The faces in the background. One was that of my client, his hand on the knob of a door, a cane swinging jauntily over his arm. Behind him was Feeney Last in a chauffeur's uniform, closing the door of the car. It wasn't just Feeney, it was the expression on his face. It was a leer of hateful triumph, a leer of expectancy as he eyed a guy in a sports outfit that had been about to step past him.