“But he was tight.”
“He was okay when I saw him come in. Then he stood by that little bar in the corner with Red and this fellow Nolan. I see them drinking and talking, real close together.”
“Then what?”
“Next time I look one of the crap-table operators is helping him leave the room. He can’t hardly walk. Must have been drunker than I figured.”
“What did Nolan do?”
“He stayed at the little bar. He was there when I left.”
“You leave early?”
“Maybe two o’clock.”
“Any others left besides Nolan?”
“Couple others. All the help yawning in their faces. Everybody tired. Slow evening.”
I thanked him and left. The cold lump in my gut that had settled there when George had told me the story, felt colder and heavier than ever. I began to figure the details from the rough outline. It was a dirty business.
The head of the service department act Townsend’s garage was a white-headed banty rooster of a man, with grey eyes like chilled rivets. My card impressed him not at all.
“The police looked at that car, fella. Don’t know as it’s any of your business.”
“Does it make it my business if I tell you that that car belongs to me, Pop?”
“Don’t call me Pop. Your car, you say?”
“Yeah. The driver was my brother. I’m his heir.”
“You kidding me, fella?”
“When I waste my time kidding a beat-up old citizen like you, I’m unemployed! Now where the hell is the car?”
He looked for a minute as though he would make something of it. A burly mechanic drifted up behind me and I stepped to the side. But the old guy turned and said, “Come on, then.”
The car, a forty-six Buick, was a mess. I could tell at a glance that it would never roll on a highway again. Maybe a few of the parts would but that was all.
There were dark stains on the dash. I looked in where the door had been. I looked carefully at the rounded front of the dash, at the top of the wheel and at the door handles. I slipped the old guy a buck for no good reason. I felt better about what to do next and how to handle it.
I checked my watch. Two-thirty. I grabbed coffee and doughnuts and then found a taxi willing to haul me out to the Mill House. I had him wait a minute while I phoned Wandowski in a drug-store booth. I started to leave the booth, then turned back and phoned George. It took me ten minutes to make it clear to him what he had to do. He agreed but tried to tell me I was nuts. I slammed the receiver on the hook while he was still talking.
When I came out the taxi driver said, “That was a long minute, Bud.”
“It’s a long day,” I answered. He let that pass and in a few minutes we were humming out the route toward the Mill House. I was staking it all on a long shot, but I figured that my assumptions were safe. And they made me ill when I thought of them.
The Mill House looked shabby by daylight, a squarish stone building with a battered water-wheel turning slowly under a muddy waterfall. The bright neon wasn’t turned on. There were two cars in the lot, one a garish convertible which I guessed belonged to Red, and one heavy old Packard sedan. As the taxi turned into the lot, I could see around the corner of the building the long, low gambling shed in the back.
I told the driver to wait. Told him that if I didn’t come out in twenty minutes to highball back to town and bring a platoon of cops. He turned startled eyes toward me and said, “Hey! Maybe I hadn’t better wait.”
I counted out two fives and handed them to him. “Five for waiting and five for worrying. Head it toward the road, keep your motor running and don’t let anybody get too close to the cab.”
I walked up to the front door and shoved it open. Two of Red’s employees stood there. They had apparently been unstacking the tables. The small dark one walked up to me and held his hand out, palm up. “Let’s have the arsenal, Kirk.”
I bowed and laid it on his palm. “You people go to too many movies, chum. Who are you today — Alan Ladd?”
He smirked and slid my gun into his side pocket. His partner, a beefy citizen with a brush cut, stepped up and patted me lightly in the proper places.
Just then a door behind the bar swung open and Red Wandowski walked out. He had an open grin on his good-looking face. With his snub nose, Hollywood tan and crisp blond hair, he looked like the polo expert without his horse.
He increased his stride and walked over to me, hand outstretched, a look of sympathetic concern on his face. “I thought you’d be around, Rich. I’m damn sorry about your brother.”
I took his hand and hoped mine wouldn’t feel too cold. I wanted him on my side, at least for the moment. “Thanks, Red. It was a bad deal. Rob was a good kid. I’ve got to ask some questions.” I looked around uncertainly at the dull faces of his two boys.
“Sure thing, boy. Come on up to the office.”
“How about my gun. Your boys took it.”
He grinned and said, “You’ll get it back when you leave. House rule. Sorry I can’t make you an exception.”
I shrugged and followed him back through the door behind the bar and up a flight of narrow stairs. He turned to the right and we walked into a sunny spacious office, furnished in maple, with the upholstery and drapes in soft pastels. The windows overlooked long rolling fields with heavy woods in the far background. His desk was a high colonial job set against the wall. The hunting prints on the walls looked authentic.
I sat on a comfortable couch. He flipped a cigarette case open and offered me one. We lit up and he sank with a sigh into an arm chair near the windows.
“I don’t want to bother you for long, Red, but...”
“Take your time, boy. I won’t be busy until about five. Only three-thirty now.”
“Okay, thanks. You see, the thing that bothers us about this is that it was out of character for Bob. He never loaded up on liquor and he seldom gambled. It doesn’t make sense somehow. How did lie act?”
Warren examined the end of his cigarette and said, “Hard to tell about people. He acted nervous and upset. I have to look for those things. We can’t stand trouble out here. You know that. He came back and had a couple of quick ones at the bar. Then he slid up beside the guy handling the crap table near the bar. He bet quietly and pretty heavy, with his hands shaking. When he was down about fifteen hundred he went back and had a couple of double scotches. He shot another thousand on one pass, lost, had some more drinks and acted like he was going to pass out. I had one of the boys get him out to the car.”
“Did he come back in after a couple of hours?”
“No. I figure he left the car, then sneaked back and got the babe out of the car somehow, then drove off. He wasn’t in shape to drive.”
“Sounds like the kid had been in some kind of trouble.”
“Sure, short in his accounts or something. Too bad.”
A half-grown cat strolled through the open door and jumped up into Warren’s lap. It settled down, purring, as he rubbed it gently behind the ears. The phone rang and he reached behind his chair and took the receiver. I tried not to look tense. I listened to his casual, “Warren speaking,” and then saw him sit bolt upright. The cat stood up and he punched it off his lap with a big fist. It yowled and streaked out the door.
I listened as he said, “Yeah... I understand... but why call me, you fool?... No... I’ll hang it on you, sure as hell... Who did?... Kirk... That’s dandy.”
He slapped the phone back and yanked a small automatic out of a belly holster. He held it on me and his eyes were small and dangerous.
“Nice work, Kirk. You know who that was?”
“No.”
“You made a mistake. That was Nolan. They let him call me from the station. They’ve been working on him.”
I had a peculiar mental picture of how much talking Nolan could do in his present condition. I imagined his articulation would be a little indistinct. Apparently my pal George had done a job good enough to land him in summer stock.