I went in through the service entrance on Sixty-ninth. The rows of apartment bells listed a Mr. K. Irving in 17-B. The elevators had operators, and in a building like this they would ask questions of a one-armed man in a duffel coat and black beret. I used my keys on the stairs door, walked up the seventeen flights.
In a narrow service corridor, I listened at the back door of 17-B. I heard no sounds, used my keys again, slipped inside. I stood in a large kitchen that had not been used much recently. In the rest of the apartment there was a heavy, empty silence. I moved on cautiously.
It was a large apartment-six rooms-with the packaged air of a hotel suite. Rented furnished, cleaned by maids, used but not quite lived in. A big living room had a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the dining room was formal. One bedroom seemed used on some regular basis, its closet full of expensive suits and jackets, its one tall bureau containing shirts, underwear, men’s accessories. I was in the right apartment, Irving Kezar’s name was on various items.
The other two bedrooms were furnished but unused, closets and drawers empty. A final room, a kind of office-den, was the only really lived-in room. It was busy, messy, with papers on a desk and empty glasses on a coffee table in front of a comfortable couch. There were no filing cabinets. If Kezar had a second set of files or books, they were in still a fourth place. I went to work studying the papers in the desk.
After an hour I had a better picture of Irving Kezar’s work-and no picture at all. A man who was “called in” to consult, got people “together.” Expediter of collaborations, arranger of contacts-the oil in the wheels of a lot of “projects” and deals. But the details seemed to slip away, elude definition. Not one concrete fact or specific company, not one reference to exactly what he expedited or arranged. And nothing remotely related to Andy Pappas, or an Albano, or Max Bagnio, or anyone else I knew.
I sat back to think, and the sound of the key in the front door almost caught me flat-footed. Not quite. My subconscious had sensed the elevator stopping at the floor without actually being aware of it, and when the key scraped in the lock, I was alert, had a few seconds. Not time to reach the kitchen and rear door across the living room, but just time to slip through the connecting door between the den-office and one of the unused bedrooms. Not even time to close the connecting door, risk its sound, but only to flatten against the door, breathe softly.
Two men came into the den-office. I had a tiny space between the hinged door and the frame, like seeing a movie screen through a keyhole. A back, a shoulder, the creak of the desk chair, and the sigh of the couch. A few seconds of silence that seemed like an hour. The snap of a cigarette lighter, smoke billowing.
“I told you I don’t like you coming here.” Irving Kezar’s voice. “I take the risks, I say when we contact.”
“You don’t contact,” a crisp voice said. “We don’t like it.”
“I report when I’m ready, damn it.”
“We like to keep better touch. It’s what we pay for.”
“You pay for results,” Kezar said. His voice was worried. “You’re sure no one saw you waiting down in the lobby?”
“We’re not amateurs,” the crisp voice said, disdainful. “The building’s watched.”
I tried to see through the narrow crack of the partly open door. I could see Kezar’s hand, pudgy and flashing with his diamond rings. I saw a foot and ankle of the other man-a well-shined brown shoe and a neat gray sock.
“Well, do you have a report on the operation, Kezar?”
“It’s moving just as planned.”
“Even with the complication?”
Silence, then Kezar’s voice again, “Pappas doesn’t change anything. A little slowdown, that’s all. No real change.”
“They know who killed him?”
“Not a clue,” Kezar said.
“That’s good,” the crisp voice said. “Ramapo Construction Company has the contract?”
My ear twitched-a name! I listened for another name. It takes two to make a contract. It didn’t come.
“All signed,” Kezar said.
“But not paid yet?”
“I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
Another silence, and I watched the brown shoe and neat ankle swing in the air, impatient or annoyed or both.
“So you have no real information to give me?” the crisp voice said. “Sometimes I wonder who you really work for, Kezar.”
“I work for me, I told you that all along,” Kezar said.
“Dangerous work,” crisp voice said. “Everyone cheats everyone in this kind of thing, but don’t cheat us too far.”
“You’ll get your money’s worth.”
“After you cream off your share from the other side,” the unseen man with the well-shined shoe said. “When do you plan to see Dunlap again?”
“When it’s right,” Kezar said. “It’s not so easy with a guy like Dunlap. I have to step careful around him. He’s not dumb.”
“Yes he is,” crisp voice said. “Dumb enough.”
“All right, but I need a few more days. He’s the one place Pappas matters, slowed it down. You don’t want him suspicious.”
There was movement. The unseen man with the crisp voice had stood up, and now I saw him. He leaned on Kezar’s desk.
“That’s for you to handle, and don’t make a mistake. No mistakes, but get it moving. We’ve waited long enough now.”
He was a tallish man, authority in his crisp voice. In his early fifties, dressed like a low-echelon executive in an ordinary brown suit, with close-cropped graying hair and the command of a man higher up than he looked. An Anglo-Saxon face, more mid-western than Ivy League. He reminded me of a successful small city lawyer, an older version of the young man I’d tailed to the building. Some Anglo-type gang, moving in on the brotherhood?
“You’ll get your results, make your score,” Irving Kezar said, not backing down. “I have to go on working, cover myself.”
“Make sure you do,” the stranger said.
He vanished from my narrow view, and a moment later I heard the outer door close. Out in the den-office, Irving Kezar’s hand tapped the desk, his rings shining. He sat there for some time in the heavy silence. I breathed as quietly as I could, it was the critical time. If he heard, sensed…
Kezar got up. I tensed.
He walked around his desk-and out of the den-office. The outside door closed once more, and the whole apartment became as silent as when I’d come in. I didn’t wait. I went out the way I had come in, down the seventeen flights, and out the side. I went to the corner of Central Park West. The young man across the street was gone, the park bench empty in the rain. I took the subway down to my office.
I checked the street carefully, and the entrance. No one was around I could see, especially not Max Bagnio. I went up, and someone was in the corridor. He came out of the shadows. Hal Wood. His face was neither boyish nor ruddy anymore. As tight and constricted as his eyes.
“The police called Emily’s folks, made me wait,” he said. “They hate me, Emily’s folks. I don’t blame them. They brought her up strict about men, and then I came along. Corrupted her, then got her killed. I’d hate me, too.”
“Come on in. You shouldn’t be wandering around.”
In my one-window office I sat behind the desk. Hal stood, paced. He was wound so tight he could break apart at any moment. If he was a danger to anyone, they might not have to kill him, he’d do their job for them.
“What should I be doing?” he said. “Hiding in an empty apartment? Try again, Dan? Pick a girl I don’t really care about this time? When she gets killed, it won’t matter?”
“Go back to work.”
“I can’t work! I want to know!”
“All right. You ever hear of Ramapo Construction Company?”
“No, never.”