“Oh, Lawrence!” Harriet Dunlap said.
“Big money,” Dunlap said, “but I never saw much. Peanuts. They got most of it-Kezar, Albano, others.”
The well-brought-up boy with more surface than money who had fallen into the hands of thieves. Not only unable to say “No,” eager to say “Yes,” but didn’t know what to do. The handsome front with the big smile, but neither real ability nor substance. Kezar was the slum-boy who knew how to hustle, and who had hustled Dunlap in the end. You almost wanted to cry, but you knew that if it hadn’t been Kezar, Dunlap would have found another crook.
“What will we do?” Harriet Dunlap said. Stronger than Dunlap, faced the issue, and I heard something go out of their marriage.
Dunlap heard it too, tried to fight. “He can’t prove any of it. We’re all covered. If he causes trouble, Albano will-”
Harriet Dunlap said, “My God, Lawrence.”
“You whistled up Albano against me once, you don’t have to do it again,” I said. “I can’t prove it, and I don’t want to. I want to solve some murders. I want help from you.”
“Help?” Dunlap said, perked up. He’d learned about deals.
“Something went wrong, didn’t it? There was trouble.”
Dunlap shook his head. “No, nothing I know of.”
“Some men are working with Kezar. Men with guns.”
“Guns? No, only Albano’s… people. Nothing went wrong.”
He sounded like a man telling the truth, but maybe he’d learned about that, too. What he said fitted my hunch about the men around Kezar, only he could be hiding something else.
“Was Andy Pappas part of the deal?”
“He never appeared, but I suppose he was.”
“All right, now what about Sid Meyer?”
Harriet Dunlap said, “He did come here once. Said he was a business reporter, asked questions about Lawrence and his position in town. I told him what I knew. He didn’t go to Lawrence.”
“You told him enough,” I said. I walked to the house. “I can’t prove the deal, won’t try. On that you’re safe from me.”
It was an attempt to reassure him, keep Charley Albano away. But as I went out the front door, I heard one of them pick up the telephone. I still worried one of them.
I approached my office cautiously. There had been plenty of time for the Dunlaps to summon troops while I drove up to New York. A voice stopped me at the corner. John Albano.
“I was coming to see what you’d learned in L.A.,” the old man said. “Someone’s watching your office, Dan. Showed up about a half hour ago, two of them. Shoulder holsters, I think.”
“Youngish? Clean-cut? Like lawyers, or accountants?”
“That’s one of them. You know who they are?”
“I think I do now,” I said. “Look, I don’t have time to talk. Where’ll you be later?”
“Home or at Mia’s. Stern’s back in town.”
I left him at the corner, got my rented car, drove uptown.
CHAPTER 26
Irving Kezar’s run-down apartment building on East Seventieth Street looked better in the late-afternoon May sun, a little the way it must have been when it was new a long time ago. I rang Kezar’s bell. I didn’t expect him to be home at this hour, but Jenny might be. If she was, I’d have to try to trick her out by calling and saying Kezar wanted to meet her. But I was in luck, there was no answer to my ring.
I rode the elevator to the sixth floor, went along the quiet corridor to 6-C. I rang again to be sure, then used my keys. Inside, I closed the door behind me, and stood studying the old apartment. It hadn’t improved since February. The seedy old furniture was still dull and dusty, the heavy drapes covered the windows, making it like some gloomy room in a museum. There was no point in searching, the police had done a thorough job back in January.
No, the evidence I expected to find now would be obvious. Overlooked, not hidden. Not recognized because both the police and I had been neatly turned in the wrong direction. At least, that was my hunch. The stain of blood on the rug had been scrubbed, but it still showed. It told me nothing new. I went through the big old apartment until I found Kezar’s bedroom.
In my mind I pictured that night in January when Sid Meyer had died. The way I had come into the lobby for a time, the way Kezar had made the janitor open the lobby door for him. A witness to his coming out before the three shots. The way he had come out in a raincoat. Kezar had changed coats. Because it had been snowing, obviously. Right? Wrong-I hoped.
The clothes in his bedroom closet weren’t as good or as numerous as in his Central Park West apartment. The velvet-collared gray Chesterfield was there-cleaned, pressed and put away in a plastic bag. But I found what I wanted anyway.
The cloth had been torn under the middle button. A small tear that might happen if someone grabbed the button. Sewn up, not expertly, but so that it hardly showed in the herringbone pattern. Herringbone looks gray, but it is really made up of contrasting threads of white and black-and Sid Meyer had had black thread under a fingernail.
Natural for a man to change into a raincoat in the snow. Because of that, and because someone had taken a minute to mend the small tear, none of us had noticed the change of coats, or studied the Chesterfield. My fault. Gazzo hadn’t even known that Kezar had changed coats.
In the living room I pulled the heavy drapes away from the windows. The broken pane had been fixed. I raised the bottom frame all the way open as it had been on the night of the murder, studied it. On both sides of the new pane there was a faint groove in the old wood. Something had dented the frame after the pane was broken, the glass out. As if some heavy weight had been hooked over the wood of the raised window.
Obvious, again, that when Sid Meyer went out the window his head had broken the glass. But Sid Meyer had been a very small man. Literally blown out the window, he should have been sprawled backwards as he fell, his head nowhere near the raised window. Maybe he hadn’t hit the glass at all, something else had. Unless it had simply been broken on purpose for a reason.
I stepped back, sighted from some five feet away through the new pane. The building across the narrow alley was a five-story brownstone, its roof parapet just below the level of the Kezars’ windows. The roof of the brownstone was cluttered with a kind of tool shed, a wooden pigeon coop, and the tall brick doorway shelter down. The pigeon coop was in direct line with the repaired windowpane.
I went down in the elevator, along to the building across the alley, and up to the roof door. I used my keys to open it, stepped out into the sun. The Kezars’ open window was just across the alley, the wooden pigeon coop was at least six feet wide. I went over every inch of the coop. It had been four months, there had been snow and rain, the wood of the coop was old and soft, and the bullet had gone in cleanly. But I saw it.
High up on the rear wall of the coop through the wire mesh and above the top roost. It was that close to having missed the coop and flying so far no one would ever have found it. Life can be a matter of an inch. A large bullet, from the look of it, buried in the gray wood and almost invisible even up close. No one could have seen it from Kezar’s window, even if anyone had been looking. No one had. Not until now.
A vital bullet. Not three shots that night, but four. I had heard only three, so when had the fourth been fired? Why hadn’t I heard it? Now I was getting excited.
I went down, back to Kezar’s building, and up to the sixth floor again. The door to the stairs was close to the door of 6-C. I went down the stairs to the landing where the one gun, the. 45 automatic, had been found. I searched the floor and the walls as high as I could reach. I looked for any crevice, anything loose, any hiding place. There was nothing.