“Certainly,” Bannion said.
He drove back to the city, through the bright shining Main Line villages, disgusted with himself, and bitterly, savagely angry.
Bannion let the Bureau’s work slide for a few days and dug into what he had on Lucy Carroway. The Detroit file on Biggie Burrows had come in, plus three pictures of the man. Burrows was a dark-haired, heavy-set hoodlum, who had averaged about an arrest a year, from Homicide to Assault and Battery, since emigrating to America from his native Sardinia twenty years ago. Real name: Antonio Burfarino. Bannion took the pictures to the clerk at the Reale Hotel, but the man couldn’t make a positive identification.
“You see, he was wearing a hat, and never looked me full in the face,” he said, studying the pictures of Biggie Burrows. In the police pictures, taken eight years ago, Burrows was hatless. “I... I just can’t be sure.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Bannion began looking for Biggie Burrows then, through stoolies, bookmakers, numbers writers and prostitutes. He learned that Burrows had definitely been in the city, had been working for Stone, and had lived in a good, commercial hotel on Chestnut Street. But Burrows was gone now. Bannion went to the hotel he had been staying at and showed the desk clerks Burrows’ pictures. They identified him positively. He had been with them for ten days, but had checked out without leaving a forwarding address. Burrows had checked out the same day that Lucy Carroway had dropped out of sight. There was a twenty-four-hour lag between the time she’d left the Triangle and the time of her death — in that interim she had been hidden away and tortured before being murdered. The set-up smacked of organization. No one can be kept for twenty-four hours against his will unless there are arrangements for a hide-out, money, food and transportation.
Bannion questioned everyone at the Triangle Bar, all the girls, the cooks, musicians, bartenders, and steady customers — but none of them had seen Lucy with a person matching Biggie Burrows’ description. He wasn’t discouraged, only impatient. He knew the break would come. One night he combed through the apartment houses near the Reale Hotel, checking one question with everybody: Had they seen a car parked before the Reale around twelve-thirty in the morning earlier in the week? Most of the people he talked to said they were in bed by that time, but a woman who happened to have been waiting up for a partying teen-age daughter remembered seeing a car in front of the Reale. She didn’t know what kind it was, but it was long and shiny, and had a canvas top. Yes, a convertible, a big one.
That was pretty good, Bannion thought. Big convertibles weren’t too common. Maybe Parnell, the county detective, might pin such a car down on the Pike. One of his “regulars” might have seen it.
He was working on the assumption that Biggie Burrows had murdered Lucy Carroway. It was an assumption he was ready to toss aside if anything else came along, but it was his best and only bet now. For one thing, if Lucy had been kidnapped, if Burrows had a gun on her while she was checking out of the Reale, then that afforded an explanation, a hypothesis at any rate, for her telephone call to him, and the mention of the twenty dollars.
Lucy, scared and in trouble, might have asked Burrows to let her make a casual phone call. She had tried to tip Bannion off, tried to point a finger at herself, by mentioning the Triangle Bar. It had been a desperate wave for help, but he hadn’t seen it in time.
Bannion checked into Homicide on the third afternoon of his hunt, feeling stale and tired. He signed the reports on his desk, said good-night to Neely, and walked over to the Y on Arch Street. There, in sweat clothes, he spent an hour working with weights — the only exercise that seemed to give his big body the physical release it needed. Three or four high school boys stopped to watch him. He stood solidly, feet well spread, and pressed a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound barbell above the head ten times in succession, and then, using two-minute rest periods, repeated the sequence five straight times. Bannion’s body was like an engine; he could hook it to a job and it would run all day. He was no body-lover, no beach athlete. He felt an impersonal regard for his strength, as if he were merely a steward whose job was to keep it functioning at par. Bannion had learned that the more able a man is to stop trouble, the less of it he is likely to meet. And he didn’t want trouble, he didn’t want to use his hands on people. When circumstances forced him to, or when his temper jerked him out of control, he inevitably felt disgusted with himself and degraded. He knew the wild streak inside him and had tamed it, or frustrated it rather, by being strong enough to stop trouble before it started. It wasn’t a unique problem, he knew; it was the problem of all the gentle giants in the world.
He put a towel around his damp neck and grinned at the boys. “That’s the price I pay for liking potatoes too well,” he said. He talked with them for a while, answered questions, showed them how to lift a barbell without risking a broken wrist, and then went down for his shower, feeling comfortably relaxed, the staleness gone from his body. He drove home thinking about dinner.
He was an hour late getting to the Bureau the next morning; he had stopped at a bar where some of Stone’s men hung out to see if he could pick up anything on Burrows. It was a wasted trip. When he walked around the counter Neely pointed to Wilks’ door. “Urgent,” he said. “Very, very urgent.”
“Well, well. Excited?”
Neely nodded.
Bannion walked into Wilks’ office without bothering to take off his topcoat. Wilks looked up at him, then down at a report he was reading. “Take a chair, Dave,” he said. He read for a moment or so, and then pushed the report away and looked directly at Bannion. “What are you working on, Dave?”
“Some angles on that Carroway girl’s murder,” Bannion said.
“That’s a county job, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, drop it, and get back to our business,” Wilks said. There was flat finality in his voice. “You’re not paid to do their work. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to you, Bannion.”
Bannion held his temper down. “Lucy Carroway, I think, was kidnapped and tortured in Philadelphia, then murdered in the county. I’m working on the first two ends of the job.”
“That’s not what you’re paid for either,” Wilks said, slapping his open hand sharply on the desk. “You’re paid to run a shift, keep reports current and in order. Any man in the Bureau can handle the Carroway job. Do you think we made you a sergeant of Detectives so you can waste your time interviewing B-girls and hotel clerks?”
Bannion kept his mouth shut. The fact that Wilks had checked on him, or had been informed on him, was the most interesting thing he’d learned so far. He shrugged and let a smile touch his lips. “Okay, I’ll pass it on to one of the boys,” he said. “But I don’t understand all the fuss. I just took a little time off to check some leads on this girl’s murder. I was doing pretty well, too.”
Wilks smiled, too. “That doesn’t surprise me, Dave. I don’t think there’s any doubt that you can make a thorough investigation. The thing is, I want you doing the more important work, supervising your shift. Understand?”
“Sure, sure,” Bannion said. “By the way, you remember who this Carroway girl is, don’t you? She’s the one who knew Tom Deery, who said his wife was lying about his bad health.”
“Yes, I remember her,” Wilks said. He looked at Bannion, then at his desk top. “I don’t see any connection between that and her death, however. She was killed by a damn, misbegotten sex maniac.”
“Yes, that’s what the county man thinks,” Bannion said.
“It’s their job, remember that,” Wilks said, returning to his executive manner.