“Let’s hope so,” Bannion said. “Thanks, Inspector.”
“Drop in anytime.”
He met Jerry Furnham in the corridor. The reporter walked along with him toward the elevators.
“Everything quiet?” Furnham said.
“Nothing doing at all.”
“Good. How about the Carroway girl?”
“That’s a county job, Jerry.”
“Yeah, but she voted locally,” Furnham said. He smiled and looked sideways at Bannion. “That’s why we’re interested. The Express feels awful when a reader gets killed. We don’t have that many to spare, you know.” They stopped at the elevators and stood there a few seconds in silence. Furnham was no longer smiling. It was raining again, the water sluicing down the dirty windows of the Hall, blackening the gray walls of the building.
“I thought you were working on this end of it,” Furnham said. “You off it?”
“Yes, I’m off it.”
“Who’s working on it?”
“You might ask Wilks.”
Furnham pursed his lips. “That’s an idea,” he said mildly. There was now a hard but patient line around his mouth. He took out his cigarettes. “Smoke, Dave?”
“No thanks.”
“Dave, the sex-fiend theory looks to me like a cover-up,” he said.
“You’re going to play detective now, eh?”
“What the hell are you sore about?” Furnham said. “I’ve played ball with you, Dave. Now something stinks. I want to know about it. I know the start. I know about Biggie Burrows, for one thing. But I’m still curious, and I don’t like being treated like a dummy.”
“You don’t, eh?” Bannion said. He stared at Furnham, suddenly transferring to him the anger he felt for Wilks. “Then why don’t you stop acting like one, Jerry? This is work for the police department, not newsboys.”
Furnham looked at him for a moment, and his face was white under the blue smudge of his whiskers. “Okay, Dave, if that’s the way you want it,” he said. He turned and walked back along the corridor to the Press Room, his heels striking the floor angrily.
Bannion felt sick of himself, sick of the lying and fencing. He took a deep breath. “Jerry,” he said.
Furnham stopped, turned around. Bannion walked to meet him, rubbing his forehead slowly with one big hand. “I wish you’d forget that, Jerry,” he said.
“Oh, sure, just like that,” Furnham said. He snapped his fingers. “Nothing to it, Bannion.”
“I mean it. I’ve got no right talking to you that way. Forget it, will you?”
“Okay, consider it forgotten, Dave,” he said, in a different voice. “Is that all you wanted to tell me?”
Bannion hesitated. “No, there’s a little more. I had a good lead on Biggie Burrows. I think he’s the man who picked up Lucy Carroway and murdered her. However, I just got that far before the case was taken out of my hands. Wilks has it now, and is going to give it to someone on Heineman’s shift. That answer your questions?”
“Like hell he’s giving it to Heineman’s shift,” Furnham said. He was smiling now, an odd little smile. “I talked to Wilks twenty minutes ago, Dave. This may interest you, by the way. Lieutenant Wilks said there was nothing to the angle you were working on that—” Furnham looked upwards expressively. “That, in short, it had gone up in the air. The stories don’t fit together, do they?”
“Well, they’re a little off at the edges,” Bannion said dryly.
Furnham rubbed his hands. “Were you talking to me off the record?”
“Hell, no.” Bannion snapped the words before he realized what he was saying. He was sick of cop-politics, of flinching when the big fists tightened their grip. “Do what you want with it, Jerry. You asked some questions, I answered them.”
“You know, you sound a little like—” Furnham stopped and shrugged. “Well, be that as it may. Thanks, Dave. I’ll see you around.” He turned and walked quickly toward the Press Room.
Bannion went back and rang again for the elevator. He had missed a car by talking to Furnham, he realized. Too bad, too bad. It always cost you something to be honest, he thought, smiling faintly...
Furnham didn’t use it as a news story because it wasn’t one. He turned it over to the paper’s political columnist, and it ran the next day, a sharp sarcastic item about certain differences of opinions in the Homicide Bureau. The difference stemmed, the writer hinted, from a clash over the amount of deference that should be extended to the city’s hoodlums. They should be deferred to, of course; the argument was one of degree rather than kind. The Carroway murder was mentioned, and it was broadly suggested that a very likely suspect, a Detroit specimen, had practically been given a police escort out of town. The solution of the Carroway murder was held to be a highly dubious prospect so long as police investigations were hindered by political and hoodlum pressure.
It was a very strong piece of writing, stronger than the facts actually deserved, and it caused an uneasy rumble from top to bottom in the police department. Reformers come and go and are seldom noticed or missed. They shout their do-gooding strictures at women’s clubs, at Boy Scout meetings, and once, in a very great while, they succeed in having a pool room closed, an extra traffic officer assigned to a school crossing, a known gambler arrested.
But a newspaper on a reform-binge is an altogether different matter. Papers know how to fight. They have seasoned men covering water boards, courts, police and fire departments, men who know all the nasty little secrets, who are, in short, an alert, intelligent, spy ring strategically circling the city. And the papers have a voice far louder than the do-gooder speaking at the women’s clubs. It was the fear that those two things would be joined up, that the Express’s blast indicated a reform drive, that caused the rumble in the department.
Wilks raised hell about it, striding up and down his office, opening all the stops on his parade ground voice, but to Bannion the performance lacked the ring of honest anger. Underneath the bluster, the desk-pounding, the well-practised glare, there was something hollow and anxious, something very much like fear.
“What business did you have giving him the story?” Wilks demanded for about the fifth time.
“Well, that was a mistake,” Bannion said easily. “But what’s everyone so excited for?”
“We don’t want police problems aired in the papers,” Wilks said. He paced the floor, glaring at Bannion. “You know that, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, but there’s no problem really,” Bannion said, in the same mild voice. “I wrote a report on what I’d learned on a case and passed it along to you. You said you were going to give it to someone on Heineman’s shift.” Bannion shrugged. “That’s what I told Furnham. But he said you’d told him I was on a bum lead, that there was nothing to it. That’s the point of confusion. Did you tell him that?”
“He misunderstood me, goddamnit,” Wilks said. He smiled quickly and the effort put a white ring around his lips. “Dave, did you ever know one of those newsboys to get two consecutive facts down accurately?”
“They make a lot of mistakes, sure,” Bannion said. He knew Wilks was lying, and it depressed him; the whole business was a stupid farce.
“But we’re off the point,” Wilks said. “You gave him the idea we’re trying to cover up something here.”
“Well, are we?” Bannion said. He was angry and disgusted, ready to force a moment of truth from Wilks. It would be better if they cut out this charade and spoke their minds.
“Of course not,” Wilks said, slapping the desk with his hand. “What excuse do you have for letting him think we do?”
“Maybe I was just mad,” Bannion said.
“You say ‘maybe.’ Were you, or not?”
“Yes, I was damn mad,” Bannion said. “I was mad because I was getting closer to who killed Lucy Carroway, and that seemed to annoy someone.”