He walked out.
Chapter 8
The woman was middle-aged, with graying hair, wide, cautious eves, and skin the color of milk chocolate. Bannion stood on the stone stoop of her house, the collar of his trench coat turned up about his throat against the rain.
“I’d like to talk to your son, Ashton,” he said for the second time.
“He ain’t home, he don’t get home till seven most nights. What you want with him? He in trouble?”
“No, he’s not in trouble. I just want to talk to him.”
“You a policeman, ain’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
The woman hesitated, looking up and down the dark rainy street anxiously, holding a sweater close about her neck with one strong hand. She glanced at Bannion. the caution and fear that was as much a part of her as her skin showing in her wide, brown eyes. “No use you drowning out there. Come on inside and wait for him.”
“Thanks.”
The house, an ace-deuce-trey type on Pine Street, with three rooms stacked one on top of the other, was shabbily furnished but clean. Bannion stood in the living room and the woman excused herself and went downstairs to the kitchen. There was a warm, pleasant smell of stewing meat and rice in the house. He didn’t have long to wait. The front door opened, letting in a gust of damp, cold air, and a man who wore overalls and a leather jacket. This was Ashton Williams, the young Negro, Burke had had in two weeks before as a murder suspect.
He stopped and stared at Bannion, and then looked around quickly, confused, like a man coming into the wrong house by mistake. His big-knuckled hands played with the seams of his pants. “What you want?” he said in a low voice.
“I want you to do me a favor,” Bannion said.
Ashton scratched his head. “What you want?”
“My wife was killed last week. Maybe you read about it. Somebody put a bomb in my car, but she got it instead of me. I’m after the men who did it.”
Ashton shifted his weight uneasily. “Why you come to me?”
“You’ve worked around garages as a body-and-fender-man. You know that car bombs aren’t on sale in the five-and-ten. They’ve got to be put together, to order, with a detonator to attach to the ignition and a stick of dynamite. Honest mechanics don’t make them. But someone did, someone who wasn’t an honest mechanic. That’s the man I’m looking for, Ashton.”
“You come with trouble,” Ashton said. “Squealing to the cops in trouble.”
“I’m not a cop anymore,” Bannion said. “I quit. You can tell me to go to hell if you like.”
“Well, I’d sure like to,” Ashton said, with an uneasy smile.
Bannion stared at him. “Is that your answer?”
“You treated me decent,” Ashton said. “I don’t know why, but you did. What you want me to do?”
“Do you know any mechanics in town who have police records?”
Ashton frowned and rubbed the side of his face. “Right off, I can’t say. I heard once there’s a fellow in Germantown who did eight years in Holmesburg, but I don’t rightly know if that’s true.” He continued to rub his face. “There’s a boy now, works in West Philadelphia, in a place on Woodland Avenue. I know him my own self, and he said, he was ‘rammy’ once. That’s prison talk, ain’t it?”
Bannion nodded. “Means the D. T.’s. Tell you what, Ashton: Think it over tonight, try to remember anyone you’ve ever met who talked or acted as if he might have done time, and I’ll check with you tomorrow. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, that’s okay,” Ashton said. “I’ll do some askin’, too.”
“Well, be careful about that,” Bannion said.
“Sure, I’ll be careful.” He came with Bannion to the door. “I hope you catch that man who put the bomb in your car.”
“Thanks,” Bannion said. He shook hands with Ashton and walked down the wet block to Fifteenth Street where he could catch a trolley to his hotel. It was too late now to go out to Al and Marg’s; Brigid would be in bed. He didn’t really want to see her; she’d ask about Mommy and he’d lie to her, knowing it was stupid, but lacking the guts to tell her Mommy wasn’t ever coming back, ever.
There was an envelope from Burke waiting for him at the hotel desk, and it contained a list of eight names and addresses, mechanics with police records, now working around town. The man heading the list worked in a garage in the Northeast on Ruan Street. His name was Mike Greslac...
It took Bannion five days to run down the list, and he didn’t get a lead. Six of the men had air-tight alibis, the kind they couldn’t have bought or arranged. The seventh man was an alcoholic who couldn’t remember where he’d been the night Kate was murdered, but Bannion didn’t think it was likely that anyone would have hired him for a tricky, shady job. The man drank, and drunks talked. The last of the lot, a youngster with a pleasant wife, told him to go to hell. Bannion had expected more of that; working without a badge was tough. However, the youngster seemed straight, and Bannion put a question mark after his name. If nothing else turned up he’d see him again; and then he’d slap the truth out of him if necessary.
Burke gave him three more names, and in a note said that these completed the run-down on mechanics with records. Ashton turned in four names to him but two of them had been on Burke’s first list. Bannion checked the new names he’d got from Burke with no success. He was back where he’d started. In a week he’d been in almost every garage in the city, had talked to every mechanic with police trouble in his past, and had learned nothing. He wasn’t discouraged. The break would come. Something was always left lying around loose. You had to keep looking, keep checking, to find it. It took time, and he had time.
He decided to start working on the other end of the job, Mrs. Deer)’.
The weather had been cold and wet. Bannion’s clothes needed attention so he sent three of his suits out to be cleaned and pressed, and gave the bellboy his laundry. He spent a couple of evenings at Al and Marg’s, playing with Brigid before she went to bed. They had two kids a few years older than Brigid and she was excited and happy about staying with them. But she woke at night crying for her mother and had to be rocked back to sleep, Marg said.
She said they’d keep Brigid until Bannion decided what he wanted to do, regardless of how long that took, and Al, her husband, an earnest balding man who worked as an inspector for the Gas Company, was prepared to lend him a thousand dollars if he needed it. They were excellent people, Bannion realized, but he couldn’t saddle them indefinitely with his troubles. He would have to make plans for Brigid — only after he had settled this job.
Inspector Cranston had sent him the gun-permit as he had promised he would, and Burke had insisted he use his car. Bannion didn’t hesitate; he took the car immediately, instinctively, as he would take anything now that might help him find Kate’s murderers.
He was ready to leave for Mrs. Deery’s one morning when the phone in his room rang. It was Ashton.
“I heard about another fellow, Mr. Bannion,” Ashton said. “Fellow name of Slim. That’s all the name he got, I guess. He work out around the graveyard for the last couple months, but he’s gone now.”
“He had a record?”
“Yeah, he blew up some safes, I been told.”
“Thanks, Ashton. I’ll try to find him.”
“I hope he’s the one you want, Mr. Bannion.”
“I do, too. Thanks again, Ashton.”
The “graveyard” was a mile-long stretch of automobile junkyards in West Philadelphia that crawled like a rusty ugly growth along the border of the city. Dozens of offices, most of them unpainted shacks, dotted the area. The dealers here bought wrecks, cut them apart and re-sold the parts to small garages, and to individuals who repaired their own cars. Every yard had small mountains of bodies, democratic heaps of smashed-up Cadillacs, and broken rusty Fords, and rows of tires curling like thick gray snakes around the orderly stacks of fenders and wheels. There were bins of headlights, pistons, sparkplugs, and rows of drive shafts, rear ends, and brake drums, all price-marked and ready to be hauled off. ‘