Or was it Greta Service? The prison grapevine could have passed along Harry's concern about his sister's absence and his contact with me and if Greta had been wrapped up with the wrong people, they wouldn't want me poking around.
Then there was Mitch Temple. A guy like that could always, pop an exposé that was worth a kill if it could be kept quiet.
Somebody wanted to know how much I knew. Somebody didn't know I knew about the thread that tied all three of those people together.
I picked up the phone and dialed Velda's apartment. After four rings her service answered and when I identified myself, said she hadn't called in since that afternoon. I left a message for her to contact me at the usual places and hung up.
There was no sense dusting the place down for prints; a pro would have worn gloves anyway. Nothing was missing as far as I could see and the data Velda had compiled for me would be in the safe at Lakland's--a precaution we always took.
I used a piece of cardboard and covered the hole in the glass from the inside, then snapped the lock, walked out and closed the door.
Silence has a funny sound. You hear it in the jungles when everything is too still and you know there's somebody in the trees with a gun ready to pick you off. You hear it in a crowded room when everybody turns off the conversation when you walk in the door and you know the hostile element is ready and waiting.
I could hear it in the corridor and before the parrots could scream with indignation of sudden movement and the monkeys jump with alarm at shattering blasts, I hit the floor and rolled, the .45 in my hand spitting back at the half-opened door behind me where the guy in the black suit was trying to bring me into the sights of his automatic and getting nowhere because his bullets were tearing aimlessly into the tile and ricocheting off the walls while mine had already punched three holes into his chest.
Chapter 5
He lay face down in the half-opened doorway, death so new that it hadn't erased the look of surprise on his face. I nudged the door open, flipped the light switch with the tip of my finger and looked around the room. There was nothing fancy about the Hackard Building or the offices it rented. This one was a minimum setup with a wooden desk, a pair of chairs and a coat rack. A layer of dust was spread evenly over everything, the window was grimy and the floor scuffed and splintered from the countless pieces of equipment that had been moved in and out.
The guy had drawn up a chair close to the door to be able to listen to any activity in the hall outside. Chances were that he had shaken my place down, found nothing and waited for me. If the door had opened from the other side he would have had a clear shot at my back before I could have done anything about it and Pat would have had me in his statistical columns instead of his address book.
I went though his pockets, found sixty-two bucks and some change, a pair of rubber gloves you could buy anywhere and two fairly stiff plastic strips that I slipped into my own pocket. None of his clothes were new. His suit had come from a large chain and looked about a year old, matching everything else. Unless the police had a record on the guy, or could come up with something out of the lab, getting a make on him wasn't going to be easy. He looked to be in his late forties, on the thin side and about five ten or so. His dark hair had receded, but there was no gray showing, so my guess at his age could have been off. I studied his face again, taking in the sharp features and the odd skin coloration. There was a death pallor there but it couldn't obliterate some of the characteristics common to some Europeans or Latin Americans.
One thing was sure, it wasn't a plain contract kill. Those guys specialize in one field and don't bother with any shakedown job to boot. Either there were two involved or this one was on assignment to find out what I knew or make sure I didn't find out any more.
But what the hell had I found out?
I stepped over the body and went back into the corridor. The elevator was still where it had left me and nobody had come to investigate the shots. It wasn't strange. The old building was solidly built and could muffle noise almost completely.
There was still a way to play it. I'd be asking for trouble, but it would keep me from doing too much explaining and it was simple enough to look right. Three of the offices down the hall from mine were occupied by small businesses that could conceivably keep something of value on the premises. In the door of each one, I knocked a hole in the glass panes, reached in and opened the lock, hoping none of them had alarms wired to them. Every room got the same treatment, a little disturbance that would indicate a search and the rubber gloves in the guy's pocket would explain the lack of prints. In the last place there was a gold wrist watch lying on top of a desk and I took it out and dropped it in the dead man's pocket for a clincher.
Then I went back to my own office and called Pat.
By nine-thirty they had bought my story. The guy at the newsstand downstairs had remembered the guy coming in after everybody had left and as he was closing up. Two of the men who rented the other offices said they did a cash business, but never left money in the office overnight, but for someone who didn't know it, they were probably targets for a robbery. The watch in the corpse's pocket made the deal firm. My version was that I had seen the broken windows, checked my own office and started out to see if anyone was still around when he tried to nail me. The manager admitted that a lot of the empty offices were unlocked, so the probability was that the guy had heard the elevator coming up, slipped into one to hide, and when he started out to make a getaway, saw me, panicked and started shooting.
I knew better. He had come prepared to handle a lock with those plastic strips. My door wouldn't give in to that technique so he had broken the window, but they made it easy for him to wait me out in a convenient empty office.
Pat drove me downtown and took my statement there. Before I finished, one of the detectives came in and told him there was no make on the guy yet, but that the gun was a .38 Colt Cobra licensed to a jeweler that had been stolen in a robbery two months before. The lab hadn't come up with any laundry marks on the guy's clothes and the only lead they had was that he had been wearing shoes made and sold in Spain but they were probably as old as his clothes. His prints had been wired to Washington and pictures were telephotoed to Interpol in case he was a foreign national.
Pat took my statement, read it through once and tossed it on his desk. "I almost believe it," he said. "Damn it, I almost believe it."
"You're a spooky slob," I grunted.
"I'm supposed to be, buddy. Right now I'm spooked more than ever. First the Delaney thing, now this."
"At least this one's cut and dry."
"Is it?" he asked softly.
"Nobody's looking for your scalp."
He interlocked his fingers and smiled at me, his eyes cold. "Are they looking for yours, Mike?"
I smiled back at him. "They'll have a hard time getting it."
"Don't con me."
"You have statements from five witnesses besides me that put a common robbery motive behind this, a stolen gun, gloves, a paraffin test that shows he shot at me, the position of the corpse proving concealment, so what more do you want?"
"I could tell you another way things might have been arranged," Pat said. "The only reason I'm not hammering at it is because the manager's statement is the only one that sticks with me...the fact he admitted that occasionally some empty offices are left unlocked. There was one other open one on your floor, but the rest were locked."
"Okay, I was lucky. I was there with a gun. Anybody else would have been written off and you'd have an unsolved one on your hands."