“No! I didn’t, Mr. Gross, I did not! What infor—”
“Be still! When I am done you may speak!”
I subsided. “I’m sorry,” I said, more calmly. “That was just... I’m sorry.”
“Very well.” He had himself become a bit ruffled. He smoothed his lapels — how astonishing that his hands didn’t leave a trail of white slime on the black cloth! — and took a deep breath. “After a while,” he said, “it became evident this was not enough. I cannot guess what your plans were before last night, but once you realized we were on to you, you suddenly intensified your program of attack. You attempted first to murder your own uncle, but were foiled. You then” — he gazed at me sternly till I stopped sputtering — “proceeded to Staten Island, murdered the Farmer, joined forces with your beautiful partner, and came here to kill me. That, as I see it, is the sum and essence of your activities.”
I said, “May I speak now?”
He waved two clusters of sausages airily. “The floor is yours.”
“All right. Number one, I did not come here to kill you. I came— No. That isn’t number one.”
“Take your time,” he said. “Organize your thoughts.”
“May I stand up?”
“Certainly. Pace the floor if you wish. Except near the door, of course.”
“Thank you.”
Moe and Curly — I mean Harvey and Luke — had been fading away into somnolence over by the door, but now that I was on my feet they suddenly became very alert again, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the doorway, gripping their guns tightly, glaring at me as though daring me to get funny. It was my own personal feeling that if I said, “Boo,” to those two, they’d turn tail and run to Montauk Point, but that didn’t matter. My job wasn’t to escape, but to plead my case.
How to do it, though, how to do it? I prowled around the room, trying to think. After a minute I stopped and said, “Can I ask a question?”
“Certainly.”
“Is that why you sent your two men to—”
“Trask and Slade.”
“Yes. Trask and Slade. Is that why you sent them to kill me? Because you believed I was giving information to the police?”
“Naturally,” he said. “An adequate enough reason, I believe.”
“Sure. Can I ask another?”
“Ask as many as you wish.”
“What made you think it was me? That was giving information to the police.”
He shook his head, with that pitying smile on it again. “We checked,” he said. “Naturally. The police were obviously in receipt of information concerning shipments of various commodities. There were at least, two instances, and perhaps more, when particular shipments which went through your hands, and which were perfectly safe before reaching you, had developed a police tail after leaving your hands.”
“You mean packages I kept in my safe.”
“Certainly.”
“What makes you think it was me?”
“As I say, we checked. I spoke to Mahoney myself, asked him to find out, and the word came back it was the bartender. You.”
“Who’s this Mahoney?” I said. “I don’t know any Mahoney.”
“Our liaison on the police force.”
Mahoney. It was a name I wanted to remember, for future reference. But I would also want it narrowed down more than that, so I said, “Would that be Michael Mahoney?”
“No,” he said. “Patrick.” Then he frowned, as though wondering why he’d told me that.
Before he could think long enough to realize he’d been psyched, I said, “How can you be sure you can trust this guy Mahoney?”
“Of course we can trust him. We bought him, years ago.”
I said, “Well, this time he’s lying. Mr. Gross, before I got that job out at that bar, I was just a drifter, just a bum, living off my mother all the time. My Uncle Al got me that job, and it just suited me right. All I wanted out of life was to go on running that bar. I never looked inside any of the packages or envelopes I was asked to hold for a while, and I never asked anybody any questions about what was inside them or about anything else, because I didn’t want to know. I never wanted a lot of money, I never wanted revenge, I never wanted anything but to go on running that bar.”
“Until,” he said, “Miss Althea Agricola came into your life.”
“No, sir. No, sir, that isn’t right.”
He shrugged and shook his head. “Tell your story,” he said.
“Just let me get it straight. I want to tell you everything in chronological order.”
“Take your time.”
I went over by the window and glanced out, and here came the black car, the same old black car. I stared, and saw it pull to a stop with the other cars parked out front, and they got out of the car, the two of them, and hitched their trousers and shifted their shoulders inside their coats and pushed their hatbrims around a little and looked at each other and up at this window and moved toward the front door.
Trask and Slade.
So I couldn’t take my time after all. Before he’d come back up, Mr. Gross had contacted Trask and Slade, told them to come out here.
I turned and said, “Trask and Slade. They just drove up.”
But he waved a fat hand to indicate it didn’t matter. “They’ll wait downstairs until called for,” he said. “Go on with your story. In chronological order, I believe you said.”
“Yes, sir.”
I went back to the table and sat down, and started: “Like I said, I never gave information to the police because I never had any information to give them and never wanted to give them any information anyway. So last night when those two guys — Trask and Slade — when they came in and put that card with the black spot down on the bar, I thought they were kidding. It was just dumb luck I got away. I went to see my Uncle Al to ask him to help me, because the organization wanted to kill me and I didn’t know why, because I didn’t do anything wrong, but he was too scared to even talk to me. So I went to see Mr. Agricola to find out from him—”
“Excuse me,” he said, holding up a wad of bread dough shaped somewhat like a hand. “If you were so devoid of information, how did you know to find the Farmer’s farm? From the Farmer’s daughter, perhaps?”
“No, sir. Trask and Slade mentioned the name to my Uncle Al, I heard them when I was hiding in the stairwell. Then I went to a friend of mine, he used to sell pills for Mr. Agricola and he knew he lived out on Staten Island, and so I went out to Staten Island and found him in the phone book.”
“The phone book?” He seemed startled.
“Yes, sir.”
He shook his head. “One never knows. Very well, go on.”
“Yes, sir. When I got there, he was dead. That was the first time I’d ever seen him or his daughter or that farm. A man named Clarence locked—”
“The bodyguard,” he said, in a tone that indicated trouble for the bodyguard in the near future.
“Yes, sir. He locked me in the barn, and then Miss Althea came with a gun and unlocked the door and tried to shoot me, because she thought I’d killed her father. She took two shots at me.”
“And missed you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How very fortunate for you.”
“It happened,” I said.
He smiled — pityingly, again — and said, “Go on, go on.”
“I got the gun away from her, and outside I found my friend that had told me where Mr. Agricola lived, he’d come after me to see if I was okay, and we got away together. We took Miss Althea with us for a hostage, but she wouldn’t believe me when I told her the truth about her father, and she got away back on Sunrise Highway and my friend went after her and I haven’t seen him since. Either of them.”
“How sad. I never, never had the privilege of meeting the Farmer’s child, and I had been looking forward to your introducing us. Is this the end of your story?”