I slapped his sore nose with the back of my hand.
“Ed,” he said dismally, “you got no call to do that.” He blinked the scrambled eggs at me. “You’re like the rest of the world. I’ve tried hard, but I never had a break. It ain’t my fault, Ed. See, I come here for a little help, and get a bust nose. Story of my life, that’s all.” He let the seepage of blood course around his mouth. A drop gathered on his pointed chin and fell to his dirty shirt. He seemed to be getting some kind of twisted pleasure from being a miserable spectacle.
“What kind of help?”
“I wanted to borrow a few bucks. I got a chance for a job, if I can get myself cleaned up and in shape.”
“What kind of job?”
“Ain’t I got no privacy at all?”
“Sure,” I said. “The privacy of my office. You’re lying all the way, Sime. You read the papers. You knew I was on the Yamashita case. There’s a deep-down dirtiness behind the case. I’m not surprised to find the worms starting to crawl from the rot. Who sent you here?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. His voice had gone sullen.
He sat waiting.
In his mind was something stronger than his fear of a beating.
“You’ve knocked off your chances like ducks in a shooting gallery,” I told him. “That’s your business. The Yamashita case is mine.
“Your chances are all used up, Sime. Nick Martin killed better men than you to keep this country decent and safe. You degrade what the Nick Martins did. You’ve taken what they gave you and befouled it.
“You’re only a snake’s belly above the person who would mutilate three bodies in order to frame Nick Martin. That’s the ultimate befoulment of the deeds of the Nick Martins, Sime. I can’t stomach it. I don’t want to stomach it. So go back to that person and tell them I can’t be bluffed, scared, or bought off. Then quit. Get out of it. Don’t put any hurdles in my way — or I’ll step on you the way I would a cockroach. Clear?”
“You got it all wrong, Ed,” he muttered as he crabbed his way to the door. “I got nothing against a poor sucker like Nick Martin.”
The toe of my shoe carried him into the hall. He was running before he got his full balance.
He went down the stair well like a crashing hod of bricks.
Chapter 8
“Sorry, Ed,” Steve Ivey said, rocking back behind his desk. “What you ask would keep my whole division busy. My boys are each capable of doing the work of three men, but not a dozen.”
“The motive was in Ichiro’s background,” I said, for about the fifth time.
“Your supposition. What have you given me? Martin’s story about the house slippers. A professional wrestler entering Ichiro’s apartment. A smudge of lipstick on a Kleenex. Sime Younkers’ appearance in your office. Where’s your concrete evidence?”
The fluorescent lighting in his office gave Ivey’s face a pale look. “Don’t ride me, Ed. You’ve been a cop. You know what it’s like. You live in a dirty world apart, with death around the next corner or on the next call. We’re supposed to work an eight-hour day. We’re on call twenty-four. To be cops, we’ve had to turn our backs on the hope of ever making any real money. We, and every department in the country, stagger under a work load that would drive us nuts if we stopped to think about it. Joe Citizen likes to bawl us out and remind us we’re public servants if we catch him running a red light. The same Joe wants us to materialize, fearless and almighty and ready to spill our blood for his sake, if he hollers for help. It’s nearly fourteen hours since I started this tour of duty, and the murders, muggings, and rapes haven’t stopped. So don’t ride me.”
“Sorry.”
“Damn it, I can’t stop everything else and pick Ichiro’s life to pieces, moment by moment, because you’ve got an idea in your hard head.”
He rocked forward and slapped his desk with his palm. “Sit down and quit looking like you want to tear something up. That is, if you want to hear what I can do and am doing.”
For answer, I took the chair across the desk from him.
He eyed me for a moment. “I said I couldn’t do what you asked. I didn’t say I wouldn’t like to. My orders come from higher up. From people who are certain of Nick Martin’s guilt and eventual conviction. How long would I last if I ignored the orders, the pressure of the masses of other work, and kept this division on the Martin case?”
“About five minutes,” I said.
“Right. I’m keeping Figueroa’s time as free as possible from other work. I’m curious myself to know where Ichiro was a few hours before his death.”
“Why?”
“A human hair. A long, blond hair.” He lifted his hands and massaged his neck briefly. “Let’s take it from point of beginning. When Ichiro’s body was brought in, the pathologist noticed the hair. It was twined around Ichiro’s right arm, tangled with the short, dark body hair. The detail was odd enough to strike a spark of curiosity. The pathologist ‘scoped the hair. The cellular structure was strange enough to cause him to take a second look.”
“Strange in what way?”
“The hair,” Ivey said, “had every appearance of having come from the head of a long-dead person, a corpse.”
Ivey’s wry grin told me I had a dumb look on my face.
“I’m only telling you,” he said, “what the pathologist told me. He wouldn’t guarantee his finding. He said only that the hair had that appearance.”
The phone skirled on Ivey’s desk. He picked it up. I vaguely heard the two-way conversation. Ivey gave an order to bring somebody in and hung up.
“Punk kid broke,” he said. “We know where some of our present supply of marijuana is coming from.”
“Yeah?”
“Little white-haired woman growing it,” Ivey said. “In rows of boxes on the roof of a slum tenement in West Tampa.”
Ivey growled as the phone commanded attention again. He picked it up.
It seemed a bolita numbers runner had used a straight razor on his mistress. She was alive, in a hospital. She’d never be pretty again, unless by some miracle she could afford the best in plastic surgeons. A manhunt was on, with a thousand dark holes to shelter the numbers runner.
All in a day’s work for Ivey.
I decided to go home and sleep on the thought of a blond hair, courtesy of a corpse.
Slide over to early evening, the next day. The day wouldn’t have interested you. I cooled my feet waiting to see people; then blistered them again going to see other people — a probate judge I knew, a banking official, a secretary in the firm of Cameron and Yamashita, a customer of the same firm, a newsstand operator in the lobby of the building where the firm had its offices, the credit manager of the city’s ritziest men’s-wear store.
I learned that no blonde woman, alive or deceased, was or had been employed by Cameron and Yamashita. Ichiro had put in a short working day, but when he’d worked, he’d been good at it. His mind had been keen, his grasp of detail thorough; his business personality had sparkled. He’d been a real asset to the firm.
His financial affairs had been in reasonable order. He had made no sudden, large expenditures before his death, and he hadn’t borrowed any large sums. In his off-business hours he had rioted through a respectable income to the final penny, but he had kept his bills current.
I got back to the apartment with my shirt sweat-plastered to my back and my socks feeling like layers of hot grease. I soaked until the water in the tub felt tepid, dressed, and cooked a dinner of pork and beans and Cuban sausage on the gas burner. I was pushing out the inner wrinkles with the food and icy beer when somebody knocked on the door.