“Who’s going to say anything?” Reardon demanded. “Or even go?”
“You are, dear. With me.”
“Who made those arrangements? Tom Bennett is working for me right now, and—”
“And it would be lese majesty on his part to sit at the same table with the illustrious Lieutenant Reardon?” Jan smiled sweetly. “I made the arrangements, dear. And I also included Sergeant Dondero, so please don’t forget to tell him.”
Reardon paused, fork in hand.
“And just how am I supposed to convince Sergeant Dondero — a noted hardhead — that your friend Gabriella is the girl he wants to date tomorrow night?”
“By pulling rank, darling,” Jan said seriously, and started to serve the mushrooms. “After all, sweet, you’re so anxious to get married, I thought you might enjoy getting a taste of a wife’s prerogatives...” She looked at him. “Did you say something, dear?”
“Grrr,” said Reardon. “That’s all... Just grrr!!”
Chapter 10
Friday — 9:03 a.m.
Lieutenant Reardon — never the one to be overly late but also not the one to be overly early of mornings getting to work — trotted up the steps of the Hall of Justice, pushed through the doors, and was about to continue toward the elevators when a voice from the information desk gave him pause. He turned, walking over.
“Good morning, Jordan. You wanted me?”
The recruit back of the desk, one of the three men on duty behind the long counter, frowned in non-understanding. “I got a message for you, Lieutenant, but it’s pretty screwy. Doesn’t make sense.”
Reardon smiled. “I like them better that way. The ones that make sense around here usually mean more work.” He waited a moment but the recruit remained silent, as if waiting himself for more pearls of wisdom to fall from the lieutenant’s mouth. Reardon’s tone firmed. “Well?”
“Oh, yeah. Some character called,” Jordan said, explaining, and then broke off to remove a note from beneath his desk calendar, referring to it. “He says to tell you that today is September the eleventh — which it ain’t, of course, it’s the fifteenth — and that any month with an R in it is a good month for oysters. I was going to hang up on the nut, see, but he sounded sober—”
“Sober but sleepy?”
The recruit stared at Reardon in amazement. He supposed it was just this profound ability to detect that led men like the lieutenant to rapid promotion — although in this particular case he honestly could not see how the lieutenant had done it.
“Yeah!” he said. “How did you know?”
“Because that’s how I feel early in the morning.”
“Oh.” The recruit was disappointed in this denial of prescience; he went ahead with his story. “Anyways, like I say, I was going to hang up on him, only he also says you’ll have my ears for bookmarks — those were his words, Lieutenant, not mine — if I don’t give you the message, so why should I take any chances?”
He looked at the lieutenant as if wondering if he were going to get a pat on the head for delivering the message faithfully, or a horselaugh for his innocence in paying any attention to such gibberish. What he actually got was a shrug.
“I like to receive all messages, Jordan, even those from nuts. You can never tell when one might be important.”
“That’s true.” The recruit was suitably impressed by the infallibility of this logic; his tone returned Reardon to his pedestal.
The lieutenant smiled to show his appreciation and headed back in the direction of the elevator bank. There was really no good reason for Porky Frank to complicate his messages in this fashion, other than the fact that he enjoyed doing so. Reardon grinned inwardly as he pictured Jordan receiving the message, and rode to the fourth floor in good humor, hoping Porky had something for him. He walked down the corridor to his office, humming slightly. Bennett and Dondero were sitting on opposite sides of his desk, waiting for him. Dondero had been keeping his pistol eye in shape by tossing paper clips at a wastebasket; at the lieutenant’s entrance he walked over, retrieved his ammunition from in and around his target, returned them to the container on the desk, and sat down again. Reardon walked around his desk, removed his clip-on holster and seated himself. He looked from one man to the other.
“Good morning. So what’s new?”
Both men shook their heads. “Nothing,” Dondero said, and shrugged.
“Nothing? Did you get hold of those men from that bar down on the Embarcadero? The ones that didn’t hang around? And what about that dame, the barfly?”
“Who, Sadie? Sadie Chenowicz.” He grinned. “I saw her. Fifty years ago I might have gone for her. She was sitting there at the bar; my guess is she’d beat the pavements, only at her age her feet probably hurt, so she used the bar as a recruiting station.”
“Did she have anything to say?”
“Yeah. Mostly, ‘Buy me a drink.’ Anyway, she wasn’t there when Capp got it — she says a gentleman friend of hers invited her up to his room. But she was there when the girl came in asking directions, and Sadie says she was a nothing, a nobody. A kid.”
“Could Sadie give a description of this kid?”
“Sadie probably couldn’t give a description of her gentleman friend’s belly button. Sadie, my friend, is a lush. Sadie also dislikes all women younger than her, and that covers practically the world. Sadie was of no use at all.”
Reardon frowned. “Unless, of course, Sadie fingered Capp herself.” He suddenly grinned and then wiped the grin away. “Don’t ask me where that hot flash came from — I told you I was desperate.”
“Well, Sadie would do anything for a buck, but if she fingered Capp she didn’t get paid yet, because she was bumming drinks with what I guess is her usual talent.”
“Forget it,” Reardon said. “What about the others?”
“Well, we got hold of them — or rather, I did; Bennett was doing the costume shop bit by phone. Anyway, on these guys, only one of them even admitted he was in the bar and he says he left before any trouble started, said he read about it in the papers and wasn’t it a bloomin’ shyme? Says Alfred, the bartender, must have been excited and forgot he left early, even before any girl came in asking directions. And the others deny having been in the bar at all. None of them seemed to care for having any intimate contact with us nasty cops, although what trouble they could get into by just telling the truth, is beyond me.”
“Maybe they’re afraid it could get to be a habit,” Reardon said.
“Or maybe they’re all telling the truth, and Alfred Sullivan and the other three guys we found there are lying,” Dondero said. “How about a conspiracy by the four of them? Sullivan does the knifing — say, because Capp caught him knocking down on the cash register — and he bribes the other three guys to keep quiet about it by promising them free beer for a week? How’s that? The guy with the broken specs acts lookout, and the old man with the scarf checks out back to make sure the kitchen’s empty and nobody’s in the john—”
Bennett was staring at the two of them.
“And that punch-drunk ex-pug makes sure the phone doesn’t ring and disturb them, I suppose,” Reardon said, and smiled. His smile faded. “Well, we may have to come back to something like that before we’re through, especially at the rate we’re going.” He swung around to Bennett. “What about the costume shops?”
“Nothing. Oh, they all rent and sell fake beards and mustaches and wigs, too, either separately or all together — one place even rents the whole works with dark glasses and a fake nose, practically a mask — but every one of them says that at the moment they don’t have any outstanding rentals that fit the description—”