“How long does this go on?” Bennett asked unhappily. “I’m only supposed to be in Homicide temporary, like.”
“I have no idea. When you’re assigned back to a car you’ll go back and we’ll have to find somebody else, I guess. Anyway, it won’t be too long.” He crossed his fingers. “I hope.”
“Isn’t that something!” Stan Lundahl snorted. “Playing nursemaid to a bum like Johnny Sekara!” He looked at Reardon. “How are we supposed to cover him? From his pocket or a block down the road?”
“Ask him,” Reardon said coldly. “He probably knows more about tailing for protection than we do. Anyway, that’s the story and those are the orders, so there’s no sense in getting in an uproar about it. Because if you’re up tight you’ll be thinking about something else when you ought to be keeping your eyes open.”
“I haven’t done anything like this for a long time, Lieutenant,” Bennett said, still unhappy about the assignment. “Maybe Sergeant Dondero would be better—”
“I’ve got things for Don to do, so why don’t you let me make the assignments around here, eh, Sergeant?” As soon as the words were out Reardon was sorry for the harshness of his tone, but it was too late to do anything about it then. He nodded brusquely, avoiding the sergeant’s red face. “Why don’t you two go down the hall and get acquainted with Mr. Sekara? And if he starts to give you a hard time because there aren’t more men on the job — or if he starts to give you a hard time about anything else, either — just turn around and walk out.”
“With pleasure,” Lundahl said. “And I hope he argues.” He started toward the door, towering over Bennett, and then stopped, realizing something. “Where is he, Lieutenant?”
“In Captain Tower’s outer office,” Reardon said, and watched the two men walk out, closing the door behind them. I should have asked them to see if the secretary was there, he thought suddenly, and then put the bizarre notion away. “All right, Don — what did you find out about Ray Martin?”
“First, let’s talk about that assignment you just handed out, huh, Jim?” Dondero’s voice was low, pleasant, but there was dead seriousness behind it. “You know damn well Tom Bennett isn’t the right man for a cover job on a hood like Sekara. Or are you hoping, maybe, that if there’s a try for Sekara, it’ll come between eight in the morning and three? So you can kill two birds with one stone — see the last of the Big Four on a slab in the morgue downstairs, and also see the old man in trouble for not being able to prevent it?”
Reardon held back his first swift flush of anger, forcing himself to count slowly to ten. He made it as far as seven before the words came out, a near record, but at least he had his tone under control.
“Don, there are very few people in this entire organization, from the chief on down, who can talk to me that way and not get their heads handed to them, and none of those few are sergeants lower than me in the table of organization.” He paused, took a deep breath, and then went on, his voice under better control. “We’ve been friends a long long time — maybe too long, I don’t know — but if you have something to say to me, you ought to know by now that I don’t like snide cracks. If you think I’m giving Bennett a hard time, just say so.”
Dondero looked at him in astonishment.
“Say so? Say so? What the hell have I been doing, for crissakes? I’ve been saying loud and clear that you’re giving Bennett a bum shake. If you haven’t heard me, you got to be deaf. Snide cracks, my ass! I think you got in a fight about those martinis, and the first guy you run into afterwards with liquor on his breath, catches hell for it. Especially when he happens to be a guy you can pull rank on—”
Reardon interrupted. His eyes were narrowed tiny chips of gray granite in a rigid, pale face.
“Can I pull rank on you, Dondero?”
“That’s what I like,” Dondero said approvingly. “A nice, logical, calm discussion. No tempers. Sure you can pull rank on me, Lieutenant. Any time you want.”
“Then I want to right now.” Reardon clamped down on his temper. “Let’s drop the entire subject of Sergeant Bennett, shall we? Let’s talk about Ray Martin.”
“All right,” Dondero said equably. “Let’s.”
He pulled his notebook from his pocket, opened it and studied it. His eyes came up, fathomless.
“Ray Martin spent most of Wednesday at home, and if he got any calls that were unusual or upsetting, his wife doesn’t know of them. He has a room he uses for an office and he’s in there a good part of the time after he gets up — which is usually around noon — until about three when he watches TV for a while. Wednesday, all was normal, according to his wife. They had a dinner engagement with friends at their home, and then all four of them went to the Top of the Mark for a drink. They were there until about eleven, after which they drove home. She says she got out of the car downstairs — their apartment is over the garage — and went upstairs, thinking Martin was going to put the car away, but when he didn’t come up she went downstairs again and found the car was gone.”
“And didn’t think anything of it?”
“She didn’t think too much of it, according to her. She figured he must of had some business to take care of; a lot of his business, she said — as if I didn’t know — is just getting started around midnight, and he’d dropped her off and gone like that quite often before, sometimes without telling her, and sometimes she says he told her and she didn’t even listen, so she says she didn’t think too much of it. She figured he’d be back when he was ready, which could be anytime up to five in the morning.”
He broke off to light a cigarette and refer to his notebook. Reardon waited quietly. Dondero flipped a page and went on.
“Then yesterday morning, when she got up and went into his bedroom — they have separate rooms — and found he still hadn’t come home, she went downstairs to check on the car again, and in daylight she saw it was parked a bit down the street, is all. Then she says she started to worry, but by the time she started calling around to find out if any of his pals had seen him the night before, or if anyone had any idea what might have happened to him, the report was in that he’d been found in the net, and the cops were out there.”
“Who?”
Dondero brushed ash from his cigarette and looked in his book.
“Park Eight was the car that was sent; they were in service and the closest to Twenty-eighth, where Martin lived. They got the same story I got later — not so much detail, but the same story. No known enemies — what a joke! — no prior knowledge of the deaths of Capp and Falcone, etc., etc.”
“He probably wouldn’t have had,” Reardon said. “Capp was stabbed about nine, and Falcone killed about eleven at night.” He shook his head. “This joker, male or female, must have a bicycle! Or he’s lucky with cabs, which is more than I ever am. What else?”
Dondero shrugged. “Well, the killer could have been waiting in the garage and reached in the open window and caught Martin by the throat before he knew what was happening. Then he could have dragged him to his own car and smothered him there. Actually,” Dondero said, letting his imagination soar, “if it was a little guy, or even a woman, I guess, they could have laid him down on the front seat, put a pillow over his face, and sat on him all the way to the Bay Bridge.”