"What do you want?" I said.
"How many times were you there, Lou? How many times did you lay her?"
"I was there quite a few times," I said. "I had reason to be. And I'm not so hard up for it that I have to lay whores."
"No?" He squinted at me thoughtfully. "No, I don't suppose you would be. Personally, I've always operated on the theory that even in the presence of abundance, it's well to keep an eye out for the future. You never can tell, Lou. You may wake up some morning and find they've passed a law against it. It'll be un-American."
"Maybe they'll put a rider on that law," I said.
"Prohibiting bullshit? I see you don't have a legal type of mind, Lou, or you wouldn't say that. There's a basic contradiction in it. Tail we can do without, as our penal institutions so righteously prove; tail of the orthodox type, that is. But what could you substitute for bullshit? Where would we be without it?"
"Well," I said, "I wouldn't be listening to you."
"But you're going to listen to me, Lou. You're going to sit right here and listen, and answer up promptly when the occasion demands. Get me? Get me, Lou?"
"I get you," I said. "I got you right from the beginning."
"I was afraid you hadn't. I wanted you to understand that I can stack it up over your head, and you'll sit there and like it."
He shook tobacco into a paper, twirled it, and ran it across his tongue. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and seemed to forget about it.
"You were talking with Max Pappas," he said. "From what I could judge it was a reasonably friendly conversation."
"It was," I said.
"He was resigned to the fact of Johnnie's suicide? He had accepted it as suicide?"
"I can't say that he was resigned to it," I said. "He was wondering whether someone-if someone was in the cell after I left, and…"
"And, Lou? And?"
"I told him, no, that it couldn't have been that way. None of the boys would be up to doing such a thing."
"Which settles that," Rothman nodded. "Or does it?"
"What are you driving at?" I snapped. "What-"
"Shut up!" His voice toughened, then went smooth again. "Did you notice the remodeling he's doing? Do you know how much all that will cost? Right around twelve thousand dollars. Where do you suppose he got that kind of money?"
"How the hell do I-"
"Lou."
"Well, maybe he had it saved."
"Max Pappas?"
"Or maybe he borrowed it."
"Without collateral?"
"Well… I don't know," I said.
"Let me make a suggestion. Someone gave it to him. A wealthy acquaintance, we'll say. Some man who felt he owed it to him."
I shrugged, and pushed my hat back; because my forehead was sweating. But I was feeling cold inside, so cold inside.
"Conway Construction is handling the job, Lou. Doesn't it strike you as rather odd that he'd do a job for a man whose son killed his son."
"There aren't many jobs that he don't handle," I said. "Anyway, it's the company, not him; he's not in there swinging a hammer himself. More'n likely he doesn't even know about it."
"Well…" Rothman hesitated. Then he went on, kind of dogged. "It's a turnkey job. Conway's jobbing all the materials, dealing with the supply houses, paying off the men. No one's seen a nickel coming from Pappas."
"So what?" I said. "Conway takes all the turnkey stuff he can get. He cuts a half a dozen profits instead of one."
"And you think Pappas would hold still for it? You don't see him as the kind of guy who'd insist on bargaining for every item, who'd haggle over everything right down to the last nail? I see him that way, Lou. It's the only way I can see him."
I nodded. "So do I. But he's not in a real good position to have his own way right now. He gets his job like Conway Construction wants to give it to him, or he just don't get it."
"Yeah…" He shifted his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. He pushed it across with his tongue, his eyes narrowed on my face. "But the money, Lou. That still doesn't explain about the money."
"He lived close," I said. "He could have had it, a big enough part, anyway, so's they'd wait on the rest. It didn't need to be in a bank. He could have had it salted away around his house."
"Yeah," said Rothman, slowly. "Yeah, I suppose so…"
He turned back around in the seat, so that he was looking through the windshield instead of me-instead of at me. He flicked his cigarette away, fumbled for his tobacco and papers, and began rolling another one.
"Did you get out to the cemetery, Lou? Out to Johnnie's grave?"
"No," I said, "and I've sure got to do that, too. I'm ashamed I haven't done it before."
"Well-dammit, you mean that, don't you? You mean every word of it!"
"Who are you to ask that?" I snapped. "What did you ever do for him? I don't want any credit for it, but I'm the only man in Central City that ever tried to help that kid. I liked him. I understood him. I-"
"I know, I know," he shook his head, dully. "I was just going to say that Johnnie's buried in Sacred Ground… You know what that means, Lou?"
"I reckon. The church didn't call it suicide."
"And the answer, Lou? You do have an answer?"
"He was so awful young," I said, "and he hadn't ever had much but trouble. Maybe the church figured he'd been faulted enough, and tried to give him a break. Maybe they figured that it was sort of an accident; that he'd just been fooling around and went too far."
"Maybe," said Rothman. "Maybe, maybe, maybe. One more thing, Lou. The big thing… On the Sunday night that Elmer and the late occupant of yon cottage got it, one of my carpenters went to the last show at the Palace. He parked his car around in back at-now get this, Lou- at nine-thirty. When he came out, all four of his tires were gone…"
16
I waited and everything got pretty quiet. "Well," I said, finally, "that's sure too bad. All four tires, huh?"
"Too bad? You mean it's funny, don't you, Lou? Plumb funny?"
"Well, it is, kind of," I said. "It's funny I didn't hear anything about it at the office."
"It'd been still funnier if you had, Lou. Because he didn't report the theft. I'd hardly call it the greatest mystery of all time, but, for some reason, you fellas down at the office don't take much interest in us fellas down at the labor temple-unless you find us on a picket line."
"I can't hardly help-"
"Never mind, Lou; it's really not pertinent. The man didn't report the theft, but he did mention it to some of the boys when the carpenters and joiners held their regular Tuesday night meeting. And one of them, as it turned out, had bought two of the tires from Johnnie Pappas. They… Do you have a chill, Lou? Are you catching cold?"
I bit down on my cigar. I didn't say anything.
"These lads equipped themselves with a couple of pisselm clubs, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, and went calling on Johnnie. He wasn't at home and he wasn't at Slim Murphy's filling station. In fact, he wasn't anywhere about that time; he was swinging by his belt from the windowbars of the courthouse cooler. But his hotrod was at the station, and the remaining two stolen tires were on it. They stripped them off-Murphy, of course, isn't confiding in the police either-and that ended the matter. But there's been talk about it, Lou. There's been talk even though-apparently-no one has attached any great significance to the event."
I cleared my throat. "I-why should they, Joe?" I said. "I guess I don't get you."
"For the birds, Lou, remember? The starving sparrows… Those tires were stolen after nine-thirty on the night of Elmer's and his lady friend's demise. Assuming that Johnnie didn't go to work on them the moment the owner parked-or even assuming that he did-we are driven to the inevitable conclusion that he was engaged in relatively innocent pursuits until well after ten o'clock. He could not, in other words, have had any part in the horrible happenings behind yonder blackjacks."