“The same thing he always worked on. He was after something that would incriminate Servo and get rid of the rottenness in this town.”
“Is it just Servo?”
“There’s a lot of them. Servo’s the boy with the brains. No, that’s not the word. Let’s say nerve. He’s ruthless. It’s a sort of gentlemanly ruthlessness that he’s acquired. He owns everything and everybody. Hell, you got to face it, nobody in the city government wants to make a move against him.”
“Wonderful situation.”
“For Servo. Someday it’ll change.”
I said, “Well, thanks for the stuff. Having you around is a big help.”
His eyes squinted under the scarred lids. “That’s okay. I’m still waiting for that big story. Maybe more.”
“Vera?”
“Yeah. I’d still take her back no matter what she was.”
“You mean as long as she wasn’t a killer or an accessory before the fact,” I grinned at him.
He said something nasty.
“There’s something I forgot to ask you,” I said. “Vera and Johnny worked together until the monkey business in the bank came out. How long after it happened did she continue to work there?”
“Not very long. The two of them took their vacations together. It was during that time that the auditors checked the books and uncovered the theft. I never got to see Vera to talk to after that. She just left the bank and started hanging around the gambling houses in town. She was making quite a splash when Servo picked her up. After that she was with him constantly until the day she just dropped out of sight.”
“No trace of her since?”
“No trace,” he repeated dully.
“I want a picture of her, Logan. Got one?”
He reached his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “There’s one in the cardcase,” he told me, “on the bottom of the pile.”
I shuffled through the cards until I found it, a two-by-three-inch photo on heavy linen paper. And there she was, a lovely natural blonde with hair like new butter flowing down to her shoulders. The photographer had caught her in a coquettish pose, but there was a freshness about her that had to be real. Her mouth was full and soft, her nose tilted gently, ready to laugh. It was hard to tell much about her eyes. They might have been soft eyes or they might have been hard. I couldn’t tell.
Logan said, “What do you think?”
“Beautiful.”
“She was that all right. You can keep that picture if you want it.”
“Thanks.” I stuck it in my pocket and handed his wallet back.
“You still didn’t tell me what you were going to do about it,” he said.
I watched the houses flash by the window a minute. “Logan, Johnny was run out of town because he was involved in something big. Like two hundred thousand bucks is big. I don’t think Johnny took that dough.”
“Frame?”
“Maybe. Vera was involved and when I find her I’ll find the answers.”
There was a red light up ahead and Logan slowed down for it. When he came to a stop he stared at me meaningly. “I’m pretty well convinced you’re not McBride, but when you started telling me about those unnatural talents of yours I started thinking of something.”
I caught it fast. “You mean did I discover I was a handy man with figures too?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Chum, the only figures I’m good with walk on high heels. I still count on my fingers. I’d make a lousy bank teller.”
“And the Johnny McBride you knew?”
I bobbed my head. “He was a mathematical whiz, that guy. He kept the company accounts.”
The light changed and the car rolled ahead. We were on the edge of town now and Logan took the time to point out some of the bigger hot spots. Most of the places were just starting to get a play and before the hour was out they’d be packed to the doors. Most of the cars in the parking lots were from out of town and about half from out of the state entirely. Lyncastle had the kind of reputation to draw the tourists.
I noticed little blue signs in a lot of the windows and mentioned it to Logan.
“Members of the Business Group,” he said, “Servo’s outfit.”
“What happens if you don’t belong?”
“Oh hell, there’s no rough stuff involved. About a tenth of the places are independents, but they don’t make out so well. If there is any trouble and you are a member of the group, there’s a lot of money for the best lawyers. Besides that, Servo has a liquor monopoly in town and if you don’t belong you don’t get the kind of stuff the customers want.”
“Never any trouble from the public?”
Logan grunted mirthlessly. “There would have been at one time. There would still be if the damn public would get the merchants out of politics and run the town themselves. What the hell, you can’t blame them too much. There’s a lot of new money in town now if you can stand to live with the kind of people who have it.”
“You ought to have an opinion on it, Logan. What is it?”
I saw his lips come back in a sneer. “I’ve covered murder cases, I’ve seen kids who were raped on the streets, I watched them pull young mangled bodies from the wrecks of cars that had a drunk at the wheel, I’ve had to live under laws set up by a pack of ignorant bastards who take all the cream and throw the rest to the people who vote for them. Now you know what my opinion is.”
“Who runs the town now?”
“Balls.”
“I mean it.”
“Who the hell knows?”
“You should know, you’re a newspaperman,” I said.
“Yeah, I should know, a lot of things. Look, feller, whoever is at the top pulling the strings does it under the nicest cover you ever saw. There’s more money in this town than you can imagine, but it isn’t going down into any books. We’ve had the feds in here and boys from the attorney general’s office trying to get to the bottom of it and they all come up shaking their heads.
“A lot of people try to put it on Servo, but he’s clean. He pays his taxes and stays out of trouble. They try it on the mayor and the city council and what happens? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Nobody knows from nothing.”
He stopped abruptly and looked at me sidewise. “What are you getting at?”
“Nothing special.” We were in the center of town by then and slowing down for another light. “Let me out on the corner, Logan.”
He pulled in to the curb and stopped. I swung out of the car and slammed the door shut. He said, “If you stay alive long enough to find out anything, you can reach me at the office.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m going to backtrack over your story, you know.”
“I expected that.”
“Where can I find you?”
I laughed at him. “You can’t, pal. I’ll find you. If I’m still alive, that is.”
I watched him pull away into traffic, then went into a joint and had a beer. The place was called Little Bohemia and had a blue sign in the window. There were slots all around the walls going full blast, an ornate juke box to drown out the sound of more money going into them than was coming out, a sheet-covered roulette wheel and two crap tables in the back and a chrome and plastic bar forming a huge oval in the center of the place.
Beer was two-bits a throw.
A sign said something about not serving minors, but I’d like to have a buck for every overpainted chippy in the place who hadn’t seen eighteen yet. Most of them were there for strictly one reason, sipping their drinks until they found a sucker to finance some faster drinking.
I had my beer and went next door where there was no blue sign in the window. Beer was a dime, but there weren’t any customers, either. The bartender was feeding the relic of a slot machine until he saw me. I said, “Where’d that come from?”