“I mean where did she have it parked when they swiped it?”
“Oh.” He had closed the list; now he flipped it open to the last page. “Broadway and a Hundred Fourteenth. Hey, that leads to an interesting question.”
It damn well did, but how did he know that? I asked him what question it led to.
“What was Mrs. Raiken doing on Upper Broadway at two in the morning? And did Mr. Raiken know about it?”
“You’ve got a dirty mind.”
“I shoulda been a Special Prosecutor. What’s Mrs. Raiken got to do with your missing husband?”
I looked blank, then remembered the case I’d invented to explain my interest in Spinner’s corpse. “Oh,” I said. “Nothing. I wound up telling his wife to forget it. I got a couple days’ work out of it.”
“Uh-huh. Who took the car and what did they do with it last night?”
“Destroyed public property.”
“Huh?”
“They knocked over a parking meter on Ninth Avenue, then got the hell away in a hurry.”
“And you just happened to be there, and so you just happened to catch the license number, and naturally you figured the car was stolen but you wanted to check because you’re a public-spirited citizen.”
“That’s close.”
“It’s crap. Sit down, Matt. What are you into that I oughta know about?”
“Nothing.”
“How does a stolen car tie into Spinner Jablon?”
“Spinner? Oh, the guy they took out of the river. No connection.”
“Because you were just looking for this woman’s husband.” I saw my slip then, but waited to see if he’d caught it, and he had. “It was his girlfriend looking for him last time I heard it. You’re being awful cute with me, Matt.”
I didn’t say anything. He picked his cigar out of the ashtray and studied it, then leaned over and dropped it in his wastebasket. He straightened up and looked at me, then away, then at me again.
“What are you holding out?
“Nothing you have to know.”
“How do you get tied into Spinner Jablon?”
“It’s not important.”
“And what’s with the car?”
“That’s not important either.” I straightened up. “Spinner got dropped in the East River, and the car sheared off a parking meter on Ninth between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. And the car was stolen uptown, so none of this has been going on in the Sixth Precinct. There’s nothing you’ve got to know, Eddie.”
“Who killed Spinner?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that straight?”
“Of course it’s straight.”
“Are you playing tag with somebody?”
“Not exactly.”
“Jesus Christ, Matt.”
I wanted to get out of there. I wasn’t holding out anything he had a claim on, and I really couldn’t give him or anybody else what I had. But I was playing a lone hand and ducking his questions, and I could hardly expect him to like it.
“Who’s your client, Matt?”
Spinner was my client, but I could see no profit in saying so. “I don’t have one,” I said.
“Then what’s your angle?”
“I’m not sure I have an angle, either.”
“I hear things to the effect that Spinner was in the dollars lately.”
“He was well dressed the last time I saw him.”
“That so?”
“His suit set him back three hundred and twenty dollars. He happened to mention it.”
He looked at me until I averted my own gaze. In a low voice he said, “Matt, you don’t want people driving cars at you. It’s unhealthy. You sure you don’t want to lay it all out for me?”
“As soon as it’s time, Eddie.”
“And you’re sure it’s not time yet?”
I took my time answering. I remembered the feel of that car rolling at me, remembered what actually happened, and then remembered how I dreamed it, with the driver taking the big car all the way to the wall.
“I’m sure,” I said.
At the Lion’s Head I had a hamburger and some bourbon and coffee. I was a little surprised that the car had been stolen so far uptown. They could have picked it up early on and parked it in my neighborhood, or the Marlboro man could have made a phone call between the time I left Polly’s and the time he found his way into Armstrong’s. Which would mean there were at least two people in the thing, which I had already decided on the basis of the voice I’d heard over the telephone. Or he could have—
No, it was pointless. There were too many possible scenarios I could write for myself, and none of them was going to get me anywhere but confused.
I signaled for another cup of coffee and another shot, mixed them together, and worked on it. The tail end of my conversation with Eddie had gotten in the way. There was something I had learned from him, but the problem was that I didn’t know that I knew it. He had said something that had rung a very muted bell, and I couldn’t get it to ring again.
I got a dollar’s worth of change and went over to the phone. Jersey Information gave me William Raiken’s number in Upper Montclair. I called it and told Mrs. Raiken I was from the Auto Theft Squad, and she said was surprised we had recovered her car so soon and did I happen to know if it was at all damaged.
I said, “I’m afraid we haven’t recovered your car yet, Mrs. Raiken.”
“Oh.”
“I just wanted to get some details. Your car was parked at Broadway and One Hundred Fourteenth Street?”
“That’s right. On One Hundred Fourteenth, not on Broadway.”
“I see. Now, our records indicate that you reported the theft at approximately two a.m. Was that immediately after you noticed the car was missing.
“Yes. Well, just about. I went to where I parked the car and it wasn’t there, of course, and my first thought was it was towed away. I was parked legally, but sometimes there are signs you don’t see, different regulations, but anyway they don’t do any towing that far uptown, do they?”
“Not above Eighty-sixth Street.”
“That’s what I thought, although I always manage to find a legal space. Then I thought maybe I’d made a mistake and I actually left the car on a Hundred Thirteenth, so I went and checked, but of course it wasn’t there either, so then I called my husband to have him pick me up, and he said to report the theft, so that was when I called you. Maybe there was fifteen or twenty minutes between when I missed the car and when I actually placed the call.”
“I see.” I was sorry now that I’d asked. “And when did you park the car, Mrs. Raiken?”
“Let me see. I had the two classes, an eight o’clock short-story workshop and a ten o’clock course in Renaissance history, but I was a little early, so I guess I parked a little after seven. Is that important?”
“Well, it won’t aid in recovering the vehicle, Mrs. Raiken, but we try to develop data to pinpoint the times when various crimes are likely to occur.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “What good does that do?”
I had always wondered that myself. I told her it was part of the overall crime picture, which is what I generally had been told when I’d asked similar questions. I thanked her and assured her that her car would probably be recovered shortly, and she thanked me, and we said good-bye to each other and I went back to the bar.
I tried to determine what I’d learned from her and decided I’d learned nothing. My mind wandered, and I found myself wondering just what Mrs. Raiken had been doing on the Upper West Side in the middle of the night. She hadn’t been with her husband, and her last class must have let out around eleven. Maybe she’d just had a few beers at the West End or one of the other bars around Columbia. Quite a few beers, maybe, which would explain why she’d walked around the block looking for her car. Not that it mattered if she’d had enough beer to float a battleship, because Mrs. Raiken didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with Spinner Jablon or anybody else, and whether or not she had anything to do with Mr. Raiken was their business and none of my own, and—