After glancing around, the lieutenant said, “I guess everything’s under control. I’m going inside.”
And casually he stepped out into the glare of the spotlights and started across the street. Clamping down on his unlighted cigar, Day immediately followed.
I hesitated for a moment. Then, hoping that Alberto was occupied at the moment in peering out either the side or back windows instead of the front, I started across briskly.
I kept my eyes fixed on the upper windows, noting both were raised a few inches from the bottom and expecting to see a gun barrel protrude from one or the other at any instant. It could hardly have taken more than thirty seconds to cross the street, but the time seemed to drag interminably.
I was halfway across before I realized Mouldy Greene was right by my side. I realized it when he suddenly asked, “What’s there to whistle about?”
As a kid I had lived for a time in a neighborhood near a cemetery, and I recall that whenever I had to traverse that particular block at night, I always whistled “Yankee Doodle.” Now, with something of a shock, I realized I was whistling “Yankee Doodle” through my teeth.
Cutting it off in the middle of a bar, I snarled at Mouldy with unnecessary savagery, “I’m whistling past the graveyard.”
Either Alberto wasn’t at the front windows when we crossed, or I had overestimated his probable resentment at my fingering him, because no shot came from above. I breathed a sigh of relief as we passed through the tavern’s front door.
Inside I discovered the tavern consisted of a single long room with a bar running lengthwise from one end to the other. An electric grill at the far end seemed to be all the kitchen the place possessed. Near the front door was the phone booth from which Alberto had presumably called, and the rear wall contained three doors. Over one a sign read “Rest Rooms.” The second I assumed was the rear exit, for the third door was open and I could see a stairway going upward as far as the first landing. That was as far as the stairs could be seen, because at the landing they made a ninety-degree left turn.
With both elbows on the bar to steady himself, a uniformed cop covered the stairway with a riot gun. Another cop, a pistol in his hand, waited to one side of the stairway door. In the far corner, well out of the probable line of fire, a middle-aged man who was apparently the tavern owner sat at a table nervously sipping at a beer.
“Any sound from up there?” the lieutenant asked the cop with the riot gun.
Without removing his eyes from the stairway, the policeman said, “Not a peep, sir. You sure he’s up there?”
“He has to be. There isn’t anywhere he could have gone.”
He started toward the stairs, but I stopped him by calling, “Lieutenant.”
When he turned to look at me, I said, “I’ve had a couple of dealings with this boy, Lieutenant. I also know more about the background of this situation than you do. I think if I talked to him, I might be able to advance some arguments for giving himself up that you wouldn’t know about.”
He eyed me for a moment, then glanced questioningly at Warren Day. The inspector looked me over moodily.
Finally Day said, “If you just want to talk, Moon. From the foot of the stairs. I don’t want you going up there and getting shot.”
“I’m not anxious to get shot,” I told him.
Since my experience of walking into my flat and being confronted by Alberto’s gun, I had been carrying my P-38. Now I drew it, clicked off the safety and approached the foot of the stairs.
“Listen, Al,” I called. “The place is surrounded and you haven’t got a chance. But we’re more interested in the guy who hired you than we are in you, Al. Give yourself up and turn state’s evidence, and the cops will give you every break possible. We want Walter Ford’s killer more than we want you.”
When there was still no sound, I called in a louder tone, “If you’re willing to put the finger on Ford’s killer, I’ll even talk Fausta into dropping the kidnap charge, providing you haven’t harmed her. So far all you’ve done is winged a cop. Shoot it out and you’re either going to get killed, or kill somebody and end up in the gas chamber. Give up and I’ll guarantee to do everything possible to get you a light sentence.”
All the answer I got was more silence.
A little impatiently I yelled, “How about it, Al?”
The answer came suddenly and unexpectedly. Apparently he leaped like a cat from the top step to the landing, for one instant the landing was vacant, and the next instant he was crouched there as though he had materialized out of thin air, the twin of the Colt Woodsman I had taken from him gripped in his hand and centering on my head.
My own gun was drooping downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and there was no time to bring it up. There was no time to do anything but drop flat on my face.
His small-caliber gun popped just as I started to drop, and the shot was so close I could feel the heat of the slug on the top of my head as it whispered by. As I rolled to one side of the doorway, it popped twice more, gouging splinters from the wooden floor where I had sprawled a micro-second before.
Then the riot gun roared.
It was all over when I climbed shakily to my feet. The young gunman had taken the full blast of the riot gun square in the chest. He was dead before he started to tumble down the stairs.
“I wanted that man alive!” Warren Day screeched at the man who had fired.
The cop looked abashed. “He was shooting, sir,” he said timidly. “He had legs!” Day yelled at him, his long nose nearly dead white. “Couldn’t you shoot his legs?”
“Oh, stop your yelling,” I said, irked at him. “The only way you could have taken him alive was to have me dead. He didn’t want to be alive. He wanted to go down shooting, like a two-bit hero. The officer here just did what he had to.”
Day swung his thin nose at me. “When I want your advice on what to say to my subordinates, I’ll ask for it, Moon!”
“If you don’t want it, don’t practice your Simon Legree personnel policy in front of me then,” I snarled back at him. “Pull it in private.”
We stood glaring at each other, both of us juvenilely taking out our rage at the loss of our star witness on the other, until Mouldy Greene brought us back to earth.
Mouldy asked of no one in particular, “Now how the hell we going to ask him where he hid Fausta?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mouldy’s question made us realize we had more important things to do than snarl at each other. With a grunt which I interpreted to mean he was willing to drop the argument, the inspector turned away.
In the hope that we might find some clue to Fausta’s whereabouts in the dead man’s pockets, Day and I searched the body. But the search told us nothing. A cheap new wallet of the type you can buy in dime stores, presumably purchased by Alberto as a temporary replacement for the wallet he had left behind when he tumbled backward out of the cottage window, contained only a few bills and no papers whatever. Aside from the usual trivia you might find in any man’s pockets, such as change, cigarettes, matches and a handkerchief, we found only two items of even faint interest. One was a small but vicious-looking leather sap filled with sand and the other was a tarnished brass key to a Yale lock.
“This might be the key to wherever he hid Miss Moreni,” the inspector said. “He must have her locked up someplace, and this is the only key on him.”
“Fine,” I said. “All we have to do is try every door in the city. Including the inside doors, since there’s no label on it saying it isn’t just a room key.”
“You don’t think very fast, Moon,” the inspector said sourly. He handed the key to the uniformed lieutenant, “Get a house-to-house canvass started, with this place as an axis. You’re looking for a good-looking blonde of about twenty-seven.” He turned his eyes to me. “Know how she was dressed, Moon?”