One place was open on the street-a gas station where a skinny, serious-looking kid wearing a baseball cap and earmuffs was changing a tire. I crossed the street and walked over to him. He paused every few seconds to blow on his cold red fingers.
“Forty thirty-eight Nineteenth,” I said.
He pointed down the street behind the gas station.
“Know a kid named Canetta?” I tried. “Wears an orange jacket?”
He nodded that he knew him.
“What do you know about him?” I said, plunging my hands deep in my pockets and shifting like the newsy from leg to leg.
“Enough not to talk about him to people I don’t know,” said the kid in a surprisingly deep voice as he pulled the tire free from the jacked-up DeSoto.
“I’m not a friend,” I said.
The kid sort of smiled.
“He’s lived around here maybe two months. Brought a car in once with Indiana plates. Goes out of town a lot.”
“Ever see him with anyone?”
The kid lifted a fixed tire and heaved it onto the wheel.
“Yeah,” he said with a grunt as he adjusted the tire. “Kind of big guy was in the car yesterday. Had a hat on, didn’t get out or talk. They just got gas. Nothing else I can give you.”
He tightened the lugs on the wheel, stood up, and warmed his hands under his arms before dropping the car.
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “Aren’t you going to ask why I want to know?”
He shook his head no.
“If I don’t ask, I don’t know when someone else asks. Makes it easier.”
“You got a point,” I said and headed down Nineteenth.
There was an empty lot on the corner of Nineteenth and Komensky. Some kids wearing thin jackets were playing football in the snow. They called each other Al, Irwin, and Melvin and they screamed and laughed. One of the kids had one arm.
Forty thirty-eight was a three-story yellow building across from a wide, three-block long prairie. Cars were parked in the prairie near the street. The wind ran over a field of frozen weeds, hitting the cars and rocking them. The ground around the cars was covered with tire ruts made in the rain and now frozen solid and partly filled with shifting snow. A little kid sat in the recess of a narrow window on one side of the entrance to the building. The recess kept the worst of the wind away. The kid was about six, with a knit green cap over his head and ears. He wore corduroy knickers and a fuzzy jacket too light for the weather. The kid watched the cars and wind and played with a loose tooth in the front of his mouth.
“Hi,” I said pulling my collar around my neck. “My name’s Toby Peters. I’m a detective. What’s your name?”
“Stgsmmm,” he said, with a finger in his mouth.
“Stugum?”
“No,” he said with weary impatience removing his finger, “Stu-ard.”
“You live here?”
“Yuh.”
“Know a guy named Canetta? Wears an orange jacket?”
A sour look crossed Stu-ard’s face. His head went up and down once, showing he knew him.
“Second floor. Over us.”
“He there now?”
“Yuh, another guy too. Maybe two other guys.”
“You know the guys?”
“One’s Morris, comes here sometimes. I don’t know the other guy-a big guy I seen here yesterday.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”
“Hit my baby sister and ran away,” he said, going back to his tooth. I gave him my scarf and wrapped it around his neck awkwardly, getting a suspicious look.
“Detectives get scarves free,” I explained.
“Detectives catch rats?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dirty rats and killers.”
“I mean real rats,” the kid explained. I thought I saw a drop of blood on his gum from the squirming tooth. “We caught one in the phoney fireplace today. My dad’s home.”
I went inside and found Canetta’s name on the mailbox, scrawled in pencil right on the metal. The downstairs door in the hall was open. The hall was clean. I went up squeaky steps covered with clean but tired carpeting and stopped in front of the two doors on the second floor.
Behind the door on the left I could hear the bark of a small dog, and a woman shouting, “Quiet Peanuts.” Then she said something like, “Sheldon will find out about the noise when he gets home.”
I decided that wasn’t my door. The wind sang bass as I tried the handle on the second door and held my other hand on the.38, which lay cool and comfortable in my coat pocket.
The door was locked. I decided to knock and heard something scuttling inside-maybe one of the rats I was looking for. My nose was running again, but I didn’t have time or a free hand. I knocked again and thought I heard the scuttling sound move toward the door. It came slow and as it got closer, it sounded more like the dragging foot of the mummy from some Universal picture.
“Hello,” I said with a heavy Yiddish accent picked up from vague memories of my grandfather, “is here a Mister Canetta? I’m from landlord mitten da pipes.”
Someone fumbled at the lock inside and I stepped back, expecting to face the kid who had tried to steal my suitcase and whose nose I had broken. The door came open a crack and stayed that way.
“Somevone dere?” I asked. No answer.
I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my sleeve, pulled out the gun and pushed the door open. I jumped inside and was about to go flat on the floor when I saw him. He was about three or four feet from me in a little reception area. His back was against a mirror on the outside of a closet. His knees were slightly buckled and his mouth was open. Blood trickled from his mouth and poured from his belly. He was a good thirty year older than Canetta-a little guy witha balding head gasping for air he couldn’t get. I moved to him, keeping low in the dark apartment. There was a living room behind me with some light coming in from the morning, but it wasn’t much of a morning.
The living room was furnished with dark, heavy furniture. I kept my back to it, and my eyes down the dark hall going the other way. With my free arm I helped the man sag to the floor. I had never seen him before, but I had the feeling he might be the Chico double I was looking for. The age and size were right. The face and features were probably close, but it was hard to tell. The face in front of me was twisted in pain and surprise. No one would mistake him for a Marx Brother if he were in the same room with the Brothers, but a good bluff might carry it off.
He tried to say something, and his eyes moved in the direction of the hall. I nodded to him that I understood, but I didn’t understand a goddam thing. Something gurgled inside of him and moved up his chest to his throat. It rattled his body and killed him. I lowered him gently and looked at myself in the bloody mirror. My hands were shaking. I held my breath for the count of ten and stepped as quietly as I could over the body and toward the apartment’s hall. The floor was uncarpeted and made of boards that squeaked above the outside wind like a carpenter driving nails.
I moved along the wall, my back against it and my gun pointing forward. A blast of machine gun fire would cut through me like the man in the alcove before I could get off a shot. I hoped the guy with the chopper was gone, but I couldn’t be far behind him. My feet slipped slightly in something wet and sticky, probably the trail of blood from the dead guy who had let me in.
I hit an open door and put as little of myself into it as I could. It was a bedroom with a single window, a single chest of drawers, a painting of a peacock on the wall, and a closet with holes in it. The holes made a curving line, as if someone had done a graph of the weather or stock market in bullets. The man in the hall had probably been shot in the closet, I thought, but something changed my mind-a sound from the closet. I inched along the wall and kicked the door open. There was nothing at eye level and only a few shirts on the hangers inside. Sitting on the floor with a pair of pants and a wire hanger in his clenched fingers was the kid who had tried for my suitcase in Indianapolis. I couldn’t see much of him in the dark, but I saw enough. His nose was bandaged where I had hit him, but it would take more than bandages to take care of what had happened to him now.