inquire how the man happened to be in a lot with a flat wheel?”
“He didn't believe a guy who said the odds were eight to five.”
“I guess that makes about as much sense as most of what I hear from you,” Rogers observed. He swung about in the seat again and reached for the door handle. With his hand on it he paused, looking straight ahead through the windshield, his voice uncomfortable. “This and a dime will get you a cup of coffee from me any time,” he said gruffly. “Understand? The first time that Cuneo-”
“Could Palmer have killed Arends, Jimmy?” Johnny cut in.
“The first time that Cuneo sees you,” the sandy-haired man continued doggedly, unheeding, “I won't be responsible.”
“I don't like people who carry their hardware around in back of me, Jimmy.”
“Cuneo was trying to break up a brawl in a public place, which he had every license to do!” Rogers' voice had risen sharply. “Which it was his duty to do,” he continued more quietly. “Each of us does his duty as he sees it.” He threw up the door handle and opened the door part way. With his legs already out he spoke over his shoulder. “I forget that question you just asked, but the answer is negative. Physically impossible.” He climbed out, slammed the door, walked around the car and ran lightly up the worn white stone steps of the old building.
“Thanks, Jimmy,” Johnny said softly after the departed figure. He climbed leisurely from the sedan and looked at his watch. Eight twenty-five. Thirty-five minutes to Rogers' appointment time. Johnny was more than a little curious about this appointment of Jimmy Rogers.
He walked up to the corner. Before he was halfway there two cruisers rushed out of the private police parking lot and roared past him nose-to-tail, a low rrrrrr of the sirens and the flashing red dome lights denoting urgency. Johnny smiled to himself. Tiny would be having company.
The smile faded as he walked. If he'd been sure this afternoon, that tire iron might have been a good idea. Madeleine Winters might have been and done a lot of things, but no woman deserved what had happened to her. Palmer might not have killed Arends, but he had a lot to answer for.
And it still left the question of who had killed Arends.
Johnny stepped off the curb at sight of a cruising cab, and it slowed and backed up for him. He pointed out Detective Rogers' sedan to the driver as they passed it. “See that one, chief? Circle the block an' pull in at the corner above here. Double-park if you have to. When he takes off don't let him get away from you.”
The driver looked. He flashed a glance back at Johnny, his voice unenthusiastic. “You see where he's parked, Mac? You sure it's not the fuzz?”
“I don't give a damn if it's an Episcopal bishop!” Johnny barked. “Get around this block an' in behind him. We lose him I'm gonna be mighty unhappy with you, chief.”
The driver surveyed Johnny in his rear-view mirror. The sight appeared to convince him. They circled the block in silence, and pulled in at the corner where Johnny had hailed him. Lights on and motor idling, they sat, with the cabbie casting nervous glances up and down the street.
Perhaps ten minutes had elapsed when Johnny saw Detective Rogers' slender figure run down the station- house steps, slip out of his jacket in the mild night breeze and slide under the wheel. The driver saw him, too. “I hope you know what you're doin', Mac,” he grunted, easing forward. “Anyways, I got him covered.”
They followed out to Eighth Avenue, and as Rogers turned north Johnny had a hunch. The Hotel Alden was their destination, he suddenly felt sure. He watched closely as they eased up to within a quarter block of the sedan, the cabbie with one eye on the lights ahead.
When they turned off Columbus Circle onto Central Park West Johnny sat back in the seat and relaxed. No question about it now. When they turned into 82nd he leaned forward again and watched until he was sure the sedan ahead was slowing. “Okay, chief,” Johnny said as soon as it did. “Anywhere's right here's good enough.” He dropped a bill on the front seat and got out in the middle of the block. Leisurely he sauntered up the street toward the lighted Alden marquee.
He saw Rogers' sedan at the first meter beyond the hotel no-parking zone. In the same glance he saw something else. Two cars ahead of the black sedan, a long blue Cadillac regally pre-empted a space and a half. Johnny quickened his stride. This could be part of Rogers' appointment, but Johnny didn't think so. And, if the detective walked in on them unknowing, there could be some firepower in that package upstairs.
“Four,” he said shortly to the gum-chewing, uniform-trousered brunette in the elevator. She ascended with him boredly. There was no sign of Rogers in the corridors. Johnny paused outside 407. He was going to need a hell of an opening line to talk his way in here. Tremaine nor nobody else wanted to see him.
He tested the knob, cautiously. Locked, of course. He shrugged, raised his hand to knock-and then heard, from what sounded like just beyond the door, a muffled thumping noise, twice repeated. Without even stopping to think, Johnny backed off the width of the corridor and charged the door with all the momentum he could generate. At the last second he barely remembered to lead with his right shoulder to protect his still-bandaged left side.
The door burst inward shiveringly in a shower of wood splinters from around the shattered lock. Johnny scrambled for balance as he lunged into Max Stitt, who was standing with his foot drawn back to kick Detective Rogers' prostrate body on the floor. Stitt backed off with a snarl, his colorless eyes lethal, his hand darting to a pocket. Johnny's quick reach and bone-crushing embrace clamped Stitt's arms helplessly to his sides; then Johnny swung him aloft with his feet to the ceiling. Abruptly Johnny released him, and the furiously struggling Stitt crashed floorward, head first. Stunned, he offered no resistance as Johnny bent quickly and removed a blued-steel Mauser from his jacket. It felt sticky to the touch, and Johnny looked down at bloodstains on his palm.
He took two quick steps to the doorway off the hall and looked through it at Jules Tremaine sitting slackly on the sofa, the handsome face lumped, red-streaked, and sick-white. Behind Johnny, Stitt rolled over and came up on his knees. Without a word Johnny stepped back inside, reversed the Mauser in his hand and slapped it tightly alongside a lean cheekbone. Max Stitt went over backward as bright juice spurted beneath his right eye. Raging, he doubled on himself like a snake and flung himself at Johnny's legs. The Mauser knocked him sideways along the floor in a sliding skid. He came halfway up to his knees again and paused.
“Keep comin',” Johnny invited him in a voice he had trouble recognizing. “Do me a favor. See can you wear out this iron. I wouldn't break up my hands on a puff adder like you.”
“Cut it-out, Johnny,” a voice said weakly from the floor to one side. Johnny half turned, one eye still on Stitt calculating his chances. Detective Rogers grimacingly pushed himself erect from hands and knees, one hand at the back of his neck and the other at his left side. “You want to- kill him?”
“Not all at once. Come on,” Johnny said to the taut-lipped, cold-eyed Stitt. “Do something. Give me an excuse.”
“Cut it out,” Rogers repeated in a stronger tone. Half doubled over and dragging his left leg, he moved past Johnny inside to the sofa on which Jules Tremaine sat with his head in his hands. “Let's have a look,” the detective said gently, and removed one of the hands.
“Nothin' thirty, thirty-five stitches won't fix up,” Johnny said sarcastically from the doorway.
Rogers turned away from the criss-crossed welts and oozing bruises on the shocked face and walked to the telephone. “Get the police up here,” he said into it.- “And an ambulance.” He walked back out to the hall, where Max Stitt was kneeling on the floor, his hands slackly at his sides, his pale eyes expressionlessly upon Johnny six feet away. A lowly pulsing tide of red ebbed down the lean visage from the slash beneath his eye.
“I'll get around later to how you happened to come through that door just then,” Rogers said to Johnny. One hand gingerly at the back of his neck, he looked down at Stitt. “I'd knocked four times before anything happened, and then it happened all at once. The door opened, he yanked me in and sapped me down. I don't know what the bootwork was for when he got the door closed again.”
“That was because he likes it.” Johnny half leaned in Stitt's direction. “Don't you, sweetheart?”
“Cut it out, I told you,” Rogers ordered. He looked inside in the direction of the sofa. “I don't understand it. Tremaine would make two of him.”
“You got to see this wart go to appreciate him,” Johnny assured him. “Fastest pair of hands I run into in a long time. An' I do mean run into. You were meetin' Tremaine?”
“So I thought.” The detective pointed a toe at the silent Stitt. “What's his mad at the Frenchman?”
“Both of 'em were wired into Dechant for a long time. Makin' money at it, too. Dechant was the contact man, an' a crackerjack. He provided the outlets for half a dozen little schemes that had stuff gettin' into the country illegally. When he died, the stuff was still comin', but there was no contact to the outlets. Tremaine hustled around, but he damn soon found out he wasn't no Dechant. He even had me tryin' to peddle a hundred fifty cases smuggled
