phone booth. There was one thing he could do. Carl Thompson had said his wife had been with him at the Taft. If she had been, her story of having been driven down from Jefferson that night was a lie. At least part of the story was a lie anyway because they'd been checked in too early. But if she'd been with her husband that morning how else could her presence upstairs now telling a story so unfavorable to him be explained except by pressure?
He dialed the Taft. It didn't take long to find out that there had been no Mr. and Mrs. Carl Thompson at the Taft that day or for several days past.
Johnny left the booth feeling frustrated. He had no alternative but to believe that Carl Thompson had tried to play him for a sucker. But why had Thompson been killed?
He pushed through the lobby revolving door and outside, on the neon-lighted near-midnight deserted sidewalk, he halted abruptly. Had his call to the Taft proved anything except that, as spooked as Carl Thompson had been, he hadn't registered in his own name?
He was tempted to go back upstairs and take a fall out of Daddario. Two things stopped him. If Daddario actually was a family friend helping out in an emergency any commotion that Johnny caused would just intensify the shock Micheline Thompson faced when the news from the Duarte reached her. And, as far as Johnny himself was concerned, the smartest thing he could do would be to get back to the Duarte and get straightened away on the discovery of Carl Thompson's body.
Without thinking, he had used the Manhattan Eighth Avenue exit. He turned right to Forty-Fifth Street. Around the corner, a man in a dark suit stood against the sheer wall of the hotel, his back to Johnny and his eyes glued on the Forty-Fifth Street exit. Across the street a horn blatted, short and then long. The watching man spun quickly to look at the horn-blowing car. Almost without a pause he continued to pivot until he was facing Johnny head on. He raised his arm and a thick-looking weapon glinted in his hand.
Instinct took Johnny to the sidewalk. He grunted as his knees hit the cement hard under the impact of his own weight. He rolled toward the curb and the shelter of illegally parked cars. Above his head he hear a muffled plop-plop and the whine of metal distressed by sharp contact with concrete. The lights of the marquee seemed all too bright.
The sound of running feet drummed in his ears. He snaked his way on hands and knees out into the street between cars. He was in time to see a sedan pull away from the opposite curb and roar west across Eighth Avenue against the light. He stood up warily. When nothing happened he brushed off his palms and the knees of his trousers. His knees were stinging and the trousers had huge rents in them. For the benefit of a rubberneck gazing curiously at him from the sidewalk, Johnny lifted his right leg and inspected the heel of his shoe as though wondering what had tripped him. The rubberneck walked away.
Johnny drew a long breath. A man with a silenced gun watching the Manhattan's Forty-Fifth Street entrance for Killain's exit? A man in a car across the street who recognized Killain unexpectedly turning the corner and warned his partner in time for him to get in a couple of shots? What in the hell was going on?
He examined again the torn-out knees of his trousers. A button was missing from his jacket and street dirt was ground into it. He was positive he'd never before seen the man who had shot at him. He was just as positive he'd know him the next time he saw him.
He set off grimly up the street, his knees twinging at every stride.
At the Duarte he walked into a lobby boiling over with blue-uniformed police and snap-brim-hatted detectives. He discovered that it somehow didn't surprise him. Behind the front desk, Marty Seiden all but stood on his head in a wordless effort to catch Johnny's eye. Had to play it straight, Johnny decided. Looking neither right nor left he headed for the elevators.
“Killain!” Johnny turned at the strident bark. A hatchet-faced, sallow-complexioned man with protruding eyes rushed up to him. “I want to talk to you, Killain.”
“So talk, Cuneo,” Johnny invited him. Ted Cuneo was a Detective First Class attached to the local precinct, and he and Johnny Killain had no use at all for each other. Johnny looked around the lobby and appeared to notice the herd of police for the first time. “What's the matter? One of your boys lose a collar button?”
“You've got some explaining to do,” Cuneo said with evident satisfaction. “Upstairs,” he added, and barged onto an elevator.
“That's for the paying customers,” Johnny said. He walked to the service elevator. “You types that run up the tax bills ride over here.”
“Just so we get there,” Cuneo sneered, following him.
“Where to?” Johnny asked him, a hand on the controls.
“Your room.”
“My room?” Johnny pretended surprise. “That big nose of yours finally caught up with the still I've got up there?” Detective Ted Cuneo's saturnine features flushed darkly. Johnny could see that it was only with an effort that he contained himself.
In the sixth-floor corridor the first thing Johnny set eyes on was Lieutenant Joseph Dameron's impressive bulk. The lieutenant was emerging from Johnny's room. Frosty gray eyes in an apple-cheeked broad face surveyed Johnny impassively. The close-cropped hair was iron-gray. “Well, well, well!” Johnny said softly. “Heap-big-frog-in- a-small-puddle himself. What the hell have I been up to that requires your august presence, Joe? You were just leaving? Don't let me detain you.”
Without a word the lieutenant turned and re-entered the room. Johnny and Ted Cuneo followed. The first glance was enough to tell Johnny that the police had already been there long enough for Carl Thompson's body to have been removed. Johnny's lips tightened. He didn't like what he was thinking.
Micheline Thompson didn't look exactly the type to be any sort of prisoner of Jim Daddario. If, instead, she were an accomplice, her call to Johnny could have been contrived to get him out of the hotel before the police arrived. Had she and Daddario wanted to know if he had already spoken to Carl Thompson? Johnny wondered what turn the conversation might have taken if he had admitted it. The idea put Micheline Thompson in a different perspective.
Lieutenant Dameron turned from a brief conversation with the medical examiner, a lean-faced, clear-eyed man carrying a small black bag. Technicians still milled about the room. Johnny headed for his armchair. “When you boys get ready-” He broke off, whistled, and pointed at chalk marks on the floor. “Is that for real or are you guys practicin'?” He turned to the lieutenant. “Thompson? Someone used my place for a shootin' gallery?” He made a sound of disgust at Dameron's silence and turned again to the chair.
“Don't sit down there!” A tall man with a black box on a cord around his neck dashed up. “I want more prints from that.” He grabbed Johnny's arm as he went to sit down.
Johnny grabbed back, and the man whitened and cursed. “If it's mine you want, take 'em off your arm, Jack,” Johnny advised him. “Keep your damn hands to yourself.”
“That's enough of that,” Lieutenant Dameron said mildly. He shook his head at the tall man who had colored angrily. The lieutenant said nothing further until the last of the laboratory men had departed. Ted Cuneo closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it.
“Well?” Johnny demanded. “Did you come over here to sell me sweeps tickets?”
Lieutenant Dameron lit a filter cigarette. He sat down on the edge of the bed and studied his well-polished shoes. All his movements were leisurely. He looked like a man with all the time in the world. He exhaled a thin cloud of blue smoke in a diminishing stream before looking up at Johnny again. “What happened here?” he asked. His voice was quiet but the official steel lay close to the surface.
“How the hell do I know?” Johnny grumbled. “Was I here?”
The lieutenant's hard gray eyes rested on the torn-out knees of Johnny's trousers. The eyes moved up until they encountered the gap left by the missing button. They missed nothing of the street grime. “Since you weren't here, just where were you?” he probed.
“Maybe I need a lawyer,” Johnny countered. “Maybe I shouldn't even be tryin' to answer your questions. Who was killed here, Joe?”
“You seem to think it was someone named Thompson. What happened to your knees?”
“Oh, those.” Johnny glanced down at them. “A guy just now unloaded on me up the street with a silenced gun. I was tryin' to dig a foxhole in the sidewalk.” From the doorway Ted Cuneo snorted in patent disbelief. Johnny ignored him. “What's it all about?” he continued to Dameron. “What bugged you enough to get you out on the street this time of night?” At the resulting silent stare Johnny rose to his feet and walked to the bedside telephone.
“Get away from that phone!” Detective Cuneo rapped at him. He took two steps into the room.
