back. In the one quick flash he had seen Paul in front of the bell captain's desk at the opposite end of the wide expanse of marbled floor, and the redhead sitting hunched, two thirds of the way across it, eyes glued on the elevators. Johnny's lips tightened; this would have to be quite a diversion.
A tremendous ringing crash set him in motion. He was in full stride entering the lobby, not running, but up on his toes and moving swiftly. Paul must have dropped at least two pitchers of ice water on the lobby floor; water, ice, and glass were everywhere, and Paul was staggering backward with his arms flailing the air to disappear behind the desk. His immediate audience had half risen at the explosion of noise and was crouched forward staring intently at the miniature flood, and from the corner of his eye as he advanced Johnny was able to see old man Tompkins jerk up from the depths of his chair off to the left and peer around in stupefication.
It seemed like a long way, but Johnny had reached a point just behind the watcher's chair when some instinct caused the redhead to turn. His one quick movement was wholly abortive. Johnny's reaching left glanced off obliquely, but jolted the red-haired man's ashen face into the path of the crushing right which drove him down and back into the cushion of the chair, out cold. Johnny reached down and picked him up bodily and turned to confront Paul, who was emerging from his refuge.
“Fella finally passed out, just like you predicted, Paul,” Johnny announced with a warning nod at old man Tompkins belatedly riveted on the creeping pools of water. “I'll take him upstairs.”
Vic trotted in from the foyer, his arms full of paper cups. “What in the hell was all that racket?”
“I dropped a tray,” Paul informed him, deadpan.
“Well, get Amy to clean up the mess.” The stocky man's eyes turned to Johnny. “What happened to him?”
“Slight case of over-indulgence. I'll tuck him in.”
“The way you wet-nurse these drunks-”
From the elevator Johnny could see old man Tompkins settling back in his chair with an indignant jerk of his hat over his eyes; with the flanged doors closed, he dropped his burden, and went down, not up. He searched his pockets for a seldom used key-ring, and dragged the limp redhead to a stout looking door in the passageway. The key revealed an empty linen closet, and Johnny stuffed the red-haired man inside, closed the door, remembered, and re-opened it.
Hurriedly he removed the snubnosed automatic from its shoulder holster and ran his hands lightly over the recumbent form for further artillery. Finding none, he again closed the door and locked it and returned to the lobby where a languid Amy was already wielding a mop against the debris.
Paul was back at the switchboard, and Johnny looked at his watch as he circled the still-rampant flood and entered through the switchboard's little gate. “Nice piece of orchestration, Paul.”
Paul smiled faintly. “I wasn't sure I could hold him long enough for you to reach him.”
“Just long enough. Whole deal took eight and a half minutes, by the clock. He's the other half of what you helped me upstairs from the other night.”
“The stubborn type?”
“Evidently. I think we burned down the schoolhouse on him this time, though. He's hopped to the ears, too dangerous to let run around loose. I've got him in the old linen closet downstairs. Here's the key; there'll be someone by to take him off your hands.”
He held up a warning finger at the sound of the tap-tap of Sally's high heels, and Paul stood up from the board. She looked at them suspiciously as she entered and placed her bag in the corner behind her chair. “If you two don't look like the cats that swallowed the canary, then I never saw any. What have you been up to now?”
“Up to, ma? You know us better'n that. Paul here was just tellin' me he'd finally made it big with a piece had been standin' him off too long.”
“Don't you men ever think of anything else?”
“You mean there is something else, ma?”
“You get out of here, both of you.”
Johnny paused at the desk. “I'll be in the room if you need me, Paul.” He turned to the elevator as Paul nodded, and went up, and he could hear his phone ringing as he stepped out into the sixth floor corridor. He opened his door hurriedly. “Yeah?”
“Johnny? You know who this is?”
“Yeah.”
“Your girl on the board? Can I talk?”
“Go ahead, Joe. I was just gonna call you.”
“Something I should know?”
“You first.”
“All right. A couple of things occurred to me after you left.”
“That was only about ten hours ago. You got insomnia?”
“If I haven't, I will have. I'm beginning to get too much noise from downtown about three bodies and no action from me. I need a little diversion. Now you take this Frederick-”
“You take him.”
“Maybe I will. I need to take someone, and you seem to think he's the man.”
Johnny hesitated. “Or close. You can't prove it, though.”
“We didn't get around to it this afternoon, but you think he was the one behind the silencer in the kitchen that night?”
“He has keys.”
“So Jimmy told me. And of course it figures that he would. But assuming he was the man in the kitchen, you know what doesn't fit?”
“The telephone call.”
“That's right. His calling someone and resigning from a pigeon loft puts him in the office boy category on this detail, while everything else says he's a lot farther up the line. You said you had the drop on the switchboard, yet your girl in whom you seem to have a lot of confidence didn't catch his call. Which brings up a very interesting point: did he make it at all? Could he have foxed you?”
Johnny opened his mouth and closed it again. When he spoke his tone was thoughtful. “I had my big bazoo open to tell you that no one coulda known where I was listenin' in from, but maybe Freddie isn't the only one around here to do a little underestimating. It's a good point, Joe. I think I can find out without too much trouble. I'll call you back. In the meantime I got a little something for you down here, like the partner of the guy you talked to after the doc got palpitations.”
“He showed up again? What happened?”
“He blew into the lobby downstairs, snowed up like a blizzard. I got him on ice downstairs; send someone around with the net.”
“A pleasure. You think he was sent?”
“Not this time. I think he was plannin' on getting himself a hunk of even for the chair I slung at him this afternoon. From the looks of him nobody's said much of anything to him in the last couple of hours that's gotten through. He's makin' his own music. This was just a little sortie to kinda re-establish his own opinion of himself.”
“We'll want to talk to him when he unwinds.”
“I'm going out for a while, so tell whoever you send by to ask Paul for the key. And don't send any flyweights. I took the difference away from our redheaded friend, but I got a feeling the man in front of that door when it opens'll think Anzio was a high tea.”
“How'd you take him?”
“He didn't see me.”
“How unsporting of you.”
“Yeah. I'll call you back.”
“Call me back in the morning. I do sleep a few hours a night.”
“You'll never get to be a captain that way, Joe.”
He hung up the phone in the middle of the multisyllabic reply.
