The pause was fractional. “Get on over here, Johnny.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you askin' me or tellin' me?”
“Why, we're asking, you delicate flower.” Detective Rogers' tone was syrupy.
“What's it about?”
“There's an easy way to find out.”
The connection was gone. Johnny opened the booth door thoughtfully and shrugged at Mike outside. “They want me over there.”
“They say why?”
“Big mystery.”
“I'll drive you over. If you're going. My car's outside.”
Johnny hesitated. “You goin' that way anyway?” He had ridden with Mike before; Mike Larsen drove a car like the devil was at his throatlatch. “Well, okay.” He debated a moment. “You think I should call Lorraine first?”
“Lorraine?” There was no mistaking Mike's curiosity.
“No real reason,” Johnny said a little vaguely. “She and I've been tradin' light jabs with the big gloves. I can't get her to level with me. Still, if she knows somethin' I can get her to tell me I'd just as soon not walk in on Joe Dameron stone cold. I think I'll call her.” He fished a dime out of the change in his pocket and returned to the booth; Mike lounged in the open door. The phone rang and rang, and Johnny hung up finally. “Nobody home.”
“Maybe she went out to a movie to cool off,” Mike suggested. “That apartment gets like an oven sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Johnny agreed absently. The unanswered phone reminded him of another caller who had been unable to reach Lorraine-Roberta Perry. Lorraine hadn't been back to the office since the murders, still you couldn't catch her at home. So where was she spending her time?
He followed Mike out through the foyer. The sporty little MG was on the restricted side of the street; Mike fished a press card out from under the lowered visor as he got under the wheel. “That's for the cruisers,” he told Johnny. “The beat man knows the car.”
“Must be nice to be a big shot.” Mike Larsen laughed as he started the motor; Johnny listened to the rough roar of the engine and raised his voice to make himself heard as their quick start snapped his neck. “Take it easy in this spittoon, now; I could shot-put this thing across the street.”
Mike stopped for the Seventh Avenue light and turned to look at him. “I took a look at Russo's client in the bar. Knew him the minute I saw him. Name's Connor, with an o, not an e. Tim Connor.”
Johnny nodded. “Russo called him Tim. What's his action?”
Mike gunned away from the light, beating a cab to the one-lane-wide passageway between the parked cars beyond Broadway. “His action is a little complicated. When I began to think about it Connor and Russo made an interesting combination. I've always wondered how Russo took the kind of living off that balcony that kept him in two-hundred-dollar suits. Maybe I know now.”
“Nothing legal, I hope?”
Mike caught the light at Eighth Avenue and thundered into a sweeping right-hand turn; the little car sounded like an engine-testing block as they set sail up the left-hand side of the one-way street. “You could get a debate on that. This Connor is tough, but he's slick, too. It's a combination you don't get too often. He's made it pay off.” He settled back in the bucket seat, and the MG skimmed north. “You know this town, Johnny; if you spread a little money around, public relations-wise there's nothing you can't do. Connor came up with a refinement.”
Mike Larsen took his eyes from the street ahead long enough for a quick side glance at Johnny. “His particular variation on the theme was simple. Instead of building the client up you tear the competition down. The way Connor worked it out it was bad news for the competition.”
He slowed in mid-block to catch the change from red to green at Fifty-fourth, accelerated and made a left turn on a wheel and a half as he darted between the curbed cars. Johnny unclenched his hands with difficulty; this Mike really used a car.
The MG flew west; Mike had to raise his voice above the muffled roar of the motor. “Like this, Johnny. You and I each own a restaurant, on opposite corners of the street. You're a smart operator, and I'm a shmo. You hire my best waiter away from me, and my hostess, and my chef. All of a sudden you've got the customers and I've got the ulcers. I'm a shmo, see, but now I'm mad.”
He swung the little car into the curb, and Johnny looked up at the familiar weather-stained brick building. Mike sat with his hands loosely on the wheel as he continued. “I'm mad, so I make a couple of phone calls. Someone puts me in touch with Connor, and I tell him the story. He says, okay, Pop, how mad are you? How much do you want to spend? I say the hell with the money-let's see a little blood. So in a couple of days a well-dressed couple come into your place at the height of the dinner hour, and during the meal the woman suddenly becomes embarrassingly, deathly ill, without ever getting away from the table. In a roomful of people her escort accuses you of serving tainted food. And three nights later it happens again.”
Mike's fingers drummed hollowly on the steering wheel. “And that's only the beginning. You've been doing the right and usual thing by all the visiting fire department boys and health inspectors, but all of a sudden now you pick up two kitchen violations from the health department. Runs to a little money to get the citations lifted. Then a piece of brass walks in from the fire department with a little bad news. Seems as though the guy you bought the place from put in that partition over there without an alteration permit. It's a fire hazard-got to come out, pronto. So it ruins the looks of your whole place? Things are tough all over. Who pays for it? You do.”
He lifted his hands from the wheel as he looked over at Johnny. “Connor doesn't appear personally too often. He holds himself out for the big ones, the boffolas, or the ones that take a little finesse. He's got a stable of half the unemployed actors and actresses in town. He has a stiff payroll, but he makes a nice living.”
“Seems to me the trick would be to stay alive to enjoy it.”
Mike shrugged. “How do you prove that kind of stuff? Regardless of what you suspect? You can't prove a thing.”
A little tickle stirred faintly in the recesses of Johnny's mind. Who- He reached for the door handle. “I've got to get inside, Mike.” He said it slowly; his mind was still on Mike's parable. Who had saidThe tickle died; he had lost the thread. He swung open the door and lifted himself up on the sidewalk.
“You doing anything in the morning?” Mike asked abruptly. “Let's get out on the Sound for a couple of hours.”
“In the morning?” Johnny echoed doubtfully.
“Blow the stink of the town off ourselves,” Mike urged him. He grinned a little self-consciously. “I'll give you another inducement. I've been trying to make up my mind to talk to you about something. Maybe out on the boat I'll be able to forget I'll be betraying a confidence.”
Johnny nodded. “Seven-thirty?”
“Good. I'll pick you up.” Mike waved and roared away, and after staring after him for a moment Johnny ran lightly up the worn white stone steps. He nodded to the uniformed man at the information desk just inside the door and turned left and strode briskly along the oil-darkened wooden floors of the station house. At the old fashioned head-high desk he looked up at the uniformed sergeant.
“Killain to see Lt. Dameron.”
The sergeant nodded and picked up the phone. He replaced it with the two syllables of Johnny's name still hanging in the air. “Second door on the left.”
Detective Rogers was at the opened door; he stood aside to let Johnny enter and closed the door behind him. The cramped, dark room seemed crowded with chairs and with men; the air was stale and blue with cigarette smoke. Johnny ran his eyes quickly around the seated semicircle-a grinning Cuneo, a fat detective with round eyes whom Johnny knew only as Owly, a man he didn't know at all, Jimmy Rogers standing behind him and Lieutenant Dameron behind his littered desk.
Johnny looked carefully at the big, apple-cheeked man with the cropped iron-gray hair and the hard gray eyes who sat plunged into the depths of his swivel chair. The entire room was illuminated by a single gooseneck lamp on the desk. “Kindergarten class, Joe?”
The big man's lips moved; it could have been a smile. “You might call it that. I guess you know everyone here except Ray Hawkins.”
Johnny inclined his head in the direction of the cadaverous, rumpled man on the outer wing of the seated men and received fifty per cent acknowledgment. Ray Hawkins had baggy, dark brown pouches under his eyes, and
