directly above them the eyes themselves looked like two hard-boiled eggs. “Ray works out of here, too,” the lieutenant said. “He and Owly caught the squeal on Sanders, which makes 'em high men on this totem pole.” He squashed out a cigarette in his ash tray and removed a fresh one from the pack in his shirt pocket. He leaned back in his chair when he had it lit, the solid-looking face expressionless. “Show him what we have for him, Jimmy.”
From behind him Detective Rogers pushed into Johnny's hand three or four double-spaced typewritten sheets, stapled together; the red-line-left-margined legal-sized crisp stationery was doubled back to a prominent signature on the right-hand side of the upmost sheet, trailed on the lower left by additional signatures.
Johnny looked at the prominently isolated signature, and a cold little wind blew down his back. Victor Barnes. His voice was harsh. “What's this thing supposed to be?”
“Forgot you couldn't read.” Johnny's eyes swiveled; Ted Cuneo was smiling at him. Unpleasantly. The lean detective was obviously delighted to explain. “It's a confession, Killain. Signed. And witnessed.”
A pulse hammered in Johnny's temple. “Confession to what, you damn hyena?”
The smile disappeared; Cuneo stood up. “You know what. To the murder of Ellen Saxon. I had a talk with your boy.”
Johnny's eyes flicked back to the papers in his hand. The signature of the first witness was Theodore Cuneo. The confession fluttered floorward as Johnny's hands balled; his chin came down on his chest, and his weight advanced to the frontal arches. His voice sounded as though it originated outside the room. “You dirty little wart, Cuneo!”
“Head him off, Jimmy!” Lieutenant Dameron rapped out the order, and Jimmy Rogers dropped both hands down on Johnny's rigid right arm.
“Stop it, Johnny!” Detective Rogers' tone was sharp as his feet left the floor; something in the urgency of the sandy-haired man's voice penetrated Johnny's red haze and halted the independent action of the right arm upon which the detective's weight rested. Jimmy Rogers was looking at Ted Cuneo, and his voice was curt. “I could let him go, Ted.”
“So let him go.” Detective Cuneo's tone was bitter, and his features were brick red. “A real wise guy. Let him go.” He darted a sullen glance at the silent lieutenant. “Christ! How does a burn-up like him live so long?”
Detective Rogers snorted. “If you'd been with me a little bit earlier tonight you'd have a better idea.”
Ted Cuneo scowled, hesitated and finally sat down again. Jimmy Rogers released his hold on Johnny's arm and stepped back. Johnny looked around again at the varying expressions in the semicircle, and finally he nodded. “Okay, boys. I read you now. Too many blips on the radar for a minute. You don't think it's legitimate, either. I'd never have gotten within a thousand yards of a confession like this if you thought it was worth a quarter.” He took a deep breath, and his eyes came back to Cuneo. “Vic Barnes is my friend. I'd just like to find out you went in there and roughed him up, you needlin' little moron-”
Ted Cuneo soared up out of his chair and landed crouched forward, feet apart. His face was scarlet. “Just let me catch you spitting on the sidewalk, even, Killain!”
Johnny cut across the shrill vehemence. “Don't try it alone, man. Not ever.”
Lieutenant Dameron's big hand crashed down on his desk as papers flew. “That's enough of that! You're no privileged character, Johnny. Keep a civil tongue in your head.”
Johnny shifted from his eye-to-eye exchange with Cuneo and stared at the apple-cheeked man behind the desk. “So how come he confessed to something he didn't do, Joe?”
The lieutenant's voice was patient. “He called out to the turnkey and asked for a stenographer, said he wanted to dictate a statement. We sent one in, and he did. You saw it.”
“With no pressure at all? Did he have any visitors?”
“No visitors. And no pressure, despite our comedian here.” Cuneo flushed a dull bronze. “Entirely voluntary.”
“Voluntary, hell! If he didn't have visitors, he was reached some other way. A message, a note, maybe. It could still be in there with him. Why don't you guys get off your butts and shake down-” The cumulative dead-pan stare from around the group finally penetrated his intensity. “All right,” he said shortly. “You already did it. So what'd you find?”
Lieutenant Dameron lifted a small green blotter from his desk; beneath it was a crumpled, torn-off corner of brown wrapping paper. “Don't touch it, Johnny.”
Johnny walked around the desk and looked down at the crudely lettered penciled message: your wife is next, BARNES.
“Came in on his supper tray, he says.” It was Detective Rogers' voice; Johnny was still staring down at the note. “Folded into his napkin. I talked to Finnegan, in the cell block. Barnes has been having his meals sent in. I've already been across the street.” He shrugged elaborately. “Nothing.”
“Of course you realize you could be telling him something he already knows, Jimmy,” Ted Cuneo said morosely.
Johnny ignored him. “Vic thought Lorraine would be safer if he confessed. Which is what whoever sent the note wanted him to think.”
“This Lorraine.” Lieutenant Dameron's hard gray eyes bored up into Johnny. “I know she hasn't told us all she knows yet. I don't think you have, either.” Johnny was silent, and added color crowded up into the red face measuring him. The big man bit his words off between tightly compressed lips. “Has Lorraine Barnes told you anything she hasn't told us?”
“How should I know what she told you? Do I get to read the transcript? You got to come crying to me because you can't run your business?”
The hands on the desk top knuckled slowly. “Three people have died. The interrelationships are complicated; the lives of more might be threatened, yet to satisfy a whim of your own you're prepared to sabotage justice. If I ever find out that you withheld information-”
Johnny's neck swelled in its suddenly too-tight collar. The desk creaked as his weight crowded it. “Ahhhh, bag it, Joe! Sabotage justice! If I had one-tenth the information you do-nothings had I'd be so close to that rotten weasel you could smell him sweatin' from here. And when I found him-” His clenched fist smashed down on the desk; a stapler jumped up in the air, tottered on the desk's edge and fell to the floor. The room was very quiet.
Lieutenant Dameron stood up behind his desk. His voice was level, positive. “Your attitude proves my point for me. I thought I'd give you one more chance; you've had it. I'll put what I've got to say now in the form of an order.” He leaned forward as he emphasized each word. “You stay away from everyone connected with this case in any way, shape or form. If I find you've contacted anyone like you did the Perry girl I'll get you off the street if I have to get a law passed.”
Johnny felt the hot blood in his face; his arms flexed involuntarily. “You think you're God Almighty, Joe? Go play with your wooden soldiers. Why should I listen to you?”
“Because I say so!” It was nearly a shout; the bull neck was thrust forward.
Johnny looked at him. He turned his head and looked at the smirking Cuneo, at the round-eyed Owly, at the grinning Hawkins and lastly at the expressionless Rogers. He turned silently and walked to the door; it shivered on its hinges from the smash with which he slammed it shut behind him.
CHAPTER 10
Johnny dropped the empty buckets at the foot of the standpipe at the shore end of the elongated pier and fumbled in his hip pocket for his wrench. He glanced out over the Sound's blue-green chop, already turned brassy in the early morning sunlight, and knelt on the scarred, splintered planking, warm to the touch, as he opened the cut- off valve at the base of the pipe.
As he filled the buckets he could see Mike in the cockpit of the thirty-foot cruiser dancing heavily at the end of her lines a hundred feet out on the pier. Amidst the small forest of stubby masts and tired rigging in the dingy hulls around it Johnny could make out the semicircled brass lettering on the bobbing stern: Ye Olde Beaste, NYC, NY. Mike had the cowling off the brutish-looking engine and was probing its interior with a long-necked oilcan.
Ye Olde Beaste was a marine monstrosity. Its beam was out of all proportion to its water line, so that even
