“Johnny! Telephone!” Mickey Tallant bellowed from the bar.
Johnny excused himself and walked over to the telephone beside the register. “Yeah?”
“It's Paul, Johnny. I'm a little jammed up here if you're not tied up.”
“Be right there.” Johnny returned to the booth and the two men. “I'll have to take a rain check on that other drink, Doc. Time to start makin' a noise like a working man.” Was it his imagination, or was there a look of relief on Dave Hendricks' face? “See you both around.”
On the way to the door he stopped in front of Mickey Tallant. “Tell Manuel to call me at the hotel,” Johnny said, and the Irishman nodded. It was time to have a little talk with Manuel about Rick Manfredi, Johnny felt. Somebody had to be wrong.
CHAPTER X
The sunrise was coming to life high upon the skyscraper windows across the street from the hotel, and Johnny lay quietly on his back in bed and watched the red-gold reflection from dozens of windows. He stretched lazily, crossing his wrists together and arching his back, then rolled up on an elbow and looked impatiently at the bathroom door. “Come on, muscles,” he called out disgustedly. “You're pretty enough.”
“You know you only say it because it's true,” Sally replied in a muffled voice. “Hold your horses, sir. Or should I make that singular?” She skipped lightly into view, swathed from neck to knee in a bath towel that Johnny promptly disposed of the second she hit the bed. Her slender body tensed like fine wire under his caressing hands.
“Really-in the mood-aren't you?” she got out jerkily.
He grunted as the sharp little teeth nipped him in the neck. “Cut the foolishment, Ma.”
“Who's f-fooling?” she gasped, and the arms about his shoulders clamped down with a strength belying her ninety-eight pounds.
Their cigarettes made twin wreaths of blue smoke against the background of the golden reflection from across the street. Sally's sigh seemed to come from her toes; she wriggled up from her back and dropped her head on Johnny's chest. “I've got to get out of here. Are you going to sleep?”
He shook his head negatively, and immediately regretted it. It would have been a lot easier to lie to her than to answer the stream of questions that bubbled over at once. “Why not? What are you going to do?” She peered up into his face. “Johnny, won't you please just forget it?”
He attempted to parry. “Forget what?”
“All these crazy goings on without any rhyme or reason to them!” she burst out resentfully. “Let the police handle it, like they're paid to do.”
“There's a rhyme and reason to it,” he said patiently, “if I had brains enough to figure it out.”
“You're not supposed to figure it out!” She bounced upright to look down at him, her small face childishly solemn. “You're all mixed up in this because of me, aren't you?” He groped for a handy, convincing denial with the brown eyes daring him to lie. “I'm right, aren't I? Johnny, I want you to forget the whole thing.”
He remained silent, a little grim at the impossibility of it. There were too many threads unraveled, too many toes stepped upon. There were a couple or three people in this thing not about to let Johnny Killain forget all about it, even if he wanted to.
“Please, Johnny,” Sally persisted. “Nothing you can do will make any difference as far as Charlie is concerned, and nothing else matters. And don't start talking about the m-money. The f-first person that asks me politely can h-have it. I'm sick of all the murderous p-pussyfooting going on over it!” She tried to blink away her tears. “Dead people, and people in h-hospitals-”
She jumped as the phone rang, instinctively grabbing up a corner of the sheet to hide behind. Then she threw it aside, slid from the bed and ran for the bathroom as Johnny picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
“Killain? This is Keith. I'm downstairs. I'd like to come up and talk to you.”
Johnny cocked an appraising eye at Sally in the bathroom door. “You caught me with one foot in the shower, Keith. Give me ten minutes, an' come on up. Something special?”
“It'll keep. Ten minutes.”
“And what does he want?” Sally demanded belligerently from behind the door.
“A little talk-talk,” Johnny said lightly. “Hustle it outta here, Ma, will you? This guy's got nerves. He'll spill like an overripe avocado one of these days, an' it might just as well be to me.”
“You just keep getting in deeper and deeper!” she exclaimed despairingly. “And it's so pointless!” She came back into the bedroom, dressed, and her exasperated expression softened as she walked to the bed. “I know I keep saying it, but you be careful, y'hear?”
“Of this guy? I'll match you against him anytime, Ma, an' give him the first punch.” He rolled off the bed and reached for his robe. “I may be by the place this afternoon.”
“You may!” she sniffed. “I may be there.” Unexpectedly she smiled. “Toodle-oo, professor.”
“You take it outta here like you're runnin' out a bunt,” he warned her. “I don't want Keith to see you, an' not for the reason you think.”
“And here I thought chivalry was in full flower again!” she mourned, grinned up at him impishly, brushed his cheek with her lips and flew out the door.
Johnny returned to the edge of the bed and seated himself; he rubbed the nape of his neck briskly to stir sluggish circulation and reached for his cigarettes on the night table. Ed Keith. Johnny squinted up around the trailing plume of smoke as he speculated. Hardly likely Keith had come to talk. Unless something had rattled the skeleton in his closet. More likely he'd come on a little fishing expedition of his own. Well, two could play at that game…
When the knock came at the door he raised his voice. “Come along in.”
The bulky newspaperman entered, and, looking at him, Johnny realized that over a good frame the man had fattened up in all the wrong places. High living does that sometimes, Johnny reflected; Keith looked almost gross, and the deep, dark circles beneath his small eyes testified to an interesting state of nerves. Johnny waved him to a chair without speaking, and the sportswriter looked a little uncomfortable as he took it and glanced at Johnny's robe. “I'll make this quick, since it's your sleeping time-”
“What's on your mind?” Johnny asked him. This was one conversation he'd like to keep pruned of unessentials.
Keith's lips grimaced in the familiar cynical-rabbit manner. The expression in his eyes was that of a man who has fought a long, losing battle. “I might need to talk to someone, Killain.” He said it jerkily, his hands jumping from his thighs to the arms of his chair and back again. “I'm- mighty near backed into a corner.” Keith paused suggestively, but Johnny remained silent. Obviously choosing his words carefully, the newspaperman continued. “I might like to talk to you, understand, but it could make one hell of a difference to me in whose ears it wound up afterward, get me?”
“There's a problem?” Johnny asked lightly.
“Damn right there's a problem!” Ed Keith said energetically. “I want to know where you stand. You get around to Manfredi's, you get around with that Rogers detective, you hang out at the Rollin' Stone, you're holding an umbrella over the telephone operator downstairs, you get around with Turner's receptionist.” He paused for emphasis. “You get around to the hospital where Roketenetz's trainer is perhaps not recovering from a beating.”
“Sound like I'm on your radar screen twenty-four hours a day, Keith,” Johnny said slowly when the sportswriter paused again. “These your own personal observations?”
“Hell, no. I pick it up here and there.”
“Here and there being Lonnie Turner's office?” Johnny inquired sharply.
The sportswriter flapped a hand impatiently. “Never mind all that, Killain. What I want to know is this-do you tell all these people all that you know? Do you-”
Johnny interrupted him. “Never mind all that, Keith. I read you now. You want to tell me somethin' that gets back to certain ears, but only to certain ears, right? You don't want it makin' no round robin?”
The big man looked discomfited. “I didn't say that. I'm-”
