Johnny needled him deliberately. “I still think you fixed that fight.”
Turner refused to rise to the bait. “So we're back at that point again? The answer is the same-I had no interest whatever in fixing it or having it fixed. I categorically deny that I had anything at all to do with it.”
Johnny shook his head stubbornly. “You'd make a good witness, mister, but what about the facts? Every goddam spoke in the wheel goes right back to you. Roketenetz, Gidlow, Hendricks, Keith, Chavez, Carmody, Munson-you pulled the strings on every single one.”
He could see the glistening shine on the high forehead. “Hendricks? If he came back to life and walked through that door I'm not sure I'd recognize the man. I may have met him three or four times, never socially. Can't you get it through your thick head that in the course of a year just about everyone in the fight game at least walks through my office?” He drew a deep breath. “We're wasting time. I want your word that the situation is unchanged.”
“You want my word!” Johnny growled. “What you'll get from me is the back of my hand, or my shoe tattooed to your tail. If you can't control Carmody, I'm supposed to believe you can control those other muzzlers you're supposed to keep off Sally's back? Grab for a bailin' bucket, buster; you're on your own. For my money you're not even capable of runnin' your own business, even if you're clear on the other, which I doubt. I don't trust you, Turner, not-” He broke off at the ring of the telephone, hesitated and shuffled over to the night table. “Yeah?”
“Dameron, downstairs. Can we come up?”
“I'm busy, Joe,” Johnny said impatiently.
“We'll be right there,” the heavy voice said blandly, and the connection was broken.
“Company,” Johnny announced, and turned to see the promoter putting his hat, coat and scarf back on.
“I won't forget this, Killain,” he said in a brittle tone. “If the day ever comes that I drop this decision, the ripples will reach you, so help me.”
“Ahhh, turn it off!” Johnny snapped testily. “You had me fooled for a while, Turner. You're like a kid playin' store, an' because you got money everyone's supposed to say 'yessir.' What you haven't got you try to buy, and what you can't buy you try to scare. The hell with you.”
The intense, furious features glared back at Johnny from the doorway. “Just keep on living until I can get to you!” Johnny started for him, but the door opened and closed, and the promoter was gone. Johnny hesitated an instant, reopened the door, looked up and down the deserted corridor and left it ajar. He walked back to the bed and sat down on the edge.
A brief tap on the door preceded the entrance of Lieutenant Joseph Dameron and Detective Ted Cuneo. The lieutenant dropped heavily into the leather armchair before the television set, picked up first one foot and then the other and studied each critically. “It's hell to get old,” he said finally, and passed a hand tiredly over his face, the apple cheeks of which were tinted nearly purple from the temperature outside. “Good thing you're on the sixth floor instead of the sixteenth.”
“Aren't the elevators running, for God's sake?” Johnny demanded.
“Just thought I'd like to see who you were shooing down the back way,” Dameron said easily.
“That's just like you, Joe, doin' it the hard way. He took the elevator down.”
The lieutenant looked at him thoughtfully as though estimating the truth in the remark; then he glanced at Detective Cuneo standing stiffly by the door. “Sit down, Ted. If everyone who didn't get along with his highness here waited for him to offer them a seat, the chair manufacturers would go out of business tomorrow.” The big man looked across from Cuneo seating himself to the bandage on Johnny's ear. “The report said that Carmody just about took that thing right off you,” he said casually. “Rogers had it that the intern was sewing for ten minutes.”
“A slight exaggeration,” Johnny told him. “How's the ticket read on Carmody, by the way? Nothin' trivial, I hope?”
“Nothing trivial,” Dameron agreed. “And if it weren't due to the circumstances, we'd-”
“Lay off me, Joe,” Johnny told him tightly. “You got a fairly good idea of what was due to happen if I hadn't happened to be there?”
“In the confusion we didn't seem to get it on the record just how you did happen to be there.” The lieutenant's tone was mild. When Johnny failed to answer he continued. “You don't consider it a little bit thick that the girl should be Turner's receptionist?”
“If you've got anything to say, Joe-” Johnny bit off the words-“say it fast.”
Lieutenant Dameron leaned forward in his chair. “Why were you in that girl's apartment?”
“Why, Lieutenant!” Johnny mocked him. “I thought you were a gentleman.”
“What was the information you wanted out of Turner's office you felt that she could get for you?” the big man persisted. “I know you far too well to imagine that it was an accident that you were dating that pipe line.”
“She's a nice kid,” Johnny said quietly. “She's goin' back home, where she belongs.” He stared at the man in the chair. “You've talked to her, Joe. She told you all that. Didn't she tell you what I wanted out of Turner's office?”
The apple cheeks darkened. “She's too damned innocent to know what you were after!” the lieutenant snapped. “And what a wolf like you does with a lamb like that is beyond me!”
“Dear me!” Johnny murmured. “Don't tell me she's going to prefer charges?” He laughed at the big man's irritation.
“He probably made a deal with Turner,” Cuneo threw in coarsely.
Johnny looked at him, then back at Dameron. “Deal? With Turner? You boys don't sound too bright, Joe. Turner's a wheel. He'd make a deal with me?”
Lieutenant Dameron studied Johnny for several seconds, settled back more solidly into the depths of the armchair and folded his arms across his chest. He stared at a point on the wall above and behind Johnny, and when he spoke again his voice was almost neutral. “Ed Keith committed suicide this afternoon,” he said.
Johnny whistled. “On the level? With him I'd have bet it would take someone pushin' the hand that held the razor. So you never know.”
“You never know. He left a couple of notes. He confessed to killing Gidlow.”
“He confessed to killing Gidlow?” Johnny could hear his own voice soaring ridiculously.
“You sound surprised,” Dameron said softly. “You had a candidate?”
“My candidate sure as hell wasn't Ed Keith,” Johnny said emphatically. “Just Gidlow? Not the kid, or Hendricks?”
“Just Gidlow. Keith did it, too.” The lieutenant stopped as though waiting for Johnny to challenge the statement, and when no challenge came he continued. “He wrote it all down very neatly. He lost money he didn't have on that fight, and he went to Gidlow to try to borrow. Gidlow laughed at him. The crusher for Keith was when Gidlow received a call that Keith interpreted as meaning Gidlow had been in on a double cross. He accused Gidlow, who denied it so unconvincingly that Keith lost his head and throttled him. Keith was a big man; when he came out of the fog Gidlow was dead. Keith then did a couple of things rather clever for an amateur. He rigged up the camera, to throw sand in the air, and he called Lonnie Turner and said he'd just walked in on Gidlow's body and that he was getting the hell out of there, and that if Turner had anything of his over there he'd better get it out. He reasoned quite correctly that no one would ever suspect the murderer of making such a call.”
“Who'd he make the other call to?” Johnny asked quickly.
“Other call? What other call?”
“You took the telephone chits outta the hotel,” Johnny reminded him impatiently. “Didn't you even bother to check them?”
“There was no other call of interest,” Lieutenant Dameron said levelly.
Johnny threw up his hands in disgust. “He must anyway have called the police commissioner to establish an alibi, the way you guys are coverin' up.” He thought it over a moment. “I don't get it. He was in the clear on Gidlow, so far anyway, an' he'd finally borrowed the money he needed. Why chuck it now when he'd bridged the gap?”
“He had other troubles, he felt. I told you he left two notes. In the second one he mentioned that he and Dave Hendricks had both bet money on that fight. It was incidental that they didn't have the money they bet; the point was that it was against the rules of what appears to be a little syndicate to which they belonged. It was supposed to be handled centrally, but he and Dave got hungry. When they lost, their scramble to produce the money they needed resulted in their position becoming rather generally known and open to certain interpretation. If not the pattern, certainly the knowledge of the fix was being disclosed by them. Keith felt that Hendricks was killed by the fixer because of this, and that he was next. His nerves were so bad he jumped rather than waiting for the
