the bed. He dialed the hotel. “Edna? Killain. Tell Vic I'm gonna be late, will you?” He looked down at the auburn hair spread on the pillow and the perfectly formed white neck with the little hollow at the base of the throat. “Make that good an' late. Thanks, Edna.” He hung up, placed a palm flat on the soft swell of Gloria's stomach and jiggled lightly. He grinned as her knees came up involuntarily. “You were sayin' it requires-” he prompted her.
“Oh. Collusion is what it requires. Money changes hands, but if the wrong inspector's assigned there can be hell to pay, like this time. It was serious for Jack, who could have lost his license. He was furious. He accused Max, but Max denied it.”
“But you think it was Max.”
“I think-” She hesitated. “I don't know. In a way it's petty larceny, and, much as I dislike Stitt, he thinks a little bigger than that. It's exactly the type of thing that appealed to Claude, though. He'd rather steal a dollar than find five. I think Claude probably made a deal with someone in Jack's warehouse.”
“Arends called Dechant a thief.” Johnny made it a question.
“Sticks and stones-” Gloria said lightly. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Let's say Claude was a devious man.” She reached up and ran a hand over the ridged scars on Johnny's chest. “Who ploughed your field, mister?”
“A guy who wished he hadn't.”
She pulled herself up to a sitting position to look down at him. “I've answered a lot of questions, haven't I, Johnny?”
“Meanin' it's your turn to ask a few? You're distractin' me up there.”
She folded her arms across her firmly nippled, full breasts. “That better?”
“Terrible.” He pulled her down beside him again. “For some reason I seem to be in a hurry, so I'll save you the trouble of askin' the questions. I'll give it to you in two words: August Hegel. Vous comprenez?”
“So you do know,” she said quietly. “Jules insisted there was no way you could.” She looked up at him as he moved over her. “You're getting into-”
“Hush, woman,” Johnny said firmly. He settled his hands in the dimpled hollows of the plump shoulders. “First things first.”
He put out the light.
His cab was back on the west side before Johnny remembered Jules Tremaine. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. “Skip the Duarte,” he ordered the driver. “Take me on up to the Alden. It's around 82nd.”
“I know,” the cabbie grunted, and swung north on Sixth. Across 57th he headed into the park. Johnny rocked from side to side on the back seat with the letter-S curves until they headed west on a sweeping turn, crossed Central Park West and pulled in under a marquee in the upper end of the first block.
Johnny had never seen the Alden before, but, even from the sidewalk, one look at its solid, banklike exterior and subdued lobby told him all he needed to know. An apartment hotel, known in the trade as a “family' hotel, exactly why he'd never been able to understand. Damn few families lived in them. Their one-and-a-half, two, and two-and-a-half room apartments were far more likely to be occupied by professional and theatrical people of a little more stature than their downtown counterparts.
“Jules Tremaine,” Johnny said into the house phone in the almost spartan lobby. “Killain,” he announced to the voice in his ear. “I'm downstairs.”
“Come on up. Four-oh-seven.”
The handsome Frenchman was standing in an open doorway when Johnny stepped off the elevator into the fourth-floor corridor. Silently he led the way inside. “Nice digs,” Johnny said after a look around. Nothing was new, but everything was comfortable. His glance rested longest on a large short-wave radio with a table to itself.
Tremaine nodded indifferently. “They want to get in to paint, but I can't stand the smell. I told them to wait till I had to be out of town.” His manner appeared neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was waiting, as though for a cue to determine the course of the conversation.
“All you people seem to be doin' pretty well,” Johnny suggested.
“All us people?”
“I went over to the blonde's, like you said. She don't look anywhere near close to the bread line.”
Tremaine pulled out his cigarettes and offered Johnny the pack. His dark eyes were inscrutable. “Anything of interest come up?”
“Is a dead body of interest?” The extended arm went rigid. “Whose?” “Jack Arends.”
For a count of five the Frenchman seemed nearly to hold his breath. “Killed?”
“Dead,” Johnny confirmed. “In the blonde's bathroom. Bathrooms are gettin' to be downright unlucky these days. Someone didn't like him four times in the head with a black automatic that looked like the twin of Dechant's.” Jules Tremaine shoved his cigarettes back in his pocket and lighted a match before be realized he hadn't taken one from the pack. “I met a guy named Harry Palmer tonight,” Johnny added.
“He financed deals for Claude.” The big-shouldered man said it absently, his mind obviously elsewhere. “I used to work for him myself.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Europe. Bird-dogging business prospects.” Tremaine finally got a cigarette going. “What are the police doing?”
“Givin' your blonde acquaintance a fit about who had keys to her apartment. Arends was inside when we got there.”
“We?”
“We,” Johnny repeated, and let it go at that. “How would you assay this boy Faulkner?”
“Not too highly. He has-” Jules Tremaine bit off whatever he had been about to say. His steady regard of Johnny was emotionlessly thorough. “At the moment I'm more interested in how I assay you. Just where do you fit into the picture?”
“That didn't seem to bother you too much on the phone when you invited me to come over an' talk.”
“I've changed my mind about the talk. Jack Arends wasn't dead then.”
“I've got an alibi for that,” Johnny said lightly.
Unexpectedly the Frenchman flushed. “Meaning I haven't?”
“I don't give a damn whether you do or not.” Johnny stared at a stubbornly protruding lower lip. “Do you want to talk or don't you?” He threw up his hands at the sullen silence. “I don't get it. This was your idea, remember? Who muzzled you? Why?” His eyes probed at Tremaine's wooden expression. “Last chance,” he warned. “This is countdown. Three. Two. One. Zero.” He turned and walked to the door. There wasn't a sound from behind him.
In the corridor he wondered fleetingly whether Gloria could have called the Frenchman and told him that Johnny actually had knowledge of August Hegel. But then wouldn't she have told him about Arends?
He had to walk three blocks before he could flag down a cab to get him back to the Duarte.
CHAPTER V
The ring of the phone in his room caught Johnny on his way to the door. He came back and picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Two to see you down here, John.” The sound of Marty Seiden's brisk voice reminded Johnny that it was Vic's night off. Marty, the red-headed, bow-tied, wisecracking middle-shift front-desk man always took over for Vic Barnes. “Names are Faulkner and Palmer.”
“Send 'em on up.” On impulse he left the room to meet them at the elevator. They got off with their backs to him, Palmer in the lead, and Johnny reached out silently and tapped Ernest Faulkner on the shoulder. The lawyer whirled, mouth agape, dead white.
“Oh-” he said weakly. “Don't-do that-”
Harry Palmer's alert features reflected amusement as he turned to survey the scene. “Try Miltown, Ernest,” he advised. He cocked an eyebrow at Johnny. “Which way?”
“Straight ahead. Six-fifteen.” Johnny trailed them down the hall, removed a key from a clip on the band of his watch and opened the door. “We won't be disturbed here,” he told them.
Harry Palmer scuffed a toe in the dull-hued Oriental rug and gazed around the attractively furnished oversized
