down with the bourbon. He took a small swallow, chasing it around his mouth with his tongue.
Five telephone numbers, now. Roger was hot on Tremaine. Say Tremaine's was the first number the detective had had Sally call. So Tremaine had no alibi. At least he wasn't home. And for this Tremaine could need an alibi.
Stitt had been home, assuming the second number to be his. From the growl Rogers had got for an answer, it about had to be Stitt. Stitt wanted no trouble, he claimed. The savagery of the attack was right up Stitt's alley, though. And Gloria said that Madeleine Winters had turned Stitt in on a deal that could have cost him a prison sentence. Could Stitt have hired the job done?
Then there was Gloria Philips herself. She didn't like Madeleine, either. But on the face of things at least it was unlikely she disliked her enough for this sort of thing.
Harry Palmer must have gotten the last call. It must have been gabby Harry hanging on asking questions with Rogers trying to shake him off. Which would leave the lawyer Faulkner not answering the third call. Still, Faulkner was a talker, too. Maybe the last call had gone to him, and Palmer hadn't answered the third call. Not that it made much difference as between those two. There was no apparent motive for either.
Johnny had his glass halfway to his lips again when a solution occurred to him. He tossed off the balance of his drink hurriedly, rose and in his stockinged feet walked to the phone. “Say, ma-”
“I've got a call for you,” she interrupted him.
“Wait. Those phone numbers Rogers handed in to you to call. Read 'em off to me, will you?”
“You're too late, man. That sour-looking Detective Cuneo came in a few minutes ago and asked me for them. He had to go all through my wastepaper basket, but he found them.”
“That Rogers is gettin' too damn smart,” Johnny grunted. “Cuneo still downstairs?”
“Not in sight, anyway.”
“Okay. Put on the call.” There was a second's dead air before he got the connection. “Yeah?”
“Killain?” Johnny thought the voice was guarded. “Don't use my name. This is the man who sent you the check. I'm over at Toffenetti's. Take a walk around.”
Toffenetti's was on Broadway, a block west and two blocks south of the Duarte. “What's the matter with right here?” Johnny asked, more to be contrary than because he had any real objection to Toffenetti's.
“I don't know who's watching your place. I don't think you do, either. I had two phone calls tonight I don't like. I want-”
“Two phone calls?” Johnny interrupted.
“Yes.” The voice paused. “You sound as if you might have known about one of them.”
A shrewd Prussian, Johnny thought. “Maybe I do. I'll be right over. Tell Danny at the soda fountain Killain wants the usual.” He hung up and dressed hurriedly, took the service elevator down to the lobby and told Paul he was going out for a little while. He swung down Forty-fifth Street in the mild night air, waving to Joe taking care of his last minute customers in the bar across from the theater. Joe waved back, and beckoned with the bottle in his uplifted hand. Johnny pointed to his wrist with a circular motion to indicate fleeting time as he passed by. On the corner, Shorty, the newsstand man, reached out to punch Johnny on the arm. Johnny scooped him up with an arm around his middle and carried him kicking and hollering half a block up Broadway before he let him go. Shorty stood in the middle of the sidewalk, and of the first fifteen words of his cheerful diatribe the only two printable were “big walrus.” A hundred yards up the street, Jackie Dolan, the owlhoot night patrolman, jabbed Johnny in the ribs with his billy and ducked a left to the body. This was the world of Killain.
At Toffenetti's Johnny found Max Stitt in a back booth. The cold-eyed man was distastefully regarding the enormous four-scoop sundae with berries, nuts and whipped cream across the table from him. “You're actually going to eat that sickening-looking thing?” he demanded as Johnny sat down and pulled it toward him.
“Goes just right on top of three double bourbons,” Johnny told him, spooning busily.
“Bourbons! And then that?” Words appeared to fail the other man.
“I always claimed that anything a boa constrictor can eat, I can eat,” Johnny said. He looked at Max Stitt across the booth table. “What's on your mind?”
“What's on my mind is that I received a phone call tonight from that detective who's been making a nuisance of himself out at the warehouse recently.”
“That's one call,” Johnny said as Stitt paused. “Oh, I got your check. What was the hurry?”
The cold-eyed man waved a deprecating hand. “I want no trouble. That phone call, now. If I hadn't been home what would I have been accused of tonight?”
“Hospitalizin' Madeleine Winters.”
Max Stitt pinched his chin thoughtfully between a thumb and forefinger. His eyes never left Johnny's face. “Another shooting?”
Johnny shook his head. “Knuckle job. Broke her face all up.”
Max Stitt's hands opened and closed. One thin streak of color flared in the pale features. “Someone is trying to involve me!” he said gutturally.
“It looked like it could've been your work, all right,” Johnny said in a detached tone. “Not but a couple pieces of bone left together anywhere in her face.”
“I tell you someone iss trying to inwolve me!” Max Stitt's consonants had tripled on his tongue in his icy rage. “I want no trouble, but if it iss brought to me, someone will wish he had never been born!”
“That second call you got,” Johnny said casually. “That from anyone we both know?” He dredged up a full- sized strawberry from one corner of the sundae and considered Max Stitt's obsessed silence. Johnny doubted that Stitt had even heard him. His hands clenched on the table-top before him to white-knuckled rigidity, the cold-eyed man seethed with an inner fire. Behind Johnny's back he sent searching glances darting up to the front of the restaurant, and once turned his head to look suspiciously at the roped-off, darkened section behind them.
“You know damn well-” Johnny began again, still trying, and turned curiously as Stitt's eyes again raked the front of the restaurant. “Oh-oh,” Johnny said softly. Detective Ted Cuneo sat upon a counter stool halfway to the door.
Stitt's eyes were upon Johnny immediately. “You know him? I thought he was paying too much attention to this booth.”
“A detective. He doesn't like-”
“I'll teach you to bag me, Killain!” Max Stitt's furious right hand swept upward in a blurred arc and crashed against Johnny's cheekbone. Still going backward from the force of the blow, Johnny hit Stitt in the chest with the sundae. Dripping fruit, nuts, syrup and ice cream, Max Stitt roared out of the booth. Johnny boiled out of his side, and they met in the aisle, head-on. Max Stitt's lightning fast hands nailed Johnny twice on his way in before Johnny could grab him, and then they went to the floor in a thrashing tangle.
Stitt fought with hands, feet, elbows, knees, head and teeth. Hooked fingers clawed at Johnny's face as they banged under a booth. A table leg smashed with a crackling of wood, and a capsized booth table pursued them as they rolled back out into the aisle, hammering at each other. Grimly, Johnny sought for a handhold on the eel-like Stitt, trading roundhouse clubbing lefts as he groped for a throat-hold with his right hand.
Surging up from beneath, Johnny tried to use his weight to pin the dervish spitting at him. Ignoring the lefts to his face, he grunted with satisfaction as his right hand slipped solidly home. Hitching his shoulders together for additional leverage, from the very corner of his eye he caught sight of a shadow standing behind him with uplifted hand. Instinctively Johnny dived and rolled, carrying Stitt up on top of him as a shield. Ted Cuneo's descending night stick caught the plunging Stitt squarely behind the ear, and he went limp on Johnny's body.
Johnny slung him aside like a sack of sugar and scrambled to his knees. “Take a sucker shot at me, will you, you sonofabitch!” he growled at Ted Cuneo, and started up.
“No, no, Johnny!” His high-pitched voice like a steam calliope in Johnny's ear, Danny Giardino, the tough little night manager, jumped from the thin circle of wide-eyed late-hour onlookers. Clamping a headlock on Johnny, he tried with his weight to prevent him from rising. “You can't swing at a cop, Johnny!”
“The hell I can't!” Johnny came up anyway, plucking at Danny hanging from his head. Peeling Giardino off himself like wet paper from a wall, Johnny threw him at Cuneo. The pair of them crashed backward into a booth, which splintered and collapsed beneath them. Johnny charged the shambles of the booth.
“No, no, no, Johnny!” Danny begged from the floor. He spread his arms wide over Cuneo beneath him, the tough face pleading. “Don't take a fall over this, Johnny!”
Some part of the rugged little Italian's sincere plea reached Johnny's bubbling ferment. He knew Danny was
