own expense. Starr is a police commissioner in Vegas.”
I turned around and looked at Ohls. “The coyotes out in the desert will get fed tonight. Congratulations. Cop business is wonderful uplifting idealistic work. Bernie. The only thing wrong with cop business is the cops that are in it.”
“Too bad for you, hero,” he said with a sudden cold savagery. “I could hardly help laughing when you walked into your own parlor to take your beating. I got a rise out of that, kiddo. It was a dirty job and it had to be done dirty. To make these characters talk you got to give them a sense of power. You ain’t hurt bad, but we had to let them hurt you some.”
“So sorry,” I said. “So very sorry you had to suffer like that.”
He shoved his taut face at me. “I hate gamblers,” he said in a rough voice. “I hate them the way I hate dope pushers. They pander to a disease that is every bit as corrupting as dope. You think those palaces in Reno and Vegas are just for harmless fun? Nuts, they’re there for the little guy, the something-for-nothing sucker, the lad that stops off with his pay envelope in his pocket and loses the week-end grocery money. The rich gambler loses forty grand and laughs it off and comes back for more. But the rich gambler don’t make the big racket, pal. The big steal is in dimes and quarters and half dollars and once in a while a buck or even a five-spot. The big racket money comes in like water from the pipe in your bathroom, a steady stream that never stops flowing. Any time anybody wants to knock off a professional gambler, that’s for me. I like it. And any time a state government takes money from gambling and calls it taxes, that government is helping to keep the mobs in business. The barber or the beauty parlor girl puts two bucks on the nose. That’s for the Syndicate, that’s what really makes the profits. The people want an honest police force, do they? What for? To protect the guys with courtesy cards? We got legal horse tracks in this state, we got them all year round. They operate honest and the state gets its cut, and for every dollar laid at the track there’s fifty laid with the bookies. There’s eight or nine races on a card and in half of them, the little ones nobody notices, the fix can be in any time somebody says so. There’s only one way a jock can win a race, but there’s twenty ways he can lose one, with a steward at every eighth pole watching, and not able to do a damn thing about it if the jock knows his stuff. That’s legal gambling, pal, clean honest business, state approved. So it’s right, is it? Not by my book, it ain’t. Because it’s gambling and it breeds gamblers and when you add it up there’s one kind of gambling—the wrong kind.”
“Feel better?” I asked him, putting some white iodine on my wounds.
“I’m an old tired beat-up cop. All I feel is sore.”
I turned around and stared at him. “You’re a damp good cop. Bernie, but just the same you’re all wet. In one way cops are all the same. They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses his pay check at a crap table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash, stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building houses.”
“Aw shut up!”
“Sure, shut me up. I’m just a private citizen. Get off it. Bernie. We don’t have mobs and crime syndicates and goon squads because we have crooked politicians and their stooges in the City Hall and the legislatures. Crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. We’re a big rough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We’ll have it with us a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”
“What’s the clean side?”
“I never saw it. Maybe Harlan Potter could tell you. Let’s have a drink.”
“You looked pretty good walking in that door,” Ohls said.
“You looked better when Mendy pulled the knife on you.”
“Shake,” he said, and put his hand out.
We had the drink and he left by the back door, which he had jimmied to get in, having dropped by the night before for scouting purposes. Back doors are a soft touch if they open out and are old enough for the wood to have dried and shrunk. You knock the pins out of the hinges and the rest is easy. Ohls showed me a dent in the frame when he left to go back over the hill to where he had left his car on the next street. He could have opened the front door almost as easily but that would have broken the lock. It would have showed up too much.
I watched him climb through the trees with the beam of a torch in front of him and disappear over the rise. I locked the door and mixed another mild drink and went back to the living room and sat down. I looked at my watch. It was still early. It only seemed a long time since I had come home.
I went to the phone and dialed the operator and gave her the Lorings’ phone number. The butler asked who was calling, then went to see if Mrs. Loring was in. She was.
“I was the goat all right,” I said, “but they caught the tiger alive. I’m bruised up a little.”
“You must tell me about it sometime.” She sounded about as far away as if she had got to Paris already.
“I could tell you over a drink—if you had time.”
“Tonight? Oh, I’m packing my things to move out. I’m afraid that would be impossible.”
“Yes, I can see that. Well, I just thought you might like to know. It was kind of you to warn me. It had nothing at all to do with your old man.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Oh. Just a minute.” She was gone for a time, then she came back and sounded warmer. “Perhaps I could fit a drink in. Where?”
“Anywhere you say. I haven’t a car tonight, but I can get a cab.”
“Nonsense, I’ll pick you up, but it will be an hour or longer. What is the address there?”
I told her and she hung up and I put the porch light on and then stood in the open door inhaling the night. It had got much cooler.
I went back in and tried to phone Lonnie Morgan but couldn’t reach him. Then just for the hell of it I put a call
