'Two beat officers, sir,' Roederheusen replied as Stankiewicz reentered the office. 'Should I call them off?'
Littlemore answered the telephone. Rosie, the operator, informed him through the telephone that the vice president of the Metropolitan Tennis Association was on the line.
'Put him through.' Littlemore motioned to Stankiewicz to hand him the list. To Roederheusen, he said, 'No. Make sure somebody keeps an eye on Speyer all day. If he makes a move, I want to know.
If he doesn't, you meet me at his house at five tomorrow morning. Yeah, five. Now go home and get some sleep.' Littlemore cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder as he returned to the page of the casualty list devoted to government officers. 'Where's the Treasury guy, Stanky? There was a Treasury guard who died.'
'Hello?' said a man's crackling voice through the receiver.
'If he ain't on that list, Cap, he ain't dead,' said Stankiewicz.
'Hold the line,' said Littlemore into the telephone. 'Know what, Stanky? Don't argue with me today. Go check the handwritten list.'
'The, um, handwritten list?'
'Hello?' said the telephone.
'Hold the line,' Littlemore repeated. To Stankiewicz, he said, 'What do I have to do, spell it for you? You and Spanky made filing cards for all the casualties. I told you to make me a list from those cards. You wrote me the list. I saw it. Then I told you to have the handwritten list typed up. This is the typed list. I'm asking you to go back and check the handwritten list. Okay? The Treasury guy's name began with R; I saw it on his badge. Maybe you missed some others too.'
'Is anybody there?' said the telephone.
'Um, the handwritten list is gone, sir,' said Stankiewicz.
'Hold the god-busted line, will you?' Littlemore yelled into the receiver. He looked at Stankiewicz: 'What do you mean 'gone'?'
Stankiewicz didn't answer.
'Okay, Stanky, you threw away the handwritten list. Nice work. How about the filing cards? Don't tell me you threw those away?'
'I don't think so, sir.'
'You better not have. Or you'll be back on patrol next week. Go through every card. This time make sure you get everybody.'
Alone in his office, Littlemore identified himself to the vice president of the Metropolitan Tennis Association and asked whether an Edwin Fischer had ever won the United States Open.
'Edwin Fischer? replied the crackling voice. 'The gentleman in all the newspapers?'
'That's the one,' said Littlemore.
'Did he ever win the United States Open?'
'I asked you first,' replied Littlemore.
'Certainly,' said the vice president.
'How many times?' asked Littlemore.
'How many times?'
'Okay, I'll bite,' said the detective. 'More than three.'
'Oh, yes, it was at least four — mixed doubles. A record, I believe. He was number nine in the country back then. Still has one the best overheads in the game. How on earth did he know about the bombing?'
Littlemore hung up. A messenger entered his office and handed the detective a package containing a written report and an envelope. Inside the envelope was a small white tooth, broken cleanly into two pieces.
Littlemore met Younger in a diner that afternoon, reporting to him over acidic coffee that the redhead at Bellevue Hospital was still unconscious.
'She should have woken up,' said Younger. 'She wasn't shot in the head. There's no injury to her skull.'
'What about her voice?' asked Littlemore. 'Colette says she sounded like a man.'
'The growth on her neck must be impinging on her vocal cords. I took X-rays of her yesterday.'
'How'd you do that?' asked Littlemore.
Younger didn't answer that question: 'The X-rays didn't go through. In fact I've never seen anything like it. I'm going to New Haven tomorrow to see what Colette thinks of the films.'
'New Haven?' answered Littlemore. 'You can't leave the state, Doc. You're on bail for a major felony, remember?'
Younger nodded, apparently unimpressed by the argument. 'This is serious,' added Littlemore. 'They can put you away for jumping bail.'
'I'll keep that in mind.'
'Let me put it this way. If you go, I don't want to know about it. And whatever you do, you got to show up for your court date in a couple of months.'
'Why?'
'Because I posted the bail bond, for Pete's sake. If you don't show, they're going to seize my bank account and everything I own to pay the bond. Plus I'll probably get fired, since a law officer isn't supposed to bail his pal out of the joint in the first place — and especially not if the pal ends up on the lam. Okay? When did you stop caring about the law anyway?'
'If you're about to die in a storm,' answered Younger, 'and you see a barn where you could save yourself, do you stay outside and die or do you break in, even though it's against the law?'
'Of course you break in,' said Littlemore, 'if you're in the middle of nowhere.'
'Everywhere s the middle of nowhere.'
'No wonder the Miss wants to go back to Europe. You're so cheerful. Well, I got some news for you. The headless girl from Wall Street? They never identified her. She disappeared from the morgue body, head, and all.'
'Why am I not surprised to hear that?' asked Younger.
'The one good thing is that they had already done the autopsy. Guess what: she was missing a molar. Couple of molars, actually. It's not proof, but I'd say we found your Amelia. Found her and lost her, that is. Something else too. Look what my dental guys found.' The detective took out his magnifying glass and, in a handkerchief, two tiny halves of a tooth, which he set down on the table. He let Younger examine them through the magnifying glass. 'That's the tooth Amelia left for the Miss at your hotel. See the holes?'
Pockmarking the internal enamel — the inner surface of the tooth, exposed where it had been broken in two — were dozens of almost microscopic vesicles or pores.
'Caries?' said Younger.
'What's that?' replied Littlemore.
'Tooth decay.'
'Nope. The dental guys said it can't be normal decay because the outside of the tooth is too perfect. No discoloration even. It's like the tooth was being eaten away from within.'
Colette's letter arrived in Younger's hotel room the following morning. He read it lying in bed. The letter provoked in him a wave of contradictory feelings. He both wanted to go with Colette to Vienna and found himself contemptible for having that desire.
What kind of man would accompany a girl halfway across the world to find her long-lost lover? He pictured himself smiling as he was introduced to Hans Gruber. The image filled him with disgust. What exactly was he supposed to do in Vienna? And why exactly did she want him there?
It occurred to him at last that she did not want him there: that her reason for inviting him was simply that she needed money to pay for the trip. The realization made him stare at the ceiling for a long time. Surely not. Surely Colette would never stoop to using him for his money. Would she?
He wondered how, without his help, she intended to pay for the voyage. And he saw, of course, that she had no means.
Chapter Ten
