I said, “Baron said he was with you Monday afternoon. Was he?”
“Sure, he came…”
“Baron’s dead,” I said. “He doesn’t need an alibi now.”
“Dead?”
Gazzo snapped, “Was he with you Monday afternoon?”
She nodded. “Yes, but… not when I said. He came about two-thirty, not one-thirty. He told me to say one- thirty. Dead? He’s dead?”
Her knuckles whitened on her bag, and she slipped off the chair in a dead faint. Gazzo jumped as if bitten. If it was an act, it was good. Gazzo bawled for his female sergeant.
“Take care of her. When she comes around, get a statement.”
The sergeant got some help, and they carried Carla Devine out. I watched her go. She was taking Weiss’s chances with her.
“He’s lying all the way, Dan,” Gazzo said.
“The girl lied before.”
“For Baron. Maybe Baron did kill Radford after all, but he’s dead. Why would she lie now?”
Gazzo said it almost bitterly. A good detective like Gazzo works close to danger. He works even closer to something else-the edge of sanity that yawns like an abyss for men who must decide, in essence, who lives and who dies. Gazzo is not a pitiless man, and that makes it hard for him to have to decide what a piece of human debris like Weiss is, or is not, guilty of doing. That gives a man scars inside, makes him bitter.
We both sat silent for a time. Then I said:
“How did Radford happen to have a list of the bills?”
“Who knows? Maybe he always did it when he had a lot of cash around, or maybe it was a trap for Baron. You tell me it was a blackmail con, not a bet. Maybe Radford was being cute.”
We sat in another silence. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, or to object to. After a while I got up and put on my duffle coat. Gazzo watched me.
“Weiss is guilty, Dan. Let it go.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’d like to find those weapons, you know? Stir the water. That’s detective work, right?”
“Damn you,” Gazzo said.
He would work on it, as I would, but maybe he’d never know for sure. Only the D.A. would be sure. The D.A. had to be elected, and he would tell himself that he was sure.
I went down to the street and got into my car. It was bitter cold. I sat and watched the Annex entrance. I smoked too many cigarettes.
It was nearly dawn before Carla Devine came out. Gazzo was an honest cop; he had sweated her hard. She had not changed her story. If she had, she would not have been coming out.
She hurried along the iron-cold street away from me. I got out and followed. She was huddled in a fur coat like something that had forgotten to hibernate. The door of a battered gray coupe swung open in front of her. I ran. She saw me, and jumped into the car. I got my hand on the door handle. The coupe ground gears and pulled away, dragging me. Her great brown eyes stared up into my face from inside. A thin, pale, wild-haired young boy was behind the wheel, his lips skinned back from his teeth.
One thing a one-armed man can’t do is get the door of a moving car open, or hang on when the car gets above 20 m.p.h. The speed turned me around backwards. I had to let go, and landed hard on my back in the street. I didn’t bother to see where the car had gone. I wasn’t going to get the number in the dark.
After a time I got up. I drove the rental car home. I went to bed. What could I have gotten from Carla Devine anyway?
15
Someone was crying. I stumbled naked through the snow and saw that it was my arm huddled behind a garbage can. Then it wasn’t my arm crying, it was Sammy Weiss. Three big men appeared and began to pound the lids of the garbage cans into Sammy’s face. I began to moan. Then my father was clutching at my empty sleeve, and I was telling him to get lost, get lost, get lost…
I woke with sun in my eyes, and knew that it was Weiss who I wanted to get lost, go away, vanish.
I lighted a cigarette. I lay in bed feeling empty. I was at a dead end, literally. I had worked hard on the vague hunch that Weiss had not killed Jonathan Radford. I had just about been sure that Paul Baron had killed the man. Now Baron was dead, and the case against Weiss was stronger than ever.
Was he lying? I didn’t know. All I knew was that if I had killed two men, I’d lie all the way.
I got up and plugged in the coffee. I turned on my heaters. I sat at the kitchen table. All right, I was at a dead end because there were too many variables, too many possibilities. Science has a method of tackling problems with too many variables and not enough facts. Scientists assume certain variables to be fixed, and then make an hypothesis to explain the facts they do know. The hypothesis may not be true, but it gives them a start.
I waited until the coffee was ready, and poured a cup. My assumption, my fixed variable, was that Weiss was telling the truth. My hypothesis was that Paul Baron had killed Jonathan Radford. It might not be true, but it fitted the facts enough to be workable, and it gave me a simple line of reasoning to follow: why had Baron been killed?
Radford is dead. Then what? Revenge? The family would have let the law handle Baron if they knew he had killed Jonathan. My client, Agnes Moore? She had a reason, and probably the hate and the courage. It was possible. I could work on that.
Radford is dead. Baron starts to frame Weiss. The frame seems to work well, the cops go howling after Weiss. Baron still has the material to blackmail Walter Radford. Did he try to use it again, go on with the squeeze with Walter now rich? Or did someone just think he might try to go on, and move to stop him? Remove the threat once and for all?
Or had some associate of Baron’s, some friend, become scared after Radford’s murder and decided that Baron was too dangerous to have around? Someone who was involved with Baron and no longer trusted Baron after Radford’s murder?
Or maybe some associate of Baron’s had decided to keep the blackmail all to himself. A partner who got greedy.
Partner?
Another rule of science says look at the facts, no matter how ridiculous they seem. No man would frame another man for his own murder. But that was exactly what Baron had done. Two facts that could not both be true, and yet were. One answer: Baron had not known what he was really doing. He had been manipulated.
Someone had changed the plan, had fooled Baron into framing Weiss for Baron’s own murder. Someone close enough to Baron, and to the whole scheme, to know everything that Baron did, and even to control much of what Baron did. A person who must have been working with Baron all along. An unknown partner.
The proof was staring at me: the message Baron had sent to Weiss to contact me. Weiss hadn’t questioned the message because as far as he knew only Baron knew where he was. But Baron had been long dead when that message was sent to Weiss.
I began to dress. Someone who knew that Baron was dead had sent the message. To flush Weiss out, to lead me to Weiss, and, eventually, to Baron. Once I heard Weiss’s story, there were only two ways I could act: go and find Baron, as I had done; or turn Weiss in to the police. Then the police would find Baron. Once Baron was found, no one would believe Weiss’s story. Everything would point to Weiss as Baron’s killer. Mission accomplished.
I went out to the nearest Riker’s for breakfast. Gazzo would say that there had been no message, that Weiss had cooked up the story to convince me that he didn’t know Baron was dead. Gazzo could be right, but my assumption was that Weiss was not lying. That meant there was a partner. Leo Zar had known where Weiss was, but Leo didn’t fit my picture. He was too obvious, he would have had to work in a different way, and I didn’t see him as a partner or double-dealer. He was a subordinate, a soldier for Baron, the loyal retainer. I could be wrong.
While I waited for my eggs, I called the Radford house in North Chester. The butler said that Walter was not
