o’clock.”
“Who’s Deirdre?”
“Deirdre Fallon, young Walter’s lady friend. She actually let Weiss into the apartment before she left.”
“What time was that?”
“She says about one-fifteen. When Gertrude, Walter’s mother, came to call at about two o’clock, she got no answer.”
I made a mental timetable. Radford had been alive at one-fifteen when Weiss came. Say fifteen minutes or so for Sammy in the study: one-thirty. At two o’clock no one answered the door. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find Weiss. Not if they were all telling the truth.
“What about enemies? Business troubles? Who gets rich now?”
But I had lost him. He might have been shaken by the murder, and I had flattered him for a moment, but he was not a fool. His eyes had hardened while I was thinking over the timetable.
“Are you working for this Weiss, Mr. Fortune?”
“In a way,” I admitted.
His voice was flint. “I see. You believe him innocent?”
“I want to hear a real motive.”
“Isn’t $25,000 enough for a man like that?”
“You mean the money Walter owed him? Why would he…?”
“I mean the $25,000 he stole, Mr. Fortune.”
So there it was. If I were the police, I would be after Weiss.
“The money was taken from the apartment?” I said.
“From a drawer in the study,” Ames said. “Weiss was here to collect the money, Mr. Fortune. He was here at the time of the murder. The weapon was at hand. The money is gone.”
I said nothing. What could I say?
“Now you come to ask questions while Weiss is apparently still at large,” Ames said. “When a rich man is murdered, only a fool fails to consider anyone who might gain by his murder. I’ve thought about it all night. There is no one. You can believe me when I tell you there was no one with a good enough reason to murder Jonathan. There is only your Weiss.”
I nodded. “Can I look at the study?”
“I believe I…” he began angrily, and stopped. He hesitated. “Very well. I don’t see why not.”
The study was down a small corridor. It was book-lined and leather-furnished. A stain on a large rug showed that the body had been partly behind the desk. There were four windows. They were all closed and inaccessible from outside except to a bird. The room had one door, and it had been thoroughly searched.
I went out and stood in the small corridor. To the right it led into the kitchen. There was a back door to the kitchen. It was locked inside by a spring lock. Through it was the usual back staircase for garbage, deliveries and fire. The lock did not seem to have been tampered with.
I returned to the living room and thanked Ames. He nodded. His well-tended face was frosty. I was nosing, unasked, into his affairs. There’s nothing like self-interest to bring a man out of shock or sorrow.
In the lobby I braced the doorman. “What time did Radford come home yesterday afternoon?”
“Around one o’clock, with the Fallon girl. I already told the Captain. I seen the fat guy go up maybe one- fifteen. Miss Fallon come down right after that, like I said.”
He was eying my missing arm. He assumed I was a cop, and the arm probably made me look like a tough cop.
“When did the fat guy come down?”
“I didn’t see. I had to help old lady Gadsden with her groceries. Two million bucks, and she carries her own stuff.”
“Where do the back stairs open out?”
“Alley in the rear. It locks inside, only you know.”
I knew. Half the time it would be open. I went out into the snow. It was still coming down, but not as heavy. I started up to the corner, thinking about what I could do next. George Ames had sounded pretty certain about no one else killing Radford. He could be right-as far as he knew. But there was another side to the coin, a side Ames might not know.
Maybe Sammy Weiss had killed and stolen $25,000, but he hadn’t acted last night like a man with $25,000. He had been really scared, I knew that much, and it wasn’t like him not to flash that money at me if he wanted help. On top of that, how did Weiss get owed $25,000 in the first place?
At the corner I decided to look closer into what Sammy had been doing lately. I started crosstown for the subway. I got two steps.
A car pulled up beside me and two men got out-one from each side of the car.
4
I didn’t try to run. There was no point. They had me boxed, and I waited in the snow for them to come up to me. They came on both sides, wary.
Then I saw the buggy-whip aerial on the car, and I saw the way they walked. Not exactly with arrogance, but with the cool assurance that comes from the massive power of law, right, and privilege that rests on them- cops.
“Fortune?” one of them said when he reached me.
“Would it help to say no?”
“Are you Daniel Fortune?” the second one asked without a smile.
“I’m Daniel Fortune,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Come on,” the first one said.
They conducted me to the car. I didn’t know either of them, which probably meant they were from the local precinct. The man in the back of the car wasn’t from the local precinct, and I knew him: Captain Gazzo from Homicide down at Centre Street.
“Hello, Dan,” Gazzo said.
“Captain,” I said.
I’ve known Gazzo all my life, since the days when he was a young cop and a friend of my mother’s after my father faded out, but he’s “Captain” when there are other cops around. It’s a big city, New York, and Gazzo is the law. He was the law now. He didn’t ask me to get in the car with him. I leaned in at the rear window, snow melting on my neck. That seemed to be where he wanted me. Interrogation is an art.
“Where’s Sammy Weiss, Dan?”
“I don’t know. I saw him early last night, not since.”
“He hired you to work for him?”
“No.”
“What did he tell you last night?”
“That he hit a man named Jonathan Radford. That Freedman was after him, and that he’s scared of Freedman.”
“Hit?” Gazzo said.
“That’s what he told me.”
Gazzo seemed to be trying to decide just how stupid I was this time. While I waited for him to decide, I thought about George Ames. It was obvious now that Ames had let me look at the study so he could make a call to the police and report me.
Gazzo decided. “George Ames called Chief of Detectives McGuire, Dan. He doesn’t like you around. McGuire called me. I was up here on the case, so I came around to give you the word.”
“Ames goes high,” I said.
“Men like George Ames call a chief of detectives the way you and I call a messenger. He wouldn’t even think about anyone lower. He knows McGuire personally, Dan. You have any real reason for thinking Weiss isn’t guilty?
