on a divan.
'Eliot… do we dare do this?'
'Sure-but we ought to keep it to ourselves.'
'Like, I shouldn't wear this ring?'
'Well, not to Higbee's… it'd just get in the way, wouldn't it? You work with your hands, after all…'
'Your reporter pals are going to know.'
'They won't say anything.'
'When can we… go public?'
'After the mayoral election. I owe that to Mayor Burton.'
'That's November… almost a year…'
'I know. I'm sorry.'
She sighed, but nodded; she looked at her ring wistfully. 'You owe that much to Burton.'
'This'll be his last mayoral campaign.'
'Oh?'
'Keep it under your hat, but greater political prospects are around the corner for him.'
'Governor? Senator? What?'
'Something like that.'
She intertwined her legs with his. 'This town'll be needing a mayor, you know.'
'I suppose that's true.'
'Nobody could beat you.'
'Me? I'm no goddamn politician.'
'Well. Nobody could beat you.'
'Don't be silly.'
'Think about it.'
'I hate politics like poison.'
'Then prove it. Skip the council meeting tonight.'
'I shouldn't.'
'You owe me, buster. You invite me to move in with you, turn this stone castle into our little love nest, and then you stay out all night all the time,'
He had, in fact, been out all night several nights a week for over two months now.
He shrugged. 'It's the nature of this current case.'
'How do I know you're not shacking up with some floozy at the Hollenden?'
She was well aware that he had set up a second, temporary office in a suite at the Hollenden Hotel, where he was interviewing witnesses for the numbers racket investigation, often at night.
He shrugged good-naturedly. 'Why don't you hire a detective to follow me?'
'What, some private eye like your friend Heller, back in Chicago? I wouldn't trust him with change for a dollar.'
'Then I guess you'll just have to trust me.'
'What the hell kind of questioning are you doing in the middle of the night?'
'Well… I really can't say.'
'Oh for Christsake, Eliot-who am I going to tell? You trust me, and I'll trust you, okay?'
He smiled. 'Okay. We have to protect the identity of our witnesses. So we pick them up in the middle of the night-if anyone's around, we pretend to be arresting 'em.'
'These are all Negroes? Numbers racketeers?'
'For the most part. In some cases, we do arrest them, when we have somebody who we think would make a good witness, but who needs some convincing.'
'What kind of convincing? Third-degree convincing, you mean?'
'No. That's not my style. We explain our strategy, which is to get such a large number of witnesses that no single individual can be blamed by the bad guys for any indictments that come down. We preach safety in numbers.'
'So you escort these witnesses to a room in the Hollenden.'
'Yes-alley entrance, up the service elevator. We spend a lot of time giving them reassurances that they'll have protection from reprisals.'
'And this works?'
'We have going on fifty witnesses, at this point.'
She whistled. 'That's not bad-safety in numbers, all right.'
There was a knock at the door. An insistent knock.
He looked over his shoulder toward the sound, suspiciously. He didn't get many people knocking at his door out here-anybody who didn't live in the subdivision would have to get by the guard at the gate, and the guard would've called ahead in such a case.
'Probably a neighbor,' she said, sensing the questions he was asking himself. 'Somebody needs a cup of sugar or something.'
The knocking continued, obnoxiously.
'I don't think so,' he said. He got up, tucked in his pants, and got a gun from the top drawer of a small desk near the front window, where he took a moment to gently part the curtains and peek out.
'It's a man,' Ness said, almost whispering, 'but from this angle, in the dark, can't make him out.'
She was still on the couch. She said, softly but audibly, 'Is that gun really necessary?'
'I hope not.'
He went to the front door and stood to one side of it and called out, 'Who is it?'
'Answer the goddamn door, Eliot!'
Sam Wild.
He opened the goddamn door. The cold hit him like a bucket of water. The reporter, his tan gabardine trenchcoat belted tight, his snap brim felt hat pulled down over his eyes, hands in fur-lined leather gloves, nonetheless looked colder than hell. His breath was fog.
'Temperature dropped,' Ness noted.
'Let me in, damnit! Freezing my nuts off, pardon my French.'
Ness made a sweeping gesture for him to enter and Wild stepped in, shutting the door himself, then said, 'Nice and toasty in here.'
Ness said, sotto voce, 'It's Ev's birthday, Sam. We're celebrating. This sure as hell better be important.'
'It's important, all right. Your own people have been trying to call you for over an hour.'
'What do you mean, trying?'
Ev's voice came from just behind him; she had snuck up on the great detective. 'I'm afraid I took the phone off the hook,' she admitted. 'Right before dinner.'
He turned and looked at her sharply.
She winced.
He sighed and worked to soften his look and, with a tense smile, said, 'Please don't ever do that.'
'I'm sorry,' she said. She obviously meant it, but her feelings were hurt. She slipped back into the living room. He turned back to Wild.
'So?' he said, irritated.
'You ever hear of a cop named Willis? Clifford Willis?'
'No.'
'He's a white cop working the Negro district. Or he was.'
'Was?'
'He got shot tonight.'
'Oh, Christ. Where?'
'If you're talking anatomy, he got shot a lot of places. If you're talking geography, the body turned up in the front yard of a house on Hawthorne.'
'Christ! That's just a block off Central…'
'Yes. A very lively colored neighborhood. And a very dead white cop. Your boys are at the scene right now. I
