sure. You remember?” He looked at the girl lying white-faced and silent on the bed. “You remember, sweet?”
The girl didn’t look at him or answer him.
“She’s pooped,” Hench said. “I had a gun, a Colt .32, same caliber as that, but a belly gun. A revolver, not an automatic. There’s a piece broken off the rubber grip. A Jew named Morris gave it to me three four years ago. We worked together in a bar. I don’t have no permit, but I don’t carry the gun neither.”
Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”
“Hell, we didn’t even know the guy,” Hench said. His tie was tied now, very badly. He was cold sober and very shaky. He stood up and picked a coat off the end of the bed and put it on and sat down again. I watched his fingers tremble lighting a cigarette. “We don’t know his name. We don’t know anything about him. I see him maybe two three times in the hall, but he don’t even speak to me. It’s the same guy, I guess. I ain’t even sure of that.”
“It’s the fellow that lived there,” Breeze said. “Let me see now, this ball game is a studio re-broadcast, huh?”
“Goes on at three,” Hench said. “Three to say four-thirty, or sometimes later. We went out about the last half the third. We was gone about an inning and a half, maybe two. Twenty minutes to half an hour. Not more.”
“I guess he was shot just before you went out,” Breeze said. “The radio would kill the noise of the gun near enough. You must of left your door unlocked. Or even open.”
“Could be,” Hench said wearily. “You remember, honey?” Again the girl on the bed refused to answer him or even look at him.
Breeze said: “You left your door open or unlocked. The killer heard you go out. He got into your apartment, wanting to ditch his gun, saw the bed down, walked across and slipped his gun under the pillow, and then imagine his surprise. He found another gun there waiting for him. So he took it along. Now if he meant to ditch his gun, why not do it where he did his killing? Why take the risk of going into another apartment to do it? Why the fancy pants?”
I was sitting in the corner of the davenport by the window. I put in my nickel’s worth, saying: “Suppose he had locked himself out of Phillips’ apartment before he thought of ditching the gun? Suppose, coming out of the shock of his murder, he found himself in the hall still holding the murder gun. He would want to ditch it fast. Then if Hench’s door was open and he had heard them go out along the hall—”
Breeze looked at me briefly and grunted: “I’m not saying it isn’t so. I’m just considering.” He turned his attention back to Hench. “So now, if this turns out to be the gun that killed Anson, we got to try and trace your gun. While we do that we got to have you and the young lady handy. You understand that, of course?”
Hench said: “You don’t have any boys that can bounce me hard enough to make me tell it different.”
“We can always try,” Breeze said mildly. “And we might just as well get started.”
He stood up, turned and swept the crumpled newspapers off the chair on to the floor. He went over to the door, then turned and stood looking at the girl on the bed. “You all right, sister, or should I call for a matron?”
The girl on the bed didn’t answer him.
Hench said: “I need a drink. I need a drink bad.”
“Not while I’m watching you,” Breeze said and went out of the door.
Hench moved across the room and put the neck of a bottle into his mouth and gurgled liquor. He lowered the bottle, looked at what was left in it and went over to the girl. He pushed her shoulder.
“Wake up and have a drink,” he growled at her.
The girl stared at the ceiling. She didn’t answer him or show that she had heard him.
“Let her alone,” I said. “Shock.”
Hench finished what was in the bottle, put the empty bottle down carefully and looked at the girl again, then turned his back on her and stood frowning at the floor. “Jeeze, I wish I could remember better,” he said under his breath.
Breeze came back into the room with a young fresh-faced plainclothes detective. “This is Lieutenant Spangler,” he said. “He’ll take you down. Get going, huh?”
Hench went back to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get on up, babe. We gotta take a ride.”
The girl turned her eyes without turning her head, and looked at him slowly. She lifted her shoulders off the bed and put a hand under her and swung her legs over the side and stood up, stamping her right foot, as if it was numb.
“Tough, kid—but you know how it is,” Hench said. The girl put a hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her little finger, looking at him blankly. Then she swung the hand suddenly and hit him in the face as hard as she could. Then she half ran out of the door.
Hench didn’t move a muscle for a long moment. There was a confused noise of men talking outside, a confused noise of cars down below in the street. Hench shrugged and cocked his heavy shoulders back and swept a slow look around the room, as if he didn’t expect to see it again very soon, or at all. Then he went out past the young fresh- faced detective.
The detective went out. The door closed. The confused noise outside was dimmed a little and Breeze and I sat looking at each other heavily.
11
After a while Breeze got tired of looking at me and dug a cigar out of his pocket. He slit the cellophane band with a knife and trimmed the end of the cigar and lit it carefully, turning it around in the flame, and holding the burning match away from it while he stared thoughtfully at nothing and drew on the cigar and made sure it was burning the way he wanted it to burn.
Then he shook the match out very slowly and reached over to lay it on the sill of the open window. Then he looked at me some more.
