I shook my head and didn’t answer.
“This is murder,” Breeze said. “You’re going to have to tell me.”
I shook my head again. He flushed a little.
“Look,” he said tightly, “you got to.”
“I’m sorry, Breeze,” I said. “But so far as things have gone, I’m not convinced of that.”
“Of course you know I can throw you in the can as a material witness,” he said casually.
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that you are the one who found the body, that you gave a false name to the manager here, and that you don’t give a satisfactory account of your relations with the dead guy.”
I said: “Are you going to do it?”
He smiled bleakly. “You got a lawyer?”
“I know several lawyers. I don’t have a lawyer on a retainer basis.”
“How many of the commissioners do you know personally?”
“None. That is, I’ve spoken to three of them, but they might not remember me.”
“But you have good contacts, in the mayor’s office and so on?”
“Tell me about them,” I said. “I’d like to know.”
“Look, buddy,” he said earnestly, “you must got some friends somewhere. Surely.”
“I’ve got a good friend in the Sheriff’s office, but I’d rather leave him out of it.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Why? Maybe you’re going to need friends. A good word from a cop we know to be right might go a long way.”
“He’s just a personal friend,” I said. “I don’t ride around on his back. If I get in trouble, it won’t do him any good.”
“How about the homicide bureau?”
“There’s Randall,” I said. “If he’s still working out of Central Homicide. I had a little time with him on a case once. But he doesn’t like me too well.”
Breeze sighed and moved his feet on the floor, rustling the newspapers he had pushed down out of the chair.
“Is all this on the level—or are you just being smart? I mean about all the important guys you don’t know?”
“It’s on the level,” I said. “But the way I am using it is smart.”
“It ain’t smart to say so right out.”
“I think it is.”
He put a big freckled hand over the whole lower part of his face and squeezed. When he took the hand away there were round red marks on his cheeks from the pressure of thumb and fingers. I watched the marks fade.
“Why don’t you go on home and let a man work?” he asked crossly.
I got up and nodded and went towards the door. Breeze said to my back: “Gimme your home address.”
I gave it to him. He wrote it down. “So long,” he said drearily: “Don’t leave town. We’ll want a statement— maybe tonight.”
I went out. There were two uniformed cops outside on the landing. The door across the way was open and a fingerprint man was still working inside. Downstairs I met two more cops in the hallway, one at each end of it. I didn’t see the carroty manager. I went out the front door. There was an ambulance pulling away from the curb. A knot of people hung around on both sides of the street, not as many as would accumulate in some neighborhoods.
I pushed along the sidewalk. A man grabbed me by the arm and said: “What’s the damage, Jack?”
I shook his arm off without speaking or looking at his face and went on down the street to where my car was.
12
It was a quarter to seven when I let myself into the office and clicked the light on and picked a piece of paper off the floor. It was a notice from the Green Feather Messenger Service saying that a package was held awaiting my call and would be delivered upon request at any hour of the day or night. I put it on the desk, peeled my coat off and opened the windows. I got a half bottle of Old Taylor out of the deep drawer of the desk and drank a short drink, rolling it around on my tongue. Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn’t like it.
I pulled the phone over and looked at the number on the slip and called it. They said my package could be sent right over. I said I would wait for it.
It was getting dark outside now. The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.
