he was saying he had a legitimate grievance. 'You made a Goddamn sharp deal with my wife, a hundred lousy bucks, an' you got away with it, she didn't have no choice, on account she was up against it with me away like I was, flat on my back in the hospital I was, an' the bills runnin' up alla time-you took advantage of her not knowin' much about business, all right! I figure it same way like a bank would, Morgan-interest, they call it, see?'
There was an appalling mixture of naive satisfaction and greed in his eyes; Morgan looked away. (Interest, just how did you figure that kind of interest? Twenty-six months of a squirming warm armful that weighed fourteen pounds, eighteen, twenty-two, and a triumphant twenty-nine-and-a-half?-he forgot what the latest figure was, only remembered Sue's warm chuckle, reporting it. Twenty-six months of sticky curious baby-fat fingers poking into yours, into the paper you were trying to read, into what was almost a dimple at the corner of Sue's mouth: of the funny solemn look in the blue eyes: of ten pink toes splashing in a sudsy tub. That would be quite a thing to figure in percentages.)
'You can raise the dough if you got to,' said Smith.
'Not ten thousand,' said Morgan flatly. 'I might manage five.' And that was a deliberate lie; he couldn't raise five hundred.
'I don't go for no time-payments, Morgan.' The gray eyes were bleak. 'You heard me the first time. I give you a couple days think about it, but don't give me no more stall now. Put up or shut up.'
Poker, thought Morgan. Bluff?-that he'd bring it open, go to law? You couldn't take the chance; and in this last five minutes it had come to him that he didn't have to. There was only one way to deal with Smith, and Morgan knew how it could be done, now: he saw the way. He could take care of Smith once for all time, and then they would be safe: if necessary later, he could handle the woman easier, he remembered her as an indecisive nonentity. There was, when you came to think of it, something to be said for being an upright citizen with a clean record. And it would not trouble his conscience at all. In the days he'd worn Uncle's uniform, he had probably killed better men, and for less reason.
There was hard suspicion now in the gray eyes; Morgan looked away, down to his empty glass, quickly. He'd been acting too calm, too controlled; he must make Smith believe in his capitulation. He made his tone angry and afraid when he said, low, 'All right, all right-I heard you the first time! I-I guess if I cash in those bonds-I might-but I'll get something for my money! You'll sign a legal agreement before you touch-'
'O.K., I don't mind that.'
'You've got to give me time, I can't raise it over Sunday-'
'Monday night.'
'No, that's not long enough-'
'Monday,' said Smith. 'That's the time you got-use it. Make it that same corner, seven o'clock, with the cash-an' I don't take nothing bigger than fives, see?' He slid out of the booth, stood up.
'Yes, damn you,' said Morgan wearily. Without another word Smith turned and walked toward the door.
Morgan took out his wallet below the level of the table, got out the one five in it, held it ready. When Smith looked back, going out, Morgan was still sitting there motionless; but the second Smith turned out of sight to the left, Morgan was up, quick and quiet. He laid the five on the table and got into his coat between there and the door; outside, he turned sharp left and hugged the building, spotting the back he wanted half a block ahead.
Because Kenneth Gunn, who had been a police officer for forty years and sure to God ought to know, had once said to him, 'They're a stupid bunch. Once in a long while you get a really smart one, but they're few and far between. The majority are just plain stupid-they can't or won't think far enough ahead.'
Maybe this was Smith's first venture into crookedness, but it should qualify him for inclusion in that; Morgan hoped so. There was a chance that the boy was posted to watch, of course; but he had to risk that. The precautions about the meeting place, beforehand, were to assure Smith that Morgan came alone: and satisfied of that, Smith's mind might have gone no further.
Smith had made another mistake too, one frequently made by men like him. They always underestimated the honest men.
It had stopped raining and turned very cold. This was the slack hour when not many people were out, and it was easy to keep Smith spotted, from pool to pool of reflected neon lights on the sidewalk. If he had looked back, he'd have found it as easy to spot Morgan; but he didn't look back. He walked fast, shoulders hunched against the cold, round the next corner to a dark side street.
When the trail ended twenty minutes later Morgan told himself, almost incredulously, that his luck had turned; he was due for a few breaks… He'd had a job to keep Smith in sight and still stay far enough back, down these dark streets, and he'd lost all sense of direction after they got off Second. But at that last corner, stopping in shadow, watching Smith cross the narrow street ahead, Morgan realized suddenly where they were. He was at the junction of Humboldt and Foster, a block down from Commerce; it looked as if Humboldt ended here, where Foster ran straight across it like the top bar on a T, but it only took a jog, started again half a block to the left. What made the jog necessary was Graham Court, a dreary little cul-de-sac whose mouth gaped narrowly at him directly opposite. He'd been here before, just this morning. And Smith was going into Graham Court.
Morgan jaywalked across Foster Street and under the lamppost whose bulb had been smashed by kids, and into Graham Court. It was only wide enough for foot traffic: there were three dark, dank, big frame houses on each side, cheap rooming places, and right across the end of the court, a four-story apartment building of dirty yellow stucco. A dim light from one of the ground-floor windows there showed Smith as he climbed the steps and went in.
'I will be damned,' said Morgan half-aloud. Luck turning his way?-with a vengeance! The building where the Lindstrom woman lived: where on his legitimate comings and goings Richard Morgan, that upright and law-abiding citizen, had every reason to be, a real solid beautiful excuse, good as gold.
And that was just fine, better than he could have hoped for: he saw clear and confident how it would go, now.
SIX
Mendoza realized they'd have to let the Danny go: it might not be impossible to find the Danny Elena Ramirez had known, if it would be difficult; but more to the point, there was no way of identifying the right Danny. What was interesting about this matter was that by implication it narrowed the locale.
He had formed some very nebulous ideas-mere ghosts of hypotheses-overnight, out of the evidence a second murder inevitably added to the evidence from a first one; and he thought that a restricted locale was natural, if you looked at it a certain way. At least, it was a fifty-fifty chance, depending on just what kind of lunatic they were hunting. If he was the kind (disregarding the psychiatrists' hairsplitting solemn terms) whose impulse to kill was triggered suddenly and at random, the odds were that his victim would be someone in the area where he lived or worked: and considering the hour, probably the former. If he was the kind capable of planning ahead, then the place of the crime meant nothing, or very little, for he might have cunning enough to choose a place unconnected with him. But to balance that there was the fact that madmen capable of sustained cunning generally chose victims by some private logic: they were the ones appointed by God to rid the world of prostitutes, or Russian spies, or masquerading Martians. Like that. And to do so, they had to be aware of the victims as individuals.
So there was a chance that this one, whatever kind he was, lived somewhere fairly near the place he bad killed. And that might be of enormous help, for it suggested that he had lived (or worked) somewhere near the place Carol Brooks had been killed last September. If he was the man who had killed her, and Mendoza thought he was.
Sunday was only another day to Mendoza; he lay in bed awhile thinking about all this, and also about Alison Weir, until the sleek brown Abyssinian personage who condescended to share the apartment with him, the green- eyed Bast, leapt onto his stomach and began to knead the blanket, fixing him with an accusing stare. He apologized to her for inattention; he got up and laid before her the morning tribute of fresh liver; he made coffee. Eight o’clock found him, shaven and spruce, poring over a small-scale map of the city in his office. When Hackett came in at nine o’clock, he listened in silence to Alison Weir’s contribution of the muchacho extrario who stared, and grunted over the neat penciled circles on the map. In the center of one was the twenty-two-hundred block of Tappan Street, and in the center of the other the junction of Commerce and Humboldt. Each covered approximately a mile in diameter,
