'And there was a guy in work clothes, young, long hair dirty blond, about six feet. He’s been in before, not regular but I recognized him.'
'Ralph Ensler,' said Palliser. 'He drives a Times delivery route. I talked to him.'
'That’s it,' said Mallow, looking at the list. 'These others, I don’t know the names. Toombs, this Sawyer- Pace and Woods. But, say, where’s-'
'Forget about everybody else but Sawyer. The others are O.K., we’ve talked to them. Now, the big question is, what does Sawyer look like? This is a secondhand description, Mr. Mallow, and you may not place it even if you’d seen him before.' Considering all they knew now about Don Ames’ reputation, it seemed hardly conceivable that anyone had had a grudge on him, deliberately sought him out; but you never knew. 'You remember it was our night watch came out on it. We’ve talked with the two officers and tried to get anything they remembered about the witnesses.' It had been a roundabout way to do it: the witnesses had been just strange faces to Piggott and Shogart, but on the other hand they were trained to notice faces. And it could be that this shy witness had defeated his own purpose with the false name, because it had caught Piggott’s attention as he took it down, and remembered more about the man.
'Well, shoot,' said Mallow obligingly. 'I’ll see what he sounds like.'
'The best we can get, he was on the young side, between twenty and thirty, medium height, stocky, with light hair going thin, and glasses,' said Palliser. 'He might have been wearing a tan jumpsuit.'
Mallow stared. 'Why, that’s Georgie,' he said. 'I just now noticed on this list, Georgie’s name isn’t here and he was there that night. I saw him talking to the officers when they were taking names. You don’t mean it was Georgie who-'
'We don’t know. Maybe he was just shy of giving police his name for some reason,' said Conway, his gray eyes hooded. 'Georgie who?'
'George Little, he works at the Shell station kitty-corner from the restaurant. But Georgie wouldn’t do a thing like that! I don’t know him except as a customer, but he seems a very decent guy.' Mallow was troubled. 'I can’t make out why he should give a wrong name.'
'Well, we’ll hope to find out. Thanks very much, Mr. Mallow.'
They weren’t feeling certain that this was going to provide an answer. People did foolish, impulsive things for all kinds of reasons and no reason: it was just a lead that had to be followed up. As they left the apartment building where Mallow lived, Palliser buttoned his coat and said, 'I don’t know when we’ve had so much rain in January.”
'Probably mean an extra-hot summer,' said Conway. They were using his Buick. They made the eight blocks to the little chain restaurant quickly, in the middle of the day, and Conway slid into the left-turn lane, crossed and pulled into the Shell station.
A young kid came up, long hair falling over his eyes, and said indolently, 'Yuh?'
'Is George Little here?'
'That’s him over there.' The kid jerked his head at a broad back bent over the raised hood of a car away from the pumps.
'O.K.' Conway pulled to the side of the apron and they both got out. 'Mr. Little?'
The man straightened and turned. 'That’s me,' he said; and then he saw the badge in Palliser’s hand and stood very still. 'Cops.'
'That’s right. Is there somewhere where we can talk to you? The station-'
'Sure,' said Little dully. He was mechanically wiping his hands on a rag, over and over. 'Sure.' He tossed the rag away and turned to the little glass-fronted station; they followed him in. 'I bet I know how you found me,' he said. 'It was a damn fool thing to do, give you guys a wrong name. Fred Mallow knew I was there.' And of course one small annoying thing about it was that they needn’t have gone the long way round; if they’d shown the list to Mallow he’d have told them right away who wasn’t on it and should have been.
'That’s right. Why did you do it?' asked Palliser. Little sat down on the edge of the desk. 'Because I was scared,' he said in a low voice. 'I didn’t believe it, when Mallow went over and said he was dead. I just didn’t believe it. But then when the squad car came-and they said we all had to stay for the detectives-I was scared. I just wanted to get away.' He raised his eyes briefly.
'Why?” asked Conway.
'Ah, you know why.' He was silent, and they gave him time; he made several false starts at it, ran oily fingers over his thinning hair, and finally said, 'The whole thing don’t make any sense at all. I don’t know why it happened. Yes, I do, but it was-it wasn’t-I don’t know. See, there’s this girl. She goes out with me sometimes. I- that night, I wanted to call her, but not from the station, I-the boss-he don’t mean anything but he likes to kid people. I went over to the restaurant on my break.' He was talking expressionlessly, head down, as if under a compulsion to explain just how senseless it had been. 'There’s a public phone just outside the rest rooms, down that little hall the other side from the counter. I’d just got up to it when I found out I didn’t have any change, and this guy came up just then, this Ames-I didn’t know his name, I’d seen him there before. And I asked him for change for a dollar, and he gave it to me and went into the rest room. So I called Dorothy-I still had the rest of the change in my hand-only she wasn’t home, her sister said she was out with somebody. And I was, I guess, so mad and kind of upset about it, I just stood there, and then I looked at the change in my hand and it was only eighty cents, he’d short-changed me a dime. And then he came out and I told him so, and he said he hadn’t, and I was still mad, I put the change in my pocket and there was my knife--' He brought it out slowly and showed it, an only slightly oversized pocketknife with a white handle. 'It’s a gadget,' he said, and pressed a catch on the top to fold and unfold the blades, one long and one short, very thin and pointed. 'I did it before I knew I would, just like a little kid-I-I-just wanted to hurt somebody,' he said. 'And I never thought I’d really hurt him-I called him a name and he looked kind of surprised and then just went by me, and after a minute I came out and sat at the counter and had some coffee. And then-over in that booth-And Mallow said he was dead! I swear to God, I thought he’d had a heart attack, it couldn’t’ve been what I- And then that one big plainclothes cop said he’d been stabbed. I couldn’t believe it.' He raised his head. 'You’ll arrest me now, I guess.'
'That’s right, Mr. Little. We’ll want to get all this down in a formal statement.'
'Me, killing somebody. I still can’t believe it,' said Little. 'All right, I know you got to. I better call the boss to come in. That snotnosed kid can’t fill a tank without falling over his own feet.'
What with one thing and another, not much had been done about Rodrigo Peralta, the addict found knifed on Monday night. Landers had started out to do some legwork on it, had talked to Walter Pepple and failed to find the other two tenants at home. They had turned up a record for Peralta, a petty pedigree of narco possession and B. and E., and that had given them the address of a relative, an uncle, Rubio Gonsalves. Glasser hadn’t found him yesterday, so now Landers tried the address again, down on Santa Barbara, and found him home. He was sitting in his single room, clad in underwear and slacks, reading a Spanish-language newspaper. He listened to Landers impassively and said, 'The boy is dead? Let God judge him. He was nothing to me any more.'
'You don’t know who any of his friends were?'
' No se. Nor I did not care. He had chosen his own road.' He shrugged massively and picked up his paper again.
It didn’t seem to be the best moment to tell him that the coroner’s office would come down on him to pay for the funeral. Landers went downstairs again, into the dirty, dingy city street where refuse blew down the sidewalks and collected in the gutter, to where he’d left the Corvair down the block. It had begun to rain again, rather hard. He got into the car, and the engine was dead, wouldn’t even try to turn over. Landers said a few things, got out and looked under the hood, decided it was hopeless to do anything in the rain. He found a public phone, called the auto club and huddled in the overhang of a building for thirty minutes until the tow truck came.
The driver had a look at the Corvair’s innards, slammed the hood and said, 'She’ll have to go in, mister. She’s about had it. Good little car, but a car’s only good for so many miles, you know. You need practically everything new. Oh, sure, a garage can fix her up, but it’ll only be a question of time before she goes out again.'
Landers said a few more things. 'Well, tow it in to the agency,' he said. 'I’ll talk to them about it.'
He called a cab and got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon.
