Hackett had just got back to the office at five o’clock, after getting the formal statement from Nygard and starting the machinery on the warrant. It was pouring rain outside, and he was wet. He found Landers blowing off steam about his car to Glasser, who said they’d all been telling him to trade that thing in for a year.
'Phil thinks it’s so funny,' said Landers. 'Saying I’ll have to break down and buy a new one, and my God, it isn’t that I’m stingy, but the payments-'
'Get a Gremlin,' said Glasser. 'You’ll get damn good mileage.'
'I know, I know, I’ve driven Phil’s.'
'Oh, Sergeant Hackett! Listen, I gotta make you believe me this time, they’re-'
'Oh, for the love of God!' said Hackett disgustedly. Mr. Yeager had plunged through the doorway with Sergeant Lake in pursuit.
'You’ve gotta listen, they’re gonna do it tonight, they’re gonna murder that woman! I heard ’em planning just how to do it, they’re gonna hit her on the head and put her in the bathtub and make it look like an accident, like she slipped and fell, and-'
'Now, Mr. Yeager,' said Hackett. 'If you’re going to tell me you were in the hall again and the door was open, don’t. Why don’t you just try to forget about it-'
'-And the girl’s going off after she’s helped him, see, nobody knows he’s got a girl, his ma, Mis’ Lampert, she’s kind of jealous of him-and then he’l1 pretend to find her and act all sorry and cry and carry on-'
'Now listen, Mr. Yeager. Just calm down. Try to explain to me just how you heard all this. You know you can’t. You’re just imagining-'
Yeager took a step back, licking his lips and looking in despair between Hackett and Lake. Then he said sullenly, 'Oh, hell. Well-well, if you gotta know, I-I got the place bugged.'
'What?' said Hackett. Landers laughed.
'I-well, hell, I don’t have much to do, nights,' said Yeager weakly. 'I took a course in electronics once. I-I did it first, we had a couple sets of newlyweds in the place-' Lake and Glasser began to laugh helplessly. 'And it was kind of interesting, and-well-well,' said Yeager half defensively, 'it was, you know, kind of like picking a channel on TV-'
'What the hell’s going on here?' asked Mendoza, coming across the hall to find all his available staff convulsed with merriment and Yeager standing in the middle looking miserable.
Hackett pulled himself together and told him, and Mendoza began to laugh too. 'It’s not so funny!' said Yeager. 'It was-you coulda knocked me over, I heard ’em talk about it the first time-and damn it, I tried to get you to believe me, so you’d stop ’em, but you wouldn’t pay no attention! And I knew I hadda do something, so I-I got all the rest of it down on tape. The other times they talked.' He reached into his pocket and produced three cheap sixty-minute tape cassettes. 'Now you gotta believe it!'
'Well, I will be Goddamned!' said Hackett. 'If this isn’t one for the books-you mean that innocent-looking fellow is really-Damnation, and we’ll have to do something about it.' He looked at his watch. 'I’d better call Angel. Luis?'
'I wouldn’t miss hearing those tapes for a million bucks,' Mendoza said, grinning.
The tapes would make excellent evidence; this would be one trial that wouldn’t cost much time or money. They went out with Piggott and Schenke to surprise the quarry, and they did. Mendoza had laughed over Mr. Yeager’s homemade entertainment; and in the course of twenty-six years at this sordid job, he had seen violence and blood, tragedy and death, brutality and mayhem of all sorts, but he wouldn’t soon forget the look on Mrs. Lampert’s face as she listened to what they knew, how they knew it. Looking from them to her son-a little too good-looking, Edward Lampert, with a weak chin and pale eyes-she aged twenty years in a moment. Expectably, he blustered and was sullen in turns, but finally parted with the girl’s name, Diane Ashley, and her address. Hackett went to add her to the party, and collected some fingernail scratches to match Piggott’s.
They ended up at the jail at eleven o’clock, booking them in.
'But you know, Mr. Yeager,' Hackett had said before that, 'you’ll really have to remove all the bugs. Apart from anything else, it’s invasion of privacy.'
'I guess so,' said Yeager. He sighed deeply. 'I’m sorry it had to come to that, I hadda tell you, get you to believe me. But I guess I better. But you just got no idea, Sergeant Hackett-it was interesting as hell!'
About two o’clock that morning Patrolmen Zimmerman and O’Neill were handed a call to a disturbance on Alvarado. When they got to it, they found an interested little crowd, mostly black, around a couple outside an all- night restaurant, beside a car at the curb.
'You take him in and lock him up!' the woman shouted at them as they got out of the car. 'He tried to kill me! Tried to strangle me!' She was a young woman, not bad-looking and decently dressed. They calmed her down and she gave them a name, Ruby Blake. 'I just stopped in that place, have a bite to eat before I go home after work-I work at a rest home, night shift. He got talking, acted all nice and polite, and offered me a ride home. And then when I got in his car, he started fooling around and tried to strangle me!' She was crying then, and she opened her coat to show them a couple of darkening bruises.
They couldn’t get anything out of the man at all. He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, about thirty: looked ordinary. He just looked at them sullenly and wouldn’t answer questions. They looked in the car and it didn’t have any registration, so they called in the plate-number. It had been reported stolen in Beverly Hills that afternoon.
'Would you make a statement charging him, Miss Blake?' asked Zimmerman.
'I surely would! You just tell me where to do it. Treat a decent girl like that-'
'It’ll be assault with intent,' said O’Neill. 'Robbery-Homicide.'
'The night watch has gone by now. Leave a report with the main desk,' said Zimmerman, 'and stash him in jail.' They called the garage to tow the car in and put him in cuffs and drove down to the Alameda facility. He never said a word all the way.
The day watch had hardly come in, on Thursday morning, when there was a heist reported at a drugstore on Spring Street. Galeano went out on it, and the pharmacist gave him a good description. He was so mad, he said he’d come over right now and look at mug-shots. He did, and within tive minutes of the time Phil Landers had settled him down with a book, he picked one. 'That’s him!' he told Galeano positively. 'I’d know him anywhere, that ugly mug! He didn’t even have a hat on, I’d know him in the dark!'
It was a picture of one Adam O’Hara, and he had the right record for the job: two counts of armed robbery and a few other things. There was a fairly recent address, and Galeano went looking for him. It was a small apartment on Sunset Avenue, and he got no answer to his ring, but the door across the hall opened and a nice- looking little gray-haired woman asked, 'Are you looking for the O’Haras?'
'That’s right,' said Galeano. 'Do you know where Mr. O’Hara is?'
'Why, yes. He’ll still be at the hospital. He said he’d let me know, but it’s a first baby and I expect she’ll be some time. What? Oh, it’s the French Hospital. He was so worried, poor boy, I had to call the doctor for him.'
Galeano went over to the French Hospital and discovered Adam O’Hara in beaming transports over a fine boy, nine pounds three ounces, born twenty minutes before. A whole staff of nurses, nurses’ aides and other prospective fathers could say that O’Hara had been there since two o’clock that morning.
Galeano was annoyed, and for some reason he also felt queerly desolate. Even as Mendoza said about the citizens, They have eyes and see not. It was likely that the pharmacist, angry and excited, had mistaken O’Hara’s mugshot for somebody who looked like him-he wasn’t an unusual type-but Galeano hadn’t any immediate impulse to browse through the books looking.
It was raining now in a halfhearted sort of way. He went to have lunch at the Globe Grill, and Marta wasn’t
