you make a picture without him.”
I was interrupted by the captain, who appeared with a telephone which he plugged in at the table.
“Excuse me, darling,” Janis said.
I could hear the voice at the other end. It was a harsh, guttural, nasty voice. It was the same voice that had called me on the phone the night before.
They talked for a moment and then Janis laughed at something he said.
I felt sick.
I stood up, reached into my pocket for my wallet. All I had were two singles and two twenty-dollar bills. I dropped one of the twenties on the table.
“The hell with it,” I said. “I’m not interested now.”
“Excuse me,” Janis said into the phone. “I’ll talk to you later.” She replaced the receiver. “What’s the matter, Dick?”
“The hell with it,” I said. “Tell Walter and Max they can take their big deal somewhere else. I’m not interested. And all of a sudden I don’t feel like having lunch.”
I started out of the restaurant.
Janis followed me. In the lobby she caught my arm.
“Wait a minute, Dick.”
The doorman approached. “Miss Whitney, Mr. Shriber sent his car. It’s waiting for you.”
“Good,” I said. “At least you won’t have to walk home.”
Janis was a step or two behind me when we reached the sidewalk.
There was a black Cadillac parked by the curb. The chauffeur was standing next to it. He saw us and began moving toward us.
It must have been the uniform because it took me a second or two to recognize him.
He recognized me an instant after I recognized him. But that instant was enough. He wasn’t ready when I hit him.
I’m no fighter. The punch was wild, and from the floor. If he had been expecting it, he could have blocked it easily. But he hadn’t been expecting it.
I’d aimed for his chin, but I caught him a little lower, in the side of his neck.
He staggered and I caught him again, this time in the stomach. Then I kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. When he bent over I hit him on the back of the neck with the side of my hand, and brought my knee up into his face.
I could see the doorman and a couple of waiters moving in. I didn’t stay around to find out what happened next.
A second later I was moving fast up Park Avenue toward the hack stand. There was a cab with a driver inside reading a newspaper.
“Uptown, baby,” I said, “and step on it.”
I didn’t look back. Not even out of the back window after the cab started.
I was suddenly aware that my right hand hurt. But I didn’t care. I felt wonderful. A kind of wild, crazy exultation.
“Where did you want to go, Mister?”
A few minutes before I had told Janis I was through with the whole thing. Now I was back in it again.
I gave the driver Walter Heinemann’s address.
A lot of things seemed to fit together. I didn’t know exactly how. But I was going to find out.
And it had certainly been interesting to discover that the big thug who had helped wreck my apartment was also Max Shriber’s chauffeur.
Chapter Nine
The butler who opened the door conducted me up in the elevator to Walter’s sitting room. Walter was lunching from a tray. A modest little lunch: eggs Benedict and champagne. He looked up with a bland smile as I closed the door behind me.
“Richard,” he said, “I hardly dared to hope that I would hear from you so quickly.”
Slowly, carefully, making sure that it would not get stuck the way it had the night before, I reached into my pocket and withdrew Jean Dahl’s gun.
I got it out and pointed it in the general direction of Walter’s abdomen.
“Walter,” I said in a friendly conversational tone, “I’m going to shoot you in the belly.”
“Richard!” he said coldly. “What is this? What did you say?”
“Come on, Edison the Boy,” I said. “Turn on your recording machine. Play it back for yourself. I said, quote, ‘Walter, I’m going to shoot you in the belly.’ Unquote.”
“Richard,” Walter said, “have you gone mad? Put away that gun.”
“I’ve had enough of this, Walter,” I said. “I’m going to do something desperate. I already did something desperate. I just beat up one of the men who wrecked my apartment. And guess who he turned out to be? Your friend Max’s chauffeur. Isn’t that interesting?”
Behind me, I heard the door quietly opening.
“Oh, Jimmie,” Walter said. “Come in.”
“Oh, Jimmie,” I said, without turning around, “beat it.”
“Jimmie,” Walter said, “would you be kind enough to take away my luncheon tray? I’m finished. You may leave the champagne, however.”
Jimmie began to make small, nervous sounds.
“Oh, it’s quite all right,” Walter said. “Take the tray and go. Richard is a wild one, but perfectly harmless. Run along now, like a dear boy. I’ll ring you if I should need anything.”
Jimmie picked up the tray and left.
I heard the door close again.
I brandished the revolver wildly under his nose. “I’m going to find out who killed Jean Dahl. And I’m going to find out why she was killed and I’m going to find out right now. Personally, I think your friend Maxie did it.”
“I refuse even to discuss the matter with you until you put down that gun. As you obviously know nothing whatever about the use of firearms, you are quite likely, in your present hysterical condition, to pull the trigger accidentally.”
He was, of course, absolutely right.
I lowered the gun.
“That’s better,” Walter said. “Now then, if you are prepared to continue this discussion in a reasonable fashion, I will tell you this much. Your surmise, however wild, was shared by someone else. An hour or two before her untimely demise, Jean Dahl was under the impression that Max Shriber was planning to murder her.”
“What makes you think that?”
“She told me,” Walter said simply.
I exploded. I roared, “She told you! First you said you didn’t even know her. You told me you didn’t know who she was, and had never seen her before in your life. Damn it, Walter, if you don’t stop lying to me I’m going to kill you right now.”
Walter giggled.
Very deliberately he took a cigarette from the box, tapped it and finally lighted it. “Well,” he said finally. “Since we are going to be partners, Richard, I suppose we might as well know the worst about each other.”
“Tell me the worst about you, Walter.” I stared at him coldly.
Walter sighed. “If my sordid confessions are distasteful to you,” he said, “I ask you to remember that you brought them on yourself.”
I did not say anything. I continued to stare.
“As you may have suspected,” Walter said, “I neither maintain this lavish establishment nor give my extravagant parties solely out of a desire to bring pleasure and entertainment to my fellow man. I find that by
