“When you were watching Diana’s new place, did you see a man like that? See him do anything strange? Did he see you?”
“Well,” he thought, then nodded, eager. “I think maybe I did. With that paunchy guy, what was his name- Kezar? And, Dan, I might have seen the small guy with the gloves around St. Marks Place, too. After the murders. Sort of watching.”
I said, “Tell Gazzo I had to go. And stay hidden, you hear?”
CHAPTER 17
I called Irving Kezar’s office from the candy store. He was out, his efficient secretary didn’t know where he was this time. She never gave out his home address.
In the rain, seven empty taxis passed me up. Lunch hour, they were heading midtown for more lucrative short hauls. I cursed them all the way to the subway at Astor Place, rode uptown to Sixty-eighth Street, and walked north to Seventieth.
In the bare lobby of Kezar’s building, a young man in a hat and brown overcoat was studying the mailboxes as if he had just come in and was looking for the apartment number of some tenant. But his hat and coat were almost dry. That made me alert, and I recognized him-the man who could have followed Kezar from his athletic club a month ago, who looked like a young lawyer, but had a gun under his coat.
That had to mean Kezar was now upstairs. I went up, and was wrong again. Not even Jenny Kezar answered my ring. I went back down, using the stairs, but the young man was gone. Puzzled, I walked out into the rain and turned west. Maybe Kezar had used another exit to give the young man the slip. Which had to mean that Kezar was up to something he wanted quiet and hidden.
I turned south on the avenue, looked for the first tavern where I could call Gazzo-and then I forgot about Gazzo. The young man in the brown coat was behind me! He hadn’t been staked out for Kezar, but for me! Jenny Kezar. She must have reported my earlier visit. Not as beaten-down as she seemed? Having Kezar tailed-or did she have some other reason for being nervous?
Brown overcoat wasn’t a bad tail, but he wasn’t the best, and this was my city. I led him to an art gallery I knew on Madison Avenue. It had a concealed back-room exit into an areaway that served the next building, too. I came back out on Madison. Brown overcoat emerged from the gallery looking annoyed. He began to wave at taxis in the rain, and I got a break-he had no more luck than I’d had. He had to walk, and I followed him. He went south and west, bent into the rain, and started across the Park at Sixty-sixth Street.
I would be too easy to hear and spot on the sunken roadway unless I stayed so far back I could lose him on the other side of the Park. So I took to the sodden grass and bare bushes and tailed from up above the roadway. On Central Park West he went north to Sixty-ninth Street, and west to Columbus, where he went into a bar. I watched him enter the telephone booth. He came out, walked back to Central Park West, sat on a bench across from a big apartment building. In the rain, he watched the entrance.
I went in through the service entrance on Sixty-ninth. The rows of apartment bells listed a Mr. K. Irving in 17 -B. The elevators had operators, and in a building like this they would ask questions of a one-armed man in a duffel coat and black beret. I used my keys on the stairs door, walked up the seventeen flights.
In a narrow service corridor, I listened at the back door of 17-B. I heard no sounds, used my keys again, slipped inside. I stood in a large kitchen that had not been used much recently. In the rest of the apartment there was a heavy, empty silence. I moved on cautiously.
It was a large apartment-six rooms-with the packaged air of a hotel suite. Rented furnished, cleaned by maids, used but not quite lived in. A big living room had a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the dining room was formal. One bedroom seemed used on some regular basis, its closet full of expensive suits and jackets, its one tall bureau containing shirts, underwear, men’s accessories. I was in the right apartment, Irving Kezar’s name was on various items.
The other two bedrooms were furnished but unused, closets and drawers empty. A final room, a kind of office-den, was the only really lived-in room. It was busy, messy, with papers on a desk and empty glasses on a coffee table in front of a comfortable couch. There were no filing cabinets. If Kezar had a second set of files or books, they were in still a fourth place. I went to work studying the papers in the desk.
After an hour I had a better picture of Irving Kezar’s work-and no picture at all. A man who was “called in” to consult, got people “together.” Expediter of collaborations, arranger of contacts-the oil in the wheels of a lot of “projects” and deals. But the details seemed to slip away, elude definition. Not one concrete fact or specific company, not one reference to exactly what he expedited or arranged. And nothing remotely related to Andy Pappas, or an Albano, or Max Bagnio, or anyone else I knew.
I sat back to think, and the sound of the key in the front door almost caught me flat-footed. Not quite. My subconscious had sensed the elevator stopping at the floor without actually being aware of it, and when the key scraped in the lock, I was alert, had a few seconds. Not time to reach the kitchen and rear door across the living room, but just time to slip through the connecting door between the den-office and one of the unused bedrooms. Not even time to close the connecting door, risk its sound, but only to flatten against the door, breathe softly.
Two men came into the den-office. I had a tiny space between the hinged door and the frame, like seeing a movie screen through a keyhole. A back, a shoulder, the creak of the desk chair, and the sigh of the couch. A few seconds of silence that seemed like an hour. The snap of a cigarette lighter, smoke billowing.
“I told you I don’t like you coming here.” Irving Kezar’s voice. “I take the risks, I say when we contact.”
“You don’t contact,” a crisp voice said. “We don’t like it.”
“I report when I’m ready, damn it.”
“We like to keep better touch. It’s what we pay for.”
“You pay for results,” Kezar said. His voice was worried. “You’re sure no one saw you waiting down in the lobby?”
“We’re not amateurs,” the crisp voice said, disdainful. “The building’s watched.”
I tried to see through the narrow crack of the partly open door. I could see Kezar’s hand, pudgy and flashing with his diamond rings. I saw a foot and ankle of the other man-a well-shined brown shoe and a neat gray sock.
“Well, do you have a report on the operation, Kezar?”
“It’s moving just as planned.”
“Even with the complication?”
Silence, then Kezar’s voice again, “Pappas doesn’t change anything. A little slowdown, that’s all. No real change.”
“They know who killed him?”
“Not a clue,” Kezar said.
“That’s good,” the crisp voice said. “Ramapo Construction Company has the contract?”
My ear twitched-a name! I listened for another name. It takes two to make a contract. It didn’t come.
“All signed,” Kezar said.
“But not paid yet?”
“I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
Another silence, and I watched the brown shoe and neat ankle swing in the air, impatient or annoyed or both.
“So you have no real information to give me?” the crisp voice said. “Sometimes I wonder who you really work for, Kezar.”
“I work for me, I told you that all along,” Kezar said.
“Dangerous work,” crisp voice said. “Everyone cheats everyone in this kind of thing, but don’t cheat us too far.”
“You’ll get your money’s worth.”
“After you cream off your share from the other side,” the unseen man with the well-shined shoe said. “When do you plan to see Dunlap again?”
“When it’s right,” Kezar said. “It’s not so easy with a guy like Dunlap. I have to step careful around him. He’s
