accident involved a local car and was just that . . . an accident.”
“Then it narrows things down. You still working on Basil Levitt?”
“All the way. We’ve gone over his record in detail and are trying to backtrack him up to the minute he died. It won’t be easy. That guy knew how to cover a trail. Two of my men are working from a point they picked up three months ago and might be able to run it through. Incidentally, I have an interesting item in his history.”
“What’s that?”
“After he lost his P.I. license he had an arrest record of nineteen. Only two convictions, but some of the charges were pretty serious. He was lucky enough each time to have a good lawyer. The eleventh time he was picked up for assault and it was Sim Torrence who defended him and got him off.”
“I don’t like it, Pat.”
“Don’t worry about it. Sim was in civil practice at the time and it was one of hundreds he handled. Levitt never used the same lawyer twice, but the ones he used were good ones. Torrence had a damn good record and the chances are the tie-in was accidental. We got on this thing this morning and I called Torrence personally. He sent Geraldine King up here with the complete file on the case. It meant an hour in court to him, that’s all, and the fee was five hundred bucks.”
“Who made the complaint?”
“Some monkey who owned a gin mill but who had a record himself. It boils down to a street fight, but Torrence was able to prove that Levitt was merely defending himself. Here’s another cute kick. Our present D.A., Charlie Force, defended Levitt on charge seventeen. Same complaint and he got him off too.”
“Just funny that those two ever met.”
“Mike, in the crime business they get to meet criminals. He does, I do, and you do. Now there’s one other thing. The team I have out are circulating pictures of Levitt. Tonight I get a call from somebody who evidently saw the photo and wanted to know what it was all about. He wouldn’t give him name and there wasn’t time to get a tracer on the call. I didn’t tell him anything but said that if he had any pertinent information on Levitt to bring it to us. I was stalling, trying for a tracer. I think he got wise. He said sure, then hung up. As far as we got was that the call came from Flatbush.”
“Hell, Pat, that’s where Levitt comes from.”
“So do a couple million other people. We’ll wait it out. All I knew was that it was an open phone, not a booth unless the door was left open, and probably in a bar. I could hear general background talk and a juke going.”
“We’ll wait that one out then. He has something on his mind.”
“They usually call again,” Pat said. “You have anything special?”
“Some ideas.”
“When do I hear them?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’ll stand by.”
When I hung up I stared at the phone, then leaned my face into my hands trying to make the ends meet in my mind. Screwy, that’s all I could think of. Screwy, but it was making sense.
The phone rang once, jarring me out of my thought. I picked it up, said hello, and the voice that answered was tense. “Geraldine King, Mike. Can you come out here right away?”
“What’s up, Geraldine?”
She was too agitated to try to talk. She simply said, “Please, Mike, come right away.
I wrote a note to Velda telling where I was going and that I’d head right back for the apartment when I was done, then left it in the middle of her desk.
Downstairs I cut around back of the cop assigned to watch me, took the side way out without being seen, and picked up a cruising cab at the street corner. The rain was heavier now, a steady, straight-down New York rain that always seemed to come in with the trouble. Heading north on the West Side Highway I leaned back into the cushions and tried to grab a nap. Sleep was out of the question, even for a little while, so I just sat there and remembered back to those last seven years when forgetting was such a simple thing to do.
All you needed was a bottle.
The cop on the beat outside Torrence’s house checked my identity before letting me go through. Two reporters were already there talking to a plainclothesman and a fire captain, but not seeming to be getting much out of either one of them.
Geraldine King met me at the door, her face tight and worried.
I said, “What happened?”
“Sue’s place . . . it burned.”
“What about the kid?”
“She’s all right. I have her upstairs in bed. Come on inside.”
“No, let’s see that building first.”
She pulled a sweater on and closed the door behind us. Floodlights on the grounds illuminated the area, the rain slanting through it obliquely.
There wasn’t much left, just charred ruins and the concrete foundation. Fire hoses and the rain had squelched every trace of smoldering except for one tendril of smoke that drifted out of one corner, and I could see the remains of the record player and the lone finger that was her microphone stand. Scattered across the floor were tiny bits of light bouncing back from the shattered mirror that had lined the one wall. But there was nothing else. Whatever had been there was gone now.
I said, “We can go back now.”
When we were inside Geraldine made us both a drink and stood in the den looking out the window. I let her wait until she was ready to talk, finishing half my drink on the way. Finally she said, “This morning Sue came inside. I . . . don’t know what started it, but she came out openly and accused Mr. Torrence of having killed her mother. She kept saying her mother told her.”
“How could she say her mother told her she was murdered when she was alive to tell her?” I interrupted.
“I know, I know, but she insisted her mother wrote something and she was going to find it. You know she kept all her mother’s old personal things out there.”
“Yes, I saw some of them.”
“Mr. Torrence is in the middle of an important campaign. He was quite angry and wanted this thing settled once and for all, so while Sue was in here he went out and went through her things, trying to prove that there was nothing.
“Sue must have seen him from upstairs. She came down crying, ran outside, and told him to leave. Neither one of us could quiet her down. She locked herself inside and wouldn’t come out and as long as she was there we didn’t worry about it. This . . . wasn’t exactly the first time this has happened. We were both used to her outbursts.
“Late this afternoon Mr. Torrence got a call and had to leave for his office on some campaign matter. It was about two hours later that I happened to look out and saw the smoke. The building was burning from the inside and Sue was still there. The record player was going and when I looked in the window she was doing some crazy kind of dance with one of those big stuffed toys that used to belong to her mother.
“She wouldn’t come out, wouldn’t answer me . . . nothing. I . . . guess I started screaming. There was a policeman outside the fence, fortunately. He just happened to be there.”
I shook my head. “No, he wasn’t. This department was cooperating with the requests of the city police. He was there purposely. Go on.”
“He came in and broke down the door. By that time Sue was almost unconscious, lying there on the floor with the flames shooting up the walls. We dragged her out, got her in the house, and I put her to bed. One of the neighbors saw the flames and called the fire department. They came, but there was nothing to do. The damage was not really important . . . except now we’ll never know what Sue had of her mother’s that she was always searching for.”
“Where was Torrence at this time?”
Slowly, she turned around, fingering the drink in her hand. “I know what you’re thinking, but perhaps twenty minutes before that I spoke to him on the phone. He was in the city.”
