'I'd still like to see it with you.'
'Okay. Finish your drink.'
I hoped I wouldn't run into Velda. Women don't exactly appreciate other women's plunging necklines.
Caesar Mario Tulley was a professional panhandler who bused over from Patterson, New Jersey, every day, picked up a hundred bucks in nickels and dimes from the tourist suckers, then went back to his flashy suite in a midtown hotel. He had pageboy hair, a faceful of stringy whiskers and a motley outfit of clothes held together with beads and chains that no decent hippie would be caught high in. But it was his gimmick. That and the lost look in the young-old face and tired eyes. The women felt sorry for him and the men flipped .their quarters in his hand to pay for the snide remarks that went with the coin. Hell, he probably was making out better than any of them.
He saw me and Renee squeezed together under her umbrella, half stepped out of the shoe store doorway, then recognized me and those deliberately tired eyes pepped right up. A loose-lip grin split the whiskers and he said, 'Oh, hi, Mike. Almost put the bite on you.'
'Fat chance,' I told him. 'How you doing, Caesar?'
'Lousy tonight. Tried working Radio City and got rousted by the fuzz. Then some drunk belts me in the chops figuring I was his own kid and tried to drag me back to Des Moines, Iowa. I was halfway to the Forty-second Street subway before I shook him loose. What kind of kooks they got around here these days?'
'Look in the mirror, kid.'
'Man, I'm straight! A working stiff! You think I'd go this route if it didn't pay off! Twice a week I take acting classes and already I got a future lined up. You see me on TV the other night?'
'Great show.' Last Tuesday they did a special on the hippies in town and managed to round up a few of the real pros like Caesar. Twenty-seven runaway kids in Greenwich Village were recognized and picked up by their parents, four narcotics pushers were spotted by sharp-eyed detectives and hauled in on possession charges, and the public had a good idea of what the city was coming to.
'Pig's ass it was a good show,' Caesar said sullenly. 'Practically everybody spots me. I even got a call from the Internal Revenue Service. Making it ain't so easy now.'
'So act.'
'What do ya think I'm doing? It ain't Shakespeare, but it sure takes talent.'
'And nerve.' Renee smiled.
'Lady, come on. It's all part of the game.' He rattled his beads and stepped back into his doorway shelter again. 'What you doing out, Mike?'
'Trying to find somebody. Tall, skinny, in his forties and boosting wallets in the theater district. Got anything?'
He cocked his head and peered at me, eyes squinting. 'Hey, some hustler was asking the same thing. Big chick, long dark hair, real knockout. Don't know why she was hustling, but I tried to make out and she brushed me off. Me! How about that? I wanted to give her a twenty . . .'
'You would have had your head handed to you,' I said, grinning again. Caesar boy had run into Velda.
'Fuzz?' he asked, incredulously.
I nodded, not explaining all of it.
'Man, they sure make them real these days. She coulda busted me for panhandling. Awful pretty for fuzz though, even under that face crap.'
'The guy I mentioned, Caesar?'
'Hell, I don't butt in to somebody else's .. .'
'You buck the theater crowds, Caesar. He would have been in the same area.'
He shrugged, giving a small negative shake to his long hair, but his eyes didn't want to look at me. I stepped out from under the umbrella and got up close to him. 'Compared to withholding information, panhandling is a chintzy rap.'
'Mike ... you ain't the fuzz. You ...'
'My license makes me responsible to turn certain facts over to them, buddy.'
'Hey, I thought we was pals.'
'After office hours.'
Caesar Tulley made a resigned gesture and ran his fingers through his hair. 'There was some talk. Wooster Sal saw this guy hit a couple of joes and tried to cut himself a chunk. He got a busted lip for it.'
'You see him?'
'I saw him pop Wooster Sal. Like a sneak punch. Wooster shoulda kept to his own racket.'
'Anything special abut him ... facial characteristics ... you know?'
Another shrug. 'Just a guy. I didn't get a real good look. Anyway, I didn't want one. I'm opposed to violence.'
'What about this Wooster Sal?'
'Hell, after that he dug out for the West Coast. Gone like two weeks now.'
'Keep looking, okay? I'm in the phone book.'
I flipped him a wave and started to walk away when he called me back. 'Hey, Mike, there was one thing.'
I turned and waited.
'He wore a red vest. Pretty dumb in his business.'
One more little piece to add to the pile. In time it would mount up to a face and a body. One red vest, and it probably wasn't dumb. It was a good luck charm, vanity or any other of a dozen reasons a petty crook could consider imperative.
I hooked my arm through Renee's and pushed the edge of her umbrella out of my face. 'You have odd friends, Mike. Those newsstand dealers, the pair at the hamburger stand ... who else do you know?'
'You'd be surprised,' I said. 'Still feel like prowling?'
Renee glanced at her watch and tightened her hold on my arm. 'It's almost ten, my big friend. I told you I had to meet William at that reception in a half hour.'
It was the same one Pat had mentioned to me, the opening of the new Soviet delegation buildings. 'Since when are you people messed up in politics?'
'Since Teddy Finlay from the State Department invited us. One of the new delegates was a foreign supplier for our Anco Electronics before we bought him out. Finlay thought it would be beneficial to have a less formal introduction to him.'
'And where do you come in?'
'I pick up William's memos he made at the meeting today, give him his tickets for his Chicago trip tomorrow, murmur a few pleasantries and leave. Impulsively, she added, 'Why don't you come along?'
'We aren't exactly in evening clothes, baby.'
'But we won't be going to the reception proper. I'm to meet him in office A-3 in the west annex, not where the crowd will be. Please, Mike?' She nudged me expectantly, her leg touching mine in a long-legged stride. The wind gusted and blew the rain under the umbrella into my face. Hell, it would be good to get out of it for a few minutes.
'Why not?' I said.
The two uniformed cops covering the annex entrance scanned Renee's admittance card and checked our ID's. The older one, sweating under his rubber raincoat said, 'Hold a second,' then walked across the street to a squad car, talked through the window and stepped back when the door opened. I let out a grunt of amusement when Pat got out, hunched against the rain, his hands in his pockets.
When he saw me his face finally registered something besides tired boredom. 'Now what are
'Personal invitation, old buddy.'
'His name isn't on the card,' the cop told him. 'What do you think, Captain? The dame's okay.'
Pat flipped the rain from the brim of his hat and stepped away, nodding for me to follow him. He swung around, his voice a low growl. 'This stinks. No matter what you tell me, it plain stinks. What are you building?'
'Not a thing, Pat. Miss Talmage has a business appointment with her employer there and invited me along. Can anything be simpler?'
'With you, nothing's simple,' Pat said. 'Look, if you pull anything .. . '
