“Lo Preston, been waiting for you.”
I turned to look at him. Randall is a big man. He’s as tall as me, a little over six feet, and half as wide again. It makes him look heavy and ponderous. He isn’t. He has a large fleshy face, with deep-set eyes threatened with engulfment by the heavy surrounding folds of flesh. These make him look half-asleep. He isn’t. Looking at him, you could easily get the impression of a man lumbering around the world, a man not too strong on intelligence. And you would be getting a very wrong impression indeed.
“Hi, Gil. Collecting for the Benefit Fund?”
“Not this trip. Do I come up?”
“Why not?”
We went up in silence. I wondered vaguely what he was after, but I wasn’t too concerned. It was one of those infrequent periods of my life when I wasn’t doing anything I wouldn’t want the police to know about. On the other hand, it was unlikely to be a social visit. Randall wasn’t in the habit of making those. Not to me anyway.
We went into the apartment, and I flicked on some light. Randall sighed, looking around.
“This place always irritates me.”
“Why, what’s wrong with it?”
His face contorted into a scowl.
“Nothing’s wrong with it, that’s what’s wrong with it. There isn’t a cop on the force, including the commissioner, can afford anything like this. How do you rate it, if you do honest work?”
“My clients seem to be more generous than the taxpayers,” I told him.
“That they do. Maybe we should ask the Bureau to look into your income tax situation.”
He wasn’t picking on me in particular. It was no more than the normal bitterness of an honest policeman, required to work all hours of the day and night, to be beaten up or shot at in alleyways, all for less pay than the grateful public would pay a waiter.
“The books are available in my office at all times. You can call in the Bureau, the Treasury men, anybody you like. Those books are in order. And there’s just the one set, incidentally.”
He snorted and stretched himself out in one of my best chairs.
“Seems to me in a swank place like this a man could get himself a cold beer,” he grumbled.
I went and broke out a couple of cans and we sat opposite each other, sipping.
“Now that we’ve exhausted the income tax position,” I said, “Was there anything else?”
He shrugged the massive shoulders.
“Nothing important, I hardly like to bother you.”
When Randall says it isn’t important, it usually means somebody is in a lot of trouble. And the somebody was going to be me.
“O.K. Well then let’s forget it,” I suggested. “I have a pretty tight schedule tonight anyway.”
“Naw, it’ll only take a minute. It’s a little matter of——”
The phone shrilled, and he broke off in mid-sentence. I looked at him, waiting for him to finish.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” he queried. “If I’m lucky it could be something illegal and I could put the arm on you straight away.”
“Thanks.”
I went across and picked up the receiver.
“Preston.”
“Listen, this is Flower.”
Her voice was low and anxious, as though afraid someone might overhear.
“What can I do for you?” I said guardedly.
“I have to see you, right away, now.”
“What about?”
“Please,” she begged, and there was no missing the sincerity in her voice, “Please, you have to come.”
“I can’t,” I hedged. “I have company.”
“Well get rid of her,” she whispered. “I’ll see to it that you don’t regret it, whoever she is.”
“It’s not a she, it’s a he. All right, if it’s so important, I could probably make it, in say half an hour. Where?”
“Come to Brookman’s apartment. You know where it is?”
“Yes,” I replied slowly, “I know it. But I don’t get any of this.”
“You will. Half an hour. You promise?”
“I promise.”
I cradled the receiver and went back to my chair. I didn’t want to talk to Randall. I wanted to see Flower, and find out what her connection was with Brookman’s apartment, and what was so important that she had to tell me, and who it was at the other end wasn’t supposed to know about the call.
“Yup, this is the life,” intoned Randall. “Sitting around in a swell apartment, swilling cold beer on a warm evening, just waiting for the dames to call up.”
“This is a slack time,” I assured him. “Normally I have three or four of them sitting around, waiting for me to choose.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “You’re going to miss all this.”
“How am I going to miss it?” I demanded. “Am I going somewhere?”
“Could be.”
He finished the last of the beer and smacked his lips.
“Preston, you have been around now how long?”
“Too long.”
“Right. I never can make out just what it is you do keeps you living it up this way. But whatever, you been doing it a long time. You know the score, and most of the time you have enough sense to keep out of the department’s hair. In an off-beat kind of way, we practically trust you.”
The words themselves were scarcely flattering, but coming from Gil Randall they amounted to an illuminated scroll.
“I try to get along with you guys,” I said carefully.
“That’s what we like to think down at headquarters. So what makes you pull a bum stunt like this afternoon?”
A typical Randall manouver. He left it for me to supply the details.
“I pulled a lot of bum stunts today,” I told him. “You wouldn’t want me to go and admit to one you don’t know about yet.”
“All right,” he held up a weary hand. “I’ll spell it out for you. You’ve been impersonating a police officer.”
Eve Prince. I’d bluffed the boy, Harry, by not letting him get a proper look at my sticker. But she couldn’t have complained. After telling me what she had, she’d be too afraid I’d repeat it.
“Did I do that today? Was that the time
