She cut me a look out of the corners of her eyes. “Your boss’ doing?”
“You’d better not ask any more questions,” I said. “I’ll get those photos. You’d better list the things you want.”
* * * *
When I went out Myart was talking excitedly with Fisk. A tall, lean, grey man, Fisk was mopping his face. They turned as I entered the sunken living room.
Myart said, “Roy Meek is out.”
I drew up on my toes, remembering. The day Meek had gone to prison. The poisonous hatred Maxie Bemelmens and Roy Meek felt for each other. I could still seem to see Maxie standing in the courtroom, laughing, Melissa on his arm, when sentence had been passed on Meek. Meek had turned and his eyes had sought Maxie and Melissa out and he had given them a look. That’s all, just one long look out of those washed-out cold blue eyes.
“When?” I asked.
“Two days ago. A parole.”
“I’ve been on it all day,” Fisk said. “I finally found the rooming house where he checked in when he hit town. But after that first night he hasn’t been back there.”
“Get back on it,” Myart said. “I’ll send Oldham over to help you.”
When Fisk went out, Myart paced briskly back and forth, stopped before me, rocking on his toes, hands clasped behind him. In the tone of a man delivering a lecture, Myart said, “The ramifications of this thing can be far reaching and charged with disaster, Hilliard. No one outside the organization must know Maxie’s real condition. This, Hilliard, is all the work of someone gone mad with hatred for Melissa and Maxie. I doubt that Roy Meek would have the cold nerve to do it.
“But most important—to me—is the organization. The work must go on. Maxie is expending a hundred dollars an hour, bending every effort of our team to track down Melissa’s killer. Dozens of people have been questioned, watched, traced. We’ve examined her movements in detail until one-twenty-five this morning. There we have hit a dead end, a blank wall.
“In the meantime, doubts and wonders about Maxie will be rising all over the city. I want you to go down to the offices. You’ll know what to do. Keep things running. Put up a front for at least today.” The phone buzzed. Myart went to it.
I stuck my head back in the rumpus room. “I’m going to be out for a while,” I said.
Cecil Calhoun looked up from the table where she was jotting on a note pad.
“Just stay in here and you’ll be okay, I promise you.”
“And I believe I can believe you, Steve Hilliard,” she said.
“Calhoun, I like you.”
As the afternoon wore on, an air of dread and doubt, like fingers of darkness, stole across the underworld of the city. I knew it from the people I talked with in the offices, the phone calls that came for Maxie that I had to cover. No one outside the organization knew what had really happened, but you can’t turn loose a score of human hunters asking questions without causing people in dark places to talk and wonder.
Calhoun was still in the rumpus room when I got back there. I had a tray of food in my hands. I kicked the door closed with my heel. “Your dinner,” I said.
“Is it that late? I hadn’t noticed.”
She had the face of the dart board covered with glossy photos of Melissa, mostly close-ups of Melissa’s soft, golden face. She had ruined the ping-pong table with a clutter of tools and plaster of paris scattered everywhere. Midway down the table what looked like a lump of plaster of paris was showing the outlines of a human face. “I hope you like chop suey,” I said.
“Adore it.” She sat down to eat. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon, Steve.”
“That’s flattering.”
“I’m really serious. You don’t belong here. This Maxie is a crook, isn’t he?”
“Let’s say the average man has ten fingers. Maxie has a hundred with each finger in a different place. He can push a lot of weight around, Maxie can.”
“But you don’t belong with him,” she repeated. “You need to put that good-looking, smiling kisser in a brokerage office.”
“And get up every morning at seven-thirty, jostle my way through the mob to get home at five, read the paper and go to bed? Set myself up so that a Saturday night bridge game is a big celebration?”
“I wish I knew your early environment,” she said. “Something has twisted you up. How did you ever get hooked up with Maxie?”
“I inherited it,” I said. “An old uncle raised me. He was a side-kick of Maxie’s. Maxie has always regarded me as a son. That’s why I have the run of the place, why I’m one of the few people he can trust.”
She was looking at me with a world of expression in her dark brown eyes. I leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t move.
When I took my lips away from hers she said, “I’m sorry you did that.”
“Would slapping my face help?”
“Not that kind of sorry. Get out of here, will you!”
I went back in the living room. Myart was on the edge of his chair at the phone. Beads of sweat stood out on his narrow forehead under his patent-leather hair and his waxed mustache had got a little limp. He was saying in agitation: “No!… Really?… Wonderful!”
He slammed the phone down, turned to me. “We pushed through the blank, Hilliad.” He laughed in that way of his, that dry, mirthless sound that wasn’t real laughter at all. “Until one-twenty-five this morning we had connected Melissa with no one who might have had a motive to kill her. But Boudreau has found a cab driver who remembers taking her to Augie Feldman’s place about two this morning. She wasn’t seen after that until
