and that inspired exchange gave me a couple of seconds to look him over.
I decided that what he looked like was a bald penguin. The tuxedo, of course, and an absolutely hairless dome atop a long narrow head. He moved like a penguin, too; little jerky motions like old silent movies before they learned how to get the timing right.
“You’re not twenty-one,” Leemy said.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Somehow I didn’t think another portrait of Alexander Hamilton was going to cut much ice with the man.
“My fucking dancer drops dead on the fucking stage and the place is going to crawl with fucking cops and I need you like a fucking hole in my head. Out!”
“But—”
“Out!” He grabbed me by the arm, tugged me toward the door. He wasn’t all that big or strong and at first I stood my ground, and then I remembered that he and I agreed that I should get out of there. At which point I stopped resisting.
He said, “Joint crawling with cops and all I need is trouble with the fucking S.L.A. about my fucking liquor license, all I fucking need, out, you little prick, and don’t come back, and—”
I couldn’t have agreed with him more, and I could have walked faster if he’d just let go of my arm. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t have walked fast enough anyway, because we were still maybe a dozen steps from the door when three or four gentlemen in blue uniforms filled the doorway.
“Oh, shit,” Gus Leemy said.
The patrolmen mostly stood around and made sure that nobody entered or left the premises. One of them went up on the stage to confirm that Cherry was dead. When he came back down somebody asked if the girl was dead and he refused to commit himself. “We’ll let the medical examiner settle that question,” he said. I guess Dylan was wrong; some people really do need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
I did manage one feat while the patrolmen stood around waiting for the heavyweights to reach the scene. I found the phone booth and looked in my pocket for a dime. I only had a quarter, and my ingenuity and experience told me not to waste time getting change. I dropped the quarter and dialed my favorite telephone number, and when Wong Fat answered I told him to wake Haig, and he said he couldn’t because Haig hadn’t gone to sleep yet. He put the great man on the phone and I talked a little and listened a little and was off the phone by the time the detectives from Homicide, flanked by a couple of other detectives from Midtown West, came plainclothesing their way through the door.
The phone booth was not far from the door they entered. I saw them before they saw me, but not very much before. Just long enough for my heart to sink a little. I recognized them right away, but they needed two looks at me to make the connection. They worked in perfect unison, those two homicide cops in the middle, looking simultaneously at me, looking away, then doing a beautifully synchronized double-take.
“You!” they said. Much as Gus Leemy had said it. And I figured if we were going to stand their trading Gus Leemy lines, I had mine all picked out.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
The one on the left was Detective Vincent Gregorio, a tall and dark and handsome number with one of those twenty-dollar haircuts and a suit you’d never find at Robert Hall. The one on the right was Detective Wallace Seidenwall, and I’d decided some time ago that Gregorio liked having him for a partner for the same reason pretty girls like having ugly girlfriends. Seidenwall’s suits always looked as though someone else had bought them at Robert Hall, then wore them day and night for a year before passing them on to Seidenwall. I never had trouble remembering his name because he was built like the side of a wall.
The first time I met the two of them was when I discovered the body of a girl named Melanie Trevelyan. The second time I met them was when somebody bombed Madam Juana’s whorehouse. That was the memorable day when Haig called them witlings, which was accurate if not diplomatic. The third meeting was in Haig’s office, when he unmasked a murderer and presented him to them on a Sheffield platter. You’d think they might be grateful, but you’d be wrong.
If there were two things Seidenwall and Gregorio hated, I was one of them. Haig was the other.
Five
“IT WAS A Mexican standoff,” I told Leo Haig. “Gregorio wanted to arrest me and Seidenwall wanted to arrest your client. I was hoping they would arrest us both and lock us up in the same cell, but then I figured you’d have Addison Shivers down there with a writ just when Tulip began to realize that it’s hip to be involved with younger men.”
Haig grunted. “There are other things in life beside sex,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole trouble. One of the things there is beside sex is coffee. At the moment I’ll settle for second best. Is there any?”
Haig picked up a little bell and rang it, and before the vibrations quit Wong entered with a couple of mugs full of hot black coffee. He’s extraordinary that way. You hardly ever have to tell him what it is you want.
In this case maybe it wasn’t all that extraordinary. It was six-thirty in the morning and I had been up all night, and while Haig had dozed on the couch waiting for me to turn up he hadn’t had anything you’d be likely to call real sleep. Of course we wanted coffee.
By the time I had finished my cup and rung for a refill, I had brought Haig up to date to the point where the cops walked in. I gave him everything reasonably verbatim and he took me back over various points until he was satisfied.
Then I went through my own interrogation. I had gotten off some good lines and I was careful to repeat them all, but since then I’ve reevaluated them, and while they were nice enough at the time, I don’t think I’m going to inflict them on you. I’m not really all that inclined to play smartass with New York’s Finest, but those two bring out the wiseacre in me and I have trouble controlling myself. To give you an example of the level of repartee, at one point Gregorio tried a trap question, asking me why I’d been jealous of the girl in the first place, and I said Haig had selected her to crossbreed with one of his fish in the hope that half the offspring would be mermaids and the other half would be Esther Williams. And that was one of my better lines, so now you know why you’ll never hear the others.
Haig perked up at that particular line, as a matter of fact. “Then they know about Miss Wolinski’s fish?”
“Yes, sir. They were going to find out she had fish, and even the police can add two and two. I told them l was at the club because I was friendly with Tulip, and I said the friendship had happened because Tulip had consulted you as a fellow aquarist about a problem connected with her hobby.”
“Which is not untrue,” Haig murmured.
“I know that. I don’t lie to the police unless I have to. Tulip overheard me say this, and she picked up the ball neatly enough. She said she doesn’t know how good a liar she is. If they grill her I guess she’ll find out.”
“And will they grill her?”
“Over and over again. She was Cherry’s roommate, she was a few yards away from her when she was murdered. They’d have to be crazy not to grill her.”
“There’s no doubt that Miss Bounce was poisoned?”
“None. I saw the blood on her breast. So did someone else, so the M.E. knew where to look for a wound. Just a pinpoint puncture.”
“And the cause of the puncture was not found.”
“No. I looked. The first thing that I thought of was poison. I thought of it before she hit the ground. God damn it, I was looking right at her and I never saw anything hit her. I just saw the blood and then she reached for herself and started to fall. Christ.”
“Chip?”
“I’m all right. When I got up on the stage I was looking for the weapon at the same time that I was determining that she was dead. Not that it was hard to determine. She was all blue in the face. I forget what that’s called. Cyanitis?”
“Cyanosis. And you weren’t looking for the weapon. You were looking for the projectile. A gun is a weapon
