Before I could think, I said, “My parents don’t have any friends.” It was out of my mouth before I realized I’d never thought of it before, but it was true.
“Really?” Sandoz cocked his head to look at me, just the tiniest little bit.
Blue said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hollander are widely acquainted.”
“You butt out, or I’ll call that doctor and have you take a walk after all.”
I tried to fix it. “What I mean is they don’t have friends
“Which were the Munroes?”
“Neither one, as far as I know. Why don’t you ask Elaine?”
Sandoz turned to Blue. “You say the Hollanders are widely acquainted. Did they know Mr. and Mrs. Munroe?”
Blue shrugged. “They might well have, but to the best of my knowledge they did not.”
“Okay.” Back to me. “What about this guy Lief?”
“What about him?”
“You know him?”
“Naturally I knew him. He was my best friend’s brother.”
“But your mother didn’t know him?”
(Watch it!) “Sure she knew him. She was the one who fixed it for him to open the box. Everybody you’ve talked to must’ve told you that. Everybody knew it—she was in charge. You think she had something against him and set this whole thing up to do him in? Nuts again.”
“You said that, Miss Hollander. Not me. Did your father know him?”
“Sure.”
“Although he and Mrs. Hollander have no friends in common?”
“That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t that kind of friend.”
Blue asked, “Are you working on the theory that the deaths of Munroe and Lief were planned in some way? In other words, that the bomb was intended to kill those two men specifically?”
“We consider that one possibility.”
“That interests me. I would have thought it obvious that they were simply the people who happened to be closest to the explosion. Unless you’re back to Munroe’s dynamite belt again.”
Sandoz scratched his cheek with a thick forefinger. “Some guy gets run down in traffic. Would you figure he just happened to be standing in front of somebody’s bumper at the wrong time? That would make a car a hell of a lot better weapon than a gun—it is anyhow in my book, but if we thought like that it would be better yet. No, when we find some poor bastard flattened on the pavement, we kind of routinely ask if somebody wanted him dead. Pretty often the answer is yes.”
“And you think someone wanted Munroe and Lief dead,” Blue said.
“No, I don’t think so. I’m just willing to consider it.”
Before I could shut my mouth I said, “The little kid!”
“Yes, Miss Hollander?”
“The little girl. She was up on the platform blindfolded. She pulled out the ticket.”
Sandoz nodded, and for just a minute there he looked like he might be somebody’s grandfather. “Her name’s Nancy Noonan. A sweet child, I’m told. I haven’t talked to her yet.”
“But if somebody wanted Mr. Munroe killed, they’d have had to arrange for him to win.”
“That’s a good point,” Sandoz said. “In fact, I’d call it an excellent point. In my opinion it wouldn’t have been utterly impossible for somebody to do that, however.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“No, not really, Miss Hollander. I used to work the bunco squad, and a lot of what we did concerned crooked gambling. You wouldn’t know about that, I’m sure, but you’d be surprised just how easy it is to fix a game that looks like it’s on the up-and-up. Take that drawing. You and Mr. Blue here both saw it, from what I’ve heard. How was it done, Mr. Blue?”
Blue shook his head, his lips tight. I said, “They put all the tickets in a big wire drum—my mother borrowed it from some church. They cranked it around, and the little girl pulled out the winning ticket.”
“Not quite, Miss Hollander. A couple of our officers have already talked to several witnesses. Shall I tell you how it was really done?”
Naturally I nodded. I knew damned well he was setting me up, but there wasn’t anything else to do.
“You said that ‘they’ cranked the drum. It was Mrs. Elaine Hollander who cranked it. Then little Nancy, blindfolded, took out a ticket. She gave it to Mrs. Hollander, and Mrs. Hollander announced the number—five ninety-six.”
“There was no way she could have know what the number on that ticket would be.”
Sandoz got a cigar out of his shirt pocket, peeled off the plastic, and rubbed it between his hands. If it had been one of those see-how-smart-I-am numbers, it wouldn’t have bothered me, or anyway I don’t think it would. Only it
