'Well, then, let's open this,' Glynes said, and pushed the paper sack with the Seagram's 7-Crown across the table toward him.
'I don't know what happened,' Dan Springs said, ten minutes later, as he freshened up Chuck Glynes's drink. 'I'm riding down the road one second, and the next second I'm off the road, straddling a tree.'
'I know what happened,' Glynes said.
'You do?' Springs asked, surprised.
'Let me go out to the car a minute and I'll get it,' Glynes said.
Springs walked out to the car with him. Glynes handed him the explosive-torn chunk of metal.
'You ran over that,' Glynes said. 'It opened your tire like an ax.'
'Jesus, I wonder where that came from?'
'Well, they found it in your wheel well, up behind that rubber sheet. But I'd like to know, professionally, where it came from.'
'Excuse me?'
'That piece of steel has been in an explosion, Dan. Look at that link of chain stuck in it.'
'I'll be damned!'
'I'd really like to see where you had the wreck.'
'Out in the Pine Barrens.'
'Could you find the spot again?'
'Sure,' Springs said. 'But not tonight. By the time we got there, it would be dark.'
'Would you feel up to going out there tomorrow?'
'I'm on sick leave.'
'Well, hell, the sheriff wouldn't have to know.'
'Yeah,' Springs said, after a moment's thought. 'I could take you out there tomorrow, I guess.'
'I'd appreciate it, Dan. We like to know who's blowing what up.'
'Yeah, and so would I.'
Mrs. Springs insisted that Chuck stay for supper. He said he would stay only if she let him buy them dinner.
At dinner, when he said he would have to head back to Atlantic City, Mrs. Springs said there was no reason at all for him to drive all that way just to have to come back in the morning, they had a spare bedroom just going to waste. He said he wouldn't want to put her out, and she said he shouldn't be silly.
TWENTY-TWO
'Ihave just had one of my profound thoughts,' Officer Howard Hansen said to Sergeant Bill Sanders as they watched Corporal Vito Lanza drive his Cadillac into the area reserved for police officers on duty at the airport.
'And you're going to tell me, right?'
'I'm not saying Lanza is a nuclear physicist, but he's not really a cretin, either…'
'What's a cretin?'
'A high-level moron.'
'Really?'
'Take my word for it, a cretin is a high-level moron. You want to hear this or not?'
'I wouldn't miss it for the world.'
'So for the sake of argument, let's say Lanza is smart enough to know that people, especially other cops, are going to ask questions about that Cadillac of his. 'Where did he get the money?''
'So?'
'He doesn't seem to give a damn, does he?'
'Howard, what are you talking about?'
'If I were dirty and had bought a Cadillac with dirty money, I wouldn't drive it to work.'
'Maybe you're smarter than Lanza.'
'And maybe he inherited the money and isn't dirty, and if somebody asks him, he can say 'I got it from my mother's estate,' or something.'
'And what about those Guinea gangsters we saw at his house? What were they doing, selling Girl Scout cookies?'
'If I was dirty, I think I'd be smart enough to tell the Mob to stay away from my house. And the Mob, I think, is smart enough to figure that out themselves.'
Sergeant Sanders grunted, but did not reply.
After a moment, Hansen said, 'Well, what do you think?'
'I think I'm going to call Swede Olsen and tell him that after Lanza bought Girl Scout cookies from Paulo Cassandro, Jimmy the Knees, and Gian-Carlo Rosselli, he went to work, and does he want us to keep sitting on him or what.'
He opened the door of the Pontiac and went looking for a telephone.
Officer Paul O'Mara stuck his head in Peter Wohl's office.
'Inspector,' he said, 'there's a Captain Olsen on 312. You want to talk to him?'
'Paul, for your general fund of useful knowledge,' Wohl replied as he reached for his telephone, 'unless the commissioner is in my office, or the building's on fire, I always want to talk to Captain Olsen.'
He punched the button for 312.
'How are you, Swede? What's up?'
'Inspector, I put Bill Sanders and Howard Hansen on Lanza. You know them?'
'Hansen, I do. Good cop. Smart. What about them?'
'Sanders is a sergeant. Good man. He just called from the airport. Lanza just went to work. They picked him up at his house. Before he went to work, Paulo Cassandro paid him a visit at his house.'
'Vincenzo Savarese's Paulo Cassandro?' Wohl asked, and then, before Olsen could reply, went on, 'We're sure about that?'
'Sanders said he went in, was inside maybe five minutes, and while he was, Gian-Carlo Rosselli and Jimmy the Knees Gnesci rode around the block in Rosselli's Jaguar.'
'I suppose it's too much to hope, Swede, that we have photographs?'
'We have undeveloped film,' Olsen said. 'But Hansen's pretty good with a camera.'
'I know. How soon can we have prints?'
'As soon as I can get it to the lab in the Roundhouse. Our lab is temporarily out of business, which is really why I called. I'm out of people, Inspector, I was hoping maybe you could help me out.'
'When are younot going to be out of people?'
'I had the feeling this was special, and that we should have good people on it. I'll be out ofgood people until about eight o'clock tonight:'
'This is special,' Wohl interrupted without meaning to.
'…when I have two good people coming in. What I need between now and then is some way to get Hansen's film to the Roundhouse lab. And if possible to relieve them.'
'They don't like overtime?'
'I like to change people. I don't want Lanza to remember seeing them on Ritner Street.'
