He poked a thick finger in my direction. “Why didn’t you stick around? The prowl boys would have liked to have talked to you.”
“There was nothing I could tell them,” I said. “I gave the desk sergeant a description of the car and the men. That let me out, and besides, I had enough for one night so I blew.”
MacGraw sat down in one of the armchairs, felt in his inside pocket and hooked out a cigar. He bit off the end, spat the shred of tobacco messily against my wall and lit up.
“I like that,” he said, rolling thick smoke around in his mouth before releasing it. “You had enough for one night. Yeah, that’s very nice. But, pally, how wrong you are. The night hasn’t even started for you yet.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s get going,” Hartsell said in a hard voice. “I’m on duty in another hour.”
MacGraw frowned at him.
“Take it easy, can’t you? What’s it matter if you are a little late? We’re on duty right now, aren’t we?” He glanced at me. “What were you talking to Stevens about?”
“I wanted to know if he was satisfied Janet Crosby died of heart failure. He wasn’t.”
MacGraw chuckled and rubbed his big white hands together. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear this.
“You know the Captain’s no fool,” he said to Hartsell. “I’m not saying he’s everyone’s bed-fellow, but he’s no fool. Those were his very words. ‘I’ll bet that son-of-a-bitch was talking to Stevens about the Crosbys.’ That’s what he said to me as soon as we got the description. And he was right.”
Hartsell gave me a long, mean look.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Was that all you wanted to know, Wonder Boy?” MacGraw asked. “Or were there other questions you asked Stevens?”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
“Didn’t the Captain tell you to lay off the Crosbys?”
Now it was coming.
“He mentioned it.”
“Maybe you think the Captain talks just to hear his own voice?”
I looked from MacGraw to Hartsell and back to MacGraw again.
“I don’t know. Why not ask him?”
“Don’t get tricky, Wonder Boy. We don’t like ‘em tricky, do we, Joe?”
Hartsell made an impatient movement. “For Pete’s sake, let’s get on with it,” he said.
“Get on with—what?” I asked.
MacGraw leaned forward to spit at the wall again. Then he scattered ash on the carpet.
“The Captain didn’t seem happy about you, pally,” he said, and grinned. “And when the Captain’s unhappy he gets sore, and when he gets sore he takes it out of the boys, so we thought we’d better make him happy again. We figured the way to get his smile back would be to come and see you and give you a little work-out. We thought it would be a good idea to sort of smack your ears down: maybe tear them off. Then we thought it would be another good idea to sort of wreck your place; kick the furniture around and hack bits out of the wall. That’s the way we figured it, didn’t we, Joe?”
Hartsell licked his thin lips and allowed a leer to come into his stony eyes. He took out a short length of rubber hose from his hip pocket and balanced it lovingly in his hand.
“Yeah,” he said.
“And did you think what would happen if you carried out these good ideas?” I asked. “Did it ever occur to you I might sue for assault, and that someone like Manfred Willet might take you apart in court and get the badge off your coats? Did that come into your sweet little minds or was that something you overlooked?”
MacGraw leaned forward and screwed his burning cigar down on the polished surface of the table. He glanced up, grinning.
“You’re not the first punk we’ve called on. Wonder Boy,” he told me. “And you won’t be the last. We know how to take care of lawyers. A lush like Willet doesn’t scare us, and besides you won’t take us to court. We came here to get a statement from you about Stevens.
For some reason or other—maybe you don’t like our faces, maybe you’re a little drunk, maybe you have a boil where it hurts—anything will do, you get tough. In fact, Wonder Boy, you get very tough indeed; so tough me and Joe have to sort of restrain you, and while we’re restraining you as gently as we possibly can, you get a little roughed up and the room sort of gets wrecked. But it’s not our fault. We don’t like it that way—not much, anyway, and if you hadn’t disliked our faces or hadn’t been a little drunk or hadn’t had a boil where it hurts, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s what they call in court your word against two respectable, hardworking police officers’, and even a lush like Willet couldn’t make much out of it, and besides that we could take you to Headquarters and keep you in a nice quiet cell where the boys could drop in from time to time and wipe their boots on your face. It’s a funny thing, but a lot of our boys like dropping in on certain of our prisoners and wiping their boots on their faces. I don’t know why it is; probably they’re high-spirited. So don’t let’s have any more talk about assault charges and badges off coats and smart lawyers; not unless you don’t know what’s good for you.”
I had a sudden cold feeling in my stomach. It would be my word against theirs. There was nothing to stop them arresting me and slinging me into a cell. By the time Willet got moving a lot of things could have happened. This didn’t seem to be my evening for fun and games.
“Got it all worked out, haven’t you?” I said as calmly as the circumstances allowed.
“We’ve got to, pally,” MacGraw said, grinning. “There are too many punks making trouble, and our jail isn’t that large. So we just hand out a little discipline every now and then and save the city some dough.”
I should have kept my eyes on Hartsell who was standing a few feet to my left and rear. Not that I could have done a great deal about it. They had me, and I knew it, and what was worse, they knew it, too. But all the same I was dumb not to have watched him. I heard a sudden swish and began to duck, but I was much, much too late. The rubber hose caught me on the top of the head and I fell forward on hands and knees.
MacGraw was waiting for that, and his foot shot out; the square steel-tipped toe of his shoe caught me in the throat. I fell over on my side, trying to get breath through a constricted, contracting windpipe. Something hit me on the forearm, sending pain crawling up into my skull. Something thudded on the back of my neck; a sharp something crashed into my ribs. I rolled away, got on my hands and knees, saw Hartsell coming at me and tried to duck.
The hose seemed to bounce against my brain; just as if the top of my head had been trepanned and my brain was there to be hit. I sprawled on to the carpet, clenching my fists, holding back the yell that tried to burst its way out of me.
Hands grabbed me and hauled me to my feet. Through a misty-red curtain MacGraw seemed over-large, overbroad and over-ugly. I began to fall forward as he released me. I fell on his fist that was travelling towards me in a punch that sent me reeling across the room, knocking over the table. I landed on my back amid a shower of jig-saw nuzzle pieces.
I lay still. The light in the ceiling came rushing towards me, stopped, and then rushed away again. It did that several times, so I closed my eyes. At the back of my mind I was thinking this could go on and on until they were tired, and it would take a lot to tire a couple of thugs like MacGraw and Hartsell. By the time they were through with me there wouldn’t be a great deal left. I wondered dreamily why they didn’t move in; why they left me lying on the floor.
So long as I didn’t move the pain that rode me was bearable. I didn’t like to think what would happen to my head if I did move. It felt as if it were hanging on a thread. One little movement would be enough to send it rolling across the floor.
Out of the pain and the mist I heard a woman say, “Is this your idea of fun?”
A woman!
That last punch must have made me slug-happy, I thought, or maybe it was the beating I had taken on top of my head.
“This guy’s dangerous, ma’m,” MacGraw said in a gentle, little-boy-caught-in-the-pantry voice. “He was resisting arrest.”
“Don’t you dare lie to me!” It was a woman’s voice all right. “I saw what happened through the window.”
