“I’m sorry,” a crestfallen Millicent said.
I smiled at her. “Don’t be. It was a great break. She’s a regular Charlie Chan. One thing I am sure of, thanks to her. Eddie Woods knows who the number one is.”
“How do you know that?”
“He was too far up in the hierarchy not to. Maybe he is the middleman. I have to go back up to San Pietro tomorrow. I think I can get some answers now.”
“If we have the money to bury Verna, can’t you just forget it?”
“Not anymore.”
“I don’t understand.”
I got very serious. “You’ve got to keep what I’m going to tell you under that cute little hat of yours for the next day or two. You can’t even confide in your father.”
“Alright, what is it?”
“Verna Wilensky was murdered. She was drowned, and whoever did the trick dropped the radio in the tub with her to make it look like an accident.”
“Oh my God!” She covered her mouth with her hand. Tears suddenly gathered in her eyes.
“Now it’s a homicide, and I’ve got to find out who killed her.”
“Can’t you ask Woods?”
I tried to smother a laugh. “I don’t think that would work with Mr. Woods. He’s not going to give up that information, not after all these years of covering it up. I may be able to hammer information out of him but I’ll save him for later. First I want to see Culhane’s face when I tell him this is now a homicide case and they’ll have to stop playing coy.”
I pulled up in front of her bank and struggled out of the car.
“Please don’t get out,” she said.
“They kicked in my ribs; they didn’t kick my manners out of me.”
I walked around the car and helped her out. As she stepped by me, she brushed my cheek with her lips.
“We still on for tonight?” I asked.
“We better be.”
“I thought we might drop by the C-Note after the show.”
She tossed me one of her million-dollar smiles. “I’d love that,” she said. “Wherever it is.”
I stood there and watched her disappear into the bank. And I thought to myself, So that’s what they mean by the luck of the Irish.
CHAPTER 21
I made a call to Ski at the Wilensky house and got one of the forensics men. After I identified myself, he confided Ski was out in the neighborhood.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Ski thinks whoever iced the lady laid up all day in the house next door and then went after her when she got in the tub.”
“When Ski gets back, tell him I’ve got a call to make and then I’ll be on over.”
“Sure,” he said, and we hung up.
I made one more call and then drove across town to a little bar called Murphy’s Eight Ball, which was a hangout for off-duty cops and newsies. It was 3:30, too early for any action. The bartender was unloading bottles of beer in a cooler behind an empty bar. In the rear, a tall, rangy guy chewing on a wooden match was practicing side-pocket bank shots at one of the two pool tables. Up front, the dozen tables and booths all were empty. Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola” was muttering from the jukebox, its volume turned down to a whisper. The bartender looked up through bored eyes and gave me half a smile.
“Zee,” he said with a nod. “Little early for you, isn’t it?”
“I’m meeting Jimmy Pen,” I said. “Draw me one, will you?”
He took a frosted mug from the refrigerator and tilted it under the beer spigot and jimmied the glass full without putting too much head on it. I picked up a rumpled copy of the early Times edition and retreated to a booth as far away from both men as possible. Under a wall lamp that put out about as much wattage as a penlight, I read the banner head: bismarck attacked. The lead graph told me all I needed to know: the British Navy had hunted down the German juggernaut, which had sunk the HMS Hood and all its hands three days earlier. A battle royal was going on somewhere in the North Atlantic. I leafed back to the obits but there was no follow-up on the Wilensky story.
The door opened and a shaft of sunlight cut through the dark interior as Jimmy Pennington strolled in, hat on the back of his head and a newspaper folded and stuffed in his jacket pocket. He was carrying a brown nine-by- twelve envelope. The door swung shut behind him and he peered around the room until he spotted me.
He pointed to my glass and said to the barkeep, “Hey, Jerry, gimme one of these, will you please?” as he sat down, dropped his hat on the seat beside him, and laid the envelope by his elbow. Then to me, “I don’t believe it, you can actually read,” as he pointed to the dog-eared early edition.
“I can count all the way to ten, too, if I take my shoes off,” I said.
“You must want something awful bad to offer to buy me a drink.”
“I’m going to do you a favor, pal,” I said.
“ And pay for my drink? You don’t believe I believe that, do you?”
“Why are all you newsies such cynics?”
“If I am, I learned it from you. So what’s the scam for today?”
“No scam. I’m offering you a trade.”
“Uh-oh.”
Jerry brought the reporter his beer and a dish of pretzel sticks. I told him to put it on my tab.
“The last time a cop bought me a drink, we still had Prohibition.”
“That’s worth an item right there.”
“I assume all this has something to do with the stuff you asked for.”
“A reasonable assumption.”
“What the hell are you interested in Mendosa for? It’s off your beat by about a hundred miles.”
“I’ll get to that. First, I’m going to offer you an exclusive story. Your end is, you can’t break it until the five- star tomorrow afternoon.”
“How big a story?”
“It’ll put a smile on your face.”
“Front page?”
“Hell, I’m not an editor, I…”
“Don’t hand me that shit, Zee. After fifteen years you know a banner story when you see one. Above the fold or below it?”
“What do I know about folds? Do we have a deal?”
“It’s a pig in a poke. What’s your angle?”
“You’ll understand when I finish. After we’re through talking, I’ll go back and write my report, which will back up everything I tell you. You can write the story ahead of time but you have to hold it until 4:00 tomorrow. I’ll file the report then, and that’ll give you a scoop.”
He thought for a minute and said: “Make it 5:00. We hit the street at 5:30 and all the competition’ll be off and drunk by then.”
“I can work that.”
“This some kind of undercover job you’ve been working on?”
“You want to listen or play twenty questions?”
He took a sip of beer, took out a little green pad and the stub of a Ticonderoga pencil, and stared at me.
I gave him a pretty straightforward rundown on how we found Verna Hicks Wilensky, Bones’s initial reaction, then got into the stuff in the strongbox, and finished with the five-hundred-a-month and the cashier’s checks. That
