He lay face down in the half-opened doorway, death so new that it hadn’t erased the look of surprise on his face. I nudged the door open, flipped the light switch with the tip of my finger and looked around the room. There was nothing fancy about the Hackard Building or the offices it rented. This one was a minimum setup with a wooden desk, a pair of chairs and a coat rack. A layer of dust was spread evenly over everything, the window was grimy and the floor scuffed and splintered from the countless pieces of equipment that had been moved in and out.
The guy had drawn up a chair close to the door to be able to listen to any activity in the hall outside. Chances were that he had shaken my place down, found nothing and waited for me. If the door had opened from the other side he would have had a clear shot at my back before I could have done anything about it and Pat would have had me in his statistical columns instead of his address book.
I went though his pockets, found sixty-two bucks and some change, a pair of rubber gloves you could buy anywhere and two fairly stiff plastic strips that I slipped into my own pocket. None of his clothes were new. His suit had come from a large chain and looked about a year old, matching everything else. Unless the police had a record on the guy, or could come up with something out of the lab, getting a make on him wasn’t going to be easy. He looked to be in his late forties, on the thin side and about five ten or so. His dark hair had receded, but there was no gray showing, so my guess at his age could have been off. I studied his face again, taking in the sharp features and the odd skin coloration. There was a death pallor there but it couldn’t obliterate some of the characteristics common to some Europeans or Latin Americans.
One thing was sure, it wasn’t a plain contract kill. Those guys specialize in one field and don’t bother with any shakedown job to boot. Either there were two involved or this one was on assignment to find out what I knew or make sure I didn’t find out any more.
But what the hell had I found out?
I stepped over the body and went back into the corridor. The elevator was still where it had left me and nobody had come to investigate the shots. It wasn’t strange. The old building was solidly built and could muffle noise almost completely.
There was still a way to play it. I’d be asking for trouble, but it would keep me from doing too much explaining and it was simple enough to look right. Three of the offices down the hall from mine were occupied by small businesses that could conceivably keep something of value on the premises. In the door of each one, I knocked a hole in the glass panes, reached in and opened the lock, hoping none of them had alarms wired to them. Every room got the same treatment, a little disturbance that would indicate a search and the rubber gloves in the guy’s pocket would explain the lack of prints. In the last place there was a gold wrist watch lying on top of a desk and I took it out and dropped it in the dead man’s pocket for a clincher.
Then I went back to my own office and called Pat.
By nine-thirty they had bought my story. The guy at the newsstand downstairs had remembered the guy coming in after everybody had left and as he was closing up. Two of the men who rented the other offices said they did a cash business, but never left money in the office overnight, but for someone who didn’t know it, they were probably targets for a robbery. The watch in the corpse’s pocket made the deal firm. My version was that I had seen the broken windows, checked my own office and started out to see if anyone was still around when he tried to nail me. The manager admitted that a lot of the empty offices were unlocked, so the probability was that the guy had heard the elevator coming up, slipped into one to hide, and when he started out to make a getaway, saw me, panicked and started shooting.
I knew better. He had come prepared to handle a lock with those plastic strips. My door wouldn’t give in to that technique so he had broken the window, but they made it easy for him to wait me out in a convenient empty Office.
Pat drove me downtown and took my statement there. Before I finished, one of the detectives came in and told him there was no make on the guy yet, but that the gun was a .38 Colt Cobra licensed to a jeweler that had been stolen in a robbery two months before. The lab hadn’t come up with any laundry marks on the guy’s clothes and the only lead they had was that he had been wearing shoes made and sold in Spain but they were probably as old as his clothes. His prints had been wired to Washington and pictures were telephotoed to Interpol in case he was a foreign national.
Pat took my statement, read it through once and tossed it on his desk. “I almost believe it,” he said. “Damn it, I almost believe it.”
“You’re a spooky slob,” I grunted.
“I’m supposed to be, buddy. Right now I’m spooked more than ever. First the Delaney thing, now this.”
“At least this one’s cut and dry.”
“Is it?” he asked softly.
“Nobody’s looking for your scalp.”
He interlocked his fingers and smiled at me, his eyes cold. “Are they looking for
yours,
Mike?”
I smiled back at him. “They’ll have a hard time getting it”
“Don’t con me.”
“You have statements from five witnesses besides me that put a common robbery motive behind this, a stolen gun, gloves, a paraffin test that shows he shot at me, the position of the corpse proving concealment, so what more do you want?”
“I could tell you another way things
might
have been arranged,” Pat said. “The only reason I’m not hammering at it is because the manager’s statement is the only one that sticks with me ... the fact he admitted that occasionally some empty offices are left unlocked. There was one other open one on your floor, but the rest were locked.”
“Okay, I was lucky. I was there with a gun. Anybody else would have been written off and you’d have an unsolved one on your hands.”
“We’re not done with this one yet, you know.”
“I hope not. I’d like to know who he was myself.”
“You’ll find out. Think it might tie into something you’re on?”
I got up and stretched, then slapped on my hat. “The only thing I’m on is trying to locate Greta Service.”
“Maybe I can help you on that.” He reached in his desk drawer, took out an envelope and handed it to me. “Authorization to see old Harry. Your conversation will be recorded. Tomorrow you’ll probably hear from the D.A. on your court appearance. Don’t stay away too long.”
“Thanks, chum.”
“No trouble. You interest me. I always wonder how far you’ll get before you wind up with your ass in a sling.”
On some people prison life had a therapeutic effect. Harry Service was one of them. He had slimmed down and his face had lost the hostility it had worn at the trial and he was genuinely glad to see me. There was a momentary surprise, but he knew all the tricks and expected that I did too and anything taken down on tape for analysis later wasn’t going to add up any hard points for him.
I said, “See your sister lately?”
“Nope. She sure knows how to worry a guy.”
“She’s big enough to take care of herself.”
“That I wouldn’t mind. What bugs me is she wants to take care of me too. I tried to tell her I’d make out.... After this stretch I’m going legit, believe me.”
“Well,” I said, “I wish I could tell you something, but I couldn’t locate her. She moved from her last place. One of her friends saw her uptown once, but that was the end of it. I wouldn’t sweat it if I were you.”
“You ain’t me though, Mike. She’s all I got for family.”
“Maybe you know some of her friends.”
He looked at me meaningfully. “Not any more.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me ... what was she like when she visited you last?”
Harry squirmed in his seat and frowned. “Well, she was ... well, different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how to say it. She wouldn’t tell me nothing. She said pretty soon everything was going to be all right because she was going to get a lot of dough. I didn’t think about it much because that’s what she said right along. This time, though, she wouldn’t say how. Like it was a big secret. The part I don’t like is that her face was the way she looked as a kid when she done something she shouldn’t of.”
“Did she mention any of her former ... friends?” I asked him.
“That was before the last time,” Harry said. “Something was cooking and she didn’t say, but I caught on that they all might have part of the action. Funny thing, Greta wasn’t one what makes friends fast. The ones she usually took to were kind of oddballs, sort of misplaced types.”
“Mixed up?” I suggested.
Harry shook his head. “No, not that. Kind of don’t-give-a-damn people. I think that was why she stayed in the Village.”
“You’re not much help,” I said.
“I know,” Harry nodded. “Only thing I could put my finger on was when she was here last she opened her pocketbook and I saw a letter in there that was postmarked ...” He paused, and wrote with his forefinger on the countertop,
Bradbury.
“I remembered it because I almost pulled a job there once,” he said. “Then, when I mentioned it to her she snapped the pocketbook shut and said it wasn’t nothing at all and I knew damn well she was lying.”
“You mean out on the Island?”
“That’s the place.” He ran his tongue over his lips and added as an afterthought, “Something else ... that letter was light green, kind of. It was long, like a business would use.”
I looked at my watch. The time was almost up. “Okay, kid, I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’ll try real hard, okay, Mike?”
“The best I can.”
Harry stood up and looked at me anxiously. “And, Mike ... I ain’t got no hard feelings about being in here. It’s my own fault. I’m just glad I didn’t shoot you.”
“You’re luckier than most, Harry,” I told him, but he hadn’t heard about last night and didn’t get the meaning at all.
On the way back to the city I picked up a newspaper at a gas stop and flipped through the pages. All the local news was obscured by the latest trouble spot in the world and the statements from the U.N. idiots who fostered the whole mess and were trying to explain their way out of it. Right now they were trying to make the United States the goat again and we were falling for it. I spit out the window in disgust and read the small blurb that detailed the shooting in the Hackard Building. Space was so limited that they didn’t bother going into my background again except to mention that I was the one who had discovered the Delaney girl’s body. The story simply stated that I had interrupted a burglar and killed him when he tried to shoot his way past me. So far the dead man had not been identified.
Velda and Hy Gardner were having coffee in the office when I got there. They sat on opposite sides of the room making small talk, deliberately avoiding the big thing that was on their minds. The place seemed charged with some unseen force that oozed from both of them.
Hy took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Well, you did it again.”
I tossed my hat on the rack. “Now what?”
Something like a look of relief passed over Velda’s face. “You could have let me know where you were.”
“What’s everybody worried about me for?”
“Mike...” Hy drained his cup and put it on the desk. “Pat’s sitting on this latest bit of yours. You think we don’t know it? It was a good story, friend, but we all know better.”
Velda said, “The D.A. called. You have a court appearance this Monday. He’s after your license.”
“So what else is new?”
She grinned and poured me a cup of coffee. “Ask Hy.”
I looked over at him. “Got something?”
“Something you started. Old Biff down at the morgue got Al Casey back and they pulled about thirty folders Mitch handled when he was poking around in the morgue. They catalogued the photos Mitch handled and it’s the damndest conglomeration you ever saw, from polo players to politicians. Right now he thinks you know more than you’re telling and they want you to see what Mitch was looking for.”
“Biff said he didn’t check anything out.”
“Hell, Mike, he could have stuck it in his pocket if he had wanted to.”
“What for? If he was looking for an I.D. on somebody he would have gotten it right there.”
Hy scrutinized my face closely. “Do you know what it was?”
“No,” I said simply.
“Then why did somebody try to kill you?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
For a few seconds Hy was silent, then he nodded and stuck the cigar back in his mouth and stood up. “All right, I’ll go for it.” He pulled a manila envelope out of his pocket and flipped it on the desk. “The copies of Greta Service’s photos you asked for. I passed the rest out. The gang will keep their eyes open.”
“Thanks, Hy.”
He picked up his coat, headed toward the door and stopped beside me. “Just tell me one thing off the record to satisfy my curiosity. That guy you shot ... it didn’t happen like you told it, did it?”
I grinned at him and shook my head. “No.”
“Damn,” he said and walked out.
Velda locked the door behind him and went back to her desk. “It’s pretty deep, isn’t it?”
“We’re on something. It’s not tangible, but it’s got somebody worried all to hell.” I briefed her on my conversation with Harry Service and the details of the gunfight in the corridof, watching her face furrow with concern.
“I asked around the neighbors where Helen Poston lived. A few of then were able to describe a friend of hers that tallied with Greta. One old biddy turned out to be a people-watcher who drew a lot of her own conclusions, but the main thing she brought out was that Helen Poston was neither happy nor doing too well until after she met Greta. From then on she started turning up in new clothes and staying away from the house on weekends. Greta had a car the woman couldn’t identify and on Friday nights they’d leave, Helen with a suitcase, and get back sometime Monday. One night she didn’t come back at all and that’s when she was found dead.”