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“You’re telling it.”
“Okay, I am. So he sees her get up and make the bell, and a minute later he hears the buzzer. He gets out of there like a shot.”
“With the money?”
“Sure with the money. But he’s probably not even shifted into third before it hits him. A fat lot of good it’s going to do him to scram if she’s lived long enough to talk. For all he knows she could have come up to borrow a Band-Aid. Hell, she may live to be ninety, and either way he’s damned sure got to find out. He comes back and watches the place. I come out twice, and the second time I take off in the MG.”
“And he comes over and walks in. Through the door you’ve conveniently forgotten to lock.”
“Hell, Nate, I left the keys under the rubber for Dan.”
Bra
“So what else?” I said. “The minute he gets inside he knows he’s done murder. He also knows that if she’s talked you’ll have him on it so fast it will make him nauseated. But if he plants the money here it’s my word against his — and I’m the one with the dead horse in the bathtub.”
“Fine,” Bra
“Wouldn’t you? You going to take the odds that she didn’t spill? Standing here with the body on the floor and me possibly on my way to the police at that very moment? You leave the coin, Nate. You leave it and you pray like hell at the same time that she didn’t talk so you’ll be out of it completely. You can’t get a much better bargain for the price.”
Coffey had gone to the bottle. “You’ve got the killer’s impulses figured out pretty clearly for pure speculation, Fa
I let the sarcasm ride. “It’s based on what didn’t happen.”
“Namely?”
“Namely that the guy didn’t come up and try to take me out myself while I was still here. A pro wouldn’t take the chance that I could tag him for it. It’s got to be somebody who didn’t intend to do it to start with, and who chickened out fast after it happened.”
“How do we know he saw her get up?” Coffey said. “Suppose she lay there a minute. Suppose the guy drove off and left her for dead?”
“Say what you mean. You mean there wasn’t anybody out there at all.”
“I didn’t say that, Fa
I turned to Bra
“Fa
“Who the hell did you have in mind, W. C. Fields?”
“Look, Fa
If Bra
“Fu
“You’re fu
It wouldn’t get any pleasanter so I let it drop. His wife had to live with it, not me. Probably some of it was my own fault anyhow. They weren’t setting any departmental records to get her off the floor over there. The room was still for a minute.
“You girls about finished?” Bra
Coffey grunted.
“Take a drink,” I told him. Mine was on the floor near me and I picked it up and stared at it.
Bra
“Right, Captain.”
“And take the money in. Report the recovery of it, but tell the insurance mob it’s impounded indefinitely. They’ll probably be on your neck in four minutes. And put through the pick-up on that cousin of Sabatini’s in Troy.”
“Yes, sir.” I watched him load the satchel. He threw a half salute like a scarecrow flapping in a breeze and when Bra
“So it all hinges on who she’d go to,” he said when he came out. “Whose doorbell she’d push when she found herself in a jam. No family besides the mother and sister?”
“None.”
“Then I suppose we check with the Kline girl first, get a list of everybody she can tie in with the deceased.” He stared at Cathy for a minute, then at me. “It’d seem like there’d be a fair-sized list of names.”
“And no-names.”
“One-night stands?”
“Something like that.”
He cursed once, chewing on the cigar. It wasn’t burning. “You want to call the Kline girl?”
“I’m working with the department?”
“You don’t think maybe it’s about time?”
“Nuts,” Coffey said.
“You got a problem, Art?”
“Damn it, yeah. There’s nothing in the book says we got to play potsie with some hot-shot peeper just because he used to be married to the dame.”
“Report me,” Bra
“Right now,” I said. I dug out the slip of paper with the Gramercy Park address and number. My hand was no more than six inches from the phone when it started to ring.
“Let me,” Bra
He lifted it as it started its third ring. He said, “Bra
He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver and looking at the chewed end of his cigar. “Don’t you just love a son of a bitch who’d tease like that?” he said then.
CHAPTER 11
Sally Kline said on the phone that there were only two or three people Cathy had seen with any regularity. One was a writer on Bank Street in the Village named Ned Sommers. Another was a photographer named Clyde Neva who had a live-in studio loft on East 10th Street. She said Neva was a pretty blatant homosexual.