The Cutie (8 page)

Tesselman, I knew, pulled a lot of weight around town. If someone were to stab his current baby doll, he would be very liable to put a bug in some official ear to get the guy, to get him fast and get him good. He’d be completely discreet about it, of course. The working stiffs like Grimes and Fred Maine would never hear a word from Tesselman himself. But one phone call to somebody way up in the stratosphere over the working stiffs, and pretty soon they would all be working extra hard.

Ed broke into my little reverie, saying, “Anything interesting?”

“Kind of. Mavis St. Paul belonged to Ernest Tesselman.”

“Ah,” he said. “That explains the interest.”

“Doesn’t it?”

Joe was looking politely curious. “Ernest Tesselman?” he said.

Ed explained who Ernest Tesselman was, and Joe nodded, then subsided into watchful silence again. Ed turned to me. “You’ll have to go see him, Clay.”

“Me? I don’t even know the guy, Ed. What good would it do for me to go talk to him?”

“You’re the only one who saw Billy-Billy Cantell after the killing. You’re the only one who could convince Tesselman that Billy-Billy didn’t bump his lady friend. Besides that, finding the cutie who really did bump her is your job, and maybe Tesselman can help you there, tell you who this whatever-her-name-was—”

“Mavis St. Paul,” I said.

“Yeah, Mavis St. Paul. Maybe he can tell you who her friends were, who might have wanted to knock her off. I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming over to see him. Write down the address.”

He gave me the address, and I wrote it down. “I don’t know, Ed,” I said. “This is public-relations stuff. I don’t know this business.”

“You just go talk to him,” he said. “You just tell him the story.”

“Tell him everything?”

“Of course. Give him the straight story. You won’t get anywhere with him by being cute. What time should I tell him you’ll be there?”

“Could I make it this afternoon sometime? I’m way behind in my sleep, Ed. I’m getting fuzzy around the edges. I’m afraid I won’t be good for much of anything until I get some sleep.”

“Okay. It’s ten o’clock now, we’ll make it for five this afternoon. You should be able to get five, six hours of sleep. Okay?”

“Sure, that’s okay.”

“You won’t be getting much sleep until we get our hands on the cutie, Clay. Like they say in the Army, this is A-priority crash emergency disaster shazam.”

“Sure, I know.”

“Okay, meeting adjourned again. Joe, come on, let’s go get some lunch. Clancy, make phone calls, get things set up. If the cops get their hands on Billy-Billy, you want to know about it right away, you want to get him sprung fast.”

“Okay, Ed,” said Clancy. He sounded doubtful.

“I’ll see Tesselman at five,” I said. “I’ll call you afterwards, and let you know what he says.”

We all left the office, all but Clancy, and rode down in the elevator to street-level. Ed offered me a lift, but I vaguely remembered the Mercedes, over on 46th Street. I grabbed a cab, and sat back in it, fighting to keep from going to sleep.

I had to fight even harder once I was in the Mercedes, doing my own driving. But I made it to the garage, handed the car over to the day kid, who doesn’t talk at all, and walked down the block to my building.

There was a cream-and-gray Ford parked out front, right next to the sign that says tow-away zone. The sun visor on the driver’s side was down, and I could see the police sticker attached to it. I had a feeling I knew whom the little blue men were visiting.

I was right. I walked into my living room, and it was full of cops. It looked like a whole convention of them. Grimes was back, and both of his buddies from last night, plus two more, both of them strangers to me. They were sitting around on the furniture, looking baggy and broad, like a bunch of used-car salesmen waiting for a victim. Ella wasn’t in sight.

They all brightened up a bit when I walked in. I was the victim they’d been waiting for. “Ah,” said Grimes, getting to his feet. “The prodigal returns.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot all about inviting you guys over. Which kind of warrant don’t you have this time?”

“Where’ve you been?” Grimes asked me.

“Out on Staten Island, distributing care packages to the natives.”

“Very cute. Now we’ll take it again for the real thing. Where’ve you been?”

“At the supermarket.”

“Do you want to answer here?” asked one of the other cops. “Or would you rather answer down at the station?”

“What would you be pulling me in for?” I asked him.

“I wasn’t going to mention that business about leaving the scene of an accident,” said Grimes.

I winced. I’d forgotten all about that. I’d intended to call the insurance company at eight o’clock, when they opened, which would have cleared me, but I’d been so tired, and was thinking of so many other things, I’d completely forgotten it.

Grimes grinned at me, so I guess I was too tired to keep a poker face. “Like to tell us where you’ve been?” he asked me.

“Mind if I make a phone call before you arrest me?”

“To Clancy Marshall?” Grimes shook his head. “We do mind, yes. You haven’t been booked. And you won’t be. We might hold you forever, but we’d never book you. We’re just holding you for questioning. That shyster of yours would never find you.”

“You’d see the inside of every precinct in Manhattan,” said one of the other cops.

“And maybe some in the Bronx,” said Grimes.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I made that circuit once. Very dull. All those precincts look alike, every one of them. Green. Every wall in every station all over the world. Green. No wonder cops have such lousy dispositions.”

“Where did you go last night, Clay, after you saw us?”

“To a vomitorium.”

“All right. Let’s go for a ride.”

I didn’t want to make that precinct circuit, I really didn’t. “Look, Mr. Grimes,” I said. “I’m tired. I haven’t slept in four years. Come ask me questions this afternoon, will you?”

“Only one question,” said Grimes. “And I’d rather ask it now. This is the last time I ask it, and if you give me a funny answer, we’re going for a ride. Where’ve you been since I last saw you?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “I’d like to, I really would. I’d tell you anything, just to get some peace and quiet, so I can go to sleep for a change. But I can’t.”

“Why not?” asked one of the other cops.

“If I don’t tell you,” I said, “you arrest me, and we play precinct-go-round. If I do tell you, worse things happen.” I turned back to Grimes. “I take it this has something to do with Cantell.”

“You take it right.”

“Okay, then, you don’t need to know where I was. It didn’t have anything to do with Billy-Billy Cantell, and that’s the truth. Don’t give me a rough time, will you?”

“Where did you go, Clay?”

I played it to the hilt. I gnawed on my lower lip, flashed a worried look at the other cops, shuffled my feet around, and finally said, “A meeting. A reorganizational meeting. I’ll never tell you where, or who else was present, or what was being reorganized, or why. It had nothing to do with Billy-Billy Cantell, that’s all I’ll tell you about it. Billy-Billy Cantell is a two-bit, second-rate punk, and it would be a rare and strange day when anybody I know would go out on a limb for him. Be sensible, Grimes.”

One of the other cops said, “Was Joe Pistol there? At this meeting?”

“The guy from Europe?”

“Probably.”

“George Raft type,” I said, “without the nose. I just met him.”

“That’s him,” said the cop. “Was he the one doing the reorganizing?”

“No. He was an observer, that’s all.”

Another cop said, “This meeting didn’t have anything to do with Cantell?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Who’s worried about a little bum like Billy-Billy Cantell?”

“I am,” said Grimes. “I’m worried a lot about that little bum. I want him. And I’ll play ‘precinct, precinct, who’s got the precinct’ with you until you’re eligible for Social Security if I don’t get him.”

“Why?” I asked him. “All right, all right, he got himself into trouble with a knife. But that’s his business, his own private business. None of the rest of us are involved in it at all. Why should we cover for him?”

“That’s what I want to know,” said Grimes. “We should have had him hours ago. Somebody’s hiding him. He’s one of Ed Ganolese’s stooges, so it figures that Ganolese or one of his other stooges is doing the hiding.”

“You give Billy-Billy a lot more importance than we do,” I said, and while I was saying it I was wishing it were true.

“What was Jack Eberhardt doing in Junky Stein’s apartment?” one of the other cops asked me.

I blinked at him. “Who?”

“Come on, you know them both.”

“Jack Eberhardt and Junky Stein? Sure I know them. So what? What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Eberhardt was waiting in Stein’s apartment. What was he waiting for?”

“How would I know?” I said. And I was trying to figure out what had happened. The cops must have figured Junky as a good contact for Billy-Billy, too, and when they went to his place they found Jack Eberhardt there. I knew I didn’t have to worry about Jack doing any extraneous talking, but with Junky under again, I wasn’t sure about him at all.

“He was waiting for Billy-Billy Cantell,” said the cop.

“He was?”

“You know it as well as I do. What else would he be doing there?”

“Maybe he and Junky are friends,” I said.

“You were out twice,” said Grimes, changing the subject again. “Once between three and five. Then you came back here and left again at eight-thirty. Which time was the reorganizational meeting?”

“Both,” I said. I wished I didn’t have to spend so much time thinking. I was too tired to think, I had trouble remembering what I’d already said. “The first time,” I told Grimes, “was just to meet this Joe Whosis, fill him in on the problems.”

“You mean the problem of Billy-Billy Cantell?”

“No. I told you, this didn’t have anything to do with Cantell.”

“Just a coincidence, is that it?”

“That I was working? I wouldn’t say that. I work almost every day.”

“You’re a glib son of a bitch,” said Grimes.

Ella walked in, then, carrying a tray. She smiled brightly at me, the innocent little girl at a party. “Hi, Clay,” she said. “I made some iced tea.” She offered the tray around at the cops.

They didn’t know what to do. A cop is ready for any situation except one. He doesn’t know what the hell to do when somebody treats him like a normal human being, like a guest.

“We, uh, we don’t have time,” said Grimes uncertainly. “We were just leaving.”

“Oh.” Ella pouted a little, looking beautiful. “And I made all this iced tea.”

“Stay awhile,” I said. All of a sudden, I was enjoying myself. “You’ve got five minutes to drink some tea. It’s hot outside.”

They looked helplessly at one another, and finally they decided to stay and drink some iced tea. I’d been standing all this time, but now I sat down in the chair by the phone. Ella distributed the tea, and then sat on the floor beside my chair. She rested an arm on my knees and looked sweet and domestic.

There was an awkward silence, and I finally broke it. “I understand Homicide East is involved with this one,” I said.

“We are,” said one of the new cops.

“How’s that?” I asked him. “I didn’t figure Billy-Billy Cantell was important enough. Or was it the woman?” I’d almost mentioned her name, which would have been a mistake.

“I don’t think you ought to worry about police business,” said Grimes.

“It’s just that Billy-Billy Cantell isn’t very important to us,” I told him. “I’m surprised to see how important he is to you.”

“Sure,” said Grimes. “I want you to pass some information on to Ed Ganolese.”

“Sure, if I see him.”

“You’ll see him. And when you see him, you tell him we want Billy-Billy Cantell. We want him by tonight. We don’t care whether he’s still breathing or not, but we want him. And if we don’t get him, we’ll do some reorganizing ourselves. You tell him that.”

“If I see him,” I said.

“You want to be less cute,” said one of the new cops. “You want to be one hell of a lot less cute.”

“He can’t help it,” said Grimes. “It’s his personality. He’s a penny-ante crook with half an education, half a conscience, and half a mind.”

Grimes could get under my skin every once in a while, and this was one of those times. “Mr. Grimes,” I said. “Tell me. What’s a crook?”

“You should know.”

“I would say that a crook is somebody who breaks the law. Is that what you would say?”

“That’s what I would say.”

“So show me the man who isn’t a crook, Mr. Grimes,” I said. “Show me an honest man, Mr. Diogenes Grimes.”

“Me,” he said.

“You never cheated a little bit on your income tax?” I asked him. Ella looked up at me, squeezing my knee, warning me to stop, but I was too tired and too annoyed. “You never drove a mile or two over the speed limit? You never asked a buddy in politics to see what he could do about cutting your property assessment?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

“Clay,” said Ella softly.

“Just a minute,” I said to her. To Grimes, I said, “You never looked the other way when somebody with influence skated a little too close to the edge of the law? You never listened to word from higher up to throw away a traffic ticket or remove the record of some rich man’s idiot son’s having been booked for drunk and disorderly? You never stood by with your eyes shut while graft money changed hands?”

“Clay, don’t,” said Ella.

Grimes was on his feet now, the glass of iced tea put down on a drum table. “You should have stopped talking a few sentences back,” he said. “There are things I have to do that I don’t have any choice over. And I don’t like to be reminded of them.”

“You’re a crook, Grimes,” I said. “You’re a crook, just like me, just like everybody else in this world. There isn’t a man alive who isn’t a crook, and who hasn’t always been a crook, and who won’t always be a crook. But I’m just a bit more honest than most of you. I admit I’m a crook.”

“Do you really think you can justify yourself?” one of the other cops asked me.