The Cutie (19 page)

“She was alive when you left, that’s all.”

“How do I prove it?”

“What time did you leave the apartment?”

“Just about four o’clock. She was killed sometime between four and four-thirty. I’ve admitted to leaving at four.”

“All right. Where did you go from there?”

“Straight home. The kid at the parking garage can tell what time I got there. They keep a record of times in and out on the cars kept there.”

“Fine. A survey called her at four-fifteen, and she was still alive then. I can arrange that. Did she have a television set?”

“I didn’t see one in the living room.”

“All right. Her answer was, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have a TV.’ That was at four-fifteen. I can have that set up by ten o’clock in the morning. Then we drop a hint that Cantell actually did that killing, too, and you’re off the hook.”

“Why did he kill her? He didn’t even know her. I’m not so sure the cops will go for this.”

“Only he could tell why he did it, and unfortunately he’s dead.” Clancy flashed that charming smile of his at me. He was being the brilliant mouthpiece now, and loving every second of it. He went big for alibis and complex series of events so confusing that after a while nobody in the world would be able to work back to the truth. That’s what made him so good in a courtroom.

“If you think you can do it,” I said.

“I can do it. In the morning. You could have come to the office at nine.”

“Ed told me to see you right away.”

“Ed is getting too excited about this. If there’s nothing else—”

“Nothing,” I said. I got to my feet and said, “I’m Mr. Clay, is that it?”

“Robert Clay,” he told me. “You work for Craig, Harry and Bourke.”

“Good for me.”

He walked me to the front door, talking loudly about the affairs of Craig, Harry and Bourke, whoever they are, and he went out on the front porch with me, closing the door behind him. “Sorry I got upset, Clay,” he whispered. The smile clicked on like a neon sign, and he gave me a friendly pat on the arm. “I just don’t like to bring my business home with me. Laura, you know.”

“I know. I’ll see you, Clancy.” Ella wouldn’t be like Laura, I was telling myself. Ella wouldn’t be like Laura.

“I’ll talk to Ed about stopping this nonsense,” he said. “We shouldn’t waste time playing cops and robbers.”

“Not as cops, anyway,” I told him.

I knew Clancy wouldn’t get anywhere with Ed. Ed wanted to get his hands on the guy who’d started all this trouble, and that was all there was to it. After the try to gun me, and the attempt to set me up at the subway station, I was kind of interested in finding the guy myself.

When I got back to the apartment, it was a little after one-thirty in the morning. I was supposed to pick Ella up at the Tambarin at two. I left the Mercedes out front and went upstairs to hang around for fifteen minutes.

The phone rang as I was taking off my coat. It was Fred Maine. “About Alan Petry,” he said. “I couldn’t find out anything about his home life at all, but I can tell you where to find him. He works a night beat on the West Side, in the Forties.”

“Prowl car?”

“No, he walks. It’s a two-man beat. I’m sorry, Clay, but I couldn’t get anything at all, otherwise. I don’t know the guy personally.”

“Thanks, anyway,” I said. “He’s working now?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Unless it’s his night off.”

“Okay, thanks.”

The West 40’s. There was a bar on 46th Street, between Eighth and Ninth, where some of Archie Freihofer’s girls wait for phone calls. The boss there probably knew the cops working his beat. I took a chance on it and called the place.

A little Puerto Rican chick answered the phone, one of those cute-as-a-button voices. I told her I wanted to talk to the bartender, Alex, and she said, “Isn’t there anything
I
can do for you?”

“I’m sure there is,” I said. “But right now I want to talk to Alex.”

“Who’s calling?”

I didn’t know if Alex would remember who Clay was. We’d never had any personal contact before. Not every boy in the organization knows exactly who or what I am, which has its advantages at times. It also had disadvantages at times. Like now. “Tell him it’s Archie’s boss,” I said, which was close enough to the truth to do.

“Okay,” she said, and in a minute a male voice came on, saying, “This is Alex.”

“Clay here,” I said. “Do you know a cop named Petry? Works the beat in your neighborhood, nights.”

“Do I know you, buddy?” he asked me.

“Call Archie and find out,” I said.

“I will. What’d you say the name was?”

“Clay. I’ll call back in five minutes.”

The five minutes dragged by, while I wished I’d just driven on down there, rather than call first. But it might have been a wasted trip, and I couldn’t afford wasted trips.

When I called back, he said, “Who do you work for?”

“The same guy Archie does. Ed Ganolese. And you can quit playing counterspy. Do you know a cop named Petry or don’t you?”

“I know him.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“Maybe.”

“I want to talk to him. When can you set it up for?”

“Maybe Friday.”

“Tonight. Right away.”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“What did Archie tell you?” I asked him.

“How do I know you’re Clay?”

“Crap,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”

I slammed the phone down and headed for the door. Then I remembered Ella. I checked my watch and it was a quarter to two. I went back and called the Tambarin and left a message for Ella to wait for me at the bar, I’d be a little late. Then I left the apartment and headed downtown.

La Sorina is one of a string of basement bars on that block of West 46th Street. When I went in, the place was full of girls, some sitting at the bar, some sitting at the booths along the right-hand wall. There was no one at all in the dining-room part of the place, to the back. A few guys were interspersed with the girls, pimps or hopefuls. Pick-ups aren’t made here. This is just the spot where the girls get their phone calls.

Alex, behind the bar, was tall and fat and sour-looking. I squeezed between two of the girls, leaned against the bar, and waited for him to acknowledge my existence. It took a couple minutes, and then he walked over to stand in front of me and glower. “What’s yours?” he asked me.

“Petry,” I told him. “I’m the guy who called.”

“Oh,” he said. “You’re Clay.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know why I should believe you,” he said.

“Because I don’t have time to fool around with you,” I told him. “And because there’s a place across the street that would like to take over your telephone business, and I’m in a position to say whether they get it or not.”

He thought about it for a minute, and while he thought he drummed his fingers against the bar top. He had thick fingers, huge hands. Finally, he turned to one of the girls and said something fast, in Spanish. She said something back, and then got off the stool and went out.

He looked at me again. “What are you drinking?” he asked me.

“Beer,” I said.

He nodded and went away and came back with a beer.

“How long do I wait?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Not long,” he said. He drifted on down the bar and served his other customers.

The girl came back about five minutes later, reclaimed her place at the bar, and said something to Alex in Spanish. She didn’t look at me at all. He nodded to her, came back over to me, and said, “Outside. Turn right, walk down to the parking lot. He’s waiting for you there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

There were two possibilities, and as I walked toward the door I thought about the both of them. One, he believed me, and the cop was waiting for me down by the parking lot. Two, he didn’t believe me, and a couple of people were waiting for me in the darkness between the front door and the steps up to the sidewalk.

I had to take a chance. I went out, moving fast, and didn’t stop till I was up the three steps and standing on the pavement. Then I looked back. There hadn’t been anyone waiting there.

I turned right and walked down toward the parking lot. A cop stood there, young and tall and slender, swinging his billy as though he’d just learned how. I stopped in front of him and said, “You’re Alan Petry?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“You used to know a girl named Mavis St. Paul,” I told him. “Back in your acting-class days.”

“I did?”

“That’s what Betty Benson said. Why, was she wrong?”

He shrugged. He had a college-boy face, square and bland and All-American. Beneath the hat, you could lay odds on there being a blond crew-cut. “I’m paid to walk,” he told me. “Let’s walk.”

We walked, and I waited for him to decide to answer me. He did, finally, and said, “Mavis was just killed, wasn’t she? Night before last.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What’s your interest in her?”

“What’s yours? Had you seen her recently?”

“I haven’t seen or heard from Mavis since she shacked up with that bastard Grildquist.”

“You don’t like Grildquist?”

“He was old enough to be her father.”

“But rich.”

“He suckered her into thinking he was going to make a big Broadway star out of her.”

“You didn’t like it when she left you, is that it?”

“I might have killed her then,” he said. “I wouldn’t wait till now to do it.”

“I hear you’re married,” I said.

“I am. Happily married. I’ve got two kids.”

“Play around at all?”

“That’s a hell of a question.”

“What’s the answer?”

“I’m not that kind of guy.”

“You’re the kind of guy who takes a little side money here and there,” I reminded him.

He stopped and glared at me. “Who says so?”

“I do. Indirectly, I’m the guy who pays you.”

“Me and everybody else,” he said. “Let’s say I don’t take any money. So what? I report you to the sergeant, but you’re paying him, too. So what do I gain? It’s the system, and I work within it. That doesn’t mean I play around with other women.”

“Do you work Monday nights?”

“Sure.”

“But you could walk off your beat for maybe half an hour without anybody noticing.”

“I have to report every once in a while. Besides, I’ve got a partner.”

“Where is he now?”

He jabbed a thumb in the direction we’d come from. “Back there in the diner, having coffee.”

“So he doesn’t see you all night long.”

“I still have to report.”

“You weren’t working yesterday afternoon at four o’clock,” I said.

“I was at school then.”

“School?”

“I’m taking a couple of afternoon courses at Columbia. Working for a law degree.”

“I could find out if you were really there yesterday.”

“Sure you could. And they’d tell you yes.”

“When was the last time you saw Mavis?”

“When she left me for Grildquist.”

“And the last time you saw Betty Benson?”

“Her roommate? Same time, maybe a little later. I stayed around Paul Devon’s classes a couple weeks more, then quit. That life wasn’t for me.”

I thought about guns. I’d been asking people if they had guns. Alan Petry had one, of course. It was strapped to his side. But I couldn’t see myself asking him to let me look at it for a minute. Cops don’t hand their guns to civilians.

We reached Ninth Avenue, turned around, and walked back toward Eighth again. Petry said, “You didn’t tell me why you were so interested in Mavis.”

“I’m following orders,” I told him. That’s always the simplest answer. A man following orders isn’t expected to know why he’s doing what he’s doing. “I just do as I’m told, the same as everybody else.”

“Sure,” he said. “If you don’t have anything else you want to ask me, maybe you ought to walk somewhere else. It probably doesn’t look good, the two of us walking along together.”

“All right,” I said. “That was Columbia, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“Thanks for your time.”

I walked faster, and he walked slower, and we weren’t together any more. I headed down the block to the Mercedes, climbed in, and drove away, asking myself, what next, little man, what next?

I headed crosstown to the Tambarin, on 50th near Sixth. I left the Mercedes in a handy Kinney parking lot and walked down the block and into the bar half of the Tambarin.

She was at the bar, quietly ignoring the half-dozen guys who were trying to pick her up. She looked cool and beautiful, and her model’s hatbox, in which she carts her costumes and make-up and so on, was on the floor beside her.

I stood in the doorway for a second, looking at her. I remembered Laura Marshall, and the double life Clancy has to lead because he’s in the organization but he’s married. Ella wasn’t a Laura Marshall, not by a long shot. Could a guy who worked for the organization marry a girl like Ella and
not
have to live a double life?

Wrong subject, Clay, you’re supposed to be thinking about the guy who killed Mavis St. Paul. And Betty Benson. And Billy-Billy Cantell.

I moved forward, pushing through the ever-hopeful stags at the bar, and touched Ella on the arm. She turned and smiled at me and said, “Oh, hi.”

“Hi.” I kissed her on the cheek, enjoying the envious looks from the stags, and said, “Let’s go straight home. I’m in a mood for shoes-off drinking.”

“Fine,” she said.

We left the club and walked to the parking lot, both of us silent. Once in the car, she said, “How are you doing, Clay? With the murderer, I mean.”

I filled her in, and she listened wide-eyed to the stories of the shot taken at me and the business in the subway station. “You could have been caught there,” she said, when I was finished.

“I know. That occurred to me, too.”

She thought about it for a minute, and then she said, “You say this man had an accent?”

“A phony. Muffled voice, accent, all phony.”

“He didn’t want you to hear his real voice.”

“That’s right.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” I started, and then I stopped and just sat there for a minute, driving with half my mind and thinking about the fact that the guy had disguised his voice. Why?
Because he didn’t want me to recognize him.