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“
We
spoke to Dade County, Florida, by phone,” Woodfinch said. “The
car was Jasper Vital’s all right. In his name. Registration,
motor number, everything checks. Lived in Miami. Picked up twice
there for being in the slot machine racket. They don’t like
slot machines interfering with more profitable gambling.” He
sucked his pipe. “Why do you say it’s a stolen car?”

“
I
only suggested it. That cash in Vital’s wallet might have been
every cent he owned, and it requires wealth to have a car like that.
And he was a crook. It made sense that way.”

“
Uh-huh.
And now what about Raymond Teacher?”

“
What
about him?” I said. “Another crook, I suppose. I’m
not up on crooks. That’s your job.”

“
A
fresh guy,” the beefy detective named Scavuzzo grunted. He was
sitting on one of the desks and swinging his legs and watching my
profile.

Briefly
Lieutenant Woodfinch looked at him over the bowl of his pipe and then
shuffled paper on his desk. “Raymond Teacher is the name he was
born with, but he had others. Will Raymond, Wilson Ray, Ted
Wishingdale. Wonder how he thought up that Wishingdale. A mug. In the
last ten years was in jail more than out. Assault and battery, stolen
cars, stick-up of a beer joint. You’d think he’d die with
a bullet in him. Instead he was knocked over by a car like any
respectable citizen. Anything to add, Mr. Breen?”

I
reached over to crush out my cigarette in the lieutenant’s
ashtray. All three men watched me impassively.

“
Last
night I told you everything I know,” I said.

“
Let’s
see.” Woodfinch leaned back. “We’ll start with
Jasper Vital offering you five hundred dollars for the bag. Had the
cash right in his wallet. Why didn’t you take it?”

“
Because
the bag wasn’t mine.”

“
You
sure you didn’t look in the bag?”

“
It
was locked.”

“
Five
hundred dollars is a lot of money. To me, anyway. I suppose to a car
salesman too.”

I
took out another cigarette. I was afraid my hands would shake with
anger. “I can understand where those two crooks, Jasper Vital
and Larry, couldn’t get it into their heads that a man can be
honest. Maybe, being a cop, you can’t either.”

“
When
a story stinks, it stinks,” Scavuzzo commented from 'his perch
on the desk.

“
Shut
up,” Woodfinch told him mildly. “All right, Mr. Breen,
you didn’t know what was in the bag, but when Vital offered you
five hundred dollars you knew it was worth a lot more. So you decided
to hold onto it.”

“
Because
the bag wasn’t mine to sell.”

“
Then
they put a gun on you, and you still held out on them. What is it —
you say you’re so honest you’d let them kill you?”

“
I’d
thrown the key away,” I said. “I would have had to search
in the grass for it with them and Esther would have seen us and come
out. And, of course, I didn’t want them to go into the house to
get the other key from Esther.”

“
Why
didn’t they think of getting the key from your wife?”

“
I
told you. Jasper Vital insisted that she be kept out of it.”

Scavuzzo
snorted.

Woodfinch
said: “Why would Vital worry about a strange woman?”

“
How
the hell do I know? Maybe he was, a gentleman. Besides, he’d
made up his mind that he could get information out of me. If he
showed himself to Esther to force her to give up the key, he’d
have to take her along too. It wasn’t necessary.”

The
pipe had gone out. Lieutenant Woodfinch tamped the ashes down with a
finger and ran a light around the bowl until he was satisfied with
the draw. He took his time. Everybody waited for him.

“
What
did you know that they wanted to know?” he asked, leaning back
again.

“
They
made a mistake. They only thought I knew something.”

“
Why
did they think that?”

“
Because,
like you, they couldn’t believe a man would refuse five hundred
dollars for a bag just because it didn’t belong to him.”

Woodfinch
shook his head. “There’s more. They were getting the bag
anyway, they thought. They wanted information about something else or
about somebody. They were sure you could give it to them. Why?”

I
set fire to the cigarette I had been holding between my fingers. I
dropped the match into his ashtray. “I think they got the idea
when I told them I was .working for Redfern Motors. I can’t
tell you why; I don’t know. It might have been something else.
Maybe because Howard Pine, the man whose car killed Teacher, had told
Vital that, he thought he had seen Esther — “ I stopped.
I could have bitten my tongue off.

Woodfinch’s
lips twitched. For him it was a broad smile. “Get it into your
head that you can’t hide anything from the police.” He
shuffled papers on his desk, selected a typewritten sheet. “This
morning Howard Pine identified the body of Jasper Vital as that of
the man who called at his house at a few minutes after six p.m. Vital
told him that his name was Webster and that he was a friend of
Teacher’s and was trying to locate Teacher’s bag.

“
I
quote Howard Pine: ‘Webster — or Vital — told me
that he had inquired at the hospital for Teacher’s bag and they
knew nothing about it. He asked me if I knew what happened to it. I
said that I had seen the police put it into Mrs. Breen’s car.
He asked me why did Teacher go straight to Mrs. Breen’s car
when he rose to his feet instead of to one of the other cars which
had stopped on both sides of the street. I said I didn’t know.
He asked if Teacher seemed to know Mrs. Breen. I said all I knew was
that they were talking together before he got into her car. For all I
knew, I said, it was even possible that Teacher had got out of Mrs.
Breen's car. I remember seeing Teacher cross in front of her car, and
he might have got out of it when it stopped for the red light and
then he crossed in front of it to get across the street before the
light'

changed.
Vital asked if I was sure of that. I said no, I couldn't be sure.
Then Vital left.”

Woodfinch
looked up from the paper and blew smoke at me.

“
That
means nothing, of course,” I said, “It was just an idea
Vital put into Pine's head.”

“
By
itself it doesn't,” Woodfinch agreed. “Certainly not
enough to convince Vital that you were connected with Teacher. But
something else did. Something more important than the fact that you
turned down his five hundred dollars. What was it?”

“
I
wish I knew.” I sat hunched over, holding my cigarette between
my knees.

Woodfinch
said: “Let’s go on. Vital tells Larry to take you to
Coney Island. Why not have Larry stay with him till he gets the trunk
open? Safer for the two of them to drive you. Why the rush?”

“
That’s
another thing I explained to you last night. Vital wanted me out of
there in a hurry before my wife came out to see what was keeping me
or to get in on the conversation. He must have seen something in my
face when Esther called out and guessed that I’d start throwing
my fists if she was in a position where they might have to, harm her.
If there was shooting, they’d have to run for it without the
bag. Besides, they wanted me alive to learn whatever they thought I
knew. Vital was using his head.”

“
He
used it, all right. He got it caved in by a tire iron.”

“
Which
was in the open trunk and only had to be reached for.”

Woodfinch
gently knocked out his pipe, ran his pinky inside the bowl, unfolded
his pouch. “Now we come to where you're a hero. You were
overseas, you said?”

“
Seventeen
months.”

“
See
action?”

“
A
little strafing and bombing and shelling. I was in supply.”

“
Didn’t
you want to get into combat?”

“
I
did what I was told. I knew cars, so they put me on jeeps. You can
check that easily enough, though I can’t see what that has to
do with anything.”

“
Brother,”
Scavuzzo said, swinging one leg against the desk, “there’s
nothing we don’t know about you. We’ve been checking you
all morning.”

“
So
why these questions?”

“
I
was thinking,” Woodfinch said, polishing his hot pipe against
his cheek, “that maybe I could understand a man, who was
hardened to combat fighting, tackling an armed man in the close
quarters of a, car.”

“
But
I’m not the type, is that it?” I twisted my mouth.
“Listen. What did I have to lose? I was being taken to torture
and death.”

Scavuzzo
took out his cigar and snorted and put it back.

I
turned to him. “I suppose no murdered bodies are found in
Brooklyn? I suppose nobody’s ever been tortured by gangsters in
Coney Island or Flatbush or Bay Ridge or anywhere else in Brooklyn? I
suppose Murder, Inc., was just newspaper propaganda?”

Scavuzzo
said: “We cleaned .that up.”

This
time it was my turn to snort.

“
All
right,” Woodfinch said mildly. “So you were sure you were
going on a one-way ride. So you turned and socked him in the close
confines of a car seat and knocked him out cold before he could shoot
you.”

“
His
attention was on the other car passing us, the one driven by the man
with the crooked nose.”

“
We’ll
get to him. You must be pretty good if you could K.O. him with one
short jab.”

“
I
am,” I said.

Scavuzzo
slid off the desk and came around for a front view of me. “Yeah,
you’re good,” he said. “Especially the way you
think up stories.”

I
ignored him. “I was division boxing champion in France,”
I told Woodfinch.

“
A
prizefighter?” Woodfinch sounded almost interested.

“
Only
an amateur. Your investigation of me wasn’t so good if you
didn’t learn that I reached the Golden Glove finals when I was
a kid. I was too tall for my weight and hadn’t much science,
and in, the finals I was cut to pieces and lost on points. But I
could always hit, and last night I gave Larry my Sunday punch. A lot
of them.” I smiled up at Scavuzzo, “Would you like a
practical demonstration?”

Scavuzzo
said: “Why, you mug!”

Lieutenant
Woodfinch was laughing. We all looked at him in surprise. He broke
off, looked embarrassed, and his face resumed its normal attitude of
repose.

“
Sit
down, Scavuzzo,” he said placidly. “All right, you have a
wonderful sock, Mr. Breen, and you knocked Larry out. He was a
criminal. Why dump, him out of the car? Why not take him to the
nearest police station?”

“
He
might have recovered consciousness on the way. I couldn’t be
bothered with him. I wanted to get home as fast as I could to make
sure Esther was all right. For all I knew, Vital had gone into the
house after all to get the key from her as soon as I was out of the
way.”

“
You
said he was a gentleman. He wouldn’t get tough with a woman.”

“
Why
should I have believed that about him?”

“
You
might have picked up a cop on the way.”

“
I
didn’t pass any.”

There
was silence. Woodfinch’s pipe bubbled. He frowned at it, then
took a pipe cleaner out of his desk and worked on the stem. The lack
of words got under my skin. That was probably the idea.

I
said: “Have you found out who Larry is?”

“
No.”
Woodfinch pulled the cleaner through the pipe stem. “If there
is such a person.”

“
My
God!” I said. “He was in my garage, he took me for a
ride. I knocked him out, I dumped him on McDonald Avenue.”

“
He
wasn’t on McDonald Avenue when I sent a squad car.”

“
That
was almost an hour later. By that time he’d recovered and gone
away.”

Woodfinch
pushed his pipe together and unfolded his pouch. He was taking it
very slowly. A war of nerves. “Nobody saw this man Larry. Not
even your' wife.”

“
What
about Gillette?” I said. “He was driving his car into his
driveway when we came out to the street.”

“
He
says he didn’t see you.”

“
What
about Larry’s fingerprints on the gun and the car?” I
said desperately. “A man like that must have a police record.”

Woodfinch
looked at Scavuzzo, and Scavuzzo said: “You find fingerprints
in detective stories. In all my life I’ve seen only two usable
prints on a handgun, and one was a fluke. Then the car. The outside
was wiped that day. Lots of people put their fingers on door handles
and door frames and the wheel. Too many people. The only prints
brought up were smudges. Trouble is people don’t put their
prints on a clean surface and then keep everybody else from messing
them up.”

“
But
guns can be identified,” I persisted.

Scavuzzo
shrugged. “The war scattered lots of Colt 45’s alt over
the country. Maybe we’ll trace this one and maybe we won’t.”