“Get over here,” Draper says. “We got something.”
“Anything I can pick up at the drugstore for it?” I ask him.
“Listen, you bastard,” Draper says, “Bolan's done your job for you. He brought somebody in.”
“How are Mr. Florian's boys?”
“Just get over here,” he says. “Enjoy your funny jokes while you can.”
He slams his phone down.
“Yeah,” I say into mine, then lay it gently to rest on its cradle and go see to the coffee.
He's around eighteen years old. His hair is dirty and worn at shoulder-blade length. His hands are dirty and his face is dirty and his clothes I would guess are the only ones he ever uses, but I've smelled worse. He's sitting in the chair and he's sitting all nice and symmetrical, hands perfectly placed on the chair's wooden arms, feet apart in perfectly matched positions on the bare floor. His head is tilted back slightly but as you face him it's perfectly in line with the straightness of his body. And he's smiling. But not at me because he doesn't even know I'm there. Or Murdock who's been reached first.
The guns are laid out on the table over by the wall. There are seven hand guns, four rifles, a shotgun and a machine gun, and lots and lots of boxes of ammunition. Bolan is leaning against the wall over by the table, arms folded, one leg crossed in front of the other, deliberately not looking at anybody from under his sleepy lids, waiting for me or somebody else to talk to him so he can modestly play down his glorious moment.
But Draper is looking at me. And when he's finished doing that, he looks at Murdock. And when he's made the most of all that he says, “It's pretty, isn't it?”
I take out a cigarette and put it between my lips. Before I can even tear a match out of my book, Draper quickly steps in front of me and lights me with his gold lighter then steps back so as not to block my view any more than he has to.
“It's nice, you have to admit,” he says.
I blow out some smoke and nod my head, looking at the kid.
“So where were you?” Draper says. “Where were you two brilliant bastards while Bolan was completing your part of the deal for you?”
“Looking for this guy, I guess,” I tell him.
“Oh, sure you were,” Draper says. “I bet you looked just everywhere; that's how you came to pick him up.”
I don't say anything; instead I walk over to the table and take a closer look at the display.
“Where did you bump into him?” I ask.
“I'll give Jim here the pleasure of telling you that,” Draper says. But Bolan has mistimed his moment because he started talking at the same time Draper did, so he has to clear his throat and start all over again.
“We had a little luck, I guess,” Bolan says. “The guy's only been staying a week at the place we picked him up. So the proprietor of the place, the place being the kind of place it is, he took a look in the guy's room while the guy's out buying some more Horse or something. While he's looking around, he sees all this stuff only he's got to get down on his hands and knees so's he can see it because it's under the bed and it's all wrapped up in a couple of topcoats. And even before he's peeled the topcoats away, he's got a pretty good idea of what he's going to find. And this proprietor, he likes to keep well in with a particular guy on the force and so he calls him up and tells him that while he's not especially interested in guns himself, he knows we are and if we want any there's some over at his place.”
“His place being?”
“Mackay's Rooming House.”
“Mackay's,” I say, bending over the table and taking a closer look at some of the hardware.
“Not exactly a place you could overlook considering the kind of place you were supposed to be covering.”
“That's right, I guess,” I say, straightening up and turning around to face Draper. “Only one thing though, Mackay's isn't exactly close to anywhere on my brother's route.”
“So what are you trying to say?” Draper asks me. “That this high flier's got a mind like an I.B.M. computer? Is that what you're trying to say?”
“No,” I tell him. “But sometimes he comes down. He came down long enough to write the note; he came down long enough to get this little arsenal together and get it to Mackay's.”
“Listen, the guy's what he is. Don't give me any crap about this reason or that. We know and you know you missed him, and whatever you say now is governed by that particular fact.”
I let him think I'm thinking about that for a moment and then I say, “So you got a guy and you got some guns,” I say. “Now I didn't want to seem overly naive because in different circumstances I'd have wanted this guy to be the man then he'd be the man. But I'd just like to ask, apart from the guns, what actually ties him in with the coming attraction?”
Draper shakes his head and says, “Jesus.”
Bolan unfolds his arms and then refolds them the other way around.
“Paper like the paper he stuck the message on. The glue he stuck it with. Scissors, a pile of magazines and newspapers all cut up. We found things like that.”
There is a short silence.
“Satisfied?” Draper says.
“Like they say on T.V., it looks open and shut,” I tell him.
“Nothing's shut about this case until your brother's out of this town. This guy changes nothing. There could be a dozen others in town just crazy enough to try what this guy did. So get your asses out of here and get back on the street and do it right this time.”
I look at the guy sitting on the chair.
“When did he start flying?” I ask. “On the way over in the squad car?”
“What do you mean by that?” Draper says.
I shrug.
“Just seems kind of odd. He goes out to get his groceries and instead of waiting till he gets home, he fixes himself someplace like a public toilet, someplace one of our vigilant men from another department could bust him and his little future arrangement.”
“Now, lookâ” Bolan begins, unsticking himself from the wall but Draper cuts him off.
“Forget it, Jim,” Draper says. “He's just trying to ride you because he's taken a fall himself.”
Bolan leans back against the wall.
“Just get back on the street and leave all the figuring to those of us in the department who can still actually figure things,” Draper says to me.
“Come on, George,” I say to Murdock. “We better go see if we can find one of these ourselves; otherwise we might never get the kind of respect that Bolan has.”
“Yeah,” says Murdock, and walks past me to open the door and go out.
“Nice job, Jimbo,” I say as I go toward the door.
“Yeah, except it should have been yours,” Draper says.
I close the door behind me.
“Beautiful,” Murdock says. “They really thought they were beautiful in there.”
“They were,” I tell him. “Two of the Beautiful People.”
Murdock is gripping the steering wheel and glaring at the street and its traffic and its people as if each element in his field of vision has contributed to his own present state of mind.
“Those bastards,” he says, and I don't say anything because Murdock's remark doesn't require any answering. He takes a left and then he says, “So that's the way they had it figured. They show us the kid, we ease off all around. A hit's made but we can't prove who by because we've let Styles alone and therefore he can make the hit from wherever he likes. And we don't know where that is because we're just covering the kind of garbage they had in there with them. And he's also nice cover for the Department because they at least got something to show the world evidence of vigilance because they have someone they can prove intended to take your brother. Christ, they'll keep him so high he'll never even know they're not busting him for flying.”
“George,” I say, looking at my watch. “The call from Fleming'll be coming through in ten minutes, so leave the story a bit alone will you and concentrate on us getting to Sammy's in time to take the call.”
“I'll get us there,” Murdock says. “What I'll do to get us out of this traffic jam is to get out of the car and make like King Kong.”
But while he's talking, the traffic starts to move again and in a couple of minutes we're at Sammy's and I get out while Murdock cruises off to find a spot to park. Sammy's is a little bar that has a few regulars, not the kind of place you'd walk by and think now there's a nice place to drop in for a drink. But Sammy doesn't miss those people because he runs the bar more for pleasure than for business because Sammy is a retired man. He used to be an explosives man, working on a freelance basis, but one time he made his one and only mistake that cost him one hand, one arm, and an eye. Luckily for him he'd made plenty and he'd had a good lawyer and a wife who thought he was the sun and the moon and Gulf and Western. So while he'd been inside, his wife had fixed the little bar up for him and he liked it because people he'd worked with from the old days would drop by and chew the fat. His wife would be there doing most of the work, but from time to time Sammy would like to show off how he could fix a drink with his mechanical limbs. I drop in from time to time and he likes that, too, because we always got along, unlike the relationships between myself and some of his other regulars, and that adds a little edge to Sammy's pleasure whenever I drop by. And this visit, it's no different.
“Mr. Boldt,” Sammy says. “A pleasure, this is a real pleasure.”
He stretches out the arm which still has some of him on it and I take hold of the cold steel that's on the end of it and I say, “Same goes, Sammy.”
Sammy's wife smiles her pleased smile. She's a hell of a lot younger than Sammy, in her late thirties. There's been plenty of takers in her time with Sammy, especially while he was away, but she's never availed herself of any of these offers. I should know because I've made her an offer she was able to refuse on more than one occasion. And here she stands, basking in her husband's pleasure, no feelings of animosity toward me because of what I've tried to pull in the past, and able to rationalize her husband's pleasure at someone who would have fucked him behind his back, if that event had been possible. There are half a dozen other people in the place, all minor faces; I know them and they know me but they're content to be around the atmosphere Sammy's generating because they're thinking that maybe if they were somewhere else, I'd be there other than for the apparent social reasons.
Sammy goes on for a while about why haven't I been in and while he's doing that Murdock comes in, and although he gets the same kind of welcome I get, Sammy and the rest of them get the picture that there's some business on. So it's made easy for Murdock and me to retreat from the bar and sit at one of the tables that run all down one side of the bar.
“Parking in this fucking town,” Murdock grumbles.
I take a sip of my drink and then the phone rings. Sammy's wife picks up the receiver and then she says something to Sammy and he calls over that the call's for me. He puts the set as far down the bar as the wire will allow and then he goes back to his crowd down the other end. I pick up the receiver and speak my name. “So far,” says Fleming, “this is what I have; the guy leaves where he's at and he takes a cab to the address you gave me. He's in there five minutes or so and then he comes out again and gets back in the cab along with the kid. Then after that the cab takes them to the park where they're still at. The only guy the guy's talked to is a guy selling candy. Nothing. But the other party, she leaves where they're staying an hour or so after the guy. She goes nowhere in particular; by that I mean she also takes a cab and goes downtown and wanders around all the big stores, just looking, except there's this one place, a unisex boutique place and she spends some time in there. While she's in there, this young guy goes in and while a shirt she's buying is being wrapped, the young guy strikes up a conversation with her. She doesn't seem to mind too much, insofar as when they leave the boutique they leave together and make for the nearest coffee shop. When they're in there, it looks as if a new romance might be blossoming over the coffee cups because they're getting along just fine. So fine that she takes a pen and some paper out of her purse and it looks as though he's getting her address and phone number.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then they leave the coffee shop and go their separate ways smiling but separate. How'm I doing?”
“Fine,” I tell him. “Tell me what the young guy looked like.”
He tells me.
“And where's the girl now?”
“Back home.”
“Fine. What you've told me I've got to think about. When the guy you're on goes back to his place, you call me here. If I'm not here, my alter ego will be. He'll talk for me.”
“Suit yourself,” Fleming says. “By the way, how's my percentages?”
“How do you mean.”
“Well, I'm still walking around. Is that bad or is it good? I mean, the more I'm still around, are my chances lessened or is it a good sign?”
He puts the phone down and before I can go back to Murdock and tell him the news. Sammy ambles down to where I am holding two fresh drinks in his machinery and he puts them down on the counter in front of me.
“Two more,” Sammy says. “Two more for two Good Guys.”
“Yeah, well the Bad Guys always could afford to buy them,” I say to him.
Sammy laughs and picks up the drinks but before I can turn away from the counter Sammy says, “You know I don't ever say anything like this before, Mr. Boldt, but there's only been two times you did business from here before. Once was fine because I never heard nothing about that one time, but the other time there was plenty of shit hitting fans all over town.”