“Maybe they had us followed. Or maybe somebody tipped them off.”

  “Who?” I shrugged. “But there’s more. Why should they play around with a bomb? They could decoy you with a phone call, then drop you with a bullet on the street. Why get so fancy? Why send you on a wild goose chase to Hector’s? That’s the kind of play an amateur might use. A pro would be more direct. And we’re up against professionals.”

  The coffee finished dripping. She poured out a pair of cups. I sweetened mine with a shot of scotch and let it cool a little.

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s suppose they wanted to search the apartment. They still didn’t have to get cute about it. Did you have anything here?”

  “Nothing they would be interested in.”

  “Well, they might not have known that. But they still could have shot you down on the street and then sent a man upstairs. Or they could break in, kill you, then search. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  We sat there drinking our coffee, tossing it all back and forth and getting nowhere in particular. She started to relax. God knows how. I decided that a card mechanic has to have a sound nervous system, and she was a card mechanic’s daughter. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that passes down a family tree.

  I told her to go to sleep. “Is it safe?”

  “Nothing’s safe,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll be around tonight. It’s late and we’re both half-dead. I am, anyway, and you must be.”

  “I’m kind of tired, Ed.”

  “Sure. We’ll get some sleep and see what happens tomorrow. It’s been their play all along now. Maybe I can start something for our side, set some wheels in motion.”

  “I’m scared, Ed.”

  “So am I. But I’m tired enough to sleep. How about you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I’m all right,” she said. “Uh…you’ll sleep on the couch tonight, won’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Ed,” she said. “Ed, listen, don’t be silly. You’re exhausted and you almost got killed tonight and—”

  “No.”

  “Ed, you’re crazy. Oh, you nut. Ed, Ed, you will sleep on the couch, won’t you?”

  I didn’t—not on the couch…

  SHE FELL asleep right away. I tossed and turned and listened to her measured breathing, and I wondered how the hell she managed it. I closed my eyes and counted fences jumping sheep, and things like that, and nothing worked. I hadn’t expected it to.

  It was still too tangled up to make any appreciable sort of sense. There were just too damned many inconsistencies. I couldn’t figure them out.

  Sleep on it, I told myself. Sleep on it, stupid. And, eventually, I did just that.

  The morning wasn’t too bad. She woke up first, and by the time I opened my eyes she was busy frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. I showered and got dressed and went in for breakfast. There was fresh coffee made and the food was on the table. She even looked pretty in the morning. It seemed impossible, but she did.

  The bacon was crisp, the eggs were fine, the coffee was perfect. I told her so and she beamed. “I had plenty of practice,” she said. “I used to cook for Dad all the time, since my mother died.”

  It was around ten by the time I got out of there. First we had to go over the ground rules. This time, dammit, she would stay in the apartment. This time, dammit, she wouldn’t answer the phone unless it was my signal. Same for the door.

  “Ed—”

  I was at the door. I turned. Her mouth came up to me and her lips brushed mine.

  “Be careful, Ed.”

  Outside, the sun was shining. There was a different doorman on duty. He ignored me—he knew the ground rules there, by George, and the rules said that the doorman took no notice of anyone. They were strictly ornamental.

  I hauled out my wallet, dug out the card I’d gotten a day ago. Just a day? It seemed much longer. I studied the card—Phillip Carr. Attorney at Law. 42 East 37th Street.

  I walked to the corner to save the doorman the trouble of hailing me a cab, and to save myself the tip I’d have had to give him. I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me to Fifth and 37th. It was time to get rolling. Carr and Zucker and the rest of the crooked-card-game set had dealt every hand so far. Rhona and I were just throwing our chips in the center and calling every bet.

  You can do that for just so long. Then it’s time to deal a hand yourself.

  I sat in the backseat and gnawed on a pipestem while the cabby fought his way uptown through mid-morning traffic. Phillip Carr, Attorney at Law. Okay, shyster, I thought. Let’s see what happens.

  NINE

  THE CAB dropped me in front of Carr’s building about midway between Fifth and Madison on 37th Street. I took an express elevator to the twentieth floor, walked along a chrome-plated hallway to a door with Carr’s name on it. I walked in.

  The secretary’s desk was kidney shaped. The girl behind it wasn’t. Her bright red hair had been painfully spray-netted until it had the general consistency of plastic. Her smile was metallic. Her sweater bulged nicely, giving a hint of flesh that the hair and the smile tried to conceal. I told her I wanted to see Carr.

  “Your name, please?”

  “Ed London,” I said. She got up gracefully, wiggled her well-girdled hips on the way through a door marked Private. The door closed behind her. I picked up a magazine from a table, glanced at it, tossed it back. The door opened and the girl came out again.

  “He’ll see you,” she said.

  “I thought he would.”

  Phillip Carr’s office had framed diplomas on the wall from every college but Leavenworth. He stood up, smiled at me, and stuck out his hand for a handshake. I didn’t take it, and after a few seconds he fetched it back again.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m damn glad to see you, London. You were pretty hostile yesterday. I guess you’ve thought things over.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Cigar?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “I thought it all over. Especially what you said about rewards and punishments.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve got a reward for you.”

  He didn’t get it until I hit him in the face. He’d stood there, hands at his sides, waiting patiently for me to tell him what the reward was, while I curled one hand into a fist, and aimed it at his jaw. It was a nice punch. It picked him up and sent him sailing over his desk, and it dropped him in an untidy pile on the floor.

  He came up cursing. He made a grab for a desk drawer, probably to get a gun. I kicked him away from it. He crouched, snarling like a tiger at bay, and lunged for the button that would summon the secretary. I caught him by the lapels and gave him a little push that turned his lunge into a full-blown charge. He didn’t slow down until he bounced off a wall and collapsed onto the high-pile carpet.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “You’ll have a heart attack.”

  “You son of a—”

  I picked him up and hit him a few times. It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do. At the moment, I wasn’t an especially nice guy. Try to kill someone often enough and he’s bound to get riled.

  I hit him in the nose, and some of the cartilage melted down and readjusted itself. I hit him in the mouth and heard a tooth or two snap. He spat them out and stared at them. I hauled him to his feet again and gave him another heave and watched him fall all over the floor.

  The secretary never got in the way. Good Old Miss Girdled-Hips—she only came running when someone pressed the little buzzer. She was the soul of discretion. You could murder her boss in his office and she’d never leave her desk.

  I PICKED him up again. He was breathing raggedly and bleeding profusely. I held him by the lapels and gave him my nastiest glare.

  “Had enough?”

  “Yes,” he panted, fear in his eyes.

  I felt a little foolish. Then I remembered the dynamite blast in Rhona’s apartment, the tommy-gun in Canarsie, the three punks in East New York. I started to get mad again. That was dangerous—I didn’t want to kill the bastard. I dumped him in an armchair and let him catch his breath.

  “This time I’ll talk about rewards and punishments,” I told him. “You’ve got a client and I’ve got a client. Your client is trying to kill mine.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Your client is a man named Abe Zucker,” I said. “He runs a rigged card game and fleeces heavy-money marks. He was doing fine. Then a man named Jack Blake came along and tried a few tricks of his own.”

  And, like a proud little schoolboy reciting the preamble to the Constitution, I read the whole bit to him. First he just sat there. Then he looked amused, and then he started to laugh.

  I asked him what was so funny.

  “London,” he smirked. “You’re a panic. A detective? You couldn’t find sand in a desert.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “What am I getting at?” He laughed some more. “Abe Zucker running a card game,” he said. “That’s a wild one, London. Don’t you know who Zucker is? Abe Zucker is so damned big he wouldn’t waste his time on all the poker games in the country. That’s not his line, London. It never was.”

  “What is?”

  “Nothing just now. He got out of the heavy stuff a long time ago. He put his dough in legit stuff and kept it there. Abe Zucker is cleaner than you are, London. Card games!” He laughed again.

  I kept my eyes on his face, trying to see what I could read there. If he was putting on an act he was good enough for Broadway…I believed him.

  “Card games,” he repeated. “Card games.”

  “Then straighten me out, Carr.” He looked at me, the smile gone now.

  “I wouldn’t tell you the right time, London. Now get out of here—”

  I started to leave when he added, “…you punk.”

  I picked him up, shook him like a rat. “Talk,” I said.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Carr—”

  “You’ll wind up in the river,” he whined. “One word from me and every gun in the city will have you in his sights.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  “London—”

  We weren’t getting anywhere. He wasn’t scaring me and I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. I didn’t need him anymore, not now.

  But he could get in the way.

  I put him out with a good, clean shot to the jaw. It landed right and I got vibrations all the way up my arm to the shoulder. He sagged and went limp. I lowered him back into the chair, folded his hands in his lap for laughs. Then I opened the door and slipped through it.

  The secretary was sitting in her swivel chair. I winked at her and she smiled her metallic smile at me. I wanted to reach over and pinch the place where her sweater bulged. I suppressed the impulse. I had enough problems.

  THERE was a drugstore on the corner of Madison and 36th with a raft of phone booths. I ducked into an empty one, switched on the overhead fan, and dialed Centre Street. I asked the cop who answered to give me Jerry Gunther.

  “I’m in a rush,” I told him. “Just want some fast information. Know anything about a man named Abe Zucker?”

  “I know the name.”

  “And?”

  “Just a second. Lemme think… Yeah.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s an old-timer,” Jerry said. “Was mixed up in everything big. Junk, numbers, women. He was one of the boys who managed to stay out of the papers, not just out of jail. But he was big.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing he talks about?”

  “Nothing at all,” Jerry said. “He doesn’t have to, Ed. He did what they’ve all been doing, made the money illegally and then sank it into legitimate business. He owns a piece of three hotels in Miami Beach and a couple of points in one of the big Vegas casinos. Plus God knows what else. I remember him now, Ed. I saw him once years ago—we had him up on the carpet for something. But that’s ancient history now.”

  “Is he in New York?”

  “Who knows, Ed. He’s clean and nobody cares about him anymore. I think he’s got a big place somewhere in Jersey. I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That all you wanted?”

  “For the time being,” I said. “I may have something for you later on.”

  I GOT OFF the phone, went to the counter, and picked up a couple of dollars worth of small change and a fresh pouch of tobacco. I had to wait for a booth—some fat old lady ducked into mine and she had enough dimes in front of her to talk all day and all night. Another booth emptied and I grabbed it. I dropped a fortune in silver into the phone and called the Continental agency in Cleveland.

  It took a few minutes before I was connected with the op I’d talked to before. I didn’t remember his name, and that had slowed things down. But I managed to get him on the line.

  “London,” I said. “You did a job for me yesterday. Remember?”

  “I remember, Mr. London.”

  “Good. I want the same thing but in depth. I want you to check out Jack Blake and his magic shop. Find out what kind of business the shop was doing, what scale Blake was living on, if he was spending more than he was earning, everything. Run a line on his daughter. Find out what you can about her. Not just a surface job. The works.”

  “When do you want it, sir?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  He laughed politely. “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” I checked my watch—it was a shade past noon. “When can you have it?”

  “Hard to say. Two hours, three hours, four hours—”

  “Give me an outside time. I don’t know where I’ll be. I want to be able to call you and find out what you’ve got.”

  He thought a moment. “Call between five and six,” he said. “We’ll have the works by then.”

  That left me with five or six hours to kill. I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. A man’s home is his castle, but mine might very well be under siege by now. Carr was undoubtedly conscious and undoubtedly sending up a hue and cry, shrieking mightily for the bloody scalp of some private eye named London. For the next five or six hours I wanted to get away from the world. My own place seemed like a ridiculous place to hide.

  I settled on a movie. I sat in the balcony of a 42nd Street movie house, puffed on my pipe, munched popcorn, and watched Ma Barker’s Killer Brood and Baby Face Nelson. I saw both pictures twice, and if you think that’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, it’s only because you’ve never tried it.

  It was five when I left the show. I had a quick dinner at a cafeteria and used their phone to make another call to Cleveland. My op was on hand and he told me everything I wanted to know. I listened quietly, thoughtfully. At the end he said he would send me a bill and I told him that was fine.

  Nothing was fine, though.

  I stayed in the phone booth, sitting, thinking. I made two more calls, local ones. I talked a little, listened a little, hung up. I went on sitting in that booth until a stern-faced man came over and rapped on the door. I apologized to him and left.

  The sun was dying outside, dropping behind the Jersey mud flats. The air was still too warm. I walked for a block or two, checking now and then to see if anybody was following me. Nobody was.

  I thought about the way things can sneak up behind you from out of nowhere and slip you a rabbit punch. I thought about the way you can walk around wearing blinders, and then you can take the blinders off and still not believe what you see. But you see it, and sooner or later it sinks in and your world falls apart.

  I hailed a cab and took a ride to a certain posh apartment house. I walked past a doorman, into an elevator. I rode up in silence. I got out and went to a door. I stood in front of it for a long time. Finally, I rang…I waited…I rang again.

  TEN

  SHE HAD never looked better. Even nude, with a white sheet under that flawless full-blown body and a pillow beneath that ash blond head, she had never looked better wearing a skirt and sweater. She flowed toward me like a hot river and she came into my arms and stayed there.

  I let her kiss me. I ran my hands over her back, felt the firmness of her body, and I waited for something to happen inside me, something I was afraid of: A shadow of response, a flicker of desire.

  It never came.

  “Oh, Ed,” she was saying. “I was so worried. You didn’t call me all day. I was afraid. I thought something had happened to you; I didn’t know what to think.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I tried calling you. You weren’t at your apartment. I must have called you a dozen times but you weren’t there.”

  “No. I wasn’t.”

  She turned coy, twisting in my arms and looking up at me. “You weren’t with another girl, were you? I’ll scratch her eyes out, Ed.”

  And then she turned kittenish again, burrowing her head in my chest and making little sounds.

  I put my hands on her shoulders. I pushed, gently, easing her away. She looked at me, a question in her eyes.

  They must have heard the slap in Canarsie. I hit her that hard, open-palmed, my hand against the side of her face. She stumbled and went down, started to get up, tripped, fell, then finally scrambled to her feet again. Her eyes said she didn’t believe it.

  “You dirty little liar,” I snapped.

  “Ed—”

  “Shut up. I know the whole bit now, Rhona. All of it, from top to bottom. I got some of it here and some of it there and figured out the rest myself. It didn’t take too much thinking on my part. It was all there. All I had to do was look for it.”

  “Ed, for heaven’s sake—”

  “Sit down.” She looked at me, thought it over, plopped down on the orange couch.

  “Jack Blake,” I said, pacing like a caged tiger. “He was a card sharp, all right. And he stopped being a card sharp. Not to go straight, though. Just to change his line of work. He stopped cheating at cards but he found other ways to cheat.