“Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes.”

“How curious. Just like the philosopher.”

“Doesn’t bother me if he doesn’t mind. Something going on down the block there?”

“Evidently. Well, yes, good to have seen you again, Hobbes. Afraid I’ve got to be running.”

“You didn’t notice anything when you passed here last night?”

“Last night?” Spragway frowned fully now. “Here? What makes you suggest that I—?”

“Come off it, mister. You were here all right, drunk as an owl. A little before four. I asked you if you noticed anything.”

He got indignant. “My good man, if I happened to come down this street last night, or for that matter any night, it would be because I live only two blocks away — as you saw on my card and which, it strikes me now, is no business of yours. I am not accustomed to being called an alcoholic. Good day, Mr. Hobbes.”

He turned on his heel and I let him go, the only insurance man in captivity who ever let a prospect slip by without taking an address and phone number. I supposed a respectable drunk would have a lot of practice deliberately not remembering people he’d met when he was boozed up. Even one whose eyes were perfectly clear four hours later and whose breath smelled of nothing stronger than Ipana.

I stood there sucking air through my teeth and thinking about nothing while he disappeared around the corner.

CHAPTER 10

The plainclothes dick in front of my building started toward me with an expression of bored annoyance when I eased the MG between two of the squad cars, all three of which were double parked. He reached the curb being so weary of the stupidity of the unenlightened masses that it was killing him.

“This look like a parking field, Mac?”

“I could have sworn.”

“Move it! Move it!”

“How you going to watch it if I do that? Its evidence. I was even thinking maybe we ought to wrap it in tissue paper or something.”

He grimaced sourly. “Funny man. They been biting their nails upstairs there, waiting for all the jokes. Lets see it, huh?”

I showed him the wallet. He glanced at it and then nodded.

They had cleaned up the blood, or probably they’d let the superintendent do it after they’d gotten their pictures. A well-clipped poodle was sniffing at the sawdust. He went off, limping a little in the left forepaw.

The door was wedged open with a folded tabloid. BERRA HITS TWO, YANKS… something or other, it said. When I turned at the top of the stairs I could see that the apartment door was open also. There was another detective in the hall, a gaunt, underfed younger specimen of the breed with a neck as long as a beer can.

“Fannin,” I told him.

He turned to relay the name inside but he didn’t get to say anything. Young cops rarely do. Brannigan came into the doorway, a beefy, red-faced, Sequoia-size man I’d once seen get jumped by a trio of longshoremen during a rackets case. He hadn’t had time to get his gun unsheathed and so he’d used his fists. He’d left the three of them propped unconscious against a wall like so much garbage. His tie was pulled down now and he was looking at me in a way that was supposed to make me stand on one foot with my head hanging. He got over that in a minute, not saying anything. He jerked his thumb disgustedly and went in.

A hawk-nosed medical examiner I had met once or twice was just leaving. “I’ll send the wagon,” he told Brannigan. He had to step across the body to get out.

Someone had covered her with my raincoat, probably Dan. He was sitting near a window in his shirtsleeves, dark-eyed and unshaven and looking sleepy. He nodded, smoking.

There were dead flash bulbs in a couple of ashtrays and one or two drawers were open. Print powder was dusted around. The laundry bag was on the floor and the money was stacked up in piles of different denominations on the desk. Home. The place looked as inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald.

There was one other detective with Brannigan, a lieutenant named Coffey who was totally bald. The skin under his eyes was pouchy and discolored. Possibly too much night duty had done that, I didn’t know. But it hadn’t put the glaze of menacing resentment in his eyes that you saw the minute you looked at him. That would be part of the personality and it was probably why he was a cop. A grand cop, and I was glad he was there. If we had to use a rubber hose on anybody he’d have two in each pocket.

I said a single filthy word which no one paid any attention to. Finally I went in and walked around to the kitchen and stuck my fingers into five glasses and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d left out earlier. I carried the bottle and the glasses back into the living room. I poured myself about an inch of the sour mash and drank it straight. I poured myself one more, not drinking it, and left the bottle open. “Fannin’s back,” I said. “Party time.”

Coffey took one. No one else did. I went across the room and pulled out a straight chair and sat down where I would not have to face her. Part of her was sticking out, like spillage from a dropped pocketbook.

Brannigan still had not said anything. He was giving me a minute. He had been on the force for twenty years but he could still drink his morning coffee without somebody’s blood in it. I supposed I might as well get to it anyhow.

“Can somebody take it down? I don’t much want to have to repeat it later.”

“The kid can,” he said. “Pete?”

The young flagpole came in from the hall. He already had his notebook out. Brannigan walked across and closed the door and came back. He sat down in the good chair, slumping forward and tilting his hat across his eyes. Dan was still by the window and the kid sat next to him.

“No questions until I’m done, huh? I know how to tell it.”

“Tell it,” Brannigan said.

I did. I gave it to them in detail. I skipped the things Cathy had said, knowing that Brannigan would ask me about that afterward anyhow, and I left out some of the things Estelle had told me, which were purely personal. I didn’t mention Ethan J. Spragway, but I wasn’t sure why, except that the whole business was probably irrelevant. I didn’t make any bones about the kind of life Cathy had been leading, or about why we’d split up. I suggested that it would be a good move to stake out the Perry Street apartment on the chance that Duke might nose around there during the day. I had been talking nineteen minutes when I finished.

“What did the girl say when she came through the door, Harry?”

“She was dying, Nate. She knew she was. She told me she was sorry about things.”

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

Brannigan sat up and pushed his hat back. “Somebody followed her here from wherever she’d gone after two o’clock. He knifed her for forty-two thousand dollars. And then he came upstairs and made you a present of it.”

I didn’t answer him. “The rest will be pure speculation, Pete,” he said. “You can cut it there.” He jerked his tie lower across his shirt. “I hate to begin hot days with guesswork, Harry. But you might as well.”

“No premeditation,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“He was looking for the money, not trouble. Maybe he thought he could talk her out of going to anybody else about it, I don’t know. Anyhow all he wanted was more conversation on the subject. And probably she had the stuff in her hand when she walked back to the guy’s car. I don’t know in what, but the guy’d seen it when she first went to him.”

“Canvas sack.” Brannigan motioned and I saw it on the floor at the side of the desk.

“All right, she’s carrying that. He wants it, and bad, but this time she tells him to make his pile some other way. Maybe this sets it off, maybe something else, but either way it’s quick, so probably they’d had the start of an argument about it before. And then they’re not arguing anymore. The guy grabs the sack but at the same time he sees that she’s not dead. He panics, but he hasn’t got the guts to stab her again. So what does he do?”