“You’re telling it.”

“Okay, I am. So he sees her get up and make the bell, and a minute later he hears the buzzer. He gets out of there like a shot.”

“With the money?”

“Sure with the money. But he’s probably not even shifted into third before it hits him. A fat lot of good it’s going to do him to scram if she’s lived long enough to talk. For all he knows she could have come up to borrow a Band-Aid. Hell, she may live to be ninety, and either way he’s damned sure got to find out. He comes back and watches the place. I come out twice, and the second time I take off in the MG.”

“And he comes over and walks in. Through the door you’ve conveniently forgotten to lock.”

“Hell, Nate, I left the keys under the rubber for Dan.”

Brannigan didn’t say anything.

“So what else?” I said. “The minute he gets inside he knows he’s done murder. He also knows that if she’s talked you’ll have him on it so fast it will make him nauseated. But if he plants the money here it’s my word against his — and I’m the one with the dead horse in the bathtub.”

“Fine,” Brannigan said. He had taken out a cigar. “But if she hasn’t talked he’s throwing the money away.”

“Wouldn’t you? You going to take the odds that she didn’t spill? Standing here with the body on the floor and me possibly on my way to the police at that very moment? You leave the coin, Nate. You leave it and you pray like hell at the same time that she didn’t talk so you’ll be out of it completely. You can’t get a much better bargain for the price.”

Coffey had gone to the bottle. “You’ve got the killer’s impulses figured out pretty clearly for pure speculation, Fannin,’’ he said sarcastically. “Any of this based on anything you know and haven’t told us, maybe?”

I let the sarcasm ride. “It’s based on what didn’t happen.”

“Namely?”

“Namely that the guy didn’t come up and try to take me out myself while I was still here. A pro wouldn’t take the chance that I could tag him for it. It’s got to be somebody who didn’t intend to do it to start with, and who chickened out fast after it happened.”

“How do we know he saw her get up?” Coffey said. “Suppose she lay there a minute. Suppose the guy drove off and left her for dead?”

“Say what you mean. You mean there wasn’t anybody out there at all.”

“I didn’t say that, Fannin.”

I turned to Brannigan. “Look, Nate, if there’s anybody else in it but me it’s got to be my way. He sees her come in because he comes in himself. If the guy drives off like Coffey says then there’s no point in putting him out there to start with, because it means I’ve got the dough all along. It kills the motive for anybody else. It means I knife her on my own doorstep and then come back up and wait while she crawls up after me. She’d do that. And I’d leave the loot stashed away with my sweat socks. I’m clever like that. Just like I’d have Dan call you. Hell, I’d call the papers, too. I’d print invitations. Come see Fannin electrocute himself. One wire in his ear and the other up his back. Free smoked mussels for everybody.”

“Fannin, I didn’t accuse you,” Coffey said.

“Who the hell did you have in mind, W. C. Fields?”

“Look, Fannin — bug off. The body’s in your apartment. The money’s here. The victim’s your ex-wife. So you come back three or four hours after you should have, tossing off some story on pure spec, and you get touchy if I question any part of it. Well, you can shove your touchiness, friend. You greasy private Johns give me a swift pain anyhow. If I made a list of every time one of you meddlers make us take three weeks to do what we could have done in three hours the department wouldn’t have enough paper to type it on. For my money you still got a lot of scrubbing to do before you stop smelling bad.”

If Brannigan hadn’t been there Coffey probably would have spit on the carpet. He sat there eyeing me like something in the gutter he’d stepped in on the way to work.

“Funny,” I told him, “I’ve got a list, too. Not as significant as yours, Coffey, just something I think about when I run out of comic books. People who’ve given me kicks, added an extra dimension to my prosaic life. Guys like, say, Einstein, Gandhi, Adlai Stevenson, Toscanini, Willie Mays — people like that, you know? And you know something else? There ain’t a cop on the list. Not one.”

“You’re funny as sick people, Fannin. Be funny, what I said still goes. Who the hell are you that I got to wear kid gloves? You somebody’s favorite nephew all of a sudden? Chew nails, huh?”

It wouldn’t get any pleasanter so I let it drop. His wife had to live with it, not me. Probably some of it was my own fault anyhow. They weren’t setting any departmental records to get her off the floor over there. The room was still for a minute.

“You girls about finished?” Brannigan said.

Coffey grunted.

“Take a drink,” I told him. Mine was on the floor near me and I picked it up and stared at it.

Brannigan made a clicking noise with his teeth. “All right, it’s as handy as we can establish for now.” He turned to the stenographer. “Pete, get out that description on Sabatini first of all. And run a check on that Adam Moss, too; see if there’s any file on him just in case. You might as well get started now. Call in on the way and put through the stake-out for that Perry Street address, my authority.”

“Right, Captain.”

“And take the money in. Report the recovery of it, but tell the insurance mob it’s impounded indefinitely. They’ll probably be on your neck in four minutes. And put through the pick-up on that cousin of Sabatini’s in Troy.”

“Yes, sir.” I watched him load the satchel. He threw a half salute like a scarecrow flapping in a breeze and when Brannigan returned it he went out. Brannigan got up and walked into the kitchen. Water ran into a glass.

“So it all hinges on who she’d go to,” he said when he came out. “Whose doorbell she’d push when she found herself in a jam. No family besides the mother and sister?”

“None.”

“Then I suppose we check with the Kline girl first, get a list of everybody she can tie in with the deceased.” He stared at Cathy for a minute, then at me. “It’d seem like there’d be a fair-sized list of names.”

“And no-names.”

“One-night stands?”

“Something like that.”

He cursed once, chewing on the cigar. It wasn’t burning. “You want to call the Kline girl?”

“I’m working with the department?”

“You don’t think maybe it’s about time?”

“Nuts,” Coffey said.

“You got a problem, Art?”

“Damn it, yeah. There’s nothing in the book says we got to play potsie with some hot-shot peeper just because he used to be married to the dame.”

“Report me,” Brannigan said. “I haven’t had a reprimand in fourteen years. The commissioner probably stays up nights worrying that I’m getting complacent. You going to make that call, Harry?”

“Right now,” I said. I dug out the slip of paper with the Gramercy Park address and number. My hand was no more than six inches from the phone when it started to ring.

“Let me,” Brannigan said. “If somebody’s checking on what happened to his investment it might just relax him into a slip or two later on if he figures you’re not running loose.”

He lifted it as it started its third ring. He said, “Brannigan, Homicide,” and then nothing else. All of us were close enough to hear the click and then the dead buzzing.

He stood there for a minute, holding the receiver and looking at the chewed end of his cigar. “Don’t you just love a son of a bitch who’d tease like that?” he said then.

CHAPTER 11

Sally Kline said on the phone that there were only two or three people Cathy had seen with any regularity. One was a writer on Bank Street in the Village named Ned Sommers. Another was a photographer named Clyde Neva who had a live-in studio loft on East 10th Street. She said Neva was a pretty blatant homosexual.