Brannigan’s mouth was still set. The carton was sealed with transparent tape and he tore it open. He glanced inside.

Henshaw giggled, clutching the back of his chair. “Like you want to be sure of the contents,” he said, “you sniff it. Ha! Like you could be the coolest cat in coptown, man. Hahahaha!

Brannigan walked across the room and set the carton on top of the piano. It was a fairly new upright, probably the only item in the apartment which did not come with the rent. Everything else had that same twenty-seven-tenants-and-still-holding-its-own look of the stuff in Sally’s place.

When Brannigan turned back he was taking out a set of cuffs. Henshaw had just gotten seated again. He jerked himself upright with his knees drawn up and his heels clutching the front edge of the seat. “Hey, man, like ain’t I been coming on real cooperative like? True now? Am I to be a victim of circumstance? I, Henshaw, innocent bystander? Like I’ve got my rights—”

Brannigan ignored him. He yanked Henshaw’s left wrist toward him and clicked the bracelet into place, then locked the other ring around a narrow steam-heat pipe which ran up to the ceiling next to the chair.

“Like help, now,” Henshaw kept protesting. “For crying out loud, dad, I want a lawyer. I want ten lawyers. I want my agent. You can’t bug me like this, I’m—”

Brannigan took him by the lapels. “Shut up,” he said. He did not raise his voice. “Just shut up and don’t say another word. If you’re clear you’ll get offand that will be the end of it. But in the meantime you’re going to sit here until I straighten this thing out and you’re not going to be any bother. You’re not going to talk unless you’re spoken to. You’re going to be seen and not heard. You’re not even going to breathe too heavily. You got that?”

Henshaw gulped helplessly. He glanced toward me but I did not have anything for him. He opened his mouth, had a second thought, said nothing. He stared at the cuffs as glumly as a stripteaser confronting a low thermometer.

Brannigan had picked up a phone across the room. He dialed a number. When he got it he said, “This is Nate Brannigan, Central. Give me somebody big in Narcotics, will you? Somebody who knows what’s current. Charley Peakes, maybe…Sullivan’ll do. Thanks.”

He looked back to Henshaw while he was waiting. “Where was Leeds last night?”

“We were blowing, your majesty, sir,” Henshaw said bitterly. “This joint over on Second Street. We’re there four nights a week, you know?”

“How late?”

“We retired early, your highness. One A.M., your kingship. We had another session scheduled for après that, but Leedsie wasn’t coming on too cool. Sir. Like he was all shook up on this police bit, comprenez vous? He kept flatting. What occurs if I got to go to the head here? I am like sometimes prone to have complications with my kidneys. They—”

Brannigan had gotten his connection. “Brannigan, Sully. Fine. Listen, an Arthur Leeds, Jones Street — there be a reason why he’d take a dive out a window rather than talk to two cops at the front door?”

The Narcotics man had a gravel voice and I caught a few random words as he talked. He went on for a minute or two and Brannigan frowned once or twice. “Yeah,” he said finally, “working on something else entirely. Just walked in on it. Yeah, dead. No, that’s all right, Sully, I’ll call. But I’ve got what reads like eight or ten thousand dollars’ worth of the stuff sitting on a piano here, so you can send a pick-up on that. I’ve got a pal of his cuffed to a pipe also, name of Henshaw. Might be a delivery, I’m not sure, but I’ll leave him for your boys at the same time. No, never mind, I’ll get a precinct wagon for the body. Right. You want to give me a switch? Thanks. See you in church, Sully.”

He turned back to me while he was waiting for his transfer. “They’ve been sweating him out for months,” he said, “trying to get a make on his contacts. Some bonehead rookie picked him up by mistake two weeks ago and they figured the whole thing was shot. If Henshaw here isn’t their boy it’s dead now completely. Leeds was a heavy traffic point.”

“Me!” Henshaw screamed. He clattered his cuffs. “Hey, now, man, like I declared, I was just here to spin a—”

Brannigan got his other call. “Brannigan, Central,” he said. He gave the Jones Street address. “Corpse impaled on a fence, accident while fleeing interrogation. Central operation. A wagon, one car. No, nothing else, it’s a Narcotics mix. They’re on the way. Right, I’ll be here. Yes.”

He hung up and glanced my way again. “Twice,” he said. “Twice in one morning. That punk through the shop window and now this. Damn it.”

I didn’t say anything. He stood there a minute, staring at nothing, and then he dialed once more. He was looking rotten. “Brannigan,” he said. “Get me Pete Weller in my office.”

I sat down across from Henshaw and took a cigarette. It was my last one.

“Me, Pete,” Brannigan said. “What’s with the Hawes sheet? Coffey make that hotel check? Yeah, I expected as much. You match up the Bogardus story with what came out of Troy? Right. What about the run-down on Fannin’s block? That too, huh? Hospital report on Sabatini? Well, that’s something, at least. What’s on red MG’s? Oh, sweet damn. No, give it to me now, just read them down so I can see if any of the locations sound interesting—”

He listened expressionlessly to something for several minutes. “Hell,” he said finally. “All right, yeah, tell him to keep checking in. No, all looks like a big bust. Yeah. Stick on it. So long.”

He put the phone back and looked at me. “Last Monday I had three different tips on the same horse,” he said somberly. “Three. Thirty bucks I put down, money the wife doesn’t even know I’ve got. You know where the horse comes in? I should have known what kind of week it was going to be.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. Coffey couldn’t get a tumble at any of the hotels. About sixty different overnights and any names in the bunch could have been Sabatini and the girl. The plainclothesmen I had checking your street for possible witnesses got nothing at all, a couple of people might have heard tires screech around three-thirty but nobody bothered to look out of any windows. Sabatini’s all right, but his version of the story pairs up with the other punk’s — no variations, no loose ends to make anything of. All we’ve got are red MG’s. You know how many of them? Forty-one, for hell’s sake. Twenty-eight cops and thirteen hack drivers saw vehicles of that description on the streets last night, but not one of them had any reason to pay attention to plate numbers. Forty-one, all the way from the Cloisters down to the Battery and back, all between roughly two and three-thirty in the morning. Every shoe clerk and his brother drives a red MG, for crying out loud. And not one of the locations fits with anything we know so far — none here or at Neva’s or at Sommers’s. Nobody even saw it parked out in front of your place. Damn it to hell. We’re nowhere, Harry. Except at a nice rosy dead end.”

He walked across the room and parked himself heavily on a studio couch, then took out a cigar and looked at it. When he did, Henshaw began to giggle.

Brannigan heaved the cigar at him. The small man ducked, but he reached out deftly with his free hand at the same time and snatched the cigar out of the air. He righted himself and flipped it into his mouth, wrapper and all, and sat there grinning smugly.

Dead end — except that we’d forgotten to wind up one small aspect of the interrogation. Henshaw had the cigar tilted up at a rakish angle, watching me merrily as I walked across.

“Okay,” I told him, “so like it’s a canary. So swallow it or spit it out. What did Leeds do after one o’clock?”

He wiggled the cigar. He tittered. He slapped his knee. “The Hawes sheet,” he chortled. “Oh, I dig that, oh, yes, oh, yes! That’s what the man said, is it not? The Hawes sheet? What a far-out place to get high! Who needs a measly fix when the Hawes sheets lie awaiting!”