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over the past month. These are rough customers. I know the deputy
inspector I'll get him to keep you out of it."
I thought the girl was taking it all with superhuman calmness. Now I realized
that she was frozen with fear. Her face was colorless, and as I put my arm
around her, I felt her body twitch violently. "Take it easy, Red," I said.
"I'll have to stay on here."
"They're both dead," she said, stepping high over the body of the man in the
doorway without looking down at him. Outside in the swirling snowstorm she
stopped and wound her knitted scarf around her head. She reached up for me and
planted a sisterly kiss on my lips. "Could it work out to be something
special& you and me?" she said.
"Yes," I said. While we stood there a police car arrived, and then a car with
a doctor.
Tony's driver opened the door of the Lincoln for her. I waved, and stood
there a long time until the car could no longer be seen. By the time I got
back to the lobby the cops were there. They were stripping the dead gunmen
naked and putting the clothes into evidence bags.
FIVE
TONY NOWAK'S APARTMENT IS IN THE SEVENTEENTHPolice Precinct, but dead bodies
from those plush addresses go down to the Twenty-first Street morgue and are
put in the chilled drawers along side pushers from Times Square and Chinese
laundry-men from the Tenderloin.
"Can we smoke?" I asked the attendant. The cold room had an eerie echo. He
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nodded and pulled the drawer open, and read silently from the police file.
Apparently satisfied, he stepped back so that we could get a good look at the
holdup man. He came out feet-first with a printed tag on his toe. His face had
been cleaned of blood and his hair combed, but nothing could be done about the
open mouth that made him look as if he'd died of surprise.
"The bullet hit the windpipe," said the attendant. "He died gasping for air."
He closed the file. "This has been a heavy night for us," he explained. "If
it's okay with you guys, I'll go back to the office. Put him away when you're
through with him." He tucked the clipboard under his arm and took a look at
his pocketwatch. It was two-fifteen in the morning. He yawned and heaved the
big evidence bag onto the stainless-steel table.
"Medical examiner had them stripped at the scene of crime just so Forensic
can't say we lost anything." He prodded the transparent bag that contained a
peaked hat, dark raincoat, cheap denim suit, and soiled underwear. "You'll
find your paperwork inside." He twisted the identification tag that was on the
dead man's toe so that he could read it. "Died on Park Avenue, eh? Now there's
a goon with taste." He looked back at the body. "Don't turn him over until the
photographer has finished with him."
"Okay," I said.
"Your other one is in drawer number twenty-seven we keep all the gunshot
deaths together at this end of the room. Anything else you want and I'll be in
the ME's office through the autopsy room."
Mann opened the bag and found the shirt. There was a bullet nick in the
collar.
"A marksman," I said.
"A schmuck," said Mann. "A marksman would have been satisfied with the gun
arm."
"You think this holdup might have a bearing on the Bekuv situation?" I said.
"Put a neat little mustache on Bekuv and send him up to Saks Fifth Avenue for
a four-hundred-dollar suit, gray his temples a little, and feed him enough
chocolate sodas to put a few inches on his waistline and what have you got?"
"Nothing," I said. "I've got nothing. What are you trying to say?"
"Mister snap-shooting goddamn intruder alarm that's who you've got, stupid."
I considered for a moment. There was a faint superficial resemblance between
Bekuv and the intruder-alarm man. "It's not much," I said.
"But it might be enough if you were a trigger-happy gorilla, waiting in the
lobby there very nervous and with just an ancient little snapshot of Bekuv to
recognize him by."
"Who'd think Bekuv would be with us at Tony's party?"
"Greenwood and Hart. Those guys wanted him there," said Mann.
I shook my head.
Mann said, "And if I told you that thirty minutes after we left Washington
Square last night Andrei Bekuv was in his tux and trying to tell the doorman
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that I had given him permission to go out on his own?"
"You think they got to him? You think they gave him a personal invitation to
be there?"
"He wasn't duding up to try his luck in the singles' bars on Third Avenue,"
said Mann.
"And you agreed?" I asked him. "You told Hart and Greenwood and Nowak that
you'd bring Bekuv to their party?"
"It's easy to be wise after the event," said Mann defensively. He used his
tongue to find a piece of tobacco that was in his teeth. "Sure I agreed, but I
didn't do it." He removed the strand of tobacco with a delicate deployment of
his little finger. "These guys in the lobby they didn't ask for cash,
wristwatch, gold tiepin; they asked for his wallet. They wanted to check they
were nervous they wanted to find something to prove he was really Bekuv."
I shrugged. "Wallet, billfold a stickup man is likely to ask for any of these
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