Chapter twenty-one:
Flight from danger
That was a bad few minutes, in that booth.
Even at one-thirty ayem, a flock of nighthawks were flitting in and out of the drugstore, looking for pickups — or pick-me-ups.
I realized how helpless a guy in a phone booth could be if a killer cornered him there. There’d be nothing to do but take it, even if a man had a gun. No room to aim. No shelter to dive beneath. I kept my eyes peeled for cream-colored suits, for weasel-faces like the one on that police flyer, for ruddy-cheeked individuals — while I extracted what I could from Tim.
Dow Lanerd was dead. Bullet in his brain. Found in the bathroom of his suite about an hour before by special Prosecutor’s assistants seeking to get Lanerd’s fingerprints for comparison with the bloody marks on Tildy’s bedroom door. Tim couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether they’d chalked it for murder or suicide. He confined his replies to “Yuh” and “Uh, uh.” Clearly a plain-clothes man was in my office, listening to what Tim said. That’s what he’d meant to warn me about when he’d suggested my phone line was tapped.
I cut it short, told him I’d be in soon’s possible, said nothing about Tildy. It didn’t seem as if she could have had anything to do with Lanerd’s death. Ha!
I didn’t know what to do with her. Hacklin wouldn’t have let her stay in 21MM. Anywhere around the Plaza Royale she’d be taking a big risk. After this third death in the case, not to mention the thin margin by which those slugs had missed us on Atlantic Avenue, I needed no more convincing that she was in extreme danger. Even hanging around in that drugstore was plenty perilous.
I made a quick purchase, whisked Tildy out to the taxi rank on the opposite corner. The driver was half asleep, cap over eyes; he didn’t have an undershot jaw or look as if he’d mashed his nose against the steering wheel in a collision with a hydrant.
It seemed brutal to break it to her cold. I tried to work up to it, step by step. “Remember Auguste, your room-service captain? They arrested him for Roffis’s murder.”