Returning to Leonard Street in a taxi, naturally I tried to decide what Saul Panzer was supposed to be doing with two thousand bucks, granting that it was in connection with Eads-Fomos-Jaffee. I concocted quite a list of guesses, beginning with a trip to Venezuela to check on Eric Hagh, and ending with a bribe to Andy Fomos to spill something his wife had told him. I bought none of them.
The five hours’ sleep that I mentioned getting between early Friday morning and Monday morning came Sunday from 4 A.M. to 9 A.M., on a bumpy old couch at the headquarters of Manhattan Homicide West on Twentieth Street. I might be able, by digging hard, to give a complete report and timetable of a hundred other activities I had a share in during that stretch, but I don’t know what good it would do you, and if you don’t mind I would rather skip it. I sat in a couple of dozen quiz sessions, at Twentieth Street, Leonard Street, and Centre Street. I read tens of thousands of words of reports and summaries. Most of Sunday I spent in a PD car with a uniformed driver, with credentials signed by a deputy commissioner, calling on a long list of people who were connected in one way or another with something that had been said by one of the suspects. Returning to Twentieth Street Sunday around midnight, I admit I had in mind the possibility of another date with the couch, but I didn’t get it. Brackets alibi had been cracked. Feeling hot breath just behind him, he was now claiming that he had gone from Wolfe’s house to Daphne O’Neil’s apartment and spent the night there, and she was concurring. When I got in from my Sunday drive, Captain Olmstead was just starting to take Daphne over the bumps, and I was invited to join the party, and accepted. It ended around six A.M. Monday, and my thoughts again dived for the couch, but I didn’t. I had to either get a clean shirt or go off and hide, so I went to Thirty-fifth Street and repeated Saturday’s performance, including a breakfast by Fritz.
Of course I didn’t see Wolfe. I had phoned him once each day, but no mention had been made of murder or Saul Panzer. He was testy, and I was touchy. I looked in the safe again; no more dough had been taken from emergency.
Returning to Twentieth Street, superficially clean and fresh, but pretty well fagged, and no bargain even at half price, I was going along the upper hall when one of my colleagues — for I might as well face it and admit it, during that period Homicide dicks were my colleagues — coming out of a room, caught sight of me, and yelled, “Hey, where the hell have you been?”
“Look at me.” I pointed to my shirt and tie. “Doesn’t it show?”
“Yeah, let me touch you. I was going to send out a general alarm. They want you down at the Commissioner’s office.”
“Who wants me?”
“Stebbins phoned twice. He’s there with the inspector. There’s a car down front. Come on.”
Some chauffeurs of PD cars like to have an excuse to step on it, and some don’t. That one did. He didn’t use much noise, but plenty of gas, and when he was in the fourth grade a maladjusted schoolteacher had made him write five hundred times, “A miss is as good as a mile,” and it sank in. I should have clocked us from 230 West Twentieth Street to 24 °Centre Street. As I got out I told him he should have an insurance vending machine, like those at airports, installed on his dash, and he grinned sociably. “Impressed you, did it, bud?”
It did, at that, but not as much as the assortment I found waiting for me in the spacious and well-furnished office of Police Commissioner Skinner. Besides Skinner and District Attorney Bowen, there were two deputy commissioners, Cramer and another inspector, a deputy inspector, a captain, and Sergeant Purley Stebbins — and they were certainly waiting for me, from the way all faces turned and stayed turned as I entered and advanced.