“I don’t care for gags,” he growled. “Not right now. They killed a cop, or one of them did. You know how much we like that.”
I did indeed and adjusted my face accordingly. “The hell they did. One of yours? Did I know him?”
“No. A dick from the Twentieth Precinct, Jake Wallen.”
“Where and when?”
“This morning, right here. The other side of that partition, in her manicure booth. Stuck a long pair of scissors in his back and got his pump. Apparently he never made a sound, but them massage things are going here off and on. By the time he was found they had gone. It took us an hour to find out where they lived, and when we got there they had been and got their stuff and beat it.”
I grunted sympathetically. “Is it tied up? Prints on the scissors or something?”
“We’ll do all right without prints,” Purley said grimly. “Didn’t I say they lammed?”
“Yes, but,” I objected, not aggressively, “some people can get awful scared at sight of a man with scissors sticking in his back. I wasn’t intimate with Carl, but he didn’t strike me as a man who would stab a cop just on principle. Was Wallen here to take him?”
Purley’s reply was stopped before it got started. Tom had finished with his customer, and the two men with hats on in the row of chairs ranged along the partition were keeping their eyes on the customer as he went to the rack for his tie. Tom, having brushed himself off, had walked to the front and up to us. Usually Tom bounced around like a high-school kid — from his chair to the wall cabinet and back again, or over to the steamer behind the partition for a hot towel — in spite of his white-haired sixty-some years, but today his feet dragged. Nor did he tell me hello, though he gave me a sort of a glance before he spoke to Purley.
“It’s my lunchtime, Sergeant. I just go to the cafeteria at the end of the hall.”