“Yeah, he was that kind. There’s too many of that kind. Not to mention names, but these precinct men—”
A phone rang. Fickler, by the cash register, looked at Purley, who stepped to the counter where the phone was and answered the call. It was for him. When, after a minute, it seemed to be going on, I moved away and had gone a few paces when a voice came.
“Hello, Mr. Goodwin.”
It was Jimmie, Wolfe’s man, using comb and scissors above his customer’s right ear. He was the youngest of the staff, about my age, and by far the handsomest, with curly lips and white teeth and dancing dark eyes. I had never understood why he wasn’t at Framinelli’s. I told him hello.
“Mr. Wolfe ought to be here,” he said.
Under the circumstances I thought that a little tactless, and was even prepared to tell him so when Ed called to me from two chairs down. “Fifteen minutes, Mr. Goodwin? All right?”
I told him okay, I would wait, went to the rack and undressed to my shirt, and crossed to one of the chairs over by the partition, next to the table with magazines. I thought it would be fitting to pick up a magazine, but I had already read the one on top, the latest New Yorker, and the one on top on the shelf below was the Time of two weeks ago. So I leaned back and let my eyes go, slow motion, from left to right and back again. Though I had been coming there for six years I didn’t really know those people, in spite of the reputation barbers have as conversationalists. I knew that Fickler, the boss, had once been attacked bodily there in the shop by his ex-wife; that Philip had had two sons killed in World War II; that Tom had once been accused by Fickler of swiping lotions and other supplies and had slapped Fickler’s face; that Ed played the horses and was always in debt; that Jimmie had to be watched or he would take magazines from the shop while they were still current; and that Janet, who had only been there a year, was suspected of having a sideline, maybe dope peddling. Aside from such items as those, they were strangers.
Suddenly Janet was there in front of me. She had come from around the end of the partition, and not alone. The man with her was a broad-shouldered husky, gray-haired and gray-eyed, with an unlit cigar slanting up from a corner of his mouth. His eyes swept the whole shop, and since he started at the far right he ended up at me.
He stared. “For God’s sake,” he muttered. “You? Now what?”
I was surprised for a second to see Inspector Cramer himself, head of Manhattan Homicide, there on the job. But even an inspector likes to be well thought of by the rank and file, and here it was no mere citizen who had met his end but one of them. The whole force would appreciate it. Besides, I have to admit he’s a good cop.