LITMIR.BIZ

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another minute without speaking, occupied with our individual thoughts. Billy took the can of warm beer off my desk, drank half of it and made a face.

      “Delicious,” he said. “But niverth’liss, Mr. Pool, I’d like to know when ye’ll be a puttin’ in the refrigerator.”

      “Niver,” I replied.

      “Warm beer’s bad fer me,” he complained. He coughed pitifully into his woolly cap, but for him it wasn’t much of a cough, sounding no worse than a leaky inner tube being blown up by a leaky tire pump.

      Ti-lo rose from the divan and walked to the doorway. For a thoughtful moment, she looked across the street at the cop shop.

      She came back to the desk and looked directly into my eyes.

      “What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

      “About what?”

      “About Felix?”

      “What can I do?”

      “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

      It was my turn to do a little head shaking. “I’m not a detective and I have no desire to be one. I’m a bail bondsman and it’s a nice, safe business and I want to keep it that way.”

      “You mean you won’t even try to find out what happened?”

      “I didn’t say that.”

      “Then you will find out what happened to Felix?”

      “I’ll try.”

      “Will you want some money? I have a little.”

      I shook my head again. “Let’s not let commercialism intrude into what could be a beautiful friendship. Besides, I don’t mail my bills out till the last week of the month.”

      “Billy, how about getting the details on what happened to Felix?”

      Ti-lo pouted prettily. “You won’t go yourself?”

      “I’d rather stay here with you,” I said. “You look like you still need comforting.”

      “Watch him, miss, when he starts that comfortin’ routine,” Billy warned as he walked out the doorway. Suddenly he turned and beckoned to me.

      I followed him and this time we stood far enough away from the door so she couldn’t overhear.

      “Ye know I’ll be no good over there,” Billy said. “I’m okay at gettin’ th’ drunks out but I don’t know nuthin’ about dead men and I’m not wantin’ to know.”

      I scowled at him. “You know damn well I can’t go.”

      “Sure and maybe ye better,” he said. “Sure and how d’ye think ye’ll ever be gettin’ cured if ye don’t meet it head on?”

      “I don’t think so,” I said.

      He tapped me vigorously on the chest. “And what about Kreena? Ain’t this the first good opportunity ye’ve had? With two Chinamen in the case already, ye might well run into a few more.”

      “Filipinos,” I corrected. “And I suppose you’re right.”

      “Tis as clear as Mrs. McCarthy’s wash water.” He shoved me in the general direction of the cop shop. “Don’t worry about it—don’t even think about it—and ye’ll be all right.”

      I went, but I was none too happy about it. I was all right so long as I was in the cop shop’s main lobby, because the side doors to the street were open. The jail, unfortunately, is on the seventh floor and as soon as I got in the elevator I had that hemmed-in feeling. It was as if the walls of the elevator were closing in on me, starting to crush me. I tried very hard to ignore those damn walls even though I knew it would no no good. Claustrophobia can’t be ignored. By the time we got to the seventh floor, I felt like I was in a coffin, a narrow metal coffin jammed so close around my body and head that I could bite into the the cheap, forty-cents-a-yard satin the undertaker had lined it with.

      I felt better, but not much better, as I stepped into the jail’s main hallway. The sight of all those gray-painted bars and walls made me feel nauseated. There wasn’t an open door anywhere. The elevator was the only way in and out, and it had departed after depositing me in the hall.

      I walked over to the booking desk.

      “Pia was my client,” I told Sergeant Winebrenner. “Where’s the action? I’m in a hurry.”

      I always talk fast when I feel lousy and Winebrenner frowned at me.

      “Okay, okay,” he said in a fatherly tone. “Calm down, Lew. Calm down.”

      He led the way to the drunk tank, passing through two sets of heavy iron gates which he unlocked and then relocked as we walked along. The locks snapping behind me, made me remember the filthy black hole where I had spent fourteen months in solitary.

      I figured I could take maybe ten minutes of this—no more.

      There was a gang of guys in the drunk tank. Most of them were Johns, uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives. They were busy taking pictures, measuring distances and gabbing among themselves.

      “Where is he?” I asked Winebrenner. “Where’s Felix?”

      “Across the street at Clapper’s,” Winebrenner said. “In the icebox.”

      “What about his stuff? His clothes and personal stuff?”

      “Lowney took ’em. He’s down in Detectives.”

      I stood there a few minutes, feeling sick. The Johns had used yellow chalk to draw the figure of a man on the concrete floor. It was unintentionally a Virgil Partch-type of thing—the head too large, the legs and arms stubby and thick. From the way it was bent in the middle I assumed Felix had been sitting on the floor, his back against the inside bars, There was another chalk line drawn on the floor to represent the path of the bullet. It originated in a large cell along the far south wall, passed through still another cell and then entered the drunk tank.

      “It hit him in the back?” I asked Winebrenner.

      “Yeah.”

      “Did he say anything before he died?”

      “Not a thing.”

      “Who was in the other cell, the one where the gun was fired?”

      “Four guys,” Winebrenner said. “They got ’em down in Detectives.”

      “You find the gun?”

      Winebrenner shook his head.

      “Don’t you consider that a little embarrassing?”

      “Why should we?”

      “Where’s your professional pride?” I said. “Isn’t it kind of sloppy of you guys to let some citizen sneak a gun in here, knock off another citizen and then hide the gun—right under your big noses?”

      He merely blinked at me, but I could tell I’d gotten to him, because above his dark blue collar his plump neck was turning red.

      I grinned at him, turned to watch one of the Johns flash another picture and then abruptly I felt sicker and the gray bars started closing in on me, like a platoon of thin soldiers marching toward me from four directions.

      I leaned against Winebrenner’s heavy shoulder.

      “I’m sick,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

      “You and your big yap,” he said. “I oughta let you stay here till you molt, like a pigeon with the pip.”

      He didn’t mean it. He started walking fast, leading me through the mob of Johns and out the two gates. He’s a good guy, the best friend I’ve got in the Police Department. He knows my trouble and what to do about it.

      He

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