Johnson was around in the morning again. He wanted to talk. I had a split head, I told him to wait. He sat smoking in a chair while Bill and I hulked around and washed our faces and got dressed. Then the three of us went out for coffee.
We went up Broadway to a Bickford’s, and filled our trays. Johnson just had coffee. Bill and I had eggs.
At the table, Johnson stuck a spoon in his coffee and stirred for five minutes without paying any attention, while he talked. “I want to give you a little background on me,” he said. “I run a one-man agency. Maybe one or two jobs a month, enough to stay even with the bills. Last year I made thirty-seven hundred dollars. I hate the job, I don’t know why I stay in. Same way a little grocer down the block from the A&P won’t close up and go get a warehouse job. You keep waiting for something to happen, like in the paperbacks.”
He held the spoon against the side of the cup with his thumb and drank. The spoon handle jabbed into his cheek. He kept watching me while he drank. Then he said, “Most of the time, it’s sitting around waiting for that one or two jobs a month. It’s boring as hell. So sometimes I get interested in something. Like you two. Upstate accents, with the broad A, and you’re living in a medium-price hotel and you’ve got medium-price clothes and a whole middle-class feeling to you. You aren’t the idle rich. And you’re too mad at everybody to be con artists. Besides, you paid me. You’re checked into the hotel by the week, for the cheaper rate. You figure to be here longer than a little, but not long enough to sign a lease on an apartment or get a job or anything like that.”
He swallowed coffee again. When the spoon stuck into his cheek, it made him look wolfish. Otherwise, he looked soft.
“You’re not salesmen or anything like that,” he said. “I’ve been in your hotel room twice, and there’s not a thing there to say somebody’s employed you. There would be. Display case, envelope from the main office, something. You go out late in the morning, you spend all day away. At night, you drink quietly in the room. One of you hires me to check a license plate, and the other one gets mad. Doesn’t want his business told around. The license plate turns out to be stolen. I’m told to go away.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I told you. A ratty office in a ratty neighborhood downtown. It depressed me. You two puzzled me. So I looked you up.” He grinned, bringing the wolf look back. “You’re Willard and Raymond Kelly,” he said. “Sons of a mob lawyer who pulled out of town way back when. Is it your father you’re working for?”
“Not exactly. He’s dead.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Not at all.” I finished the toast and the last of the coffee.
He sat there chewing a thumbnail. He was stupid, but shrewd. I should have left, but I waited. Bill lit us cigarettes.
Then he stopped chewing the nail and said, “Oh.” He looked at me, grinning again. “Do you tell me, or do I go look it up?”
“All right,” I said. “He was shot.”
“Sure. I knew you were looking for something. I couldn’t figure what.” He leaned forward. “All right. I’m a cheap fifth-rate investigator. I can barely scrape up the license fee every year. But I’ve been in this business for twelve years. I have the contacts, I know how to look and where to look. I could maybe save you time.”
I said, “I have one question. Why should we trust you?”
“Because I’m fifth-rate. Poor but honest, that’s me. I’d like to do a job because it’s interesting.”
I chewed my cheek. “There isn’t anything I can think of for you to do.”
His grin was sour. “You two talk it over. You probably won’t find me in the office, but leave a message with the answering service. If you want me for anything, that is.” He got to his feet, took his coffee check, nodded to us both, and left.
Bill said, “I trust him, Ray. I think he’s all right.”
“I want to trust him,” I said, “but I’m not going to.”
“Maybe we could use his help.”
“We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” I lit a new cigarette. We paid our checks and went out to the sidewalk. “I tell you what,” I said. “You go on down to the library and look him up in the New York Times Index. He said he’d been working twelve years. Maybe he made the paper once. I’d like to be able to check him out.”
I told him how to get to the library, and then I went back to the room.
I was there half an hour when Krishman called. He was mad, but controlling it. “I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “that Andrew McArdle was dead.”
“Yes. Heart attack.”
“Did you have anything to do with that? I want the truth. Were you there?”
“We were there.”
“Andrew had nothing to do with your father’s death.”
“And I had nothing to do with Andrew’s. I didn’t want him dead. He knew something. He would have told me, if he’d lived.”
“Knew something? About what? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Somebody told my father to get out of New York. Back in 1940. McArdle knew who.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“He said you were a fool. He said you never knew anything.”
“What? That’s a lie. Andrew wouldn’t say such a thing.”
I said, “Goodbye.” I hung up.
When Bill called, he said, “Twice. Once, he was along as witness for divorce evidence. With a husband breaking in on a wife in a hotel room. Somebody’d killed the wife when they went in. Johnson was mentioned as a witness, that’s all. There were a couple more stories on the murder, but nothing about him.”
“Okay. Any police names?”
“Detective Winkler. Homicide West. They have two homicide offices here, did you know that? East and West.”
“Winkler,” I said, writing it down. “What about the other one?”
“His car was blown up. About three years ago. There was a policeman named Linkovich at the wheel. There wasn’t any explanation, and I couldn’t find any later stories on it at all.”
“Okay, I’ll call Winkler. You come on back. How long ago was this?”
“The divorce evidence thing? Four years ago. April or May, I forget which.”
It took a while to get through to Winkler and then he said, “Johnson? Private detective? I’m not sure.”
“There was a woman found killed in a hotel room,” I said. “Four years ago. Her husband and Johnson found her. They were there to get divorce evidence.”
“Yeah, wait a second,” he said. “I remember that. Edward Johnson. Vaguely. What about him?”
“I’m thinking of hiring him,” I said. “But I wanted to get a recommendation I could trust first.”
“Did he tell you to call me?”
“No. I found your name in the Times. The story on that hotel killing.”
“Oh. Because I barely remember the guy. Hold on a minute.”
I held on. After a while, a man named Clark came on the line. “You want a recommendation on Edward Johnson, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay. He’s honest. He’s also stubborn, and a coward. He’s efficient, but don’t ask him to do anything dangerous because he won’t.”
“But he is honest.”
“I think you can count on it, yes.”
I thanked him. Then I looked up Robert Campbell in the Brooklyn phone directory. There were two of them. I dialed the first one and asked for Dorothea and the woman said, “This is she.”
“Wrong number,” I said, and hung up. Then I copied down the address: 652 East 21st Street. I got out the Brooklyn map and the street guide. I found the address, and penciled a route to it. Then Bill came back and we got the car out.