The Erection Set

It threw them a little off base. That and something else they hadn’t put their finger on yet. The one who identified himself as Sergeant Tobano said, “Can you account for your whereabouts today?”

“Every minute.”

“Witnesses?”

“All the way. Why?”

He held out his hand and the other one handed him a manila envelope. He tapped the package against his thigh and watched me. “How about, let’s say, eleven thirty this morning.”

“We had just gotten back into the city.”

“We?”

“Two friends of mine and the driver of the car.”

“Go on.”

I took another pull of the drink and put the glass down so I could get a cigarette out. “We dropped my lawyer friend off ... his name is Leyland Hunter, by the way, then my other friend, female Caucasian named Sharon Cass, and I got out at the garage and I walked her home.”

“What garage?”

“Beats me. It’s in the East Fifties.”

“Denier Garage?”

“Now that you mention it, yes.”

He opened the envelope and drew out two eight by ten photos and handed them to me. I held them out in front of me and looked at them. Beside me Lee’s breath gagged in his throat. Bridey-the-Greek and Markham were enough to make anybody gag. They both looked dead as hell with all the blood around Markham’s face and the ice pick still stuck through the Greek’s balls.

“Messy,” I said.

“Recognize them?” the cop asked me.

“Am I supposed to?”

“That’s not the question, Mr. Kelly. Look at them again.”

“So it’s two guys laid out in a public john.”

“How do you know it’s a public john?”

“Who has urinals in their house anymore?” I said without taking my eyes off the photos. I was beginning to enjoy myself. “Where do I fit in?”

“That’s the toilet in the Denier Garage. You were in that toilet when you were there.”

“That’s right. I asked the attendant for directions, had my friend wait for me and went to take a leak. I finished, buttoned up my fly and left.”

“Did you see these two?”

“Not when I went in.” I handed the photos back and he stuck them in the envelope. “How did I come into this?”

“The attendant remembered the limousine you came in. We checked the license out, contacted your friend Leyland Hunter and he gave us you.”

“I can give you my other friend’s address too if you want.”

“Never mind. We have that.”

“So?”

The two cops glanced at each other, not quite decided whether to be puzzled or aggravated. The younger one said, “We thought you might have seen something. They came in right after you. One wanted to know if that alcove went out to the street. The attendant said it went to the john and they headed in that direction.”

“There wasn’t anybody around when I came out,” I told him. “There were plenty of parked cars, though. Somebody could have been behind them.”

Sergeant Tobano’s mouth was in a taut smile. “You didn’t seem very shook up over those pictures. Not like your friend here.”

“I’ve seen dead men before, Sergeant.”

“These aren’t dead, Mr. Kelly.”

Lee breathed a quiet Damn!

They both moved toward the door. “Okay, thanks. We may check back.”

Tobano was reaching for the doorknob when I asked him, “Who took those pictures, Sergeant?”

“A free-lance photographer who happened on the scene right after you left. He ought to make himself a buck from them.”

“He a suspect?”

“Nope. One of the boys who parked cars happened to go in with him at the same time. The other guy fainted.”

“Queasy stomach,” I said, and picked up my drink.

“Some people are like that,” the sergeant told me.

When they left, Lee half ran to the bar and poured himself another drink. He finished that one and made another before he turned around. A shudder ran across his shoulders and he swirled the ice around in his glass. Finally he raised his head and stared at me. “You lied to them, Dog, didn’t you?” ,

I finished my drink too and joined him at the bar for another.

“Yes.”

“You actually saw them there ... that guy with his face all mashed in and the other one ...”

I raised my glass in a silent toast. “Hell, buddy, I did it to them.”

XI

I knew the call would come so I sat up and waited for it. At ten minutes past three the phone rang and I told Chet Linden to meet me at the Automat on Sixth Avenue. There was a deadly evenness to the tone of his voice and I could feel the mad seeping up my arms into my shoulders.

Why the hell couldn’t they lay off me? I wasn’t an unknown quantity they had to speculate about. They knew damn well what was going to happen if they pushed too far. When you make it through the hard way you aren’t about to take any shit from anybody anytime. A lot of tombstones spelled that out loud and clear.