Killing Time

Five

Hezekiah Harcum is Chief of the Winston Police Department. Hezekiah being one of those names, he’s been called nothing but Harcum for the last thirty years or more, and by now he’s almost forgotten that he has a front name too.

After leaving Dan Wanamaker’s office, I walked back down the hall, past the elevators, and through the door marked “Chief of Police — Private — Use Other Door.”

The girl still had her clothes on, but if I’d showed up five minutes later it would have been a different story. She and Harcum were on the green-leather sofa, not quite sitting and not quite lying down. She was blond, doll-faced, big-eyed, and built like a new convertible. Harcum had been in the process of putting the top down.

He saw me and jumped up, howling. “What the hell you coming through that door? You come around the other way, same as anybody else.”

“Since when?” I’d known Harcum all my life. He was a big kid when I was a little kid, and a uniformed cop when I was a big kid, a plainclothes cop when I was just recently a plainclothes civilian, and Chief for the last eight years. I had always come through the private door, and Harcum’d never had a reason for bitching about it before.

He did now. “Since right this minute,” he answered me. “You get the hell out of here and come around the other way.”

The hell I would. I told him to do something to himself that would have left the blonde unemployed, and he growled, “Watch your language.”

The blonde oozed up from the sofa, rearranging herself, and said, “I’ll see you later, honey. For lunch.” She had a voice like warm banana yogurt.

“I’ll pick you up at the motel,” he told her, gushing and gawking all over the place. He escorted her to the private door and patted her on the fanny as she left, with the manner of a small boy being daring. Then he locked the door — which he should have done to begin with if he didn’t want anybody barging in — and turned to glare at me.

“Ease off, Harcum,” I said. “I’ve been coming in that way for years. If you wanted me to start going around the other way, you should have said so around 1946.”

He thought it over, and finally shrugged. “It was a shock, Tim, that’s all. I hadn’t even thought about that door.”

“Looked like you weren’t thinking about much else at all.”

He had sense enough to be embarrassed. Harcum had never been much of a ladies’ man, not even in his prime. Now, at forty-seven, he was less of a prize than ever. Stocky to begin with, years of soft easy exercise-free life with the local law had left him paunchy and double-jowled and stoop-shouldered. His black hair was thinning fast, and no matter how much he combed the remainder over the bald spot the top of his head still reflected light.

Harcum had married early, a mousy little girl even less attractive than he, and gradually she had faded into the background of his life. Three years ago, she’d died — of neglect, I think — and today’s blonde was the first indication that he had some sex life in him yet.

He mumbled a bit in embarrassment, now, and sat down behind his desk. “Model from New York,” he said, not looking at me. “Met her when I was down there on vacation last month.”

“You don’t have to explain her to me,” I told him. “That’s a natural phenomenon. I’m here about last night.”

“Yes,” he said. He looked relieved at the opportunity to change the subject, and spent a couple of minutes fussing importantly through the jumble of papers on his desk. Then he looked up and said, “Tell me about this guy Tarker.”

“Who?”

“Tarker,” he repeated. He checked the paper he was holding, and said, “Alex Tarker. The dead man.”

“The guy who tried to kill me, you mean.”

“Of course that’s what I mean. Tell me about him.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Where you knew him from, what he had against you—”

I shook my head. “You’ve got it wrong, Harcum. I never met him before last night.”

He frowned, with all his chins. “You must have known him from somewhere. Or why else would he shoot at you?”

“There was nothing personal in it,” I explained. “He was doing it for money.”

His frown deepened, and he fastened on me a bad imitation of a gimlet eye. “Did he say so?”

“Harcum,” I said impatiently, “the guy was a professional. Take my word for it. Also, I never saw him before in my life. I— Let me see that sheet you’ve got on him.”

He hesitated, wondering if his professional dignity would be lessened by my looking at his official documents, and finally handed it over, grudgingly. “Just came off the teletype fifteen, twenty minutes ago,” he said.

It was that poor-quality yellow paper they use on teletypes, and the information was typed in huge capital letters, with no punctuation marks. It said the dead man was one Alex Tarker, a minor hood with arrest records in New York and Miami and Baltimore and one or two other places — mostly for assault, with or without a deadly weapon — and a couple of convictions, both of them dating way back. His home base seemed to be New York. The New York cops knew him better than they wanted to know him, but they didn’t want him for anything in particular at the moment.

Harcum interrupted my reading, saying, “Are you sure you didn’t know him from the Army?”

“Marines,” I corrected him. “There’s a difference. And yes, I’m sure I didn’t know him from the Marines. Besides, that was fifteen years ago or more. And besides that, for the fortieth time, he was a pro. He was hired, by somebody here in town—”

He shook his head violently, jowls a-waggle, and said, “I don’t like that, Tim. I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t much care for it myself.”

“No one in this town would do a thing like that,” he said firmly. “I’ve sent a request to Washington for this man’s military record. If he was in the Marines with you—”

“He wasn’t,” I snapped. I knew what Harcum was doing, and why. He knew he didn’t have a chance of finding out who had hired Tarker, so he was busily looking for an out. On the one hand, he had the successful murder of an unknown hood from downstate. Nobody in town knew this hood or cared about him one way or the other, so there’d be no squawk if he came up with nothing on that score. On the other hand, he had the attempted murder of a prominent local citizen, namely me. For that, he had Tarker. Tarker had done the attempting and was now dead. Case closed.

Harcum liked it when he could close a case without having to do much of anything. The only thing that could cause him any trouble in this mess was the finding of the guy who had hired Tarker. That would be a real problem, so he was doing his best to make believe it didn’t exist.

And I was doing my best to make sure it did exist. “Somebody hired Tarker,” I said. “The same guy who killed him.”

“Why, Tim? For God’s sake, why?”

“Citizens for Clean Government,” I said.

He frowned some more. “You’re complicating things, Tim,” he said sourly.

“No, I’m not. I’m simplifying things. You don’t have to send to Washington or New York or anywhere. The guy who hired Tarker is right here in town, probably somewhere in this building.”

“I wouldn’t go making any wild accusations if I were you, Tim,” he warned me.

I shook my head and got to my feet. “You’re an ostrich, Harcum,” I said. “You’ve got a murder to solve, and you’re wasting all your energy trying to make believe it isn’t there.”

“We’re working on it,” he said defensively.

“Who’ve you got on the case?”

“Hal Ganz. He’s my best man, Tim, you know that. He went to police school in Albany and everything. I put my best man on it.”

“Sure.” I went over to the private door, unlocked it, pulled it open, and glanced back at him. His forehead was lined and lips pursed, and he was gloomily studying the teletype sheet. “By the way,” I said, “what’s that blonde’s name?”

“Sherri,” he said, and looked embarrassed again.

“S-h-e-r-e-e?”

He shook his head, and spelled it out for me. “She’s all right,” he added defiantly.

“I’m sure she is. But I’ve got some advice for you.”

“What?”

“Have steak and raw eggs for lunch.”