“Ah!” The grin came back. “Margaret gets her little kicks. How about that, by the way? A glue-footed old linebacker like me, coming up with that kind of class — pretty neat, eh?”

“Sure,” I said. I put the Beretta’s magazine on the bar. “Look, I guess I better scram. The cops are going to rack me up as it is. Also I ought to get in touch with the girl’s father.”

“Well, here, here — call him.” He pointed out a white phone behind me. “No extra motion, that’s my motto. Always was. Hell, you compare college linemen to the boys in the pro game someday. The pros don’t make a move until they see where the play’s going.” He dropped a shoulder and lunged toward me. “Am I right or am I right?”

“I still remember,” I told him. I did. He’d been able to hit like an irritated rhino. And I was thirty-two years old and still enough of a kid to daydream once in a while about the All-America halfbacks I’d worshiped when I was twelve or fourteen. I supposed I could quit all that now. I dug out Grant’s number.

I let the phone ring eight or ten times before I put it back. It was 12:40, but 0. J. Fosburgh had said the man was a drinker. Most likely he would have a corner in a neighborhood bar somewhere.

Constantine was working the bottle again. “Funny,” he said. “Those two girls. I figured it was something personal with Josie, you know? I mean whatever it was between her and this Beatnik writer they booked. But here’s Audrey too. Whatever the connection is, neither one of them will get their money now, poor kids.”

I frowned at him. “Get what money?”

“Well, that’s the thing. They quit on me, both of them. They’d never mentioned it before, but they told me they were distantly related and that they were coming into a lot of scratch. Like I say, I thought it was just one of those things with Josie, so we were still trying to talk Audrey into sticking. That’s why Margaret was down there tonight, actually.”

“This wasn’t two months ago, in July?”

“When they mentioned the money? No — hell, it was only a week, ten days back.”

I stood there. For a minute it did not make any sense at all. Then it started to. If Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about inheriting money, there was only one person I knew that it could be coming from.

I felt as cold as a Christian on the way to the Colosseum.

It must have showed on my face. “Well, listen, fellow, what is it?”

I was already headed toward the foyer. “Just an idea, Connie, but I’ve got to beat it. Thanks for the booze.” I pressed for the elevator, hard.

He followed me. “Well, say, get in touch, will you? I don’t mean just about this — hell, I know you won’t throw my name around with the bulls. Some evening, why not? Strictly social—” He was mauling my hand again. “Old Fannin himself—”

The doors opened, and he stood there grinning at me until they closed again. We were bosom buddies and he knew I wouldn’t mention his name to the cops. Either he was still the campus clown or he was a lot more shrewd than I understood.

It didn’t matter at the moment, either way. Neither did my haste.

Whatever time I got there, Ulysses S. Grant was going to be just as dead.

CHAPTER 19

I stood in front of a door marked 5-D at the end of a corridor which had last been mopped during the candidacy of Alf Landon. There were other doors behind me, all closed, but judging from the odors they would have opened onto three stables and a sty. The Nineties, just east of Broadway. The neighborhood had been more than decent when Grant had first moved in.

Ask a landlord about the rot and he would blame it on the influx of Puerto Ricans. He would be well informed about Puerto Ricans. You would probably have to go to a beach in the Caribbean to find him.

Fannin, the social critic. Try the door, Fannin.

It had taken a cab fifteen minutes to get me across town. I’d pressed a bell at random to get a buzz, since Grant’s had not answered. I could still have been wrong, and there was still that local pub for him to be in. But if Audrey Grant and her half-sister had talked about expecting money this was the only place I knew that it could be coming from.

Try it, Fannin.

A notice for an undelivered telegram was sticking out under the door. I took out a handkerchief before I worked the knob.

I could have been wrong. I’m never wrong. Somewhere down the hall a baby began to cry and I closed the door behind us, against the sound.

A window was open, and in the brief draft a single feather stirred near my foot, then fell again. He’d bought that white shirt.

Another body. Describe it, Fannin. The bullet which took him on the cheek, shattering too much bone to be a.22 this time. The mess where it had emerged at the base of his skull, making it a.38 at least. The whole thing, like how many others? It didn’t make me light-headed this time. I slumped against the wall and stared at my hands, not upset either, just tired.

There were more feathers. They were from an ordinary bedroom pillow which had been used to muffle the report. I wondered remotely if the feathers were goose down.

What else, Fannin? A smashed alarm clock on its back, its hands stopped at 5:47. That was a mistake, although a minor one. Grant had been in my office at 5:47. But he had still been dead three or four hours longer than his daughter, which seemed to be the point the killer had hoped to suggest. He was cold as oceans.

There was a phone. I used the handkerchief again, dialing Western Union. A woman with seaweed in her mouth repeated Grant’s name and address and then said: “‘For information about your daughter try a man named Constantine. Can be located through Morals Squad.’ The message is signed, A Friend.’” I thanked her.

I wasn’t with it. I wasn’t anywhere. Every seemingly logical thought in my head went just so far and then reversed itself like a buttonhook. If Josie and Audrey had anticipated an inheritance they had to have been involved in Grant’s murder themselves. But then they would not have talked about it. Also they should not have been dead.

Button, button, who’s got the button? Not Fannin, not now. I lifted the directory and fumbled pages until I found McGruder, D., Christopher St.

It rang twice. Grant was on the floor in back of me. His daughter was on the floor three feet from where it was ringing. My hand shook.

“Detective Toomey.” A voice said.

“This is Fannin.”

“Oh, brother — where are you?”

I gave him the street number. “I’ve got another one.”

He whistled. “A couple more, you can start charging the department a commission.”

“Yeah.”

“But don’t tell anybody I’m making with the jokes. You’re lucky the sergeant’s in the next room or you’d hear the steam through the wire. You better get yourself down here fast, chum.”

“I just leave this for whoever wanders in?”

“Since when would that be a new trick for you? Hell, stay there, I guess. We might even do you the honor ourselves— we’ve accomplished about all we can in this madhouse anyhow.”

He hung up. I felt like a crankcase full of sludge. I needed draining.

The place was cluttered. Everything was scarred, dilapidated. There were thousands of books. A console phonograph was fairly new, and there were at least two hundred records stacked near it. There was a complex radio mechanism, and there was a tape recorder.

The playthings of a man almost blind, who would have given special devotion to sound. There was no television set.

More books in cartons in the bedroom. The bed unmade, and a week’s filthy laundry flung around the floor, looking like soggy flotsam on an unswept strand. An autographed photo of Eugene V. Debs framed on a wall.

A cockroach scuttled along the drain when I flipped the light in the kitchen. Thoreau’s Walden was propped against a sugar bowl on the table, and something called The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha was held open by a half loaf of black bread. A broken Chablis bottle lay on the window ledge.