"We"re not looking for him."
For an awful moment I thought I must have spoken to Durkin during my blackout, that one of us had called the other and I didn"t remember it. But he went on talking and I realized that hadn"t happened.
"We had him over at the station house and we sweated him," he explained. "We put out a pickup order but he wound up coming in on his own accord. He had a slick lawyer with him and he was pretty slick himself."
"You let him go?"
"We didn"t have one d.a.m.n thing to hold him on. He had an alibi for the whole stretch from several hours before the estimated time of death to six or eight hours after. The alibi looks solid and we haven"t got anything to stack up against it. The clerk who checked Charles Jones into the Galaxy can"t come up with a description. I mean he can"t say for sure if the man he signed in was black or white. He sort of thinks he was white. How"d you like to hand that to the D.A.?"
"He could have had someone else rent the room. Those big hotels, they don"t keep any track of who goes in and out."
"You"re right. He could have had someone rent the room. He also could have had someone kill her."
"Is that what you figure he did?"
"I don"t get paid to figure. I know we haven"t got a case against the son of a b.i.t.c.h."
I thought for a moment. "Why would he call me?"
"How would I know?"
"Does he know I steered you to him?"
"He didn"t hear it from me."
"Then what does he want with me?"
"Why don"t you ask him yourself?"
It was warm in the booth. I cracked the door, let a little air in. "Maybe I"ll do that."
"Sure. Scudder? Don"t meet him in a dark alley, huh? Because if he"s got some kind of a hard-on for you, you want to watch your back."
"Right."
"And if he does nail you, leave a dying message, will you? That"s what they always do on television."
"I"ll see what I can do."
"Make it clever," he said. "but not too clever, you know? Keep it simple enough so I can figure it out."
I dropped a dime and called his service. The woman with the smoker"s rasp to her voice said, "Eight-oh-nine-two. May I help you?"
I said, "My name"s Scudder. Chance called me and I"m returning his call."
She said she expected to be speaking to him soon and asked for my number. I gave it to her and went upstairs and stretched out on the bed.
A little less than an hour later the phone rang. "It"s Chance," he said. "I want to thank you for returning my call."
"I just got the message an hour or so ago. Both of the messages."
"I"d like to speak with you," he said. "Face to face, that is."
"All right."
"I"m downstairs, I"m in your lobby. I thought we could get a drink or a cup of coffee in the neighborhood. Could you come down?"
"All right."
TEN.
He said, "You still think I killed her, don"t you?"
"What does it matter what I think?"
"It matters to me."
I borrowed Durkin"s line. "n.o.body pays me to think."
We were in the back booth of a coffee shop a few doors from Eighth Avenue. My coffee was black. His was just a shade lighter than his skin tone. I"d ordered a toasted English m.u.f.fin, figuring that I probably ought to eat something, but I hadn"t been able to bring myself to touch it.
He said, "I didn"t do it."
"All right."
"I have what you might call an alibi in depth. A whole roomful of people can account for my time that night. I wasn"t anywhere near that hotel."
"That"s handy."
"What"s that supposed to mean?"
"Whatever you want it to mean."
"You"re saying I could have hired it done."
I shrugged. I felt edgy, sitting across the table from him, but more than that I felt tired. I wasn"t afraid of him.
"Maybe I could have. But I didn"t."
"If you say so."
"G.o.d d.a.m.n," he said, and drank some of his coffee. "She anything more to you than you let on that night?"
"No."
"Just a friend of a friend?"