Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [77]
“Hello?” said a man’s crackling voice through the receiver.
“If he ain’t on that list, Cap, he ain’t dead,” said Stankiewicz.
“Hold the line,” said Littlemore into the telephone. “Know what, Stanky? Don’t argue with me today. Go check the handwritten list.”
“The, um, handwritten list?”
“Hello?” said the telephone.
“Hold the line,” Littlemore repeated. To Stankiewicz, he said, “What do I have to do, spell it for you? You and Spanky made filing cards for all the casualties. I told you to make me a list from those cards. You wrote me the list. I saw it. Then I told you to have the handwritten list typed up. This is the typed list. I’m asking you to go back and check the handwritten list. Okay? The Treasury guy’s name began with R; I saw it on his badge. Maybe you missed some others too.”
“Is anybody there?” said the telephone.
“Um, the handwritten list is gone, sir,” said Stankiewicz.
“Hold the god-busted line, will you?” Littlemore yelled into the receiver. He looked at Stankiewicz: “What do you mean ‘gone’?”
Stankiewicz didn’t answer.
“Okay, Stanky, you threw away the handwritten list. Nice work. How about the filing cards? Don’t tell me you threw those away?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“You better not have. Or you’ll be back on patrol next week. Go through every card. This time make sure you get everybody.”
Alone in his office, Littlemore identified himself to the vice president of the Metropolitan Tennis Association and asked whether an Edwin Fischer had ever won the United States Open.
“Edwin Fischer?” replied the crackling voice. “The gentleman in all the newspapers?”
“That’s the one,” said Littlemore.
“Did he ever win the United States Open?”
“I asked you first,” replied Littlemore.
“Certainly,” said the vice president.
“How many times?” asked Littlemore.
“How many times?”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” said the detective. “More than three.”
“Oh, yes, it was at least four—mixed doubles. A record, I believe. He was number nine in the country back then. Still has one the best overheads in the game. How on earth did he know about the bombing?”
Littlemore hung up. A messenger entered his office and handed the detective a package containing a written report and an envelope. Inside the envelope was a small white tooth, broken cleanly into two pieces.
Littlemore met Younger in a diner that afternoon, reporting to him over acidic coffee that the redhead at Bellevue Hospital was still unconscious.
“She should have woken up,” said Younger. “She wasn’t shot in the head. There’s no injury to her skull.”
“What about her voice?” asked Littlemore. “Colette says she sounded like a man.”
“The growth on her neck must be impinging on her vocal cords. I took X-rays of her yesterday.”
“How’d you do that?” asked Littlemore.
Younger didn’t answer that question: “The X-rays didn’t go through. In fact I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m going to New Haven tomorrow to see what Colette thinks of the films.”
“New Haven?” answered Littlemore. “You can’t leave the state, Doc. You’re on bail for a major felony, remember?”
Younger nodded, apparently unimpressed by the argument.
“This is serious,” added Littlemore. “They can put you away for jumping bail.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Let me put it this way. If you go, I don’t want to know about it. And whatever you do, you got to show up for your court date in a couple of months.”
“Why?”
“Because I posted the bail bond, for Pete’s sake. If you don’t show, they’re going to seize my bank account and everything I own to pay the bond. Plus I’ll probably get fired, since a law officer isn’t supposed to bail his pal out of the joint in the first place—and especially not if the pal ends up on the lam. Okay? When did you stop caring about the law anyway?”
“If you’re about to die in a storm,” answered Younger, “and you