The Cutie Read Free Page B

All of them in their late thirties or early forties, but already well into middle-aged spread.
    I opened the door, opening it wide to keep from looking suspicious. “Mr. Grimes,” I said. “Social call?”
    “Not so’s you’d notice,” he told me. He pushed me away from the door and came into the apartment. I only had the one lamp on, over by the chair Billy-Billy had been sitting in, and Grimes glared around the semidark room for a minute until his sidekicks were inside and the door was closed, and then he turned to me. “Do you know a punk named Billy-Billy Cantell?”
    “Sure. A junkie. Hangs out on the Lower East Side.”
    “When’d you see him last?”
    “Tonight.”
    That surprised them. They hadn’t expected me to admit that he’d been around. They’d been hoping to get me off-balance, in the cute manner of cops everywhere, but I’d been lucky enough to get them off-balance first. They looked at one another and back at me, and one of the strangers asked me, “Where was this you saw Cantell?”
    “Right out in the hall, there,” I said, nodding my head at the door. “About an hour ago. He came in with some wild H-dream about waking up in a high-class apartment with a murdered woman, and I told him to go get lost for himself.”
    “It wasn’t an H-dream,” said Grimes.
    I moved my face around to register surprise. “It wasn’t?”
    “He killed a woman,” said one of the strangers.
    “Billy-Billy Cantell?” I laughed at him, just as though it had really been funny. “Billy-Billy doesn’t have the strength to kill time,” I told him.
    “He didn’t use his hands,” said the cop. “He used a knife.”
    I shook my head, being serious now, wanting to help these poor guys. “Wrong boy,” I said. “Billy-Billy doesn’t carry a knife. He’s always getting picked up on one bum rap or another, and he knows if the law found a knife on him, it would be a nice cheap conviction.”
    “He carried one tonight,” said Grimes. “And he used it.”
    “Listen,” I said, still being the helpful citizen trying to set the cops straight. “I thought Billy-Billy was just talking through his hypodermic needle, if you know what I mean, but maybe he was telling the truth. He told me somebody set him up to play patsy. Killed the woman, dumped Billy-Billy in the apartment, and took off. Billy-Billy was high on heroin and didn’t even know he was being moved.”
    “Is that his story?” asked Grimes.
    “As much as I heard of it,” I said. “I got rid of him as fast as I could. It’s pretty late at night to listen to some junkie’s dreams.”
    “It’s a cute story,” said Grimes. “I’ll get a real kick out of it when he tells it down at the station.”
    “Who knows?” I said. “Maybe it’s the truth.”
    “Sure,” said Grimes. He started looking around the living room again, as though he’d just lost a cigarette lighter or something. “We don’t have a warrant,” he told me, “but we’d like to take a look around your apartment. You got any complaints?”
    “One,” I said. “She’s in the bedroom.”
    “We’ll try not to disturb her,” he said. He nodded to the other two, and they crossed the living room toward the hall leading to the rest of the apartment.
    “Hold on,” I said. “We didn’t get that complaint of mine straightened out yet.”
    They stopped and looked at Grimes. He shrugged. “Check under the bed,” he said. “That’s probably where you’ll find him.”
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll conduct the tour myself, personally.”
    “You’ll wait right here,” Grimes told me. “They can find their way around without any help from you.”
    “I don’t want them going into the bedroom,” I said.
    “That’s too bad, Clay.”
    “Listen, Grimes, you can give me a bad time the day you’ve got a charge against me. Until then, I’m a citizen just like anybody else. If those two clowns of yours go barging into that bedroom, you’re going to regret it.