Too Many Clients Read Free Page A

saving nothing; you have it all. Here’s your sixty bucks.”
    Al reached to get a corner of one twenty with a finger and thumb and slipped it out. “This’ll do,” he said. “This is enough for my time, and keeping my Up buttoned is just personal. I’ll enjoy it. Every cop I see I can think, You bastard, what I know and you don’t.”
    Mike, grinning, took his three twenties. “I’m different,” he said. “Just as apt as not I’d tell everybody in reach, including cops, but now I can’t because I’d have to give your forty bucks back. I may not be noble but I’m honest.” He put the bills in a pocket and extended a paw. “But we’d better shake on it just to be sure.”
    We shook, and I got back into Al’s cab and told him to take me to the Gazette building.
    If Lon Cohen had a title, I didn’t know what it was and I doubt if he did. Just his name was on the door of the little room on the twentieth floor, two doors down from the corner office of the publisher, and in that situation you would think he would be out of the dust stirred up by the daily whirlwind of a newspaper, but he always seemed to be up, not only on what had just happened but on what was just going to happen. We kept no account of how we stood on give and take over the years, but it pretty well evened up.
    He was very dark�dark skin stretched tight over his neat little face, dark brown deep-set eyes, hair almost black, slicked back and up over his sloping dome. He was next to the best of the poker players I occasionally spent a night with, the best being Saul Panzer, whom you will meet later. When I entered the little room that Monday evening he was on the phone, and I took the chair at the end of his desk and sat and listened. It went on for minutes, and all he said was “No” nine times. When he hung up I said, “Just a yes man.”
    “I have to make a call,” he said. “Here, pass the time.” He picked up a cardboard folder and handed it to me and returned to the phone.
    It was the file on Thomas G. Yeager. Not bulky�a dozen or so newspaper clippings, four typewritten memos, tear sheets of an article in a trade journal, Plastics Today, and three photographs. Two of the photographs were studio jobs with his name typed at the bottom, and one was of a gathering in the Churchill ballroom, with a typed caption pasted on: “Thomas G. Yeager speaking at the banquet of the National Plastics Association, Churchill Hotel, New York City, October 19, 1958.” He was at the mike on the stage with his arm raised for a gesture. I read the memos and glanced through the clippings, and was looking over the article when Lon finished at the phone and turned.
    “All right, give,” he demanded.
    I closed the folder and put it on the desk. “I came,” I said, “to make a deal, but first you should know something. I have never seen Thomas G. Yeager or spoken with him or had any communication from him, and neither has Mr. Wolfe. I know absolutely nothing about him except what you told me on the phone and what I just read in that folder.”
    Lon was smiling. “Okay for the record. Now just between you and me.”
    “The same, believe it or not. But I heard something just before I phoned you at five o’clock that made me curious about him. For the time being I would prefer to keep what I heard to myself�for at least twenty-four hours and maybe longer. I expect to be busy and I don’t want to spend tomorrow at the DA’s office. So it’s not necessary for anyone to know that I rang you this afternoon to ask about Yeager.”
    “It may be desirable. For me. I sent for his file. If I say I dreamed something was going to happen to him people might talk.”
    I grinned at him. “Come off it. You haven’t even got a pair. You can say anything you damn please. You can say someone told you something off the record and you’re hanging on to it. Besides, I’m offering a deal. If you’ll forget about my curiosity about Yeager until further notice,