“Dinner tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Make it Thursday,” I suggested. “Tomorrow’s going to be pretty open-ended.”
As soon as I put the phone down, it rang. “Dr. Herschel’s residence,” I said. It was my favorite reporter, Murray Ryerson.
“Just got a squeal that Tony Bronsky may have killed John Thayer,” he said.
“Oh, really? Are you going to publish that?”
“Oh, I think we’ll paint a murky picture of gangland involvement. It’s just a whiff, no proof, he wasn’t caught at the scene, and our legal people have decided mentioning his name would be actionable.”
“Thanks for sharing the news,” I said politely.
“I wasn’t calling out of charity,” Murray responded. “But in my lumbering Swedish way it dawned on me that Bronsky works for Smeissen. We agreed yesterday that his name has been cropping up here and there around the place. What’s his angle, Vic—why would he kill a respectable banker and his son?”
“Beats the hell out of me, Murray,” I said, and hung up.
I went back and watched the rest of the movie, The Guns of Navarone, with Lotty, Jill, and Paul. I felt restless and on edge. Lotty didn’t keep Scotch. She didn’t have any liquor at all except brandy. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a healthy slug. Lotty looked questioningly at me, but said nothing.
Around midnight, as the movie was ending, the phone rang. Lotty answered it in her bedroom and came back, her face troubled. She gave me a quiet signal to follow her to the kitchen. “A man,” she said in a low voice. “He asked if you were here; when I said yes, he hung up.”
“Oh, hell,” I muttered. “Well, nothing to be done about it now…. My apartment will be ready tomorrow night—I’ll go back and remove this powder keg from your home.”
Lotty shook her head and gave her twisted smile. “Not to worry, Vic—I’m counting on you fixing the AMA for me someday.”
Lotty sent Jill unceremoniously off to bed. Paul got out his sleeping bag. I helped him move the heavy walnut dining-room table against the wall, and Lotty brought him a pillow from her bed, then went to sleep herself.
The night was muggy; Lotty’s brick, thick-walled building kept out the worst of the weather, and exhaust fans in the kitchen and dining rooms moved the air enough to make sleep possible. But the air felt close to me anyway. I lay on the daybed in a T-shirt, and sweated, dozed a bit, woke, tossed, and dozed again. At last I sat up angrily. I wanted to do something, but there was nothing for me to do. I turned on the light. It was 3:30.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and tiptoed out to the kitchen to make some coffee. While water dripped through the white porcelain filter, I looked through a bookcase in the living room for something to read. All books look equally boring in the middle of the night. I finally selected Vienna in the Seventeenth Century by Dorfman, fetched a cup of coffee, and flipped the pages, reading about the devastating plague following the Thirty Years War, and the street now called Graben—“the grave”—because so many dead had been buried there. The terrible story fit my jangled mood.
Above the hum of fans I could head the phone ring faintly in Lotty’s room. We’d turned it off next to the spare bed where Jill was sleeping. I told myself it had to be for Lotty—some mother in labor, or some teen-ager—but I sat tensely anyway and was somehow not surprised when Lotty came out of her room, wrapped in a thin, striped cotton robe.
“For you. A Ruth Yonkers.”
I shrugged my shoulders; the name meant nothing to me. “Sorry to get you up,” I said, and went down the short hallway to Lotty’s room. I felt as if all the night’s tension had had its focus in waiting for this unexpected phone call from an unknown woman. The instrument was on a small Indonesian table next to Lotty’s bed. I sat on the bed and spoke into it.
“This is Ruth Yonkers,” a husky voice responded. “I talked to you at the UWU meeting tonight.”
“Oh. yes,” I said calmly. “I remember you.” She’d been the stocky, square young woman who’d asked me all the questions at the end.
“I talked to Anita after the meeting. I didn’t know how seriously to take you, but I thought she ought to know about it.” I held my breath and said nothing. “She called me last week, told me about finding Peter’s—finding Peter. She made me promise not to tell anyone where she was without checking with her first. Not even her father, or the police. It was all rather—bizarre.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you?” she asked doubtfully.