Free Death of an Old Sinner by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

one customer. Two roast beef sandwiches he took out with him. So we just sat, four of us outside, Minnie inside.”
    “Do they always go in fours over there?” Jimmie asked.
    “I don’t know that, but there was a couple too many of us all right as it turned out. The car wasn’t marked, and there was other cars, but this round-faced goon sure spotted us. It went off like a string of firecrackers. This fellow was coming to us on the run, don’t know where from, we picked up the sound of his feet hitting cement first, and I knew at the same time there was a car coming fast. When I open the window this cheese face hollers: ‘You want Johnny Rocco? Go get him!’ He was shouting because just about then the Jaguar goes by like a Jet out of hell. Our driver had his foot on the accelerator, but we never got any closer than the minute I got the license number, and it hit me right then maybe the car was the decoy, and the moon-faced guy the real collection man. By the time we got back he was gone, of course. Keystones, bloody Keystone cops they made of us.”
    Jimmie could see the famous melancholia settling on Jasper.
    “It was routine I put a tracer on that license number, Jimmie. I knew it was RO—Rockland County; in fact that’s what made me think we’d been decoyed.” Jasper scratched his ear. “Funny, RO—Rockland County. Ro, Rocco. He was a great guy for sport cars, too. He left a sweet little Austin-Healey in front of the bank last night.”
    Jimmie thought about those implications. “You never picked up The Rock’s trail at all then?”
    “Nope. Not till we saw him on a slab in the morgue this morning.”
    “Do you suppose your father could have been used as the decoy, Jarvis?” the D.A. asked.
    “Goddamn it,” Jimmie exploded, “he was a general in the United States Army!”
    “Maybe he was covering up for somebody who got in trouble,” Tully said softly. “There’s a lot of times respectable people get mixed up with mobsters. Say they like the horses. Did he have lots of money?”
    Jimmie held up his hands. “If my father had owned the state of Texas, gentlemen, he could still have managed to be out of funds by any given weekend. That is why, unfortunately, I have to speak slowly when I defend him.”
    “How is Mrs. Norris?” Tully asked, having a sudden association with someone who also spoke slowly when it came to defending the General.
    “She’ll be in tonight, I expect,” Jimmie said. He looked at his watch. “Eleven-twenty. It’s taking them a while in there, isn’t it?”
    Both men shrugged, as though casualness best explained it.
    “Finish up your Brooklyn fiasco for us, Jasper,” Fallon said.
    Tully looked at him mournfully. “Well, it wasn’t ten minutes till we got back to Minnie’s. Minnie never saw or heard of Moon-Face, of course. Matter of fact, I never did either. I went through the gallery today and I couldn’t find him. Anyway, it wasn’t another fifteen minutes till Minnie closed up and went home. That was twenty minutes to nine. And he did go home, I dropped out and tailed him myself all the way to his television set.
    “I picked up the boys in front of Rocco’s house later. In fact all four stakeouts wound up there at midnight. At three o’clock we knocked off. Eight hours of nothing. And just about that time the beat man patrolling the First Federal Bank on Fulton Street came on the Austin-Healey at the curb, motor still running. He checked the bank, nothing happening. Went back, turned off the ignition. Forgot about it. They’re going to give him a wooden medal tomorrow. And here’s another nice touch: at seven-fifty this morning his relief man ticketed the car for illegal parking.”
    “Where did the papers get the ‘black limousine’?” Jimmie asked.
    “A drunk claims to be a witness. He was sitting in the precinct station when it broke this morning. Said he tried to tell a cop about the guy he saw being shoved into the black limousine on the same