Free The Longest Second by Bill S. Ballinger

could be neater?”
    I agreed that nothing could be neater and told Merkle that I’d return the following evening to pick up the cards.
    It was not late when I reached Bianca’s house. She was waiting for me, and when I entered the kitchen I found her seated at the round table, deep in thought, a glass of brandy in her band She arose, somewhat unsteadily, and I realized that she had drunk too much. This surprised me as she usually drank very little. Hesitating for a moment, she approached and then threw her arms around me. Immediately she buried her face in my shoulder, and I could feel the shaking of her body. I stood there motionless, wondering about the cause of her distress.
    She released her arms and stepped back. “There was a phone call for you while you were out,” she told me.
    “Yes-s?”
    “But no one except Rosemary or Santini knows you're here.”
    That was true so far as I knew.
    “It was a man’s voice. He spoke with a foreign accent When I said you were out, he wanted me to give you a message.”
    “What?”
    “He said just to tell you one word—that you’d understand. I can’t pronounce it the way he did, so I wrote it down." She walked to the table and removed a sheet of paper. On it was written in English the single word “Attl.” I stared at it Abruptly Bianca turned away, wrapping her arms around her breasts as if to keep warm. “Vic,” she said softly, “Vic, I’m frightened.”
    Attl, in Arabic, means “kill.”
    I was frightened too.

14
    BURROWS was on the lobster shift, twelve midnight to eight a.m. in the morning. Because of his new assignment, he decided to wait until later in the morning ... all day if necessary ... until information began to come in. He had heard nothing more from Jensen and deduced from his silence that the bureau of identification had failed to come up with anything. It was still too early, at eight o’clock, for information to arrive from Washington.
    But it was not too early for Burrows to report to Lieutenant Scott, in charge of the detectives at the Eighth precinct. Scott arrived promptly at eight o’clock. He had been at the Eighth only a little over a month, and had been transferred there from the Seventeenth where he had served five years. Under the revitalized departmental rotation system, Scott had been moved to a new precinct.
    Burrows handed Scott a copy of his report, and quickly filled in, verbally, the developments between two and eight a.m. Scott, who shouldered many responsibilities, thought to himself, “What the hell. This case, at least, isn’t going to be a hot one, and it’s still brand new.” However, he said to Burrows, “Has everyone here had a chance to look at the stiff?”
    “No,” Burrows replied, “just Jensen and me and a couple
    of the uniformed men. Gorman has the body down at the lab.”
    “When Gorman’s through, well try to get them moving on it Better get some pictures and put ’em up on the board.”
    Burrows agreed. It was difficult to get the detectives in the precinct to go to the morgue to view the body. Reporting in three shifts, at different hours of the day, and having their own assignments to cover, few of them found time to make such an effort, unless it was a spectacular case. They far preferred to make their examination and identification from photographs whenever possible. “The prints from the photographic department should be here anytime,” Burrows said.
    Scott nodded his approval. “You know,” he continued to Burrows, “that bit about the shoes and the grand bill might mean a lot of things. Back in the thirties, it used to be the custom to find a squealer in the street with a penny in his mouth. For a while, a crooked gambler would have an ace of spades in his pocket. Sometimes hoods like to get fancy ... dramatic.”
    “This doesn’t look exactly like a mob killing,” Burrows said. “It might be, of course, but usually they prefer to use a gun.”
    Scott was inclined to agree with