“What do you think his chances are of getting caught dealing drugs?”
“He’ll get caught eventually,” Chason said. “If he don’t get killed first, in some drug deal gone bad, or kill himself, the way that Detweiler girl did.”
“Well, one thing for sure,” Joey said. “We don’t want this son of a bitch walking around the lot, do we?”
“I wouldn’t if I was you, Joey,” Chason said.
“Phil, I don’t want anybody to know I was even thinking of giving this son of a bitch a job. It would be embarrassing, if you know what I mean.”
“What I do, Joey, like it says in the phone book, is confidential investigations. What I told you, you paid for. It’s yours. I just forgot everything I told you.”
“I appreciate that, Phil,” Joey said.
Chason nodded his head.
“How long did it take you to come up with all this, Phil?”
“No longer than usual. I’m going to bill you for ten hours, plus, I think, about sixty bucks in expenses.”
“Two things, Phil. First of all, I think it took you like twenty hours,” Joey said. “And I figure you had maybe two hundred in expenses.”
“You don’t have to do that, Joey.”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do, Phil, please, as a favor to me. Second thing, how would you feel about being paid in cash, instead of with a check? Are you in love with the IRS?”
“I don’t have a thing in the world against cash, Joey.”
“That’s good, because I just happen to have some cash the IRS don’t know about, either,” Joey said.
He got up from his desk and went into what looked to Phil Chason like a closet. He returned in a minute with an envelope.
“You want to check it, to make sure it’s all right?” Joey asked.
“I’m sure it is, Joey,” Chason said, and put the envelope in his suit jacket pocket.
Joey offered him his hand.
“We’ll be in touch,” Joey said.
Chason started out of the office.
“Phil, you want to get out of that piece of shit you’re driving, I’ll make you a deal on something better.”
“Not right now, Joey, but I’ll consider that an open offer.”
“It’s an open offer,” Joey said.
Chason left the office. Joey went to the venetian blinds and watched through them until Chason had left the lot.
Then he left his office.
“I’ve got to see a man about a dog, Helene,” he said.
He went out and got into a red Cadillac Eldorado convertible and drove off the lot. Six blocks away, he pulled into an Amoco station and stopped the car by an outside pay phone.
He dropped a coin in the slot and dialed a number from memory.
“This is Joey. I need to talk to him,” he said.
“Yes?” a new voice responded a minute later.
“This is Joey, Mr. S.,” Joey said. “I just left the retired cop. I think we had better talk, if you have time.”
“Come right now, Joey,” Vincenzo Savarese said.
TWELVE
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin looked up from the mountain of paper on his desk and saw Michael J. O’Hara sitting on his secretary’s desk.
“How long have you been out there, Mickey?” Coughlin called.
“You looked like you were busy,” O’Hara said.
“I told him I’d let you know he was out here,” Veronica Casey, Coughlin’s secretary, said.
“Never too busy for you, Mickey,” Coughlin said, motioning for O’Hara to come into his office.
“Oh, you silver-tongued Irishman, you,” O’Hara said, and slumped into one of the two armchairs in the room. “What’s going around here you don’t want me to know about?”
“There’s a long list of things like that,” Coughlin said. “You have something specific in mind?”
“Actually, what I had in mind was that you and I should go somewhere and have a little sip of something. Maybe two sips. Maybe even, if you don’t have something on, dinner. You got plans?”
“No,” Coughlin said. He looked at his watch. “I didn’t realize it was so late.” He raised his voice. “Go home, Veronica!”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Put this stuff away, and we’ll start again in the morning.”
“Okay,” she said, coming into the office and gathering up the papers on Coughlin’s desk. “He skipped lunch,” she said to O’Hara, “so eat first before you do a lot of sipping.”
“Okay,” O’Hara said. He waited until she had left the office, and then said, “She’s in love with you. Why don’t you marry her?”
“She has a husband, as you damned well know.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Go to hell, Mickey,” Coughlin said, laughing. “But she’s right. I didn’t have any lunch. I