Everybody Had A Gun by Richard Prather Read Free Book Online Page B

left and right sides of the elevator. The dressing rooms, office, and whatnot were beyond the velvet-draped left wall, and against the far wall ahead of you was a little platform for a small combo, and the usual small dance floor.
    That didn't help me much, and I was still standing in the alley looking at the door to the elevator when I did the first fairly sensible thing I'd done all day. I had a very small thought.
    It was obvious that, if Sader had picked up Iris, no matter what his reason, he could have parked her almost anywhere. But the only place I knew where Sader might hang out were his home and here. I'd scratched the home off, and assuming Sader was here—and maybe Iris, too—Marty, the way I had him figured, wouldn't be in the least happy to see me. So then I had my small thought.
    I was going back over in my mind all that the nearly hysterical Iris had babbled at me, and I remembered the bit she'd blurted about being locked up. Somewhere in there she'd said she went up the dumb-waiter to someplace. To—Clark's? That was it.
    I walked back out of the alley to Seventh Street and took another peek at the cafeteria edging the alley on my left as I came out.
    Uh-huh. The sign on the windows said, "Clark's Cafeteria." And right underneath it was Marty Sader's Pit. Looking in through the glass front of the cafeteria, I could even see the right-angle extension jutting out on the left wall and extending to the back of the cafeteria. Part of that space next to the wall might be a storeroom, but I knew at least a six-by-six-foot square of it was taken up by an elevator reached from outside.
    There was a little twitch in the bunched nerve and muscle still in the center of my back. Unless Iris was a psychiatric case, she'd sure as hell been locked up down below in the Pit just before she'd come bobbing across the street to my office.
    I was feeling fairly pleased with myself when a motion on my left made me jump. The shape I'd been in for the last four hours, just a worm turning would have made me jump. But this was a long black Plymouth sedan turning into the alley a foot on my left.
    There were two guys in the front seat and they paid no attention to me. That was O. K. I'd had more than my share of attention today. But I knew I'd seen the guy sitting beside the driver somewhere before. I stopped thinking about dumb-waiters long enough to run the thought down.
    Then I remembered where I'd seen his mug: in a newspaper story a month or so back saying he'd been picked up on a suspicion-of-robbery charge, with no subsequent conviction. That wasn't much, but the guy who'd gone bail for him was Collier Breed, the chap with his sticky fat fingers in pies, the boy to see if you wanted into any of the racket gravy around town. I didn't know for sure what the black Plymouth meant, but things were getting complicated. And I had a gruesome feeling that I was industriously working my way into the middle of the complications.
    I edged over to my left and watched the car for a minute. It pulled up in front of the elevator where I'd been standing a few minutes before. It stopped, and the guy on the right got out. He pulled a big watch from his pocket, looked at it, then stuffed it back into his pants. He said something to the driver, then crossed his arms and leaned back against the door of the car. Nothing seemed to be happening, so I walked over to the door of Clark's Cafeteria.
    Dumb-waiter, Iris had said. That sounded like a kitchen. I looked through the glass window of the cafeteria, past the tables and the long serving line with its steam tables at the right, to a pair of swinging doors in back. As I watched, a man in a white jacket came through the swinging doors and walked behind the steam tables. I said, "Here goes nothing, Scott," and went in. I walked past the sad-looking characters shoving food down their throats, down the length of the serving line, and stopped at the cashier. She'd been busy making change and hadn't