The Cutie by Donald E. Westlake Page B

around begging to be picked up on a concealed-weapons charge. His face was one of those blanks, a blob of putty in the middle for a nose, eyes so small and so surrounded by scar tissue that you could barely see them, and a jaw almost as big as Tony Chin’s. He was sitting there, waiting, absolutely expressionless.
    Clancy gave me the big smile when I walked in. “You’re late, keed,” he said.
    “I stopped off to push an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs,” I told him.
    He showed me his sparkly teeth. “Kidder,” he said.
    “What about Billy-Billy?” asked Ed.
    “No word yet,” I said. “I’ve got a guy waiting in Junky Stein’s apartment. Junky’s the guy Billy-Billy would normally go to. As far as I know, the cops haven’t picked him up yet, and he hasn’t showed up at Junky’s yet.”
    “We don’t want the cops to get to him at all.” Ed pointed suddenly at George Raft. “I don’t think you ever met Joe Pistol,” he said. “Joe, this is Clay. My good right hand.”
    Joe and I shook good right hands, and he said, “Clay?” He said it with a rising inflection, smiling at me a bit, inviting me to tell him the rest of the name.
    I smiled right back and said, “Joe Pistol?” I was inviting him to tell me his real name. He calls himself something stupid like Joe Pistol for the same reason Tony Chin has a new name and Clancy Marshall changed his name from whatever it was and I’m just Clay. A long time ago I was George Clayton. Today I’m only Clay.
    “We want to get Billy-Billy fast,” said Ed. “Clay, you spread the word wider. You don’t know where a clown like that will run when he’s spooked. Get onto everybody he knows.”
    I nodded. “Okay, Ed.”
    “I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s going to screw things up. With Billy-Billy on the loose, the cops are going to be poking their dirty noses in all over the place.”
    “I got the word Homicide East is involved,” I said. “Somebody higher up raised a squawk on this one.”
    “Why?” Ed demanded. “Now why the hell does it have to be like that?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll maybe be able to tell you after I find out who Mavis St. Paul called sugar daddy.”
    Everybody looked blank. Ed echoed, “Mavis St. Paul?”
    “That’s the girl who got knifed,” I explained. “I’m working on it now, to find out who she was playing house with.”
    Ed nodded and gave me a thin smile. “You’ve been working, Clay,” he said. “Good boy.”
    Clancy chimed in, saying, “You look as though you didn’t get much sleep, Clay.”
    “I didn’t get any,” I told him.
    “I understand,” said Joe Pistol, “this Cantell is hiding out somewhere?”
    “We think so,” Ed told him. “Maybe he’s on a train, for all we know. The cops don’t have him, and we don’t have him.” He looked over at me. “By the way, Clay,” he said. “You remember what we discussed last night on the phone, about Europe. You don’t spread it, okay?”
    I had to think for a second before I knew what he was talking about. Then I caught on. He didn’t want anybody to know he had to go to bat for a punk like Billy-Billy Cantell because of somebody in Europe who’s a bigger wheel even than Ed Ganolese. I avoided grinning. I could tell how the whole situation must be jabbing Ed in the pride. And Ed is a boy with a lot of pride. “I’ll forget it all right now,” I told him.
    “Good.”
    Clancy spoke up again. “Even after we locate Cantell,” he said, “we’ve still got a problem on our hands. The police will be looking for him. As you said, sticking their dirty noses in everywhere. We can’t afford to cover for him, but we can’t afford to turn him over to the police alive, either.”
    “We’re covering for him,” said Ed quietly.
    Clancy was surprised. He knew standard operating procedure as well as I did. “Ed, I don’t get it,” he said. “The police will just keep looking until they find him. And