“Yeah,” I told him. “Got Red, Flora, Pogy and the cush.”
“But—not—Papa—dop—oul—os.”
“Papa does what?” I asked impatiently, a shiver along my spine.
He pulled himself up on the seat.
“Papadopoulos,” he repeated, with an agonizing summoning of the little strength left in him. “I tried—shoot him—saw him—walk ’way—with girl—bull—too damn quick—wish …”
His words ran out. He shuddered. Death wasn’t a sixteenth of an inch behind his eyes. A white-coated intern tried to get past me into the car. I pushed him out of the way and leaned in, taking Vance by the shoulders. The back of my neck was ice. My stomach was empty.
“Listen, Bluepoint,” I yelled in his face, “Papadopoulos? Little old man? Brains of the push?”
“Yes,” Vance said, and the last live blood in him came out with the word.
I let him drop back on the seat and walked away.
Of course! How had I missed it? The little old scoundrel—if he hadn’t, for all his scariness, been the works, how could he have so neatly turned the others over to me one at a time? They had been absolutely cornered. It was be killed fighting, or surrender and be hanged. They had no other way out. The police had Vance, who could and would tell them that the little buzzard was the headman—there wasn’t even a chance for him beating the courts with his age, his weakness and his mask of being driven around by the others.
And there I had been—with no choice but to accept his offer. Otherwise lights out for me. I had been putty in his hands, his accomplices had been