I woke to a disagreeable rainy morning. Maybe it was the weather, maybe I’d been too frisky the day before, anyway the slit in my back was like a foot-long boil. I phoned Dr. Canova, who lived on the floor below me, and had him look at the cut before he left for his downtown office. He rebandaged it and told me to take life easy for a couple of days. It felt better after he had fooled with it, but I phoned the agency and told the Old Man that unless something exciting broke I was going to stay on sick-call all day.
I spent the day propped up in front of the gas-log, reading, and smoking cigarettes that wouldn’t burn right on account of the weather. That night I used the phone to organize a poker game, in which I got very little action one way or the other. In the end I was fifteen dollars ahead, which was just about five dollars less than enough to pay for the booze my guests had drunk on me.
My back was better the following day, and so was the day. I went down to the agency. There was a memorandum on my desk saying Duff had phoned that Angel Grace Cardigan had been vagged—thirty days in the city prison. There was a familiar pile of reports from various branches on their operatives’ inability to pick up anything on Papadopoulos and Nancy Regan. I was running through these when Dick Foley came in.
“Made him,” he reported. “Thirty or thirty-two. Five, six. Hundred, thirty. Sandy hair, complexion. Blue eye. Thin face, some skin off. Rat. Lives dump in Seventh Street.”
“What did he do?”
“Tailed Carey one block. Carey shook him. Hunted for Carey till two in morning. Didn’t find him. Went home. Take him again?”