In the Still of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

worked the revolver into the bag without taking it from his pocket.
    It wasn’t ten o’clock yet when he reached Mickey’s Place, the hangout of the Rooneys. Rooney was out of town, Phillips was glad to hear. Fitz Fitzgerald was the one he wanted to see, without Rooney putting his nose in. Fitz was shooting pool. He had three more balls to clear the table. Phillips went into the back room, called the “conference room,” and waited for him. He tried to remember the names of the former gang members whose initials were carved in the table. Fitzgerald came in flushed with a win. He looked scrubbed and, as usual, wore a white shirt and striped tie. He looked like a bank teller, and his daytime job wasn’t far from that mark: he worked in a check-cashing shop. He looked no more like a gun fence than Phillips looked like a killer. The first thing he asked was if the gun was hot.
    “Plenty. You don’t get it unless you got a place for it outside the U.S.A. And I don’t mean Ireland.”
    “You know I ain’t political, Billy. Let’s have a look at it and you can tell me how much you want.”
    “Half what you can get for it, and I’m willing to wait for mine.” He slipped the gun from the bag.
    Fitzgerald’s face went white. He knew a police special when he saw one. He began to back off.
    “It’s okay with me if you put it on ice for a while,” Phillips cajoled. “I’m going out to the West Coast tracks in the morning. Just put it on ice and I’ll check with you at the end of the week.”
    Fitzgerald moistened his lips. “Rooney won’t like it, Billy. He keeps saying, ‘Some of my best friends—’”
    Phillips cut in, “Does he have to find out? It’s you and me doing business here.”
    “He finds out most things, don’t he?”
    “Yeah, when some fink tells him.”
    “I ain’t no fink and you know it, Billy.”
    “What in hell would I be doing here if I didn’t know that?” The words had a familiar ring: it was what Gibbons had said talking him into the job.
    Marge Phillips was about to leave the house on Saturday morning when the phone rang. She hoped her perm customer wasn’t canceling.
    “Is Billy back yet?”
    “He’s not, but he’s due in around noon.”
    “It’s Fitz Fitzgerald, Marge. I got to deliver a package to Billy and it’s got to be this morning, Rooney’s orders. Could I bring it around to you on my way to the shop?”
    “Ah, Fitz, I won’t be here, but William’s home. I’ll have him watch out the window for you. It’ll give him something to do and keep him out of mischief till his father gets here.”
    Fitzgerald hesitated. “The kid wouldn’t open it, would he?”
    “Not if you tell him he mustn’t. He’s very good that way.”
    Moran was in the squad room unwrapping his lunch when the report came through of a ten-year-old boy dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been shot while playing with a .38 revolver. Moran stuck the sandwich in his pocket on his way to the desk. “I want to roll on this one, Sergeant. I’m looking for a .38. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

Now Is Forever
    T HEY MET IN THE Medieval Sculpture Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a vast room through which museum visitors can go off in any of several directions—to galleries for special exhibits, into the wing housing the Lehman Collection, through the Medieval Treasury and on to the Garden Court and the American Wing. It is so vast a room one almost always feels alone, no matter how numerous the company. They shook hands and spoke softly, words that any listener, picking up on them, might interpret as casual. It looked like, and was contrived to look like, an accidental meeting after which, as though there were a discovery she had made recently and wanted to show him, they moved into the small Romanesque chapel with its thirteenth-century stained glass. They stared up at the window from the Lady Chapel of the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres, not really seeing it. They were too