said the sergeant. “Only I thought you’d want to know that it’s Walter Winchell’s Girl Friday at the Mirror. She wants you to confirm or deny a report that you know the whereabouts of Miss Ina Kell, the supposedly undercover witness in the Gault case. They’ve just had a hot tip that she’s you guess where.” Smitty nodded wisely. “There’s been a leak somewhere.”
“A leak? The goddamn dam has burst! How’d they find out what only you and I know?”
“The tip came from Sam Bordin, sir. He’d like to have it known that he wants to call Ina Kell as a witness for the defense.”
“Get Bordin’s office on the phone.”
A few minutes later inspector Oscar Piper was listening to the dulcet if slightly Brooklynesque tones of Gracie, Sam Bordin’s secretary, who was very sorry to say that Mr. Bordin was out of town and not expected back for some time. Was there any message?
Was there! Apt and well-chosen words rose in the Inspector’s throat, but luckily he bit them off just in time.
9
“Everybody wants ta get inta da act!”
—JIMMY DURANTE
M ISS WITHERS KNEW ALL about Tijuana and anticipated no difficulties whatever in proving or disproving her wild hunch about Dallas Trempleau in the first half-hour. She remembered her other visit here—it had been on her first tourist trip west shortly after her gory misadventures on Catalina Island. The little border village had been a sleepy ruin, wrecked by the repeal of prohibition in the States. She had walked the drowsy Main Street, where a few bars and restaurants and tourist traps were still trying to keep open for the yanqui dollar, had seen the Foreign Club with its roulette wheels shrouded in cobwebs, dead grass rippling on the course where the great Australian Phar Lap had triumphed and been murdered in his stall, the once-famous gardens of Agua Caliente’s dead hotel bleak and sterile in the white sunlight.
That was then; it must be a veritable ghost town by now. American tourists would be as conspicuous as a caravan on the desert.
Confidently the maiden schoolteacher, with Talley beside her on the front seat of a little drive-it-yourself coupe, had headed south on U.S. 101 early that Sunday evening less than an hour after she had landed at Lindbergh Field, pausing only to leave her un-unpacked suitcases in a room at the U.S. Grant. Out of San Diego the highway cut past gasworks, tuna canneries, acres of junked and rusting Navy landing craft; it wound through unlovely industrial towns, dead lemon groves, and finally into barren, open country with here and there a crowded trailer court or motel.
Soon she found herself caught in a solid column of cars all moving in the same direction, mostly filled with uniformed sailors. Passing between ever bigger and better billboards, the parade moved steadily onward until suddenly they were all piled up at the gigantic fence of the international port of entry. At long last her turn came, and Miss Withers drove up beside a sleepy dark man in a half-unbuttoned uniform. She reached into her handbag for her passport (circa 1936), her proof of vaccination and other papers.
“Con supermiso, señor, Yo quiero —” she began, in her high-school Spanish.
Horns were blaring behind her. “You’re blocking trafeek!” the border guard cried, waving her on. “Get the lead out, lady!” And then, with a fanfare of crashing gears, she was suddenly in the romantic land of roses and guitars.
Crossing the long bridge over the muddy trickle of the Tijuana River, Miss Withers sniffed sharply, remembering Coleridge’s poem about the city of Cologne and its two-and-seventy stenches. The way led up a steep, narrow street and suddenly burst into the town itself, no town at all now, but a booming city that had somehow exploded all over the surrounding hills. The glare in the hazy sky of early evening seemed brighter than that over Broadway during the theater hour; the sidewalks were spilling with humanity of all ages,
“A leak? The goddamn dam has burst! How’d they find out what only you and I know?”
“The tip came from Sam Bordin, sir. He’d like to have it known that he wants to call Ina Kell as a witness for the defense.”
“Get Bordin’s office on the phone.”
A few minutes later inspector Oscar Piper was listening to the dulcet if slightly Brooklynesque tones of Gracie, Sam Bordin’s secretary, who was very sorry to say that Mr. Bordin was out of town and not expected back for some time. Was there any message?
Was there! Apt and well-chosen words rose in the Inspector’s throat, but luckily he bit them off just in time.
9
“Everybody wants ta get inta da act!”
—JIMMY DURANTE
M ISS WITHERS KNEW ALL about Tijuana and anticipated no difficulties whatever in proving or disproving her wild hunch about Dallas Trempleau in the first half-hour. She remembered her other visit here—it had been on her first tourist trip west shortly after her gory misadventures on Catalina Island. The little border village had been a sleepy ruin, wrecked by the repeal of prohibition in the States. She had walked the drowsy Main Street, where a few bars and restaurants and tourist traps were still trying to keep open for the yanqui dollar, had seen the Foreign Club with its roulette wheels shrouded in cobwebs, dead grass rippling on the course where the great Australian Phar Lap had triumphed and been murdered in his stall, the once-famous gardens of Agua Caliente’s dead hotel bleak and sterile in the white sunlight.
That was then; it must be a veritable ghost town by now. American tourists would be as conspicuous as a caravan on the desert.
Confidently the maiden schoolteacher, with Talley beside her on the front seat of a little drive-it-yourself coupe, had headed south on U.S. 101 early that Sunday evening less than an hour after she had landed at Lindbergh Field, pausing only to leave her un-unpacked suitcases in a room at the U.S. Grant. Out of San Diego the highway cut past gasworks, tuna canneries, acres of junked and rusting Navy landing craft; it wound through unlovely industrial towns, dead lemon groves, and finally into barren, open country with here and there a crowded trailer court or motel.
Soon she found herself caught in a solid column of cars all moving in the same direction, mostly filled with uniformed sailors. Passing between ever bigger and better billboards, the parade moved steadily onward until suddenly they were all piled up at the gigantic fence of the international port of entry. At long last her turn came, and Miss Withers drove up beside a sleepy dark man in a half-unbuttoned uniform. She reached into her handbag for her passport (circa 1936), her proof of vaccination and other papers.
“Con supermiso, señor, Yo quiero —” she began, in her high-school Spanish.
Horns were blaring behind her. “You’re blocking trafeek!” the border guard cried, waving her on. “Get the lead out, lady!” And then, with a fanfare of crashing gears, she was suddenly in the romantic land of roses and guitars.
Crossing the long bridge over the muddy trickle of the Tijuana River, Miss Withers sniffed sharply, remembering Coleridge’s poem about the city of Cologne and its two-and-seventy stenches. The way led up a steep, narrow street and suddenly burst into the town itself, no town at all now, but a booming city that had somehow exploded all over the surrounding hills. The glare in the hazy sky of early evening seemed brighter than that over Broadway during the theater hour; the sidewalks were spilling with humanity of all ages,
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