Читать книгу The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead - Hampton Stone - Страница 6

Her cries of injustice were by no means the whole of it. She was also a theorist. She wasn’t content with simply yelling burglary. She insisted that we look for a burglar who was also a ghoul. Miss Bell was dead. She had known Miss Bell well. Miss Bell would never have been caught dead in a flannel nightgown. Therefore it followed inevitably that Miss Bell had not been wearing that red flannel when she had died. The burglar had stopped at nothing in collecting the loot. He had even stripped off the poor girl’s body one of those glamorous red nylon-and-lace jobs and substituted for it that detestable flannel.

We had Nora McGuire in from next door. The high-value-on-privacy girl could go on indefinitely making all her nicely turned points to the effect that she had never had the slightest interest in her neighbor’s habits, but she had already confessed to us that she was enough a woman to have taken some considerable notice of her neighbor’s clothes. We asked Nora to look over the things in the drawers and the closet. Nora was appalled. She remembered a pink satin evening coat. She remembered several dazzling dresses. She was by no means as letter perfect in the late Sydney Bell’s wardrobe as was Gloria’s mamma, but she remembered enough. None of the party clothes she had been seeing on her neighbor’s back were now to be found in her neighbor’s apartment.

She had, of course, no knowledge of the lingerie or the nightdresses, but she did give it as her opinion that the items in that department, as described by Gloria’s mamma, would have been the sort of thing she would have expected. Sydney Bell had not been the flannel nightgown type. They were agreed on that.

They left us with something to think about. I turned to Gibby.

“What now?” I asked. “Do we go hunting the ghoulish burglar?”

“That,” Gibby said. “Or else we concentrate on the religious tracts. I don’t know that they aren’t worse.”

I didn’t quite follow him there but he sketched enough of it in and I was able to take it from there to fill out the whole picture. Party girl murdered. Every last physical trace of her party-girl life removed. Girl left looking like the complete Miss Prim in death. Prayer book and religious tracts among her things. Start reconstructing from that and see where you come out.

It’s all too easy. Sydney Bell has been leading the gay life. She goes out partying. Men call on her, even at strange hours. She has fun. Then she meets a man and this man is different. He’s a serious type who talks religion at her. Would Sydney Bell have had any time for a type like that? One never knows. The wilder forms of religiosity do have a way of turning up in extraordinarily virile and ardent people at times.

You must understand that this isn’t religion we’re talking about. It’s insanity, the kind of insanity that comes of guilt feelings gone out of hand, the sense of sin run amok. This type sets out to save the girl’s soul. He calls it that in his twisted thinking and he believes it. She goes for him. She’s saved. She makes the clean sweep of all her fripperies, all the trappings of that sinful life she used to lead. Next stop the Kingdom of Heaven, but the poor girl hadn’t dreamed it could be that quick. This crazy type she’s fallen for does one of those quick twists you have to look for in people who have set up housekeeping in a fantasy world. Abruptly the whole picture turns itself inside out for him. He hasn’t saved her soul at all. She has led him into corruption instead. He rears up out of her sinful bed, puts his hands around her fair, white throat and chokes the life out of her. Then he buttons her up neatly to the chin. It’s in character. His sense of propriety has been satisfied, and he goes his crazy way.

In any murder case, as soon as the surrounding circumstances begin to take on a peculiar look, somebody is bound to come up with the easy out, a mad killer. The thought is, of course, that, having a collection of evidence which you cannot make add up into any rational pattern, you can just stop trying, tick it off as the work of a madman, and call it one that cannot be expected to make sense. Actually it is never quite that simple. The mad killing is not without pattern. It may follow a mad pattern but within its own crazy frame it will be rational enough.

The possibility of a madman in the Sydney Bell killing was not one of those things that popped into our heads because we were feeling baffled and defeated. The evidence had begun to form and it was giving sharp indication that it might be shaping in that special direction. It wasn’t the easy out. It was a conclusion to which we might very possibly be forced, however reluctantly, because when they are like that they can be awfully tough.

Meanwhile, of course, Gibby was quite right. It was no good trying to forget the possibility of the madly righteous loon but it was also no good settling for anything that definite, at least until we had done all the available digging along all the lines that presented themselves.

We had just gone into a huddle with the lab boys to see whether they might have something that could be a lead for us, when the cleaning woman came pounding back in a fever of excitement. She knew where all Miss Bell’s lovely things had gone. She could take us there and show us.

“It’s only around the corner,” she said. “Secondhand clothes it is and never a thing in the window that isn’t from five years ago and nobody, they’re anybody, is wearing it any more until just now I went past and I seen it right away. One of Miss Bell’s beautiful red nightgowns—nylon and lace and all sheer like she had made special for her all the time—one of them is in the window and inside I can see hanging the pink coat and the new evening dress with the harem skirt.”

We let her show us the way. It was, as she said, just around the corner, and the shop looked as unprepossessing as she had described it. A sign in the window said they bought and sold used clothing and the stuff on display could hardly have looked more used. It was a crowded window except for a space in the center of it. That space was empty.

Gloria’s mamma gasped. She pointed at the empty space.

“It was there only a minute ago,” she said. “Right there.”

We could see through the window into the shop. A rather frowzy woman who unmistakably had the secondhand look was in there with a man. She was holding up for his inspection something that was so red and so filmily transparent that it looked like a tongue of flame. It had lace on it and the lace appeared to be in just that area that Gloria’s mamma had described to us as here.

The cleaning woman dug Gibby in the ribs and pointed. Gibby nodded. He made no move. He just watched through the window. We made quite an audience at that window. So much so, that I began to feel a bit crowded. There were the three of us but there were two men as well and they all but had their noses pressed to the windowpane. I glanced at them and dismissed them as not worth a second look. I may have wondered a bit at their being interested in this window, but I also dismissed that.

They could see that red nightgown the woman was showing to the man inside. No man who is a man can look at one of those things without immediately dreaming up a picture that would put some dame into it and it wouldn’t be just any dame either. It would be something luscious, but necessarily. Tossing off the pair who were outside looking in as a couple of idle dreamers, I concentrated on that more enterprising character inside who appeared to be on the road toward implementing his dream.

That was one big hunk of man. He had a very yellow look, but it was the look of the outdoors type who happens to be having a spot of ill health. You know how a really dark suntan looks when the healthy, red blood isn’t coursing under it. This lad had been out in the sun plenty, but under the bronzing he was carrying an unhealthy pallor.

His clothes didn’t help. He was wearing a reddish brown suit and a reddish brown shirt and a yellow tie, colors calculated to make a sick man look sicker. The shop’s show window had been modernized with a surrounding trim of mirror glass and I noticed that this gent’s color scheme seemed to be repeated in the glass. I turned my head to have a look at what was reflecting in such splendid combinations of brown and yellow.

It was an enormous convertible, parked at the curb, a very special-looking job of bronze paint and yellow leather upholstery. It was an easy guess that the convertible belonged to the man in the shop. He was dressed to match it. Another car, far less spectacular, was double-parked just outside the big bronze and yellow job.

I turned back to the show window and a new detail caught my eye. The mirror glass reflected the convertible’s license plate. It was a Connecticut license—one of those that is all letters and no numerals—and in the glass it read JERK. That seemed too comic and I turned back for another look at the car. Of course, the plate read KREJ.

Meanwhile inside the shop the man, whom I was now in my own mind calling Krej spelled backwards, dug in his pocket and brought out a couple of bills which he gave the woman. She put the luscious red nightgown in a bag for him. The two men who had been watching with us moved. They didn’t move far, only to the shop door. There they waited; and when the big boy came out with his package, they fell in on either side of him.

“Hi,” they said.

“Hi,” he answered in a husky whisper. “What brings you over here?”

He started toward his car and then he turned back to his two friends, scowling. He had seen how the car double-parked outside him had him boxed in.

One of the men laughed and they both came in beside him again and very close.

“We’ve been chasing you, stupid,” the one who was laughing told him. “Mae’s got a party going and she asked me to bring you. Seeing as how we’ve been watching you buy that red thing, you can’t pretend to us you won’t be in the mood for the Mae bit tonight.”

The big fellow didn’t relax the scowl. “If you move so I can get out,” he said, “I’ll see you over at Mae’s later.” It was still the husky whisper. He sounded as though he had lost his voice, was trying to get it back, and wasn’t making it.

They moved over as far as the convertible where they held a whispered huddle. After a moment, the huddle at the curb broke up. More exactly it moved around the Cadillac to the car that was double-parked outside it. They went in that same formation they had held in crossing to the curb. The big man was in the middle. The two others were beside him, one on either side, and they walked close. The one who had done all the laughing and talking got in the car and big boy got in beside him. He was still clutching his parcel in his massive mitt. With his free hand he was passing over a ring with keys on it to the remaining man. That third one hadn’t gotten into the car.

Gibby made a quick dash out into the street. I went with him. We met the one with the key ring just as he was turning toward the Cadillac. It was close quarters there between the parked cars and Gibby kept going almost as though the man wasn’t there. Gibby rammed right into him and pushed him backwards. When Gibby came to a standstill, he had the man backed tight against the car and there was no question that he was holding him there.

“What the hell?” the man said, clawing ineffectually at Gibby’s arm.

Gibby ignored him and talked past him to the big boy with the yellow face.

“Anything we can do for you, mister?” he asked. “It looks as though you’re in trouble.”

The big boy went some shades yellower. “Trouble?” he repeated, stupidly echoing Gibby’s word.

“These two ganging up on you?” Gibby asked.

The vocal one of the pair had had his foot on the starter. Now he took it off and laughed again.

“Us gang up on him?” he said. “He could whip the two of us with one hand tied behind his back.”

“How about taking him with both hands tied behind his back?” Gibby asked. “You could handle him then, couldn’t you? Especially with a gun.”

The man stopped laughing. “Look, mister,” he growled, “maybe you’re drunk or something. Maybe you’ll go away now and bother someone else.”

“Your buddy here hasn’t the gun,” Gibby said. “He’s clean.”

As though he were demonstrating the fact on the man he had crowded against the side of the car, Gibby slapped him smartly in all the standard, concealed-weapons places.

“You’re not drunk,” the man behind the wheel said. “I can see that. What’s with you anyway? You take it in the arm?”

“District Attorney’s Office,” Gibby said and brought out his credentials.

None of the three even bothered to look at them. I’ve never seen people more easily convinced.

The man who had been doing the talking climbed out from behind the wheel.

He was talking as he came. “I suppose I could start yelling,” he said. “I have a hunch there’s all kinds of rights I have in a thing like this, but what the hell, you want to feel me up, mister, go ahead. Have your fun. Only look out you don’t tickle. People tickle me, I get the hiccups and when I get them I go on forever.”

He came around into that narrow space between the cars and he put his arms up at his sides. Gibby ran him over.

I don’t know whether I had been expecting a gun or just hoping for one. This was one of those limbs Gibby goes out on and when you’re out that far, brother, look out. You had better be right. This character did have all kinds of rights and Gibby was walking over every last one of them. He didn’t find a gun. He didn’t yield an inch. He wasn’t letting them see it was bothering him. I hoped vaguely that I was managing to play it as deadpan. I had a feeling anyone could have seen how much it was bothering me.

“No gun,” Gibby said. “What’s the setup?”

“Setup? We’re friends. We spot his car in traffic. You’ll give us that. It’s no trouble to spot. We want him on a party we’re having, so we pick him up. I know we’re double-parked, but it’s only for a minute and since when is the DA’s office handing out the traffic tickets?”

Gibby looked to the big boy. He was still hanging on to his package and he hadn’t found his voice. He had to try twice before he made even the husky whisper come.

“They’re my friends,” he said. “We’re going to be late for the party. The dames, they’ll get sore we keep them waiting.”

“Okay,” Gibby said, stepping back out of it. “Have fun.”

“We can go now?” It was the man who hadn’t bothered to yell for his rights who did the speaking.

Gibby nodded.

“Thanks,” the man murmured with only the smallest edge of sarcasm on it. He slid back behind the wheel and put his foot on the starter again. “See you,” he said to the man he was leaving with us.

With a wave of his hand, he pulled away. He was carrying New York plates. Gibby wrote down the number.

The man who had the Cadillac keys shook them and made them jingle. “Brother,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You nearly tore that one.”

Gibby looked at him coldly. “Feel like talking?” he asked.

“Only to ask how come you didn’t smell the liquor on his breath,” the man said. “How far do you think he can drive with all that liquor in him before he’s pinched or even has an accident? This isn’t the first time we’ve talked him out from behind the wheel. You don’t know, but I do. He can be stubborn. Stubborn, and how. He’s all right now. I’ll put the Caddy in the garage for him and I don’t turn up with the keys till he’s slept it off. What did you think we were doing? Kidnaping the little fellow?”

“I didn’t like his looking so yellow,” Gibby said, “and getting much yellower the minute he saw you.”

“It’s an old story with him. He isn’t pretty when he’s drinking.”

The man got into the Cadillac. He was all affability now. He even asked if he couldn’t drop us off somewhere.

We weren’t going anywhere just then. I shook myself to get some of the creep out of my flesh. “It’s a good thing they were that nice about it,” I said. “There’s the time you really went overboard.”

He talked right past my words. “They didn’t look like male nurses,” he said. “Even working in pairs, male nurses should be bigger.”

“They said they were his friends and so did he,” I said. “You went over both of them and no guns. What’s wrong with believing them?”

“They didn’t look like friends,” Gibby insisted. “When two men close in on a third that way and crowd him that close, they’re letting him feel that they’ve got guns on him and he hasn’t got a chance.”

I didn’t even attempt to argue that the thing hadn’t looked that way. Just on the way the men had closed in on either side of Yellowface, on the way they had moved with him to the curb, on the way they had taken him to the car, it could have been a Police Academy demonstration of how a pair of gangsters might pull off a snatch out in the public street. I stuck with the point I could make. Appearances had been deceptive. It hadn’t been at all as it had looked. Gibby had checked and neither of the men had been carrying a gun.

Ramming his hand into his pocket, Gibby shouldered in tight against me. A lightning-fast jab caught me in the side just at that soft place between the rib cage and the hip bone. I have seen men who’ve been shot and the bullet’s point of entry was just there. It’s a bad place. They get it there and they don’t survive it. Furthermore they don’t die quickly or easily.

“Am I holding a gun on you?” Gibby asked.

I laughed at him. “That was your thumb, kid,” I said. “You aren’t carrying a gun.”

“Suppose you didn’t know I’m not carrying a gun, would you be all that sure then?”

“Completely sure. I know you. If you had a gun on you, you wouldn’t be playing games with it.”

“Suppose that hadn’t been your old pal, Gibson. Suppose it had been one of those friends of the Jerk spelled backwards, how certain would you have been then?”

“I would have been in a cold sweat.”

“And the big guy was in just that.”

I’d known he would be building to that and I was ready for him or I thought I was.

“Not at the end there,” I said. “Not after you had checked on the both of them and found no guns. He couldn’t have been afraid of a thumb in his gut. He’s too big a guy for that.”

“If he believed me,” Gibby muttered.

“Why wouldn’t he believe you? Would you go looking for concealed weapons, find them, and then change your mind?”

“That’s what keeps me thinking there was something funny about all that,” Gibby said. “The two who had every reason to make an ugly fuss over my stepping in and crowding them like that were really docile about it. Since when do we get to throw our weight around that way and all we have to say is DA’s office and we get all that respect for it? They were too good-natured and they hardly looked at my credentials. I could have done it just as well on my driver’s license. I could have been Joe Doak, practical joker, and done it on a traveling salesman’s business card. And the boy they were pushing around, he didn’t look at all. Couldn’t he have been worrying about some really fancy trick, all four of us out to take him together?”

I was about to take the line of least resistance by reminding him that we already had a murder we were working on, but by that time Gloria’s mamma had tired of staring balefully through the shop window. She came over to the curb and joined us there.

Gibby took her by the arm and we went into the shop. He asked the woman in there whether she had any more red nightgowns like the one she had just sold. The woman went into a quick song and dance about how very special those nightgowns were. It was the build-up for asking such a price as wouldn’t often be named in a place like that.

I think Gibby, for a while at least, would have played it along as though we were merely shopping, but Gloria’s mamma gave the show away. There wasn’t any help for that. She began going through the place and pulling out one thing after another.

“See,” she kept saying. “This is mine and that’s mine and that over there is mine.”

The woman who ran the place was, of course, lightning-quick to go on guard.

“What is this?” she asked. “What do you want?”

We showed our credentials and Gibby started asking questions. It wasn’t the first time we had talked with a fence and we recognized all the answers the woman had ready. She had bought these fine things over a period of several months. She had bought them from various people, none of them regular patrons of her shop. She didn’t think she would recognize the people if she were to see them again. None of the items Gloria’s mamma was claiming had she bought within the last few days.

That was her story and she couldn’t be shaken from it. Even when Gibby told her she was covering for a killer, she wouldn’t budge. Gibby didn’t waste much time on that. He went into action. He called the apartment house and had one of the cops over there ask Nora McGuire to come around the corner and join us. She came, and although she couldn’t speak for lingerie, she did back Gloria’s mamma up on the pink evening coat and a flock of dresses.

Gibby took it from there. He impounded the identified items and gave the shopkeeper a receipt for them. Then he turned them over to one of the Homicide detectives. It was going to be this man’s job to trace them back to the places where they had been bought. It was a cinch that some of the stuff at least would be pinned down as not even having been manufactured at the dates when this woman said she had bought them. She would break down eventually, but it was going to take time, a lot of time.

One of the police lab chaps came down to talk to us. He waited restlessly while we finished what we had to do in the secondhand-clothes store. At that point Gibby thanked Gloria’s mamma and Nora McGuire and sent them on their way. Nora went with good grace. Gloria’s mamma went off repeating her cries of injustice. We went out to the street with the lab cop. We left the dame in the store to utter her own cries of injustice, but those were no more than normal expectancy.

That cop was the fingerprint man and he had the dope on prints. He looked about as agog as those boys ever get. Those lab cops, after all, are the scientists of the police department and for the most part they work very hard at their air of scientific detachment. This boy’s detachment had come detached.

“We’ve got a little honey in this one, Mr. Gibson,” he said.

Gibby wasn’t going to be easily impressed. “All prints wiped clean?” he asked.

“Yes and no,” said the cop.

Gibby gave him a hard look. “When did you start talking like a girl on the porch swing?”

The cop grinned. “Yes, the whole place was wiped clean of prints,” he said. “But no, the place wasn’t clean of prints.”

“Anything we can use?” Gibby was still not impressed.

It happens often enough, more often than not in fact. Fingerprint evidence has been so well publicized. Everybody knows about it. Almost anyone bent on crime these days knows enough to wear gloves or wipe clean any surface he has touched. You get it all the time that a place has been carefully wiped up to remove all prints, but one or two surfaces will have been forgotten. Practically anyone will think of doing it. Many aren’t nearly methodical enough to do a complete job of it. This cop, in his experience, should have seen dozens like that. It seemed strange that this one should excite him so much.

He shrugged. “I don’t know how you’ll use it,” he said, “but maybe you can make something of the fact that the dame lived there and in the whole place we can’t bring up even a fragment of a print that will fit with hers.”

Gibby’s interest quickened. “All wiped away?” he asked.

“Even in the places they mostly don’t think of like the toilet seat,” the cop answered.

“But you did get prints?” Gibby asked. He was eager now.

“Two people’s prints. We have an easy make on one of the people, that cleaning woman you’ve been working on.”

“Where did you turn hers up?”

“Knobs on the front door, inside and out. Knob of the closet door and panel of the closet door. Soiled clothes hamper in the bathroom. Front of every drawer in the place. Footboard of the bed.”

Gibby was scowling with concentration, making an evident mental check of each location the cop mentioned.

“And another person?” he asked.

“Clear prints well spread over the apartment. Small fingers, probably a woman’s. Not in our files and we’ve put them through to the FBI for a check with their central file.”

“Too soon to have anything on that yet,” Gibby muttered. “You say well spread over the apartment. What specific locations?”

The cop consulted a list he was carrying. He read it off for us and it did sound as though this unknown had covered the place completely, touching just about everything in sight. These prints had been turned up on the closet door, on several empty hangers found in the closet, on all drawer fronts, on both headboard and footboard of the bed, on all the cupboards in the kitchenette, on the toilet seat in the bathroom, on the taps of the bathroom washstand, on a can of cleansing powder in the bathroom, and on the porcelain of the bathroom washstand. He spoke specially of this last set.

“The ones on the washstand,” he said, “they’re the doozies, Mr. Gibson. Both hands, left and right, and all ten fingers. It’s like they’d been done for the file, perfect and complete. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve never picked up another set like them.”

We went up to the apartment with him and he took us into the bathroom and showed us the exact position on the washstand where he had been able to bring out these phenomenal prints. The four fingers of each hand had turned up on the sides and the thumbs had turned up on top. Gibby smiled grimly.

“No wonder they’re so good,” he said. “She had her whole weight behind them.”

The cop shrugged. “Craziest one I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Don’t forget this was after wiping the place clean.”

“I’m not forgetting,” Gibby said.

We were moving out of the bathroom when the bell rang. The cop knew all about the bells. He had been working in there most of the afternoon and there had been plenty of coming and going, what with all the police and the Medical Examiner’s men.

“That’s the downstairs bell,” he said. “One of our fellows coming back that’ll be.”

He put his finger on a button that would release the lock on the downstairs door. He held it there for a few moments.

“Expect any of your men back here now?” Gibby asked.

“We’ll be keeping a man on here tonight anyhow—” the cop began.

“Just in case some of her friends should turn up,” Gibby said, finishing it for him. “Someone has turned up. It can be one of our boys. It could be someone for her. Let’s not assume anything.”

The cop flushed. He was a specialist and evidently a bit rusty on the general run of police routine, but he was still a cop. He made an apologetic gesture. Nobody said anything. We were waiting. In the quiet I could hear Nora McGuire’s record player next door. It was coming through pleasantly as just the most discreet murmur of music. The sudden, sharp shrilling of the upstairs doorbell made me jump a bit.

Gibby moved to the door and opened it. A young man with thin hair stood on the doormat. He was all big grin and dancing eyes. He saw us and the grin faded and some of the gaiety went out of his eyes. He went into a flutter of apologetic gestures.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have the wrong apartment.”

“Come in,” Gibby said. “You have the right apartment.”

I thought he was just riding a hunch. In fact, it did strike me that this could very possibly belong to Nora McGuire next door. He looked the type who might join her for a high old time with Frédéric Chopin on the gramophone.

Then he came in and the light fell full on his face. Just for verification, I took a quick glance at the picture on the bedside table. He was looking some years older and he wasn’t in uniform, but there was no mistaking him. Even without the combat infantry medal or the Pfc. stripe, this was Milty, the only man in the life of the late Sydney Bell on whom we had anything more than Nora McGuire’s vague descriptions.

At that moment he stuck his hand out and introduced himself. “I’m Milt Bannerman,” he said. “You know, Ellie’s brother.”

Since nobody had taken his hand he now used it to gesture toward his picture where it still sat on the table.

“Yes,” Gibby said. “We recognized you from the picture.”

“Both the girls out?” Milty asked. “Serves me right, I suppose, for trying to surprise them. They weren’t expecting me till tonight. I found I could get an earlier train.”

“You were expecting to find your sister here with Miss Bell?” Gibby asked.

For just a split second Milt Bannerman looked confused. Then he laughed.

“Of course,” he said. “You know her as Sydney Bell. That’s Ellie. That’s my sister.”

He made that gesture toward the table again but this time it was at the dead girl’s picture.

“Then what other girl were you expecting to find here with her?” Gibby asked.

Milty started to speak. The beginning of a syllable did come past his lips, something that sounded like “Jo—” but he bit off sharply and with a wary eye on the three of us he started edging toward the door. The cop wasn’t so much the fingerprint lab specialist that he didn’t quietly move with Bannerman, putting himself in the doorway behind him.

“Hey, what is this?” Bannerman asked. “Who are you anyway and where are the girls?”

Gibby introduced himself and while he was at it, he also introduced me and the officer who stood in the doorway.

Bannerman’s wary look took on a sharper edge. His eyes narrowed and there was that almost imperceptible change all over him under the decent blue suit. Muscles were settling themselves. Mentally he was pinning the combat infantryman’s badge back on his chest.

“You’ll have some sort of identification,” he said. “I don’t just have to take your word for it.”

Gibby showed him his identification. I brought mine out and the officer stood with his in his hand. It couldn’t have been more different from the previous time we had shown them. If Gibby had been questioning the readiness of those characters out in the street to take us on our own say-so, he could have no complaint of Milton Bannerman’s thoroughness.

He didn’t just look at our credentials. He made a study of them. He examined all three in turn and he was so long over each that he could have been memorizing them unless he was a very slow study. I didn’t think he was memorizing them. I thought he was playing for time.