Some Buried Caesar

"All right, I'll encourage you some more. This morning a sheriffs deputy was in the hotel lobby when Bronson entered. When Bronson went to a phone booth and put in a New York call, the deputy got himself plugged in on another line. He heard Bronson tell somebody in New York that a man named Goodwin had poked him in the jaw and taken the receipt from him, but that he expected to pull it off anyway. Well?"

"Gee," I said, "that's swell. All you have to do is have the New York cops grab the somebody and run him through the coffee grinder-"

"Much obliged. What was the receipt for and where is it?"

I shook my head. "The deputy must have heard wrong. Maybe the name was Doodwin or Goldstein or DiMaggio-"

"I would like to clip you. Jesus, I would enjoy stretching you out." Barrow breathed. "Are you going to spill it?"

"Sorry, nothing to spill."

"On the hotel register you wrote your first name as Archie. Is that correct?"

"Yep."

He turned to his colleague. "Bill, youll find Judge Hutehins waiting upstairs. Run up and swear out a material witness commitment. Archie Goodwin. Hurry down with it, we've got to shake a leg."

I raised the brows. The cossack made it snappy. I asked, "How's the accommodations?"

"Fair. A little crowded on account of the exposition. Any time you're ready to talk turkey-"

"No speak English. This will get you a row of ciphers and the finger of scorn and a bellyache."

He merely looked unflinching. We sat. In a few minutes his pal returned with a document, and I asked to see it and was obliged. Barrow took it and asked me to come on, and I went between them down the dark hall, around a comer and along another hall, and into another office smaller than the one we had left but not so dingy, with WARDEN on the door. A sleepy-looking plump guy sat at a desk which had a vase of flowers on it besides miscellany. He let out a low growl when he saw us, like a dog being disturbed in the mid- dle of comfort. Barrow handed him the paper and told him:

"Material witness in the Bronson case. We've gone through him; I suppose you'll want to take his jackknife. I'll stop in bter for my copy or get it in the morning. Any time he asks for me, day or night, I want to see him."

The warden pushed a button on his desk, ran his eyes over the paper, looked at me, and cackled. "By golly, bud, you should have put on some old clothes. The valley service here is terrible."

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