The Third Figure Read Online Free Page A

a small swallow of coffee, set down his cup and examined me appraisingly with his pale blue Nordic eyes.
    “You’re kidding,” he said.
    I shook my head. “She came to my place last night and laid it all out. She stayed for more than an hour.”
    He sighed, perhaps with a certain weariness, perhaps more with a wry regret. Larsen was both an honest and a realistic cop. He realized that corruption existed in municipal politics, and therefore in lawmaking, and therefore in law enforcement. He knew that organized crime was the principal reason. Protection money is the one fixed item of overhead in the budget of every illegal venture. Larsen knew all this—and more. Yet, like most honest cops, he preferred not to think about it, just as a shoe salesman would rather not think of the frequency with which his customers’ feet are washed.
    “What all did she say?” he asked, his voice noncommittal.
    As concisely as I could, I told him.
    “And you’re going to do it?” he said incredulously.
    “This morning, I wasn’t. Now I am.”
    “What changed your mind? The money?” His voice was chilled with irony.
    “No, it wasn’t just the money. It’s the chance to interview Frankie Russo. You know as well as I do that organized crime is the biggest single business in the country. And it’s the biggest, most sensational news story in the country, too—in the world, for that matter.”
    “It’s the biggest untold story in the country. Anything you’ll ever need for material, you’ve already got. You don’t have to talk to Russo, and you know it.” He shifted in his chair, suppressing an impatient pique. “You could spend a week writing news stories that’d never get past your own city desk—or maybe your own wastebasket, once you thought about it.”
    “I could say the same to you. San Francisco’s a clean town as far as organized crime is concerned. It’s the only clean big city in the country, outside of maybe Portland and Seattle. But you could still spend that same week arresting a lot of people that you know are guilty as hell.”
    “Knowing is one thing,” he said sharply. “Proving it’s something else.”
    For a long moment we sat staring at each other. I was regretting my last remark; possibly Larsen was regretting his.
    Finally he took a deep breath and stirred his coffee, frowning.
    “Send the money back, Steve. You’ve taken your lumps over this clairvoyance thing. I gave you a few myself, a couple of years ago. But this is different. You could find yourself in deep, permanent trouble.”
    “With the law, you mean?”
    “With the law or with the Outfit. Just because Mrs. Vennezio doesn’t think her husband was murdered in the, ah, line of duty doesn’t make it so.”
    “But she’s got Russo talked into seeing me. That must mean something.”
    “It probably does. It probably means that Russo wants those letters.”
    “But …”
    “I’m telling you, Steve: you can’t possibly win. If the murder turns out to be a professional job, done on contract, and you find out who did it, you could be murdered yourself. If it wasn’t a professional job, then it’s possible Russo might let you go ahead. He doesn’t want unauthorized murders in his organization. It’s bad business. Sloppy management. However, if you do help him, then you’ll be on his side. He’ll take your information and use it to enforce ‘discipline,’ as they call it. You could be an accessory. At the very least, you’ll be on his payroll, just the same as if you were one of his lawyers, for instance. So then, if you go to the police, you’ll be in trouble with Russo. If you don’t go to the police, though, you’ll be violating the law. So you can’t win, no matter which way you jump. It’s happened to plenty of people, Steve, believe me. Just last year a vending machine operator walked into a police station and asked for protection, if he’d talk. He said he was scared—that he’d been a legitimate businessman