skin. I dunno what he thinks he's sucking around for.' His mood changed. 'You haven't deserted me, anyway. Go ahead, make yourself a drink.'
I manufactured a light highball and brought it back to the couch. I didn't offer Hoffman any. In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.
'You were telling me about Luke Deloney and how he grew.'
He squinted at me. 'I don't know why you're so interested in Deloney. He's been dead for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years and three months. He shot himself, but I guess you know that, eh?' A hard intelligence glinted momentarily in his eyes and drew them into focus on my face.
I spoke to the hard intelligence: 'Was there anything between Helen and Deloney?'
'No, she wasn't interested in him. She had a crush on the elevator boy. George. I ought to know, she made me get him the job. I was sort of managing the Deloney Apartments at the time. Luke Deloney and me, we were like that.'
He tried to cross his second finger over his forefinger. It kept slipping. He finally completed the maneuver with the help of his other hand. His fingers were thick and mottled like uncooked breakfast sausages.
'Luke Deloney was a bit of a womanizer,' he said indulgently, 'but he didn't mess around with the daughters of his friends. He never cared for the young stuff, anyway. His wife must of been ten years older than he was. Anyway, he wouldn't touch my daughter. He knew I'd kill him.'
'Did you?'
'That's a lousy question, mister. If I didn't happen to like you I'd knock your block off.'
'No offense.'
'I had nothing against Luke Deloney. He treated me fair and square. Anyway, I told you he shot himself.'
'Suicide?'
'Naw. Why would he commit suicide? He had everything, money and women and a hunting lodge in Wisconsin. He took me up there personally more than once. The shooting was an accident. That's the way it went into the books and that's the way it stays.'
'How did it happen, Lieutenant?'
'He was cleaning his .32 automatic. He had a permit to tote it on his person--I helped him get it myself-- because he used to carry large sums of money. He took the clip out all right but he must of forgot the shell that was in the chamber. It went off and shot him in the face.'
'Where?'
'Through the right eye.'
'I mean where did the accident occur?'
'In one of the bedrooms in his apartment. He kept the roof apartment in the Deloney building for his private use. More than once I drank with him up there. Prewar Green River, boy.' He slapped my knee, and noticed the full glass in my hand. 'Drink up your drink.'
I knocked back about half of it. It wasn't prewar Green River. 'Was Deloney drinking at the time of the shooting?'
'Yeah, I think so. He knew guns. He wouldn't of made that mistake if he was sober.'
'Was anybody with him in the apartment?'
'No.'
'Can you be sure?'
'I can be sure. I was in charge of the investigation.'
'Did anybody share the apartment with him?'
'Not on a permanent basis, you might say. Luke Deloney had various women on the string. I checked them out, but none of them was within a mile of the place at the time it happened.'
'What kind of women?'
'All the way from floozies to one respectable married woman here in town. Their names didn't go into the record then and they're not going to now.'
There was a growl in his voice. I didn't pursue the subject. Not that I was afraid of Hoffman exactly. I had at least fifteen years on him, and a low alcohol content. But if he went for me I might have to hurt him badly.
'What about Mrs. Deloney?' I said.
'What about her?'
'Where was she when all this was going on?'
'At home, out on Glenview. They were sort of separated. She didn't believe in divorce.'
'People who don't believe in divorce sometimes believe in murder.'
Hoffman moved his shoulders belligerently. 'You trying to say that I hushed up a murder?'
'I'm not accusing you of anything, Lieutenant.'
'You better not. I'm a cop, remember, first last and always.' He raised his fist and rotated it before his eyes like a hypnotic device. 'I been a good cop all my life. In my prime I was the best damn cop this burg ever saw. I'll have a drink on that.' He picked up his tumbler. 'Join me?'
I said I would. We were moving obscurely on a collision course. Alcohol might soften the collision, or sink him. I finished my drink and handed him my glass. He filled it to the brim with neat whisky. Then he filled his own. He sat down and stared into the brown liquid as if it was a well where his life had drowned.
'Bottoms up,' he said.
'Take it easy, Lieutenant. You don't want to kill yourself.' It occurred to me as I said it that maybe he did.
'What are you, another pussy willow? Bottoms up.'
He drained his glass and shuddered. I held mine in my hand. After a while he noticed this.
'You didn't drink your drink. What you trying to do, pull a fast one on me? Insult my hosh--my hoshpit--?' His lips were too numb to frame the word.
'No insult intended. I didn't come here for a drinking party, Lieutenant. I'm seriously interested in who killed your daughter. Assuming Deloney was murdered--'
'He wasn't.'
'Assuming he was, the same person may have killed Helen. In view of everything I've heard, from her and other people, I think it's likely. Don't you?'
I was trying to get his mind under my control: the sloppy drunken sentimental part, and the drunken violent part, and the hard intelligent part hidden at the core.
'Deloney was an accident,' he said clearly and stubbornly.
'Helen didn't think so. She claimed it was murder, and that she knew a witness to the murder.'
'She was lying, trying to make me look bad. All she ever wanted to do was make her old man look bad.'
His voice had risen. We sat and listened to its echoes. He dropped his empty glass, which bounced on the rug, and clenched the fist which seemed to be his main instrument of expression. I got ready to block it, but he didn't throw it at me.
Heavily and repeatedly, he struck himself in the face, on the eyes and cheeks, on the mouth, under the jaw. The blows left dull red welts in his clay-colored flesh. His lower lip split.
Hoffman said through the blood: 'I clobbered my poor little daughter. I chased her out of the house. She never came back.'
Large tears the color of pure distilled alchohol or grief rolled from his puffing eyes and down his damaged face. He fell sideways on the couch. He wasn't dead. His heart was beating strongly. I straightened him out--his legs were as heavy as sandbags--and put a bolster under his head. With blind eyes staring straight up into the light, he began to snore.
I closed the roll-top desk. The key was in it, and I turned it on the liquor and switched off the light and took the key outside with me.
