`Whoever did her in got rid of everything she had in that line. But we'll identify her. We have her.'
`Let me know when you do.'
I walked across down to the courthouse, under a sky that yesterday's rain had washed clean. I asked the deputy on duty in the sheriff's department where to find Lieutenant Bastian. He directed me to the identification laboratory on the second floor.
It was more office than laboratory, a spacious room with pigeons murmuring on the window ledges. The walls were crowded with filing cabinets and hung with maps of the city and county and state. A large adjacent closet was fitted out as a darkroom, with drying racks and a long metal sink.
Bastian got up smiling. His smile wasn't greatly different from last night's frown. He laid down a rectangular magnifying glass on top of the photograph he had been studying. Leaning across the desk to take his outstretched hand, I could see that it was a picture of Mrs. Brown in death.
`What killed her, Lieutenant?' I said when we were seated.
`This.'
He held up his right hand and clenched it. His face clenched with it. `The human hand.'
`Robert Brown's?'
`It looks like it. He gave her a beating early yesterday afternoon, according to Stanislaus. The deputy coroner says she's been dead that long.'
`Stanislaus told me they quarreled over a telephone call she made.'
`That's right. We haven't been able to trace the call, which means it was probably local. She used the phone in Stanislaus's office, but he claims to know nothing more about it.'
`How does he know Brown gave her a beating?'
I said.
`He says a neighbor woman told him. That checks out.'
Bastian wiped his left hand across his tense angry face, without really changing his expression. `It's terrible the way some people live, that a woman could be killed within a neighbor's hearing and nobody knows or cares.'
'Not even Brown,' I said. `He thought she was alive at nine-thirty last night. He talked to her through the door, trying to get her to open up. Or he may have been trying to con himself into thinking he hadn't killed her after all. I don't think he's too stable.'
Bastian looked up sharply. `Were you in the cottage when Brown was talking through the door?'
`I was. Incidentally, I recognized his voice. He's the same man who extorted twenty-five thousand dollars from Ralph Hillman last night. I listened in on a phone call he made to Hillman yesterday.'
Bastian's right fist was still clenched. He used it to strike the desk top, savagely. The pigeons on the window ledge flew away.
`It's too damn bad,' he said, `you didn't bring us in on this yesterday. You might have saved a life, not to mention twenty-five thousand dollars.'
`Tell that to Hillman.'
`I intend to. This morning. Right now I'm telling you.'
`The decision wasn't mine. I tried to change it. Anyway, I entered the case after the woman was killed.'
`That's a good place to begin,' Bastian said after a pause. `Go on from there. I want the full record.'
He reached down beside his desk and turned on a recorder. For an hour or more the tape slithered quietly from wheel to wheel as I talked into it. I was client-less and free and I didn't suppress anything. Not even the possibility that Tom Hillman had cooperated with Brown in extorting money from his father.
`I'd almost like to think that that was true,' Bastian said. `It would mean that the kid is still alive, anyway. But it isn't likely.'
`Which isn't likely?'
`Both things. I doubt that he hoaxed his old man, and I doubt that he's still alive. It looks as if the woman was used as a decoy to get him in position for the kill. We'll probably find his body in the ocean week after next.'
His words had the weight of experience behind them. Kidnap victims were poor actuarial risks. But I said: `I'm working on the assumption that he's alive.'
Bastian raised his eyebrows. `I thought Dr Sponti took you off the case.'
`I still have some of his money.'
Bastian gave me a long cool appraising look. `LA was right. You're not the usual peeper.'
`I hope not.'
`If you're staying with it, you can do something for me, as well as for yourself. Help me to get this woman identified.'
He slid the picture of Mrs. Brown out from under the magnifying glass. `This postmortem photo is too rough to circularize. But you could show it around in the right circles. I'm having a police artist make a composite portrait, but that takes time.'
`What about fingerprints?'
