“Fine.”
We shook hands, and I went out and down the wind-swept drive to Queen’s Lane. There were still half a dozen citizens hanging around the area; one of them, a kid in his late teens, cut over near me as I turned up toward where I’d left my car.
“What happened up there, mister? Was it a suicide?”
“Yeah. Suicide.”
“The old boozehound knocked himself off, huh?” the kid said. “Wow.” And he grinned at me.
People.
It was dusk by the time I got back into downtown San Francisco. I went straight to my office and checked the answering machine. No messages. Then I sat down to make some calls.
There was still no answer at the Nichols’ home; either Laura Nichols was still out somewhere or she had returned and Donleavy had got in touch with her, and she’d left again to see her brother. I rang up Bert Thomas and Milo Petrie, told each of them the stakeout was finished and what had happened in Brisbane. My last call was to the Hall of Justice, and this time Eberhardt was in. But “I’m busy right now,” he said. He sounded snippy, the way he does when he’s being overworked. “You planning to be home tonight?”
“I was, yeah.”
“I’ll drop by later, sometime after seven.”
I had nothing more to do in the office after that; I locked up again and drove home to my flat. From there I gave the Nichols number another try, with the same nonresults.
I got a beer out of the refrigerator, put a frozen eggplant parmagiana in the oven, and sat down to look at the house mail. The only thing of interest was a sales list from a pulp dealer in Ohio. The guy’s prices were kind of high, even for the over-inflated pulp market, but he had three issues of Thrilling Detective, one of Mammoth Mystery, and one of FBI Detective that I needed and that I thought I could afford. I wrote him a letter and a check-and wondered as I did so just how much I had spent this year on pulps. Too much, probably; that was one of the reasons why I was always short of money. But then, outside of my work, collecting pulps was the only real passion I had in life. What good was money if not to use to indulge your passions?
The telephone rang while I was eating my supper. A reporter from the Chronicle wanting to know if I had any statement to make concerning the murder of Victor Carding. I said no, politely, and hung up. When I had finished supper and was putting the dirty dishes into the sink with the other dirty dishes the phone rang a second time. Another reporter, this one from one of the TV stations. I told him the party he was looking for had been called to Los Angeles on business and would not be back for a week. Who was I? An associate named Phil Marlowe, I said, and then hung up on him too. Media people bring out the worst in me-I suppose because their business is disseminating sensationalistic crime news and mine relies on avoiding too much lurid publicity. The public eye versus the private eye.
I tried once more to call Laura Nichols. Nobody picked up this time, either. So I plunked myself down in the living room with a 1936 issue of Popular Detective, to read and wait for Eberhardt.
The phone rang again at seven fifteen. Another damned reporter? I went into the bedroom and caught up the receiver and said hello with my finger on the cut-off button.
But it wasn’t a reporter. “This is Donleavy,” his soft sleepy voice said in my ear. “I’ve got some news for you.”
I took my finger off the button. “Good news, I hope.”
“Not from your point of view. I talked to Talbot again; so did a couple of psychologists. He still maintains he’s guilty and nobody can shake him. We’ve got no choice except to charge him with suspicion of homicide.”
“What? Christ, I explained why he couldn’t have done it.”
“Sure you did. But you could be wrong about the time element and the silence in the garage before the shot. And about the blood coagulation, too; coroner wasn’t able to pinpoint the exact time of death. I’m not saying you are wrong, understand. Just that the rest of the evidence indicates you might be.”
“What evidence? Look, didn’t Osterman’s men find a second bullet in the garage?”
“No,” Donleavy said, “they didn’t.”
“But it’s got to be there. Otherwise the whole thing doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense the way Talbot tells it.”
“No, it doesn’t. There’s just no way he could have killed Carding. The man committed suicide.”
Donleavy made an audible sighing sound. “You’re a hundred percent wrong about that, my friend,” he said. “Lab boys tested the victim’s hands for nitrate traces and his clothing for powder marks; there weren’t any. He hadn’t fired a gun and he wasn’t shot at point blank range: it couldn’t possibly be suicide. Victor Carding was murdered.”
SEVEN
When Donleavy rang off I went into the kitchen, got out another bottle of beer, and sat brooding with it at the table. I had been so positive I was right about the day’s events in Brisbane-and I still thought so, damn it, at least where Martin Talbot’s actions and motivations were concerned. No way could I have been mistaken about the time element and the silence before the shot and the coagulating blood; I had been sharply conscious of time, I had been listening for sounds of any kind, I knew well enough when blood was coagulating and when it was fresh. So it added up the same way as before: Talbot had found Carding dead, picked up the gun, and fired a harmless shot- because he believed, just as I had believed, that Carding committed suicide, and because of a double-dose of guilt and a desire for punishment.
But then where the hell was the second bullet? It had to be in the garage; why hadn’t Osterman’s men found it?
The real surprise, though, was the fact that Carding was not a suicide but a murder victim. A man whose wife has just died in an automobile accident seems an unlikely candidate for homicide; you would think that old enemies, for instance, would consider the tragic loss of a loved one retribution enough. It could have been one of those random thrill killings-but that kind of psychopathic personality usually ties up his victims or slays them execution-style, and in addition almost never leaves his weapon behind. It could have been a burglar whom Carding surprised in the act-but as messy as the house was, it had not been searched for valuables; and burglars, like psychotics, seldom leave weapons behind. Anyway, what would a burglar be doing in the garage in the first place? It could have been a drinking companion of Carding’s, and the shooting a result of a drunken argument-but the body had not smelled of alcohol when I examined it, nor were there any whiskey bottles that I could remember seeing in the garage. So again, why would Carding have been shot there instead of inside the house?
Speculation was not going to get me anywhere, I decided. There were just too many things I did not know. About Victor Carding: What kind of man had he been? What kind of life had he led, who were his friends and his enemies? And also about the gun: Did it belong to Carding? If not, was it registered to anyone else? Or traceable in any other way?
Maybe the answers to one or more of those questions would point up the truth. Or maybe Donleavy and Osterman would get lucky and find a neighbor who had seen the killer leave and could identify him. Talbot and the cabbie and I would have seen him ourselves if we had arrived just a short time earlier; Carding could not have been dead more than a few minutes when I found him.
Well, in any case Donleavy was a first-rate cop and it was a good bet that he would get to the bottom of things sooner or later. Which was enough for me-but what about Laura Nichols? How was she taking it? Assuming she knew by now: I had neglected to ask Donleavy, in the wake of his revelations, if he had got in touch with her.
I stood and returned to the bedroom and redialed the Nichols number. This time, on the fourth ring, there was an answering click; Karen Nichols’ voice said a moment later, “Yes? Hello?”
“Is your mother there, Karen?” I asked when I had identified myself.
“No. She left hours ago.”
“Do you know what happened today?”
“Yes. Some friends and I were at Civic Center all afternoon; I just found out a few minutes ago. Mother left
