He was in his shirtsleeves and he looked tired, but he had that kind of face. He was smoking one of his tasteless cigarettes. Ashes from it had fallen on his loosened tie. His limp black hair was all over the place.
He stared at me silently after I sat down. Then he said: “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, if ever I met one. Don’t tell me you’re still digging into that mess.”
“Something worries me a little. Would it be all right now if I assumed you were representing Mr. Harlan Potter when you came to see me in the birdcage?”
He nodded. I touched the side of my face gently with my fingertips. It was all healed up and the swelling was gone, but one of the blows must have damaged a nerve. Part of the cheek was still numb. I couldn’t let it alone. It would get all right in time.
“And that when you went to Otatoclan you were temporarily deputized as a member of the D.A.’s staff?”
“Yes, but don’t rub it in, Marlowe. It was a valuable connection. Perhaps I gave it too much weight.”
“Still is, I hope.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s finished. Mr. Potter does his legal business through San Francisco, New York, and Washington firms.”
“I guess he hates my guts—if he thinks about it.”
Endicott smiled. “Curiously enough, he put all the blame on his son-in-law, Dr. Loring. A man like Harlan Potter has to blame somebody. He couldn’t possibly be wrong himself. He felt that if Loring hadn’t been feeding the woman dangerous drugs, none of it would have happened.”
“He’s wrong. You saw Terry Lennox’s body in Otatoclan, didn’t you?”
“I did indeed. In the back of a cabinet maker’s shop. They have no proper mortuary there. He was making the coffin too. The body was ice-cold. I saw the wound in the temple. There’s no question of identity, if you had any ideas along those lines.”
“No, Mr. Endicott, I didn’t, because in his case it could hardly be possible. He was disguised a little though, wasn’t he?”
“Face and hands darkened, hair dyed black. But the scars were still obvious. And the fingerprints, of course, were easily checked from things he had handled at home.”
“What kind of police force do they have down there?”
“Primitive. The jefe could just about read and write. But he knew about fingerprints. It was hot weather, you know. Quite hot.” He frowned and took his cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it negligently into an enormous black basalt sort of receptacle. “They had to get ice from the hotel,” he added. “Plenty of ice.” He looked at me again. “No embalming there. Things have to move fast.”
“You speak Spanish, Mr. Endicott?”
“Only a few words. The hotel manager interpreted.” He smiled. “A well-dressed smoothie, that fellow. Looked tough, but he was very polite and helpful. It was all over in no time.”
“I had a letter from Terry. I guess Mr. Potter would know about it. I told his daughter, Mrs. Loring. I showed it to her. There was a portrait of Madison in it.”
“A what?”
“Five-thousand-dollar bill. ”
He raised his eyebrows. “Really. Well, he could certainly afford it. His wife gave him a cool quarter of a million the second time they were married. I’ve an idea he meant to go to Mexico to live anyhow—quite apart from what happened. I don’t know what happened to the money. I wasn’t in on that.”
“Here’s the letter, Mr. Endicott, if you care to read it.”
I took it out and gave it to him. He read it carefully, the way lawyers read everything. He put it down on the desk and leaned back and stared at nothing.
“A little literary, isn’t it?” he said quietly. “I wonder why he did it.”
“Killed himself, confessed, or wrote me the letter?”
“Confessed and killed himself, of course,” Endicott said sharply. “The letter is understandable. At least you got a reasonable recompense for what you did for him—and since.
“The mailbox bothers me,” I said. “Where he says there was a mailbox on the street under his window and the hotel waiter was going to hold his letter up before he mailed it, so Terry could see that it was mailed.”
Something in Endicott’s eyes went to sleep. “Why?” he asked indifferently. He picked another of his filtered cigarettes out of a square box. I held my lighter across the desk for him.
“They wouldn’t have one in a place like Otatodan,” I said.
“Go on.”
“I didn’t get it at first. Then I looked the place up. It’s a mere village. Population say ten or twelve thousand.
One street partly paved. The jefe has a Model A Ford as an official car. The post office is in the corner of a store, the chancery, the butcher shop. One hotel, a couple of cantinas, no good roads, a small airfield. There’s hunting around there in the mountains—lots of it. Hence the air. field. Only decent way to get there.”
“Go on. I know about the hunting.”
“So there’s a mailbox on the street. Like there’s a race course and a dog track and a golf course and a Jai Alai Fronton and park with a colored fountain and a bandstand.”
“Then he made a mistake,” Endicott said coldly. “Perhaps it was something that looked like a mailbox to him—
