escape. My guess is you took the guy somewhere. And right now a guess is all I need. The skipper is tough these days. He knows the rulebook but he gets absent-minded. This could be a misery for you. One way or another we get a statement from you. The harder it is to get, the surer we are we need it.”
“That’s a lot of crap to him,” Dayton said. “He knows the book.”
“It’s a lot of crap to everybody,” Green said calmly. “But it still works. Come on, Marlowe. I’m blowing the whistle on you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Blow it. Terry Lennox was my friend. I’ve got a reasonable amount of sentiment invested in him. Enough not to spoil it just because a cop says come through, You’ve got a case against him, maybe far more than I hear from you. Motive, opportunity, and the fact that he skipped out. The motive is old stuff, long neutralized, almost part of the deal. I don’t admire that kind of deal, but that’s the kind of guy he is—a little weak and very gentle. The rest of it means nothing except that if he knew she was dead he knew he was a sitting duck for you. At the inquest if they have one and if they call me, I’ll have to answer questions. I don’t have to answer yours. I can see you’re a nice guy, Green. Just as I can see your partner is just another goddamn badge flasher with a power complex. If you want to get me in a real jam, let him hit me again. I’ll break his goddamn pencil for him.”
Green stood up and looked at me sadly. Dayton hadn’t moved. He was a one-shot tough guy. He had to have time out to pat his back.
“I’ll use the phone,” Green said. “But I know what answer I’ll get. You’re a sick chicken, Marlowe. A very sick chicken. Get the hell outa my way.” This last to Dayton. Dayton turned and went back and picked up his pad.
Green crossed to the phone and lifted it slowly, his plain face creased with the long slow thankless grind. That’s the trouble with cops. You’re all set to hate their guts and then you meet one that goes human on you.
The Captain said to bring me in, and rough.
They put handcuffs on me. They didn’t search the house, which seemed careless of them. Possibly they figured I would be too experienced to have anything there that could be dangerous to me. In which they were wrong. Because if they had made any kind of job of it they would have found Terry Lennox’s car keys. And when the car was found, as it would be sooner or later, they would fit the keys to it and know he had been in my company.
Actually, as it turned out, that meant nothing. The car was never found by any police. It was stolen sometime in the night, driven most probably to El Paso, fitted with new keys and forged papers, and put on the market eventually in Mexico City. The procedure is routine. Mostly the money comes back in the form of heroin. Part of the good-neighbor policy, as the hoodlums see it.
7
The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. Six months later he was indicted for perjury before a grand jury, booted without trial, and later stamped to death by a big stallion on his ranch in Wyoming.
Right now I was his raw meat. He sat behind his desk with his coat off and his sleeves rolled almost to his shoulders. He was as bald as a brick and getting heavy around the waist like all hard-muscled men in middle age. His eyes were fish gray. His big nose was a network of burst capillaries. He was drinking coffee and not quietly. His blunt strong hands had hairs thick on their backs. Grizzled tufts stuck out of his ears. He pawed something on his desk and looked at Green.
Green said: “All we got on him is he won’t tell us nothing, skipper. The phone number makes us look him up. He’s out riding and don’t say where. He knows Lennox pretty well and don’t say when he saw him last.”
“Thinks he’s tough,” Gregorius said indifferently. “We could change that.” He said it as if he didn’t care one way or another. He probably didn’t. Nobody was tough to him. “Point is the D.A. smells a lot of headlines on this one. Can’t blame him, seeing who the girl’s old man is. I guess we better pick this fellow’s nose for him.”
He looked at me as if I was a cigarette stub, or an empty chair. Just something in his line of vision, without interest for him.
Dayton said respectfully: “It’s pretty obvious that his whole attitude was designed to create a situation where he could refuse to talk. He quoted law at us and needles me into socking him. I was out of line there, Captain.”
Gregorius eyed him bleakly. “You must needle easy if this punk can do it. Who took the cuffs off?”
Green said he did. “Put them back on,” Gregorius said. “Tight. Give him something to brace him up.”
Green put the cuffs back on or started to. “Behind the back,” Gregorius barked. Green cuffed my hands behind my back. I was sitting in a hard chair.
“Tighter,” Gregorius said. “Make them bite.”
Green made them tighter. My hands started to feel numb.
Gregorius looked at me finally. “You can talk now. Make it snappy.”
I didn’t answer him. He leaned back and grinned. His hand went out slowly for his coffee cup and went around it. He leaned forward a little. The cup jerked but I beat it by going sideways out of the chair. I landed hard on my shoulder, rolled over and got up slowly. My hands were quite numb now. They didn’t feel anything. The arms above the cuffs were beginning to ache.
Green helped me back into the chair. The wet smear of the coffee was over the back and some of the seat, but most of it was on the floor.
“He don’t like coffee,” Gregorius said. “He’s a swifty. He moves fast. Good reflexes.”
Nobody said anything. Gregorius looked me over with fish eyes.
“In here, mister, a dick license don’t mean any more than calling card. Now let’s have your statement, verbal at first. We’ll take it down later. Make it complete. Let’s have, say, a full account of your movements since ten P.M. last night. I mean full. This office is investigating a murder and the prime suspect is missing. You connect with him. Guy catches his wife cheating and beats her head to raw flesh and bone and blood-soaked hair. Our old friend the bronze statuette. Not original but it works. You think any goddamn private eye is going to quote law at me over this, mister, you got a hell of a tough time coming your way. There ain’t a police force in the country could do its job with a law book. You got information and I want it. You could of said no and I could of not believed you. But you didn’t even say no. You’re not dummying up on me, my friend. Not six cents worth. Let’s go.”
