conference room. A tall pale dark-haired man was standing there looking out of the window. There was a fat brown briefcase on the table. He turned. He waited for the door to close. Then he sat down near his briefcase on the far side of a scarred oak table that came out of the Ark. Noah bought it secondhand. The lawyer opened a hammered silver cigarette case and put it in front of him and looked me over.
“Sit down, Marlowe. Care for a cigarette? My name is Endicott. Sewell Endicott. I’ve been instructed to represent you without cost or expense to you. I guess you’d like to get out of here, wouldn’t you?”
I sat down and took one of the cigarettes. He held a lighter for me.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Endicott. We’ve met before—while you were D.A.”
He nodded, “I don’t remember, but it’s quite possible.” He smiled faintly. “That position was not quite in my line. I guess I don’t have enough tiger in me.”
“Who sent you?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. If you accept me as your attorney, the fee will be taken care of.”
“I guess that means they’ve got him.”
He just stared at me. I puffed at the cigarette. It was one of those things with filters in them. It tasted like a high fog strained through cotton wool.
“If you mean Lennox,” he said, “and of course you do, no—they haven’t got him.”
“Why the mystery, Mr. Endicott? About who sent you.”
“My principal wishes to remain anonymous. That is the privilege of my principal. Do you accept me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If they haven’t got Terry, why are they holding me? Nobody has asked me anything, nobody has been near me.”
He frowned and looked down at his long white delicate fingers.. “District Attorney Springer has taken personal charge of this matter. He may have been too busy to question you yet. But you are entitled to arraignment and a preliminary hearing. I can get you out on bail on a habeas corpus proceeding. You probably know what the law is.”
“I’m booked on suspicion of murder.”
He shrugged impatiently. “That’s just a catch-all. You could have been booked in transit to Pittsburgh, or any one of a dozen charges. What they probably mean is accessory after the fact. You took Lennox somewhere, didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer. I dropped the tasteless cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. Endicott shrugged again and frowned.
“Assume you did then, just for the sake of argument. To make you an accessory they have to prove intent. In this case that would mean knowledge that a crime had been committed and that Lennox was a fugitive. It’s bailable in any case. Of course what you really are is a material witness. But a man can’t be held in prison as a material witness in this state except by court order. He’s not a material witness unless a judge so declares. But the law enforcement people can always find a way to do what they want to do.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A detective named Dayton slugged me. A homicide captain named Gregorius threw a cup of coffee at me, hit me in the neck hard enough to bust an artery—you can see it’s still swollen, and when a call from Police Commissioner Allbright kept him from turning me over to the wrecking crew, he spat in my face. You’re quite right, Mr. Endicott. The law boys can always do what they want to do.”
He looked at his wristwatch rather pointedly. “You want out on bail or don’t you?”
“Thanks. I don’t think I do. A guy out on bail is already half guilty in the public mind. If he gets off later on, he had a smart lawyer.”
“That’s silly,” he said impatiently.
“Okay, it’s silly. I’m silly. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. If you’re in touch with Lennox, tell him to quit bothering about me. I’m not in here for him. I’m in here for me. No complaints. It’s part of the deal. I’m in a business where people come to me with troubles. Big troubles, little troubles, but always troubles they don’t want to take to the cops. How long would they come if any bruiser with a police shield could hold me upside down and drain my guts?”
“I see your point,” he said slowly. “But let me correct you on one thing. I am not in touch with Lennox. I scarcely know him. I’m an officer of the court, as all lawyers are. If I knew where Lennox was, I couldn’t conceal the information from the District Attorney. The most I could do would be to agree to surrender him at a specified time and place after I had had an interview with him.”
“Nobody else would bother to send you here to help me.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” He reached down to rub out his cigarette stub on the underside of the table.
“I seem to remember that you’re a Virginian, Mr. Endicott. In this country we have a sort of historical fixation about Virginians. We think of them as the flower of southern chivalry and honor.”
He smiled. “That was nicely said. I only wish it was true. But we’re wasting time. If you had had a grain of sense you’d have told the police you hadn’t seen Lennox for a week. It didn’t have to be true. Under oath you could always have told the real story. There’s no law against lying to the cops. They expect it. They feel much happier when you lie to them than when you refuse to talk to them. That’s a direct challenge to their authority. What do you expect to gain by it?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t really have an answer. He stood up and reached for his hat and snapped his cigarette case shut and put it in his pocket.
“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. I guess you’re not in any mood to be helped. So I’ll take myself off. You can reach me if you change your mind.”
“I’ll stick it out for a day or two longer. If they catch Terry they won’t care how he got away. All they’ll care
