“I know who he is, ma’am,” the deputy said, and dialed. She looked down at the front of her blouse. “May I go upstairs and change this?”
“Sure.” He nodded to her and spoke into the phone, then hung up and turned. “You say he’s been shot. That mean somebody else shot him?”
“I think this man murdered him,” she said without looking at me, and went quickly out of the room.
The deputy looked at me. He got a notebook out. He wrote something in it. “I better have your name,” he said casually, “and address. You the one called in?”
“Yes.” I told him my name and address.
“Just take it easy until Lieutenant Ohls gets here.”
“Bernie Ohls?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“Sure. I’ve known him a long time. He used to work out of the D.A.’s office.”
“Not lately,” the deputy said. “He’s Assistant Chief of Homicide, working out of the L. A. Sheriff’s office. You a friend of the family, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Mrs. Wade didn’t make it sound that way.”
He shrugged and half smiled. “Just take it easy, Mr. Marlowe. Not carrying a gun, are you?”
“Not today.”
“I better make sure.” He did. He looked towards the couch then. “In spots like this you can’t expect the wife to make much sense. We better wait outside.”
37
Ohls was a medium-sized thick man with short-cropped faded blond hair and faded blue eyes. He had stiff white eyebrows and in the days before he stopped wearing a hat you were always a little surprised when he took it off—there was so much more head than you expected. He was a hard tough cop with a grim outlook on life but a very decent guy underneath. He ought to have made captain years ago. He had passed the examination among the top three half a dozen times. But the Sheriff didn’t like him and he didn’t like the Sheriff.
He came down the stairs rubbing the side of his jaw. Flashlights had been going off in the study for a long time. Men had gone in and out. I had just sat in the living room with a plain-clothes dick and waited.
Ohls sat down on the edge of a chair and dangled his hands. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette. He looked at me broodingly.
“Remember the old days when they had a gatehouse and a private police force in Idle Valley?”
I nodded. “And gambling also.”
“Sure. You can’t stop it. This whole valley is still private property. Like Arrowhead used to be, and Emerald Bay. Long time since I was on a case with no reporters jumping around. Somebody must have whispered in Sheriff Petersen’s ear. They kept it off the teletype.”
“Real considerate of them,” I said. “How is Mrs. Wade?”
“Too relaxed. She must of grabbed some pills. There’s a dozen kinds up there—even demerol. That’s bad stuff. Your friends don’t have a lot of luck lately, do they? They get dead.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Gunshot suicides always interest me,” Ohls said loosely. “So easy to fake. The wife says you killed him. Why would she say that?”
“She doesn’t mean it literally.”
“Nobody else was here. She says you knew where the gun was, knew he was getting drunk, knew he had fired off the gun the other night when she had to fight with him to get the gun away from him. You were there that night too. Don’t seem to help much, do you?”
“I searched his desk this afternoon. No gun. I’d told her where it was and to put it away. She says now she didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“Just when would ‘now’ be?” Ohls asked gruffly.
“After she came home and before I phoned the substation.”
“You searched the desk. Why?” Ohls lifted his hands and put them on his knees. He was looking at me indifferently, as if he didn’t care what I said.
“He was getting drunk. I thought it just as well to have the gun somewhere else. But he didn’t try to kill himself the other night. It was just show-off.”
Ohls nodded. He took the chewed cigarette out of his mouth, dropped it into a tray, and put a fresh one in place of it.
“I quit smoking,” he said. “Got me coughing too much. But the goddamn things still ride me. Can’t feel right without one in my mouth. You supposed to watch the guy when he’s alone?”
“Certainly not. He asked me to come out and have lunch. We talked and he was kind of depressed about his writing not going well. He decided to hit the bottle. Think I should have taken it away from him?”
“I’m not thinking yet. I’m just trying to get a picture. How much drinking did you do?”
“Beer.”
“It’s your tough luck you were here, Marlowe. What was the check for? The one he wrote and signed and tore up?”
