She almost passed me without a glance on the way out, then at the last moment turned her head a couple of inches and nodded very slightly, as if I was somebody she must have met somewhere a long time ago, but couldn’t quite place in her memory.
Outside on the steps when it was all over I ran into Ohls. He was watching the traffic down below, or pretending to.
“Nice job,” he said without turning his head. “Congratulations.”
“You did all right on Candy.”
“Not me, kid. The D.A. decided the sexy stuff was irrelevant”
“What sexy stuff was that?”
He looked at me then. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said. “And I don’t mean you.” Then his expression got remote. “I been looking at them for too many years. It wearies a man. This one came out of the special bottle. Old private stock. Strictly for the carriage trade. So long, sucker. Call me when you start wearing twenty-dollar shirts. I’ll drop around and hold your coat for you.”
People eddied around us going up and down the steps. We just stood there. Ohls took a cigarette out of his pocket and looked at it and dropped it on the concrete and ground it to nothing with his heel.
“Wasteful,” I said.
“Only a cigarette, pal. It’s not a life. After a while maybe you marry the girl, huh?”
“Shove it.”
He laughed sourly. “I been talking to the right people about the wrong things,” he said acidly. “Any objection?”
“No objection, Lieutenant,” I said, and went on down the steps. He said something behind me but I kept going.
I went over to a corn-beef joint on Flower. It suited my mood. A rude sign over the entrance said: “Men Only. Dogs and Women Not Admitted.” The service inside was equally polished. The waiter who tossed your food at you needed a shave and deducted his tip without being invited. The food was simple but very good and they had a brown Swedish beer which could hit as hard as a martini.
When I got back to the office the phone was ringing. Ohls said: “I’m coming by your place. I’ve got things to say.”
He must have been at or near the Hollywood substation because he was in the office inside twenty minutes. He planted himself in the customer’s chair and crossed his legs and growled: “I was out of line. Sorry. Forget it.”
“Why forget it? Let’s open up the wound.”
“Suits me. Under the hat, though. To some people you’re a wrong gee. I never knew you to do anything too crooked.”
“What was the crack about twenty-dollar shirts?”
“Aw hell, I was just sore,” Ohls said. “I was thinking of old man Potter. Like he told a secretary to tell a lawyer to tell District Attorney Springer to tell Captain Hernandez you were a personal friend of his.”
“He wouldn’t take the trouble.”
“You met him. He gave you time.”
“I met him, period. I didn’t like him, but perhaps it was only envy. He sent for me to give me some advice. He’s big and he’s tough and I don’t know what else. I don’t figure he’s a crook.”
“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal. ”
“You sound like a Red,” I said, just to needle him.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said contemptuously. “I ain’t been investigated yet. You liked the suicide verdict, didn’t you?”
“What else could it be?”
“Nothing else, I guess.” He put his hard blunt hands on the desk and looked at the big brown freckles on the backs of them. “I’m getting old. Keratosis, they call those brown spots. You don’t get them until you’re past fifty. I’m an old cop and an old cop is an old bastard. I don’t like a few things about this Wade death.”
“Such as?” I leaned back and watched the tight sun wrinkles around his eyes.
“You get so you can smell a wrong setup, even when you know you can’t do a damn thing about it. Then you just sit and talk like now. I don’t like that he left no note.”
“He was drunk. Probably just a sudden crazy impulse.”
Ohls lifted his pale eyes and dropped his hands off the desk. “I went through his desk. He wrote letters to himself. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Drunk or sober he hit that typewriter. Some of it is wild, some of it kind of funny, and some of it is sad. The guy had something on his mind.
He wrote all around it but he never quite touched it. That guy would have left a two-page letter if he knocked himself off.”
“He was drunk,” I said again.
“With him that didn’t matter,” Ohls said wearily. “The next thing I don’t like is he did it there in that room and
