He shuffled the pink deckle-edged pages together and Lawford leaned down to sign a form. He picked up the pink pages, folded them, put them in his breast pocket and walked out.
Dr. Weiss stood up. He was tough, good-natured, unimpressed. “We had the last inquest on the Wade family too quick,” he said. “I guess we won’t bother to have this one at all. ”
He nodded to Ohls and Hernandez, shook hands formally with Loring, and went out. Loring stood up to go, then hesitated.
“I take it that I may inform a certain interested party that there will be no further investigation of this matter?” he said stiffly.
“Sorry to have kept you away from your patients so long, Doctor.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Loring said sharply. “I’d better warn you—”
“Get lost, Jack,” Hernandez said.
Dr. Loring almost staggered with shock. Then he turned and fumbled his way rapidly out of the room. The door closed and it was a half minute before anybody said anything. Hernandez shook himself and lit a cigarette. Then he looked at me.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“What are you waiting for?”
“This is the end, then? Finished? Kaput.”
“Tell him. Bernie.”
“Yeah, sure it’s the end,” Ohls said. “I was all set to pull her in for questioning. Wade didn’t shoot himself. Too much alcohol in his brain. But like I told you, where was the, motive? Her confession could be wrong in details, but it proves she spied on him. She knew the layout of the guesthouse in Encino. The Lennox frail had taken both her men from her. What happened in the guesthouse is just what you want to imagine. One question you forgot to ask Spencer. Did Wade own a Mauser P.P.K.? Yeah, he owned a small Mauser automatic. We talked to Spencer already today on the phone. Wade was a blackout drunk. The poor unfortunate bastard either thought he had killed Sylvia Lennox or he actually had killed her or else he bad some reason to know his wife had. Either way he was going to lay it on the line eventually. Sure, he’d been hitting the hooch long before, but he was a guy married to a beautiful nothing. The Mex knows all about it. The little bastard knows damn near everything. That was a dream girl. Some of her was here and now, but a lot of her was there and then. If she ever got hot pants, it wasn’t for her husband. Get what I’m talking about?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Damn near made her yourself, didn’t you?”
I gave him the same no answer.
Ohls and Hernandez both grinned sourly. “Us guys aren’t exactly brainless,” Ohls said, “We knew there was something in that story about her taking her clothes off. You outtalked him and he let you. He was hurt and confused and he liked Wade and he wanted to be sure. When he got sure he’d have used his knife. This was a personal matter with him. He never snitched on Wade. Wade’s wife did, and she deliberately fouled up the issue just to confuse Wade. It all adds. In the end I guess she was scared of him. And Wade never threw her down any stairs. That was an accident. She tripped and the guy tried to catch her. Candy saw that too.”
“None of it explains why she wanted me around.”
“I could think of reasons. One of them is old stuff. Every cop has run into it a hundred times. You were the loose end, the guy that helped Lennox escape, his friend, and probably to some extent his confidant. What did he know and what did he tell you? He took the gun that had killed her and he knew it had been fired. She could have thought he did it for her. That made her think he knew she had used it. When he killed himself she was sure. But what about you? You were still the loose end. She wanted to milk you, and she had the charm to use, and a situation ready-made for an excuse to get next to you. And if she needed a fall guy, you were it. You might say she was collecting fall guys.”
“You’re imputing too much knowledge to her,” I said.
Ohls broke a cigarette in half and started chewing on one half. The other half he stuck behind his ear.
“Another reason is she wanted a man, a big, strong guy that could crush her in his arms and make her dream again.
“She hated me,” I said. “I don’t buy that one.”
“Of course,” Hernandez put in dryly. “You turned her down. But she would have got over that. And then you blew the whole thing up in her face with Spencer listening in.”
“You two characters been seeing any psychiatrists lately?”
“Jesus,” Ohls said, “hadn’t you heard? We got them in our hair all the time these days. We’ve got two of them on the staff. This ain’t police business any more. It’s getting to be a branch of the medical racket. They’re in and out of jail, the courts, the interrogation rooms. They write reports fifteen pages long on why some punk of a juvenile held up a liquor store or raped a schoolgirl or peddled her to the senior class. Ten years from now guys like Hernandez and me will be doing Rorschach tests and word associations instead of chin-ups and target practice. When we go out on a case we’ll carry little black bags with portable lie detectors and bottles of truth serum. Too bad we didn’t grab the four hard monkeys that poured it on Big Willie Magoon. We might have been able to unmaladjust them and make them love their mothers.”
“Okay for me to blow?”
“What are you not convinced about?” Hernandez asked, snapping a rubber band.
“I’m convinced. The case is dead. She’s dead, they’re all dead. A nice smooth routine all around. Nothing to do but go home and forget it ever happened. So I’ll do that.”
Ohls reached the half cigarette from behind his ear, looked at it as if wondering, how it got there, and tossed it
