over his shoulder.
“What are you crying about?” Hernandez said. “If she hadn’t been fresh out of guns she might have made it a perfect score.”
“Also,” Ohls said grimly, “the telephone was working yesterday.”
“Oh sure,” I said. “You’d have come running and what you would have found would have been a mixed up story that admitted nothing but a few silly lies. This morning you have what I suppose is a full confession. You haven’t let me read it, but you wouldn’t have called in the D.A. if it was just a love note. If any real solid work had been done on the Lennox case at the time, somebody would have dug up his war record and where he got wounded and all the rest of it. Somewhere along the line a connection with the Wades would have turned up. Roger Wade knew who Paul Marston was. So did another P.I. I happened to get in touch with.”
“It’s possible,” Hernandez admitted, “but, that isn’t how police investigations work. You don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat on to get it finalized and forgotten. I’ve investigated hundreds of homicides. Some are all of a piece, neat, tidy, and according to the book. Most of them make sense here, don’t make sense there. But when you get motive, means, opportunity, flight, a written confession, and a suicide immediately afterwards, you leave it lay. No police department in the world has the men or the time to question the obvious. The only thing against Lennox being a killer was that somebody thought he was a nice guy who wouldn’t have done it and that there were others who could equally well have done it. But the others didn’t take it on the lam, didn’t confess, didn’t blow their brains out. He did. And as for being a nice guy I figure sixty to seventy percent of all the killers that end up in the gas chamber or the hot seat or on the end of a rope are people the neighbors thought were just as harmless as a Fuller Brush salesman. Just as harmless and quiet and well bred as Mrs. Roger Wade. You want to read what she wrote in that letter? Okay, read it. I’ve got to go down the hall. ”
He stood up and pulled a drawer open and put a folder on the top of the desk. “There are five photostats in here, Marlowe. Don’t let me catch you looking at them.”
He started for the door and then turned his head and said to Ohls: “You want to talk to Peshorek with me?”
Ohls nodded and followed him out. When I was alone in the office I lifted the cover of the file folder and looked at the white-on-black photostats. Then touching only the edges I counted them. There were six, each of several pages clipped together. I took one and rolled it up and slipped it into my pocket. Then I read over the next one in the pile. When I had finished I sat down and waited. In about ten minutes Hernandez came back alone. He sat down behind his desk again, tallied the photostats in the file folder, and put the file back in his desk.
He raised his eyes and looked at me without any expression. “Satisfied?”
“Lawford know you have those?”
“Not from me. Not from Bernie. Bernie made them himself. Why?”
“What would happen if one got loose?”
He smiled unpleasantly. “It won’t. But if it did, it wouldn’t be anybody in the Sheriff’s office. The D.A. has photostat equipment too.”
“You don’t like District Attorney Springer too well, do you, Captain?”
He looked surprised. “Me? I like everybody, even you. Get the hell out of here. I’ve got work to do.”
I stood up to go. He said suddenly: “You carry a gun these days?”
“Part of the time.”
“Big Willie Magoon carried two. I wonder why he didn’t use them.”
“I guess he figured he had everybody scared.”
“That could be it,” Hernandez said casually. He picked up a rubber band and stretched it between his thumbs. He stretched it farther and farther. Finally with a snap it broke. He rubbed his thumb where the loose end had snapped back against it. “Anybody can be stretched too far,” he said. “No matter how tough he looks. See you around.”
I went out of the door and got out of the building fast.
Once a patsy, always a patsy.
45
Back in my own house on the sixth floor of the Cahuenga Building I went through my regular double play with the morning mail. Mail slot to desk to wastebasket, Tinker to Evers to Chance. I blew a clear space on the top of the desk and unrolled the photostat on it. I had rolled it so as not to make creases.
I read it over again. It was detailed enough and reasonable enough to satisfy any open mind. Eileen Wade had killed Terry’s wife in a fit of jealous fury and later when the opportunity was set up she had killed Roger because she was sure he knew. The gun fired into the ceiling of his room that night had been part of the setup. The unanswered and forever unanswerable question was why Roger Wade had stood still and let her put it over. He must have known how it would end. So he had written himself off and didn’t care. Words were his business, he had words for almost everything, but none for this.
“I have forty-six demerol tablets left from my last prescription,” she wrote. “I now intend to take them all and lie down on the bed. The door is locked. In a very short time I shall be beyond saving. This, Howard, is to be understood. What I write is in the presence of death. Every word is true. I have no regrets—except possibly that I could not have found them together and killed them together. I have no regrets for Paul whom you have heard called Terry Lennox. He was the empty shell of the man I loved and married. He meant nothing to me. When I saw him that afternoon for the only time after he came back from the war—at first I didn’t know him. Then I did and he knew me at once. He should have died young in the snow of Norway, my lover that I gave to death. He came back a friend of gamblers, the husband of a rich whore, a spoiled and ruined man, and probably some kind of crook in his past life. Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled. The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen to me. Goodbye, Howard.”
I put the photostat in the desk and locked it up. It was time for lunch but I wasn’t in the mood. I got the office bottle out of the deep drawer and poured a slug and then got the phone book off the hook at the desk and looked up the number of the Journal. I dialed it and asked the girl for Lonnie Morgan.
“Mr. Morgan doesn’t come in until around four o’clock. You might try the press room at the City Hall. ”
