He stood close to me and said in a low timid sort of voice: “I guess you think I’m an awful heel.”
“On account of that story you told about the doubloon?”
“Yes.”
“That didn’t affect my way of thinking about you in the least,” I said.
“Well—”
“Just what do you want me to say?”
He moved his smoothly tailored shoulders in a deprecatory shrug. His silly little reddish brown mustache glittered in the sun.
“I suppose I like to be liked,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Murdock. I like your being that devoted to your wife. If that’s what it is.”
“Oh. Didn’t you think I was telling the truth? I mean, did you think I was saying all that just to protect her?”
“There was that possibility.”
“I see.” He put a cigarette into the long black holder, which he took from behind his display handkerchief. “Well—I guess I can take it that you don’t like me.” The dim movement of his eyes was visible behind the green lenses, fish moving in a deep pool.
“It’s a silly subject,” I said. “And damned unimportant. To both of us.”
He put a match to the cigarette and inhaled. “I see,” he said quietly. “Pardon me for being crude enough to bring it up.”
He turned on his heel and walked back to his car and got in. I watched him drive away before I moved. Then I went over and patted the little painted Negro boy on the head a couple of times before I left.
“Son,” I said to him, “you’re the only person around this house that’s not nuts.”
23
The police loudspeaker box on the wall grunted and a voice said: “KGPL. Testing.” A click and it went dead.
Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze stretched his arms high in the air and yawned and said: “Couple of hours late, ain’t you?”
I said: “Yes. But I left a message for you that I would be. I had to go to the dentist.”
“Sit down.”
He had a small littered desk across one corner of the room. He sat in the angle behind it, with a tall bare window to his left and a wall with a large calendar about eye height to his right. The days that had gone down to dust were crossed off carefully in soft black pencil, so that Breeze glancing at the calendar always knew exactly what day it was.
Spangler was sitting sideways at a smaller and much neater desk. It had a green blotter and an onyx pen set and a small brass calendar and an abalone shell full of ashes and matches and cigarette stubs. Spangler was flipping a handful of bank pens at the felt back of a seat cushion on end against the wall, like a Mexican knife thrower flipping knives at a target. He wasn’t getting anywhere with it. The pens refused to stick.
The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it.
A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pass in beyond the green lights of a precinct station you pass clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.
I sat down. Breeze got a cellophane-wrapped cigar out of his pocket and the routine with it started. I watched it detail by detail, unvarying, precise. He drew in smoke, shook his match out, laid it gently in the black glass ashtray, and said: “Hi, Spangler.”
Spangler turned his head and Breeze turned his head. They grinned at each other. Breeze poked the cigar at me.
“Watch him sweat,” he said.
Spangler had to move his feet to turn far enough around to watch me sweat. If I was sweating, I didn’t know it.
“You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls,” I said. “How in the world do you do it?”
“Skip the wisecracks,” Breeze said. “Had a busy little morning?”
“Fair,” I said.
He was still grinning. Spangler was still grinning. Whatever it was Breeze was tasting he hated to swallow it. Finally he cleared his throat, straightened his big freckled face out, turned his head enough so that he was not looking at me but could still see me and said in a vague empty sort of voice:
“Hench confessed.”
Spangler swung clear around to look at me. He leaned forward on the edge of his chair and his lips were parted in an ecstatic half smile that was almost indecent.
I said: “What did you use on him—a pickax?”
“Nope.”
They were both silent, staring at me.
