nothing.
“And at that point,” I said, “you run into a real basic coincidence, the only one I’m willing to admit in the whole picture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man named Bill Chess in a Riverside beer parlor and for reasons of her own married him and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake. And Little Fawn Lake was the property of a man whose wife was intimate with Lavery, who had found Mrs. Almore’s body. That’s what I call a real coincidence. It can’t be anything else but, but it’s basic, fundamental. Everything else flows from it.”
Webber got up from his desk and went over to the water cooler and drank two paper cups of water. He crushed the cups slowly in his hand and twisted them into a bail and dropped the ball into a brown metal basket under the cooler. He walked to the windows and stood looking out over the bay. This was before the dim-out went into effect, and there were many lights in the yacht harbor.
He came slowly back to the desk and sat down. He reached up and pinched his nose. He was making up his mind about something.
He said slowly: “I can’t see what the hell sense there is in trying to mix that up with something that happened a year and a half later.”
“Okay,” I said, “and thanks for giving me so much of your time.” I got up to go.
“Your leg feel pretty bad?” he asked, as I leaned down to rub it.
“Bad enough, but it’s getting better.”
“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve always known that. I’m not bitter about it. Goodnight, Captain Webber.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Sit down a minute. If we’ve got to have the Almore case in this, let’s drag it out into the open and look at it.”
“It’s about time somebody did that,” I said. I sat down again.
28
Webber said quietly: “I suppose some people think we’re just a bunch of crooks down here. I suppose they think a fellow kills his wife and then calls me up on the phone and says: ‘Hi, Cap, I got a little murder down here cluttering up the front room. And I’ve got five hundred iron men that are not working.’ And then I say: ‘Fine. Hold everything and I’ll be right down with a
blanket.’”
“Not quite that bad,” I said.
“What did you want to see Talley about when you went to his house tonight?”
“He had some line on Florence Almore’s death. Her parents hired him to follow it up, but he never told them what it was.”
“And you thought he would tell you?” Webber asked sarcastically.
“All I could do was try.”
“Or was it just that Degarmo getting tough with you made you feel like getting tough right back at him?”
“There might be a little of that in it too,” I said.
“Talley was a petty blackmailer,” Webber said contemptuously. “On more than one occasion. Any way to get rid of him was good enough. So I’ll tell you what it was he had. He had a slipper he had stolen from Florence Almore’s foot.”
“A slipper?”
He smiled faintly. “Just a slipper. It was later found hidden in his house. It was a green velvet dancing pump with some little stones set into the heel. It was custom made, by a man in Hollywood who makes theatrical footwear and such. Now ask me what was important about this slipper?”
“What was important about it, captain?”
“She had two pair of them, exactly alike, made on the same order. It seems that is not unusual. In case one of them gets scuffed or some drunken ox tries to walk up a lady’s leg.” He paused and smiled thinly. “It seems that one pair had never been worn.”
“I think I’m beginning to get it,” I said.
He leaned back and tapped the arms of his chair. He waited.
“The walk from the side door of the house to the garage is rough concrete,” I said. “Fairly rough. Suppose she didn’t walk it, but was carried. And suppose whoever carried her put her slippers on—and got one that had not been worn.”
“Yes?”
“And suppose Talley noticed this while Lavery was telephoning to the doctor, who was out on his rounds. So he took the unworn slipper, regarding it as evidence that Florence Almore had been murdered.”
Webber nodded his head. “It was evidence if he left it where it was, for the police to find it. After he took it, it was just evidence that he was a rat.”
“Was a monoxide test made of her blood?”
He put his hands flat on his desk and looked down at them. “Yes,” he said. “And there was monoxide all right. Also the investigating officers were satisfied with appearances. There was no sign of violence. They were satisfied that Dr. Alrnore had not murdered his wife. Perhaps they were wrong. I think the investigation was a little superficial.”
