After a moment Webster said, 'Why, I got no objection. I'm clean.'
'Let's just see if the warrant's come through… Did Miss Corliss ever give you anything to keep for her?'
'No, sir.'
'If she did, better tell me now,' said Mendoza.
'No, she never. I don't know what you're getting at. I told you all I know, can I go now?'
'No,' said Mendoza. 'You'll stay right here until a couple of men have looked through your place.' He looked at his watch; they'd be night-shift men. He took Webster out to the anteroom. The search warrant was on its way up; Sergeant Lake was just leaving. Mendoza told Sergeant Farrell, just coming on, about the warrant, to send out a couple of men.
He went back to his office and called Alison to tell her he'd be late. Possibly not home at all until God knew when.
'All right, darling, we won't expect you… Yes, she's fine, we've been so relieved ever since they called this morning? Alison laughed. 'And, Luis, Mairi's taking all the credit for it-her solemn novena beginning to work, you know!”
'One good Christian soul to intercede for the heathen,' he said. 'Yes. Expect me when you see me, hermosa.'
Time enough to tell them, if…
He put the phone down.
It was a definite headache now. He hadn't wanted much lunch, and come to think he hadn't had any breakfast. Ought to go out and get something.
Sixty hours, said Dr. MacFarlane. My God, thought Mendoza in vague surprise, is this still only Monday? These long, long days, since he'd ripped open that yellow envelope in the Bermuda hotel room…
It was seven-fifty, and he'd taken two aspirin Sergeant Farrell had found for him, which hadn't done much for the headache, when Glasser and Higgins came back from Larry Webster's apartment. Higgins said, 'Sorry, we'd have been here before but we thought they ought to be checked for prints, just in case. Webster's are all over most of 'em-they checked Records.' He laid a manila envelope on the desk; he was looking pleased.
Mendoza upended it and a dozen little glass ampoules rolled out. The kind containing one set dose each, for convenience in filling a hypodermic syringe. They were all neatly labeled. Morphine.
'?Que bello! ' said Mendoza. 'Where?'
Higgins smiled. 'In the middle of a couple of pounds of sugar in a cannister in the kitchen. A lot of people don't realize we're halfway bright.'
Mendoza said, 'Fetch him in.”
Webster came in smiling ingratiatingly. 'Now you found out I'm clean, I never-'
Mendoza crooked a finger at him. 'Come here, friend. Where'd you get these pretty little things? Are you breaking in on the big time, with dope?'
Webster looked at the ampoules and said despondently,
'Oh hell. Hell and damnation. I never figured you'd fnd 'em where I hid 'em. But they're not mine. Honest, sir, I never- Madge asked me to hold 'em for her. I'm not taking no narco rap, not even for Madge. I'm leveling with you, they're hers, see-'
Mendoza said resignedly to Higgins, 'Go bring her in, George. Fast. Tell Farrell to get the warrants, Webster and Corliss-narco possession. And he might send out for a sandwich and coffee.'
'With pleasure,' said Higgins, and went out.
'You can't hold me- I didn't have anything to do-it was Madge!
I-'
'Sit down, Larry,' said Mendoza tiredly. 'You're going nowhere for a while.'
FOURTEEN
Margaret Corliss didn't come apart as easily as Webster had, of course. She went on stolidly denying it, calling Webster a liar, saying they couldn't prove anything. Mendoza kept at her for some time before the sense of what he was saying seemed to reach her.
'We will prove it, you know. We're already on the way to proving that most of those names in the appointment book are fakes, and who else could have put them there and why? On that bloodstained smock, we're going to find that no legitimate patient ever bled in his office, and we know it's not his type of blood, but it is his smock. Why did he want a sterilizer? Why did he want morphine? And so on and so on. You'd be surprised what evidence the lab can find when they go looking, and they'l1 be taking those examination rooms apart. Now we've charged you with something, I can get an order to open that safe deposit box you've got at the Bank of America, and I'll bet I'll find some interesting things in it.'
That was what got to her. She shrugged and sat back, accepting it coolly: a gambler who'd lost this throw. 'I guess you will,' she said calmly. 'You win. I did all I could-it was reely very awkward, Doctor getting shot like that, you can see it was. But if you open that box, well, you'll get the evidence all right. Just how the luck goes. Can I have a cigarette?'
He gave her one. 'Now, let's have some straight answers.'
'I don't know why I should tell you anything.'
'Look,' he said. 'You'll get a one-to-three and serve the minimum term, on a first offense. You're still ahead in a way-I expect you've saved some of your cut. But whoever killed Nestor, again in a way, put you in this spot, didn't he? All I want to know-'
She was quite informative, eventually. Once she saw she couldn't get out of it, she told him what he wanted to know; and he thought she was telling the truth. Frank Nestor had approached her much as Mendoza had imagined, seeing her name in the paper in connection with the beauty shop. He'd said frankly he intended to set up a mill and needed a woman contact. She'd sized him up and thrown in with him, and it had turned out a very profitable venture. In one way, thought Mendoza, those two had been much alike: all business, taking the main chance.
'Doctor was very clever,' she said. 'He had a lot of ever so clever ideas. You know those ads in the personal columns that say, Any girl in trouble call this number? Well, of course they're put in by real charities or social workers, like that, and they don't exactly mean the kind of help Doctor meant.' She smiled. 'But he had a lot of cards printed with that on, and my phone number. I left them all sorts of places, places he picked out-at the college libraries at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A., and so on, and in ladies' rooms in all the expensive night clubs and big hotels-'
'Quite the little publicity agent,' said Mendoza, 'wasn't he?'
'Oh, I said he was clever. And once you get a business like that started, you know, the women tell each other-it gets around. Not that I ever had any experience of it before,' she added hastily. She wasn't, at this late date, going to connect herself again to the Sally-Ann business.
'And he was good, too. Never the hint of any trouble, he was always so careful, everything all sterile, and he always put them right out with the morphine… I don't know where he got that. No, that's level, I reely don't. I know he'd have liked to use a regular anesthetic, like sodium pentothal or something like that, but there was no way for him to get hold of it, you see. He was very careful, about the morphine-he always tested their hearts first and took their blood pressure. He'd have made a good surgeon. Right from the first, it all went as smooth as could be… You'd be surprised, how many of the girls who called me, who'd meant to go on and have the baby and put it out for adoption, because they didn't know where to go, you see-they jumped at it, when they found how Doctor wanted to help them.'
'How did he charge?'
'Well, that was the only trouble there ever was,' admitted Margaret Corliss. 'Not all of them could raise the kind of money he was asking. You see, the-well, call them patients-he wanted to get, he said from the first, were
