turned to Katchen he allowed himself a slow, deliberate wink at me. He moved away while I went through an elaborate pantomime of rubbing my wrists and looking injured.
“Sit down, Mr. Brandon,” the straw-haired man said. “I’m Curme Holding of the District Attorney’s office. I heard Captain Katchen wanted to see you so I thought I would see you too.”
I began to feel less depressed.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Holding. I feel in need of protection. The Captain has already talked to me once today. So I’m more than pleased to see you.”
Holding took off his glasses, inspected them and put them back on again.
“Captain Katchen wouldn’t do anything out of the line of duty,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it.
I smiled.
“Maybe the Captain has a sense of humour. I took his talk seriously, but maybe you could be right. You have only to look at the deep-seated kindness in his face to realize he could be a great little kidder.”
Katchen made a growling sound deep in his throat and moved from the window towards me. He looked like a gorilla disturbed at feeding time.
“Will you ask the questions, Captain, or shall I?” Holding said, sudden steel in his voice.
Katchen paused. His little red-flecked eyes moved from me to Holding, who stared at him with the bored expression of a man watching a very tough gangster movie and finding it phony.
“Now you’ve got your oar in, you can handle it yourself,” Katchen snarled, biting off each word. “I’m going to talk to the Commissioner. There’s too much goddam interference from your office. It’s time someone did something about it.”
He went past me, out through the doorway and slammed the door behind him. The room rocked a little under the percussion.
Sergeant Candy said, “You won’t need me, Mr. Holding?”
“That’s okay, Sergeant.”
I heard the door open, but I didn’t look around to see Candy leave. The door closed behind him gently in sharp contrast to the exit made by Katchen.
“Well, now, Mr. Brandon, would you take a seat?”
Holding said, and waved to a chair opposite the desk. He got up and took the desk chair.
As I sat down I met Rankin’s blank stare. I got no information from it: it was neither friendly nor hostile.
Holding moved a pencil from the blotter to the pen tray and gave me a hard look from behind the screen of his glittering glasses.
“Captain Katchen is retiring at the end of the month,” he said. “Lieutenant Rankin is taking his place.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
Rankin moved restlessly, fingering his tie. He didn’t say anything.
“Lieutenant Rankin is in complete charge of this investigation,” Holding went on. “I am, of course, referring to these two murders at Bay Beach.”
I could see the trap in that.
If I were going to deny being in the cabin when the girl had died, now was the time to show surprise and ask what other murder had been committed? But I got one jump ahead of that thought fast. For all I knew they had found a fingerprint of mine in the cabin or someone had seen me and had offered to identify me, or they had spotted the Buick parked on the scene. I decided to take a chance and come clean.
“Now I know the Lieutenant is handling the case,” I said, “I’m ready to make a statement. I would have done so an hour ago, but Captain Katchen’s threats put me off. He warned me to keep out of this business and I didn’t keep out of it. When I found the girl I saw Katchen could pin the killing on me.”
Holding appeared to relax a little.
“So you were the man who was seen entering the cabin?”
“I don’t know about that, but I did enter the cabin and I found her dying.”
“Did she say anything?”
“No. She died within seconds of my finding her.”
Rankin said, “Suppose we go over it from the start?” He reached forward and took a notebook off the desk and opened it. “Why did you go down there?”
“I had no particular reason except I had nothing to do and I wanted to look the place over,” I said. “I know it sounds corny, but my partner was killed there, and your men were all over the place when I went there this morning. I just wanted to have a second look at it.”
He didn’t seem wildly enthusiastic about this explanation, but he let it go. He asked, “What time did you get there?”
I told him, and then went on to give him an exact description of what had happened. I told him how I had heard the police siren and how I had realized that if I were caught there, Katchen’s conclusion would be that I had killed her. I went on to describe how I had got away and what time I returned to the hotel.
Rankin looked over at Holding, then suddenly his hard, tight face crinkled into a smile and he looked quite human.
“Can’t say I blame you,” he said. “I guess I would have done the same thing. But it’s not the kind of thing I’d recommend you to try again.”
I said I wouldn’t try it again.
“You realize how lucky you have been?” he said. “You could have got yourself nailed for murder. But the doc says she was stabbed at least two hours before you entered the cabin. She took that time to die. He could tell by the blood on her and on the floor.”
“How did your men know she was there?”
“Some guy spotted you going into the cabin. He was taking a look at the scene of the crime, so he says; he spotted you and called headquarters.”
“What wouldn’t we do without the great American public?” I said. “No sign of the killer, of course?”
Rankin shook his head.
Then I asked the sixty-four dollar question.
“Any idea who she is?”
Rankin stubbed out his cigarette, then sat back while he and Holding exchanged glances.
Holding shrugged.
“It’s pretty obvious she’s the woman who called for Sheppey at his hotel this morning. What she has been doing from eleven o’clock this morning up to the time of her death defeats me. She was still wearing the swimsuit she had on when she left Sheppey.”
“Have you been able to identify her yet?”
“A girl named Thelma Cousins has been reported missing by her landlady. The landlady said she hadn’t been back since she left for work this morning. We got her to look at the body. She says the girl is Thelma Cousins. We’re getting a second check on her. The man she works for is on his way down now.”
“Who is he?”
Rankin supplied the information, which had me suddenly pointing like a gun dog.
“His name is Marcus Hahn,” he said. “He’s a phony who runs a pottery racket he calls the School of Ceramics out at Arrow point. The girl worked in his showroom.”
II
I had to decide whether to tell them about the folder of matches I had found in Sheppey’s luggage and the odd tie-up between the folder and this School of Ceramics or whether to say nothing.
I told myself that maybe this wasn’t the time for a complete exchange of confidences. I had to make sure first that Rankin was going to find Sheppey’s killer. Although he was in charge of the investigation that didn’t mean he had a free hand. He could still be blocked by Katchen on Creedy’s orders. I wasn’t going to hand him anything on a plate until I was sure he meant business.
Rankin said, “We want to find out what Sheppey and this girl were up to. It’s my bet she had a boyfriend and he fixed them both.”
