“Not yet.” Vail sat down in the other chair before the fire. “One strong highball just before bed—that’s my limit.”
Marcus, stretching his hands toward the flames, reflected that Vail’s self-discipline was characteristic. Conrad Vail was a hard man. He could be, when necessary, a ruthless one. Until five nights ago, Saturday-last, he had been a kind of major-domo in the political house of Big Jim Shannon. Now, after a series of lightning maneuvers, he was master of the house.
Big Jim was dead and buried. He had been found shot to death behind the wheel of his limousine in a dark, narrow street near the river. Someone—apparently a passenger in the car beside him—had held a .38 caliber gun against Big Jim’s side and had fired one fatal shot into the great cage of ribs that held his heart. It was on this business that Lieutenant Marcus was now calling.
“You’re a busy man,” Marcus said, “so I won’t waste your time. As you probably know, I’ve been working on the Shannon murder. The D.A. and the Chief have been giving out all the news releases, but I’ve been on the job.”
“I know.” Vail smiled thinly. “They make the noise, you do the work. Well, they couldn’t have chosen a better man.”
“Thanks. Anyhow, it’s a tough case. Big Jim had a thousand enemies. It would take a year to round up everyone who had reason to wish him dead. Moreover, there’s very little to go on. It’s the hardest kind of case in the world to solve. Someone simply shot him and walked away—no witnesses, no clues, no anything.”
“I can see that. Still, we can assume that it was someone Big Jim knew well enough to have with him in his car. Probably someone he trusted. That should narrow it down for you.”
“Not if Big Jim had the gun on him all the while. Not if he was forced to drive down to that street near the river.”
“That sounds logical in theory, but I can’t buy it, Lieutenant. I knew Big Jim Shannon for years, ever since I came to him for a job when I was fresh out of law school. And nothing I know makes me believe he would have submitted to that kind of intimidation. He was a strong, contemptuous man, one of the last of a vanishing breed in city politics. Believe me, he would never have driven anywhere under the threat of a gun. He would have forced the issue wherever it began, whatever the consequences.”
Marcus was glad to hear this, for it accorded perfectly with his own opinion. He had brought up the point only to have it refuted and cleared from his mind. Big Jim just didn’t fit the picture of the murder. Contemptuous, Vail had called him, and it was an apt word. One of the last of a vanishing breed—an apt phrase.
Vail, on the other hand, was one of the new breed—just as hard, just as arrogant, just as ruthless in the exploitation of power, but operating under a surface of learning and polish. Anyone who doubted it had only to remember the swift and efficient way Vail had gathered into his own hands the complex of reins that Big Jim had dropped in the front seat of the limousine near the dark river.
“I welcome your judgment in the matter,” Marcus said. “It clears the way for another idea I have.”
“Oh? What idea?”
“I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it. It’s my notion that Big Jim Shannon did not drive to that street where his body was found. He was driven there.”
“An interesting notion, but I don’t see how you support it. He was found sitting under the wheel, although his body had toppled sidewise onto the seat. The wound was in his right side, with all the evidence indicating that it had been made by a gun fired from the seat beside him.”
“True. But the wound could have been deliberately made that way to create that impression. In other words, Shannon could have been killed elsewhere and then taken to where he was found.”
“Killed where?”
“I don’t know. That’s something we still have to determine.”
“Is this just your imagination working, Lieutenant, or do you have any evidence?”
“Some. But nothing conclusive.”
“Whatever it is, I’d like to hear it.”
“Well, for one thing, the steering wheel. It had plenty of Big Jim’s fingerprints on it, and many of them were quite clear. Yet he wasn’t wearing gloves.”
“He rarely did.”
“So I understand. Anyhow, there were also some prints on the center braces of the wheel. You know how a man will often hold the wheel that way when he’s driving. However, those prints were badly smeared. It was almost as if someone, wearing gloves, had grasped the braces in order to leave the prints on the wheel itself undisturbed.”
“Clever, Lieutenant, but you’ll have to admit, rather tenuous. Big Jim wasn’t the only person who drove that limousine. His son used it, and occasionally his wife.”
“Oh, I know. I admitted it was not conclusive.”
“If you’ll pardon my saying so, it’s not even convincing. You’ll have to come up with more than that.”
“There is more. Not much, but a little. At any rate, I think you may find it more convincing.”
“I’m perfectly willing to be convinced, Lieutenant. Try me.”
“It’s incredible, really. Assume for a minute that my idea is sound. Big Jim Shannon was killed somewhere else and driven by the murderer in Shannon’s car to the place where it was found. His body was pulled into position behind the wheel to support the fiction that he was shot there by a passenger sitting next to him. Then the murderer walks away into the darkness, and no one can prove that it didn’t happen exactly the way he had made it appear. Except for one thing. As his nickname implies, Shannon was a big man. He was six-feet-three. But the driver’s seat in the murder car was in the farthest forward-position. Big Jim could
