“That’s what you said before. Just for exercise, suppose you let me go through the motions of being a lawyer, anyhow.”
He stood up, moving into the slanting projection of the sun and lifting his head to look up along its angle to the distant patch of sky beyond. I was sorry to see him like that, looking up through bars into the rationed light of day. We’d been good cronies once, we’d had good times over those beers. Even now, we hadn’t seen much of each other since, memories of the past stirred and came alive again.
Hal was primarily muscular; he’d never really had the cut of a lawyer. After we’d gotten out of law school, while I was hanging out a shingle, he’d gone into enforcement. The metropolitan police department was crying for law students at the time; the idea being that the best way to eliminate inefficiency and corruption was to get top grade personnel. It was one of those movements that the old timers get prodded into now and then by a temporarily-aroused public.
After a while, when the public goes back to business as usual, the reform dies quietly, ignored by the veterans in office. The lure was last promotion in a field that has an appeal for a certain type. Hal was the type, and he’d gone in. But he hadn’t stayed long. In one way or another, he fouled up and he’d landed outside fast, education and efficiency be damned.
Maybe, now, he read my thoughts. Moving out of the sunlight, and returning to the shadows, he said, “You ever hear why I was bounced off the force?”
“No.”
“I thought not. It was hushed up at the time, but it makes a good story. Career of an educated copper—Dick Tracy with a degree.” His voice sank to a low level of bitterness. “One night we were cruising out East Market, Old Finnegan and I. We were working double-harness. He was breaking me in, getting me started on that nice career everyone was talking about. We got a call to stop at a place over on Forest, a few blocks away. Seems a gang of kids were raising hell in an apartment over there. Well, they were raising hell, all right.
“We walked right into the middle of a flowering tea party—reefer smoke as thick as fog. One of the young guys cut up rough, and I had to put him to sleep. When we booked them, it turned out that this kid was the mayor’s nephew, the nephew of handsome Danny Devore himself. That’s it—story of a career boy—the end.”
“You sure that’s all? I hear you made a threat. To be precise, I hear you promised to kill Danny and eat him for breakfast.”
His shoulders sagged, and his head fell a little forward. He pressed the heel of his right hand against his forehead. “I got a little drunk. A guy says crazy things when he’s drunk.”
I sat watching him, thinking of the mayor he had threatened to kill. A threat to kill doesn’t usually mean much before the fact. After the fact, it takes on significance. And this was after the fact, because the mayor was dead. Charming Danny Devore, the bachelor, glamour boy, the smooth idol of metropolitan politics. Hard as it was to realize, he was dead from the slugs of a .38.
“How about the gun?” I said. “Your gun was found in the study by the body, and it had your prints on it.”
“Does a man commit murder and leave the gun behind?”
“Who knows? Murderers do idiotic things sometimes. Besides, one question doesn’t answer another. How did the gun get there?”
“I’ve already said—I’ve said a thousand times—it was stolen from my room. It had to be, I hadn’t even looked at it for weeks.”
“You never even missed it?”
“No.”
“Okay, let it go. How about the witness? This guy Richert happened to be passing Danny’s place about the time of the murder. He saw you come out the front door and go down the drive. To make it practically perfect, he just happens to be one of the district attorney’s special investigators.
Hal shook his head, and began to pound his clenched fist into his palm. His voice, paced to the pounding said, “He didn’t see me, Sol. He couldn’t have seen me, because I wasn’t there.”
“You think he’s lying?”
“Not necessarily. Look. He saw this guy from a distance, and in bad light. Maybe he really thinks it was me, but you know how those things are. If there’s other evidence, like the gun, it’s easy to go along with it. It would be easy for Richert to convince himself that I was the guy.”
“True enough. Now, tell me where you were that night, if you weren’t out there shooting Danny Devore.”
His clenched fist relaxed, the fingers falling open. “I was with a girl,” he said.
“At the time of the murder?”
“I was with her all night.”
“Then why the hell haven’t you said so? What’s this girl’s name?”
He shook his head, tiredly. “I can’t tell you, Sol.”
“Why the hell not? Listen, you’re on a short road to the hot seat, and you haven’t got time for chivalry.”
He just shook his head again, turned away from me and looked blankly into a corner of the cell.
“You got an idea of protecting her honor? You actually got a corny idea like that? Listen to me, Hal. So you were with the gal. Who cares? These days they’re doing it in headlines all over the world. You get everything but photographs.”
He laughed his short, ugly laugh. “You’re not thinking well for a lawyer. Like I said, I’m in a frame. It was built by an expert. I’m in it because someone wants me in it, and he wants me to stay there. What do you think would happen
