“Can’t you tell me? Can’t you show me?” I wailed.
“All right. Now this is solemn. This is the moment. I borrowed this document from Lieutenant Strom, and I will probably fry in the electric chair if I lose it. But with what I’ve got on Lieutenant Strom—well, we’ll skip that. This is the incriminating document. And the name at the end is the name of the person who murdered Mrs. Garr, choked you once, and tried twice to kill you. Ready?”
“Hurry up!”
“Okay.”
His eyes alight on my face, he reached into his inner coat pocket, brought forth a sheet of letter paper, yellowed and old, unfolded it. I had no hands to use; he held it up in front of my face. It was handwritten in faded black ink, the handwriting irregular, nervous.
I confess it was me that got Rose Liberry to go to Mrs. Garr’s house. She come into the drugstore for a soda. She was a knockout, so I mixed her the right kind of a drink, and when it’d taken hold, I said I’d take her to a place where she could lay down awhile. Like I did with all the girls I got for Mrs. Garr. She paid me $25 extra.
That was all, except for the signature; the name I’d known the minute my eyes reached the second line.
Charles Buffingham.
25
THE NURSE CHASED HODGE out then.
It wasn’t until the next day that I got the explanations. That day, I graduated from having a nurse of my own to being tended by the regular nursing staff. What are a few broken bones? I’d made the doctor tell me how often I’d cracked, too: a fractured collarbone and a left arm broken in three places. The rest were only concussions, bruises, and such.
I was bursting with hows, whats, whens, and whys when Hodge again arrived promptly at three o’clock. I’d found out it was Wednesday, so it was nice of him to come in the daytime. He brought what must have been his seventh bunch of flowers: daisies again, with tall stalks of gladioli.
He was so triumphant, it hurt your eyes to look at him.
“What a bunch of ‘I told you so’ I bet you’re spreading,” I told him.
“Sure, why not? It isn’t often I’m as right as I was this time.”
He’s good at taking the curse off himself.
“Tell me everything. Do you realize how long I’ve waited?”
“Ah, but you know the denouement. Some nice points, though. Guess who got the second-best bit of clinching evidence?”
“I give up right away. Who?”
“Waller.”
“You mean he suspected Mr. Buffingham, too?”
“He got around to it. You see, after Grant died, and Waller got let out by Strom, he came around to the Guide office to see me. Said now that he’d quit being afraid of being found out, he’d got to thinking. He asked me who I thought the murderer probably was, before it had been pinned on Grant, and I said Buffingham. So he said, ‘Funny, I’ve come around to Buffingham, too.’
“We talked it over, and Waller decided he’d trail Buffingham as much as he could without being seen, because there wasn’t much he could do working back over what had happened; that’d all been covered by the police. He trailed Buffingham now and again from then on, and he also hung around the Elite Drugstore on the nights Buffingham was off.
“It wasn’t long before he began to get on to something. He noticed an awful lot of men dropped into that drugstore late at night and paid a visit to a back counter. It wasn’t hard to get in on. Buffingham and the owner of the store were running a little numbers racket of their own, taking bets on the total livestock receipts at the South Gilling stockyards; the figure’s printed in the Comet every night.
“He got to know the regulars: shoe salesmen, collectors, carpenters, grocery clerks, punks—it’s a low-pay neighborhood. He didn’t get anything out of them until one night, he was talking to a guy he’d seen there almost every night. When he asked him what his business was, the guy said ‘bank guard.’ Get that? Bank guard.”
“I don’t see what connection that would have.”
“Neither did Waller, at first. But he went on chatting, eventually mentioning that he lived in the same house as Buffingham, where an old lady had died, Mrs. Garr, to see if he’d get any reaction. And for the first time, he got one. The bank guard said, ‘She died, did she? Who got all her dough?’ Waller said, ‘Oh, she didn’t leave so much.’
“The bank guard said, ‘Didn’t leave much? I’ll never forget the time she come in the bank when we went off the gold standard, carrying an old black reticule my great-grandmother wouldn’t of been seen out with. She lugged that reticule up to a cashier’s window, took a good swing on it to lift it, and splashed gold all over the counter. That was the biggest lot of gold we ever had turned in by a private individual. “Give me new paper money for it,” she says. Forty thousand dollars even, the cashier said it was. She stuck those stacks of bills back in the reticule and walked out like it was forty cents.’
“‘I guess she’d been giving a lot to her niece,’ Waller said quickly. ‘Man, that’s a good story. What’d Buffingham say when he heard it?’ ‘Said he never knew the old bitch had so much dough,’ the bank guard said to Waller.”
Hodge stopped to let it sink in.
“F’heaven’s sake,” I said, “and I thought I was a detective.”
“Yeah. Waller’s got a gift for it. He’d have got along all right as a cop
