“Here’s the guy lives next door,” the small neat cop said helpfully. “His name’s Talbot.”
Degarmo looked straight at me, but nothing in his acid blue eyes showed that he had ever seen me before. He came quietly along the hall and put a hard hand against my chest and pushed me back into the room. When he had me half a dozen feet from the door he said over his shoulder:
“Come in here and shut the door, Shorty.”
The small cop came in and shut the door.
“Quite a gag,” Degarmo said lazily. “Put a gun on him, Shorty.”
Shorty flicked his black belt holster open and had his .38 in his hand like a flash. He licked his lips.
“Oh boy,” he said softly, whistling a little. “Oh boy. How’d you know, lieutenant?”
“Know what?” Degarmo asked, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. “What were you thinking of doing, pal—going down to get a paper—to find out if she was dead?”
“Oh boy,” Shorty said. “A sex-killer. He pulled the girl’s clothes off and choked her with his hands, lieutenant. How’d you know?”
Degarmo didn’t answer him. He just stood there, rocking a little on his heels, his face empty and granite-hard.
“Yah, he’s the killer, sure,” Shorty said suddenly. “Sniff the air in here, lieutenant. The place ain’t been aired out for days. And look at the dust on those bookshelves. And the clock on the mantel’s stopped, lieutenant. He come in through the—lemme look a minute, can I, lieutenant?”
He ran out of the room into the bedroom. I heard him fumbling around. Degarmo stood woodenly.
Shorty came back. “Come in at the bathroom window. There’s broken glass in the tub. And something stinks of gin in there something awful. You remember how that apartment smelled of gin when we went in? Here’s a shirt, lieutenant. Smells like it was washed in gin.”
He held the shirt up. It perfumed the air rapidly. Degarmo looked at it vaguely and then stepped forward and yanked my coat open and looked at the shirt I was wearing.
“I know what he done,” Shorty said. “He stole one of the guy’s shirts that lives here. You see what he done, lieutenant?”
“Yeah.” Degarmo held his hand against my chest and let it fall slowly. They were talking about me as if I was a piece of wood.
“Frisk him, Shorty.”
Shorty ran around me feeling here and there for a gun. “Nothing on him,” he said.
“Let’s get him out the back way,” Degarmo said. “It’s our pinch, if we make it before Webber gets here. That lug Reed couldn’t find a moth in a shoe box.”
“You ain’t even detailed on the case,” Shorty said doubtfully. “Didn’t I hear you was suspended or something?”
“What can I lose?” Degarmo asked, “if I’m suspended?”
“I can lose this here uniform,” Shorty said.
Degarmo looked at him wearily. The small cop blushed and his bright red-gold eyes were anxious.
“Okay, Shorty. Go and tell Reed.”
The small cop licked his lip. “You say the word, lieutenant, and I’m with you. I don’t have to know you got suspended.”
“We’ll take him down ourselves, just the two of us,” Degarmo said.
“Yeah, sure.”
Degarmo put his finger against my chin. “A sex-killer,” he said quietly. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide brutal mouth.
THIRTY-FOUR
We went out of the apartment and along the hall the other way from Apartment 618. Light streamed from the still open door. Two men in plain clothes now stood outside it smoking cigarettes inside their cupped hands, as if a wind was blowing. There was a sound of wrangling voices from the apartment.
We went around the bend of the hall and came to the elevator. Degarmo opened the fire door beyond the elevator shaft and we went down echoing concrete steps, floor after floor. At the lobby floor Degarmo stopped and held his hand on the doorknob and listened. He looked back over his shoulder.
“You got a car?” he asked me.
“In the basement garage.”
“That’s an idea.”
We went on down the steps and came out into the shadowy basement. The lanky Negro came out of the little office and I gave him my car check. He looked furtively at the police uniform on Shorty. He said nothing. He pointed to the Chrysler.
Degarmo climbed under the wheel of the Chrysler. I got in beside him and Shorty got into the back seat. We went up the ramp and out into the damp cool night air. A big car with twin red spotlights was charging towards us from a couple of blocks away.
Degarmo spat out of the car window and yanked the Chrysler the other way. “That will be Webber,” he said. “Late for the funeral again. We sure skinned his nose on that one, Shorty.”
“I don’t like it too well, lieutenant. I don’t, honest.”
“Keep the chin up, kid. You might get back on homicide.”
“I’d rather wear buttons and eat,” Shorty said. The courage was oozing out of him fast.
Degarmo drove the car hard for ten blocks and then slowed a little. Shorty said uneasily:
“I guess you know what you’re doing, lieutenant, but this ain’t the way to the Hall.”
“That’s right,” Degarmo said. “It never was, was it?”
He let the car slow down to a crawl and then turned into a residential street of small exact houses squatting behind small exact lawns. He braked the car gently and coasted over to the curb and stopped about the middle of the block. He threw an arm over the back of the seat and turned his head to look back at Shorty.
“You think this guy killed her, Shorty?”
“I’m listening,” Shorty said in a tight voice.
“Got a flash?”
“No.”
I said: “There’s one in the car pocket on the left side.”
Shorty fumbled around and metal clicked and the white beam of the flashlight came on.
Degarmo said: “Take a look at the back of this guy’s head.”
The beam moved and settled. I heard the small man’s breathing behind me and felt it on my neck. Something felt for and touched the bump on my head. I grunted. The light went off and the darkness of the street rushed in again.
Shorty said: “I guess maybe he was sapped, lieutenant. I don’t get it.”
“So was the girl,” Degarmo said. “It didn’t show much but it’s there. She was sapped so she could have her clothes pulled off and be clawed up before she was killed. So the scratches would bleed. Then she was throttled. And none of this made any noise. Why would it? And there’s no telephone in that apartment. Who reported it, Shorty?”
“How the hell would I know? A guy called up and said a woman had been murdered in 618 Granada Apartments on Eighth. Reed was still looking for a cameraman when you came in. The desk said a guy with a thick voice, likely disguised. Didn’t give any name at all.”
“All right then,” Degarmo said. “If you had murdered the girl, how would you get out of there?”
“I’d walk out,” Shorty said. “Why not? Hey,” he barked at me suddenly, “why didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer him. Degarmo said tonelessly: “You wouldn’t climb out of a bathroom window six floors up and then burst in another bathroom window into a strange apartment where people would likely be sleeping, would you? You wouldn’t pretend to be the guy that lived there and you wouldn’t throw away a lot of your time by calling the police, would you? Hell, that girl could have laid there for a week. You wouldn’t throw away the chance of a start like that, would you, Shorty?”
“I don’t guess I would,” Shorty said cautiously. “I don’t guess I would call up at all. But you know these sex fiends do funny things, lieutenant. They ain’t normal like us. And this guy could have had help and the other guy could have knocked him out to put him in the middle.”
“Don’t tell me you thought that last bit up all by yourself,” Degarmo grunted. “So here we sit, and the
fellow that knows all the answers is sitting here with us and not saying a word.” He turned his big head and stared at me. “What were you doing there?”
“I can’t remember,” I said. “The crack on the head seems to have blanked me out.”
“We’ll help you to remember,” Degarmo said. “We’ll take you up back in the hills a few miles where you can be quiet and look at the stars and remember. You’ll remember all right.”
Shorty said: “That ain’t no way to talk, lieutenant. Why don’t we just go back to the Hall and play this the way it says in the rule book?”
“To hell with the rule book,” Degarmo said. “I like this guy. I want to have one long sweet talk with him. He just needs a little coaxing, Shorty. He’s just bashful.”
“I don’t want any part of it,” Shorty said.
“What do you want to do, Shorty?”
“I want to go back to the Hall.”
“Nobody’s stopping you, kid. You want to walk?”
Shorty was silent for a moment. “That’s right,” he said at last, quietly. “I want to walk.” He opened the car door and stepped out on to the curbing. “And I guess you know I have to report all this, lieutenant.”
“Right,” Degarmo said. “Tell Webber I was asking for him. Next time he buys a hamburger, tell him to turn down an empty plate for me.”
“That don’t make any sense to me,” the small cop said. He slammed the car door shut. Degarmo let the clutch in and gunned the motor and hit forty in the first block and a half. In the third block he hit fifty. He slowed down at the boulevard and turned east and began to cruise along at a legal speed. A few late cars drifted by both ways, but for the most part the world lay in the cold silence of early morning.
After a little while we passed the city limits and Degarmo spoke. “Let’s hear you talk,” he said quietly. “Maybe we can work this out.”
The car topped a long rise and dipped down to where the boulevard wound through the parklike grounds of the veterans’ hospital. The tall triple electroliers had halos from the beach fog that had drifted in during the night. I began to talk.
“Kingsley came over to my apartment tonight and said he had heard from his wife over the phone. She wanted some money quick. The idea was I was to take it to her and get her out of whatever trouble she was in. My idea was a little different. She was told how to identify me and I was to be at the Peacock Lounge at Eighth and Arguello at fifteen minutes past the hour. Any hour.”
Degarmo said slowly: “She had to breeze and that meant she had something to breeze from, such as murder.” He lifted his hands lightly and let them fall on the wheel again.
“I went down there, hours after she had called. I had been told her hair was dyed brown. She passed me going out of the bar, but I didn’t know her. I had never seen her in the flesh. All I had seen was what looked like a pretty good snapshot, but could be that and still not a very good likeness. She sent a Mexican kid in to call me out. She wanted the money and no conversation. I wanted her story. Finally she saw she would have to talk a little and told me she was at the Granada. She made me wait ten minutes before I followed her over.”
Degarmo said: “Time to fix up a plant.”
“There was a plant all right, but I’m not sure she was in on it. She didn’t want me to come up there, didn’t want to talk. Yet she ought to have known I would insist on some explanation before I gave up the money, so her reluctance could have been just an act, to make me feel that I was controlling the situation. She could act all right. I found that out. Anyhow I went and we talked. Nothing she said made very much sense until we talked about Lavery getting shot. Then she made too much sense too quick. I told her I was going to turn her over to the police.”
Westwood Village, dark except for one all-night service station and a few distant windows in apartment houses, slid away to the north of us.
“So she pulled a gun,” I said. “I think she meant to use it, but she got too close to me and I got a headlock on her. While we were wrestling around, somebody came out from behind a green curtain and slugged me. When I came out of that the murder was done.”
Degarmo said slowly: “You get any kind of a look at who slugged you?”
“No. I felt or half saw he was a man and a big one. And this lying on the davenport, mixed in with clothes.” I reached Kingsley’s yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and draped it over his knee. “I saw Kingsley wearing this earlier this evening,” I said.
Degarmo looked down at the scarf. He lifted it under the dashlight. “You wouldn’t forget that too quick,” he said. “It steps right up and smacks you in the eye. Kingsley, huh? Well, I’m damned. What happened then?”
“Knocking on the door. Me still woozy in the head, not too bright and a bit panicked. I had been flooded with gin and my shoes and coat stripped off and maybe I looked and smelled a little like somebody who would yank a woman’s clothes off and strangle her. So I got out through the bathroom window, cleaned myself up as well as I could, and the rest you know.”
Degarmo said: “Why didn’t you lie dormy in the place you climbed into?”
“What was the use? I guess even a Bay City cop would have found the way I had gone in a little while. If I had any chance at all, it was to walk before that was discovered. If nobody was there who knew me, I had a fair chance of getting out of the building.”
“I don’t think so,” Degarmo said. “But I can see where you didn’t lose much trying. What’s your idea of the motivation here?”
“Why did Kingsley kill her—if he did? That’s not hard. She had been cheating on him, making him a lot of trouble, endangering his job and now she had killed a man. Also, she had money and Kingsley wanted to marry another woman. He might have been afraid that with money to spend she would beat the rap and be left laughing at him. If she didn’t beat the rap, and got sent up, her money would be just as thoroughly beyond his reach. He’d have to divorce her to get rid of her. There’s plenty of motive for murder in all that. Also he saw a chance to make me the goat. It wouldn’t stick, but it would make confusion and delay. If murderers didn’t think they could get away with their murders, very few would be committed.”
Degarmo said: “All the same it could be somebody else, somebody who isn’t in the picture at all. Even if he went down there to see her, it could still be somebody else. Somebody else could have killed Lavery too.”
“If you like it that way.”
He turned his head. “I don’t like it any way at all. But if I crack the case, I’ll get by with a reprimand from the police board. If I don’t crack it, I’ll be thumbing a ride out of town. You said I was dumb. Okay, I’m dumb. Where does Kingsley live? One thing I know is how to make people talk.”
“965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills. About five blocks on you turn north to the foothills. It’s on the left side, just below Sunset. I’ve never been there, but I know how the block numbers run.”
He handed me the green and yellow scarf. “Tuck that back into your pocket until we want to spring it on him.”
THIRTY-FIVE
It was a two-storied white house with a dark roof. Bright moonlight lay against its wall like a fresh coat of paint. There were wrought-iron grills against the lower halves of the front windows. A level lawn swept up to the front door, which was set diagonally into the angle of a jutting wall. All the visible windows were dark.
Degarmo got out of the car and walked along the parkway and looked back along the drive to the garage. He moved down the driveway and the corner of the house hid him. I heard the sound of a garage door going up, then the thud as it was lowered again. He reappeared at the corner of the house, shook his head at me, and walked across the grass to the front door. He leaned his thumb on the bell and juggled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand and put it between his lips.
He turned away from the door to light it and the flare of the match cut deep lines into his face. After a while there was light on the fan over the door. The peephole in the door sw
ung back. I saw Degarmo holding up his shield. Slowly and as if unwillingly the door was opened. He went in.
He was gone four or five minutes. Light went on behind various windows, then off again. Then he came out of the house and while he was walking back to the car the light went off on the fan and the whole house was again as dark as we had found it.
He stood beside the car smoking and looking off down the curve of the street.
“One small car in the garage,” he said. “The cook says it’s hers. No sign of Kingsley. They say they haven’t seen him since this morning. I looked in all the rooms. I guess they told the truth. Webber and a print man were there late this afternoon and the dusting powder is still all over the main bedroom. Webber would be getting prints to check against what we found in Lavery’s house. He didn’t tell me what he got. Where would he be—Kingsley?”
“Anywhere,” I said. “On the road, in a hotel, in a Turkish bath getting the kinks out of his nerves. But we’ll have to try his girl friend first. Her name is Fromsett and she lives at the Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. That’s away downtown, near Bullock’s Wilshire.”
“She does what?” Degarmo asked, getting in under the wheel.
“She holds the fort in his office and holds his hand out of office hours. She’s no office cutie, though. She has brains and style.”
“This situation is going to use all she has,” Degarmo said. He drove down to Wilshire and we turned east again.
Twenty-five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms. The entrance was in an L, up marble steps, through a Moorish archway, and over a lobby that was too big and a carpet that was too blue. Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in. There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.
Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.
“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”