“Don’t tell him,” Dobbs said. The police car began to move. “You’d hurt his feelings.”
Cooney slammed into the Chrysler and started it and clashed the gears as if he was trying to strip them. Dobbs tooled the police car smoothly around and started north again along the brickyard.
“You’ll like our new jail,” he said.
“What will the charge be?”
He thought a moment, guiding the car with a gentle hand and watching in the mirror to see that Cooney followed along behind.
“Speeding,” he said. “Resisting arrest. H.B.D.” H.B.D. is police slang for “had been drinking.”
“How about being slammed in the belly, kicked in the shoulder, forced to drink liquor under threat of bodily harm, threatened with a gun and struck with a blackjack while unarmed? Couldn’t you make a little something more out of that?”
“Aw forget it,” he said wearily. “You think this sort of thing is my idea of a good time?”
“I thought they cleaned this town up,” I said. “I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bullet proof vest.”
“They cleaned it up some,” he said. “They wouldn’t want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar.”
“Better not talk like that,” I said. “You’ll lose your union card.”
He laughed. “The hell with them,” he said. “I’ll be in the army in two weeks.”
The incident was over for him. It meant nothing. He took it as a matter of course. He wasn’t even bitter about it.
26
The cell block was almost brand new. The battleship gray paint on the steel walls and door still had the fresh gloss of newness disfigured in two or three places by squirted tobacco juice. The overhead light was sunk in the ceffing behind a heavy frosted panel. There were two bunks on one side of the cell and a man snored in the top bunk, with a dark gray blanket wrapped around him. Since he was asleep that early and didn’t smell of whiskey or gin and had chosen the top berth where he would be out of the way, I judged he was an old lodger.
I sat on the lower bunk. They had tapped me for a gun but they hadn’t stripped my pockets. I got out a cigarette and rubbed the hot swelling behind my knee. The pain radiated all the way to the ankle. The whiskey I had coughed on my coat front had a rank smell. I held the cloth up and breathed smoke into it. The smoke floated up around the flat square of lighted glass in the ceiling. The jail seemed very quiet. A woman was making a shrill racket somewhere very far off, in another part of the jail. My part was as peaceful as a church.
The woman was screaming, wherever she was. The screaming had a thin sharp unreal sound, something like the screaming of coyotes in the moonlight, but it didn’t have the rising keening note of the coyote. After a while the sound stopped.
I smoked two cigarettes through and dropped the butts into the small toilet in the corner. The man in the upper berth still snored. All I could see of him was damp greasy hair sticking out over the edge of the blanket. He slept on his stomach. He slept well. He was one of the best.
I sat down on the bunk again. It was made of flat steel slats with a thin hard mattress over them. Two dark gray blankets were folded on it quite neatly. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hail. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifty Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.
She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.
I went over to stand by the door. There. was nobody stirring across the way. The lights in the cell block were bleak and silent. Business in the jail was rotten.
I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
A man in the blue-gray jail uniform came along between the cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I’m a cop, brother, I’m tough, watch your step, brother, or we’ll fix you up so you’ll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it, brother, let’s get a load of the. truth, brother, let’s go, and let’s not forget we’re tough guys, we’re cops, and we do what we like with punks like you.
“Out,” he said.
I stepped out of the cell and he relocked the door and jerked his thumb and we went along to a wide steel gate and he unlocked that and we went through and he relocked it and the keys tinkled pleasantly on the big steel ring and after a while we went through a steel door that was painted like wood on the outside and battleship gray on the inside.
Degarmo was standing there by the counter talking to the desk sergeant.
He turned his metaffic blue eyes on me and said: “How you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Like our jail?”
“I like your jail fine.”
“Captain Webber wants to talk to you.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Don’t you know any words but fine?”
“Not right now,” I said. “Not in here.”
“You’re limping a little,” he said. “You trip over something?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I tripped over a blackjack. It jumped up and bit me behind the left knee.”
“That’s too bad,” Degarmo said, blank-eyed. “Get your stuff from the property clerk.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “It wasn’t taken away from me.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he said.
“It sure is,” I said. “It’s fine.”
The desk sergeant lifted his shaggy head and gave us both a long stare. “You ought to see Cooney’s little Irish nose,” he said. “If you want to see something fine. It’s spread over his face like syrup on a waffle.”
Degarmo said absently: “What’s the matter? He get in a fight?’
“I wouldn’t know,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe it was the same blackjack that jumped up and bit him.”
“For a desk sergeant you talk too damn much,” Degarmo said.
“A desk sergeant always talks too God damn much,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe that’s why he isn’t a lieutenant on homicide.”
“You see how we are here,” Degarmo said. “Just one great big happy family.”
“With beaming smiles on our faces,” the desk sergeant said, “and our arms spread wide in welcome, and a rock in each hand.”
Degarmo jerked his head at me and we went out.
27
Captain Webber pushed his sharp bent nose across the desk at me and said: “Sit down.”
I sat down in a round-backed wooden armchair and eased my left leg away from the sharp edge of the seat. It was a large neat corner office. Degarmo sat at the end of the desk and crossed his legs and rubbed his ankle thoughtfully, looked out of a window.
Webber went on: “You asked for trouble, and you got it. You were doing fifty-five miles an hour in a residential zone and you attempted to get away from a police car that signaled you to stop with its siren and red spotlight. You were abusive when stopped and you struck an officer in the face.”
I said nothing. Webber picked a match off his desk and broke it in half and threw the pieces over his shoulder.
“Or are they lying—as usual?” he asked.
“I didn’t see their report,” I said. “I was probably doing fifty-five in a residential district, or anyhow within city limits. The police car was parked outside a house I visited. It followed me when I drove away and I didn’t at that time know it was a police car. It had no good reason to follow me and I didn’t like the look of it. I went a little fast, but all I was trying to do was get to a better lighted part of town.”
Degarmo moved his eyes to give me a bleak meaningless stare. Webber snapped his teeth impatiently.
He said: “After you knew it was a police car you made a half turn in the middle of the block and still tried to get away. Is that right?”
I said: “Yes. It’s going to take a little frank talk to explain that.”
“I’m not afraid of a little frank talk,” Webber said. “I tend to kind of specialize in frank talk.”
I said: “These cops that picked me up were parked in front of the house where George Talley’s wife lives. They were there before I got there. George Talley is the man. who used to be a private detective down here. I wanted to see him. Degarmo knows why I wanted to see him.”
Degarmo picked a match out of his pocket and chewed on the soft end of it quietly. He nodded, without expression. Webber didn’t look at him.
I said: “You are a stupid man, Degarmo. Everything you do is stupid, and done in a stupid way. When you went up against me yesterday in front of Almore’s house you had to get tough when there was nothing to get tough about. You had to make me curious when I had nothing to be curious about. You even had to drop hints which showed me how I could satisfy that curiosity, if it became important. All you had to do to protect your friends was keep your mouth shut until I made a move. I never would have made one, and you would have saved all this.”
Webber said: “What the devil has all this got to do with your being arrested in the twelve hundred block on Westmore Street?”
“It has to do with the Almore case,” I said. “George Talley worked on the Almore case—until he was pinched for drunk driving.”
“Well, I never worked on the Almore case,” Webber snapped. “I don’t know who stuck the first knife into Julius Caesar either. Stick to the point, can’t you?”
“I am sticking to the point. Degarmo knows about the Almore case and he doesn’t like it talked about. Even your prowl car boys know about it. Cooney and Dobbs had no reason to follow me unless it was because I visited the wife of a man who had worked on the Almore case. I wasn’t doing fifty-five miles an hour when they started to follow me. I tried to get away from them because I had a good idea I might get beaten up for going there. Degarmo had given me that idea.”
Webber looked quickly at Degarmo. Degarmo’s hard blue eyes looked across the room at the wall in front of him.
I said: “And I didn’t bust Cooney in the nose until after he had forced me to drink whiskey and then hit me in the stomach when I drank it, so that I would spill it down my coat front and smell of it. This can’t be the first time you have heard of that trick, captain.”
Webber broke another match. He leaned back and looked at his small tight knuckles. He looked again at Degarmo and said: “If you got made chief of police today, you might let me in on it.”
Degarmo said: “Hell, the shamus just got a couple of playful taps. Kind of kidding. If a guy can’t take a joke-”
Webber said: “You put Cooney and Dobbs over there?”
“Well—yes, I did,” Degarmo said. “I don’t see where we have to put up with these snoopers coming into our town and stirring up a lot of dead leaves just to promote themselves a job and work a couple of old suckers for a big fee. Guys like that need a good sharp lesson.”
“Is that how it looks to you?” Webber asked.
“That’s exactly how it looks to me,” Degarmo said.
“I wonder what fellows like you need,” Webber said. “Right now I think you need a little air. Would you please take it, lieutenant?”
Degarmo opened his mouth slowly. “You mean you want me to breeze on out?”
Webber leaned forward suddenly and his sharp little chin seemed to cut the air like the forefoot of a cruiser. “Would you be so kind?”
Degarmo stood up slowly, a dark flush staining his cheekbones. He leaned a hard hand flat on the desk and looked at Webber. There was a little charged silence. He said:
“Okay, captain. But you’re playing this wrong.”
Webber didn’t answer him. Degarmo walked to the door and out. Webber waited for the door to close before he spoke.
“Is it your line that you can tie this Almore business a year and a half ago to the shooting in Lavery’s place today? Or is it just a smoke screen you’re laying down because you know damn well Kingsley’s wife shot Layery?”
I said: “It was tied to Lavery before he was shot. In a rough sort of way, perhaps only with a granny knot. But enough to make a man think.”
“I’ve been into this matter a little more thoroughly than you might think,” Webber said coldly. “Although I never had anything personally to do with the death of Almore’s wife and I wasn’t chief of detectives at that time. If you didn’t even know Almore yesterday morning, you must have heard a lot about him since.”
I told him exactly what I had heard, both from Miss Fromsett and from the Graysons.
“Then it’s your theory that Lavery may have blackmailed Dr. Almore?” he asked at the end. “And that that may have something to do with the murder?”
“It’s not a theory. It’s no more than a possibility. I wouldn’t be doing a job if I ignored it. The relations, if any, between Lavery and Almore might have been deep and dangerous or just the merest acquaintance, or not even that. For all I positively know they may never even have spoken to each other. But if there was nothing funny about the Almore case, why get so tough with anybody who shows an interest in it? It could be coincidence that George Talley was hooked for drunk driving just when he was working on it. It could be coincidence that Almore called a cop because I stared at his house, and that Lavery was shot before I could talk to him a second time. But it’s no coincidence that two of your men were watching Talley’s home tonight, ready, willing and able to make trouble for me, if I went there.”
“I grant you that,” Webber said. “And I’m not done with that incident. Do you want to ifie charges?”
“Life’s too short for me to be filing charges of assault against police officers,” I said.
He winced a little. “Then we’ll wash all that out and charge it to experience,” he said. �“And as I understand you were not even booked, you’re free to go home any time you want to. And if I were you, I’d leave Captain Webber to deal with the Lavery case and with any remote connection it might turn out to have with the Almore case.”
I said: “And with any remote connection it might have with a woman named Muriel Chess being found drowned in a mountain lake near Puma Point yesterday?”