“I asked for Howard Spencer. I know it’s early, but it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Spencer checked out last evening. He took the eight o’clock plane to New York.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
It was a couple of hours later that Bernie Ohls called me.
“Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Get down here and suffer.”
44
It was like the other time except that it was day and we were in Captain Hernandez’s office and the Sheriff was up in Santa Barbara opening Fiesta Week. Captain Hernandez was there and Bernie Ohls and a man from the coroner’s office and Dr. Loring, who looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion, and a man named Lawford, a deputy from the D.A.‘s office, a tall gaunt expressionless man whose brother was vaguely rumored to be a boss of the numbers racket in the Central Avenue district.
Hernandez had some handwritten sheets of note paper in front of him, flesh-pink paper, deckle-edged, and written on with green ink.
“This is informal,” Hernandez said, when everybody was as comfortable as you can get in hard chairs. “No stenotype or recording equipment. Say what you like. Dr. Weiss represents the coroner who will decide whether an inquest is necessary. Dr. Weiss?”
He was fat, cheerful, and looked competent. “I think no inquest,” he said. “There is every surface indication of narcotic poisoning. When the ambulance arrived the woman was still breathing very, faintly and she was in a deep coma and all the reflexes were negative. At that stage you don’t save one in a hundred. Her skin was cold and respiration would not be noticed without close examination, The houseboy thought she was dead. She died approxi mately an hour after that. I understand the lady was subject to occasional violent attacks of bronchial asthma. The demerol was prescribed by Dr. Loring as an emergency measure.”
“Any information or deduction about the amount of demerol taken, Dr. Weiss?”
“A fatal dose,” he said, smiling faintly. “There is no quick way of determining that without knowing the med. ical history, the acquired or natural tolerance. According to her confession she took twenty-three hundred milligrams, four or five times the minimal lethal dose for a non-addict.” He looked questioningly at Dr. Loring.
“Mrs. Wade was not an addict,” Dr. Loring said coldly. “The prescribed dose would be one or two fifty-milligram tablets. Three or four during a twentyfour-hour period would be the most I’d permit.”
“But you gave her fifty at a whack,” Captain Hernandez said. “A pretty dangerous drug to have around in that quantity, don’t you think? How bad was this bronchial asthma, Doctor?”
Dr. Loring smiled contemptuously. “It was intermittent, like all asthma. It never amounted to what we term status asthmaticus, an attack so severe that the patient seems in danger of suffocating.”
“Any comment, Dr. Weiss?”
‘Well,” Dr. Weiss said slowly, “assuming the note didn’t exist -and assuming we had no other evidence of how much of the stuff she took, it could be an accidental overdose. The safey margin isn’t very wide. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. You don’t want to suppress the note, Hernandez, for Pete’s sake?”
Hernandez scowled down at his desk. “I was just wondering. I didn’t know narcotics were standard treatment for asthma. Guy learns something every day.”
Loring flushed. “An emergency measure, I said, Captain. A doctor can’t be everywhere at once. The onset of an asthmatic flareup can be very sudden.”
Hernandez gave him a brief glance and turned toLawiord. “What happens to your office, if I give this letter to the press?”
The D.A.‘s deputy glanced at me emptily. “What’s this guy doing here, Hernandez?”
“I invited him.”
“How do I know he won’t repeat everything said in here to some reporter?”
“Yeah, he’s a great talker. You found that out. The time you had him pinched.”
Lawford grinned, then cleared his throat. “I’ve read that purported confession,” he said carefully. “And I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve got a background of emotional exhaustion, bereavement, some use of drugs, the strain of wartime life in England under bombing, this clandestine marriage, the man coming back here, and so on. Undoubtedly she developed a feeling of guilt and tried to purge herself of it by a sort of transference.”
He stopped and looked around, but all he saw was faces with no expression. “I can’t speak for the D.A. but my own feeling is that your confession would be no grounds to seek an indictment even if the woman had lived.”
“And having already believed one confession you wouldn’t care to believe another that contradicted the first one,” Hernandez said caustically.
“Take it easy, Hernandez. Any law enforcement agency has to consider public relations. If the papers printed that confession we’d be in trouble. That’s for sure. We’ve got enough eager beaver reformer groups around just waiting for that kind of chance to stick a knife into us. We’ve got a grand jury that’s already jittery about the working-over your vice squad lieutenant got last week—it’s about ten days.”
Hernandez said: “Okay, it’s your baby. Sign the receipt for me.”
He shuffled the pink deckle-edged pages together and Lawford leaned down to sign a form. He picked up the pink pages, folded them,- put them in his breast pocket and walked out.
Dr. Weiss stood up. He was tough, good-natured, unimpressed. “We had the last inquest on the Wade family too quick,” he said. “I guess we won’t bother to have this one at all.”
He nodded to Ohls and Hernandez, shook hands formally with Loring, and went out. Loring stood up to go, then hesitated.
“I take it that I may inform a certain interested party that there will be no further investigation of this matter?” he said stiffly.
“Sorry to have kept you away from your patients so long, Doctor.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Loring said sharply. “I’d better warn you—”
“Get lost, Jack,” Hernandez said.
Dr. Loring almost staggered with shock. Then he turned and fumbled his way rapidly out of the room. The door closed and it was a half minute before anybody said anything. Hernandez shook himself and lit a cigarette. Then he looked at me.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“What are you waiting for?”
“This is the end, then? Finished? Kaput.”
“Tell him, Bernie.”
“Yeah, sure it’s the end,” Ohls said. “I was all set to pull her in for questioning. Wade didn’t shoot himself. Too much alcohol in his brain. But like I told you, where was the, motive? Her confession could be wrong in details, but it proves she spied on him. She knew the layout of the guest house in Encino. The Lennox frail had taken both her men from her. What happened in the guest house is just what you want to imagine. One question you forgot to ask Spencer. Did Wade own a Mauser P.P.K.? Yeah, he owned a small Mauser automatic. We talked to Spencer already today on the phone. Wade was a blackout drunk. The poor unfortunate bastard either thought he had killed Sylvia Lennox or he actually had killed her or else he bad some reason to know his wife had. Either way he was going to lay it on the line eventually. Sure, he’d been hitting the hooch long before, but he was a guy married to a beautiful nothing. The Mex knows all about it. The little bastard knows damn near everything. That was a dream girl. Some of her was here and now, but a lot of her was there and then. If she ever got hot pants, it wasn’t for her husband. Get what I’m talking about?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Damn near made her yourself, didn’t you?”
I gave him the same no answer.
Ohls and Hernandez both grinned sourly. “Us guys aren’t exactly brainless,” Ohls said, “We knew there was something in that story about her taking her clothes off. You outtalked him and he let you. He was hurt and confused and he liked Wade and he wanted to be sure. When he got sure he’d have used his knife. This was a personal matter with him. He never snitched on Wade. Wade’s wife did, and she deliberately fouled up the issue just to confuse Wade. It all adds. In the end I guess she was scared of him. And Wade never threw her down any stairs. That was an accident. She tripped and the guy tried to catch her. Candy saw that too.”
“None of it explains why she wanted me around.”
“I could think of reasons. One of them is old stuff. Every cop has run into it a hundred times. You were the loose end, the guy that helped Lennox escape, his friend, and probably to some extent his confidant. What did he know and what did he tell you? He took the gun that had killed her and-he knew it had been fired. She could have thought he did it for her. That made her think he knew she had used it. When he killed himself she was sure. But what about you? You were still the loose end. She wanted to milk you, and she had the charm to use, and a situation ready-made for an excuse to get next to you. And if she needed a fall guy, you were it. You might say she was collecting fall guys.”
“You’re imputing too much knowledge to her,” I said.
Ohls broke a cigarette in half and started chewing on one half. The other half he stuck behind his ear.
“Another reason is she wanted a man, a big, strong guy that could crush her in his arms and make her dream again.
“She hated me,” I said. “I don’t buy that one.”
“Of course,” Hernandez put in dryly. “You turned her down. But she would have got over that. And then you blew the whole thing up in her face with Spencer listening in.”
“You two characters been seeing any psychiatrists lately?”
“Jesus,” Ohls said, “hadn’t you heard? We got them in our hair all the time these days. We’ve got two of them on the staff. This ain’t police business any more. It’s getting to be a branch of the medical racket. They’re in and out of jail, the courts, the interrogation rooms. They write reports fifteen pages long on why some punk of a juvenile held up a liquor store or raped a schoolgirl or peddled ter to the senior class. Ten years from now guys like Hernandez and me will be doing Rohrschach tests and word associations instead of chin-ups and target practice. When -we go out on a ease we’ll carry little black bags with portable lie detectors and bottles of truth serum. Too bad we didn’t grab the four hard monkeys that poured it on Big Willie Magoon. We might have been able to unmaladjust them and make them love their mothers.”
“Okay for me to blow?”
“What are you not convinced about?” Hernandez asked, snapping a rubber band.
“I’m convinced. The case is dead. She’s dead, they’re all dead. A nice smooth routine all around. Nothing to do but go home -and forget it ever happened. So I’ll do that.”
Ohls reached the half cigarette from behind his ear, looked at it as if wondering, how it got there, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“What are you crying about?” Hernandez said. “If she hadn’t been fresh out of guns she might have made it a perfect score.”
“Also,” Ohls said grimly, “the telephone was working yesterday.”
“Oh sure,” I said. “You’d have come running and what you would have found would have been a mixed up story that admitted nothing but a few silly lies.- This morning you have what I suppose is a full confession. You haven’t let me read it, but you wouldn’t have called in the D.A. if it was just a love note. If any real solid work had been done on the Lennox case at the time, somebody would have dug up his war record and where he got wounded and all the rest of it. Somewhere along the line a connection with the Wades would have turned up. Roger Wade knew who Paul Marston was. So did another P.I. I happened to get in touch with.”
“It’s possible,” Hernandez admitted, “but, that isn’t how police investigations work. You- -don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat on to get it finalized and forgotten. I’ve investigated hundreds of homicides. Some are all of a piece, neat, tidy, and according to the book. Most of them make sense here, don’t make sense there. But when you get motive, means, opportunity, flight, a written confession, and a suicide immediately afterwards, you leave it lay. No police department in the world has the men ‘or the time to question the obvious. The only thing against Lennox being a killer was that somebody thought he was a nice guy who wouldn’t have done it and that there were others who could equally well have done it. But the others didn’t take it on the lam, didn’t confess, didn’t blow their brains out. He did. And as for being a nice guy I figure sixty to seventy percent of all the killers that end up in the gas chamber or the hot seat or on the end of a rope are people the neighbors thought were just as harmless as a Fuller Brush salesman. Just as harmless and quiet and well bred as Mrs. Roger Wade. You want to read what she wrote in that letter? Okay, read it. I’ve got to go down the hall.”
He stood up and pulled a drawer open and put a folder on the top of the desk. “There are five photostats in here, Marlowe. Don’t let me catch you looking at them.”
He started for the door and then turned his head and said to Ohls: “You want to talk to Peshorek with me?”
Ohls nodded and followed him out. When I was alone in the office I lifted the cover of the file folder and looked at the white-on-black ph�tostats. Then touching only the edges I counted them. There were six, each of several pages clipped together. I took one and rolled it up and slipped it into my pocket. Then I read over the next one in the pile. When I had finished I sat down and waited. In about ten minutes Hernandez came back alone. He sat down behind his desk again, tallied the photostats in the file folder, and put the file back in his desk.
He raised his eyes and looked at me without any expression. “Satisfied?”
“Lawford know you have those?”
“Not from me. Not from Bernie. Bernie made them himself. Why?”
“What would happen if one got loose?”
He smiled unpleasantly. “It won’t. But if it did, it wouldn’t be anybody in the Sheriff’s office. The D.A. has. photostat equipment too.”
“You don’t like District Attorney Springer too well, do you, Captain?”
He looked surprised. “Me? I like everybody, even you. Get the hell out of here. I’ve got work to do.”
I stood up to go. He said suddenly: “You carry a gun these days?”
“Part of the time.”
“Big Willie Magoon carried two. I wonder why he didn’t use them.”
“I guess he figured he had everybody scared.”
“That could be it,” Hernandez said casually. He picked up a rubber band and stretched it between his thumbs. He stretched it farther and farther. Finally with a snap it broke. He rubbed his thumb where the loose end had snapped back against it. “Anybody can be stretched too far,” he said. “No matter how tough he looks. See you around.”
I went out of the door and got out of the building fast.
Once a patsy, always a patsy.
45