“Can I reach you here if I need to?”
“Know Peak Murry?”
“I’ve met him, and I know his joint.”
“Anything you give him will get to me,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. It’s not so good. That Tanner lay is all set.”
“Right. Thanks.” I went out of the house.
XXII. The Ice Pick
Downtown, I went first to police headquarters. McGraw was holding down the chief’s desk. His blond-lashed eyes looked suspiciously at me, and the lines in his leathery face were even deeper and sourer than usual.
“When’d you see Dinah Brand last?” he asked without any preliminaries, not even a nod. His voice rasped disagreeably through his bony nose.
“Ten-forty last night, or thereabout,” I said. “Why?”
“Where?”
“Her house.”
“How long were you there?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you stay any longer than that?”
“What,” I asked, sitting down in the chair he hadn’t offered me, “makes it any of your business?”
He glared at me while he filled his lungs so he could yell, “Murder! in my face.
I laughed and said:
“You don’t think she had anything to do with Noonan’s killing?”
I wanted a cigarette, but cigarettes were too well known as first aids to the nervous for me to take a chance on one just then.
McGraw was trying to look through my eyes. I let him look, having all sorts of confidence in my belief that, like a lot of people, I looked most honest when I was lying. Presently he gave up the eye-study and asked:
“Why not?”
That was weak enough. I said, “All right, why not?” indifferently, offered him a cigarette. and took one myself. Then I added: “My guess is that Whisper did it.”
“Was he there?” For once McGraw cheated his nose, snapping the words off his teeth.
“Was he where?”
“At Brand’s?”
“No,” I said, wrinkling my forehead. “Why should he be–if he was off killing Noonan?”
“Damn Noonan!” the acting chief exclaimed irritably. “What do you keep dragging him in for?”
I tried to look at him as if I thought him crazy.
He said:
“Dinah Brand was murdered last night.”
I said: “Yeah?”
“Now will you answer my questions?”
“Of course. I was at Willsson’s with Noonan and the others. After I left there, around ten-thirty, I dropped in at her house to tell her I had to go up to Tanner. I had a half-way date with her. I stayed there about ten minutes, long enough to have a drink. There was nobody else there, unless they were hiding. When was she killed? And how?”
McGraw told me he had sent a pair of his dicks–Shepp and Vanaman–to see the girl that morning, to see how much help she could and would give the department in copping Whisper for Noonan’s murder. The dicks got to her house at nine-thirty. The front door was ajar. Nobody answered their ringing. They went in and found tile girl lying on her back in the dining room, dead, with a stab wound in her left breast.
The doctor who examined the body said she had been killed with a slender, round, pointed blade about six inches in length, at about three o’clock in the morning. Bureaus, closets, trunks, and so on, had apparently been skillfully and thoroughly ransacked. There was no money in the girl’s handbag, or elsewhere in the house. The jewel case on her dressing table was empty. Two diamond rings were on her fingers.
The police hadn’t found the weapon with which she had been stabbed. The fingerprint experts hadn’t turned up anything they could use. Neither doors nor windows seemed to have been forced. The kitchen showed that the girl had been drinking with a guest or guests.
“Six inches, round, slim, pointed,” I repeated the weapon’s description. “That sounds like her ice pick.”
McGraw reached for the phone and told somebody to send Shepp and Vanaman in. Shepp was a stoop-shouldered tall man whose wide mouth had a grimly honest look that probably came from bad teeth. The other detective was short, stocky, with purplish veins in his nose and hardly any neck.
McGraw introduced us and asked them about the ice pick. They had not seen it, were positive it hadn’t been there. They wouldn’t have overlooked an article of its sort.