Ken Branks, in yellow knit shirt, shapeless felt hat and racetrack tweeds, sat in my lounge and took cautious sips from the steaming mug of coffee and made small talk and watched me with clever eyes in a supremely ordinary face.
Finally he said, “You’ve been questioned a few times, McGee. Here and in Miami.”
“I haven’t been charged with anything.”
“I know. But you seem to get a piece of the action on little things here and there. It interests me.”
“Why?”
“Sam Taggart’s death interests me too. It didn’t check out the way I thought it would. We worked all the bars and came up with nothing. You know, I thought it was an amateur hacking, some guy working blind in the dark, drunk maybe, chopping at him, finally getting him.”
“Wasn’t it like that?”
“I thought maybe the murder weapon could have been ditched behind those cabins, somewhere in all those junked automobiles, so I had a couple people check it over. They found it. A brand new dollar-nineteen carving knife. Fifty supermarkets in the area carry that brand. There was some other stuff with it. One brand new cheap plastic raincoat, extra large. One brand new pair of rubber gloves. One set of those pliofilm things that fit over shoes. The stuff was bundled up, shoved into a car trunk, one with a sprung lid. Except for the blood, which is a match for Taggart’s, the lab can’t get a thing off that stuff. What does that all mean to you?”
“Somebody expected to get bloody.”
“Somebody didn’t like Taggart. They wanted it to last. They were good with a knife and they made it last. They wanted him to know he was getting it. Look at it that way, and study the wounds, and it was a professional job. Somebody played with him, and then finished him off. We traced Taggart’s car. It was bought for cash off a San Diego lot nearly two weeks ago.”
“What do you want to ask me?”
“Who could take that much of a dislike to him?”
“He’s been gone three years. He never wrote.”
Branks scowled at his coffee. “You saw him that afternoon. You’d take an extra large size. Maybe he came back to find out if you were still sore at him. Maybe you got back to your boat minutes before Nora Gardino arrived there.”
“If you could sell yourself that idea, you wouldn’t be trying it on me.”
His smile was wry. “You’re so right. We’re understaffed, McGee. We haven’t got time to futz around with something that gets too cute.”
“A man would get an extra large size to cover more of himself.”
“Sure. I don’t want pressure. I don’t want newspapers howling about a mystery slaying. So I’m trying to keep it on the basis of a brawl, a vagrant, a dirty little unimportant killing. No release on the blood-proof clothing. I’ve asked California if they’ve got anything at all… I’ve checked him out three years ago here, and I don’t find anything special. He had a job. He worked at it. He took off. What did the two ofyou talk about that day?”
“People we’d both known, where are they, how are they. Do you remember this and that. He said he was back for good, and he borrowed forty dollars.”
“He was right about that. He’s back for good. A man doesn’t get burned that black in any kind of job except on boats.”
“I got the idea that’s what he’d been doing.”
“Out of California?”
“Or Mexico. I told you before he said he’d spent some time in Mexico.”
“You take a man on boats, and an international border, and you can come up with reasons for somebody getting killed. Smuggling. Maybe he was a courier, and he kept the merchandise and ran with it.”
“He had to borrow forty dollars.”
“Maybe he had something he could change into money. And somebody came after him and took it back. Maybe he tried to make a deal.”
“Aren’t you reaching pretty far?”
“Sure. Maybe there were two of them, and he didn’t say anything to you about the other party.”
“Maybe they couldn’t agree on how to split it up. Maybe it was woman trouble, and the husband followed him. I can reach in a lot of directions, McGee. It doesn’t cost anything: It’s just that something like that, a man carefully dressing up to do bloody work, it bothers me. If he took that much care, he took a lot of other kinds of care too. I don’t think my chances of unraveling it from here are very good. I can’t believe anybody was waiting here three years to do that to him. They came with him or followed him, or agreed to meet him here. That’s what my instinct says.”
“I’d have to agree.”
All the questions were about as welcome as a diagnosis of Hansen’s Disease. He was noodling. Good cops have that trait and talent. The mediocre ones pick a theory that pleases them and try to make the facts fit it, one way or another. The good ones keep dropping a little bit at a time, so that you have no way of knowing how much or how little they know, and then they watch how much effort you make to cover yourself regarding information you think they might know.
The best solution is to give them a little bit, particularly when you suspect they might already have it.
“I may have misled you about one thing, but I don’t think it’s too pertinent,” I said.
“Did you now?”
“Maybe I understated the relationship between Nora Gardino and Taggart. I told you she was fond of him. I guess it was a little more than that. And I guess Sam had some business he wanted to take care of before he saw her again, because he told me to tell her he wasn’t going to be in town until the next day, Saturday. I guess you could say they were in love with each other.”
“And he went away for three years? Were they in touch?”
“No. It was a misunderstanding.”
“So if this was a lover’s reunion, what the hell were you doing there, McGee?”
“She didn’t know where he was staying.”
“So what made her think you’d know?”
“Well… I’d told her he was due back in town.”
“Now how would you have known that?”
“He phoned me Thursday from Waycross, Georgia, to ask me if she was so sore at him she never wanted to see him again. I said no.”
“Couldn’t he wait to get here to find out?”
“Maybe he wasn’t even going to come here if I told him she was too angry or married, or moved away.”
“Okay, so why didn’t you just tell her where she could find him?”
“Sam wasn’t in very good shape, and that was a crummy place he was staying. And I didn’t want him to think I’d tipped her off that he’d come in Friday instead of Saturday. I thought it would give him a chance to pull himself together, and go out to the car. It wasn’t much of a setting for a reunion, you see.”
“I can buy that. It ties up a few loose ends, McGee. Like the way she damned near passed out on Thursday night out at the Mile O’Beach.”
“That’s when I told her he was coming back. Did you think that’s when I told her somebody was going to kill him?”
“The thought passed through my mind. I even wondered if last night in Miami you were trying to find the Cuban who did it.”
“You’re pretty good.”
“I wondered if you went to New York to find out which Cuban to look for.”
“You make me very happy I leveled with you.”
“Did you?”
“And I intend to keep right on leveling with you. Nora is still pretty shaky about this whole thing. We’re old friends. She has a gal who can run the store. I think it would do her good to get her away from here for a while.”