Sellers sighed and started the car. “Okay,” he said wearily. “That’s just the way it goes. You have to investigate all of these angles.”
While we were driving back to San Robles, I said casually to Sellers, “What time do you figure the shooting took place, Sellers?”
“Right around ten-fifteen, as nearly as we can determine. You know how it is in a case of that kind. No one pays enough attention to look at the time, and then they have to approximate it afterwards, but it was right around ten-fifteen.”
“Checked up on everybody?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” he said wearily.
“How about Mrs. Fulton?”
“What about her?”
“Checked up on her?”
“What are you getting at?” Mrs. Fulton said.
Sellers cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me.
I said, “You must have had quite a shock last night, Mrs. Fulton. When did you learn your husband was dead?”
“About one o’clock in the morning. The police came and got me out of bed.”
“That’s tough. Of course,” I said, “you thought you had insurance. That must have helped soften the blow.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “I thought I had insurance until I talked with that insurance man. What’s all this about checking up on me?”
“He just wants to know where you were,” Sellers said, grinning. “He’s taking an indirect way of finding out.”
“Where I was! Why, I was home, of course.”
“Anyone else with you?”
“Certainly not. My husband was away. I was there with the children.”
“Where were the children?”
“In bed.”
“I mean at ten-fifteen.”
“That’s when I mean.”
Sellers glanced over at the woman, then looked at me again. “Lam,” he said, “you do get some of the damnedest ideas.”
“Don’t I?”
Sellers said, “Okay, Mrs. Fulton, I hate to rub it in, but just for the record, you could have slipped out of the house, gone down to the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT, found your husband down there, made a scene and…”
“Oh, bosh!” she interrupted.
“And that scene,” Sellers went on, “could have been the thing that caused your husband to shoot his sweetheart and commit suicide.”
“Don’t be a sap.”
“There’s something cockeyed about it.”
“In the first place,” she said, “how would I have got down there? I didn’t have a car.”
“How do we know you didn’t? You told us that your husband was out working and had his car, but... by God, Lam, I believe you’ve got something! Dover Fulton didn’t have the car with him. He’d left the car at home. His wife got in the car, beat it down to the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT, made a scene and the scene terminated in a shooting, and she was afraid to drive the car back. She…”
Sellers’s voice trailed off into silence.
“Running out of ideas?” Mrs. Fulton asked sarcastically.
“No, just getting them,” Sellers said. “You got any way of showing where you were at ten-fifteen? Any way at all?”
She hesitated a moment, then said, “Certainly I have.”
“What is it?”
“A man called up just about ten-fifteen,” she said, “and asked me if my husband was home. Then he said something about a Lucille Hart, who was supposed to be my sister. I told him I didn’t have any sister. And then he hung up. But all we have to do is to find that man and…”
“Nice stuff,” Sellers said sarcastically. “All we have to do is to find one guy out of the three or four million phone subscribers who are within reaching distance.”
“Well, it seems to me it would be easy. If you’d let it be known in the paper. .”
“We might, at that,” Sellers interrupted. “You answered the phone personally?”
“That’s right.”
“Talked with this man?”
“Yes.”
“Think he’d recognise your voice?”
“He should — he should be able to tell it again. In any event, he can tell that some grown woman was at my address and answered the telephone. That would certainly seem to dispose of this wild theory you have.”
Sellers drove for a while in silence.
“And how do you think I got home after the shooting?” Mrs. Fulton asked.
“You probably hitch-hiked,” Sellers said. “You’d locked the car when you went there and you were afraid to... Now, wait a minute. Donald Lam’s card was in there, and... Where’s your coin purse?”
“Right here in my bag.”
“Let’s take a look at it.”
She opened her bag, and Sellers pulled the police car over to the kerb to a stop. He looked at the coin purse Irene Fulton handed him, said thoughtfully. “That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Neither do you!” she snapped, then said suddenly, “Isn’t it enough that I have all these troubles without having you come along and adding to them?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Sellers said, and eased the car out from the kerb. But all the way to San Robles he was scowling as he watched the road. He didn’t use the siren, and he was driving so slowly that a couple of times I was afraid we’d be pinched for blocking traffic.
Mrs. Fulton didn’t say anything, either. She sat with her face hard, white and strained, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. She had thoughts for company, and they weren’t nice thoughts.
We got to the house in San Robles and Sellers said, “I guess I’ll just take a look through the place. You can show me where the kids were sleeping and where the phone’s located.”
I made motions in the rear seat, and Sellers threw over his shoulder, “You sit right there, Lam.”
I settled back and smoked a cigarette.
Sellers was gone about ten minutes. When he came out, he had a cigar in his mouth that he had chewed into frayed wreckage.
He adjusted himself behind the steering wheel, slammed the car door, turned to me and said, “Damn it, Lam, there are times when I could knock your teeth right down your throat.”
I looked at him innocently. “Why?” I asked.
“I’m damned if I know,” Sellers said angrily, “and that’s what makes it so damned irritating.”
Seven
Sellers turned on the siren when he was half-way to town and we started speeding again.
“You can take me back to the office,” I told him. “I’m not done with you yet.”
“Where to now?”
He said, “You’ll find out,” and pushed down harder on the throttle.
We screamed through the Sunday traffic, pulled up at length in front of the Beaverbrook Hotel.
A plain-clothes officer gave a nod of his head as Sellers stalked in.
Sellers moved over to him and said, “What’s he doing? In his room?”
The man nodded.
“Alone?”
“That’s right.”
“Telephoning?”
“Only to room service.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Getting plastered.”
“That suits me fine,” Sellers said. He jerked his head in my direction and said, “Come on, Lam.”
We went to the lift, and got off at the eleventh floor. Sellers already knew the way. He walked on down the corridor and banged with his knuckles on the door of 1110.
“Who is it?” a voice called from behind the panels.
“Come on,” Sellers said impatiently, “get it open.”
There was the sound of motion from within the room, and then the door was opened by a tall, thin individual with good shoulders, flat stomach, and an air about the way he wore his clothes which showed he knew he was good-looking. He had dark, wavy hair, a long, firm mouth, wide-spaced grey eyes, and a skin that was tanned to a hard bronze.
He’d been drinking, and his eyes were red. Whether all the redness came from the liquor was not readily apparent.