Dill slowly rose to his feet. A policeman who seemed to have had medical training knelt quickly by Corcoran and used deft fingers to search for any signs of life. He found none and sat back on his heels, shaking his head.
Dill helped the trembling Anna Maude Singe to her feet. When he asked if she was hurt, she slowly shook her head no, her eyes fixed on the huge curled-up body of Clay Corcoran. Dill put an arm around Singe to lead her away. He found their path blocked by Captain Gene Colder. A moment later, Chief of Detectives John Strucker rushed up. Colder glanced at Strucker, as if for permission. Strucker granted it with a nod.
“Tell us quick, Dill,” Colder said in a crisp hard voice. “They say he said something. Could you understand what he said?”
Dill nodded. “Sure. He said, ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ He said it twice.”
“That’s all?” Strucker said, the disbelief in his tone, if not on his face.
“That’s it.”
Strucker turned to Colder. “You know what to do, Captain. You’d better get at it.”
“Yes, sir,” Colder said, turned, and hurried away, pointing first at this policeman and then beckoning to that one. It was the only time Dill could remember having heard Colder say sir to Strucker.
The chief of detectives took a cigar from his breast pocket and slowly stripped away the cellophanelike plastic, not taking his eyes from the body of the dead Corcoran. He wadded the cellophane up into a small ball and flipped it away. Still staring down at Corcoran, he bit off one end of the cigar, spat it out, and lit it with a disposable lighter.
“You knew him, huh — Corcoran?” Strucker said, still staring at the dead man.
“He said he used to go with my sister.”
“That’s right,” Strucker said, finally shifting his gaze to Dill. “He did.”
“He said he used to be a cop.”
“He was. Not bad either, although he was a hell of a lot better linebacker. He say what he was doing now?”
“He claimed he was a private detective,” Dill said. “A frightener, he called it.”
Strucker smiled, but it was a small grim one that vanished almost immediately. “He wasn’t bad at that either, although he was better at football than anything else. He just came down and introduced himself to you where — at the hotel?”
“Right.”
“What’d you talk about?”
“My sister, what else?”
“He tell you how she’d dropped him sudden-like?”
“Yes.”
“He still steamed about it?”
“He seemed more resigned than anything else — resigned and sad, of course.”
Strucker turned to Anna Maude Singe. “You knew him, too, didn’t you, Miss Singe?”
“Yes. Quite well.”
“What happened here — a few moments ago?”
“I’m not absolutely sure.”
Strucker puffed on his cigar, blew smoke up into the air and away from Singe. He nodded at her encouragingly. “Just tell me what you saw and what you remember.”
She frowned. “Well, Clay came up to us and said he thought it was a nice funeral and everything seemed to have gone off quite well. Mr. Dill agreed and then Clay said he’d been looking around, or poking around, maybe, and that he needed to ask Mr. Dill something. But then, well, then I guess he saw something behind us — behind Mr. Dill and me — because after that everything happened awfully fast. He bumped Mr. Dill—”
Dill interrupted. “He gave me a hip shot.”
Strucker nodded and again smiled encouragingly at Singe.
“Then his arm snapped out like this,” she said, demonstrating how Corcoran’s arm had moved. “And the next thing I knew I was flat on my back.”
“Clotheslined her?” Strucker asked Dill.
“Apparently.”
“Then I heard the shot,” Anna Maude Singe went on, “and I looked up and saw Clay, except he was down on one knee by then, kneeling, and he had his pants leg up and a little gun in his hand. But he dropped the gun and his hands went up to his throat and came away bloody. After that, he just decided to lie down. It looked like that anyway. He lay down and his knees came up to his chest and he just — he just curled up and died.”
She looked away then. “You all right?” Strucker asked.
She nodded. “Yes. I’m all right.”
Strucker turned to Dill. “What’d you see?”
“The same thing — except I also saw a hand poking a gun through the hedge right about there.” Dill pointed to where a knot of policemen were down on their hands and knees in their dress uniforms making a careful search of the cemetery grass near the spot in the privet hedge Dill had indicated. He assumed they were looking for a spent cartridge.
Strucker watched them for a moment and dolefully shook his head. “Look at ’em,” he said. “All in uniform and alike as peas in a pod. He could’ve got himself an out-of-town uniform somewhere, gone to the funeral, come out here, shot Corcoran, and ducked out the other side of the maze. Could’ve happened like that.”
“Maybe,” Dill said.
Strucker looked at him with renewed interest. “What d’you mean, maybe?”
“The one time I talked to Corcoran, he told me he did a lot of bodyguard work. Maybe that’s what he did here — almost by reflex. He got Anna Maude and me out of the way and then went for the shooter — except it didn’t work out too well.”
Strucker puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, coughed twice, and then nodded — a bit grudgingly, Dill thought. “And the shooter was after who?” Strucker said. “You?”
Dill looked at Singe. “Or her.”
Singe’s eyes went wide for a second and her mouth dropped open, but snapped shut so she could form the M in her startled “Me?”
“Maybe,” Dill said.
“Why the hell me?”
“For that matter,” Dill said, “why the hell anyone?”
Chapter 21
At police headquarters, Sergeant Mock waited outside in the limousine while Dill and Singe made brief statements into a tape recorder. He then drove them back to the Hawkins Hotel. The question Dill had been expecting didn’t come until he and Singe rode the elevator down to the basement garage and were seated in the rented Ford with its engine idling and its air-conditioning turned as high as it would go. Outside, the First National Bank’s time and temperature sign was reporting 101 degrees at 1:31 P.M.
“Why didn’t you tell them what Clay said about Jake Spivey?” Anna Maude Singe asked.
“What’d he say?”
“He said, ‘There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who—.’” She paused. “That’s verbatim.”
“There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who what?” Dill said.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I, and that’s why I didn’t tell them. Why didn’t you?”
“You’re my client.”
“That’s not it,” Dill said and backed the Ford out of its parking slot.
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe I didn’t because Clay could’ve been about to say, ‘There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to come out to his house Sunday for barbecue and a jump in his pool and I understand you all are coming, too.’ Or…” She fell silent.
“Or what?” Dill said as he drove up the ramp.
“I don’t know.”
They came out on Our Jack Street, drove to a red light at the corner of Broadway, stopped, and turned right on red — a logical practice the city had come up with in 1929, which later was borrowed without acknowledgment by California.
After driving north for two blocks on Broadway, Dill said, “You hungry?”