He turned to relay the name inside but he didn’t get to say anything. Young cops rarely do. Brannigan came into the doorway, a beefy, red-faced, Sequoia-size man I’d once seen get jumped by a trio of longshoremen during a rackets case. He hadn’t had time to get his gun unsheathed and so he’d used his fists. He’d left the three of them propped unconscious against a wall like so much garbage. His tie was pulled down now and he was looking at me in a way that was supposed to make me stand on one foot with my head hanging. He got over that in a minute, not saying anything. He jerked his thumb disgustedly and went in.
A hawk-nosed medical examiner I had met once or twice was just leaving. “I’ll send the wagon,” he told Brannigan. He had to step across the body to get out.
Someone had covered her with my raincoat, probably Dan. He was sitting near a window in his shirtsleeves, dark-eyed and unshaven and looking sleepy. He nodded, smoking.
There were dead flash bulbs in a couple of ashtrays and one or two drawers were open. Print powder was dusted around. The laundry bag was on the floor and the money was stacked up in piles of different denominations on the desk. Home. The place looked as inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald.
There was one other detective with Brannigan, a lieutenant named Coffey who was totally bald. The skin under his eyes was pouchy and discolored. Possibly too much night duty had done that, I didn’t know. But it hadn’t put the glaze of menacing resentment in his eyes that you saw the minute you looked at him. That would be part of the personality and it was probably why he was a cop. A grand cop, and I was glad he was there. If we had to use a rubber hose on anybody he’d have two in each pocket.
I said a single filthy word which no one paid any attention to. Finally I went in and walked around to the kitchen and stuck my fingers into five glasses and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels I’d left out earlier. I carried the bottle and the glasses back into the living room. I poured myself about an inch of the sour mash and drank it straight. I poured myself one more, not drinking it, and left the bottle open. “Fannin’s back,” I said. “Party time.”
Coffey took one. No one else did. I went across the room and pulled out a straight chair and sat down where I would not have to face her. Part of her was sticking out, like spillage from a dropped pocketbook.
Brannigan still had not said anything. He was giving me a minute. He had been on the force for twenty years but he could still drink his morning coffee without somebody’s blood in it. I supposed I might as well get to it anyhow.
“Can somebody take it down? I don’t much want to have to repeat it later.”
“The kid can,” he said. “Pete?”
The young flagpole came in from the hall. He already had his notebook out. Brannigan walked across and closed the door and came back. He sat down in the good chair, slumping forward and tilting his hat across his eyes. Dan was still by the window and the kid sat next to him.
“No questions until I’m done, huh? I know how to tell it.”
“Tell it,” Brannigan said.
I did. I gave it to them in detail. I skipped the things Cathy had said, knowing that Brannigan would ask me about that afterward anyhow, and I left out some of the things Estelle had told me, which were purely personal. I didn’t mention Ethan J. Spragway, but I wasn’t sure why, except that the whole business was probably irrelevant. I didn’t make any bones about the kind of life Cathy had been leading, or about why we’d split up. I suggested that it would be a good move to stake out the Perry Street apartment on the chance that Duke might nose around there during the day. I had been talking nineteen minutes when I finished.
“What did the girl say when she came through the door, Harry?”
“She was dying, Nate. She knew she was. She told me she was sorry about things.”
“That all?”
“That’s all.”
Brannigan sat up and pushed his hat back. “Somebody followed her here from wherever she’d gone after two o’clock. He knifed her for forty-two thousand dollars. And then he came upstairs and made you a present of it.”
I didn’t answer him. “The rest will be pure speculation, Pete,” he said. “You can cut it there.” He jerked his tie lower across his shirt. “I hate to begin hot days with guesswork, Harry. But you might as well.”
“No premeditation,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“He was looking for the money, not trouble. Maybe he thought he could talk her out of going to anybody else about it, I don’t know. Anyhow all he wanted was more conversation on the subject. And probably she had the stuff in her hand when she walked back to the guy’s car. I don’t know in what, but the guy’d seen it when she first went to him.”
“Canvas sack.” Brannigan motioned and I saw it on the floor at the side of the desk.
“All right, she’s carrying that. He wants it, and bad, but this time she tells him to make his pile some other way. Maybe this sets it off, maybe something else, but either way it’s quick, so probably they’d had the start of an argument about it before. And then they’re not arguing anymore. The guy grabs the sack but at the same time he sees that she’s not dead. He panics, but he hasn’t got the guts to stab her again. So what does he do?”
“You’re telling it.”
“Okay, I am. So he sees her get up and make the bell, and a minute later he hears the buzzer. He gets out of there like a shot.”
“With the money?”
“Sure with the money. But he’s probably not even shifted into third before it hits him. A fat lot of good it’s going to do him to scram if she’s lived long enough to talk. For all he knows she could have come up to borrow a Band-Aid. Hell, she may live to be ninety, and either way he’s damned sure got to find out. He comes back and watches the place. I come out twice, and the second time I take off in the MG.”
“And he comes over and walks in. Through the door you’ve conveniently forgotten to lock.”
“Hell, Nate, I left the keys under the rubber for Dan.”
Brannigan didn’t say anything.
“So what else?” I said. “The minute he gets inside he knows he’s done murder. He also knows that if she’s talked you’ll have him on it so fast it will make him nauseated. But if he plants the money here it’s my word against his — and I’m the one with the dead horse in the bathtub.”
“Fine,” Brannigan said. He had taken out a cigar. “But if she hasn’t talked he’s throwing the money away.”
“Wouldn’t you? You going to take the odds that she didn’t spill? Standing here with the body on the floor and me possibly on my way to the police at that very moment? You leave the coin, Nate. You leave it and you pray like hell at the same time that she didn’t talk so you’ll be out of it completely. You can’t get a much better bargain for the price.”
Coffey had gone to the bottle. “You’ve got the killer’s impulses figured out pretty clearly for pure speculation, Fannin,’’ he said sarcastically. “Any of this based on anything you know and haven’t told us, maybe?”
I let the sarcasm ride. “It’s based on what didn’t happen.”
“Namely?”
“Namely that the guy didn’t come up and try to take me out myself while I was still here. A pro wouldn’t take the chance that I could tag him for it. It’s got to be somebody who didn’t intend to do it to start with, and who chickened out fast after it happened.”
“How do we know he saw her get up?” Coffey said. “Suppose she lay there a minute. Suppose the guy drove off and left her for dead?”
“Say what you mean. You mean there wasn’t anybody out there at all.”
“I didn’t say that, Fannin.”
I turned to Brannigan. “Look, Nate, if there’s anybody else in it but me it’s got to be my way. He sees her come in because he comes in himself. If the guy drives off like Coffey says then there’s no point in putting him out there to start with, because it means I’ve got the dough all along. It kills the motive for anybody else. It means I knife her on my own doorstep and then come back up and wait while she crawls up after me. She’d do that. And I’d leave the loot stashed away with my sweat socks. I’m clever like that. Just like I’d have Dan call you. Hell, I’d call the papers, too. I’d print invitations. Come see Fannin electrocute himself. One wire in his ear and the other up his back. Free smoked mussels for everybody.”