“Go on,” I said, frowning.
Dillon put out his cigarette and gave me a humorless smile. “I looked into the Association for Medical Research and I did quite a thorough bit of checking. It doesn’t exist; there isn’t any Association for Medical Research. And the only person who could have invented it is or was my father’s lawyer and executor, Adam Chillingham.”
Sherrard and I thought that over and came to the same conclusion. I said, “So even though you never got along with your father, and you don’t care about money for yourself, you decided to expose Chillingham.”
“That’s right. My father worked hard all his life to build his fortune, and admirably enough, he decided to give it to charity at his death. I believe in worthwhile causes, I believe in the work being done by the Heart Fund, and it sent me into a rage to realize they had been cheated out of a substantial fortune that could have gone toward valuable research.”
“A murderous rage?” Sherrard asked softly.
Dillon showed us his humorless smile again. “I didn’t kill Adam Chillingham,” he said. “But you’ll have to admit, he deserved killing — and that the world is better off without the likes of him.”
I might have admitted that to myself, if Dillon’s accusations were valid, but I didn’t admit it to Dillon. I’m a cop, and my job is to uphold the law; murder is murder, whatever the reasons for it, and it can’t be gotten away with.
Sherrard and I hammered at Dillon a while longer, but we couldn’t shake him at all. I left Jack to continue the field questioning and took a couple of men and re-searched Chillingham’s private office. No gun. I went up onto the roof of the nearest building and searched that personally. No gun. I took my men down into the lawn area and supervised another minute search. No gun.
I went back to Chillingham’s suite and talked to Charles Hearn and Miss Tower again, and they had nothing to add to what they’d already told us; Hearn was “almost positive” he had heard a muffled explosion inside the office, but from the legal point of view, that was the same as not having heard anything at all.
We took Dillon down to Headquarters finally, because we knew damned well he had killed Adam Chillingham, and advised him of his rights and printed him and booked him on suspicion. He asked for counsel, and we called a public defender for him, and then we grilled him again in earnest. It got us nowhere.
The F.B.I. and state check we ran on his fingerprints got us nowhere either; he wasn’t wanted, he had never been arrested, he had never even been printed before. Unless something turned up soon in the way of evidence — specifically, the missing murder weapon — we knew we couldn’t hold him very long.
The next day I received the lab report and the coroner’s report, and the ballistics report on the bullet taken from Chillingham’s neck — .22 caliber, all right. The lab’s and coroner’s findings combined to tell me something I’d already guessed: the wound and the calculated angle of trajectory of the bullet did not entirely rule out the remote possibility that Chillingham had been shot from the roof of the nearest building. The ballistics report, however, told me something I hadn’t guessed — something that surprised me a little.
The bullet had no rifling marks.
Sherrard blinked at this when I related the information to him.
“No rifling marks?” he said. “Hell, that means the slug wasn’t fired from a gun at all, at least not a lawfully manufactured one. A homemade weapon, you think, Walt?”
“That’s how it figures,” I agreed. “A kind of zipgun probably. Anybody can make one; all you need is a length of tubing or the like and a bullet and a grip of some sort and a detonating cap.”
“But there was no zipgun, either, in or around Chillingham’s office. We’d have found it if there was.”
I worried my lower lip meditatively. “Well, you can make one of those zips from a dozen or more small component parts, you know; even the tubing could be soft aluminum, the kind you can break apart with your hands. When you’re done using it, you can knock it down again into its components. Dillon had enough time to have done that, before opening the locked door.”
“Sure,” Sherrard said. “But then what? We still didn’t find anything — not a single thing — that could have been used as part of a homemade zip.”
I suggested we go back and make another search, and so we drove once more to the Dawes Building. We re-combed Chillingham’s private office — we’d had a police seal on it to make sure nothing could be disturbed — and we re-combed the surrounding area. We didn’t find so much as an iron filing. Then we went to the city jail and had another talk with George Dillon.
When I told him our zipgun theory, I thought I saw a light flicker in his eyes; but it was the briefest of reactions, and I couldn’t be sure. We told him it was highly unlikely a zipgun using a .22-caliber bullet could kill anybody from a distance of a hundred yards, and he said he couldn’t help that, he didn’t know anything about such a weapon. Further questioning got us nowhere.
And the following day we were forced to release him, with a warning not to leave the city.
But Sherrard and I continued to work doggedly on the case; it was one of those cases that preys on your mind constantly, keeps you from sleeping well at night, because you know there has to be an answer and you just can’t figure out what it is. We ran checks into Chillingham’s records and found that he had made some large private investments a year ago, right after the Dillon will had been probated. And as George Dillon had claimed, there was no Association for Medical Research; it was a dummy charity, apparently set up by Chillingham for the explicit purpose of stealing old man Dillon’s $350,000. But there was no definite proof of this, not enough to have convicted Chillingham of theft in a court of law; he’d covered himself pretty neatly.
As an intelligent man, George Dillon had no doubt realized that a public exposure of Chillingham would have resulted in nothing more than adverse publicity and the slim possibility of disbarment — hardly sufficient punishment in Dillon’s eyes. So he had decided on what to him was a morally justifiable homicide. From the law’s point of view, however, it was nonetheless Murder One.
But the law still had no idea what he’d done with the weapon, and therefore, as in the case of Chillingham’s theft, the law had no proof of guilt.
As I said, though, we had our teeth into this one and we weren’t about to let go. So we paid another call on Dillon, this time at the hotel where he was staying, and asked him some questions about his background. There was nothing more immediate we could investigate, and we thought that maybe there was an angle in his past that would give us a clue toward solving the riddle.
He told us, readily enough, some of what he’d done during the fifteen years since he’d left home, and it was a typical drifter’s life: lobster packer in Maine, ranch hand in Montana, oil worker in Texas, road construction in South America. But there was a gap of about four years that he sort of skimmed over without saying anything specific. I jumped on that and asked him some direct questions, but he wouldn’t talk about it.
His reluctance made Sherrard and me more than a little curious; we both had that cop’s feeling it was important, that maybe it was the key we needed to unlock the mystery. We took the mug shots we’d made of Dillon and sent them out, along with a request for information as to his whereabouts during the four blank years, to various law-enforcement agencies in Florida — where he’d admitted to being just prior to the gap, working as a deckhand on a Key West charter-fishing boat.