«Yah,» Shorty said. «He’s the killer, sure. He come in through the bathroom window and put on clothes belonging to the guy that lives here. The folks are away. Look at the dust. No windows open. Dead air in the place.»
De Spain said softly: «Shorty’s a scientific cop. Don’t let him get you down. He’s got to be wrong some day.»
I said: «What for is he in uniform, if he’s so hot?»
Shorty reddened, De Spain said: «Find his clothes, Shorty. And his gun. And make it fast. This is our pinch, if we make it fast.»
«You ain’t detailed on the case even,» Shorty said.
«What can I lose?»
«I can lose this here uniform.»
«Take a chance, boy. That lug Reed next door couldn’t catch a moth in a shoe box.»
Shorty scuttled into the bedroom. De Spain and I stood motionless, except that he took his hand off my chest and dropped it to his side. «Don’t tell me,» he drawled. «Just let me guess.»
We heard Shorty fussing around opening doors. Then we heard a yelp like a terrier’s yelp when he smells a rathole. Shorty came back into the room with my gun in his right hand and my wallet in his left. He held the gun by the fore sight, with a handkerchief. «The gat’s been fired,» he said. «And this guy ain’t called Talbot.»
De Spain didn’t turn his head on change expression. He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide, rather brutal mouth.
«You don’t say,» he said. «You don’t say.» He pushed me away from him with a hand as hard as a piece of tool steel. «Get dressed, sweetheart — and don’t fuss with your necktie. Places want us to go to them.»
SIX
I GET MY GUN BACK
We went out of the apartment and along the hall. Light still came from the open door of Helen Matson’s apartment. Two men with a basket stood outside it smoking. There was a sound of wrangling voices inside the dead woman’s place.
We went around a bend of the hall and started down the stairs, floor after floor, until we came out in the lobby. Half a dozen people stood around bug-eyed — three women in bathrobes, a bald-headed man with a green eyeshade, like a city editor, two more who hung back in the shadows. Another uniformed man walked up and down just inside the front door, whistling under his breath. We went out past him. He looked completely uninterested. A knot of people clustered on the sidewalk outside.
De Spain said: «This is a big night in our little town.»
We walked along to a black sedan that had no police insignia on it and De Spain slid in behind the wheel and motioned me to get in beside him. Shorty got in the back. He’d had his gun back in his holster long since, but he left the flap unbuttoned, and kept his hand close to it.
De Spain put the car into motion with a jerk that threw me back against the cushions. We made the nearest corner on two wheels, going east. A big black car with twin red spotlights was only half a block away and coming fast as we made the turn.
De Spain spat out of the window and drawled: «That’s the chief. He’ll be late for his own funeral. Boy, did we skin his nose on this one.»
Shorty said disgustedly from the back seat: «Yeah — for a thirty-day lay-off.»
De Spain said: «Keep that mush of yours in low and you might get back on Homicide.»
«I’d rather wean buttons and cat,» Shorty said.
De Spain drove the car hard for ten blocks, then slowed a little. Shorty said: «This ain’t the way to headquarters.»
De Spain said: «Don’t be an ass.»
He let the car slow to a crawl, turned it left into a quiet, dank, residential street lined with coniferous trees and small exact houses set back from small exact lawns. He braked the car gently, coasted it oven to the curb and switched the motor off. Then he threw an arm over the back of the seat and turned to look at the small «sharp-eyed» uniformed man.
«You think this guy plugged her, Shorty?»
«His gun went off.»
«Get that big flash outa the pocket and look at the back of his head.»
Shorty snorted, fussed around in the back of the car, and then metal clicked and the blinding white beam of a large belltopped flashlight sprayed over my head. I heard the little man’s close breathing. He reached out and pressed the sore place on the back of my head. I yelped. The light went off and the blackness of the dark Street jumped at us again.
Shorty said: «I guess he was sapped.»
De Spain said without emotion: «So was the girl. It didn’t show much but it’s there. She was sapped so she could have hen clothes pulled off and be clawed up before she was shot, so the scratches would bleed and look like you know what. Then she was shot with a bath towel around the gun. Nobody heard the shot. Who reported it, Shorty?»
«How the hell would I know? A guy called up two-three minutes before you came into the Hall, while Reed was still looking for a cameraman. A guy with a thick voice, the operator said.»
«Okay. If you done it, Shorty, how would you get out of there?»
«I’d walk out,» Shorty said. «Why not? Hey,» he banked at me, «why didn’t you?»
I said: «I have to have my little secrets.»
De Spain said tonelessly: «You wouldn’t climb across no air shaft, would you, Shorty? You wouldn’t crash into the next apartment and pretend to be the guy that lived there, would you? And you wouldn’t call no law and tell them to take it up there in high and they’d catch the killer, would you?»
«Hell,» Shorty said, «this guy call up? No, I wouldn’t do any of them things.»
«Neither did the killer,» De Spain said, «except the last one, He called up.»
«Them sex fiends do funny things,» Shorty said. «This guy could have had help and the other guy tried to put him in the middle after knocking him out with a sap.»
De Spain laughed harshly. «Hello, sex fiend,» he said, and poked mc in the ribs with a finger as hard as a gun barrel. «Look at us saps, just sitting here and throwing our jobs away — that is, the one of us that has a job — and arguing it out when you, the guy that knows all the answers, ain’t told us a damn thing. We don’t even know who the dame was.»
«A redhead I picked up in the bar of the Club Conned,» I said. «No, she picked me up.»
«No name or anything?»
«No. She was tight, I helped hen out into the air and she asked me to take her away from there and while I was putting her into my car somebody sapped mc. I came to on the floor of the apartment and the girl was dead.»
De Spain said: «What was you doing in the bar of the Club Conned?»
«Getting my hair cut,» I said. «What do you do in a bar? This redhead was tight and seemed scared about something and she threw a drink in the floor boss’s face. I felt a little sorry for her.»
«I always feel sorry for a redhead, too,» De Spain said. «This guy that sapped you must have been an elephant, if he carried you up to that apartment.»
I said: «Have you ever been sapped?»
«No,» De Spain said. «Have you, Shorty?»
Shorty said he had never been sapped either. He said it unpleasantly.
«All right,» I said. «It’s like an alcohol drunk. I probably came to in the car and the fellow would have a gun and that would keep me quiet. He would walk mc up to the apartment with the girl. The girl may have known him. And when he had me up there he would sap me again and I wouldn’t remember anything that happened in between the two sappings.»
«I’ve heard of it,» De Spain said. «But I never believed it.»
«Well, it’s true,» I said. «It’s got to be true. Because I don’t remember and the guy couldn’t have carried mc up there without help.»
«I could,» De Spain said. «I’ve carried heavier guys than you.’,