De Spain grinned, a hard, lazy grin that was neither amused nor triumphant. It was just a grin.
The chief jerked a gun out of his overcoat pocket. It was a foot long, a regular hogleg, but he seemed to know how to hold it. He said tightly: «Where’s Lonenz?»
«He’s hid. We got him all ready for you. I had to bruise him a little, but he talked. That right, shamus?»
I said: «He says something that might be yes or no, but he makes the sounds in the right places.»
«That’s the way I like to hear a guy talk,» De Spain said. «You oughtn’t to be wasting your strength on that homicide stuff, Chief. And them toy dicks you run around with don’t know nothing about police work except to go through apartment houses and shake down all the women that live alone. Now, you give me back my job and eight men and I’ll show you some homicide work.»
The chief looked down at his big gun and then he looked at Dr. Austrian’s bowed head. «So he killed his wife,» he said softly. «I knew there was a chance of it, but I didn’t believe it.»
«Don’t believe it now,» I said. «Helen Matson killed her. Dr. Austrian knows that. He covered up for her, and you covered up for him, and he’s still willing to cover up for her. Love is like that with some people. And this is some town, Chief, where a gal can commit a murder, get her friends and the police to coven it, and then start out to blackmail the very people that kept her out of trouble.»
The chief bit his lip. His eyes were nasty, but he was thinking — thinking hand. «No wonder she got rubbed out,» he said quietly. «Lorenz —»
I said: «Take a minute to think. Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson. He said he did, but De Spain beat him up to the point where he would have confessed shooting McKinley.»
De Spain straightened from the wall. He had both hands lazily in the pockets of his suit coat. He kept them there. He stood straight on wide-planted feet, a wick of black hair showing under the side of his hat.
«Huh?» he said almost gently. «What was that?»
I said: «Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson for several reasons. It was too fussy a job for his type of mind. He’d have knocked her off and let hen lay. Second, he didn’t know Greb was leaving town, tipped off by Dr. Austrian who was tipped off, in turn, by Vance Conned, who is now up north providing himself with all the necessary alibis. And if Lonenz didn’t know that much, he didn’t know anything about Helen Matson. Especially as Helen Matson had never really got to Conned at all. She had just tried to. She told mc that and she was drunk enough to be telling the truth. So Conned wouldn’t have taken the silly risk of having her knocked off in her own apartment by the sort of man anybody would remember seeing if they saw him anywhere near that apartment. Knocking off Matson up in L.A. was something else again. That was way off the home grounds.»
The chief said tightly: «The Club Conned is in L.A.»
«Legally,» I admitted. «But by position and clientele it’s just outside Bay City. It’s part of Bay City — and it helps to run Bay City.»
Shorty said: «That ain’t no way to talk to the chief.»
«Let him alone,» the chief said. «It’s so long since I heard a guy think I didn’t know they did it any more.»
I said: «Ask De Spain who killed Helen Matson.»
De Spain laughed harshly. He said: «Sure. I killed her.»
Dr. Austrian lifted his face off his hands and turned his head slowly and looked at De Spain. His face was as dead, as expressionless as the big dead-pan copper’s. Then he reached over and opened the night-hand drawer of his desk. Shorty flipped his gun out and said: «Hold it, Doe.»
Dr. Austrian shrugged and quietly took a wide-mouthed bottle with a glass stopper out of the drawer. He loosened the stopper and held the bottle close to his nose. «Just smelling salts,» he said dully.
Shorty relaxed and dropped the gun to his side. The chief stared at me and chewed his lip. De Spain stared at nothing, at nobody. He grinned loosely, kept on grinning.
I said: «He thinks I’m kidding. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding. He knew Helen — well enough to give hen a gilt cigarette case with his photo on it. I saw it. It was a small hand-tinted photo and not very good and I had only seen him once. She told mc it was an old sweet that wore out. Afterwards it came back to me who that photo was. But he concealed the fact that he knew her and he didn’t act very much like a copper tonight, in a lot of ways. He didn’t get me out of a jam and run around with me in order to be nice. He did it to find out what I knew before I was put under the lamps down at headquarters. He didn’t beat Lorenz half to death just in order to make Lorcnz tell the truth. He did it to make Lorcnz tell anything De Spain wanted him to tell, including confessing to the murder of the Matson girl whom Lorenz probably didn’t even know.
«Who called up headquarters and tipped the boys about the murder? De Spain. Who walked in there immediately afterwards and horned in on the investigation? De Spain. Who scratched the girl’s body up in a fit of jealous rage because she had ditched him for a better prospect? De Spain. Who still has blood and cuticle under the nails of his night hand which a good police chemist can do a lot with? De Spain. Take a look. I took several.»
The chief turned his head very slowly, as if it were on a pivot. He whistled and the door opened and the other men came back into the room. De Spain didn’t move. The grin stayed on his face, carved there, a meaningless hollow grin that meant and looked as if it would never go away again.
He said quietly: «And you the guy I thought was my pal. Well, you have some wild ideas, shamus. I will say that for you.»
The chief said sharply: «It doesn’t make sense. If De Spain did kill her, then he was the one who tried to put you in a frame and the one that got you out of it. How come?»
I said: «Listen. You can find out if De Spain knew the girl and how well. You can find out how much of his time tonight is not accounted for and make him account for it. You can find out if there is blood and cuticle under his nails and, within limits, whether it is or could be the girl’s blood and the girl’s skin. And whether it was there before De Spain hit Moss Lorenz, before he hit anybody. And he didn’t scratch Lorenz. That’s all you need and all you can use — except a confession. And I don’t think you’ll get that.
«As to the frame, I would say De Spain followed the girl over to the Club Conned, or knew she had gone there and went oven himself. He saw her come out with me and he saw me put her in my car. That made him mad. He sapped me and the girl was too scared not to help him get me to her apartment and up into it. I don’t remember any of that. It would be nice if I did, but I don’t. They got me up there somehow, and they had a fight, and De Spain knocked her out and then he deliberately murdered her. He had some clumsy idea of making it look like a rape murder and making mc the fall guy. Then he beat it, turned in an alarm, horned in on the investigation, and I got out of the apartment before I was caught there.
«He realized by this time that he had done a foolish thing. He knew I was a private dick from L.A., that I had talked to Dolly Kincaid, and from the girl he probably knew that I had gone to see Conned. And he may easily have known I was interested in the Austrian case. Okay. He turned a foolish play into a smart one by stringing along with me on the investigation I was trying to make, helping me on it, getting my story, and then finding himself another and much better fall guy for the murder of the Matson girl.»
De Spain said tonelessly: «I’m goin’ to start climbing on this guy in a minute, Chief. Okay?»
The chief said: «Just a minute. What made you suspect De Spain at all?»