Apparently the inspector decided to take no chances, and the decision brought about one of his abrupt changes in manner which never fails to fascinate me. All at once he was full of wheedling friendliness.
“We’re always willing to cooperate with you private fellows when you cooperate with us, Manny. I’ll be glad to give you the little bit we got, if you’ll promise to turn in everything you find out the minute you find it... not a week or two later, as you sometimes do.”
“I’ll hold nothing back at all from you, if you’ll promise the same treatment.”
“Sure, Manny.”
“There’s one qualification,” I said. “I want you to agree that regardless of which one of us breaks the case, we keep the arrest secret for twenty-four hours.”
Straightening in his chair, he looked at me with amazement. “Why should I agree to a silly thing like that?”
“There’s a political reason,” I said casually.
“No politician is going to tell me how to run Homicide,” he declared unconvincingly.
“None wants to,” I assured him. “You’ll have your killer and no one will interfere with the legal prosecution. All I’m asking is he be held as a material witness or some such thing for twenty-four hours. Assuming we ever catch him, that is. If he can’t, we’ll have to work independently, because I’m committed to work on that basis only.”
“Why?”
“Because I am. Do we cooperate, or do I tell Laurie Davis I’m on my own?”
I let the name slip deliberately, and watched Day’s reaction to the confirmation that my client was who he suspected. A faint spot of white appeared at the tip of his nose. Around headquarters Warren Day’s nose is surreptitiously referred to as the “rage gauge,” for it exactly meters his degree of anger. When it becomes dead white, he is just short of homicidal.
“For an old friend like you I think we can arrange that,” he said in a choked voice.
So our agreement was made and the inspector proceeded to bring me up to date.
As I had surmised from his double wound, the bullet which killed Lancaster had passed entirely through his body. The spent slug, too badly battered from striking a rib on the way out to make comparison tests possible in the event the murder weapon was ever found, was located lying on the gravel drive only a few feet from the body. Since no ejected casing was found, it was assumed the weapon had been a revolver rather than an automatic.
A thin coating of dried leaves from the previous fall had been spread over the close-cropped grass as fertilizer by El Patio’s gardener, and the resulting spongy turf left no footprints. However, muzzle flash had singed a bush at the edge of the drive, so it had been possible to determine where the killer had been standing.
At this point I interrupted. “Then my story is verified without Fausta’s statement. If she repudiates it, that taxi driver’s imaginings still don’t mean anything.”
Racketeer Barney Seldon had been held for questioning as a matter of routine, the inspector went on unperturbably, but since he was still seated at his table in the midst of over a hundred other diners when the shot was fired, he was not even booked. It developed that he was an habitue of El Patio, dining there several nights a week, so there was nothing unusual about his being present at the time of the murder. Except for his reputation for violence, the police had no reason to connect him with the affair.
“Right after you left I sent Hannegan over to Carson City to break the news to Lancaster’s wife,” Day went on. “A lousy job, but somebody always has to do it. He found out from Mrs. Lancaster the dead man’s purpose in being this side of the river was a business meeting with some investment brokers, and she had expected him home last night. He also found out practically everybody knew Lancaster would be at El Patio last night. During a luncheon speech in Carson City a few days back he made a humorous reference to a charge by a political rival that he was in the pay of a restaurant-owner’s lobby which was trying to get the state sanitary code relaxed. He said his influence among restaurateurs was so great that when he phoned El Patio a week in advance for a six-thirty dinner reservation for last night, he only had to argue about twenty minutes in order to get himself fitted in two hours later than he wanted. The speech was reprinted in the Carson City Herald, so anyone who can read could have known he would be coming out of El Patio about nine-thirty.”
“Who were the investment brokers he met with?” I asked.
“Jones and Knight Investment Company on Broadway. I sent a man over this morning and he talked to one of the partners. Guy named Harlan Jones. According to him, Lancaster left the brokerage office alone at five P.M. Offhand this looks to me like a political assassination by some fanatic.”
I said, “Remember a while back when a couple of pot shots were taken at Laurie Davis?”
He nodded. “Before he hired that ex-FBI fellow as a bodyguard.”
“There’s a probability Barney Seldon was behind those attempts.”
Day peered at me over his glasses. “How would you know a thing like that?”
“I don’t,” I told him. “It’s only a guess. But it’s a guess founded on pretty sound reasoning. Did you know Laurie Davis ran Seldon’s rackets out of his county?”
“No. I don’t pay much attention to Illinois crime. I’ve got enough troubles of my own.”
“Well, he did,” I said. “And if you read the papers, you’d know Davis literally hand-picked Walter Lancaster for lieutenant governor. Maybe Barney was striking back at Davis by having his protege knocked off.”
“A little roundabout for a hood like Seldon,” Day said dubiously. “He’d be more likely to have Davis himself bumped. Besides, he has a perfect alibi.”
“So what? He wouldn’t do his own gun work. He probably has a dozen gunnies he could call on.”
The inspector gave his head a shake of disagreement. “We’ll watch for him to come across the river again and go over him some more, but I can’t see Barney Seldon behind this. If he ordered it, he wouldn’t go out of his way to be on the spot. He’d have a perfect alibi a hundred miles from the murder.”
“Maybe,” I suggested, “that’s exactly what he figured the police would think.”
IV
My first move was to see the murdered man’s family in Carson City, which in spite of being only a few miles distant, took most of the afternoon by the time I had fought bridge traffic both coming and going. I did not anticipate the visit would be very fruitful, since Hannegan had already interviewed the widow, and the stocky lieutenant rarely misses a bet. It was just as fruitful as I anticipated.
The widow was a rather plain woman of middle-age, dry eyed and controlled, but obviously grief stricken. The son, a redheaded youngster named Rodney, impressed me as being more angry than sad. He had driven home from Illinois University, where he was a sophomore, the moment he heard the news, and he was rearing to tear somebody apart for shooting his dad.
From neither of them did I learn anything which seemed to me at the time to possess value. I did get verification of Laurie Davis’s statement about Lancaster having been a director of four corporations aside from Illinois Telegraph before he resigned all directorships to run for lieutenant governor. But neither Mrs. Lancaster nor Rodney had more than the vaguest understanding of his business affairs.
From the widow I also learned Lancaster had considered his meeting with Jones and Knight Company important, and had been considerably upset for some days before it. But since he never discussed business matters at home, Mrs. Lancaster had no idea what was upsetting him.