“Okay, Regan. Maybe she wasn’t such a dope as to remove the glass. I always thought it was crummy the glass wasn’t there. Well, we’ll see. Come on: I’ll drive you back.”
II
Two days later I had a telephone call from Macklin.
“Hunt is taking the case,” he said. “He wants to talk to you. Will you be at his office at eleven this morning?”
I said I would.
Macklin sounded curt and unfriendly, and after he had given me Hunt’s address, he hung up.
Lowson Hunt had a set of offices in the fashionable quarter of Los Angeles. I knew him by reputation as did anyone who read the murder cases in the papers over the past ten years.
I had never seen him, and I was surprised to find that he was small, thin and frail looking. He could have been anything from fifty to sixty years of age. His thin pale face was nondescript: it was only his eyes that gave a hint of the man behind the mask. They were remarkable eyes: small and washed out and blue, but they gave me the impression of being able to look through a wall and see well beyond it: the most disconcerting eyes I have ever had to meet.
“Sit down, Mr Regan,” he said, waving to a chair. He made no attempt to get up or to shake hands. “I’ve been through the case against Mrs Delaney. I understand you are offering to finance her defence.”
“That’s right.”
I then got the full blast from his eyes, and the searching stare made me move uneasily.
“Why?”
“That’s my business,” I Said curtly. “What’s it going to cost?”
He leaned back in his chair, resting his small white hands on the desk, and continued to stare at me.
“It happens to be my business if you want me to get Mrs Delaney off,” he said. “Let me explain: when I started to try to make a reputation for myself as a defending attorney, I had the bad luck to run up against Maddox of the National Fidelity. I was defending a man who was charged with the murder of his wife. She was insured, and the money came to him. There wasn’t much of a case against him, and I felt confident that I’d get an acquittal, but I was wrong. When Maddox got on the stand and began sounding off about his instincts for spotting a phoney claim I could see the jury sliding away from me. Simply by stating facts and figures over the period he had been investigating claims, Maddox put so much suspicion into the minds of the jury that my client went to the gas chamber. During my career I have come up against Maddox three times, and each time he has licked me. I’ve accepted the fact now that he is an expert witness; he can sway juries and he is a deadly danger to anyone standing trial for murder. Maddox has been able to lick me because in every case he has been right. He has this odd instinct that tells him long before he even digs up the evidence that a claim is a phoney, and that the man or woman insured by his company has been murdered. He has sent eleven men and five women to the gas chamber during the past ten years. He now has a reputation that is almost impossible to shake. The jury and the press know that when he is connected with a prosecution the man or the woman on trial is a goner.” He drummed on the desk while he continued to stare at me. “He has never been proved wrong for the simple reason he isn’t ever wrong. Maddox says Delaney was murdered, and that means Delaney was murdered. It’s my job when defending a client to get him off whether he is guilty or not. I don’t give a damn how guilty he is. When he hires me, I’m his, body and soul, until he either walks out of a court a free man or goes to the gas chamber. I’m telling you this because, if I am going to lick Maddox, I must have the whole truth and all the facts. Whatever you tell me won’t go beyond this room. It’s up to you. It’s your money. If you want to save her, you’ll have to give me the facts.” He pointed a finger at me. “But remember this: even if I get all the facts, I’m still not guaranteeing that I’ll save her. I have had three failures against Maddox. I’m determined to lick him before I quit this racket, and this case may be my chance. I don’t give a damn if Mrs Delaney did murder her husband. All I care about is pricking Maddox’s ego. Once I show that he can be wrong, I’ve got him where I want him. No jury will be impressed with him as they have been in the past. It’s going to make my other cases in which Maddox is involved a lot’ easier for me.” He paused, then went on, “So if you have anything to tell me that I should know, now’s the time.”
I hesitated for about three seconds, then I told him. I gave him the whole story from the moment I first met Gilda to the last time I saw her. I held nothing back, and it was a relief to get the whole thing off my mind.
He sat listening, not moving, his eyes fixed on the paperweight on his desk.
When I was through, he got abruptly to his feet and began to prowl around his big office, his hands in his trousers pockets, his face looking leaner than ever.
“That guy’s instinct for smelling murder!” he said. “It’s fantastic!”
“But she didn’t kill him,” I said. “He killed himself.”
He turned to look at me.
“That was your luck. The setup was for murder, and Maddox spotted it. I’m not so sure that what you’ve told me couldn’t make it tougher for her. The DA is going to prove that Delaney was a drunk. He’s got the maid who worked there who’ll tell the court Delaney began to hit the bottle as soon as he got up in the morning and went on hitting it. He’s going to show that Mrs Delaney could have put the cyanide in his whisky which killed him instantly. Now that you’ve claimed to have found the glass, the DA is going to say she washed the glass out, then rinsed it in whisky and put it by his side. You spoilt that planted clue of hers by absent-mindedly picking up the glass and putting it away. He is going to show that it was Mrs Delaney who arranged the TV set so that it looked as if he had electrocuted himself. If it gets out that you two were lovers, there’s not a thing I can do for her. I’ve got to make the jury believe she was loyal and faithful to him and because he had no more money, he took his life.”
“That’s how it did happen!” I said. “They’ve got to believe it!”
“Well, we’ll see. You can leave it to me now. Everything depends on whether the police find out you two were lovers. If they do, both of you are sunk. If they don’t, then she has a chance. Now remember this, if she is found guilty, they won’t send her to the gas chamber. She’ll get maybe ten years. So don’t do anything crazy like confessing, because it won’t help her. She’ll get a longer sentence, and you’ll be in trouble too.”
“Well, okay,” I said uneasily. “How about paying you? Do you want money now?”
“No. When it’s over and the excitement’s died down, I’ll want five thousand bucks from you. But right now I’m going to put out the story that I am so sure Maddox has made a mistake this time that I’m going to defend her for nothing just for the satisfaction of proving Maddox is wrong. The press know all about the fights I’ve had with Maddox. They’ll lap up a story like that. It’ll also make an impact on the jury. You leave all that to me. I’ll go and talk to her this afternoon.”
I went back to my cabin.
Soon after the trial, I would have to find five thousand dollars to pay Hunt. To raise the money I would have to part with practically every dime I had saved. I would be cleaned out.
I would have to leave Glyn Camp after the trial and it wouldn’t be possible now for me to start again on my own. I would have to find a job, and there and then I wrote to a firm in Miami I had had dealings with, asking them if they could make use of my services.
There was nothing for me to do now but to wait the outcome of the trial and to hope Boos wouldn’t find out about the Italian restaurant.
I wanted badly to write to Gilda, but I didn’t dare.