Donovan nodded. “Sound enough. How much, if any, of what you’ve said can be told to our journalistic friends?”
“Let’s just let them have the facts. No guesses. Bronson’s residence here, with the woman. Her death and his.”
Donovan squared himself and looked challengingly at Wixler. “And why did we look in the lake?”
“In checking the area, Captain, you and your people came across evidence that there could have been a second killing.”
Matthews said quietly, “Ben here hasn’t all the rank he ought to have yet, Captain. There are wolves in the shrubbery.”
Donovan nodded. “It won’t hurt me to give away a little credit. I just wanted to know the attitude, Matthews.”
“We’re in the same business,” Ben said.
“Sometimes Roeber forgot that.” He studied Wixler. “We’ll get along.”
“Thanks for letting us know so quickly, Captain,” Ben said. “We have to be getting back now.”
As Wixler, Spence, and Matthews went to the car where the driver was still waiting, Billy Sullivan drifted over and said, “Are we going to get the brush, Ben?”
“No. He’ll be fair.”
“Can I come get another statement from you after I get this story in?”
“I won’t be able to give you any more than he’ll give you, Billy.”
“You know,” Billy said thoughtfully, “if I could get a rewrite man to hang out a window, he could take it direct from Donovan.”
Matthews pulled the door of the sedan shut and said through the window, “The captain used to command troops.”
“On windy days,” Sullivan said.
They drove out and headed back toward the city. Matthews told the driver to make time. He put the sedan up to ninety, with red blinker light flashing. He touched the siren only when traffic was clotted in front of them, and the low warning growl quickly opened up a lane.
Al Spence turned around in the front seat, cigarette in the corner of his mouth hobbling as he spoke. “You act like you know where we go from here,” he said.
“You’ve been pretty quiet, Al,” Ben said. “Got any ideas?”
“I’d like to know more about this Burton Catton. She was cheating on him. He took it pretty casual. If Betty ever did that to me, I’d go off like a rocket.”
“I know the man,” Matthews said. “You wouldn’t believe the way he’s changed. He used to be the jolly boy type. He had a dreadful harridan of a wife named Ethel. At the time he married her, he was selling insurance and real estate. She was pretty well loaded. She backed him in his first deal. That was a hell of a long time ago. He bought the city dump.”
“That sounds just dandy,” Spence said.
“It was. The city was abandoning it. It needed a hell of a lot of fill. He was high bidder for it. He’d made arrangements with a contractor who was making that big cut where they rerouted Eastern Avenue. So he got the fill for the cost of hauling it. He got it hauled free by giving a trucker a piece of the pie. They filled it, landscaped it, renamed it, cut it up into approved plots, and just when they were about to start unloading it, the new Vulcan plant was announced. So Burt incorporated, took in a builder, and started putting up houses. They were sold as fast as they could get them up. They were pretty damn shoddy little houses. You know the area. Lakewood Estates it’s called. From then on he rolled like a big ball. Belonged to everything. He built that camp as a hideaway, to get away from Ethel. He lived hard and drank hard and chased the women. I was out there twice, at stag picnics he used to have. Free liquor and some pretty gaudy entertainment. Then, last year, when he was riding high, things started to go sour for him. Right when he was at the top. He’d married Drusilla after Ethel died. Big money, a handsome young wife, and a lot of laughs. And he got careless. The Director of Internal Revenue turned that laugh into a sickly smile.”
“Fraud?” Ben asked.
“They didn’t try to make that stick. They just handed him a fat deficiency judgment. As I understand it, Burt had taken capital gains on a lot of big land deals. So they reclassified him as a land merchant, and made it retroactive several years, so what he had taken as capital gains had to be considered as income. He fought it, but they made it stick. He got hurt badly and so did the people in with him. Most of them could stand it because they’d only had a small piece of his syndicate operations. As I heard it, a lawyer named Verney took a big clouting.”
Ben turned and stared at Matthews. For a moment the siren made conversation impossible. When the sound died, Ben said, “Paul Verney?”
“Do you know him?”
“I know him,” Spence said. “He came into this thing through Johnny Keefler. That’s how we found out Danny was trying to plant an envelope somewhere.”
Ben felt, deep inside him, that familiar and telltale surge of excitement. “I’m a guy who takes long looks at coincidences, Wendy.”
Matthews said, “Let me get this. It was Verney who told Bronson he wouldn’t hold onto his envelope for him.”
“He told Keefler that Bronson acted so strange he didn’t want to get mixed up in it.”
“That’s what he told me,” Spence said.
“How big a man is he?” Ben asked Spence.
“He’s a pretty good-sized bastard. He isn’t heavy, but he’s tall and sort of what you call raw-boned, and he’s got a pair of meat hooks on him like that guy that used to like to bust down doors when they had him on the Vice Section. He’s about forty. A very solemn type guy. Sits there behind his desk like somebody was engraving his picture to put on a thousand-dollar bill.”
“He sold you?” Ben asked.
“No reason why he shouldn’t. He talked just fine. Got a nice office. Gave me a hell of a good cigar.”
Matthews said, “He has the reputation of being almost too shrewd, Ben. He worked pretty closely with Burt Catton for years.”
“Okay,” Ben said, “here’s a question for you. We’ll assume he was hurt bad by the tax decision. We’ll take it another step and we’ll assume he had figured out some fancy way to make up his losses. How the hell would Drusilla Catton know about it, know enough about it to give Danny a lever to use? Were he and Drusilla playmates?”
“I would doubt that. Verney had a wife in an institution somewhere. And a son away at school. He’s never, as far as I know, had much to do with women. I think he would be too heavy-handed for Drusilla.”
“Is he in any position of trust where he could be taking the wrong money? Estate work, maybe?”
“I wouldn’t think so. At least no important estates.”
“The penalty is the same.”
“But he couldn’t get healthy on a small estate. That was a big tax bill, the way I heard it.”
Spence said, “I’ll just throw this in and you can kick it around. If Catton and Verney were so close, maybe they got a deal where they can both get healthy. Then maybe Mrs. Catton would have found out from her husband and told Danny.”
“Then why not squeeze Catton?” Ben asked.
“Because of the likelihood he would drop dead,” Matthews said.
“I don’t know if we’re getting anywhere,” Ben said.
“Maybe we ought to back up a little,” Spence said. “Let’s say it was Verney. Okay, how does he know about Lucille Bronson?”
Ben thought in silence for a few moments. “From Johnny Keefler? Wait a minute. We’re not doing this logically. We’re going too fast. If we assume it’s Verney, we have to assume that when Bronson went to see him last Thursday, it was part of the squeeze. This stuff about the envelope was fabricated.”