“Maybe I have. What’s the unkindest interpretation?”
“It’s possible you were covering up for yourself.” He dropped it very casually. “We found the gun, you see. A member of my detail picked it out of a storm drain on the street behind the Casa Loma parking lot.”
Gary opened the drawer in front of him and set a squat black .38 automatic on the desk. “Recognize it?”
I recognized it. It was my own gun.
“You should,” he said. “It’s registered to you. Our ballistics man just completed some firing tests with this gun a couple of hours ago. It’s his opinion, based on examination with a comparison microscope, that this gun fired the slug that was dug out of Dalling’s cortex. It severed the jugular vein and imbedded itself in the cortex. Dalling bled to death. How do you like that, Archer?”
“Not very much. Go on. You haven’t warned me that anything I say may be used against me yet.”
“I’ll give it to you now. Have you got anything to say?”
“I’m very smart,” I said, “and very devious. I saw Dalling for the first time last night and decided that he was too pretty to live, a fit subject for the perfect crime. So I committed it. I shot him with a gun that could easily be identified as mine and carefully deposited it in the nearest drain, where any cop would be sure to look for it. Four or five hours later I returned to the scene of the crime, as murderers must, in order to admire my handiwork. Also to let a milkman spot me for you. I wanted to make things difficult for myself–”
“You have.” Gary was using his gentle voice once more. “This isn’t very funny. It doesn’t make me laugh.”
“It isn’t funny. It has some funny elements, though–”
He cut me off again: “You’ve acted like a damn fool, and you know it. I could probably get an indictment and possibly make it stick–”
“The hell you could. I was just going to tell you the funniest thing of all. I shot Dalling at a range of one hundred and twenty miles. Pretty good for a .38 automatic that normally can’t hit a barn door at fifty paces.”
“Failing a murder indictment,” he went on imperturbably, “I could be very nasty about your failure to report discovery of the corpse. It happens I don’t want to be nasty. Colton doesn’t want me to be nasty, and I value his judgment. But you’re going to force me to be nasty if you go on talking like a damn fool on top of acting like one.” He chewed his upper lip. “Now what was that about an alibi?”
It struck me that vaudeville was dead. “At the time Dalling was shot, I was fifteen or twenty miles on the other side of Palm Springs, talking to a woman by the name of Marjorie Fellows. Why don’t you get in touch with her? She’s staying at the inn there.”
“Perhaps I will. What time was that?”
“Around three in the morning.”
“If you know that Dalling was shot at three, you know more than we do. Our doctor places it around four, give or take an hour.” He spread his hands disarmingly, as if to underline the fact of his candor. “There’s no way to determine how long he lived after he was shot, or exactly when he was shot. It’s evident from the blood that he lived for some time, though he was almost certainly unconscious from the slug in his cortex. Anyway, you can see how that plays hell with any possible alibi. Unless you have better information?” There was irony in the question.
I said that I had.
“You want to make a statement?”
I said that I did.
“Good. It’s about time.” He flipped the switch on the squawk-box on the corner of his desk, and summoned a stenographer.
My obligation to Peter Colton was growing too big for comfort. Apparently the conversation up to this point had been off the record. That suited me, because my performance had been painful. I’d bungled like an amateur when I found Dalling’s body; gambled and lost on the chance that Miss Hammond or Joshua Severn might tell me something important if I got to them before policemen did. Gary had driven that home, in spite of my efforts to talk around the point. Vaudeville was dead as Dalling, and the Rover Boys were as out of date as the seven sleepers of Ephesus.
Gary gave up his chair to the young male stenographer.
“Do you want it in detail?” I asked him.
“Absolutely.”
I gave the thing in detail from the beginning. The beginning was Dalling’s visit to Mrs. Lawrence, which brought me into the case. The night died gradually, bleeding away in words. The police stenographer filled page after page of his notebook with penciled hieroglyphics. Gary paced from wall to wall, still looking for a way out. Occasionally he paused to ask me a question. When I told him that Tarantine had taken my gun, he interrupted to ask: “Will Mrs. Tarantine corroborate that?”
“She already has.”
“Not to us.” He took a paper-bound typescript from his desk and riffled through it. “There’s nothing in her statement about your gun. Incidentally, you didn’t report the theft.”
“Call her up and ask her.”
He left the room. The stenographer lit a cigarette. We sat and looked at each other until Gary came back: “I sent a car for her. I talked to her on the phone and she doesn’t seem to object. She a friend of yours?”
“She won’t be after this. She has a queer old-fashioned idea that a woman should stick by her husband.”
“He hasn’t done much of a job of sticking by her. What do you make of Mrs. Tarantine, anyway?”
“I think she made the mistake of her life when she married Tarantine. She has a lot of stuff, though.”
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “Is she trying to cover for him, that’s what I want to know.”
“She has been, I think.” And I recited what she had told me about the early-morning visit to Dalling’s apartment.
That stopped him in his tracks. “There’s a discrepancy there, all right.” He consulted her statement again. “According to what she said this afternoon, she drove him straight over from Palm Springs to Long Beach by the canyon route. The question is, which time was she telling the truth?”
“She told me the truth,” I said. “She didn’t know then that Dalling was dead. When she found out that he was, she switched her story to protect her husband.”
“When did you talk to her?”
“Early this afternoon – yesterday afternoon.” It was four o’clock by my wristwatch.
“You knew that Dalling was dead.”
“I didn’t tell her.”
“Why? Could she have killed him herself, or set him up for her husband?”
“I entertained the possibility, but she’s crazy if she did. She was half in love with Dalling.”
“What about the other half?”
“Mother feeling or something. She couldn’t take him seriously; he was alcoholic, for one thing.”
“Yeah. Did she communicate all this, or you dream it up?”
“You wouldn’t be interested in my dreams.”
“Okay. Let’s have the rest of the statement, eh?” And he went back to filling the room with his pacing. It was ten to five when I finished my statement. The stenographer left the room with orders to have it typed as quickly as possible.
“If you’ve been leveling,” Gary said to me, “it looks very much like Tarantine. Why would he do it?”
“Ask Mrs. Tarantine.”
“I’m going to. Now.”
“I’d like to sit in if possible.”
“Uh-uh. Good night.”
She met me in the corridor, walking in step with Sergeant Tolliver.
“We’re always meeting in police stations,” I said.