Captain William Andover of Traffic went with us to call on Mrs. Eloise Troy. He said she was the only witness whose testimony would be worth anything in connection with that hit-run traffic accident.
Sellers said to Andover, “Would it be all right if I did the questioning, Bill? I’m working on something a lot bigger than this traffic. I’m working on a murder case.”
“Go right ahead,” Captain Andover said. “I’m working on a hot lead in this case, but I’m not ready to tip my hand yet. You go ahead.”
Sergeant Sellers rang the bell.
Mrs. Eloise Troy turned out to be a straightforward, rather fleshy widow, around fifty-two or fifty-three. She wore glasses, seemed poised and sensible.
Captain Andover identified himself and introduced us.
“We wanted to talk about that hit-run accident last August,” Sellers said.
“Heavens, I’ve told everything I know about that half a dozen times.”
“Would you mind going over it just once more?” Sellers said, “because I want to hear it first hand. I’m working on a lead which just might pan out.”
“Well, I certainly hope it does,” she said. “That was the most callous, brutal thing I have ever seen. It just made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t sleep for a long while without having nightmares about what happened.”
“Would you mind telling us?”
“I can go over it again all right,” she said. “Come in and sit down.”
Her flat was a comfortable, homey place, with the aroma of good cooking coming from the kitchen.
She closed the kitchen door and said, “I’m cooking some chicken in a rotisserie and it gives a perfectly ravishing aroma, but very penetrating. I wasn’t expecting company.”
“It’s all right, we’ll only be a minute,” Sellers said.
“Oh, I don’t mind that at all. I just thought the flat was a little, well a little odoriferous.”
We took chairs and Mrs. Troy said, “Well, it was about six-thirty in the afternoon, I guess, right after the rush hour. I was driving toward Los Angeles and this car was coming behind me.
“I always make it a point to look at my rearview mirror from time to time, just to keep a line on what’s coming behind. Driving in traffic, if you have to stop, it always makes a great deal of difference about the car that’s right behind you. You want to know whether it’s a driver who has his car under control or whether he’s one that might bang into the rear end.
“Heaven knows, I’ve had that happen.”
Sellers nodded sympathetically.
“Well, I saw this car quite a ways back and the man was drunk. Now, there’s no question about that. The man was drunk.”
“Could you describe the car?”
“Now, that is the thing I can’t do,” she said. “I can tell you that it was a big car, a dark car, a modern, shiny car—you know, it wasn’t an old beat-up model. It was new and it was a pretty big car.”
“He was weaving around?” Sellers asked.
“I’ll say he was. He almost sideswiped a car as he went around it, and then he cut in on another car and crowded it clean off the road and then I just said to myself, Heavens, that man is drunk and the Lord knows what he’s going to do. I’m going to slow down and get over to the side of the road.
“So I slowed and got over to the side of the road and he just came tearing along right up behind me and I thought he was going to run right into my rear end. Then he swerved out abruptly, swerved too far and then swung back. The hind end of his car just sideswiped the front part of mine, and that seemed to put him entirely out of control. He swung over way to the left and then back to the right and went right through this group of people who were waiting for the bus.”
“You didn’t get his license number or anything?” Sellers asked.
“Heavens, no. I was too busy fighting my own car trying to get it stopped and keep it under control. He hit the front end and pushed it off the side of the road and then when I tried to get back, the shoulder of the highway jerked on my steering wheel and I had to stop—and I guess I was shaken up a bit.”
“You don’t need to say anything about that,” Captain Andover said. “In case you ever have to give your testimony, Mrs. Troy, don’t say anything about being shaken up because some lawyer would grab hold of that and make it appear you were too hysterical to know what you were talking about.”
“I wasn’t hysterical,” she said. “I was shaken up a bit and I was annoyed and…well, I certainly wasn’t hysterical—not what I’d call hysterical.”
“You don’t know anything about this car, what kind it was, other than that it was big?”
“That’s all.”
“And he sideswiped your car?”
“Yes.”
Captain Andover said, “We took the paint that had been rubbed on her fender and gave it a microscopic examination and a spectroscopic examination. It came from a late model Buick.”
“That’s Holgate’s car,” I said. “That is, his was a late model Buick.”
Sellers’ eyes narrowed. “Did you get anything—any look at the car that would give you a clue? Just think carefully. Was there anything about the car—anything that seemed distinctive?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t remember so much about the car. I did get a good look at the driver.”
Sellers straightened. “You got a good look at him?”
“Yes.”
“What can you tell about him?”
“Well, he looked sort of…well, he was a big man with a western hat and he had a mustache, I remember that, one of these close-clipped mustaches and he was wearing one of these sort of whipcord suits. You know, the kind that officers and cowboys and some forest rangers and outdoor people wear.”
Sellers and Andover exchanged glances.
“Do you think you’d know his picture if you saw it?” Sellers asked.
“Well, I don’t know. It’s awfully hard to identify people from pictures. Perhaps if I saw a profile I might.”
“Suppose you looked at the man, do you think you could identify him?”
“I think I could. His appearance is etched on my mind.”
Sellers said, “This may come as a shock to you, Mrs. Troy, but we have a man we’d like to have you look at. Now, this man is—well, frankly, he’s in the morgue. Now that would be something of a shock, but it would be very much in the interests of justice if you’d take a look.”
“Dead people don’t bother me,” she said. “I’ll look.”
Sellers took a photograph from his pocket and said, “Now, I’m going to show you a photograph of a man’s profile. I don’t want you to let this photograph influence you. If you can identify it, all right. If you can’t, I don’t want you to look at the dead man and just because you’ve seen his photograph think that’s the man you saw.”
“I understand.”
Sellers handed her a profile photograph.
She looked at it and said, “Why…why, yes…I think that’s the man. It looks like him.”
Sellers took the picture away from her, put it back in his pocket and said, “I think you’re going to have to accompany us to the morgue, Mrs. Troy, if you don’t mind. It’ll only be a short trip. We’ll take you there and then we’ll have an officer bring you right back home.”
“I don’t mind. When do you want me to go?”
“Right now—that is, just as soon as you can.”
“Well, heavens; I’ve got this chicken in the rotisserie and—”
“Isn’t there some neighbor you could ask to look at it for you?” Sellers asked.
“Oh,” she said, “it isn’t that important. I’ll shut it off. It won’t affect the flavor too much. I’ll just shut off the current and turn it on when I come back. We won’t be long, will we?”
“Not too long,” Sellers said.
She said, “You just give me a minute.”
She bustled into the kitchen and Sellers and Andover exchanged glances.
“I sure as hell would like to button this one up,” Andover said.
Sellers looked at me. “You lucky sonofabitch! If you can squirm out of this one, you sure as hell are ringed with luck.”
“I’m not squirming out of anything,” I told him. “I’m simply giving you the breaks, that’s all.”
“You’re giving me the breaks!” Sellers said. He shook his head. “That’s more typical of you than anything you could have said. You’re giving us the breaks.”
We drove to the morgue. The two officers sat in front. Mrs. Troy sat in back with me.
“What’s your interest in this, Mr. Lam?” she asked.
“Lam’s a detective,” Sellers said over his shoulder, “and while he appreciates everything you’re doing, he doesn’t want to discuss what he has in mind.”
“Oh, I understand, I understand,” Mrs. Troy said. “I was just asking to be polite.”
“Well, you know how it is in this business,” Sellers said. “We have to be pretty closemouthed.”
“Oh, I understand I’m sure. You don’t have to make any explanations to me.”
She didn’t ask any more questions.
We got to the morgue and Sellers said, “You wait out here in the car, Pint Size. We’ll do this without your fine Italian hand gumming up the works.”
They were inside about fifteen minutes. When they came out Sellers was shaking his head.
“Okay,” I said, “what happened?”
“What happened?” Sellers said. “You know what happened. She made an identification—not a one-hundred percent positive identification, but an identification all right.
“She took a look at the mustache from the side and said she knows that’s the man because of the mustache—and of course you know what some attorney would do on cross-examination. He’d claim she didn’t identify the man, she identified the mustache. But it’s an identification, all right.
“She says the man was drunk and his eyes were sort of what she calls droopy and heavy-lidded and he was sort of slouched over the steering wheel, but she got a look at his face all right and she remembers about the mustache. Of course, Pint Size, between you and me, a goddam mustache has accounted for more mistaken identifications than anything the world has ever known. But, nevertheless, she made an identification—a pretty damned positive identification.”
“We’re driving her back?” I asked.
“We are not,” Sellers said. “We’re sending her back home with an officer and by God, if I catch you trying to talk with her and influence her testimony in any way. I’ll slap you in a dungeon where you won’t know whether it’s day or night, and where you’ll be living on bread and water for thirty days. I get so damned fed up with you stepping in and masterminding my cases, that it’s hard for me to keep my hands off you.
“We fool around with a lot of methodical police work and solve our cases by good, hard intensive work and you come along with some hocus-pocus and pull a rabbit out of the hat.”
“And I take it,” I said, “that now we are going to look up Vivian Deshler.”
“What a genius!” Sellers exclaimed sarcastically. “Now, who would ever have thought of that? That’s sheer genius, Lam. Here we have two parties testifying to an automobile accident and you come along with the bright idea that the accident never happened, that it was a cover-up for a hit-and-run, and we get a witness who indicates that you’re right. And then you surmise or deduce that we’re going to talk with the other party involved in the accident.
“Now, isn’t that just too clever?”
“You don’t need to be so damned sarcastic,” I told him. “As Mrs. Troy said, I was just trying to be polite.”
“Well, you don’t need to bother,” Sellers said, biting down on his soggy cigar.
“I notice it doesn’t cramp your style any,” I told him.
“What doesn’t?”
“Trying to be polite.”
“You’re damned right it doesn’t,” Sellers said. “Hang on, Pint Size, we’re going to interview Vivian Deshler before some cooperative sonofabitch gets the word to her and she starts clamming up or consulting an attorney.”