Vivian Deshler came to the door in response to our ring, opened it a crack, looked out and saw Frank Sellers. “Oh, how do you do, Sergeant?” she said. “My heavens, I’m dressing and—Well, Donald, too! Is everything straightened out all right?”
“We’d like to come in and talk with you for a minute,” Sellers said.
“Well, I’m sorry. I’m just not presentable, that’s all. I…I’m dressing.”
“Haven’t you got a robe?” Sellers asked.
“I have it on.”
“Well, then, what’s holding you back?” Sellers said. “Open the door. We just want to talk for a minute.”
“I’m hardly presentable.”
“We’re not trying to judge a beauty contest,” Sellers told her. “We’re trying to clean up a murder case.”
She pouted a bit and said, “I like to look my best when good-looking men are calling on me, but…well, come in.” She opened the door.
We went in and Sellers jerked his cold cigar toward a chair. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll only be a minute.”
She seated herself, and the robe slid smoothly back along one bare leg. She gave a little kittenish gesture, retrieved the robe and pulled it back over the flesh.
“See what I mean?” she said.
“What?” Sellers asked.
“About not being dressed.”
“I don’t get it,” Sellers said.
She started to say something, then looked at me and smiled. “Donald got it,” she said.
“All right,” Sellers said, “let’s quit beating around the bush. I want to know about that automobile accident.”
“Heavens, not again! I’ve told that so many times.”
“What time?” Sellers asked.
“Now, I can’t be absolutely certain about the time,” she said, with her eyes downcast and counting on her fingers with her thumb. “It was along in the afternoon and it might have been… well, now I just don’t know. I’ve been trying to think back on what happened that day and I can’t remember exactly the time. You see, Sergeant, I was pretty well shaken up and I didn’t realize at the time I’d been seriously hurt. I started driving to my apartment and then somewhere along the line I guess I blacked out. The next thing I knew I was in my apartment and then everything went blank and—Well, of course by that time I knew I was shaken up and injured but I certainly didn’t think it was anything real serious. I thought I was just excited and—Well, I’ve read about fainting spells and what can happen from an emotional shock and I thought that’s what I was experiencing.”
Sellers said, “All right, I’m going to put it to you cold turkey. Was there an automobile accident?”
“Was there an automobile accident?” she echoed. “Why, what in the world do you mean? Of course there was.”
“I want to know just this,” Sellers said. “Did Holgate run into the back of your car or is it a cover-up?”
“What do you mean, a cover-up?”
Sellers said, “There’s evidence that Holgate was mixed up in a hit-and-run deal and had the front end of his car smashed in, that you and Holgate cooked up a deal by which he could account for his smashed front end on the car and you could help him out and present a claim to the insurance company for—”
“What in the world are you talking about? The accident took place just as I have described it. I wouldn’t try to defraud any insurance company and I had never met Mr. Holgate prior to the time that he ran into the rear of my automobile and we exchanged names from our driving licenses.”
Sellers looked at me thoughtfully. “Want to ask any questions, Pint Size?”
I said, “Who prepared the claim you submitted to the insurance company, Miss Deshler?”
She regarded me with a head-to-toe sweep of the eyes and her manner suddenly changed. “That,” she said, “doesn’t have anything to do with the accident or anything else. In short, it’s none of your business, Mr. Lam.”
I said, “I’ll ask you one other question. Have you ever been in an automobile accident before?”
She looked at Frank Sellers and said, “Do I have to sit here and submit to this kind of questioning? After all, you’re trying to solve a murder case. What difference does it make if I’d been in a thousand automobile accidents?”
“He was just asking,” Sellers said.
“Well, I’m just answering,” she snapped. “It’s none of his business. And now, gentlemen, I don’t have all afternoon to sit around here in my underwear and swap words with you. I’ve got to get busy and dress. I’m going out tonight. I’ve had a hard day and I want to look my best when I go out.”
Sellers said, “We’re not making any accusations but you know things could get awfully sticky if you started playing tag in a murder case. Now I’m going to ask you this: Did you hire a detective agency to do anything?”
“Heavens, no.”
“To keep tabs on Lamont Hawley, the agent of the Consolidated Interinsurance Company?”
“No, I told you. No, no, no! Ten thousand times no! I didn’t hire any detective agency, period. Now will you people please get out of here.”
The telephone rang.
She crossed over to the instrument to pick it up and answer it. She didn’t bother about her robe, which fell open to show she was wearing a bra and panties.
Sellers looked her over, looked at me and said, “You want to try any more questioning?”
“Of course,” I said. “You haven’t skimmed the surface yet. What did you think she was going to do, break down and tell you, yes, I worked this thing out in order to defraud the insurance company and it led to murder? Do you usually get confessions that easy?”
Sellers said, “There’s something about this thing that doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t like it. We’re skating on thin ice.”
She said, “This is a telephone call for you, Sergeant Sellers. It’s from a Captain Andover in Traffic. Says he has to speak to you right away on a matter of the greatest importance.”
Sellers went over, picked up the telephone, shifted the cigar over to the other side of his mouth, said, “Yeah? Sellers speaking.…Shoot.”
He was silent for a minute, then said, “What the hell!”
Again there was more conversation.
Vivian Deshler started looking at me, sizing me up, then managed to smile and said, “I hope you come out all right, Donald.”
She shifted her position again and again the robe slid down her bare leg. She reached for it coyly, pulled it back and said, “I can sympathize with you. If there’s anything I can do—legitimately…”
Sergeant Sellers slammed up the telephone, said, “Okay, Pint Size, on our way.”
“On our way.”
Sellers turned around to Vivian Deshler and said, “I’m awfully sorry we came barging in here this way, Miss Deshler, but it was on a matter that was quite important and I had to check on it—and we have quite a time working against a schedule and all that.”
“It’s all right, Sergeant,” she said. “It was a pleasure. If you folks will come again sometime when I’m not caught completely unawares. I’ll buy you a drink.”
I said, “I want to ask a couple more questions, and—”
Sergeant Sellers took my arm and literally pushed me out the door.
She gave us a parting smile and then the door closed behind her.
“You and your theories,” Sellers said.
“What’s the matter now?” I asked.
“I told you about mustaches,” Sellers said. “Dammit, if I was wearing a mustache I’d shave the thing off before I even got in the automobile. I’d cut it off with a jackknife if I had to. I don’t think I’d even wait long enough to get to a barbershop.”
“What’s eating you now?” I asked.
“Mistaken identification.”
“Who?”
“That Troy woman.”
“What about her?”
“Andover told me he’d been working on a lead that was pretty much undercover. You remember that? He said he didn’t want to take a chance on wrecking it by showing his hand prematurely, but after this identification by Mrs. Troy he decided he might just as well shoot the works, so he started running this thing down and what do you know?”
“I don’t know anything,” I said irritably.
“What do you know?” “Well,” Sellers said, “for your information, Pint Size, the automobile that killed those two people wasn’t driven by Carter Holgate at all. It was driven by a man named Swanton, who was driving a big late model Buick and had got himself pretty well loaded at a cocktail party. His car wasn’t damaged very much and he thought he’d got the whole thing covered up and was sitting pretty, but when we got that identification on Holgate, Andover thought he’d better go talk with this guy and put the cards on the table.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What happened?” Sellers said. “The guy caved. He’d had his conscience gnawing on him for quite a while, and the minute Andover made a pass at him the guy broke down and admitted the whole damned business, started wringing his hands and telling how sorry he was and what this was going to mean to his family, and how he didn’t know how in the world he had ever done a thing like that; that it was foreign to his nature, that he didn’t realize how drunk he was, that he couldn’t think straight, that—Hell, all the rest of it.”
“Is there any resemblance to Holgate?” I asked.
“Quite a striking resemblance,” Andover said. “Both of them are big men with mustaches and this guy wears Texas hats and whipcord suits—so there’s your high-powered theory that you had me running around on all shot to hell.
“You know, Donald, if you child geniuses would just mind your own goddam business and let us officers run the police department according to the accepted theories of systematic investigation, you’d save yourself a lot of trouble and perhaps in the course of time I could learn to overcome that feeling of irritation which grips me every time you stick your neck out with one of these theories of yours.
“Come on now, we’re going back to headquarters.”
“Can I make one more suggestion?” I asked.
“No,” he said and his voice had a hard crack to it. “I’ve finished listening to you and your theories. You’re a prime suspect in a murder case. We’re going back to headquarters and if the deputy district attorney says okay, you’re going into the felony tank and you aren’t going to talk your way out from nothing.”
I said, “I don’t know what kind of a pull the Ace High people have with you, but I’d like to find out. What do they do, send you a case of cigars every Christmas?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.
I said, “The Ace High Detective Agency was mixed in this thing and you’re certainly letting them off the hook. If it had been Cool and Lam, you’d have had us on the grid and—”
“Oh, forget it,” he said. “You’ve got a persecution complex.”
“Probably I have,” I told him, “but this much is certain. The Ace High was investigating Holgate and probably investigating that accident. Heaven knows what they’ve found out and they certainly aren’t going to pick up the telephone and tell you.
“You go ahead and play it real cozy with them if you want to. The next time you want information out of us—”
Sellers clamped down on his cigar angrily for a moment, then said, “Listen, Pint Size, did it ever occur to you there isn’t going to be any next time? You’re going to be charged with murder within the next forty-eight hours and you’re going to have one hell of a time trying to beat the rap.
“I’ll admit there are some things in the case that are a little cockeyed but we’ll get them all buttoned up before we get done. Personally, I don’t think you killed him, but you certainly stuck your neck out in such a way that you became a prize patsy, and I don’t think you’re going to be able to convince a jury you’re such a sweet, innocent little lamb.”
Sellers thought for a minute and then grinned and said, “And that’s not a bad pun, in case you’re interested.”
I said, “It’s okay by me. Just remember that I told you the Ace High had been investigating Holgate and the accident and that you did nothing about it.”
“Now, wait a minute. What’s the idea of that crack?”
“I’ve given you warning,” I said. “When I put on my defense I’ll make a real issue out of that. There’ll be no holds barred.”
Sellers said, “In other words you’d try to make something out of the fact that I didn’t—Oh, hell, it’s all right with me. The city’s paying for my gasoline. If you want to make a trip to the Ace High people, we’ll make a trip to the Ace High people and then you won’t have anything to squawk about.”
I settled back against the cushions and said, “I’d just like to see how soft you are with some of the other agencies.”
“You’ll see,” he said grimly.