The Complete Cases of Stuart Bailey

by Roy Huggins

  I stood up slowly, muttering an empty apology and swallowing past the thickness in my throat. And then it came—a hint, the merest touch of terror. The bed was still down. I looked at the window. It was locked. I walked a little stiffly into the kitchen. I looked for a garbage-disposal door, a dumb-waiter. I didn’t find any. I kicked the walls under the sink and beside the range. I went back through the living room into the bathroom. I tapped the walls, tried to lift the tub. I went into the closet. I looked under the bed, behind the davenport. I stood in the center of the room while icy fingers played a roundelay on my back and something stabbed at my stomach. I stumbled over to the door and unlocked it and pushed on it to see if it would open outward. Silly, wasn’t it? But you’d have done it too. I pulled on it and it opened a little more than an inch and came up hard against the bed. I closed it and locked it again.

  “Tricky,” I said to no one at all. “But I didn’t kill her, so there’s a way in and a way out.” My hands were wet.

  Then someone with a bad breath leaned over my shoulder and whispered, Let’s face it chum. How do you know what you did while you were asleep on that couch?

  I got out a handkerchief and wiped my hands, and then rubbed over the part of the bed I had touched when I put it down the night before; then I eased the bed into the wall and it screamed in agony.

  I went to the door and looked around. The rest of the fingerprints were okay. Then I remembered and went in and wiped her purse clean where I’d handled it. I went back to the door and listened. I unlocked the door and looked out to the right. No one there. I stepped out.

  Coming down from the left, where I couldn’t have seen her without putting my head out into the hall, was a short gray woman. She walked post me silently, taking me in with dull little eyes like bullets. She walked on down the hall. I locked the door to Apartment 304, put the key in my pocket and went out of there. The woman had seen me and time was running out.

  I drove downtown and parked about two blocks from The Paddock, walked up Congress to the combined office of Tucson’s two papers and borrowed a city directory. I didn’t find any D.C. Halloran or any Halloran with first names that would fit D.C. Then I went on over to the Western Union office. There was a lone man in the place with blond eyelashes and all the time in the world. I waited awhile, then got an expression on my face like a man with foot trouble, gave him some fast talk with the word detective in it, and hung my L.A. deputy’s badge under his nose for one and a half seconds.

  It worked fine. Yes, he remembered a girl in a mink coat, a looker. Very sweet girl, seemed upset or something. Yes, she wired some money, to Los Angeles, if he recollected correctly. I told him that checked with our facts and walked out. I was feeling better; I had almost slipped out of character and thanked him.

  The Paddock’s red leather door was propped open and a husky Chinese boy was cleaning up behind the bar.

  I said, “Good morning, son.”

  “We’re not open for business, doc. I’m just airin’ the place out.”

  “Where can I find someone—anyone—who was here last evening?”

  “I was here till ten o’clock.”

  I said, “You wouldn’t have noticed a tall thin party hanging around out front? Wore a dark suit and tie, and rolled his own cigarettes.”

  “He also had a hernia and flat feet. That was Jim Shaftoe.”

  “Know where I’ll find him?”

  “Sorry. I don’t know where he lives.”

  I went across the street to a sidewalk magazine stand. A tall man in a La Guardia hat was in charge. Sure, he knew where Jim Shaftoe lived. The Congress Rooms, down on Meyer. He showed me how to get there. “I think Jim’s in the first room on the left.” He made Jim Shaftoe sound about as sinister as a jelly roll.

  The Congress Rooms looked like it might be the oldest building in Tucson, I went in and knocked on the first door on the left. A chair scraped bare boards inside and slow feet sounded. The door opened.

  It was the gaunt man. His eyes were deep and tired and without color. I said, “Mr. Shaftoe?”

  He made a sound in his throat.

  “I want to talk to you a minute.”

  “I never buy nuthin’.”

  “Maybe you’d like to sell something.”

  The eyes blinked a couple of times, and he stepped out into the corridor, closed his door and said, “Whuzzup?”

  “It’s about the Dorothy Halloran job—the brunette in the mink coat.” The eyes blinked again, and I thought they looked a little disappointed.

  “I saw you,” I went on, “outside The Paddock.”

  “Sure.”

  “Who put you there?”

  ”Huh?”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Sellin’ papers.”

  “Sell ‘em there every night?”

  “That’s my corner. Been there seven years. Everybody knows me. Ask anybody about Jim Shaftoe. I don’t want no trouble.”

  I went away from there and walked up to my car. I drove off. I was on a street on the north side of the underpass, I saw a barber shop. I needed a shave. I could lie back with a hot towel on my face.

  It was a one-man shop, the man short and bald and blue-chinned. He wasn’t a talkative man and there was a small radio playing. The towel was over my face when the morning news came on.

  There were several local items, none of them about murder. Then there was more music, and suddenly the man with the bad breath was back, whispering at me. What are you doing here? Give yourself a break and get going. Jim Shaftoe. Everybody knows me. Get it, chum. She was a nut Remember Last night? Remember looking down at her and thinking she’d foxed you? That’s right, chum. You remember. What are you doing here?

  “What’d you say?” The barber was asking me that with a kind of wild look in his eye.

  I said, “Huh?”

  He said, “I thought you said something. It sounded like ‘I didn’t kill her’ or something.”

  “Yeah. Somebody poisoned our cat. My wife thinks I did it. It worries me.”

  The barber gave me a wry look and went on with the shave. When he was giving me my change, he winked at me and said, “I don’t like cats neither.”

  I winked back and went out and drove away. After a while I got the two doctor bills out of my pocket and looked at them. One was from Dr. G.E. Slocum, apparently not an M.D. The bill was for ten dollars. The other was from Arthur Blair, M.D., with an address downtown on Alameda. The charge was twenty dollars. I drove downtown.

  Arthur Blair, M.D., had a building all to himself. Not too large, very new, with a lot of glass brick and a sterile look to it. The entrance opened into a Large waiting room equipped with flowers and a cheery young thing to sit out and wait with you. She smiled at me when I came in, and told me it was a nice morning. There wasn’t anyone waiting, so I told her I’d like to see Doctor Blair.

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  “Nope. No appointment.”

  The smile went to half mast. “Doctor only sees people by appointment.”

  “This is something of an emergency.”

  She had me there. “Doctor never,” she said brightly, “takes emergency cases.”

  ”What kind of a doctor is he—a psychiatrist?”

  She was hanging onto the smile now by her little white teeth. “Ye-es,” she said.

  “Well, this is about one of his patients; I’m afraid she’s in no position to make an appointment.”

  She thought about that. She asked me for the name of the patient and for my name. I told her the patient’s name was Dreves, although maybe she had used Halloran, and that my name was Roark. She asked me to sit down.

  While I sat, she made passes at a pad on her desk with a silver pencil and studied me from under her left hand. It didn’t worry me. There hadn’t been anything on the air, and Tucson wouldn’t have an afternoon paper that hit the streets before noon. After a while the door behind the receptionists desk opened and a large bony woma
n came out. The receptionist showed her to the door, then went back and disappeared into the doctor’s office. When she came out she told me Doctor Blair would see me now.

  He was leaning back in his leather-upholstered swivel chair with his long legs crossed, staring out his east window with a distant lost look in his eyes. They were large dark eyes in a gray face.

  He glanced up and said, “Sit down, please, Mr. Roark.” The voice was gray, too, and distant.

  I sat in a deep leather chair beside his desk. There may have been more comfortable chairs in the world. I never sat in them. The sunlight was at my back, so that the hard glare was on him, not me. Doctor Blair was a man who liked to put his patients at ease.

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  “I’m a private investigator. Miss Halloran brought me down here from L.A. and I arrived last night. Maybe that gives you an idea why I wanted to see you.”

  “Should it?”

  “If you had a patient who was a paranoiac, would you say that the patient might go so far as to hire private detectives for no reason at all?”

  “Quite likely.”

  I didn’t say any more. He would tell me or ho wouldn’t.

  After a while, he said, “ Where is Miss Halloran now?”

  “At her apartment.”

  “And what did she tell you she wanted done?”

  I grinned. “Is she a nut?”

  He looked at me shyly and without sharpness.

  “I think you know, Mr. Roark, that a doctor doesn’t discuss his patients. That is particularly true in the field of psychiatry.”

  My fingers were kneading the fat arms of the leather chair. I said, “Just a word from you might save me a lot of bother and Miss Halloran a good deal of money. Detectives come high these days.”

  He studied me for a while, then looked at the view out of his east window. Finally he said, “Perhaps we should both make an exception in this case, since I think we both want to help the young lady. I’ll answer your question. And then you will answer mine. The one and only time,” he went on flatly, “that I examined Miss Halloran, I concluded that she might possibly be a paranoid personality with depressive tendencies.”

  My hands stopped their kneading. My mouth was hanging open, and my tongue seemed suddenly coated with a bitter pollen. It all added up to something I wasn’t willing to let it add up to. If she was a nut, then no one was after her. If no one was after her . . . I stopped thinking. I would play this one on my intuition—until the facts started going my way again.

  “Now,” he said quietly, and after what seemed a long time, “just what kind of trouble does Miss Halloran say she’s in?”

  I said, “She was murdered this morning.” My voice sounded as distant as the hills.

  His eyes widened, and his voice had sharpened when he said, “I don’t quite see the point, Mr. Roark. If that is true, why did you come to me?”

  “To get the answer to the question I just asked.”

  “The answer seems a bit irrelevant. And of course my conclusion about her was tentative at best. She appeared to have a persecution complex, but from what you say, it must have had a firm basis in reality.”

  “Maybe it didn’t.”

  His face became wary for the first time. His tone was different when he said, “What do you mean by that?”

  “Information you get from patients is considered a privileged communication, isn’t it?”

  He nodded almost imperceptibly.

  I said, “I’m a patient.”

  He hadn’t expected that. After a moment, he said, “All right, Mr. Roark, you’re a patient.”

  “I spent the night in Miss Halloran’s apartment . . . on the couch. She was in the bed. It folds down from the wall, and when it’s down, the door can’t be opened, with or without a key.

  I didn’t go to sleep till dawn, after I’d taken a couple of stiff drinks. When I woke up, she was on the floor. From the looks of things, someone had taken her by the back of the neck and held her face against a pillow until she was all through breathing.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “The bed was still down,” I droned. “The window locked on the inside, and so far I haven’t found any other way into the room.”

  He looked at me gently and said, “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that you’re able to tell me that someone took her by the back of the neck? Almost as if you had seen it done, eh?”

  “There were bruises, doc. The kind lingers would make.”

  “Don’t fight me, Mr. Roark. I can’t help you unless you’re willing to let me. And you need help.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you killed her.” He said it quietly, a little sadly, in a practiced professional tone.

  “I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t tell you the story to get medical help.”

  He said, “Were you in service, Mr. Roark?”

  I nodded.

  “In combat?”

  “Yeah. I don’t like to disappoint you, but I got out on points.”

  He thought about that for a while and said, “You didn’t kill her consciously, Mr. Roark. No doubt you killed her for reasons that were deeply necessary. You did it on a level of behavior in which ethics are irrelevant. If you have told me the truth—that you didn’t know her and had no motive, in the legal sense, for killing her—I shall be able to help you. Your confinement needn’t be permanent and it needn’t be in a penitentiary. And someday I shall be able to tell you why you killed her. Then you will never kill again.”

  He smiled tiredly, leaned forward and started to uncross her legs.

  I said, “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Press the foot button, I saw It when I came in.”

  “I want to help you.” He uncrossed the legs.

  “Don’t move that foot.”

  He shook his head at me sadly. The right foot moved. I took the .38 out wearily and showed it to him. His foot stopped moving.

  I said, “I told you the story just as it happened because I have a feeling you’re holding out on me, holding back something that might make sense out of what happened. This isn’t any time to be cagey or to juggle with the professional ethics. What is it? For example, did Miss Halloran ever tell you what she was afraid of?”

  He shook his head. “You told me the story because you had to. You couldn’t help it.”

  “Have it your way.” I stood up. My face felt hot. “I was seen leaving her apartment, so I’m going down now and report the thing to the law. I’m not telling them I was there when it happened. I need a few more hours. Are you going to let me have them?”

  “What you have told me is confidential.”

  I knew that was the gun talking when he said that.

  “But you are making a mistake,” he went on, “You should put yourself in my hands. No matter what the truth of the thing is, I can help you.”

  I leaned forward, still holding the gun, still keeping half an eye on the right leg. “Yeah, you can help. Tell me what she said. You sent her a bill for twenty bucks. She must have done some talking. Maybe it’ll mean something to me.”

  He shook his head slowly. “She wouldn’t even give me a case history, Mr. Roark. Assuming for a moment that you didn’t kill her, I have no knowledge that could help you.”

  I put the gun away and walked out. I closed the door behind me and kept my hand on the knob. The girl turned at her desk and frowned at me. I waited a few seconds and opened the door again. Doctor Blair was dialing his phone hurriedly. He stopped with a long pale finger poised in the air, his mouth set in a thin line. I shook my head at him and said, “Tsk, tsk.”

  I turned and walked out. I was three blocks away when I heard the sirens wail.

  CITY police headquarters was in the basement of a two-story brick building. I walked down a ramp, opened a door and went into a room with glass interview windows and a two-way radio hookup. The man at the radio desk got up and came to the window. He seemed to
be half asleep. I told him I wanted to report a murder. He woke up with a jerk and told me to go on out and come in the door to the left, and he’d take me in to see Captain Farr. I went out and came in by the other door, through a room full of benches, and into a corridor, where the radioman met me and took me down to a small office. A man at a desk was just hanging up a phone. The radioman told him I had a murder to report and he thought he ought to bring me right in. He added that he hadn’t had me fill out a report yet, and went away.

  The man at the desk was short and broad. He wore a black shirt, a maroon tie, a coat that was too tight for him, and an air of being on the business end of a fuse. I got the idea he might jump out of the chair at any moment and dash out to take care of something really important. He didn’t ask me to sit down.

  He perched on the edge of the chair, ripped a large double sheet from a tablet and said, “What’s the story?”

  The title of the form he had in front of him was Modus Operandi. He had a pencil poised over it, his arm tensed, it made me nervous. I could see how it would make a lot of people nervous. It would make them talk faster than they wanted to, say more than they intended to say. I wondered if he had much luck with it.

  I said, “There’s a body out at the Lennox Arms Apartments, Room Three-o-four.”

  “How did it get there?”

  I lit a cigarette and said, “She lived there.”

  “Who are you?”

  I showed him my license. He looked at it for a brief, unmeasurable moment and tossed it back at me and said, “So?”

  “She hired me by wire. I arrived last night.”

  “We’ve got a couple of private eyes right here in Tucson. Retired members of the force. Why’d she bring you in?”

  “I wish she hadn’t.”

  “Who did it?”

  I counted to three and said, “I don’t know anything at all. I was to come to her place at nine this morning.