by Roy Huggins
“What did you want to see me about?”
“I’m a private investigator. Miss Halloran brought me down here from Los Angeles 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 he 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. However, none of my patients are ‘nuts.’ ”
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. X 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 be suffering from an acute anxiety neurosis, but from what you say, it may 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 was 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.”
“There were bruises, Doc. The kind fingers would make.”
“Mr. Roark. I can’t help you unless you’re willing to let me. And you need help.”
“Why?”
“Because it appears that 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, “If you killed her, you did not do so consciously, Mr. Roark. You may have killed her for reasons that were deeply necessary. If so, 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.”
He smiled tiredly, leaned forward and started to uncross his 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 could be holding out on me, holding back something that might make sense out of what’s 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.
“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. Dr. 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 hook-up. 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, 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. I went up there and found her dead on the floor.” He whipped out a watch. I was going to lose him. He said, “It’s now exactly eleven-fifty.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look up a lawyer?”
I counted to five this time and said, “Why would I do that?”
He opened his right drawer with one hand, got out a match with the other and popped a cigarette into his mouth. The lighted match was waiting for it. Then he talked to me with the cigarette in his mouth, and it bobbed like a fretful finger.
“People report murder immediately,” he snapped. “They don’t wait three hours.”
I took a slow drag on the cigarette and said, “I had to make up my mind whether I liked the idea of being held as a material witness.”
He grabbed the phone, asked for a number and said, “Gimme the coroner . . . Joe, meet me out at the Lennox Arms, out there by the U. Got a body for ya . . . Okay.” He hung up. He looked at me and said, “What was this girl’s name?” I told him, and he jumped up and grabbed a hat and went to the door. At the door he turned and said, “You’d better come with me.”
A uniformed officer drove us there in a patrol car. He parked in front of the Lennox Arms apartments and Farr and I went in. The lobby was empty.
Going up the stairs, Farr said, “You say you walked in. She didn’t wire you a key, which means the door was unlocked, which means we won’t have to have a key. Right?”
“Wrong.”
“Then you’d better rework that story of yours.”
“There was a key on the table when I went in. I decided it would be a good idea to lock the place up.” We were at the door now. Farr turned to me, and his face was red. “So you pick up something at the scene of the crime, ruin any chance of getting fingerprints, then take three hours to report! The D.A.’s boys are going to love you, Bailey. Gimme the key.” I took it out and said, “I figured locking the door and taking the key was better than leaving the apartment unlocked and letting someone come in and really mess things up.”
Farr was unlocking the door when a tall man in a black suit came down the hall. Farr said, “Hi, Joe. This is a guy named Bailey, from L.A.”
Joe was an elective officer. He smiled broadly and shook my hand. He said he was glad to know me. Farr had the door unlocked. He opened it and we all went in. The room was touched with a faint odor of whisky. The room was hot, the air thick and still. And the room was also empty. There was no body on the floor.
TWELVE
I removed the gray gallows I had been building in the back of my mind, sang a brief inward hosanna, and sneered at the man with the bad breath. I asked him if he thought I had come back and hauled Dorothy Halloran’s body away. He didn’t answer.
Farr made a sound in his throat like a butcher bird, glared at me and said, “What’s the game?”
“There was a corpse here at nine o’clock.”
He glanced at the room again.
I was looking at the room too, trying to get even just a theory. I figured it was easy enough to make a complicated way into the room, but I couldn’t see why anyone would bother.
The man in the dark suit asked, “How was he killed?”
“It was a girl. It looked like strangulation.”
“How did you know she was dead?”
“No pulse, among other things.”
“Pulses are pretty hard to find sometimes.”
Farr said, “Nuts. This guy’s in on it. He waited three hours to report the thing.”
The coroner said, “Let’s look up the manager and ask some questions. While you’re doing that I’ll call the hospitals. What was her name?”
I said, “Dorothy Halloran or Dorothy Dreves. Try both.”
Farr continued to look the room over. He pulled the bed part way down and looked behind it. When he opened the closet door, I noticed the mink coat was still hanging where she’d hung it the night before. He finished and we went out and locked the door and went downstairs. The manager was waiting for us. The coroner borrowed the phone in her apartment and she had questions to ask.
Farr cut her short and said, “Anything unusual happen around here in the past ten hours?”
“No o— Yes! One of the keys was stolen.”
“Which room?”
She glanced at me out of tired eyes in her long yellow face. “Miss Halloran’s room.”
“When?”
“I keep ’em on a rack right inside my door. When they’re gone, I notice it. I saw the empty place there on the board around noon today, so it couldn’t of been very long ago.”
Farr brought out the key I had given him. “This fits her room. Is this it?”
“Couldn’t say. Maybe it’s hers.”
“Seen anyone hanging around?”
She sniffed and pointed a long finger at me. “Yes, him.”
“When was that?”
“Around nine.” She leered and added, “They had the bed down.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Grimes heard it go up—it’s a teensy bit noisy —and then she saw him come out.”
“How do you know what Mrs. Grimes saw?”
“It’s only a little way from here to that room. I saw him, too, remember.”
Farr was bouncing on the balls of his feet now. He had stayed in one place too long. But he was a thorough man. He said, “And how did Mrs. Grimes know the bed was going up when she heard it? Maybe it was going down.”
“Because he come out right after. The rooms on that side of the house have beds that have to be up or you can’t get the door open.”
That gave Farr something to think about. For a long moment he was quite still. He didn’t flex a muscle. Then he said, “See anyone else?”
“A blond woman come in. Pretty. Flashy dresser. Never did see her before and don’t know who she called on.” She sounded a little bitter about it.
I said, “Did you see her come down?”
She glared at me and said, “No.”
Farr said, “Is there a back way out of here?”
“I keep it locked. Say, what’s up, anyhow?”
“Do you think someone could have carried a bulky object out of here without you seeing them? Sometime this morning.”
“Not likely! What’s missing?”
“But possible.”
“I doubt it. You’ll notice they’s a clear glass on my door. I don’t miss much.” That called for a glare in my direction.
“Then,” Farr said, “you haven’t gone shopping yet today?”
The long face grew longer. “All right, that’s the only time it could of happened. What’s missing—her mink coat?”
But Farr was off. She had really lost him. He was in her apartment, leaning over the coroner’s shoulder.
I said, “Tell me, did this blond woman come in before or
after you went shopping?”
“I don’t have to talk to you.”
Farr and the coroner came out, and I repeated my question as if it were the first time it had come up. She looked at Farr, who was rolling back and forth on his feet, waiting for her to answer.
She said, “She went up just before I left.”
I said, “Do you keep your apartment door locked?”
“When I go downtown to shop, yes.”
“Did you go downtown today?”
She glanced at Farr. “No.”
“Come on, Bailey.” Farr was out the door, shouting a “Good-by, Joe,” and sliding into his car. “Back to the station, Jim.”
I got in beside him and the car shot out from the curb.
I said, “No luck with the hospitals?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“You forgot to ask her a very important question.”
“You tell me how I should have done it.”
“You didn’t ask which way I was going when she saw me—in or out?”
“I didn’t have to.”
“I was afraid you’d make something out of her story about the bed,” I said. “Mrs. Grimes heard some other bed going up, Farr, not the one in the girl’s room.”
He snorted. “She heard that bed, all right. Which means you couldn’t have walked in there. When the bed’s down, it blocks the door. That means she heard you putting the bed up so you could get out. So you were in the room all night. This morning you had a quarrel when you both woke up with hang-overs. Yeah, I smelled the whisky too. She didn’t look so good to you hung over, huh, Bailey?”
“So you book me for murder?”
“Maybe they’d do that in L.A. This is Tucson. It’s a wealthy town. We can afford a competent police department. We don’t book you for murder until we know you’re on the hook to stay.”
“In the meantime you book me for what?”
“You haven’t got a place to stay. Right?”
“No, but I’ve got a car and a wallet full of dough, plus a record at Western Union that shows I’m here on business.”
“No place to stay. We’ll vag you. You’ll like our hotel.” He grinned. It was wide, loose-lipped, out of character, and he seemed to know it, because he stopped grinning suddenly and put his jaw out.
