Dunbar’s head came up, his face to me. “I’ll apologize.”
“You don’t have to. Skip it.”
“But maybe you’ll tell me who you saw and what was said. Later. I know I’m not in command of my faculties, I haven’t got any faculties. I’ve had no sleep and I don’t want to sleep. I answered questions all night and all morning. They think I killed her. By God, they think I killed her!”
I nodded. “But you didn’t?”
He stared. His eyes were in no condition for staring. “My God, do you think I did?”
“I don’t think. I don’t know you. I don’t know anything.”
“I know him,” the father said. He was looking at Wolfe. “He wanted to come here because he thought... what he said. I didn’t know what to think, but I was afraid. I was mortally afraid that I was responsible. Now perhaps I wasn’t; I can hope I wasn’t. And I wanted to come for another reason. They are going to arrest him. They think he killed her. They are going to charge him with murder. We need your help.”
Wolfe tightened his lips.
Whipple went on. “I came and asked your help when I shouldn’t have. That was wrong, and I bitterly regret it. I thought at the time I was justified, but I wasn’t. I hated to tell my son about it, but I had to. He had to know. Now I must ask your help. Now it would be right for me to remind you of that speech. ‘But if you shield him because he is your color there is a great deal to say. You are rendering your race a serious disservice. You are helping to perpetuate—’”
“That’s enough,” Wolfe snapped. “It isn’t pertinent. It has no bearing on the present situation.”
“Not directly. But you persuaded me to help you by prescribing adherence to the agreements of human society. I was an ignorant boy, immature, and you tricked me — I don’t complain, it was a legitimate trick. I don’t say this is analogous, but you had a problem and asked me to help, and I have one and I’m asking you to help. My son is going to be charged with murder.”
Wolfe’s eyes were narrowed at him. “They have questioned him for hours and aren’t holding him.”
“They will. When they’re ready.”
“Then he will need a lawyer.”
“He’ll need more than a lawyer. The way it looks. He’ll need you.”
“You may be exaggerating his jeopardy.” Wolfe went to Dunbar. “Are you under control, Mr. Whipple?”
“No, I’m not,” he said.
“I’ll try you anyway. You said they think you killed her. Is that merely your fancy or has it a basis?”
“They think it has a basis, but it hasn’t.”
“That begs the question. I’ll try again. Why do they think it has a basis?”
“Because I was there. Because she and I — we were friends. Because she was white and I’m black. Because of the billy, the club that killed her.”
Wolfe grunted. “You’ll have to elucidate. First the club. Was it yours?”
“I had it. It’s a club that had been used by a policeman in a town in Alabama to beat up two colored boys. I got it — it doesn’t matter how I got it, I had it. I had had it on my desk at the office for several months.”
“Was it on your desk yesterday?”
“No. Susan—” He stopped.
“Yes?”
Dunbar looked at his father and back at Wolfe. “I don’t know why I stopped. I’ve told all this to the police, I knew I had to, because it was known. Miss Brooke had rented and furnished a little apartment on One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street, and the club was there. She had taken it there.”
“When?”
“About a month ago.”
“Have the police found your fingerprints on it?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I think it had been wiped.”
“Why do you think it had been wiped?”
“Because they didn’t say definitely that it had my fingerprints on it.”
Fair enough. Apparently he had got control. Answering questions will often do that.
“A reasonable assumption,” Wolfe conceded. “So much for the means. As for the opportunity, you were there, but there is the question of your prior movements yesterday, say from noon on. Of course the police went into that thoroughly. Tell me briefly. I am examining the official assumption that you killed her.”
Dunbar was sitting straighter. “At noon I was at my desk in the office. At a quarter to one I met two men at a restaurant for lunch. I was back at the office a little before three. At four o’clock I went to a conference in the office of Mr. Henchy, the executive director. It ended a little after six, and when I went to my room there was a message on my desk. Miss Brooke and I had arranged to meet at the apartment at eight o’clock, and the message was that she had phoned that she couldn’t get there until nine or a little later. That was convenient for me because I had a dinner engagement with one of the men who had been at the conference. It was twenty-five minutes past eight when we parted at the subway entrance on Forty-second Street, and it was five minutes past nine when I got to One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street and entered.”
“And discovered the body.”
“Yes.”
Wolfe glanced up at the clock. “Will it jar you to tell me what you did?”
“No. She was there on the floor. There was blood, and I got some on my hands and my sleeve. For a while, I don’t know how long, I didn’t do anything. The club was there on a chair. I didn’t touch it. There was no use getting a doctor. I sat on the bed and tried to think, to decide what to do. I suppose you think that wasn’t natural, with her there dead on the floor, for me to be worrying about me. Maybe it wasn’t, but that’s what I did. You wouldn’t ever understand because you’re white.”
“Pfui. You’re a man, and so am I.”
“That’s what you say. Words. I knew I had to face it or do something with — with it I would have, too, but I just barely had sense enough to know I wouldn’t get away with it. It couldn’t be done. I went and looked in the phone book for the number of police headquarters and dialed it. That was at twenty minutes to ten. I had been there over half an hour.”
“The delay was ill-advised but explicable. You have come to grief, certainly, but a murder charge? What will they do for motive?”
Dunbar stared. “You don’t mean that. A Negro and a white girl?”
“Nonsense. New York isn’t Utopia, but neither is it Dixie.”
“That’s right. In Dixie I wouldn’t be sitting in a fine big room telling a famous detective about it. Here in New York they’re more careful about it; they take their time. But about motive, with a Negro they take motive for granted. He’s a shine, he’s a mistake, he was born with motives white men don’t have. It may be nonsense, but it’s the way it is.”
“With the scum, yes. With dolts and idiots.”
“With everybody. Lots of them don’t know it. Most of them up here wouldn’t say that word, nigger, but they’ve got that word in them. Everybody. It’s in them buried somewhere, but it’s not dead. Some of them don’t know they’ve got it and they wouldn’t believe it, but it’s there. That’s what I knew I’d have to face when I sat there on the bed last night and tried to decide what to do.”
“And you made the right decision. Disposing of the body, however ingeniously, would have been fatal.” Wolfe shook his head. “As for your comments about that word, nigger, its special significance for you distorts your understanding. Consider the words that are buried in you but not dead. Consider even the ones that are not buried, that you use: for instance, ‘fat ape.’ May I assume that a man who resembles an ape, or one who is fat, or both, could not expect just treatment or consideration from you? Certainly not. The mind or soul or psyche — take the term you prefer — of any man below the level of consciousness is a preposterous mishmash of cesspool and garden. Heaven only knows what I have in mine as synonyms for ‘woman’; I’m glad I don’t know.”