“It sounds like a smart thing to do, Sergeant.”
“I wish to hell I hadn’t done it.”
“Why have you told me?”
“To fill you in. So long as I got work ahead of me that I’ll have to do on my own time because the Shennary case is officially closed out of our files, I want to save time. I figure if you weren’t satisfied with Shennary, you’ve been lookin’ around. If it wasn’t Shennary, the gun was planted in his room and that spells premeditation, and that means motive, and you’ve been in a better position to think up a good motive for anybody killing your brother than I have. If you can’t tip me to anything, I’ve got to start digging on my own. The place I start is with the widow. She is a handsome chunk of stuff and she inherits a nice piece of money from your brother. The tipster was a man, so I start thinking in terms of her playing around on the side. That is, unless you can give me something.”
“Why do you start with that motive, Sergeant?”
“Because I have got experience in police work. When you are green in this work, everything is strange. But after a while you see the patterns and how they work. This is an upper-bracket murder. That means one thing to me. It has to be money, sex, or blackmail. In an upper-bracket murder the victim is knocked off for what he’s worth, or to get him out of somebody’s bed, or to shut his mouth up about something he might say or threatens to say to the wrong people. They all come out that way, when you have premeditation. Sometimes the upper-brackets get drunk and kill somebody because they don’t like the part in their hair, but this wasn’t any spur-of-the-moment thing. Something was nibbling on your brother. We know it wasn’t money. He was getting along fine, the way salary and dividends add up. So he was worried about sex or blackmail. He seems clean. I can’t figure any blackmail aimed at him. So it all smells like sex to me, like somebody got next to that sister-in-law of yours and your brother found out.”
“I don’t think that’s a good guess.”
He looked blandly at me. “You have a better guess?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Mr. Dean, kindly don’t try to kid me. I know you’re hiding something. Maybe four or five times in your life you try to conceal essential information. But twenty times a day I am prying information out of people. No amateur does good bucking a pro.”
It was dangerous to underrate this man. His mind was quicker and keener than I had suspected. “All right. I’ll be honest with you at least this far, Sergeant. Something big is going on. I think Ken found out what it is. I think it concerns the company and I think it concerns his wife. I don’t know what that big thing is. I just think I know the general area where I have to look. I think Ken made up his mind to let some cats out of some bags, and that’s why he was killed. I’m not ready to say anymore than that. It would be guesswork, and it would sound silly as hell. I want to look around. I promise I’ll come to you just as soon as I have something definite.”
For long minutes he looked as if he were falling asleep. Then he got clumsily to his feet, brushed ashes from the front of his coat. “Okay, I can’t push you if you don’t want to be pushed. I’ll keep looking around in my own way on my own time. But if it is big, like you hint, do me one favor.”
“Yes?”
“Write down all these crazy guesses of yours and put them in the hotel safe, addressed to me. Amateurs always seem to have accidents.”
He waited for my promise and then left. I stood at the door after he had closed it softly behind him. There was a prickling at the nape of my neck.
I sat down at once and wrote out what I had learned, and a batch of guesses. They sounded melodramatic and absurd. I was tempted to tear up the sheets of hotel stationery. But I sealed them in an envelope and wrote his name on the outside of the envelope.
The phone rang at that moment. A thin, musical voice said, “Mr. Dean? This is Martha Colsinger.”
I remembered the huge woman from the boarding house. Over the phone her voice had a young shy sound.
“Yes. Have you found out anything?”
“Well, a couple of my girls are home now. I’ve been talking to them, you know, about Alma. She didn’t come home yet.”
“Did the girls tell you anything?”
“These two, they live together in a front room, the biggest one, that used to be the living-room. They had the lights out last night and they were sitting in the windowseat that goes across the front of the big bay window. They were talking late because one of them has some kind of love trouble and she is pretty depressed about it, you know, and her friend was trying to cheer her up. They are both nice girls that go to the graduate school over to the college. Miriam, she comes from Albany, and she is the one that—”
“Did they see Alma Brady?”
“I was coming to that. No, they didn’t. They didn’t see anybody come in, but around three they heard the front door close and a man went off the porch real quiet and walked away. I’ve told the city people we got to have more lights on this street. If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a hundred times. It can give you a creepy feeling thinking about a man prowling around in here last night. I feel responsible for my girls, and with a lot of low-class people in town, and with those sailors all over the place from the Naval Training Station, you never know what—”
“Could the girls describe the man?”
“Like I was saying, the lights aren’t strong enough on this street, so they couldn’t see him good. They said he was a smallish man dressed dark, walking quick and soft. Now I’ve been thinking maybe it was him I heard walking around up there in Alma’s room. It makes me terrible nervous and I can’t understand her never coming home since Thursday morning when she went to work. Do you think I ought to phone the police and report her missing?”
“That might be the wise thing to do.”
“The girls didn’t say anything to me until I started asking, because they thought it was somebody sneaked a boy friend in after I got to bed and he was sneaking out again. But I told them about Alma and now they’re nervous like I am. The man is here changing the lock. It’s a big expense whenever a girl loses her front-door key because I don’t feel right if there’s a key around that just about anybody could have. There’s one key for each girl, and one for me, and if that man got in with a key, he had to use Alma’s key. I’ll phone the police right now.”
“Mrs. Colsinger, I’d consider it a favor if you didn’t mention my visit.”
“Well,” she said dubiously, “if they ask me if somebody was around asking about her, I don’t feel awful much like telling lies about it.”
“If they ask you directly, tell them. Just don’t volunteer the information. I’d like to tell you the reason, but I can’t right now. I assure you it’s a good reason.”
She seemed to accept that. “Maybe, Mr. Dean, I ought to go ahead and wire her people, too. They live in Junction City, Kansas.”
“I wouldn’t do that yet, Mrs. Colsinger. It might only worry them when there’s nothing they can do. Maybe she’ll come in later tonight.”