“That’s what you say,” Sellers said.
“And that,” I told him, “is why I want you to get this thing cleared up. It’s my only chance for my white alley. Let’s go down and talk with Claire Bushnell’s aunt before she has a chance to think up a good story. She was being blackmailed. I think the blackmailer would keep in touch with her, probably by telephone. I don’t think Tom Durham is doing much travelling around today, because I think he’s got a .32 bullet in him somewhere. All you need to do is to stop by Amelia Jasper’s house on the road to headquarters and give her a grilling.”
“Yeah, and lose my badge for it,” Sellers said. “What do you think I am? A sucker that’s going to break in on somebody’s rich aunt and say, ‘Look here, Madam, you’re being blackmailed’?”
I said, “You’re going to let me do that. I wouldn’t ask you to do it. All you need to do is to sit and listen.”
Sellers thought it over, then shook his head and said, “It’s a gag. You’re going to headquarters.”
“By that time the trail will be cold and you’ll never find out anything.”
“I’ve caught me a murderer,” Sellers said, grinning with self-satisfaction. “That’s all right for one day’s work. Come on.”
Bertha said, “For the love of Mike, Frank, give me a break. You’re busting up my partnership and smearing the thing with a lot of publicity that’s going to cost me all kinds of dough. I’m on the trail of an eighty-thousand-dollar insurance job. If what Donald says is right, I stand a chance of throwing the hooks into the insurance company and cleaning up a little gravy.”
Frank Sellers hesitated. At length he said to me, “If you doublecross me on this thing I…”
“Since when did anybody doublecross you?” Bertha demanded.
Sellers looked at me and frowned. “It’s not you, Bertha. It’s this guy. You never know what he’s figuring.”
I held out my manacled wrists, and said sarcastically, “Yeah, it looks like I’m smart.”
Bertha said. “We could give you a cut in case we…”
“Don’t be a fool, Bertha,” I interrupted. “Frank isn’t thinking about money.”
Sellers gave me a grateful look.
I said, “You have an opportunity to straighten up that killing out at the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT. You have an opportunity to put a whole bevy of feathers in your cap. You have a chance to break up a blackmailing ring, and you have a chance to show how that Hollister girl was actually killed, why she was killed and who killed her.”
“A lot of people would say I had the answer to that last right here, right now,” Sellers said, but his tone lacked the positive conviction he had shown earlier.
“And,” I went on, “you’ve got a widow out there in San Robles who has two kids. Those kids have got to grow up, they’ve got to go to school. They’ve got to go through college, if they really want to make a dent in the world. It takes education these days, and education takes money. There’s a woman out there who doesn’t know where her next dime is coming from. Now, then, if you could play things my way, and she could have eighty thousand bucks…”
“You’ve made a sale,” Sellers said. “Let’s go.”
We all got up, and I said, “What about the handcuffs?”
“Just let them ride,” Sellers grinned. “Don’t bother about them. You can walk all right if you just keep your hands in front of you and right close to your belt.”
“I could do a lot more good if you would take them off.”
“Good for whom?” he jibed.
“The trouble with you is you have the mind of a cop. Come on, let’s go.”
We piled into the lift, rattled down to the ground floor, and then all climbed into Frank Sellers’ police car.
“What’s the address?” Sellers asked.
“226 Korreander,” Claire Bushnell said.
Sellers pushed the car into speed.
I said, “You’ll do better if you don’t use the siren.”
Sellers gave me a withering glance, then devoted his attention to driving.
He slowed the car to a conservative thirty miles an hour before we got to the two hundred block on Korreander, then slid to a stop in front of the white stucco house.
We all piled out and trooped up the stairs to the porch. Sellers rang the bell.
Susie, the loose-jointed maid, came striding deliberately down the hallway. She opened the door, and for a moment I thought she recoiled at the sight of Frank Sellers. Then she let her face petrify in expressionless lines of wooden indifference.
“Hello, Susie,” Claire said. “Is Aunt Amelia in?”
The maid hesitated.
Frank Sellers pulled back his coat, showed his star. “She in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Come on,” Sellers said, and pushed his way in, without waiting for any announcement to be made.
Susie glowered at him, but stood helplessly where she had been pushed to one side. Just before we got to the living-room her presence of mind reasserted itself and she raised her voice and called in a high, shrill tone, “Oh, Mrs. Jasper! Claire and the police are here to see you.”
Sellers, with one hand gripping my arm, pushed the door open with his left hand and we entered the sitting-room.
Amelia Jasper looked up from her wheel chair and transfixed us with her most winning smile. “How do you do!” she said. “Won’t you all be seated? Hello, Claire, honey. How are you today, dear?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“Well, since I can’t get up you’ll have to act as hostess, Claire. That sciatica again, a flare-up from that horrid automobile accident. I do wish I could do something to get over the pain. I’ve taken aspirin until I’m sick — but do sit down. Pardon me if I seem a little groggy. I’ve taken so much drug.”
Her eyes fluttered half-shut, then she caught herself and raised the lids.
We started to sit down, and then she caught sight of the handcuffs. “Why, Mr. Lam!” she said, and then added, “Surely you’re not... Why…”
Susie Irwin, the maid, finished the sentence from the doorway. “I heard about it on the radio, ma’am. I wasn’t going to say anything. He’s the one that killed that Lucille Hollister last night. You remember you were reading about it in the papers, the stocking murder.”
“Donald Lam killed her!” Amelia Jasper exclaimed, incredulously. “Why, I thought he was so nice. Why... Why... And you bring him here!”
“In order to try and clear up a couple of angles of the case,” Sergeant Sellers apologised.
“Well, I don’t want that man in my house. I don’t want to be near him. I read all about that crime in the newspapers, the horrible, sickening details. I... I’m sorry, but I just…”
“Just a couple of questions, Aunt Amelia,” Claire said. “Just a few things that the police want to clear up. If you can answer the questions quickly, why then they’ll be out that much sooner.”
“Well, I don’t want them here at all,” Amelia Jasper snapped. “And what possible questions could I answer? I saw this man just once when—”
Sergeant Sellers interrupted, “We want to know something about a man by the name of Durham.”
“What about him?” Amelia Jasper demanded truculently.
“We thought that there might be some connection between him and this man, Lam.”
“Well, there certainly isn’t,” Amelia Jasper said. “Mr. Durham is a very nice young man.”
“How long since you’ve seen him?” I asked.
She glared at me and said, “I don’t have to answer your questions.”
I said, “The reason I’m asking is because I think Durham may have been mixed up in some trouble out at the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT.”
She tilted her chin in the air, and ignored me.