“What do you want of me?” he asked.
“Please!” McCuller said, speaking for the first time. “The man was a member of your family for a while. Who are his friends? Who had it in for him? Add him up for us, Malvern.”
“You’ve added him up for yourself,” Mike said. “He was a heel.”
McCuller sighed. “You don’t want to help?”
“Any way I can.”
“Incidentally, we’d like to talk to Mrs. Layne,” Rand said.
A nerve twitched in Mike’s cheek. “She’s not at home just now.”
“When do you expect her?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Mike said. He looked down at his fingernails. “She went out before I was up this morning. I don’t know where she is.”
“You’re not sorry Layne is dead,” McCuller said casually.
“I don’t wish any man a violent death,” Mike said. “I particularly and pointedly disliked Layne, if that’s what you’re asking.”
McCuller heaved himself up out of his chair. “Just routine,” he said, “but I suppose you can account for your movements last night and early this morning.”
Mike smiled faintly and nodded at me. “My perpetual alibi,” he said. “I never go anywhere without Vance.”
“I can write you out an itinerary,” I said. Then I glanced at Mike, wondering. There had been a period of nearly two hours last night when he’d gone up to Joe Ricardo’s apartment and left me waiting for him in a bar across the street.
“Write out the itinerary,” McCuller said. He turned to Mike: “I won’t wait for Mrs. Layne, but I want to see her as soon as you can get in touch with her.”
“Of course,” Mike said. McCuller started for the door, and Mike checked him. “I’m a newspaperman,” he said. “Because of Layne’s connection with me I can’t ignore this, although it’s not strictly my department. Would it be possible to see his room at the hotel?”
“Why not?” McCuller said. “We’re going there now.” He looked at me. “Bring along a piece of paper and you can write out that itinerary on the way in the taxi.”
Mike told Kathy where we were going and told her if Erika called she was to phone him at Layne’s room at the Wakefield. If he didn’t hear from her he’d check back with Kathy as soon as he left there.
I found out on the way to the Wakefield that McCuller wasn’t kidding about the itinerary. He even lent me his pen to write with. I had no chance to check with Mike, and I couldn’t get any kind of tip-off from him. He seemed to be studiously avoiding me. It wasn’t that there was any reason why he shouldn’t have visited Joe Ricardo. That sort of thing was part of his work. The point was that I couldn’t really alibi him for a two-hour stretch. I don’t know why it bothered me. The idea that he might have killed Waldo never entered my head.
I finally wrote everything down just the way it had happened, including a list of people we’d seen and talked with in various spots during the evening. When I handed it to McCuller he didn’t look at it. He just folded it up and put it in his wallet.
The Wakefield was a dingy place. There was something shifty about the manager, the clerk, and the house dick. It was hard to tell whether they had something to hide about Waldo, or whether they were afraid that general violations might be unearthed during the murder investigation. They were too greasily co-operative, somehow.
Waldo’s room was a mess. Clothes strewn around, the desk a mass of unsorted notes, letters, and papers, cigarette butts everywhere. The smooth, slick young man you saw at night clubs was revealed here as disorderly and unfastidious. Waldo himself was gone. I wasn’t sorry.
“The door has a snap lock,” Rand said, “and it hasn’t been forced. The house detective had to use a passkey to get in after they’d had the phone call from the woman.”
Mike stood looking around the room with an air of distaste. I imagined he was thinking that Erika had had to put up with this sloppy unpleasantness.
“The woman must have had a date with him,” Mike said, “came upstairs, found the door open, and went in. She probably ran out, closing the door behind her.”
“That’s the way we figure it,” McCuller said.
“The gun?” Mike asked.
“Small caliber,” McCuller said. “I haven’t the ballistics report yet. Probably the kind of gun a woman could carry in a handbag.”
“What makes you think a woman killed him?” Mike asked sharply.
“I don’t think anything,” McCuller said. “I just say it was that kind of a gun.” He shook his head. “A case like this you just check and check and check,” he said. “His friends, his acquaintances, everyone he saw yesterday, everywhere he went, his past, present, and what might have been his future. That’s where you and Mrs. Layne can help us, Malvern. I’d like to get at it.”
“He had no friends,” Mike said quietly. “He fed off people until they had no more to give, or couldn’t take him, and then he turned to others. That was his past and his present.” He raised his eyes to look directly at McCuller. “I think his future was always what happened here last night.”
“Somebody was bound to get him sooner or later?”
“Violence of some sort,” Mike said, and turned to the door...
You can’t go anywhere with Mike that he isn’t recognized. We left McCuller and Rand at the Wakefield, after promising to let them know the minute Erika showed up at home. We went across the street to a little bar and grill. The proprietor spotted Mike at once. He would have given Mike the joint, and he acted hurt when Mike said all he wanted was some plain soda with a half a lime in it. I ordered a cup of coffee. We went to a booth at the back of the place. Mike lit a cigarette and sat there staring at the table-top until the soda and coffee came and we were alone again.
He took a sip of his drink and looked up at me. “I’m not sorry about Layne,” he said.
“Why should you be?”
He took a deep breath. “Work has to go on just the same,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He took out a pocket notebook. There were some clippings in it. I cut them out every morning and leave them for him, along with the mail, on the breakfast table. They’re usually news items I think he might be interested in following up. He glanced through them quickly.
“How come we didn’t hear of this fire at the Hotel Spain while we were doing our rounds last night?” he asked.
“It happened while you were at Ricardo’s,” I said. “Nobody knew where we were.”
“Twelve people burned to death.” He shuddered. “Death by fire is the worst of all.”
“Not pleasant.”
“You’d better dig up what you can on it. There’s no list of the dead or injured here.”
“It was from an early edition,” I said. “Don’t you want to cover it yourself?”
He shook his head. “Check with the fire chief on the cause,” he said. “There are probably dangerous violations in places like that all over the city. It might make a running story.”
“Right.”
“When you’ve got all you can, come back to the house.”
“You’re going there?”
“I want to see Erika the minute she gets back,” he said. “Layne’s death will be a shock to her. She did love him once, you know.”
“Or thought she did.”
“What’s the difference?” he said. “I want to be with her when she hears about it. She’ll need me.”
So we separated, and I went to see what had happened at the Hotel Spain. Ordinarily, it would have been an interesting story to cover, but I couldn’t get over my feeling of uneasiness about Erika. Some months ago, when Mike was getting some anonymous letters threatening him and his family, he bought Erika and Joan each a small .22 revolver to carry, and got licenses for them. That was the first thing I’d thought of when McCuller mentioned the type of gun used to kill Waldo Layne.