The man in charge said, “Hold him up here for a couple of minutes, give Mrs. X. a chance to make her getaway from the neighborhood first, before anyone spots her. You see that she gets home safely, Dillon.”
“Will she be all right?” I asked.
“She’ll be all right, we’ll look after her.”
“Poor Mrs. Scalento,” I said, going down the stairs with the man delegated to accompany me, “I’ll have to buy her another plant.”
The formal identification was brief, and, as far as I was concerned, of about the same degree of comfort as the extraction of a live tooth without anesthesia. Why they had to have it I don’t know, since, according to my bargain with Weill, my own identity was to remain unrevealed. It took place in Weill’s office, with a heavy guard at the door, to keep pryers — even interdepartmental pryers — at a distance.
“Bring him in.”
I didn’t raise my eyes from the floor until the scuff of unwilling shoe-leather dragged against its will had stopped short.
“Mrs. X. Is this the man you saw in the living-quarters of one John Carpenter, — East — th, at about four-thirty A.M. on the fifteenth day of April?”
My voice rang out like a bell. “That is the same man.”
“Did he have a weapon in his hand?”
“He had a weapon in his hand.”
“Stand up, please, and repeat that under oath.”
I stood up. They thrust a Bible toward me and I played my right hand on it as if we had been in a courtroom. I repeated after the man swearing me in: “...the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Then I said: “I solemnly swear that I saw this man, with a weapon in his hand, in the living-quarters of John Carpenter, — East — th Street, at about four-thirty A.M., April 15th.”
Nelson’s fatigue-cracked voice shattered the brief silence. “You can’t pin this on me! I didn’t do it, d’ya hear, I didn’t do it!”
“No, and you didn’t kill Little Patsy O’Connor either, did you? Or Schindel? Or Duke Biddermen, in a car right outside his own front door? Take him out!”
“She’s framing me! She done it herself, and then she made a deal with you, to switch it to me!”
They dragged him out, still mouthing imprecations. The closing of the door toned them down, but you could still hear them dying away along the corridor outside.
Weill turned back to me and let his fingertips touch my gloved hand reassuringly for a moment, maybe because he saw that it was vibrating slightly, as an after-effect of the scene of violence that had just taken place. “That’s all. That finishes your participation in the affair. You just go home and forget about it.”
I could carry out the first part of the injunction all right; I had my doubts about the second.
“But you had a stenographic transcription made of my identification of him just now, I noticed,” I faltered uneasily.
“Yes, and I’m also having depositions made out to be signed by those two witnesses I had in the room, regarding what took place here. In other words I’m preparing affidavits of your affidavit, so that it doesn’t have to hang suspended in midair. But that needn’t alarm you. I have the okay of the D.A.’s office on getting around it in this way in your case.”
“But in the courtroom, won’t he — won’t his lawyer, demand that you produce me, for cross-examination?”
“Let him. The D.A.’s office is taking that into account, in preparing its procedure. I’m prepared to take the stand in your place, as your proxy, if necessary. And police-lieutenant or not, I don’t think I’d make the kind of a witness whose testimony is to be lightly disregarded.”
He seemed to have taken care of every contingency; I felt a whole lot better.
He shook my hand. “I keep my bargains. You’re out of it to stay. All knowledge of you ends with us.”
He said to the detective standing outside the door, “Take this lady to the special departmental car you’ll find waiting for her outside. Go along in it with her and keep everyone at a distance. Take her to the — th Street side-entrance of the Kay Department Store.”
That was the biggest one in the city. I went in, walked through it on the bias without stopping to buy anything, got into a taxi a moment later at the main entrance, and had myself driven home.
The whole town had been talking about it for several weeks past, so I wasn’t surprised when it finally penetrated even to Jimmy’s insulated consciousness. I was only surprised that it hadn’t long before then. But the news of the world, for Jimmy, was only the quotations on a tickertape.
Carpenter’s metier of preying on respectable and socially-prominent women, which had been uncovered during the course of it, and which the defense was as willing (but for different reasons) to play up as the prosecution, was what gave it the fillip of being above just another underworld killing, I suppose. Anyway, half of the men around town kept whispering that it was the next guy’s wife, and the other half looked kind of thoughtful, as though they were doing some mental checking-up.
He’d been reading about it one night — that was toward the end, after it had been going on for several weeks — and he started discussing it with me.
I twiddled my thimble-sized coffee-cup around disinterestedly, looked down at it. “Do you think there really is such a woman?” I asked idly. “Or are he and his lawyer just making it up, howling for her to try to distract attention from his own guilt?”
He grimaced undecidedly, didn’t answer right away. But Jimmy is not likely to be without opinions for long; that’s why he is as successful as he is. It came on slowly; I could almost see it forming before my very eyes. First he just chewed his lip in cogitation. Then he nodded abstractedly. Then he gave it words. “Yes. I dunno why, but — I have a feeling they’re telling the truth, as mealy-mouthed as they are. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some woman up there that same night. The prosecution doesn’t deny it, I notice; they just clam up each time. That’s what makes me half-inclined to believe—”
They hadn’t made use of any of the back-stops Weill had prepared, up to this point, so there was still room for legitimate doubt: the affidavits on my affidavit; nor had Weill taken the stand to pinch-hit for me. Maybe they were saving them for a bang-up finish, or maybe they weren’t going to ring them in at all, had found they didn’t really need them. My chief contribution had been to point out Sonny-Boy Nelson to them, and help them trap him, and that could be safely left out of it without damaging their case any. Otherwise what could I add? Only circumstantial strengthening to what was already an overwhelmingly strong circumstantial case. They’d even found someone who had seen him — Nelson — run out of the house next door, gun still unsheathed, and the door of Carpenter’s apartment and the two roof-doors had been found yawning wide open.
But there was one thing I couldn’t get straight in my own mind. I mentioned it aloud to him — although very carefully. “But why do they — Nelson and his lawyer — keep harping on this woman? What do they expect to get out of that? I should think it would be the other way around, that it would harm them rather than help them to have her—”
He shrugged. “Evidently they’ve figured out some way in which they think she can help them. They must have something up their sleeves. I wouldn’t know. I can’t figure out what goes on in the crooked minds of shady lawyers and their clients.” He pitched the paper disgustedly aside, as though the subject didn’t interest him any more. He delivered himself of a concluding postscript.
“Anyway, if there is such a woman — and most likely there is — she’s a fool. She should have gone to her own husband, whoever she is, and taken him into her confidence, before she got in that deep.”