"Same to you-happy to oblige, Lieutenant. We like to cooperate with the locals where we can," said Laidlaw blandly.
"I might," said Mendoza, sliding out of the car, "like the polite tone of that better if you didn't somehow sound like a professional race driver assuring his little boy he'll teach him to ride his new bicycle."
"Why, Loo-tenant, suh, I nevah meant no such thing, suh," said Laidlaw. Mendoza laughed, shut the door, and dodged back to the shadow of the wall as the building door opened up there. Laidlaw slid the Ford out to the street; Mendoza waited until Stuart had driven out in the Buick before going back to his own car.
NINE
"You want to make it read," said Hackett, "that this Whalen got so mad at Twelvetrees-six months after he stopped paying this genteel blackmail-that he killed him?"
"I don't want to make it read any way," said Mendoza. "We don't know what dealings they may have had since. All I say is, no harm to look at Whalen."
"I don't believe it," said Hackett. "In the first place, I can't see a rough-and-ready customer like this Whalen taking the trouble to bury him. And there may have been a renewed motive, but there's nothing to show they ever laid eyes on each other after last August, when Whalen got fired. I don't-"
" No seas tan exigente -don't be so difficult," said Mendoza. "If I want a warrant for Whalen, I've got to be able to give some logical reason to authority. And it may be that I will. Like-mmh-looking openly pleased to draw a five-spot when I'm already holding a royal flush."
"Oh!" said Hackett. He laughed. "So that's what's in your mind. It's a thought. Set somebody's mind at rest so maybe he'll do something silly."
"Did you spot, in all these inverted quotes I've been giving you, the one really interesting little thing? You remember that Whalen suggested to Twelvetrees that his boss might not like hearing about the little stretch Twelvetrees had done-and Twelvetrees just laughed and said it wouldn't matter a damn."
"Which of course sounds as if these Kingmans knew all about him.
"Yes. You're laying your blue chips on the Kingmans?"
Mendoza swiveled around in his desk-chair to look out the window at the hazy panorama of the city stretching away to hills invisible this gray morning. "I've sent out queries to Pennsylvania on Twelvetrees and the Kingmans-we'll see what they can give us, if anything. Unfortunately I didn't have the Kingmans' prints to send, but I sent Twelvetrees', of course. I don't know, Art, there's a couple of things that say this and that to me, on that deal. Look at the way Twelvetrees landed here and slid into such a soft spot-five hundred a month, for what? Woods says, he ingratiated himself. Well, somehow I don't think Mr. Dale Carnegie himself would find it very easy to ingratiate that far with Mr. Martin Kingman. What it amounted to was muscling in on Mr. Kingman's own racket and cutting Mr. Kingman's net take by that five hundred."
"Yes, and you know the thought I had about that? Considering the times. It sounds to me as if just maybe those three had made up a crowd before, and for some reason-maybe because he was inside-Twelvetrees was a little late joining them out here."
"Also a thought. But I don't like it nearly so well as I like mine-that he might have pulled exactly the same sort of genteel blackmail on the Kingmans that he did on Whalen. Look. The Temple's been a going concern for over a year when Twelvetrees lands here. You never did catch up to this Mona Ferne yesterday but you will today, and I think what she'll tell you is that her original contact with Twelvetrees wasn't through the Temple, but that she met him somewhere in connection ith his movie aspirations. And that she was the one who led him to the Temple. Because he took a job when he got here, remember?-not a very good job, clerking in a store-he was broke, or close to it. I get the picture of this fairly canny young fellow, who's taken one rap and means to find some legal racket-where he doesn't have to work too hard. He'd like to get into pictures-he's got all the requirements, so he thinks, but he finds it isn't so easy. Then, by accident, he discovers the Kingmans and their Temple. And almost immediately he becomes 'secretary-treasurer' or whatever they call it and starts drawing that nice salary for practically no work. Now that looks to me as if he had something on them. That he took one look at Mr. Martin Kingman, maybe, and said, ‘Ah, my old friend Giovanni Scipio-or Mike O'Connor-or Harold J. Cholmondeley-from good old Philly.' Comprende? And Kingman had to kick in, let him in on the racket, to protect the investment-because, while the people who've fallen for Mystic Truth aren't exactly Einsteins, most of them would think again about dropping folding money into the collection bag if they knew, for instance, that Kingman had done a stretch for fraud or something like that."
"That's so. It makes a picture, all right. And that'd give the Kingmans a dandy reason to put him out of the way. I'll say this too, it makes it look even more natural, maybe, that they stood it nearly four years before getting fed up. Because con men don't use violence, they like everything nice and easy and smooth, it isn't once in a blue moon you find one of 'em committing actual physical assault. It might be that it wasn't until Twelvetrees got a little too greedy and asked too much blackmail that they got worked up to that. The only thing I don't like about it, Luis, is the spot Twelvetrees landed in-treasurer. The Kingmans wouldn't have handed him anything like that, as blackmail payment. Why, he could have taken off with the whole bank account any day."
"So he could. But I think we'd find, Arturo, that it was treasurer in name only-that Kingman was damned careful to keep a check on the account. A kind of gentleman's agreement. You know, let me in on your racket and I won't tell-and on Kingman's side, you level with us on the racket or I'll tell what I know about you. Don't forget, Twelvetrees still had dreams of a future as a big stat. His agents wouldn't care about keeping him on their books, he wouldn't have a chance of getting anywhere in big-time show business, if it was known he'd served apprenticeship as a pimp and got tagged for it. He got Kingman to give him a job openly-he wanted an excuse to quit the nine-to-five job he had, which he probably didn't enjoy much. But I'll bet you too that the bank will tell us that one of the Kingmans made some excuse for coming in regularly to check up. It was a fifty-fifty deal, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."
"Something in that, sure."
"I should hate," said Mendoza, "to have to arrest Madame Cara. She's a very intelligent woman, she says I have great insight and wisdom. But it would have been so much more convenient, you know, if there'd been two of them on the job, on account of Twelvetrees' car. If just one person did it all, how awkward that part of it would be-driving the Porsche clear down to the Union Station, a good ten miles or more, and then having to get back to pick up the car left at the apartment. If, of course, there was one and the murderer hadn't been driven there by Twelvetrees. It's a great pity Mrs. Bragg minded her own business so assiduously… There are a lot of things we don't know yet. But it's very helpful that we can almost pin it down to that Friday night-"
"I don't see that we can," said Hackett. "I don't like it much, Walsh's thing, about Bartlett."
"I do. I think it makes sense." Mendoza sat up and swiveled around to the desk again. "I don't say it's certain, no, but I like it enough that I've told the D.A.'s office to get a continuance on bringing those kids up, until we know a little more. Here's what Ballistics says on the gun. It's one of an experimental lot of smooth-bore revolvers made by Winchester about fifty years ago. Not too many like it will be floating around these days, but it's nothing antique in the sense of being rare or valuable-we're not likely to get an identification of ownership on it that way. Now, as the class will remember from yesterday's lecture, I trust, we all know that a firearm with a smooth-bored barrel is never as accurate over distances as one whose barrel is rifled with spiral grooves. However, at fairly short distances a smoothbore is accurate enough in expert hands. Ballistics had a lot of fun firing different kinds of bullets out of this at different distances, and they tell us that with a cannelured bullet-which, if you will recall, was the type found in Bartlett and on the kids-a reasonably good shot can expect quite fair accuracy out of this at up to about twenty-five feet."