“All right, wise guy,” Sellers said. “I gave you a chance and you couldn’t take it the easy way. You have to do it the hard way. All right, that’s the way we’re going to play from now on. Come on, Buddy, you’re going back upstairs.”
I said indignantly, “What the hell’s eating you? Those keys are somewhere there on the carpet in front of that door and...”
“And I’ve just noticed,” Sellers said, “that you aren’t wearing your driving gloves. A hell of a detective I am. Come on, Buddy, we’re going back.”
We went back. There was nothing else to do.
Sellers got down on his knees in front of the door to Billy Prue’s apartment. He felt along the carpet. It was only a perfunctory gesture. Then he took my own skeleton keys and fitted one into the lock.
I made one last desperate attempt.
“Are you going in there without a search warrant?” I asked.
Frank Sellers isn’t a guy you can bluff that easy. “You’re damn right I’m going in there without a warrant,” he said.
The key clicked the lock back.
Billy Prue was sitting just as I had left her in the chair, her face might have been molded in pastry dough and daubed with make-up.
Sellers took in the situation with a practiced eye, walked over to the table and said, “Those your gloves, Lam?”
I said, “I’m not answering any questions.”
Sellers picked up the car keys, said, “The gloves and the keys will be evidence. Get your things on, Billy. You’re going places. Let me see your hand a minute.”
He picked up her hand.
There was nothing I could do about it even if I had warned her.
A half second later she jerked back and screamed as the cold steel touched her wrists, then the ratchet bit into pressure and Billy Prue and I were handcuffed one to the other.
“All right, Little Miss Murderess and Mr. Accessory-After-the-Fact,” Frank Sellers said grimly. “We’re going to teach you little lovebirds something.”
Bertha looked from me to Frank Sellers. “Listen, Frank,” she said, “suppose...”
“Nothing doing,” Sellers said roughly.
“But Frank...”
“Shut up,” he said. “And this time, we all ride in my car.”
18
Sellers only stopped long enough to fit my keys to the lock on the agency car to make sure they worked. Then he loaded us into the police automobile, turned on the motor and kicked in the siren.
It was a hell of a place in which to have to think, but I knew that I had to think, and think fast. By the time we reached Headquarters, it would be too late to do any good.
The siren was screaming for the right of way and the car was building into speed. We flashed past a street intersection. My eyes noticed the name of the street we were on. It was Mantica Street.
Ahead of us and on the left was a rather swanky apartment hotel. A couple of taxicabs were parked in front. One of the drivers looked up curiously as the siren went screaming by. I had a glimpse of a twisted, broken nose.
The next street was Garden Vista Boulevard and Frank Sellers was bracing his car for a screaming turn.
“Frank!” I yelled at him.
He didn’t even turn his head.
The tires screamed the car around the turn.
“Frank, for God’s sake stop!”
Something in my voice caught his ears, made him ease his foot on the throttle. “What is it this time, a stall?”
“The murderer of Rufus Stanberry,” I said.
“I’ve got her right here.”
“No, no, Frank. For God’s sake — at least pull in to the curb and let me talk to you before he gets away.”
He hesitated.
Bertha said, “Please, Frank.”
“The hell with him,” Frank said. “It’s just a stall and you know it as well as I do. He’s quick witted enough to have thought up some lie and...”
“Goddammit!” Bertha screamed at him. “Pull this car in to the curb!”
Sellers looked at her in surprise.
Bertha leaned forward, twisted the ignition key in the lock, jerked it out and held her hand out of the window.
The motor went dead. The momentum carried us in to the curb as Sellers turned the steering wheel.
Sellers sat perfectly still. His face was white with rage.
After a half second, he said in a choked voice, “It’s all right with me. I take in the three of you.”
Bertha looked back at me and said, “And don’t kid yourself he isn’t man enough to do it. If you’ve got anything to say, say it — and I hope to hell you’ve got something.”
I leaned forward to put my left hand on Frank Sellers’ shoulders. The right was handcuffed to Billy Prue.
“Listen, Frank,” I said, “I’m coming clean. I’ve wondered how the hell that murder weapon got in my car. I’ve thought back over every step of the way. It couldn’t, simply couldn’t have been put in my car by someone who knew whose car it was and was framing things on me unless Billy Prue double-crossed me, and I don’t think she double-crossed me. There’s only one other way it could have got in my car.”
Sellers was listening now.
I said, “Listen, Frank, I’m doing this for you as much as for anybody. For the love of Mike, don’t pull us in and get a splash in the newspapers and then have to hide your face.”
“Don’t worry about my face,” Sellers said. “Tell me about that murder weapon.”
I said, “The only way it could have been put in the car was by someone who didn’t know what car it was — who it belonged to.”
“Nuts!” Sellers said.
“And,” I went on, “there was only one way that could have happened and that was that my car happened to be the most convenient and the most accessible place for the murderer to have put it, and there’s only one way that could have happened, and that was when my car was parked at the Rimley Rendezvous and I tried to be a smart Aleck and squeeze in front of the car behind me on the hope that it wouldn’t go out before I did. But the guy in the car behind me wasn’t that sort of an egg. He simply stuck his car in low gear and pushed mine out into the taxi zone and went on his way. And a taxi driver damn near beat me up over it when I came out — and that taxi driver was sitting in a cab at that hotel a couple of blocks back on Mantica Street. That’s probably his regular stand. And the handle of that hand ax had been sawed off so it would fit in a woman’s handbag.”
“And what the hell’s all that got to do with this pinch?” Sellers asked.
“Don’t you see?” I said. “Don’t you get the sketch? Remember that accident at Mantica Street and Garden Vista Boulevard? Figure out the time element. Now then, if you want to be a smart dick — be smart, and if you want to be dumb — be dumb. I’ve said everything I’m going to say. Put the keys back in the ignition, Bertha.”
Bertha said, “But I don’t get it, lover. What the hell has the taxicab got to do with...”
“Put the keys back in the lock,” I said. “Sellers has a chance now to either cover himself with glory, or make himself the prize damn fool of the force.”
Sellers said, “I’m not making myself a prize damn fool of anything — not with the stuff I’ve got on this Billy Prue.”
“You haven’t got a damn thing on her except coincidence,” I went on. “Billy and I were having an affair before I left. She knew I was coming back. I couldn’t be with her in the apartment where she was living without having Pittman Rimley blow my guts out. She got this apartment in the Fulrose Apartments so we could be together. It was a love nest. That’s where I was last night, and why Bertha couldn’t find me.”
“You son-of-a-gun,” Bertha said half under her breath, and put the keys back in the ignition.