“Okay,” the D.A.’s man said. “Let’s get started.”
While we were screaming through the streets, making time behind the siren and red lights, the D.A.’s man did a lot more thinking. He said, “Now, listen, Lam, you know the position we’re in. We don’t want a false identification any more than you do.”
“Personally,” I said wearily, “I don’t give a damn. If she identifies me, I can spring an iron-clad alibi for the whole damn night. It’s just the principle of the thing, that’s all. If you’d played fair with me, I’d have come down and gone to the hotel with you in the morning. I didn’t like that bum’s rush, that’s all.”
“Well, you’re sure rusty when you get rusty. How the hell did you get that woman and the lawyer tipped off so they were waiting at the airport?”
I yawned.
“Any leak out of your place, Bill?” the investigator asked one of the officers.
The officer shook his head. “It looks fishy to me,” he said.
The D.A.’s investigator stared at me. “Say, listen, suppose you tell me about your alibi first. Maybe we could check on that, and we wouldn’t have to bother getting this girl up out of bed. Why didn’t you tell me about that sooner? I could have used a telephone and maybe saved you a trip down.”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think of it. The way you folks gave me the rush act — you know how it is. Try thinking where you were every minute of the time two or three nights ago, and—”
“Well, where were you? What’s the alibi?”
I shook my head. “We’re down here now,” I said, “and it’ll be easier to get this girl out of bed than to get all of my witnesses out of bed.”
“How many are there?”
“Three.”
He leaned over and whispered something to one of the officers. The officer shook his head dubiously.
Bertha Cool looked at me with her forehead puckered in lines of worry. The lawyer looked smugly down his nose as though he’d actually done something.
We hit the city, and went screaming through the streets. The intersections whizzed past. The distances of city blocks dissolved under the wheels of the speeding automobile. That siren certainly flattened out traffic. In no time at all we were at the door of the apartment house where Esther Clarde lived.
I said to Bertha Cool, “Come on. I want a witness.”
One of the officers stayed with the car. The other one came along with us. The lawyer also got in on the party. We sounded like an army on the march pounding up the stairs. It was a walk-up, and the D.A.’s investigator, putting me in the lead, kept prodding me from behind. I think he thought he was going to leave Bertha Cool behind, but he reckoned without Bertha. She hoisted her two hundred and fifty-odd pounds up those stairs, keeping her place in the procession.
We got up to the third floor. One of the officers pounded on Esther Clarde’s door. I heard her voice saying, “Who is it?” And the D.A.’s man said, “The law. Open up.”
There was silence for four or five seconds. I could hear Bertha’s breathing. Then Esther Clarde called out, “Well, what do you want?”
“We want to come in.”
“Why?”
“We want you to look at a man.”
“Why?”
“We want to see if you know him.”
“What does the law have to do with that?”
“Nuts. Open up. Let us in.”
“All right. Wait a minute. I’ll let you in.”
We waited. I lit a cigarette. Bertha Cool looked at me with a puzzled expression in her eyes. The lawyer looked as important as a rooster in a hen yard. The officers fidgeted, exchanged looks.
Esther Clarde opened the door. She had on that black velveteen housecoat with the zipper up the side that she’d worn the night before. Her eyes looked a little sleepy. She said, “Well, I guess it’s all right. Come on in and—” She saw me and jerked the door shut. She yawned and said, “Okay, what is it?”
The investigator from the D.A.’s office jerked his thumb at me. “Ever see this guy before?” he asked.
The lawyer corrected meticulously, “Any of these men before. After all, you should be fair—”
Esther Clarde shifted her expressionless eyes over my face, looked at the lawyer, pointed her finger at him, and said, “You mean this guy? Is he the one?”
The district attorney’s man took my shoulder and pushed me forward. “No, this guy. Is he the one who was in the hotel the night of the murder?”
I looked at Esther Clarde and didn’t move a muscle in my face. She looked at me, frowned a minute, and said, “Say, he does look something like the same guy.”
She squinted her eyes and looked me over, then she slowly shook her head. “Say,” she said to the officer, “don’t let anybody kid you. There’s a resemblance, all right.”
“Well, are you certain it isn’t the same one?”
“Listen,” she said, “I’ve never seen this guy in my life before, but, no fooling, he looks like the man who was in there. If you want to get a good description, you can take this man to work on. That fellow was just exactly the same height, and almost the same weight. He was a little bit broader-shouldered than this guy. His eyes weren’t quite the same color, and there’s a difference about his mouth, and the shape of the ears is a lot different. I notice people’s ears. It’s a hobby of mine. This man that was in the hotel, I remember now, didn’t have any lobes on his ears at all.”
“That’s a valuable point,” the officer said. “Why didn’t you tell us that before?”
“Never thought of it,” she said, “until I got to looking this man over. Say,” she asked me, “what’s your name?”
“Lam,” I said. “Donald Lam.”
“Well,” she said, “you sure do look a lot like the man who was in the hotel. Taken from a distance, a person might make a mistake.”
“But you’re sure?” the officer asked.
“Of course I’m sure. My gosh, I talked with the guy that was in there. He leaned up against the cigar counter and asked me questions. This man’s ears are different, and his mouth is different. He isn’t quite as heavy. I think he’s just about the same height. Where do you work, Lam?”
“I’m a private detective. This is Bertha Cool. I work for her. It’s B. Cool — Confidential Investigations.”
“Well, say,” she said, “you’d better keep out of the way of that old biddy who looked out of the room door on the fourth floor. She told me afterward that without her glasses all she could see was a blur, but she knew it was a young man, and—”
“Never mind that,” the officer interrupted.
Esther Clarde said casually, “Walter — that’s Walter Markham, the night clerk — didn’t get such a good look at him either. He was asking me only this morning about some things, trying to make sure about the color of the man’s eyes and hair. I guess I’m the only one that did get a good look at him.”
The D.A.’s investigator said, “Okay, that’s all.”
“How do I get back to where I was picked up?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Take a bus.”
“Who pays the fare?”
“You do.”
I said, “That’s not right.”
Esther Clarde said, “Well, I guess I’ve lost enough of my beauty sleep.” She took keys from her pocket, unlocked the spring latch on her door, and went in. We heard the bolt turning on the inside.
The whole procession trooped down the stairs. Bertha Cool was in the rear. Out on the sidewalk, I said, “Now listen, I was picked up several hundred miles from here. It cost me money to get there and—”
The officers opened the door of the police car. The district attorney’s investigator piled in. The door slammed. The car shot smoothly away from the curb and left us standing there.