“Why even argue about it?” Barney said. “What can we lose? I’ll get Communications to put out a rider on that circular right away.” He moved off in the direction of his cubbyhole office.
“Well, so much for the lens,” Stan said. “What next, Pete?”
I got out my notebook, found the page listing the names of the people who had appeared in Fred Beaumont’s stag film, and handed it to him.
“How about calling BCI and the Information Unit on these?” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to catch up on a little paperwork.”
Stan got busy on the phone, and I settled down to the job of typing separate reports on all the people I had talked to since our arrival at Larry Yeager’s apartment.
“Mr. Selby?” a whiny voice said, so unexpectedly and so close to me that I whirled around in my chair, half angry at having been approached from behind in such a way.
The man who stood there, nervously toying with the brim of a brown straw hat, was somewhere in his middle forties, with iron-gray hair parted exactly in the middle, a sharp, narrow face, an almost lipless slit of a mouth, and a jutting, undershot jaw with a two-day growth of beard on it.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m Selby. What can I do for you?”
“I was a friend of Larry Yeager’s,” he said. “My name’s Grimes. Obie Grimes.”
I nodded toward the straight chair at the end of my desk. “Sit down, Mr. Grimes.”
He sat down carefully on the edge of the chair and put his hat in his lap. “When I saw in the paper what had happened to Larry, I knew I had to do something right away. I called Headquarters and asked them who was in charge of the case. They said you were.” He sat fingering the hat nervously for a moment. “I’ll put it straight out,” he said. “I’m scared to death, Mr. Selby. I’m so scared that I’m sick to my stomach.”
“Why?”
“Because I know who killed Larry,” he said, suddenly beginning to sweat. “But he made a mistake. When he—”
“Just a minute,” I said. “When who made a mistake?”
“Roy Cogan,” he said. “When he finds out he killed the wrong man—”
“What do you mean, wrong man?”
“I’m the one he meant to kill. Only he got it all wrong. When he finds out, he’ll kill me.”
“You mean Cogan shot Yeager, thinking it was you?”
“No. What I mean is, Cogan thought Yeager was the one that’d been messing around with his wife. But it wasn’t Yeager. It was me. Larry never even knew Cogan’s wife.”
“One moment, Mr. Grimes,” I said, noting that Stan was hanging up his phone. “Stan, this is Mr. Obie Grimes, Mr. Grimes, this is my partner, Detective Rayder.”
The, two men nodded to each other, and I said, “I wanted you to hear Mr. Grimes’ story, Stan. He thinks he knows who killed Larry Yeager.”
“I don’t just think it,” Grimes said in his whining voice. “I damn well know it.”
“Suppose you tell us about it,” I said.
“It’s just like I already told you,” he said. “Roy Cogan thought Larry was fooling around with Vernice — with Mrs. Cogan. But Larry’d never even laid eyes on her.”
“Then why did Cogan think that?” I asked.
“Because we’d been using Larry’s apartment. Vernice and me. I couldn’t take her to my place, on account of my landlady, and Vernice was afraid somebody’d see her if we went to a hotel.”
“You take Mrs. Cogan there pretty often?”
“Yes, quite a bit. I’d call Larry to see if he was going to be out. If he was, he’d leave the door on the latch. Vernice didn’t want to risk being seen on the street with anybody, so I’d meet her over there. But somebody must have seen her go in there. Somebody that knew her husband. Because the first thing Cogan did when he got out of jail was—”
“Hold it,” Stan said. “What was he in for?”
Grimes shuddered. “Manslaughter,” he said. “He beat a man to death with his fists. He was in Dannemora, but I didn’t know that, of course. Vernice told me he was down in South America, working for some oil company. The first I knew he wasn’t was when he busted in on me over at Larry’s apartment.”
“Tell us about it,” Stan said.
“Well, when Roy came back from Dannemora, and Vernice wasn’t home, he went straight over to Larry’s. Vernice said later she hadn’t expected him home for another six weeks. Anyhow, Cogan knew all about her going over there all the time, and that’s why he didn’t let her know exactly when he was getting out. He wanted to catch her by surprise.
“And he almost did catch her, too. I was already there at Larry’s, and Vernice was on her way over. In fact, she got there not more than five minutes after he left.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was sitting there waiting for Vernice, when all at once the door flies open and there stands Roy Cogan. I don’t know who he is then, of course; all I know is he’s the meanest looking one man I ever saw in my life, and one of the biggest. And besides that he’s got a gun in his hand.
“The first thing he says is, ‘You son of a bitch!’ and then he comes tearing over to me and grabs me by the shirt front and yanks me up out of the chair and says, ‘Damn you, Yeager, I’m going to blow your damn head off. Where’s Vernice?’ I was so scared I couldn’t even talk. I kept trying to tell him I wasn’t Larry, but I just couldn’t get the words out.
“And all the time I was trying to say something, he kept pushing that gun harder and harder into my belly and yelling for me to tell him where Vernice was. And then he yanks my arm up behind me and walks me all through the apartment in front of him, looking for Vernice.” He shook his head. “You talk about scared? Boy, I was so scared I—”
“We’ll concede, the point,” I said. “You were scared. Go oh, Mr. Grimes.”
“Well, so when he couldn’t find Vernice, he grabbed me by the shirt front again, and stuck the gun in my belly again, and stuck his face right up against mine and said if I didn’t, tell him where she was in five seconds, I was one dead son of a bitch.” He paused. “That’s when I got my voice back. I told him I was only using the apartment a couple of days while Larry was out of town. I said if he’d look at the stuff in my billfold, my driver’s license and all, he’d see I wasn’t Larry Yeager, I was Obie Grimes!” The man hesitated, embarrassed.
“And did he do that?” Stan asked.
“Yes, he did. I didn’t think he would, but he did. And then he shoved me halfway across the room and said he ought to have known Vernice wouldn’t fool around with anybody as ugly as me anyhow.”
“What’d Cogan do then, Mr. Grimes?” Stan asked.
“Well, mostly he just stood there and cussed about Vernice two-timing him while he was in Dannemora and all. And about how he was going to kill Yeager. Then all of a sudden he whirled around and tore out of the apartment, like he’d just thought of somewhere he had to be in a hell of a hurry.”
“And you say Mrs. Cogan arrived, shortly after that?” said.
“Not more than five minutes after.”
“How about Larry Yeager?” I asked. “What’d he have to say when you told him what had happened?”
“I never told him.”
“You didn’t warn him about the danger he was in?”
“I figured he was old enough to take care of himself.”
“What you really figured was that as long as Cogan was looking for Yeager, he wouldn’t be looking for you,” I said. “Isn’t that about the size of it, Mr. Grimes?”
“Anybody else would’ve done the same,” he said. “It’s every man for himself in this world, and you know it.”
“Where’s Vernice Cogan live?”
“The Dorsey. It’s an apartment house between 65th and 66th on Amsterdam, about halfway down the street on the east side.”