"But..." I protested.
"But you, you bastard, you've got me all crazied up again and I'm thinking I'm wrong even when I know I'm right! Why don't you drop dead!"
It had been a long time since I had seen Pat like that. I grinned at him and blew a wreath of smoke around his head. The draft made a halo of it and I said, "The smoke it encircled his head like a wreath."
"What?"
"Excerpt from the 'Night Before Christmas.' You probably can't go back that far."
Pat ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. "You give me the pip. Maybe I'm nuts. What makes me get all excited about things like this? Ordinarily I'm cool, calm and collected. I run my office with precision and great efficiency, then you come along and I get like a rookie on his first beat with a gang war going on in the back alleys."
I shoved the deck of Luckies towards him and he stuck one in his mouth. When I thumbed a match and lit him I said very quietly, "Pat, offices like yours are great things. You take one lousy little clue and make a case out of it and somebody pays society for a misdeed. Sure, you serve justice. You do more good than a million guys working separately, but there's one thing you miss."
"Tell me what." He was getting sarcastic again.
"The excitement of the chase, Pat. The thrill of running something down and pumping a slug into it. Right now you are so damn fond of indisputable proof you can't figure an angle anymore. Since when can't murder be made to look like an accident?"
"She was hit by the car, Mike. The driver admits he hit somebody but he was too fuzzy to remember who. The lab found traces on the car. They found traces on her. We had witnesses who saw her staggering down the street dead drunk a little while before she got it. The guy that hit her is ordinarily an upstanding citizen with no underworld connections. We checked."
I nodded. "Yet now you're beginning to entertain doubts. Right?"
He said something obscene.
"Right is right! Entertain is no word for it. You have me refuting everything I ever learned and I'll wind up being a stupe. Do you know why?"
"Yeah, but tell me again, Pat."
This time he leaned on the table and practically hissed through his teeth. "Because right in here"--he tapped the side of his head--"you're a sharp article. You could be a good crook, but you're a better cop. You get something and hang on to it longer than anybody else and make something of it. You got a brain and the sense to use it and you have something I haven't got which is a feeling for things. Damn it, I'd like to poke you in the ear."
"Stop hating yourself. You were going to tell me something. Who's behind the racket?"
"I wish I knew. All I know is a few names of the guys we suspect of having a hand in it."
"They'll do."
"Oh, no! First let's hear what you have. Remember, please, that I'm the one who should know things. Of all the crazy things that happen, imagine a cop and a private eye chumming up like we do. Give out, Mike, sing me a song."
It was going to take a while, so I ordered some more coffee for us both, and when it came I started at the beginning and didn't stop until I brought Pat up to date--all but a few of the more intimate details. He didn't bother to jot anything down; his mind was filing away each item for future reference and I could see him laying the facts side by side, trying to make something of them.
When I finished he put a cigarette in his mouth and sat back thinking. When he fully absorbed everything, he said, "You have a nice accumulation of events, Mike. Now theorize."
"I can't," I told him. "There's no place to start."
"Start with Red."
"She was killed. That means she was killed for a reason."
"The same reason she had for being in the racket?"
"Maybe... or maybe the reason developed afterwards. What would a girl in her position have that would make it worthwhile being killed. Blackmail? I've thought of that, but it doesn't fit. Who would take her word in court? Maybe she had proof of someone's misconduct, but I doubt it. That's a tough racket and she wasn't mingling with anybody who counted. If she was playing against small stuff that same small stuff was tough enough to take care of her clean and simple without a lot of dummying. I have that feeling, as you call it, that the reason was a big one. I'm mad at somebody, Pat, and that person is going to answer to me for her death."
"Find the motive and you find the murderer," Pat said. "What about this Feeney Last character?"
"To me he looks like a punk. When he hit the city he went off on a spree and wound up in Red's neighborhood. He's the kind of a guy that would pull off a blackmail stunt all right. He said Red swiped his pay-off material and as long as she was what she was I wouldn't put it past her. But there's always another angle to that. He could have lost it, or whoever was being blackmailed paid off to see that it was destroyed. If Red was paid enough she might have lifted it from him while he was with her."
"Could he have killed her?"
"Sure, but not with any fancy trimmings. Feeney's no artist. He likes knives and guns. The only trouble is... he doesn't seem to expect to run into any opposition. No, Feeney didn't kill her. If he did, Red would have died quick and messy."
Pat dragged on the cigarette again. "What about your client, Mike?"
"Berin-Grotin? Hell, he couldn't have a hangnail without the papers knowing about it. He's from another generation, Pat. Money, position, good manners... everything you could expect of a gentleman of the old school. He's fiercely proud of his name, you know... constantly alert that nothing should cloud the escutcheon of his family. The old boy's no fool, either. He wanted protection so he hired Feeney, but he was ready to get rid of him as soon as the jerk got himself in trouble. It seemed to me that he was a little leery of Feeney, anyway. I got the impression that he was happy over what had happened up there in the cemetery."
"Which brings us to Lola. What there?"
"Nothing. She knew Red."
"Come on, Mike, she wasn't a complete nonentity, was she?"
"You can say that again." I let out a little laugh. "Marvellous personality, Pat. A body that'd make your hair stand on end. Lola's another of the decent kids you were speaking about, that went wrong. Only this one wised up in time."
"O.K., then let's go back a step. You told me the guy in the hash house and that Cobbie Bennett were afraid of something. Think around that."
"It doesn't think right, Pat. Shorty was a con and he was more than anxious to stay away from murder. Cobbie's in a racket where nothing looks good except dough. Anything could scare him. Both those guys scare too damn easily, that's why I can't attach too much significance to either one. I've thought it over a dozen times and that's how it shapes up."
Pat grunted, and I could feel his mind working it over, sorting and filing, trying for an answer. When none came he shrugged his shoulders and said, "The guys I know who may be part of the game are small fry. They run errands and do the legwork. I've made my own guesses before this, but I won't pass them on to you, for if I do you'll go hog wild and get me in a jam. Yourself, too, and like I said, they were only guesses with nothing to back them up."
"You usually guess pretty good, Pat. I'll take them."
"Yeah, but you're not going to get them. But I will do this: I'll see if I can make more out of it than guesses. We have ways of finding out, but I don't want to scare off the game."
"Good deal! Between the two of us we ought to make something of it."
Pat snubbed the butt out and stared into the ashtray. "Now for the sixty-four dollar question, Mike. You got me into this, so what do you expect me to do?"
"You got men at your fingertips. Let them scout around. Let them rake in the details. Work at it like it was a murder and something will show up. Details are what we need."