"That’s right, Mr. Little. We’ll want to get all this down in a formal statement."
"Me, killing somebody. I still can’t believe it," said Little. "All right, I know you got to. I better call the boss to come in. That snotnosed kid can’t fill a tank without falling over his own feet."
What with one thing and another, not much had been done about Rodrigo Peralta, the addict found knifed on Monday night. Landers had started out to do some legwork on it, had talked to Walter Pepple and failed to find the other two tenants at home. They had turned up a record for Peralta, a petty pedigree of narco possession and B. and E., and that had given them the address of a relative, an uncle, Rubio Gonsalves. Glasser hadn’t found him yesterday, so now Landers tried the address again, down on Santa Barbara, and found him home. He was sitting in his single room, clad in underwear and slacks, reading a Spanish-language newspaper. He listened to Landers impassively and said, "The boy is dead? Let God judge him. He was nothing to me any more."
"You don’t know who any of his friends were?"
" No se. Nor I did not care. He had chosen his own road." He shrugged massively and picked up his paper again.
It didn’t seem to be the best moment to tell him that the coroner’s office would come down on him to pay for the funeral. Landers went downstairs again, into the dirty, dingy city street where refuse blew down the sidewalks and collected in the gutter, to where he’d left the Corvair down the block. It had begun to rain again, rather hard. He got into the car, and the engine was dead, wouldn’t even try to turn over. Landers said a few things, got out and looked under the hood, decided it was hopeless to do anything in the rain. He found a public phone, called the auto club and huddled in the overhang of a building for thirty minutes until the tow truck came.
The driver had a look at the Corvair’s innards, slammed the hood and said, "She’ll have to go in, mister. She’s about had it. Good little car, but a car’s only good for so many miles, you know. You need practically everything new. Oh, sure, a garage can fix her up, but it’ll only be a question of time before she goes out again."
Landers said a few more things. "Well, tow it in to the agency," he said. "I’ll talk to them about it."
He called a cab and got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon.
Hackett had just got back to the office at five o’clock, after getting the formal statement from Nygard and starting the machinery on the warrant. It was pouring rain outside, and he was wet. He found Landers blowing off steam about his car to Glasser, who said they’d all been telling him to trade that thing in for a year.
"Phil thinks it’s so funny," said Landers. "Saying I’ll have to break down and buy a new one, and my God, it isn’t that I’m stingy, but the payments-"
"Get a Gremlin," said Glasser. "You’ll get damn good mileage."
"I know, I know, I’ve driven Phil’s."
"Oh, Sergeant Hackett! Listen, I gotta make you believe me this time, they’re-"
"Oh, for the love of God!" said Hackett disgustedly. Mr. Yeager had plunged through the doorway with Sergeant Lake in pursuit.
"You’ve gotta listen, they’re gonna do it tonight, they’re gonna murder that woman! I heard ’em planning just how to do it, they’re gonna hit her on the head and put her in the bathtub and make it look like an accident, like she slipped and fell, and-"
"Now, Mr. Yeager," said Hackett. "If you’re going to tell me you were in the hall again and the door was open, don’t. Why don’t you just try to forget about it-"
"-And the girl’s going off after she’s helped him, see, nobody knows he’s got a girl, his ma, Mis’ Lampert, she’s kind of jealous of him-and then he’l1 pretend to find her and act all sorry and cry and carry on-"
"Now listen, Mr. Yeager. Just calm down. Try to explain to me just how you heard all this. You know you can’t. You’re just imagining-"
Yeager took a step back, licking his lips and looking in despair between Hackett and Lake. Then he said sullenly, "Oh, hell. Well-well, if you gotta know, I-I got the place bugged."
"What?" said Hackett. Landers laughed.
"I-well, hell, I don’t have much to do, nights," said Yeager weakly. "I took a course in electronics once. I-I did it first, we had a couple sets of newlyweds in the place-" Lake and Glasser began to laugh helplessly. "And it was kind of interesting, and-well-well," said Yeager half defensively, "it was, you know, kind of like picking a channel on TV-"
"What the hell’s going on here?" asked Mendoza, coming across the hall to find all his available staff convulsed with merriment and Yeager standing in the middle looking miserable.
Hackett pulled himself together and told him, and Mendoza began to laugh too. "It’s not so funny!" said Yeager. "It was-you coulda knocked me over, I heard ’em talk about it the first time-and damn it, I tried to get you to believe me, so you’d stop ’em, but you wouldn’t pay no attention! And I knew I hadda do something, so I-I got all the rest of it down on tape. The other times they talked." He reached into his pocket and produced three cheap sixty-minute tape cassettes. "Now you gotta believe it!"
"Well, I will be Goddamned!" said Hackett. "If this isn’t one for the books-you mean that innocent-looking fellow is really-Damnation, and we’ll have to do something about it." He looked at his watch. "I’d better call Angel. Luis?"
"I wouldn’t miss hearing those tapes for a million bucks," Mendoza said, grinning.
The tapes would make excellent evidence; this would be one trial that wouldn’t cost much time or money. They went out with Piggott and Schenke to surprise the quarry, and they did. Mendoza had laughed over Mr. Yeager’s homemade entertainment; and in the course of twenty-six years at this sordid job, he had seen violence and blood, tragedy and death, brutality and mayhem of all sorts, but he wouldn’t soon forget the look on Mrs. Lampert’s face as she listened to what they knew, how they knew it. Looking from them to her son-a little too good-looking, Edward Lampert, with a weak chin and pale eyes-she aged twenty years in a moment. Expectably, he blustered and was sullen in turns, but finally parted with the girl’s name, Diane Ashley, and her address. Hackett went to add her to the party, and collected some fingernail scratches to match Piggott’s.
They ended up at the jail at eleven o’clock, booking them in.