“Okay. Next.”
“John Dutton was in Reno at the time. I checked his reservation on the plane. His ticket was used.”
“Yeah, but is there any chance someone else used it?”
“None at all. One of the stewardesses remembered him. She identified his picture. He was handing her a line and trying to date her up for later that evening.”
“Great, just great. Next.”
“Before we move on, I got some more on John Dutton.”
“What?”
“Well, there’s a little discrepancy. According to his secretary, he was staying at the Wilshire Hotel. However, the Wilshire has no record of him staying there.”
“Really…”
“Yeah, but before you get all excited, I think there’s an explanation. We know Johnny’s a playboy, and there’s every reason to believe he had something lined up in Reno he didn’t want anyone to know about.”
“Yeah, that checks,” Steve said. “No, it doesn’t either. If he had some girl waiting for him, what the hell would he be doing trying to date up the stewardess?”
Taylor shrugged. “Probably just running his game. It seems to be a compulsion with him. Anyway, I don’t think it’s any big deal. The stewardess he was hitting on saw a young woman run up and hug him when he got off the plane, so that’s probably all there was to it.”
“I suppose so.”
“Plus we have the confirmation that he did meet with his wife’s attorneys while he was out there.”
“All right, all right, I give up,” Steve said. “If he met with the attorneys… Hey, wait a minute.”
“What?”
“What about his wife? Did he meet with her too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out, will ya?”
Taylor looked puzzled. “Why? I mean, if the attorneys confirm the meeting.”
“They confirm him. What about her?”
“Her?”
“Yeah. Dutton’s wife.”
Taylor looked at him. “Are you kidding?”
“No. I’m not kidding. What I’ve been looking for all along is someone who hates Sheila Benton, who would have reason to want to frame her. I can’t think of anyone with a better reason than the present Mrs. John Dutton.”
Taylor shook his head. “I really think you’re grasping at straws.”
“I gotta grasp at something. What’s his wife’s name?”
Taylor consulted the pad. “Inez Dutton.”
“Fine. Check her out. Who’s next?”
“Carla Finley.”
“Ah, yes. Let’s not forget Carla Finley. What about her.”
Taylor grinned. “Carla Finley happens to have the best alibi of all. At the time of the murder, she was seen by at least fifty people. Naturally, none of them would be very eager to testify, even if they could be found.”
Steve grinned. “I’ll bet. Next.”
“Zambelli, as he said, was involved in a poker game at the time. There again, no one is particularly anxious to testify.”
“Which proves nothing. If he hit him, he’d have hired it out. Who’s next?”
Taylor wheeled around and put his feet up on his desk. “Now we come to the have-nots. Mrs. Rosenthal, the next-door neighbor, claims she was at the supermarket at the time.”
“For the whole hour?”
“So she says. She points to an eighty-nine-dollar, forty-seven-cent cash-register receipt and a stocked refrigerator and pantry as confirmation.”
“Wait a minute. How could she carry that much stuff?”
“She didn’t. She had it delivered. The delivery boy brought it around two-thirty that afternoon.”
“That sounds about right. But wait a minute. Wouldn’t he have run into the cops, then?”
“He did. Mrs. Rosenthal was out in the hallway giving the cops an earful when he arrived. At first the cops weren’t going to let him through, but then Mrs. Rosenthal raised merry hell about her frozen foods melting, and billing the cops for it, and suing the city, and finally they gave in just to shut her up.”
“So… her alibi is purely circumstantial.”
Taylor sighed. “Yes it is. Now, I know you asked me to do this, so I did it, and I have to tell you, if there’s any connection between Mrs. Rosenthal and Robert Greely, I can’t find it. And just between you and me, alibi or no alibi, I’d be willing to bet you my agency she didn’t do it. Mrs. Rosenthal isn’t the type of woman who would have known Robert Greely. Mrs. Rosenthal is the type of woman who accounts for the large number of bachelors in this country. In short, Mrs. Rosenthal is an obnoxious, gossipy, interfering, nosy pain in the ass.”
“All right,” Steve said, relenting. “Next.”
Taylor glanced at the sheet. “Teddy Baxter says he was at home. Whether he was is anybody’s guess. As a widower living alone, he has no corroborating witness.”
“Too bad.”
“Uncle Max has the same problem. The elevator man doesn’t remember seeing him go out, but of course there’s a back entrance, and a man on his way to a murder might be inclined to use it.”
“He certainly might. I’d give anything to be able to prove that he did.”
“You’d really like to pin it on him, wouldn’t you?”
“I certainly would.”
“I don’t blame you. With him convicted of murder, you could knock out the trust, get Sheila a few cool million, and cut yourself a nice slice of the pie.”
“Yeah. But that’s not why I want to do it.”
Taylor looked at him. “Oh? Well then, why?”
Steve shrugged. “I don’t know. He just really pisses me off.”
34
For once, Sheila Benton was subdued. She was doing her best to keep up a good front, but her perky facade was so transparent Steve Winslow could see right through it. She was really scared.
“Well,” she said, “how bad is it?”
“You want information or reassurance?”
“Information.”
“Well, the way it looks right now, the only way I could make any money on this case would be to bet on the prosecution.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“The trial really starts tomorrow?”
“Well, not the trial itself. Jury selection will probably take a couple of days. But we have to be in court, if that’s what you mean.”
“Couldn’t you have gotten a continuance?”
“Why would you want one? The longer we stall, the longer you have to stay in jail.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have pushed for bail.”
“Well, it probably wouldn’t have done any good. And the thing is, I have a big problem there. See, one of the main points in our defense is that you have no money, and therefore no one could have been blackmailing you. If I pushed for bail, I’d be in the position of arguing that on the one hand, you had enough collateral to post bail, but on the other, not enough to pay blackmail. That would seriously weaken our position.”
“What do you mean ‘our’? I’m the one in jail.”
“This is true. I feel it’s only fair to tell you, if you’d let Uncle Max handle this, Marston, Marston, and Cramden probably could have arranged bail.”
“What? Why?”
“They’re a highly reputable and conservative firm. Their assurances carry weight. Besides, you’d have Uncle Max and his millions behind you. It wouldn’t even be a question of a bail bond, then. Uncle Max would post cash bail for you.”
Sheila bit her lip. “I see.”
“But there’s other reasons for not getting a continuance. I want to rush this thing to trial before the D.A. finds out about your little habit of sticking drugs up your nose.”
Sheila started to protest, but stopped. It just wasn’t in her today. Instead she looked searchingly into his face.
“You don’t like me, do you?” she said.
Steve laughed. “Hey, come on.”
Sheila kept looking at him. “No, it’s true, isn’t it? You don’t like me. You think I’m just a rich bitch. And you don’t like me.”
Sheila looked down. Sighed. Looked up at him again. “Do you know what it’s like to be me? I don’t mean here, now, in jail. I mean me in general. Would you like to know what it’s like to be me?”