Mason raised his eyebrows.
Tragg said, “They’re not nice to look at. The gun is held right against the head. The bullet goes in and so do the gases from the gun. When the gases get inside the head, they keep on expanding.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said, “but don’t torture yourself, Lieutenant.”
“Hell, I can’t get over it,” Tragg said bitterly. “You should have talked with the guy’s wife, and his two kids, a couple of fine upstanding children who looked like their father with steady, honest blue eyes. The older one was old enough to know what had happened. The younger one wasn’t.”
“And the wife?” Della Street asked.
Tragg looked at her for a moment, then tightened his lips and said, “She knew what had happened, all right... A darned nice girl. She and Bob Claremont had been in love for years, but the war came along and he went overseas. You know what it means, praying for someone every night, looking for a letter from him in the mail, dreading the delivery of a telegram, hating to hear the phone ring... All right, she went through that, so did a lot of other people. That’s war. Her man came back to her. Lots of men didn’t come back.
“She was lucky that far. He came back on leave. They got married. He never did see his son until the war was over. The boy was over a year old then... Then Bob started studying, studying so he’d be a credit to the profession. He had an idea law enforcement was a career. Used to claim that the scientific investigator would be as important in the public eye as the lawyer or the doctor. Spent all of the money he could get hold of buying books on crime detection, criminology, legal medicine, and that sort of stuff.”
“You said it was a contact wound?” Mason said.
“One of them was. The others weren’t. It was the contact wound that caused death. Then they went on and emptied the gun into him just to make sure. Or else because one of the guys was trigger-happy and liked to hear the bullets thud.”
“Then what happened?” Mason asked.
“Then,” Tragg said, “they dumped him out.”
“Right where he was shot?” Mason asked.
“Nobody knows where he was shot,” Tragg said. “Apparently it was in a speeding car. They dumped him. They didn’t even bother to stop the car — just opened the door and let him hit the pavement and roll over and over like a sack of meal, leaving little splotches of blood every time he hit. The car kept on going.”
Tragg puffed thoughtfully at his cigar for a moment, then said, “We saved the bullets, of course... Now here’s a funny one. We’ve got a man in Ballistics who has been collecting a bank of specimen bullets. Every cop has to fire a bullet from his gun into a tube of cotton waste. The bullets are saved and filed.
“So we had test bullets from Bob Claremont’s gun. We compared them with the fatal bullets. They matched. Bob had been shot six times with his own gun.”
“Well?” Mason asked.
Tragg shook his head. “It couldn’t have happened that way. Bob Claremont wouldn’t have knuckled under and let them take his gun. That’s why I was telling you about cops, Mason. Even if there’s only one chance in a million, a cop has to take it. If there’s no chance at all, a cop goes out fighting — Bob Claremont’s kind of cop.
“They wouldn’t have found six shells to have shot at him from his own gun. He’d have fired a shot or two — if he’d stopped an auto to shake it down.”
“What about his gun?” Mason asked.
“It never showed up. That’s strange. Ordinarily they’d have tossed the gun out before they’d gone a hundred yards. Remember the gun was empty. It was an officer’s gun and it was hot.”
“You searched, of course?”
“Searched?” Tragg said. “We combed the sides of that road — every inch of it. Then we got mine detectors and looked around through the tangled weeds.”
“And found nothing?”
“Not a thing.”
“I presume,” Mason said, “you’re telling me the story for some particular reason?”
“For a particular reason,” Tragg said. “Bob Claremont was murdered September seventeenth — a year ago... Believe me, Mason, we turned everything upside down. We had one suspect.”
“Who?” Mason asked.
Tragg hesitated.
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Mason said. “I was just trying to get a picture of the case.”
“No, I’ll tell you,” Tragg said. “I’m putting all the cards on the table, because this may be awfully damn important, Mason. The suspect was a fellow by the name of Sedgwick. His name was Thomas E. Sedgwick, and he was making book. Claremont was on to him. Claremont was hoping to get the goods on him, and run him in. Claremont hadn’t learned all of the angles yet. That is, he knew them but he didn’t want to use them. He wouldn’t work through stoolies. He wanted to get evidence himself. He was working on Sedgwick at the time he was bumped off.
“We wanted to round Sedgwick up for questioning on the murder, not that we had anything specifically on him, but we knew that Claremont was working on him.”
“Go ahead.”
“And,” Tragg said, “we couldn’t find Sedgwick. He had vanished, disappeared, swallowed his tail, gone. We’d like very, very much to know where Thomas E. Sedgwick is.”
“You didn’t have anything else on him,” Mason asked, “only the fact that this officer had been working on Sedgwick...?”
“Sedgwick had a cigar counter,” Tragg said. “He was doing a pretty good business. He was doing a damned good business, when you put everything together. And the night Claremont was killed, Sedgwick left town. The next day there was a new chap in the cigar counter. Said that Sedgwick had sold out to him for a thousand dollars, and had a bill of sale to prove it. Said that he had been negotiating with Sedgwick for a purchase for a week or ten days, that at two o’clock in the morning Sedgwick had called him on the phone, told him that if he wanted to put up a thousand dollars in spot cash, the cigar business was for sale, lock, stock and barrel, lease, good will, cigars on hand, inventory, everything.
“The fellow jumped at the chance. Sedgwick wouldn’t take his personal check. He had to have cash. The guy finally raised the cash, and about four o’clock in the morning the deal was consummated. Sedgwick signed the bill of sale in front of witnesses, and that was the last anyone has ever seen of Thomas E. Sedgwick. Needless to say, the guy who bought the place sold cigars, that was all; just cigars. It was a good location. He sold cigars and he kept his nose clean. If he’d ever given us a chance to take him down to headquarters the boys would have worked him over. He never gave anybody the chance. We tried everything on him. We tried stoolies. We tried spotters. We tried everything we could think of. Hell, the guy was clean.”
“What happened to him?” Mason asked.
“He stuck around the place for about two months, then he sold it out to another guy who had a police record. That guy started making book and we flattened him so damn fast he never knew what hit him.”
“But no Sedgwick?”
“No Sedgwick.”
“I suppose this is leading up to something,” Mason said.
“Last night,” Tragg said, “there was this mix-up down at Alburg’s place. A waitress got terrified and ran out through the back alley. Someone threw a gun on her. She didn’t react the way the gunman probably expected she would act. She didn’t get in the car. She screamed and made a dash for the mouth of the alley.
“Sometimes things are funny that way. A man has a gun and it’s a symbol of power. The average person is deathly afraid of a gun. He looks down the big black hole and sees the wicked little bullets grouped around the cylinder, and his knees buckle... The more you know about guns the more you realize that it isn’t the gun that’s dangerous — it’s the man behind it. Some men can shoot a gun, some men can’t. A few men who pack rods couldn’t hit a man-sized target at a distance of fifteen feet, without stopping to take careful aim, and even then they might miss. Shooting a gun just by the feel of the weapon takes a little practice.”