Barney said from the front seat: “He sounds to me like he’s all hopped up.”
Conger leaned across me. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“All hopped up?”
“Yeah. I chew seaweed, then I orbit. Take me to the nearest launching pad.”
Conger looked at me pityingly. I was a hophead. The pity was gradually displaced by doubt. He had begun to grasp that he was being ragged. Very suddenly, his face turned dusky red under the tan. He balled his right fist on his knee. I could see the packed muscles tighten under the shoulder of his blouse. I pulled in my chin and got ready to roll with the punch. But he didn’t hit me.
Under the circumstances, this made him a good cop. I almost began to like him, in spite of the handcuffs. I said:
“As I told you before, my name is Archer. I’m a licensed private detective, retired sergeant from the Long Beach P.D. The California Penal Code has a section on false arrest. Do you think you better take the jewelry off?”
Barney said from the front seat: “A poolroom lawyer, eh?”
Conger didn’t say anything. He sat in pained silence for what seemed a long time. The effort of thought did unexpected things to his heavy face. It seemed to alarm him, like a loud noise in the night.
The car left the county road and climbed Sable’s hill. A second sheriff’s car stood in front of the glass house. Sable climbed out, followed by a heavy-set man in mufti.
Sable looked pale and shaken. “You took your time about getting here.” Then he saw the handcuffs on my wrists. “For heaven’s sake!”
The heavy-set man stepped past him, and yanked the car door open. “What’s the trouble here?”
Conger’s confusion deepened. “No trouble, Sheriff. We picked up a suspect, claims he’s a private cop working for Mr. Sable.”
The sheriff turned to Sable. “This your man?”
“Of course.”
Conger was already removing the handcuffs, unobtrusively, as if perhaps I wouldn’t notice they’d ever been on my wrists. The back of Barney’s neck reddened. He didn’t turn around, even when I stepped out of the car.
The Sheriff gave me his hand. He had a calm and weathered face in which quick bright eyes moved with restless energy. “I’m Trask. I won’t apologize. We all make mistakes. Some of us more than others, eh, Conger?”
Conger didn’t reply. I said: “Now that we’ve had our fun, maybe you’d like to get on the radio with the description of my car and the man that took it.”
“What man are we talking about?” Trask said.
I told him, and added: “If you don’t mind my saying so, Sheriff, it might be a good idea for you to check with the Highway Patrol yourself. Our friend took off in the direction of San Francisco, but he may have circled back.”
“I’ll put out the word.”
Trask started toward his radio car. I held him for a minute: “One other thing. That Jaguar ought to be checked by an expert. It may be just another stolen car–”
“Yeah, let’s hope it isn’t.”
Chapter 6
THE DEAD MAN was lying where he had fallen, on a patch of blood-filmed grass, about ten feet from Sable’s front door. The lower part of his white jacket was red-stained. His upturned face was gray and impervious-looking, like the stone faces on tombs. A Sheriffs identification man was taking pictures of him with a tripod camera. He was a white-haired officer with a long inquisitive nose. I waited until he moved his camera to get another angle:
“Mind if I have a look at him?”
“Long as you don’t touch him. I’ll be through here in a minute.”
When he had finished his work, I leaned over the body for a closer look. There was a single deep wound in the abdomen. The right hand had cuts across the palm and inside the curled fingers. The knife that had done the damage, a bloody five-inch switch-blade, lay on the grass in the angle between the torso and the outstretched right arm.
I took hold of the hand: it was still warm and limp: and turned it over. The skin on the tattooed knuckles was torn, probably by teeth.
“He put up quite a struggle,” I said.
The identification officer hunkered down beside me. “Yeah. Be careful with those fingernails. There’s some kind of debris under ‘em, might be human skin. You notice the tattoo marks?”
“I’d have to be blind to miss them.”
“I mean these.” He took the hand away from me, and pointed out four dots arranged in a tiny rectangle between the first and second fingers. “Gang mark. He had it covered up later with a standard tattoo. A lot of old gang members do that. I see them on people we vag.”
“What kind of gang?”
“I don’t know. This is a Sac or Frisco gang. I’m no expert on the northern California insignia. I wonder if Lawyer Sable knew he had an old gang member working for him.”
“We could ask him.”
The front door was standing open. I walked in and found Sable in the front sitting-room. He raised a limp arm, and waved me into a chair:
“Sit down, Archer. I’m sorry about what happened. I can’t imagine what they thought they were pulling.”
“Eager-beavering. Forget it. We got off to a poor start, but the local boys seem to know what they’re doing.”
“I hope so,” he said, not very hopefully.
“What do you know about your late houseman?”
“Not a great deal, I’m afraid. He only worked for me for a few months. I hired him originally to look after my yacht. He lived aboard the yacht until I sold it. Then he moved up here. He had no place to go, and he didn’t ask for much. Peter wasn’t very competent indoors, as you may have noticed. But it’s hard for us to get help out in the country, and he was an obliging soul, so I let him stay on.”
“What sort of a background did he have?”
“I gathered he was pretty much of a floater. He mentioned various jobs he’d held: marine cook, longshoreman, house-painter.”
“How did you hire him? Through an employment agency?”
“No. I picked him up on the dock. I think he’d just come off a fishing-boat, a Monterey seiner. I was polishing brass, varnishing deck, and so on, and he offered to help me for a dollar an hour. He did a good day’s work, so I took him on. He never failed to do a good day’s work.”
A cleft of pain, like a knife-cut, had appeared between Sable’s eyebrows. I guessed that he had been fond of the dead man. I hesitated to ask my next question:
“Would you know if Culligan had a criminal record?”
The cleft in his brow deepened. “Good Lord, no. I trusted him with my boat and my house. What makes you ask such a question?”
“Two things mainly. He had a tattoo mark on his hand, four little black dots at the edge of the blue tattoo. Gangsters and drug addicts wear that kind of mark. Also, this has the look of a gang killing. The man who took my car is almost certainly the killer, and he has the earmarks of a pro.”
Sable looked down at the polished terrazzo as if at any moment it might break up under his feet. “You think Peter Culligan was involved with criminals?”
“Involved is putting it mildly. He’s dead.”
“I realize that,” he said rather shrilly.
“Did he seem nervous lately? Afraid of anything?”
“If he was, I never noticed. He didn’t talk about himself.”
“Did he have any visitors, before this last one?”
“Never. At least, not to my knowledge. He was a solitary person.”
“Could he have been using your place and his job here as a sort of hide-out?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”
An engine started up in front of the house. Sable rose and moved to the glass wall, parting the drapes. I looked out over his shoulder. A black panel truck rolled away from the house and started down the hill.