“Thank you,” said Aunt Lallie coldly. “I have never in my born days heard of anything more disgusting. I suppose you found that that old fool of a doctor should be committed to a mental institution?”
“We’re not ready with our findings yet,” lied Grundy. “By the way, Miss O’Shea, can you tell me the name of your brother’s lawyer?”
“His lawyer? Why do you want to know that?”
“Routine,” said the lieutenant, resorting to the magic word. “His name, Miss O’Shea?”
“It seems to me you’re being terribly evasive, Lieutenant.”
“So are you!”
Aunt Lallie chuckled unexpectedly, “Too-shee.”
“I can get the information the hard way, Miss O’Shea. Why not be cooperative and save us a little trouble?”
“I don’t see why I should. However, I suppose it can’t do any harm. Slater’s lawyer was Selwyn Fish.”
“Oh. Thank you very much.”
Grundy hung up and pulled his long nose longer. He might have known, he reflected bitterly, that an oddball client like Slater O’Shea would go for an oddball attorney like Selwyn Fish like a fly for an open garbage pail. Professionally, Fish gave off a mephitic aroma. Everything about him — his person, his office location, his methods — offended the nostrils. He was an expert in the art of marginal dealing, said art consisting in a talent for pursuing the questionable while remaining just inside the purlieus of the law. There was a certain poetic unity in the revelation that the victim of a fancy murderer had engaged the services of a shyster lawyer, but Lieutenant Grundy did not warm to it. Grundy’s lack of empathy with art in whatever form has already been remarked.
Consequently, he rose from his desk with a scowl; and he covered his head with a hat and left his office, Selwyn Fish-bound.
It was a short walk from police headquarters. The shyster’s office was located over a cheap-john clothing store in the seediest section of old Cibola City, on a crooked side street with gaps in its cobbles, like broken teeth. The two-story frame building leaned a little on its foundations, and its ancient dirt-colored walls always reminded Grundy of the scaling hide of a dying old dwarf elephant. It was twenty years past its just deserts of condemnation, a fate it successfully avoided by the fact that it was owned by the most influential member of the Cibola City Council.
The lieutenant pushed open the street door, which screamed feebly, and he groped through the sour dimness of a flight of narrow creaking stairs to the upper floor. Here, lurking along the grimy little hall, were grimy little offices, their half-pebbled glass doors announcing a chiropractor, the headquarters of a local sect known as The Sublime Order of the Sons of the Sun, a public stenographer, and finally — in scabby gilt lettering — Selwyn Fish, Attorney-at-Law.
Grundy walked in. He found himself in a sort of closet, presided over by a desiccated female with a new purple pimple on the end of her nose and a shroudlike black dress over her bones. All Grundy could think of was a disinterment order.
“Yes” this lady snapped. Then she noticed who it was, and she said, this time in a wary tone, “Yes?”
“Lieutenant Grundy, police,” Grundy said. “Mr. Fish in?”
“Police?” she repeated, as if she had not noticed. “Mr. Fish has a client with him. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No,” said Grundy; and he looked around for a chair. There was none except the chair occupied by the talking corpse. He leaned against the door and waited.
He waited twenty minutes. Then the inner door of the closet opened and a woman with dried-out yellow straw for hair and an improbable chest measurement appeared. At sight of Grundy she froze like an alley cat. Then she tiptoed across the closet floor, Grundy politely held the door open for her, and she clattered down the hall and down the stairs on her three-inch heels as if she expected him to come racing after her, gun in hand. Grundy knew her well. Her name was Big Suzy.
“Come in, Lieutenant, come in,” called a boomy voice; Grundy shut the hall door and went into the inner office. Selwyn Fish was on his feet behind his desk, showing his crystal teeth in what Grundy supposed was intended as a smile. “Sit down, sit down. What can I do for you?”
Grundy sat down in an armchair with a broken spring. He placed his hat precisely in his lap, taking his time about it; accommodated his lean buttocks to the lumpy seat; then deliberately sat back and looked Selwyn Fish over. Fish had been fashioned in the same remarkable workshop that had produced Twig O’Shea. He had a long thick torso set on short bandy legs, so that when he stood he looked like a dwarf and when he sat down — as he now rather uncertainly did — he seemed gigantic. Above the enormous shoulders wobbled a pin-head, without a hair on it, but whose contents, Grundy knew, were out of all proportion to its container. The whole effect was that of an android made up out of spare parts by a drunken workman of the year 2783. The lawyer’s only savory feature were his eyes — large, black, brilliantly beautiful, like some gorgeous flower growing in a swamp.
“I understand,” began Grundy, “that you were the late Slater O’Shea’s attorney, Mr. Fish.”
“Who told you that, Lieutenant?” asked the lawyer, cautiously.
“Miss Lallie O’Shea.”
“I see. Well, yes, I was old Slater’s lawyer. Quite a shock, his dying so suddenly.”
“He’s dead, there’s no question about that.”
“Why are you interested, Lieutenant? Did Slater break a law before he died? If so, you’re a bit late.”
“He didn’t break any law. Not that I know of.”
“Well, I’ll venture that he broke quite a few you don’t know of. He wasn’t greatly inhibited by scruples, the old rascal. Just ran down a bit in his later years.”
“He was a wealthy man, I understand.”
“To you and me, yes. Wealth is relative, isn’t it? Inherited it from the widow he married. Quite the lady’s man in his day. I suspect Slater made a good thing out of more than one gullible female.”
“You drew up his will?”
“That’s right. It’s in my safe there.”
“Funny sort of will, I understand.”
Fish said quickly, “Why do you say that? Who told you about it?”
“The family. They all seem to think it was a dirty trick for him to split his estate up among so many heirs.”
“Oh, that.” Selwyn Fish laughed, and he sounded like Basil Rathbone doing the Witch in Hansel and Gretel. “That was no will. It was a fraud.”
“What!” said Grundy.
“O’Shea had a fine time over it. A joke on his free-loading family, he called it. He had me draw it up, but he never signed it. It has no legal standing at all.”
“The hell you say.”
“Whatever else he may have been, old Slater was nobody’s fool. He didn’t want his money scattered among a lot of relatives he didn’t give a damn for and who certainly didn’t give a damn for him.”
Grundy was thinking acidly, This complicates an already complicated mess. “I take it O’Shea left another will? A secret one that’s legal? Who inherits, Fish?”
“Well, now,” demurred the Little Giant, making a steeple out of his conical fingers, “I don’t know that I can tell you that, Lieutenant. As a matter of ethical practice.” Grundy suppressed a snort. “I’d have to have the family’s consent.”
“Counselor, this is a police inquiry.”
“Why should the police be interested?” asked Fish innocently. “Is there something suspicious about Slater O’Shea’s death?”
Grundy briefly considered coming clean, then decided against it.
“It’s just something that’s come up,” he said. “Let’s not get technical, Counselor. I’ll know shortly, anyhow. How about it?”