I looked over at Holding. His face had gone blank and he had begun to fidget with the pen tray.
“It shouldn’t be difficult to find out if she had a boy friend,” I said.
“Hahn may know something.” Rankin looked at his watch. “I guess I’d better go over to the morgue. He should be down any moment now.” He looked at Holding. “Okay?”
“Oh, sure,” Holding said.
I made a move to get up, but Holding lifted his hand.
“I’d like to run over your statement just once more, Mr. Brandon. You get off, Lieutenant.”
Rankin got to his feet, nodded to me, and went out.
There was a long pause after he had shut the door, then Holding pulled a pipe from his pocket and began to fill it.
I took that as a signal that we were going to be chummy and I fetched out my pack of Luckies and lit one.
“You had a talk with Captain Katchen this morning?” Holding said, not looking at me.
“You might call it that. It was a little one sided, but I managed to sound off in the end. I collected a slap in the face for my trouble, but I’m not complaining.”
“Something was said about Lee Creedy,” Holding said, looking up.
“Something was said about Lee Creedy,” I said, watching him.
His small hard eyes searched my face.
“You mentioned his name to Katchen?”
“I did.”
“You are under the impression that Creedy hired Sheppey to do a job?”
“Yes.”
Holding lit his pipe, frowned, shifted in his chair and puffed smoke.
“You have no proof of that?”
“Sheppey wrote Creedy’s name on his blotter while he was talking on the telephone. I know the man he was talking to hired him to come down here. Sheppey had a habit of writing on his blotter. I can’t see why he should have written down Creedy’s name unless Creedy was the man who hired him.”
“Unless someone wanted Sheppey to work on a job connected with Creedy. I mean Sheppey’s client could have asked him to get information about Creedy. Thought of that?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t quite fall into line.”
I went on to tell him how I had telephoned Creedy’s residence and had asked for an appointment, how I had been taken in to see Creedy over the heads of six business men, how I had been threatened and how Fulton and I had been attacked by Hertz.
Holding listened to all this, puffing away at his pipe, his face expressionless.
“It seems to me that Creedy hired Sheppey, and now Sheppey has been murdered, Creedy is falling over backwards to hush up the fact that he did hire him,” I concluded.
Holding brooded for a moment, then said, “I take it you’re pretty anxious to get Sheppey’s murder cleared up?”
I stared at him.
“Well, of course.”
“When I heard you had come down here and had talked to Katchen,” Holding said, “I called the District Attorney’s office at San Francisco and made some inquiries about you. It seems your agency has been pretty co-operative in the past and you have a high rating in Frisco. You were also on the staff of the D.A.’s office there for some years and you did a pretty good job.”
I grinned.
“I bet the D.A. didn’t tell you that.”
Holding allowed himself a small smile. It didn’t do much to ease the ferrety expression on his face.
“I spoke to my opposite number, the A.D.A. He said your rating for insubordination was high, but, given a free hand, you were a good man on an investigation.”
“He told you that because he still owes me ten bucks,” I said, wondering where all this was leading to.
“How would you like to have a crack at solving the Sheppey murder?”
“I’m working on it now: opposition or no opposition.”
Holding nodded.
“But you won’t get far without some form of protection.”
“I know that. Protection is something I’m a little short of right now.”
“It can be arranged.” He rubbed his lean jaw. “Up to a point that is: it’s not absolutely guaranteed.”
“If it will hold Katchen off my neck, I’ll take care of Hertz.”
“Katchen can be fixed. You may find Hertz hard to handle. You don’t want to under-estimate him.”
“I won’t.”
Holding brooded some more, then said, “Well, I guess that’s about it, Mr. Brandon. It’s getting late. It’s time I was in bed.”
I shook my head at him.
“Why the free hand? What chestnut am I pulling out of the fire for you?”
I saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall, but otherwise his face remained impassive.
“It’s not a question of that,” he said carefully. “It seems to me that since your partner has been murdered and you are in the line of business, you would want to make a separate investigation.”
“You’ll have to do better than that if you want me to play,” I said, putting an edge to my voice.
He went back to fidgeting with the pen tray, then, after taking time to find the right words, he said, “I’m not entirely convinced this is a job for the police. It could be, of course. If this girl was associated with a thug and if he found Sheppey was fooling around with her, and killed them both, then it is something the police could handle. But if it goes deeper than that, if it involves Creedy, then we’re not going to make much progress.”
“And that would worry you?”
He looked sharply at me.
“All right: I’ll put the cards on the table. It’ll be difficult for you to understand the position really unless I do.”
“Let’s have all the cards in view,” I said. “Including the one you have up your sleeve.”
He let that one ride.
“Within the next few weeks the Administration is coming up for a new term,” he said, picking his words as if they were as fragile as eggshells. “The opposition is naturally looking for an opportunity to loosen the grip Creedy has on this town. If Creedy is involved in some way in Sheppey’s murder, it may give the opposition the opportunity it is looking for. The Administration isn’t particularly popular, but it is extremely powerful. At the moment it is balanced on a razor’s edge. Any scandal that could be used on the front page of the opposition newspapers might turn the trick.”
“I take it, Mr. Holding, that you are a member of the opposition?”
“I believe in justice and freedom,” he said, taking the pipe out of his rat-trap of a mouth and looking at it as if he were surprised to find it still alight.
“Pretty praiseworthy, Mr. Holding,” I said. “If the opposition gets into power, you would probably become the new District Attorney?”
That made his Adam’s apple do a hand spring. He looked at me from over the top of his glasses, scratched the lobe of his right ear, hesitated about looking indignant, then relaxed completely with a wide, boyish smile that was as false as a chorus girl’s eyelashes.
“I suppose I would, but that, of course, has nothing to do with the issue, nothing at all.”
“Who’s gunning for Creedy?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. This is a straight fight between the Creedy Administration and Judge Harrison, who is going to the poll on a Reform ticket.”
“And this town could do with a little reforming?”
“It certainly could.”
“Where does Rankin figure in all this?”
“There isn’t a great deal Rankin can do if this case develops along the lines that would be detrimental to the Administration,” Holding said. “The Commissioner wouldn’t encourage an investigation that might embarrass Creedy. He and Creedy are good friends.”
“And, of course, Rankin is hoping to become Captain and needs to keep his nose clean,” I said. As Holding didn’t have any remarks to make on that one, I went on, “So no one is sticking his neck out except me, is that it?”