Palmer Haas slid suddenly into the booth. “Six guys at the bar gave me the jolly greeting when I was on my way out, Johnny. It gave me that good old warm glow. I’m a real celebrity. What’s really on your mind?”
“I’m going to give you all the funny pieces out of the file. If it ever comes to trial, you might dig up most of them beforehand, but not all. After you get these pieces, then I ask a favor. When you say no, you’ve gotten all our ammunition free.”
“Interesting risk.”
“First item: She said she’d never been to those Mooney cottages before. She said she had a hard time finding them, a week ago tonight. We took some sneak shots of Harkinson. I assembled a set of ten similar photos, ten women, blonde, about the same age bracket. Staniker had been there one night back in April, as G. Stanley from Tampa. I sent Mercer and Tuck to see that little hump-back lady that operates the place, on the very slim chance maybe Crissy had been with him and the dwarf lady had a glimpse of her. She said she couldn’t remember any woman, and then when she went through the pictures she got a reaction to the Harkinson woman. She got flustered. She went into some kind of a wild story about remembering an outside screen wasn’t hooked on the cottage they were in, and going to fix it so the wind wouldn’t blow it off, and seeing the two of them in there. It turns out she’s a peeper, and goes scooting around in the night with her little aluminum kitchen ladder. She nailed the ID a little more solid by describing the car the blonde arrived in, a little white foreign convertible, parked beside Staniker’s Olds in front of the place. She watched some pretty strenuous fun and games, apparently. That was at about the same time, according to Crissy, she was breaking up forever with Staniker. And it means she lied about never having been there before. Conclusion: They were setting up a hideout for Staniker after he got back from the Islands.
“Second item: She claims she did not tell the Akard boy where Staniker was. She guesses he probably followed her. Yet on that same Friday night Sam Boylston tried to follow her, and she pulled a very smart trick, exactly the same trick Staniker pulled on Raoul Kelly when he tried to tail Staniker that same day.”
Palmer Haas asked what ruse was used, and Lobwohl described it. “Nothing much yet,” Haas said. “Keep going.”
John Lobwohl recounted the deft way Crissy had tricked Kindler and Scheff into letting her dispose of a bundle of something or other when they drove her in. “We phoned Kelly in Texas,” Lobwohl said, “and he questioned his girl. As far as the maid knows, Crissy never bought yard goods, never used a dressmaker. We combed that shopping center and came up empty. Conclusion: She wanted to get rid of something, and improvised a good story and dropped the bundle in a trash can, and it is long gone.”
“What would have been in it?”
“Something worth getting rid of with as much cold nerve as a burglar.” With his hands he showed the dimensions of the bundle as Kindler and Scheff had described it.
“Anything else?”
“Yes. And it doesn’t make any sense either. Mercer and Tuck searched the Akard boy’s room. There was a dufflebag in the back of his closet, packed for a trip. They found a duplicate of the note found in his pocket. It was under the blotter on his desk in his bedroom. It was almost identical to the note on the body. There was one change. The note on the body said at the end, ‘I have to get everything straightened out in my head before I do something real crazy.’ The one in the room said ‘things’ instead of ‘everything’.”
“As if one was a first draft?”
“Which one?”
Haas drained the stein and set it down. “The trouble with this, beginning to end, the ones you want to ask questions, they just aren’t around any more. Questions from your point of view, of course. My job is to defend my client to the best of my ability.”
“You know what’s holding her together, don’t you?”
“How do you mean, Johnny?”
“All that pie in the sky. She hangs on through this and she’ll never have any pain again. As Boylston said this morning, now that we know Staniker didn’t have the use of the Muñequita, the places where he could have hidden the money narrows down.”
“What direction are you going?”
“There’s an interrogation room over at Female Detention. You said this morning, Palmy, that we by God better have charges to file or we better leave your client alone. You said you were all through advising her to cooperate in any way. You said you wouldn’t let your client be used for fishing expeditions.”
“And I said it loud.”
“I would like to have you bring her in again, smuggle her in through the back way and up to Room C, third floor, east wing. Very routine stuff. All very polite. You and me, two of my people, recording clerks, and Sam Boylston if you agree.”
“I haven’t agreed to any part of it.”
“I ask permission to have her taken down to the little ID section downstairs for a photograph. Nothing to be construed as being in any way a charge against her. I explain that we are being swamped by crazies who claim to have seen her in a hundred different places, and this will just help weed out the ones who are sick-minded.”
“And I just sit there and say, go ahead, Johnny, old buddy.”
“It just happens that the matron who’ll take her down there belongs to the same church as the Akards. She’s called Little Annie. She’s been teamed with another matron named Norstund for a couple of years. There will be a little misunderstanding.”
“Now come on, Captain!”
“I swear to you on my word of honor that there will be no brutality. Those two are competent people. They will pay absolutely no attention to anything she says. They’ll probably be talking to each other about their favorite soap opera. If Harkinson puts up a fight, they’ll subdue her without hurting her or marking her. They’ll merely put her through the complete physical search routine, from hair roots to rubber gloves, that they give suspected female pushers. They’ll scrub her down in a disinfectant shower, put her in gray twill and paper slippers and bring her back up to Room C.”
“Have you lost your mind, Lobwohl?”
“This isn’t social register goods, Palmy. This isn’t a first horrid contact with ugly reality. But it’s been a long time for her. A long, lush time. Maybe she’s forgotten what that special kind of indignity feels like.”
“How can I justify letting a client in for...”
“Why do you have to? You don’t even know there’s going to be a little misunderstanding. The basic request is reasonable.”
“Just a lousy moralistic Christer cop after all.”
“But here is what I lay on the line. So you can get your kicks, Counsellor. If Lady Harkinson rides with it, you can cover yourself by making an official complaint. Then, you see, I can’t stay out of it and let the two matrons take the grief. I stand up at the hearing and say they did it on my orders.”
“Do you know what that might mean?”
“I do indeed.”
“Johnny, you want this one real bad, I guess.”
“This bad. If I can’t nail this one, I think I will stop giving much of a damn about any of them from now on.”
“She’s tough. She’s hard as stones, Captain Johnny. I tell you what. I’ll bring her in. I’ll have her there at four. A picture? I can advise her to cooperate. But forget all this other stuff. Okay?”
Lobwohl said slowly, “You couldn’t bring her in if you thought I was fool enough to try anything as stupid as that. You wouldn’t be living up to your obligations to your client. Okay. We’ll have a final chat with her, take a picture, apologize and let it go at that.”
“Takes about fifteen minutes to get a good picture?”