“One has.” The smile in Sandra’s eyes was like the deepest velvet in the world. She picked up her bag. “I’m on the way to see him now, Captain Corrigan. He’s not very big, but he’s gone through a lot on my account. He’s waiting for me over at the clinic.”
Proof of Guilt by Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini (b. 1943) is both an aficionado of the pulp and mystery magazines and a highly respected writer of crime and mystery fiction. He is best known for his long-running series featuring the unnamed private eye and former cop known simply as Nameless. His first novel appearance was with The Snatch (1971) and his adventures include the double locked-room puzzler Hoodwink (1981). Pronzini has won many awards including the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement. He is married to author Marcia Muller. The following does not include any of his series characters and is probably the most audacious of the stories in this volume.
I’ve been a city cop for 32 years now, and during that time I’ve heard of and been involved in some of the weirdest, most audacious crimes imaginable – on and off public record. But as far as I’m concerned, the murder of an attorney named Adam Chillingham is the damnedest case in my experience, if not in the entire annals of crime.
You think I’m exaggerating? Well, listen to the way it was.
My partner Jack Sherrard and I were in the Detective Squad-room one morning last summer when this call came in from a man named Charles Hearn. He said he was Adam Chillingham’s law clerk, and that his employer had just been shot to death; he also said he had the killer trapped in the lawyer’s private office.
It seemed like a fairly routine case at that point. Sherrard and I drove out to the Dawes Building, a skyscraper in a new business development on the city’s south side, and rode the elevator up to Chillingham’s suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. Hearn, and a woman named Clarisse Tower, who told us she had been the dead man’s secretary, were waiting in the anteroom with two uniformed patrolmen who had arrived minutes earlier.
According to Hearn, a man named George Dillon had made a 10:30 appointment with Chillingham, had kept it punctually, and had been escorted by the attorney into the private office at that exact time. At 10:40 Hearn thought he heard a muffled explosion from inside the office, but he couldn’t be sure because the walls were partially soundproofed.
Hearn got up from his desk in the anteroom and knocked on the door and there was no response; then he tried the knob and found that the door was locked from the inside. Miss Tower confirmed all this, although she said she hadn’t heard any sound; her desk was farther away from the office door than was Hearn’s.
A couple of minutes later the door had opened and George Dillon had looked out and calmly said that Chillingham had been murdered. He had not tried to leave the office after the announcement; instead, he’d seated himself in a chair near the desk and lighted a cigarette. Hearn satisfied himself that his employer was dead, made a hasty exit, but had the presence of mind to lock the door from the outside by the simple expediency of transferring the key from the inside to the outside – thus sealing Dillon in the office with the body. After which Hearn put in his call to Headquarters.
So Sherrard and I drew our guns, unlocked the door, and burst into the private office. This George Dillon was sitting in the chair across the desk, very casual, both his hands up in plain sight. He gave us a relieved look and said he was glad the police had arrived so quickly.
I went over and looked at the body, which was sprawled on the floor behind the desk; a pair of French windows were open in the wall just beyond, letting in a warm summer breeze. Chillingham had been shot once in the right side of the neck, with what appeared by the size of the wound to have been a small-caliber bullet; there was no exit wound, and there were no powder burns.
I straightened up, glanced around the office, and saw that the only door was the one which we had just come through. There was no balcony or ledge outside the open windows – just a sheer drop of 16 stories to a parklike, well-landscaped lawn which stretched away for several hundred yards. The nearest building was a hundred yards distant, angled well to the right. Its roof was about on a level with Chillingham’s office, it being a lower structure than the Dawes Building; not much of the roof was visible unless you peered out and around.
Sherrard and I then questioned George Dillon – and he claimed he hadn’t killed Chillingham. He said the attorney had been standing at the open windows, leaning out a little, and that all of a sudden he had cried out and fallen down with the bullet in his neck. Dillon said he’d taken a look out the windows, hadn’t seen anything, checked that Chillingham was dead, then unlocked the door and summoned Hearn and Miss Tower.
When the coroner and the lab crew finally got there, and the doc had made his preliminary examination, I asked him about the wound. He confirmed my earlier guess – a small-caliber bullet, probably a.22 or.25. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course, until he took out the slug at the post-mortem.
I talked things over with Sherrard and we both agreed that it was pretty much improbable for somebody with a.22 or.25 caliber weapon to have shot Chillingham from the roof of the nearest building; a small caliber like that just doesn’t have a range of a hundred yards and the angle was almost too sharp. There was nowhere else the shot could have come from – except from inside the office. And that left us with George Dillon, whose story was obviously false and who just as obviously had killed the attorney while the two of them were locked inside this office.
You’d think it was pretty cut and dried then, wouldn’t you? You’d think all we had to do was arrest Dillon and charge him with homicide, and our job was finished. Right?
Wrong.
Because we couldn’t find the gun.
Remember, now, Dillon had been locked in that office – except for the minute or two it took Hearn to examine the body and slip out and relock the door – from the time Chillingham died until the time we came in. And both Hearn and Miss Tower swore that Dillon hadn’t stepped outside the office during that minute or two. We’d already searched Dillon and he had nothing on him. We searched the office – I mean, we searched that office – and there was no gun there.
We sent officers over to the roof of the nearest building and down onto the landscaped lawn; they went over every square inch of ground and rooftop, and they didn’t find anything. Dillon hadn’t thrown the gun out the open windows then, and there was no place on the face of the sheer wall of the building where a gun could have been hidden.
So where was the murder weapon? What had Dillon done with it? Unless we found that out, we had no evidence against him that would stand up in a court of law; his word that he hadn’t killed Chillingham, despite the circumstantial evidence of the locked room, was as good as money in the bank. It was up to us to prove him guilty, not up to him to prove himself innocent. You see the problem?
We took him into a large book-filled room that was part of the Chillingham suite – what Hearn called the “archives” – and sat him down in a chair and began to question him extensively. He was a big husky guy with blondish hair and these perfectly guileless eyes; he just sat there and looked at us and answered in a polite voice, maintaining right along that he hadn’t killed the lawyer.
We made him tell his story of what had happened in the office a dozen times, and he explained it the same way each time – no variations. Chillingham had locked the door after they entered, and then they sat down and talked over some business. Pretty soon Chillingham complained that it was stuffy in the room, got up, and opened the French windows; the next thing Dillon knew, he said, the attorney collapsed with the bullet in him. He hadn’t heard any shot, he said; Hearn must be mistaken about a muffled explosion.