“It’s the way we live,” said Joy. “Why were you up at the lake?” asked Liggett.
“Just for the ride,” I said.
“And the dog was with you?”
“Sure, he was. We took him along. He’s good company.”
The bag was gone from the hook where Stirling had hung it and I couldn’t see it anywhere. I couldn’t look too hard or Liggett would have noticed.
“You’ll have to go down to headquarters Liggett told me. “The both of you. There are some things we want to get cleared up.”
“The Old Man knows about all this,” said Joe. “The city desk phoned him about it as soon as you called in to the laboratory.”
“Thanks, Joe,” I told him. “I imagine we’ll be able to take care of ourselves.”
Although I wasn’t as sure of that as I made it sound. If we went downstairs and the Dog began shooting off his mouth so that Liggett could hear him, there would be hell to pay. And there was the rifle in the car, with its magazine half full and the barrel fouled with powder from the shots I’d taken at the car. I’d have a rough time explaining what I’d been shooting at, even why I carried a rifle in the car at all. And in my pocket was a loaded pistol, and another pocket was loaded down with mixed-up pistol and rifle ammunition. No one—no good citizen went around in perfect peace and the best intentions with a loaded rifle in his car and a loaded pistol in his pocket.
There was more, too—a whole lot more that they could trip us up on. There was the phone call Joy had made to Stirling. If the cops really got down to business and in earnest, they’d soon know about that call. And there was every likelihood that whoever had stepped out of his house up in Joy’s neighborhood to see about the uproar would have seen the car parked in front of her house and how it had zoomed off down the street, with the accelerator pressed against the floor.
Maybe, I told myself, we should have told Liggett a bit more than we had. Or been a bit more frank in our answers to him. For if he wanted to trip us up, he could trip us up but good.
But if we had, if we’d told him a quarter of the truth, it was a cinch that they’d keep us cooped up for hours down at headquarters while they sneered at the things we told them or tried to rationalize it all into good, solid, modern explanations.
It still might happen, I told myself—all of it might happen—but so long as we could hold it off, we still had a chance that something might pop up that would forestall it.
When I had opened the box of rifle cartridges, some of them had fallen to the floor. Stirling had picked them up. But had he given them to me or had he put them in his pocket or had he laid them on the bench? I tried to remember, but for the life of me I couldn’t. If the police had found those cartridges, then they could tie up the rifle in my car with this laboratory, and that would be something else to contribute to their tangle of suspicion.
If there were only time, I thought, I could explain it all. But there wasn’t time, and the explanation, in itself, would trigger a rat race of investigation and of questions and of skepticism that would gum up everything. When I came to explain what was going on, it had to be to something other than a room full of police.
There was no hope, I knew, that I could untangle all the mess myself. But I did have to find someone who could. And the police, most emphatically, were not the ones to do it.
I stood there, looking around the laboratory, looking for the bag. But there was something else, just for a moment there was something else. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the motion and the image the furtive, sneaking sense of motion in the sink, the distinct impression that for an instant an outsize, black angleworm had thrust a questing head above the edge of the sink and then withdrawn it.
“Well, shall we go?” said Liggett.
“Certainly,” I agreed.
I took Joy’s arm and she was shivering—not so you could notice, but when I took her arm I could feel the shiver.
“Easy, gal,” I said. “The lieutenant herejust wants a statement.”
“From the both of you,” he said. “And from the dog?” I asked. He was sore. I could see that he was sore. I should have kept my mouth shut.
We started for the door. When we got to it, Joe said, “You’re sure, Parker, there’s nothing you want me to tell the Old Man?”
I swung around to face him and the lieutenant. I smiled at both of them.
“Not a thing,” I said.
Then we went out the door, with Joe following us and the detective following him. The detective closed the door and I heard the latch snap shut.
“You two can drive downtown,” saidLiggett. “To headquarters. I’ll follow in my car.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We went down the stairs and out through the front door and down the steps to the sidewalk.
“The Dog,” Joy whispered to me.
“I’ll shut him up,” I said.
I had to. For a time he could be no more than a happy, bumbling dog. Things were bad enough without him shooting off his face.
But we needn’t have worried.
The back seat was empty. There was no sign of the Dog.
The lieutenant escorted us to a room not much larger than a cubbyhole and left us there.
“Be back in just a minute,” he said.
The room had a small table and a few uncomfortable chairs. It was colorless and chilly and it had a dark, dank smell to it.
Joy looked at me and I could see that she was scared but doing a good job of trying not to be.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. Then I said:
“I’m sorry I got you\into this.”
“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” she said.
And that was the hell of it. We had done nothing wrong and yet here we were, into it clear up to our necks, and with valid explanations for everything that had happened, but explanations that no one would believe.
“I could use a drink,” said Joy.
I could have, too, but I didn’t say so.
We sat there and the seconds dragged their feet and there was nothing we could say and it was miserable.
I sat hunched in a chair and thought about Carleton Stirling and what a swell guy he had been and how I would miss dropping in on him over at the lab and watching him work and listening to him talk.
Joy must have been thinking about the same thing, for she asked: “Do you think that someone killed him?”
“Not someone,” I said. “Something.”
For I was positive that it had been the thing or things I’d carried to him in the sheet of plastic that had done him in. I had walked into the laboratory, carrying death for one of my best friends.
“You’re blaming yourself,” said Joy. “Don’t blame yourself. There was no way you could know.”
And, of course, there wasn’t, but that didn’t help too much.
The door opened and the Old Man walked in. There was no one with him.
“Come along,” he said. “It’s all straightened out. No one wants to see you.”
We got up and walked over to the door.
I looked at him, a little puzzled.
He laughed, a short, chuckling laugh. “I Pulled no strings,” he said. “Not a mite of influence. I flung no weight around.”
“Well, then?”
“The medical examiner,” he said. “The verdict’s heart attack.”
“There was nothing wrong with Stirling’s heart,” I said.
“Well, there was nothing else. And they had to put down something.”
“Let’s go someplace else,” said Joy. “This place gets me down.”
“Come up to the office,” the Old Man said to me, “and get outside a drink. There is a thing or two I want to talk with you about. You want to come along, Joy, or are you anxious to get home?”
Joy shivered. “I’ll come along,” she said. I knew what was the trouble. She didn’t want to go back to that house and hear things in the yard—hear them prowling there even if there weren’t any.
“You take Joy,” I said to the Old Man. “I will drive her car.”
We went outside and we didn’t talk too much. I expected the Old Man would ask me about my car blowing up and perhaps a lot of other things, but he barely said a word.