“Nobody. Yet.”
“Yet?”
“Yet,” Stevie repeated grimly.
“But somebody will?”
“Yeah, after you get through with me. All this soft-lights-and-sweet-music atmosphere isn’t fooling me a bit. This is just the test bout. The real bout will come later at the station and it’ll be me against half a dozen ham-handed cops with rubber hoses...”
“It has happened,” Sands said. “But not in my cases.”
“... and lights and no water and no sleep until I talk. You wouldn’t do it to the Heaths but you’d do it to me. Well, I’ll save you the trouble. I’ll take a chance on being murdered. I’ve got a use for my face and I don’t want it banged up, see?”
“So?”
“So I know who killed the girl.”
He took out a handkerchief and rubbed it over the palms of his hands. His movements were careful, his voice careful.
“Sure. I’m a remarkable guy. I know two murderers now. And I don’t think you’ll get either of them. Especially the first guy you won’t get. He’s very smooth. What’s in that bottle?”
“Scotch. Have some?”
“Yeah.”
He drank it straight.
“We won’t even talk about the first guy,” he said. “He’s so good he deserves to get away with it. The second guy is no good at all. You should have seen him running down the street, right out of the driveway, right past my car. I never saw anybody run so fast!”
He let out a hoarse laugh. “Jesus! His face was green. He’s got the guts of a worm, same like me. I haven’t any guts. I want to rent a furnished cell in the Dom jail until you catch up with him. Then I’ll begin life all over again with a new rule: never make friends with murderers. Don’t even speak to them. Shun ’em like rattlesnakes.”
“Let’s have it,” Sands said quietly.
“Murillo. Tony Murillo, a gentleman handy with a knife, a wop with the sex life of a fruit fly. And don’t ask me if I’m sure. Sure I’m sure. Sure enough to sock a cop and try and get out of town. Because there’s a chance he saw me too. Maybe he’s just as sure as I am. But I didn’t begin to get scared until I found out it was murder. The second murder comes easy.”
He paused to draw in his breath. “You’re supposed to be looking surprised, Mr. Sands.”
“I am surprised,” Sands said. “But not very much.”
“All right,” Stevie said bleakly. “It’s your spotlight. Take it away.”
“By tonight I was pretty sure that the murder was an outside job with inside help. All the evidence pointed to the combination. The front door was left open. The lock on Miss Heath’s jewel box had been picked, though nothing was missing. We found the marks of a pigskin glove on the box. On the rug, hidden by the nap, were some shreds of tobacco. But it wasn’t tobacco exactly. It was marihuana.”
“Murillo’s brand.”
“Yes. The stuff was stale as if it had been loose in a pocket and had come out accidentally when something like a handkerchief was pulled out of the pocket. I wouldn’t have thought of Murillo if I hadn’t had him in mind about another case. But the two cases are strangely similar: they are both unsuccessful robberies.”
“What was the other one?”
“More about that later. Murillo couldn’t have done the Heath job himself. He had to have someone leave that door open for him, he had to know the girl was blind, that it was safe for him to turn on the light. He had to have someone guide him to her room and tell him where her jewel box was.”
“So why didn’t he pick up the jewel box and get out of the house again? He wouldn’t have had the guts to stand there and pick the lock on it even if the girl was deaf and dumb as well as blind. He’s yellow and he’s a nervous wreck.”
“He might have had the nerve,” Sands said, “if he was hopped up. Or he might have lost his judgment to such an extent that he didn’t even think of picking up the jewel box and escaping. It was probably while he was standing at the bureau picking the lock that Kelsey Heath woke up. If she screamed no one heard her. He couldn’t have done any thinking at all at that point. The girl was awake, there was the knife beside her bed, so he killed her. He didn’t stop to figure that she was blind and couldn’t identify him or that he could keep her quiet by hitting her. From start to finish he was consistently illogical.”
“That part’s all right,” Stevie said. “It’s the robbery itself that’s a phony. He would never have attempted a house robbery except one of these soft jobs in a house vacant for the night with windows and doors unlocked. Not even if he was hopped up. Marihuana’s not like cocaine.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Me? Not well at all by your standards, maybe. I’ve only seen him a few times. I had to kick him out of the club once, and he drew a knife on me. I’ve seen him a couple of times skulling around the alley waiting for Mamie. Those are the only times I’ve seen him, but I know him as well as I know the back of my hand.”
“Intuition?” Sands said dryly.
“Mamie,” Stevie said, smiling. “Murillo is Mamie’s sole topic of conversation. I know what Murillo eats, what he wears, what he says, what he thinks. I know how many bowel movements he has in a week and what tie he was wearing on June the tenth two years ago. I’ve listened to the saga of Tony and Mamie for years, and Mamie has a very loose tongue. Mamie’s loose tongue occasionally gets her a black eye. Oh, yes, Murillo has guts — with women and men under four feet and blind girls.”
Sands took out a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Stevie. It was a police picture of a man, front and side views.
Antonio Sebastian Murillo
Eyes: brown
Hair: black, curly
Complexion: medium
Height: 5' 7"
Weight: 121
Born: 1914, Feb. 8, Chicago, Ill.
No fixed address
Identifying marks: none visible. Strawberry birthmark left hip
Charged: peddling marihuana
Convicted: same
Sentenced: two years less one day, Guelph Reformatory, June, 1932. Served full term
Remarks: carries knife, marihuana addict. Potentially dangerous.
The picture was that of a young man, handsome, insolent, thin almost to emaciation.
“So that’s our boy,” Stevie said, “as a boy. He’s not so pretty now.”
“The picture’s ten years old. He’d have changed in ten years. How much?”
Stevie peered at the picture again. “Christ, you’re sure it is Murillo? I’d never recognize him.”
“That’s too bad,” Sands said, “because it’s the only one we have and I doubt if Mamie Rosen will give us another. So we’ll try something else. Excuse me while I phone.”
He looked for a number in the phone book and dialed a number. The number rang fifteen times before it was answered by a sleepy male voice.
“Klausen?” Sands said.
“Yes.”
“Are you still running the art college? Sands speaking.”
“I’m not running it at one o’clock in the morning,” Klausen said bitterly.
“This can’t wait. Have you still got that little man Smithson around?”
“Yes. Now what?”
“I want him to do a job on a picture. Same thing he did to Galvison’s picture last year: add thirty or forty pounds, ten years, draw in some disguises, you know the kind of thing.”
“That’s a good week’s work and Smithson is busy.”
“This man’s a murderer. I want to get Smithson started right away if it’s going to take that long. What’s his number?”
“I thought after that Galvison mess that the police would go to a little trouble and renew their photo files, keep them up to date. Why haven’t you hauled in this man and taken his picture again?”