“It looks like you hurt your neck, too,” he said. Then he raised his voice. “Hey there, George! Look what the cat dragged in.”
I heard footsteps coming along the corridor. I had thought we were alone in the building. The red-faced deputy came into the front room, looked at my face and grimaced.
“Hell’s bells, George, I didn’t do it. Ask him. Better yet, look at his eye. He’s got stitches over-his eye. Could I of put them there?”
George admitted the impossibility of that.
“We’re going in back, George, where it’s nice and quiet. You hold down the fort up front here?”
“Why, sure,” George said.
Sheriff Lonegran marched me down the corridor. He didn’t have a gun and he didn’t need one. All he had, and all he needed, was the law of the state of Virginia on his side.
CHAPTER NINE
WE WENT down the corridor to a small room in back. It was empty except for a pair of surplus army filing cabinets, a pair of surplus army cots and a small sink in one corner. The single small window was barred. Crickets chirped outside.
“Sit,” Lonegran ordered.
I sat on one of the cots. The canvas sagged under me.
“Now spill it, Drum. All of it.”
Lonegran stood over me, leaning forward at the waist. He had a faint smell of sweat and white salt marks crusted his khaki shirt at the armpits. His droopy lids made him look sleepy and morose. I was used to that by now. It meant trouble.
“Why?” I said. “The State Board’ll ask me the same questions you ask—with a steno taking down my answers.”
“The hell with that crap,” he shouted. “I’m through taking that kind of crap from you. I took it all I’m going to. You killed a man, Drum. Maybe there isn’t any law going to say you did, but as far as I’m concerned you killed a man in my territory and you belong to me tonight. Now talk.”
There are Sheriff Lonegrans in all the countries of the world, just as there have been Sheriff Lonegrans in all the ages of history. Captain Masters had him pegged pretty well—a good peace officer, but he got riled too easily. A frontier needed his type, but civilization crowded him. When he got riled, his own personal code of ethics pushed the law from his mind. Hell, I thought with a faint wry grin, maybe he’d have made a crackerjack private eye.
The grin was a mistake. He wiped it off my face with a back-handed swipe that almost knocked me off the cot.
My vision jerked and blurred and I took a long time focusing on him. He didn’t seem to have moved. The way I felt, with a power shovel I might move him an inch or two. But I had to grip the wood sticks of the cot hard through the canvas to keep from jumping him.
“Maybe I been too vague,” he said. “Somebody paid you for that dossier on Dr. Lord. Who would that be?”
There wasn’t any answer I could give him. If I told him the truth, that Mrs. Lord had been the only one to pay me, he would probably swing on me again, and if he did, he’d have a fight on his hands. Whether he won or lost, he could call the fight any way he wanted to. I sat with my lips tight and the whole left side of my face numb.
“I asked you, Drum.”
No answer wasn’t any better than the only answer I could give him. He got hold of the lapels of my jacket and jerked me to my feet. “Let me tell you where it’s your tough luck to be standing,” he said from a distance of half a foot. “In the morning they’re gonna underplay their hand. There ain’t nobody gonna want publicity on this thing. But that’s the morning. Until the morning, you’re my boy. If I can get a name out of you before they send a subpoena for you, then all the politicians in Washington won’t be able to make them sit on this. I aim to get that name. Now, who was it paid you?”
I BROUGHT my hands up fast and broke his arms away from my jacket. He went back a step and swung on me, but he was off balance. I caught his arm and turned the wrist out from his body and then back. He found himself on the wrong end of a hammerlock. When I bent his wrist up between his shoulder blades he stomped down with his heel on my instep. He’d let himself in for a sucker play, but so had I. He jerked free, almost breaking his arm. I could barely stand on my right foot.
He spun around and glared at me.
Then we both heard a car pulling up outside. The car door slammed, and a couple of seconds later there were footsteps in the corridor outside. Someone knocked at the door.
“Rog, it’s Matt. Open up, will you?”
Lonegran swore under his breath, but opened the door. Captain Masters came in, looked us both over and grinned ruefully. “I guess I got back just in time,” he said.
Lonegran was angry and didn’t try to hide it. “Until they get around to serving papers, he comes under my jurisdiction, Matt.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“Says who?”
Captain Masters took off his visored cap and ran a hand through wavy black hair. “The State Attorney General, Rog. That’s the way it goes.”
“But Christ, be reasonable. Sure, I figure them to pull that kind of crap in the morning. Don’t tell me you’re gonna jump the gun for them?”
Masters shook his head. “It came over on short wave while we were driving back. They want Drum in Richmond, Rog. Not here. They’re afraid of what might happen here.”
“All they want to do is sit on it,” Lonegran groaned.
“Don’t I know it.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Take him to Richmond with me. I’ve got to, Rog. Those are my orders. If I don’t you know what kind of stink it will raise.”
“Then what’ll they give him? A nice polite hearing?”
Masters nodded. “Hearing’s the day after tomorrow.”
“What the hell kind of hearing will it be, tell me that.”
“I told Drum once we’d make him eat his license. That still goes.”
“But a civil charge,” Lonegran complained. “They’re gonna sit on it, that’s all they’ll stick him with. You tell me, is it justice?”
“It’s politics.”
“Politics.” Lonegran threw his hands up in a wide, helpless gesture. Then the three of us went out through the corridor to the large front room of the building. George was sitting at one of the desks with his feet up and a thick cigar stuck in his red face.
“No hard feelings, Rog?” Masters asked.
“Hell, it ain’t your fault. But before you go I got something I want to say to Drum. All right?”
Masters had no objections.
“If they did it my way, Drum, they could of got you on a criminal charge. But up there in Richmond they got politics on the brain. So I tell you what,” Lonegran said, looking more sleepy and more morose than I had ever seen him. “You go up there and get your license lifted and your goddamn wrist slapped. Then come back down here to Prince Charles County. Come back down here for any reason at all. I’ll get you for parking on the wrong side of the street and I’ll get you for spitting on the sidewalk and I’ll get you for breathing out of the wrong side of your nose and then I’ll take you in back where we were just getting warmed up and before I’m through I’ll get you for resisting arrest and I’ll have you put away for so long you’ll grow a beard down to your toenails. That’s all, Matt. You can take him now. He’s your prisoner.”
Masters turned toward the door. George swung his feet off the desk and stood up. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and stared to turn, but I wasn’t quick enough.
Lonegran rabbit-punched me just under the left ear, and I fell forward against the door and then down.
“I guess he kind of tripped,” Lonegran said.
“A guy ought to watch where he walks,” George chimed in.
I got up with the taste of bile in my mouth. Blank-faced, Captain Masters looked me over and jerked a thumb toward the car waiting outside. I lurched out there, dragging lead shoes. Masters and I got into the back of the car.
“You come back,” Lonegran called from the doorway nice a storekeeper dunning a departin
g customer. “Don’t forget you all come back.”
If I wanted to do anything about what had happened to Duncan Hadley Lord, I knew, I’d have to take him up on it.
THEY went through the formalities of placing a criminal charge against me at the Capital in Richmond. This meant booking, mugging and printing me in the middle of the night, then taking away my shoelaces and belt and what I had in my pockets and giving me a cell all to myself in the Richmond City Jail.
The cot in there was firmer than the one in Lonegran’s rear office. Besides, sleep was what I had been put in there for. I stretched out on the cot and tried to think of what I was going to do in the morning. I couldn’t think straight. My mind went around and around, the way it does when you’re exhausted. I told myself what I did tomorrow depended on how the Attorney General dealt the cards. They had left me my cigarettes, and I smoked a couple. A few cells down the block a drunk began to sing sadly and nasally in the tank. Then he stopped and either he or somebody else was noisily sick. I thought about my detective license and was reasonably sure they’d lift it in Virginia and lift it in Washington too. My brow burned where the stitches had been taken in it and I had two painful swellings on my neck from Lonegran’s fists. I thought a little about Duncan Hadley Lord up there on his ledge before he had jumped. I shut my eyes and saw Bobby Hayst in the firelight and remembered how the firelight and the sound of the rain had gone away. Half asleep, I tried to call her name. She smiled at me.
Then I slept like a dead man.…
In the morning they gave me corned beef hash, dark bread and coffee which tasted like it had been made with the grounds collected from every greasy spoon in Richmond. A little while after the trustee toolc away my breakfast tray a guard came for me.
“Your lawyer’s here,” he said.
I went with him without answering. My lawyer, who I had never seen before, was a little man in a rumpled flannel suit.
“The name is Bart Fox, Mr. Drum,” he said. “I posted your bond.”
“Who asked you to?”
“I can’t hear a word you say.”
“Okay. How much was it?”
“Five grand.”
That was a good sign. Five thousand dollars meant that the criminal booking was regarded only as a technicality to be scratched out after the State Board held a hearing and decided what to do about my license.
“You put up Jerry Trowbridge’s bail too?”
“Trowbridge? I didn’t put up any other bail.”
“What about Dygert?”
“I don’t know anybody named Dygert,” Bart Fox said quickly.
“Where’s Trowbridge?”
“I’m not supposed to have any truck with any names,” he said, then lowered his voice. “But if you’re looking for Trowbridge, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you he’s checked in over at the John Marshall. That’s over on—”
“I know where it is, Mr. Fox.”
“Your hearing’s tomorrow morning at the state capital. Caucus room C. You be there.”
“I’ll be there. They’re not wasting any time, huh?”
“What I hear, they’re holding the preliminaries today, both for the hearing and to see if they can turn what they’ve got over to a Grand Jury.”
“Think they can?”
“How should I know? But they don’t think so, if the size of the bond means anything.”
“That’s what I thought. Will I see you again?”
“Not unless they do turn it over to a Grand Jury, and you get indicted, and you need a lawyer, and pick me.” Bart Fox grinned.
“Well, thanks.”
“I’ll give you a word of advice, though,” he said, walking with me to the turnkey’s desk, where I got my personal possessions and a signed receipt. “You better call up some friends and have some character witnesses down here tomorrow.” We walked outside together. It was sunny and warmer than it had been all week.
I said, “Tell Dygert thanks for the bail. But tell him the way I figure it he owed me that. I don’t owe him a thing.”
“I don’t know anybody named Dygert,” Bart Fox said, slowly and carefully this time.
“Well, in case you ever meet him, tell him.”
We both grinned, and shook hands. Then Fox walked up the block, turned the corner and was gone. I took a cab over to the John Marshall Hotel.
THE desk clerk at the John Marshall was a little leery of a guy with a stubble of beard on his face, no luggage and a suit which looked as if it had been slept in because it had been slept in. But the John Marshall is a big hotel, this wasn’t the convention season and Richmond has never been much of a convention town, so in the end I got my room.
When I asked, they told me a Mr. Trowbridge had checked in alone last night, but there was no answer when they rang his room. Then I picked up a razor and a toothbrush and went with my room key to the bank of elevators while the whole lobby stopped what it was doing to watch the big guy with the stitches on his brow and the bruises on his face make like a paying guest.
Upstairs, I shaved, showered and stretched out on the bed in my underwear, communing with the ceiling. That didn’t help me any more than it helped the ceiling, so I lit a cigarette, flipped the phone off its cradle, and asked for long distance.
Five minutes later I was talking to Jack Morley at the Protocol Section of the State Department in Washington.
“Chet!” he said. “My God, man, where’ve you been since you got back from India?”
“Up to my ears in work at first—”
“Well, I’m glad to hear the old private op’s making out.”
“—until recently. Now I’m up to my ears in trouble, Jack.”
Jack Morley didn’t ask me to name the trouble right off. The first thing he asked was, “Anything I can do to help?”
He’d graduated from F.B.I. Academy with me, then we’d each served a hitch with J. Edgar’s boys and I’d decided to put up the shingle while Jack had gone to work for the State Department. He and his wife Betty were my favorite married couple in Washington. To prove it, I ate Betty’s corned beef and cabbage every couple of weeks. I guess I was their favorite bachelor.
“I need a character witness tomorrow,” I said. “If Mr. Dulles isn’t too busy, could you tell him to hop a bus down here? Seriously, Jack, can you get the time off and come?”
“One of us named Morley will be there. Better tell papa about it, Chet. Plenty trouble?”
“Plenty,” I said, and sketched it in for him. The first thing I heard was a groan, then he asked: “They going to pull your license?”
“It looks that way.”
He didn’t say anything.
“We’re about the same size,” I said. “If you could bring down a suit of clothes and a shirt and meet me at the John Marshall in the morning, I’d go in there without looking like I rode the rails all night to make it. Okay?”
He said okay and added, “I hope to hell you’re wrong about how it’ll turn out tomorrow. What about Trow-bridge?”
“You knew his old man too, didn’t you?”
Jack said that he had known him slightly.
“Money and a misdirected idealism,” I said. “And the wrong connections.”
“That Dygert,” Jack groaned. “He plays rough, Chet. Watch out for him.”
“Who’s he working for? Who’d send that kind of letter to the U.S. News Agency?”
“I could make a pretty good guess, but why don’t we wait till morning and find out for sure? Uh-on, Chet. They want me. The Finnish Foreign Minister’s flying in today and old Jack’s got to roll out the red carpet. One thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I know how you feel about old man Trowbridge. But don’t let the kid railroad you for it, huh?”
I said I wouldn’t, and we hung up.
JERRY didn’t show up at the John Marshall all day. As near as I could figure, Dygert had put up my bail through Bart Fox so I’d be free to talk to Jerry about that breaking-and-entering al
ibi. But if Fox had told the truth, Jerry hadn’t been arraigned at all. That didn’t make much sense. But his not showing up began to make sense: they had changed their mind and didn’t think they’d need me to set up Jerry’s alibi.
I ate dinner at a little place on Maymont Avenue across the street from William Byrd Park, then took a long walk on Broad Street because I knew I’d feel caged back at the hotel. For almost the first time in my life I admitted to myself I was lonely. A private detective who runs a one man agency as I had done most of the time has to be a lone wolf. He likes workrng alone or he wouldn’t be in the business. But this was different. This was being cut off from everyone including yourself, because I could form no picture in my mind of anyone named Chet Drum forbidden by law to practice his trade. Yet starting tomorrow that was the Chet Drum I’d have to learn to live with.
That began to smack of self-pity, and I ran away from it. I went into the first grill I passed on Broad Street and tanked up on a few beers. When I hit the street again it was almost eleven o’clock. Neon made glowing patterns in the cool autumn night. Trolley cars rumbled by. I went around the corner, heading for Franklin Street and the John Marshall. A pan-handler with a tic in his face stepped out of a dark doorway. I gave him a dollar knowing he would booze it before the night was over. He almost slobbered his thanks. That made the difference: I belonged to the human race again and self-pity moved off furtively and invisibly to find another victim.
“He come back?” I asked the desk-clerk who had come on in the late afternoon.
“Not yet, sir.”
“But he hasn’t checked out?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Ring me if he comes in any time tonight.”
“Yes, sir.”
I went up in the elevator. The desk clerk didn’t ring me. Around dawn I fell asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
THE man from the Virginia Attorney General’s office was named Jefferson Lee Jowett. He was a big fellow with a mane of hair graying picturesquely at the temples and a soft, persuasive voice. He was as southern as hominy grits. He dominated Caucus room C because that was his job. Except for the four men from the State Licensing Board, everyone else was there reluctantly.
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