‘Well, what?’ he said.
‘I was thinking’, O’Brien said, ‘I guess I got all the facts’—he waved towards his desk—‘but I could do with a little inside information. What you newspaper guys call “off the record” stuff. You sort of stuck your neck out going up there to that girl’s house with Dorrance. If you’d told me I could have had them both down here.’
‘I thought of that’, Murdock said. ‘The trouble was I didn’t have any concrete evidence. I stretched the truth a little about that parking lot guy; he remembered a Massachusetts car all right, but he didn’t remember the licence number nor could he identify Dorrance. Also’, he said, ‘I didn’t want to go off halfcocked and make an ass of myself. If Claire Emerson couldn’t identify Dorrance I had nothing left and I was afraid if she came down here the idea of being at police headquarters might make her clam up and deny she’d seen Dorrance even if it was the truth.’
‘Who the hell am I to kick.’ O’Brien shrugged. ‘It ain’t often an outsider can come in here and wrap up a case for me as neat as you did. All you had was a hunch, hunh? Based on the idea that Dorrance had been in town before he said he had because he knew where that parking lot was located.’
‘I had a little more than that.’
‘I’d like to hear it. Something we overlooked on the Farnsley killing?’
‘I wouldn’t say it was anything you overlooked. And anyway it concerned what happened last night to Rigby.’ He hesitated, wondering how best to explain what he had in mind. ‘We know that the killer forced Rigby to telephone Murray Leonard—he called me right after that merely as a precaution in case Leonard didn’t show up in time—and his point in that was to have Leonard caught in Rigby’s office, preferably by your men, but if not by them, then by me.’
‘So?’
‘What I’m getting at’, Murdock said, ‘is that the whole point of the frame depended on Dorrance’s knowing where he could locate Leonard at the right time.… What’s the Ledger’s full name?’ he added quietly.
‘The Evening Ledger.’
‘Evening is the word. It’s an afternoon sheet. That means that in a town like this it closes up shop when the final is on the streets, except for a skeleton staff. Leonard worked days. Both he and Helen Farnsley said it was unusual for him to stop in the office like he did last night after dinner.’
He paused and said: ‘So how would a killer know that Leonard would be there last night when he wanted him. Who beside Helen Farnsley could know for sure that Leonard would be at the Ledger?’
‘Dorrance.’ O’Brien sighed. ‘Because Dorrance had dropped him off there a few minutes earlier before he took his niece home. Very simple, isn’t it! And when you got that far you began thinking back. Yeah. Dorrance and nobody else.’
He sighed again and stood up. He went over to kick the door shut and then he opened a desk drawer. He produced a pint bottle, held it up to the light, felt around until he found two small paper cups, then he very carefully divided the whisky that was left. He dropped the bottle in the waste-basket and then, as an afterthought, retrieved it and put it into the inside pocket of his topcoat.
‘I think I’d better dispose of that one outside’, he said and grinned.
He offered Murdock one of the cups and then leaned back, his grin still there. He held his own cup head high in a silent toast. He waited until Murdock matched this gesture with one of his own. Then, without speaking but each understanding, it seemed, how the other felt, they drank.
THE END
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copyright © 1953 by George Harmon Coxe
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