“I’m one short of my pension.”
“Twenty-nine years… But we wouldn’t graduate a rookie from police school who couldn’t tell you the division of responsibility between police, district attorney, magistrate, and grand jury… You’ve slipped, Marty.” Suddenly Latson’s voice got brisker; his feet came off the desk and he leaned forward, openly smiling. “You’ve slipped, and I like you better for it. You’ve been a cold one, Marty, to me. The perfect cop! Well, I never believed in the perfect anything; nobody does, and nobody’d like it if he met it. You’re human now, Marty, and human beings get tired when they’ve been overworking. I’m authorizing two weeks’ leave for you, starting right now, and it’s not to come off your annual leave; it’s in lieu of all the overtime you’ve put in.”
Captain Martin said, “No.”
But Chief Latson went on as though he hadn’t heard. “And when you come back, it won’t be to Homicide. It’ll be to an inspector’s desk and an inspector’s shield; in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division. Chief of all detectives; how do you like those apples, Marty?”
And as he said it, Jim Latson remembered Dave Corday saying he’d lost his taste for apples; but Dave had regained that taste, had hesitated at tipping over the machine’s applecart. Martin wasn’t Dave Corday; but Martin was a man with only a year to go for his pension.
Captain Martin said, “I appreciate the offer, Chief; but I won’t be able to take leave just now. The Guild case needs reopening.”
Latson’s dull eyes brightened again. There was the bite of anger behind his mild words: “Marty, even from you I expect listening when I’m talking.”
“It may not take me long,” Captain Martin said. “But there was a witness to the killing. I want to question him. After that, it will be up to the district attorney and his staff; they can drop it if they want to. But not till I give them this one piece of evidence, this story from the witness.”
Jim Latson leaned forward. “That’s a long speech—for you. This witness got a name?”
“It’s one you know,” Captain Martin said.
“Better than I do my own?” But the mockery didn’t have much depth to it.
“Not better. As well.”
Larson’s right hand slowly curled into a fist; Captain Martin, watching him, wondered if the chief knew. Latson slowly rose to his skinny height, and Captain Martin wasn’t sure that Jim Latson knew he was doing that, either. Latson said slowly, “Why, Marty? With a year more to run, why?”
Captain Martin shrugged.
Jim Latson said, “You think I killed her?”
“I wasn’t there,” Captain Martin said, “so all I know is when she was shot, where she was shot, and with what she was shot—an unregistered Czech pistol.”
“And that I was there.”
Captain Martin looked at the floor. He held his hands out, turned them over, inspected them as though they were strange to him. He said, “You said that, Chief Latson, I didn’t. Here is what I know: that you dated her, from time to time. That a man came home with her. That she had eaten nightclub food shortly before. And that you were in the neighborhood and went to a good deal of trouble to conceal the fact.”
“Illegal trouble. Doctoring of department records. Yeah, Marty, I took her home.”
Captain Martin said nothing.
Jim Latson slowly sat down again. He studied Captain Martin, Captain Benjamin L. Martin, though no one in the department called him Ben, never had. Mart, Captain Martin, commander Homicide Squad. “You’re married, aren’t you, Marty?”
Captain Martin said, “Yes.”
Jim Latson said, “It’s a funny question right now, I know. The reason I asked it, it just occurred to me I know less about you than almost any man in the department. We’ve served together twenty-five years—you were an acting sergeant when I was a rookie—and I don’t know the first damn thing about you. You’ve never brought your wife to a department party, you’ve never had another officer in your home, have you?”
“No.”
Jim Latson said furiously, “You were chatty enough a minute ago—when you were hanging it on me. Why clam up now?”
Captain Martin smiled. It was a slow smile, calculated to enrage a suspect; he had used it often. So, he was sure, had Jim Latson. Shakespeare’s expression, worn to a cliché by its years of aptness, came to mind: “hoist by his own petard.” With the slow, sarcastic smile still on his face, he thought: Latson would know the phrase, or a reasonable approximation of it, but he wouldn’t know where it came from.
“I guess I’m heisted by my own derrick,” Jim Latson said. “If I’d put a poorer man in Homicide and shoved you in Traffic, I’d have been better off.”
Captain Martin waited.
Traffic was distant, headquarters was not on a main street. Some place in the building, the direct wire from fire headquarters rang its bell; a one-alarm fire in the Park district. Rubber-heeled feet tramped in the corridors, and Captain Martin waited.
“Damn it,” Jim Latson said finally, “I didn’t shoot her.”
Captain Martin spared him two words: “I see.”
“But I can’t prove it,” Chief Latson said. He was out of his chair again, ranging the room, flinging his long arms around. “And don’t give me that crap about a man being innocent until he’s proven guilty! You know that isn’t so, and I know it isn’t so. A man’s innocent till the cops decide he’s guilty, and that’s that!”
Captain Martin said, “Is it?”
Jim Latson came to rest. He leaned on the back of one of the easy chairs, his arms folded. He said, “It isn’t with you, is it? An honest cop!” He made it sound like the worst sort of insult. But when it didn’t erase Martin’s smile, he raged again: “Who sold me out? Rein, Page, one of the girls in the log-typing room? Go on, tell me. I can find out. I can find out anything in this department. It’s my work. I built the department up from a lousy, small-time police force, and I run it! Me, Jim Latson.”
Captain Martin was thinking: I’ve got all the time in the world. If I have to pinch the chief, the newspapers’ll explode all around me. I’ll be over my head in reporters for a week, and I’m in no hurry for that. All the time in the world.
Latson was off on another tack, now. “I didn’t kill her! Do you think I did?”
Captain Martin said, “You’re still wearing your gun.”
“And you’d have taken it off me if you thought I was guilty? Not you! Not the longest, sunniest day of your damn smug life! The cop doesn’t live who could take Jim Latson’s gun away. Not here, not in the FBI, not in Scotland Yard.”
Captain Martin thought vaguely that a pipe would be a nice thing to smoke just now.
Jim Latson came as close to pleading as he would ever come in his life. “What’s the percentage, Marty? You haul me in on this and you ruin my career, you maybe get the whole administration thrown out at next election, and who gains? Say you don’t get broken, say you only get transferred to the sticks, and where does that leave any of us? It means the department has a worse deputy chief than it had before, and it means it has a worse head of Homicide. The city’s the loser, the department’s the loser, and who gains?”
“I don’t know,” Captain Martin said. “Who shot Hogan DeLisle?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” Jim Latson said.
“Try me.”
Jim Latson came around the chair. He started to sit in it, and then thought better of that, went behind his desk, placed himself in his swivel chair of command; the high-backed, expensive chair of the deputy chief. “Dave Corday,” he said.
Captain Martin reached in his pocket and took out a notebook and pencil. And then the whole story came out; came out in such a rush that the captain had trouble getting it all down, though he had taught himself shorthand.
When it was all through, he closed the notebook and pm it away, put his pencil back in his inside coat pocket. He stood up, and went to the door. “Thank you, Chief Latson,” he said.
Jim Latson was red-eyed, his hair wild about his head. “My God,” he said, “believe it or not, I feel better for getting that off my chest.”
“Sure,” Captain Martin said. “By the way, I want James Rein transferred to Homicide. Detective second grade, till he makes sergeant.”
“Okay,” Jim Latson said. “He’s almost at the top of the promotion list now. Wouldn’t detective first grade be better?”
“This isn’t a bribe,” Captain Martin said. “It’s a promotion for the good of the department.” He walked to the door.
But the chief called him back, as Captain Martin had known he would. “What’s going to happen? I haven’t signed anything, and I’m not going to. You know the truth now, but you can’t use it in court.”
Captain Martin shrugged, an almost imperceptible motion. “Who knows?” he asked. “I’m going to see Corday.” And he went out.
Jim Latson reached down in the double drawer of his desk and got out the bottle with which he entertained visiting brass. He took a shot, all by himself. Then he gathered the half dozen bank books from his locked drawer.
He put them in an envelope, addressed the envelope to Norman Wright, Hotel Plaza, New York. In the upper left-hand corner he put his own name and his apartment address.
If he had to take off, it was simple to go to New York and register as Norman Wright. If he didn’t have to take off, it was equally simple to write to the Plaza and tell them his friend, Mr. Wright, had decided not to go to New York after all, and would they return the envelope to the addresser.
Life remained something that came in doses no bigger than a man could swallow, one at a time.
For him. But for Dave Corday, who was about to be interviewed by that iceberg, Captain Martin, the pills were about to grow to horse-doctor size. And no man has a throat as big as a horse’s.
Jim Latson grinned. The door opened, one of his secretaries brought in the mail, he saw there was another letter from his wife and he stopped grinning.
Chapter 18
DAVE CORDAY’S GIRL, Alice, held the door for Captain Martin and then closed it behind him.
Martin crossed the office at his steady pace, looked down at Dave Corday, and held the pose for a full minute. It was a lovely day over the city, a beautiful morning, and the clear light came into the high office and made Martin’s features clearer than usual. Still, Dave Corday could read nothing there.
Finally, Captain Martin said, “Tell your secretary to hold all calls.”
Dave Corday started to bluster. He said all the usual things: this was his office, he would run it, a chief deputy district attorney amounted to something, and so on. He used phrases like common courtesy, chain of command, and perhaps the word protocol got in there.
When he finished, Cap Martin was still standing in front of the desk, still impassive. Dave Corday flipped the intercom and said, “Hold all calls, Alice.” This, of course, did not cut off the red phone hooked to the high emergency desk at police headquarters.
Cap Martin looked Dave Corday over. He was sure that there was no gun on the man’s body, but there was undoubtedly one in his top desk drawer; experience knew the type. Well, Captain Martin could stop Corday getting at that gun; he did not want a suicide on his record. He went and sat down.
“I’ll give it to you straight, Mr. Corday,” he said. “Short and simple. I have an accusation against you. The DeLisle case.”
Then he leaned back. His eyes kept steady on Dave Corday’s; his ears let a wave of indignation go by them. Preposterous, unheard-of and insolence left him untouched, as did incompetent and irresponsible; but he felt a slight twinge of respect for vaporous extravagations. He hoped he would remember to work that into a conversation with his brother-in-law.
When the noise subsided—with, of course, a threat to get his badge—he said, “Yes.” Then he opened his notebook, keeping his feet squarely on the floor; he wished he also had a bowler hat, like a Scotland Yard man in a movie. If he had, he would have kept it on.
“Statement by James Latson, police officer,” he read. “Dated yesterday. I read: ‘I escorted Hogan DeLisle, or Beverly Hauer, to her apartment from the Zebra House. I opened the front door with a key she gave me, and followed her in. David Corday, known to me personally, was hiding behind the apartment door. When it was closed, he appeared, threatened me with a revolver, and took from my armpit holster a Skoda .38 which I carried there. Using a pillow to muffle the noise of the report, Mr. Corday then shot Miss DeLisle with the Skoda, emptying the gun into her and returning it to me. Seeing that she was dead, I then left in company with—’”
The eyes told Captain Martin what he needed to know; Dave Corday was involved. Latson might have shot the girl; or Latson might have told the truth, but Corday was involved.
He shut the notebook, held it ready, and got a pencil from his pocket. “Want to add anything to that, Mr. Corday?”
Guts Dave Corday didn’t have and never had had. His brain content was a dubious matter; he probably had more brains than he ordinarily used. But his lawyer’s training was an asset frequently available to him; he’d bought it hard and it stuck with him when courage and thinking power failed.
So he said, “Is that statement signed?”
Captain Martin shook his head. Dave Corday said, “Then it is worthless.” His voice was still clear and firm. But his face was the color of cream left on the coffee table overnight, and his hands were beginning to shake.
“Why, yes,” Captain Martin said. “It is. In a court of law. But I have good evidence that Chief Latson was in the neighborhood of the girl’s apartment at the time of the killing, and that he committed criminal acts to conceal that fact. Using those for levers, I think he’ll sign the accusation against you. Sooner or later.”
“Either that,” Dave Corday said, “or face a murder rap himself.”
“To escape which, he’ll formally accuse you.”
“Nothing to say,” Dave Corday said. “Nothing to say.”
“You do not wish to file a counter-accusation against James Latson?”
“Nothing to say,” Dave Corday said. “Nothing to say.”
Captain Martin nodded, and got to his feet. He stowed his pencil and his notebook away, picked up his hat, and went to the door. He didn’t say good-by.
Before he could get out of the secretary’s office, Dave Corday’s voice came after him, through the squawk-box.
“Cancel my appointments for the morning; something important has come up.”
Captain Martin let himself out quietly. Time was on his side now; time would break Dave Corday down, as it would never do Jim Latson.
Chapter 19
JIMMY REIN had reported to Homicide, as ordered, and it was a temptation for Captain Martin to send for him, give him a chair in the captain’s office, and invite him to talk over the DeLisle killing. But that was the one thing Captain Martin couldn’t do.
The slightest implication that Rein’s promotion was a bribe for silence, and discipline would go to hell. And it looked as if silence was what was going to result.
The interview with Dave Corday had brought up nothing but ranting and raving. Which was evidence—to Captain Martin—that Latson’s accusation of Corday had been true. But was no evidence at all in a court of law.
So—Captain Martin reached in the top drawer of his desk, got out a pack of cards, and started a game of Canfield—what did you have? Evidence that Jim Latson had been near the scene of the crime. Said evidence being the testimony of a police officer, James Rein.
Evidence that Chief Latson had tampered with the department files to conceal the fact testified to by Patrolman Rein… And how did you go about putting that evidence to a court? You subpoenaed the department records, and you dragged a lot of clerks into court, and it all added up to negative stuff.
Captain Martin put a black queen on a red king.
He had been foolish. In the hopes of using surprise to get a little farther, he had confronted Jim Latson. It h
ad never occurred to him that Latson had killed the girl, and he didn’t think so yet. The chief was neither half-witted nor impulsive. If he’d wanted to get rid of a party girl like that, he’d have had her floated out of town, firmly and in such a way that any accusation against him on her part would sound like nonsensical revenge… And the autopsy had shown she was not pregnant, which was about the only accusation she could make that would amount to anything…
Yeah, Dave Corday was guilty… Maybe Hogan DeLisle—Beverly Hauer—had a brother who could be brought here from Detroit, handed a gun, and told to go get Corday. And maybe he’d do it.
Captain Martin turned up the ace of diamonds, and covered it with a whole run, up to the nine. Big deal. He smiled to himself.
Yeah, and supposing all that happened. Then, would Captain Martin, being consistent with the standard he had set for himself, have to go and arrest Mr. Hauer?
It made a nice problem.
The Canfield was about to come out. He gathered up the cards, carefully shuffled them, and put them in their box. He thumbed his squawk-box: “Afternoon papers up yet, Jake?”
Jake said, “Yes, sir,” and promptly brought in the eleven o’clock edition of the News-Journal and the lesser afternoon sheet; the one that specialized in racing news.
Captain Martin put the cards away and opened the News-Journal. Yeah. Guild admitted to bond; trial would probably be postponed until Frederick Van Lear took over the district attorney’s post, which might be soon; the D.A. would probably resign in order to campaign, and the governor would appoint Van Lear. The writer—no by-line—pointed out that the new district attorney would be unable to assist in a case where he had once been defense counsel, and that, with a murder case pending, Van Lear’s appointment should be postponed. But it is much easier to get a man elected to an office he already holds… The old typewriter exercise was wrong; there is no time that is not the right time to come to the aid of the party.
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