The Way Some People Die

Chapter 25

It was nearly two o’clock when I reached my section of the city. I lived in a five-room bungalow on a middle-class residential street between Hollywood and Los Angeles. The house and the mortgage on it were mementos of my one and only marriage. Since the divorce I never went home till sleep was overdue. It was overdue now. The last few miles down the night-humming boulevard I drove by muscle memory, half-asleep. My consciousness didn’t take over until I was in my driveway. I saw the garage door white in my headlights, a blank wall at the end of a journey from nowhere to nowhere.

Leaving the motor idling, I got out of the car to open the garage. Two men walking abreast emerged from the shadows on the porch beside me. I waited in the narrow passage between the house and the open door of the car. They were big young men, dressed in dark suits and hats. In the half-light reflected from the garage door, their wide shoulders and square faces looked almost identical. A pair of heavenly twins, I guessed, from the Los Angeles police. The thought of Dalling in his blood had followed me all day. Now Dalling was catching up.

“Archer?” one of them said. “Mr. Lew Archer?”

“You have me. Hearthstone of the Death Squad, I presume.” I was running short of elan. “Accompanied by Death-stone of the Hearth Squad. Where’s Squadstone of the Death Hearth?”

“I’m Sergeant Fern,” said First Policeman. “This is Sergeant Tolliver.”

“Pronounced Taliaferro, no doubt.”

Second Policeman said: “It’s pretty late to be making corny jokes, isn’t it, Mr. Archer?”

“Bloody late. Can’t this wait until morning?”

“Lieutenant Gary said to bring you in whenever you showed. He wants to talk to you now.”

“About the Dalling killing?”

The plain-clothes sergeants looked at each other as if I had said something significant. The first one said: “Lieutenant Gary will be glad to explain.”

“I suppose there’s no way out of it.” I switched off the headlights and slammed the car door shut. “Let’s go.”

The patrol car was waiting around the corner. Lieutenant Gary was waiting in his Homicide Division cubicle.

It was a small square room dismally equipped with gray-painted steel furniture: a filing-cabinet, a desk with a squawk-box and In and Out baskets piled with reports, a water-cooler in a corner. A street map of the city nearly covered one wall. The single window opened on the windowless side of an adjacent building. A ceiling fixture filled the room with bright and ugly light.

Gary stood up behind his desk. He was a man in his forties with prematurely white hair. It stuck up all over his head in thistly spikes, as if his fingers had been busy at it. Gary had the shoulders of a football guard, but there was nothing beef-trust about his face. He had quarterback’s eyes, alert and shifting, a thin inquiring nose, a mobile mouth.

“Lew Archer, eh?” he said, not unpleasantly. His shirt was open and his tie hung askew. He tugged at it halfheartedly and forgot it. “Okay, Fern, thanks.”

The sergeant who had escorted me into the station closed the glass door behind him. Gary sat down at his desk and studied me. There was a green cloth board on the wall beside him, with several pictures of wanted men, full-face and profile, pinned to it. I had a fellow-feeling with the black-and-white smudged faces.

“You’ll always remember me, Lieutenant.”

“I do remember you. I’ve been checking your record, as a matter of fact. A pretty good record, as records go, in your job, in this town. I can’t say you’ve ever co-operated very freely, but you’ve never tried to cheat us, and that’s something. Also, I’ve talked to Colton on the D. A.’s staff about you. He’s in your corner, one hundred percent.”

“I served under him in Intelligence during the war. What are you working up to, Lieutenant? You didn’t haul me in at two in the morning to compliment me on my record.”

“No. I mention the record because if it wasn’t for that you’d be under arrest.”

It took me a little while to swallow that. He watched me, his nervous mouth chewing on itself.

I decided to come up smiling. “As it is I’m paying you a social call. Charming occasion, isn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed and brightened. They were like rifle slits in his walled lace, with blue and steel glinting behind them. “The warrant’s drawn,” he said softly. “If I decided to execute it, you wouldn’t think it was funny.”

“What’s it for? Spitting on the sidewalk?”

I got no rise out of him. He answered me with a question: “What have you been doing with yourself all day?”

“Eating. Working. Drinking. Having laughs.”

He answered his own question: “Looking for Joe Tarantine. Tell me why.”

“I have a client.”

“Name him.”

“My memory for names is very lousy.”

He shifted in his chair, his blue gaze circling the room as if he wanted out. “I have several questions to ask you, Archer. I hope this isn’t going to be typical of your answers.”

“You seem to know the answers.”

“Hell, let’s get down to cases. Soft-pedal the repartee.”

“I’m afraid when you wave a warrant at me it brings out the comedian.”

“Forget the warrant. It wasn’t my idea.” Against all the odds, he sounded like a fair man. “Sit down and tell me why in God’s name you should start running errands for Dowser at this late date.”

“What have you got against Dowser?” I sat in the one straight chair in front of the desk. “Dowser’s a solid citizen. He’s got a swimming pool and a private bar to prove it. He entertains politicians in his charming ranch-type home on an exclusive hilltop. He even supports a butler and a blonde.”

“I don’t get it, Archer.” He sounded disappointed. “You’re working for him?”

“Why not? He must be on good terms with the law or he wouldn’t be running loose. I wonder how many cops he has on his payroll. I’m just an ex-cop with a living to hustle.”

His eyes shut tight. For an instant the long gray face looked dead. “Don’t tell me about Dowser’s payoff. I know. I also know why you left the Long Beach force. You wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut, and he forced you out.”

“Colton’s been talking too much,” I said. “If you know all about Dowser, go out and bring him in and put him in Alcatraz where he belongs. Don’t take out your official frustrations on me.”

“He isn’t my department.” Gary was masticating his lip again. “The boys knock off his peddlers two and three a month, but that’s as far as it goes. Tarantine’s one of his right-hand men, you know that?”

“He was. Not any more.”

“Where is Tarantine now?”

“Nobody knows.”

“We found his fingerprints in Dalling’s apartment.” He changed the subject suddenly: “What were you doing in Dalling’s apartment this morning?”

I let it go by, trying not to show that he had startled me.

He went on: “A driver for Western Dairy gave us your description this afternoon. He also described your car. You or your twin went to the Casa Loma the back way some time around eight o’clock this morning.” He sat back and waited for me to have a reaction.

I had a number of them. This meant that his questions about Dowser were by-play. He’d told me to forget the warrant, but he remembered it.

There was nothing in being cagey. “At eight o’clock Dalling had been dead for hours. The autopsist will tell you that, if he hasn’t already.”

“You admit you were there? You admit that Dalling was dead.”

“I was there. He was dead.”

“You didn’t report it to us. We had to wait until the blood soaked through the floor and made a spot on the ceiling of the apartment underneath and somebody finally got around to noticing it. That wasn’t smart of you, Archer, it wasn’t co-operative, it wasn’t even legal. It’s the kind of thing that makes for license trouble.” He leaned forward across the desk, his eyes jumping like blue Bunsen flames, and tossed me a change-of-pace: “Of course license trouble is the least of your worries.”

“Go on.”

“You rushed straight from the Casa Loma to interview a couple of witnesses, Severn and the Hammond woman. God knows what you thought you were trying to do. The kindest interpretation is that you suddenly remembered you were an aging boy-wonder and decided to cut us out entirely and run a murder investigation as a one-man show. Have you been seeing a lot of movies lately? Reading The Rover Boys at Hollywood and Vine?”

“Maybe I have. What’s the unkindest interpretation?”

“It’s possible you were covering up for yourself.” He dropped it very casually. “We found the gun, you see. A member of my detail picked it out of a storm drain on the street behind the Casa Loma parking lot.”

Gary opened the drawer in front of him and set a squat black .38 automatic on the desk. “Recognize it?”

I recognized it. It was my own gun.

“You should,” he said. “It’s registered to you. Our ballistics man just completed some firing tests with this gun a couple of hours ago. It’s his opinion, based on examination with a comparison microscope, that this gun fired the slug that was dug out of Dalling’s cortex. It severed the jugular vein and imbedded itself in the cortex. Dalling bled to death. How do you like that, Archer?”

“Not very much. Go on. You haven’t warned me that anything I say may be used against me yet.”

“I’ll give it to you now. Have you got anything to say?”

“I’m very smart,” I said, “and very devious. I saw Dalling for the first time last night and decided that he was too pretty to live, a fit subject for the perfect crime. So I committed it. I shot him with a gun that could easily be identified as mine and carefully deposited it in the nearest drain, where any cop would be sure to look for it. Four or five hours later I returned to the scene of the crime, as murderers must, in order to admire my handiwork. Also to let a milkman spot me for you. I wanted to make things difficult for myself–”

“You have.” Gary was using his gentle voice once more. “This isn’t very funny. It doesn’t make me laugh.”

“It isn’t funny. It has some funny elements, though–”

He cut me off again: “You’ve acted like a damn fool, and you know it. I could probably get an indictment and possibly make it stick–”

“The hell you could. I was just going to tell you the funniest thing of all. I shot Dalling at a range of one hundred and twenty miles. Pretty good for a .38 automatic that normally can’t hit a barn door at fifty paces.”

“Failing a murder indictment,” he went on imperturbably, “I could be very nasty about your failure to report discovery of the corpse. It happens I don’t want to be nasty. Colton doesn’t want me to be nasty, and I value his judgment. But you’re going to force me to be nasty if you go on talking like a damn fool on top of acting like one.” He chewed his upper lip. “Now what was that about an alibi?”

It struck me that vaudeville was dead. “At the time Dalling was shot, I was fifteen or twenty miles on the other side of Palm Springs, talking to a woman by the name of Marjorie Fellows. Why don’t you get in touch with her? She’s staying at the inn there.”

“Perhaps I will. What time was that?”

“Around three in the morning.”

“If you know that Dalling was shot at three, you know more than we do. Our doctor places it around four, give or take an hour.” He spread his hands disarmingly, as if to underline the fact of his candor. “There’s no way to determine how long he lived after he was shot, or exactly when he was shot. It’s evident from the blood that he lived for some time, though he was almost certainly unconscious from the slug in his cortex. Anyway, you can see how that plays hell with any possible alibi. Unless you have better information?” There was irony in the question.

I said that I had.

“You want to make a statement?”

I said that I did.

“Good. It’s about time.” He flipped the switch on the squawk-box on the corner of his desk, and summoned a stenographer.

My obligation to Peter Colton was growing too big for comfort. Apparently the conversation up to this point had been off the record. That suited me, because my performance had been painful. I’d bungled like an amateur when I found Dalling’s body; gambled and lost on the chance that Miss Hammond or Joshua Severn might tell me something important if I got to them before policemen did. Gary had driven that home, in spite of my efforts to talk around the point. Vaudeville was dead as Dalling, and the Rover Boys were as out of date as the seven sleepers of Ephesus.

Gary gave up his chair to the young male stenographer.

“Do you want it in detail?” I asked him.

“Absolutely.”

I gave the thing in detail from the beginning. The beginning was Dalling’s visit to Mrs. Lawrence, which brought me into the case. The night died gradually, bleeding away in words. The police stenographer filled page after page of his notebook with penciled hieroglyphics. Gary paced from wall to wall, still looking for a way out. Occasionally he paused to ask me a question. When I told him that Tarantine had taken my gun, he interrupted to ask: “Will Mrs. Tarantine corroborate that?”

“She already has.”

“Not to us.” He took a paper-bound typescript from his desk and riffled through it. “There’s nothing in her statement about your gun. Incidentally, you didn’t report the theft.”

“Call her up and ask her.”

He left the room. The stenographer lit a cigarette. We sat and looked at each other until Gary came back: “I sent a car for her. I talked to her on the phone and she doesn’t seem to object. She a friend of yours?”

“She won’t be after this. She has a queer old-fashioned idea that a woman should stick by her husband.”

“He hasn’t done much of a job of sticking by her. What do you make of Mrs. Tarantine, anyway?”

“I think she made the mistake of her life when she married Tarantine. She has a lot of stuff, though.”

“Yeah,” he said dryly. “Is she trying to cover for him, that’s what I want to know.”

“She has been, I think.” And I recited what she had told me about the early-morning visit to Dalling’s apartment.

That stopped him in his tracks. “There’s a discrepancy there, all right.” He consulted her statement again. “According to what she said this afternoon, she drove him straight over from Palm Springs to Long Beach by the canyon route. The question is, which time was she telling the truth?”

“She told me the truth,” I said. “She didn’t know then that Dalling was dead. When she found out that he was, she switched her story to protect her husband.”

“When did you talk to her?”

“Early this afternoon – yesterday afternoon.” It was four o’clock by my wristwatch.

“You knew that Dalling was dead.”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“Why? Could she have killed him herself, or set him up for her husband?”

“I entertained the possibility, but she’s crazy if she did. She was half in love with Dalling.”

“What about the other half?”

“Mother feeling or something. She couldn’t take him seriously; he was alcoholic, for one thing.”

“Yeah. Did she communicate all this, or you dream it up?”

“You wouldn’t be interested in my dreams.”

“Okay. Let’s have the rest of the statement, eh?” And he went back to filling the room with his pacing. It was ten to five when I finished my statement. The stenographer left the room with orders to have it typed as quickly as possible.

“If you’ve been leveling,” Gary said to me, “it looks very much like Tarantine. Why would he do it?”

“Ask Mrs. Tarantine.”

“I’m going to. Now.”

“I’d like to sit in if possible.”

“Uh-uh. Good night.”

She met me in the corridor, walking in step with Sergeant Tolliver.

“We’re always meeting in police stations,” I said.

“As good a place as any, I guess.” She looked exhausted, but she had enough energy left to smile with.