LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to control my rage. “Jimmy cleaned out Smithell’s jewelry box, stripped his wallet and took his watch,” I said monotonously. “Then he ran for it. That doesn’t sound very innocent to me.”

      “You know why he ran,” she cried, fresh tears in her eyes. “He came home from the picture show and Smithell was dead on the floor and he knew you lousy cops would try to pin it on him.”

      I stood very close to her. “Now you said it. Why don’t you finish? I’m one of those lousy cops. I suppose you think I hit the kid too. I suppose you think I beat on him when Gulliver was tired. Is that what you think?”

      “Maybe you did! If he was so guilty you didn’t have to beat him to find out!” she sobbed. She stepped back and hit me hard in the face with her open palm. It really rocked me. Her eyes brimmed. She hit me again, almost swinging from the heels, then staggered to the bed, fell across it.

      “Ah, Bill,” she said. “Ah, Bill, he was such a sweet little kid. If you knew him like I did . . .”

      I rubbed my face gently where she had hit me. I went to her and sat beside her and put my arm across her shoulders.

      After a while she sat up on the bed, put her arms around her knees. She looked at me uncertainly. “Are you angry?”

      “Little idiot,” I said.

      “I was so hurt,” she said. “It’s always been like that, when I’m hurt.”

      “I know. You had to hit something.”

      “Bill, you wouldn’t lie to me.”

      “About what?”

      “Did Gulliver hit him?”

      “Is it important now?”

      “Yes,” she said, “it is. I know Jimmy’s dead, and nothing can change that. But I want to know why he died.”

      I seized one of her hands and held it. “You’ve got to remember how it must have been with him, Stella. You believed in him. He knew how disappointed you were. Maybe he couldn’t take that.”

      “Yes, I guess so,” she said remotely. I wondered how much Jimmy had talked to her. A silence gathered between us, a silence I didn’t like. Then she said softly, “Did he? Gulliver?”

      “For Christ’s sake,” I said. Then I said, “Yes, I suppose he did. Gulliver is a tough violent man, Stella. He’s been a cop all his life. Sometimes he gets fed up with all the dirty people. Sometimes he loses his temper and hits a man in custody.”

      “Were you with him when he was questioning Jimmy?”

      “Yes.”

      “Did you see him hit Jimmy?”

      I didn’t like the calm way she was speaking, and I didn’t like being forced into a lie, into an expression of loyalty for Gulliver I didn’t feel.

      “No,” I said, thinking of the movement of Gulliver’s stocky body, the hands going out, the hard splatting sounds as his palms rocked Jimmy’s head.

      Come on, Jimmy, I got enough right now to turn you over to the county attorney, but I want to make good and sure. Tell me you killed him.

      No. No. No. No. No.

       Where did you get that thirty bucks, Jimmy?

      He gave it to me—to buy a suit.

       I guess you wanted more. I guess that’s it, isn’t it Jimmy?

      “No,” I said. “I didn’t see him hit Jimmy.”

      She propped herself on one elbow and looked at me. “Bill,” she said earnestly, “do you honestly believe Jimmy was guilty?”

      I looked at her for a long time. “Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, Stella. I think Jimmy killed him.”

      Her eyes closed and she settled back against the pillow. “Bill,” she said, “I’d like to be alone now.”

      I touched her leg but she didn’t respond. I got off the bed and lit a cigarette. She didn’t move or look at me.

      “When will I see you again?”

      “I don’t know, Bill,” she said, as if it didn’t matter at all, had never mattered. “I don’t know.”

      I left her then, beginning to feel a restless anger I couldn’t define.

      2

      THAT night I was having a drink in the bar of Roxy Marko’s place on Highway 44 when Miller Starkey came over.

      “Evening, Sergeant,” he said amiably, sliding onto a stool next to mine.

      I wasn’t particularly interested in talking to him, or to anyone else, but I returned his greeting.

      “Whiskey sour, Max,” he advised the bartender. “Buy you a drink, Sergeant?”

      “This’ll hold me for a while, Mr. Starkey. How are the girls?”

      “Fine. Fine.” He beamed at me. He was proud of his two girls. “Pootsie—that’s Alice, you know—is expecting again. And Juanita is president of her sorority up at State.”

      I nodded. The Starkey girls were famous in Cheyney. Born a year apart, they had raised hell from the cradle on, growing boisterous and beautiful. The last time I had seen them together they were under arrest on a shoplifting charge. Gulliver and Starkey had held a fast conference and the girls weren’t booked. Charges were subsequently dropped.

      In return for this favor, Starkey allowed police personnel to buy everything in his men’s shop, the best in town, for twenty-five percent off. It meant, to me and to most of the others, the difference between feeling almost dressed and well dressed on the same salary.

      Miller Starkey was unimpressively built, very near-sighted, with gray hair that stuck straight up from his scalp about four inches. It was hard to imagine how he could have been responsible for the Starkey women.

      Max delivered the whiskey sour and Starkey fondled the glass before drinking, smiling. He smiles all the time. I suppose it’s a mannerism. Like nose-picking.

      “So Jimmy Herne committed suicide,” he said. “I guess that wraps up the case, doesn’t it, Sergeant?”

      “As far as we’re concerned it was already wrapped up.”

      He lost some of his man-to-man chumminess. “Certainly. I only meant—” He poked in embarrassment at his glass.

      The small bar was cool and uncrowded. To my left were glass panels partially covered with soft blue drapes and on the other side of the glass was the dining room, almost filled to capacity despite the fact that it was past nine o’clock.

      “You know, I . . . I wanted to talk to you about Mr. Smithell,” Starkey said.

      “How’s that, Mr. Starkey?”

      The smile again. “It’s this way. Mr. Smithell owed rather a large bill at the time of—his death—and I don’t quite know . . .”

      “Oh. I wouldn’t worry about that, Mr. Starkey. See Nordin Kaylor and I’m sure he’ll take care of it.” Nordin Kaylor had been Smithell’s partner in two Cheyney automobile agencies.

      “Certainly. I should have thought of that.” The unreal whiteness of his false teeth touched the rim of the glass. “I knew Mr. Smithell had only lived in Cheyney about three years and had no relatives here, so you understand . . .”

      I looked toward the dining room just as Roxy Marko was passing. He noticed me and waved, so I lifted my glass in his direction.

      “It seems as if there’s no gratitude in the world,” Starkey said. “Here Mr. Smithell was willing to take on a boy who had been in the reformatory, let him live in his house, pay him a good salary. Probably the boy was planning all

Скачать книгу