for a man of your achievements?”
“I’ve been assigned to the case.”
“Office politics?”
Except for the purp-purp of his pipe, the room was silent.
“The month is August,” I mused. “The Commissioner is off on his holiday, the Deputy Commissioner has always been resentful of your success, and since retail murder is somewhat out of fashion these days and usually, after the first sensation, relegated to page two or worse, he has found a convenient way of diminishing your importance.”
“The plain truth, if you want to know it”—he was obviously annoyed with himself for bothering to give an excuse—“is that he knew I wanted to see the Dodgers play Boston yesterday afternoon.”
I was enchanted. “From trifling enmities do great adventures grow.”
“Great adventures! A two-timing dame gets murdered in her flat. So what? A man did it. Find the man. Believe me, Mr. Lydecker, I’m seeing the game this afternoon. The killer himself couldn’t stop me.”
Pained by his vulgar estimate of my beloved Laura, I spoke mockingly. “Baseball, eh? No wonder your profession has fallen upon evil days. The Great Detectives neither rested nor relaxed until they had relentlessly tracked down their quarry.”
“I’m a workingman, I’ve got hours like everyone else. And if you expect me to work overtime on this third-class mystery, you’re thinking of a couple of other fellows.”
“Crime doesn’t stop because it’s Sunday.”
“From what I’ve seen of your late girlfriend, Mr. Lydecker, I’d bet my bottom dollar that whoever did that job takes his Sunday off like the rest of us. Probably sleeping until noon and waking himself up with three brandies. Besides, I’ve got a couple of men working on detail.”
“To a man of your achievement, Mr. McPherson, the investigation of a simple murder is probably as interesting as a column of figures to a public accountant who started as a bookkeeper.”
This time he laughed. The shell of toughness was wearing thin. He shifted in his chair.
“The sofa,” I urged gently, “might be easier on that leg.”
He scowled. “Observant, aren’t you?”
“You walk carefully, McPherson. Most members of your profession tread like elephants. But since you’re sensitive, let me assure you that it’s not conspicuous. Extreme astigmatism gives me greater power in the observation of other people’s handicaps.”
“It’s no handicap,” he retorted.
“Souvenir of service?” I inquired.
He nodded. “Babylon.”
I bounced out of my chair. “The Siege of Babylon, Long Island! Have you read my piece? Wait a minute . . . don’t tell me you’re the one with the silver fibula.”
“Tibia.”
“How magnificently exciting! Mattie Grayson! There was a man. Killers aren’t what they used to be.”
“That’s okay with me.”
“How many detectives did he get?”
“Three of us with the machine-gun at his mother-in-law’s house. Then a couple of us went after him down the alley. Three died and another guy—he got it in the lungs—is still up in Saranac.”
“Honorable wounds. You shouldn’t be sensitive. How brave it was of you to go back!”
“I was lucky to get back. There was a time, Mr. Lydecker, when I saw a great future as a night watchman. Bravery’s got nothing to do with it. A job’s a job. Hell, I’m as gunshy as a traveling salesman that’s known too many farmers’ daughters.”
I laughed aloud. “For a few minutes there, McPherson, I was afraid you had all the Scotch virtues except humor and a taste for good whiskey. How about the whiskey, man?”
“Don’t care if I do.”
I poured him a stiff one. He took it like the pure waters of Loch Lomond and returned the empty glass for another.
“I hope you don’t mind the crack I made about your column, Mr. Lydecker. To tell the truth, I do read it once in a while.”
“Why don’t you like it?”
Without hesitancy he answered, “You’re smooth all right, but you’ve got nothing to say.”
“McPherson, you’re a snob. And what’s worse, a Scotch snob, than which—as no less an authority than Thackeray has remarked—the world contains no more offensive creature.”
He poured his own whiskey this time.
“What is your idea of good literature, Mr. McPherson?”
When he laughed he looked like a Scotch boy who has just learned to accept pleasure without fear of sin. “Yesterday morning, after the body was discovered and we learned that Laura Hunt had stood you up for dinner on Friday night, Sergeant Schultz was sent up here to question you. So he asks you what you did all evening . . .”
“And I told him,” I interrupted, “that I had eaten a lonely dinner, reviling the woman for her desertion, and read Gibbon in a tepid tub.”
“Yeh, and you know what Schultz says? He says this writer guy, Gibbon, must be pretty hot for you to have read him in a cold bath.” After a brief pause, he continued, “I’ve read Gibbon myself, the whole set, and Prescott and Motley and Josephus’ History of the Jews.” There was exuberance in the ’fession.
“At college or pour le sport?” I asked.
“When does a dick get a chance to go to college? But being laid up in the hospital fourteen months, what can you do but read books?”
“That, I take it, is when you became interested in the social backgrounds of crime.”
“Up to the time I was a cluck,” he confessed modestly.
“Mattie Grayson’s machine-gun wasn’t such a tragedy, then. You’d probably still be a cluck on the Homicide Squad.”
“You like a man better if he’s not hundred percent, don’t you, Mr. Lydecker?”
“I’ve always doubted the sensibilities of Apollo Belvedere.”
Roberto announced breakfast. With his natural good manners, he had set a second place at the table. Mark protested at my invitation since he had come here, not as a guest, but in pursuit of duty which must be as onerous to me as to himself.
I laughed away his embarrassment. “This is in the line of duty. We haven’t even started talking about the murder and I don’t propose to starve while we do.”
Twenty-four hours earlier a cynical but not unkindly police officer had come into my dining room with the news that Laura’s body had
