“I didn’t kill her.”
“Then you shouldn’t have run away, my lad. You know what happens when you try to make a break for it. You thought you could walk out and get by with it. You didn’t think anyone who had seen you could identify you. But I just happened to play a smart hunch. I remembered the description of the little blonde number you gave me tallied absolutely with the dead girl. I got—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It all came over the radio.”
Sellers glared at me. “And I checked up on the book, incidentally, and your fingerprints are all over the cellophane cover.”
“Sure,” I said. “I was out there.”
“That’s the second time he’s admitted it,” Sellers said to Bertha Cool and Claire Bushnell. “Remember it.”
I said, “There’s pretty good reason to believe that whatever the blackmail consisted of, it centered around the Cabanita Club. You know what happens around those places. The playboys go out when they’re on the loose. Occasionally some smart egg with a good memory and an eye for faces sticks around and gets a line on who’s doing the celebrating. If it happens to be a married man from out of town, or someone who lives in the city and is doing a little week-end playing, the blackmailers look them over. Nearly all of those places have blackmailers who hang around, or, I’ll put it another way: Lots of blackmailers drop around to those places and keep looking the crowd over, trying to pick up the licence number on an automobile, or something that’ll mean a little cash. It’s usually a job of slim pickings, but I think that this blackmail centers around the Cabanita outfit. I think that Tom Durham is mixed up in it, and I think that Bob Elgin knows who Tom Durham is and where he can be found.”
“Durham was staying at the Westchester Arms Hotel. He checked out right after the killing. I thought at the time it was because he’d found out I was shadowing him. I think now it was because he knew there’d been a shooting. I’d like to look him over. We might find a .32 bullet parked somewhere in his anatomy.”
Sellers said, “Okay, I’ll keep it in mind and see what can be done.”
I said, “I started prowling around the Cabanita last night. I started getting pictures that had been taken. People didn’t like it. They tried to work me over. I barely squeezed out from under a good beating. I had some pictures and an address. The address was that of the blonde girl who was killed last night. I went out there to check, to find out what was at that address. I found out. Somebody was following me, or else someone knew I was going to be there.”