“I’m damned if I know. And I’m a little suspicious.”
I said, “Endicott was fighting for all the delay he could get. Jannix was to back his play. He was to be the witness who’d swear Corla’s father was in the pen. Endicott was going to pay him. You know Jannix. He was hot tempered and a little suspicious anyway. Endicott made the mistake of coming to see him, and caught Jannix in one of his more suspicious moments. When he left, Jannix was dead.”
“Very, very nice,” Kleinsmidt said. “Only it’s full of holes. It’s bum stuff, even for a theory. You wouldn’t, by any chance, have any facts to back up this fairy story, would you?”
“Lots of them.”
Kleinsmidt said, “Well, you might begin by telling me how it happened Endicott could have done this at the exact moment he was sitting in a picture show. The chief would be interested in that. He’s funny that way, the chief is.”
I said, “If a woman had killed Jannix, he was killed between eight-fifty and nine-fifteen. If a man killed him, he might have been killed any time.”
“How interesting!”
“The trouble with you,” I said, “is that you got a theory and then tried to fit the facts to it. Your idea was that because the people who lived in the adjoining apartment hadn’t heard a shot, the shot must have been fired while they were out.”
“Try firing a shot in there without that old dame hearing it,” Kleinsmidt said.
“Sure. She didn’t hear a shot. She was out at the train. Therefore, the murder must have been committed while she was out.”