Chapter twenty-three:
Bait for a slugging
If I’d been one of those fictional dicks who deduce a criminal’s entire life history from the manner in which he drops his cigar ashes, it would all have been simple then, I suppose. All I’d have had to do would have been to crawl around with a magnifying glass, retire to my dressing-gown, give myself a shot in the arm, play a solo on my battered fiddle, and zango! Everything clear as a slug of straight gin. Whereas nothing was clear to me except that the prominent corpse in the bathroom wasn’t the doing of one Al Gowriss.
Reidy informed me, “We compared the note with Miss Marino’s registration card. Same writing, Gil.” I asked if the gun was in Lanerd’s fist or on the floor when they found him.
“He had it gripped tight,” Hacklin grumbled. “So don’t strain your brain givin’ us suggestions. We had all the amateur advice we want.”
“From Lanerd’s secretary?” I inquired.
“No, not from Lanerd’s secretary.” He mocked me, annoyed. “We didn’t get anything from her, thanks to you lettin’ her out of the suite before I had a chance to question her. She skipped — an’ that’s only one of the stumblin’ blocks you’ll have to account for when we haul you over the barrel.”
“We got a man after her, to bring her in,” Schneider said. “She must’a known about the suicide, an’ concealment of a crime is just as much a felony as helpin’ a suspect escape. Maybe the body was there when you were here in his suite with her?”
I said if it had been, I hadn’t known it. Any notion of telling them about Tildy or the events over on Atlantic Avenue went out of my head. If they meant to pass the buck to me for the bungling that’d gone on, I might need an ace up my sleeve.
Schneider waved at a couple of accordion-folded tickets caterpillaring along the top of a fingerprint-equipment case. “This is a wrap-up. Lanerd was nuts about the skater. He planned to go away with her. He had those plane tickets to Rio in his pocket along with her note. We know it wasn’t his wife he planned to take along; we phoned her; she didn’t even know he intended to go to Rio.”