“That makes it different,” said Sperling, not grief-stricken. “That seems to settle it.”
“Look, Mr. Archer,” Lieutenant Noonan offered. “It’s only a hit-and-run now, and you’re a busy man and so is Dykes. This Goodwin thinks he’s tough. Why don’t I just take him down to the barracks?”
Archer, skipping him, asked Dykes, “How good is it? Enough to bank on?”
“Plenty,” Dykes declared. “It all has to go to the laboratory, but there’s blood on the under side of the fender, and a button with a piece of his jacket wedged between the axle and the spring, and other things. It’s good all right.”
Archer looked at me. “Well?”
I smiled at him. “I couldn’t put it any better than you did, Mr. Archer. My contribution is entirely negative. If that car killed Rony I was somewhere else at the time. I wish I could be more help, but that’s the best I can do.”
“I’ll take him to the barracks,” Noonan offered again.
Again he was ignored. Archer turned to Wolfe. “You own the car, don’t you? Have you got anything to say?”
“Only that I don’t know how to drive, and that if Mr. Goodwin is taken to a barracks, as this puppy suggests, I shall go with him.”
The DA came back to me. “Why don’t you come clean with it? We can wind it up in ten minutes and get out of here.”