She spoke moodily, as if she was talking to herself. "I — I was afraid you'd come back."
I said: "We had a date.
I told you it was all arranged." I began to laugh like a loon.
Then she was bending down over him, touching him.
And after a little while she stood up with a small key on a thin chain.
She said bitterly: "Did you have to kill him?"
I stopped laughing as suddenly as I had started.
She went behind me and unlocked the handcuffs.
"Yes," she said softly. "I suppose you did."
30
This was another day and the sun was shining again.
Captain Gregory of the Missing Persons Bureau looked heavily out of his office window at the barred upper floor of the Hall of Justice, white and clean after the rain.
Then he turned ponderously in his swivel chair and tamped his pipe with a heat-scarred thumb and stared at me bleakly.
"So you got yourself in another jam."
"Oh, you heard about it."
"Brother, I sit here all day on my fanny and I don't look as if I had a brain in my head.
But you'd be surprised what I hear.
Shooting this Canino was all right I guess, but I don't figure the homicide boys pinned any medals on you."
"There's been a lot of killing going on around me," I said. "I haven't been getting my share of it."
He smiled patiently.
"Who told you this girl out there was Eddie Mars' wife?"
I told him.
He listened carefully and yawned. He tapped his gold-studded mouth with a palm like a tray.
"I guess you figure I ought to of found her."
"That's a fair deduction."
"Maybe I knew," he said. "Maybe I thought if Eddie and his woman wanted to play a little game like that, it would be smart — or as smart as I ever get — to let them think they were getting away with it.
And then again maybe you think I was letting Eddie get away with it for more personal reasons." He held his big hand out and revolved the thumb against the index and second fingers.
"No," I said. "I didn't really think that.
Not even when Eddie seemed to know all about our talk here the other day."
He raised his eyebrows as if raising them was an effort, a trick he was out of practice on.
It furrowed his whole forehead and when it smoothed out it was full of white lines that turned reddish as I watched them.
"I'm a copper," he said. "Just a plain ordinary copper.
Reasonably honest.
As honest as you could expect a man to be in a world where it's out of style.
That's mainly why I asked you to come in this morning.
I'd like you to believe that. Being a copper I like to see the law win.
I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred hard guys that got knocked over on their first caper and never had a break since.
That's what I'd like.
You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen.
Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A.
We just don't run our country that way."
I didn't say anything.
He blew smoke with a backward jerk of his head, looked at the mouthpiece of his pipe and went on:
"But that don't mean I think Eddie Mars bumped off Regan or had any reason to or would have done it if he had.
I just figured maybe he knows something about it, and maybe sooner or later something will sneak out into the open.
Hiding his wife out at Realito was childish, but it's the kind of childishness a smart monkey thinks is smart.
I had him in here last night, after the D.A. got through with him.
He admitted the whole thing.
He said he knew Canino as a reliable protection guy and that's what he had him for.
He didn't know anything about his hobbies or want to.