Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

She said quickly, “I thought you weren’t interested in destroying my husband’s beautiful faith.”

I grinned at her. “I’m not. I just want my hypotheses verified. When you can’t get verification from one source, you try another. And beautiful as your husband’s faith is, I have an idea a session with me and Mrs. Knight would shake it.” I let her absorb this a few moments, then added, “Of course, if I could get a few halfway sensible answers out of you, it wouldn’t be necessary to bring Mrs. Knight and Harlan together.”

Isobel swished ice around in her glass, looked thoughtful, and cast a surreptitious side glance at Fausta.

“I will step into your front room,” Fausta said dryly, rising from her chair.

She entered the house without glancing back at us.

Isobel continued to look thoughtful.

“Well?” I prompted.

“This won’t go beyond you?” she asked.

“It won’t go to your husband. It may go to the police, but I’ll ask them to hold it in confidence. And if it ever gets back to your husband, you can simply say I’m a liar. I’m sure he’d believe you before he’d believe me.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I can handle Harlan.” She examined the swishing ice a moment longer, then said, “It’s true Willard stopped by Monday night. But it was only a social call.”

“What time did he arrive?”

“About six fifteen.”

“A quarter hour after your husband’s plane left for Kansas City. How long did this social call last?”

“Well, he stayed for dinner...”

When her voice trailed off, I asked, “What time did he leave?”

“Late, I guess. Rather late.”

“His wife said he got home about one A.M. That when he left?”

“Oh, no. Not that late.”

“A quarter of one?”

“I guess,” she said reluctantly. “Along in there somewhere.”

“And you stayed here the whole time? You didn’t go out?”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t spend an evening out with a man who was not my husband.”

“I see,” I said. “Was Knight gone any of this time?”

“Gone?”

“From the house.” She shook her head.

“You’re certain? Perhaps while you were washing dishes?”

“He wiped,” Isobel said. “He wasn’t out of my sight all evening. Except...”

She paused and I asked, “Except when?”

“Well, a little after nine he went down the basement for more beer because the refrigerator was empty, and was gone nearly a half hour. He got interested in Harlan’s tool bench.”

“A little after nine,” I repeated. “With perfect timing, he could have driven to El Patio, shot Lancaster and driven back again in a half hour. Could you hear him moving around in the basement?”

“No. But I know he didn’t leave the house.”

“How?”

Suddenly she grinned a reckless grin straight at me. “He didn’t have any pants on. And the pants were draped over a chair within my sight all the time he was gone.”

“That settles that,” I said. “One last question. Your meeting with Knight last night wasn’t accidental at all, was it?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Just trying to make all parts of the puzzle fit. Let me guess. He phoned you to arrange the meeting, and what he wanted was to work out some story which would get him off the hook for Lancaster’s murder, without disclosing he was over here with his pants off at the time Lancaster died.”

“You put it rather crudely,” Isobel frowned.

Her zany jiggling back and forth between candid admission and offended virtue began to irk me. “You mentioned his pants first,” I said. “Why, for cripes’ sake, do you balk at admitting a planned meeting with Knight in public, after admitting he spent a pantless six and a half hours with you in private?”

“He didn’t have his pants off the whole time,” she said primly.

I scowled at her and she said, “All right. He phoned me to meet him at the Sheridan and I sneaked out after Harlan went to sleep. We worked out a story that we had both gone to the auto races Monday night, only not together. I was going to tell the police I saw him in the crowd, but too far away to speak. The races last from eight thirty until ten thirty, so he would have been alibied for the time Mr. Lancaster was shot. After Willard died, there wasn’t any point in the story, of course, because it didn’t make any difference whether the police thought he killed Lancaster or not.”

I examined her face, trying to decide whether this, finally, was the truth. It was, I decided, because the reasoning was so peculiarly her own. When she said it didn’t make any difference whether the police suspected a dead man of killing Lancaster or not, she meant simply that it didn’t make any difference to her. The fact that settling on Knight as Lancaster’s murderer would allow the real killer to go free, did not concern her. Nothing concerned her which did not directly affect herself.

I climbed out of the swing. “Thanks, Isobel. I’ll keep our conversation as confidential as possible.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said, smiling up at me. “Drop back again sometime. Without your lady friend.”

The invitation did nothing to me. It didn’t flatter me, it didn’t excite me, it didn’t even bore me. It also hardly surprised me, for her lack of feeling over her lover’s death made me realize, at least subconsciously, she would be looking for another lover before the first turned cold. I just happened to be the first man handy.

I gave her back a smile, but mine was merely polite instead of intimate. Then raising my voice, I called, “Fausta!”

It was nearly four thirty when we finally got back to headquarters. Day and Hannegan were awake by then, but only barely. We found them both in the inspector’s office, still rubbing sleep from their eyes.

Warren Day greeted us glumly and made a vague gesture toward a couple of chairs. Hannegan, as usual, said nothing.

When we were seated, I announced, “I’ve got a brand-new theory.”

“Did you have an old one?” the inspector asked sourly.

I said, “It’s a theory I don’t like very much.”

“Then don’t bother me with it.”

“I don’t mean it has flaws in it,” I explained. “I don’t like it for personal reasons.”

Day’s expression turned faintly interested. “Personal reasons,” he repeated. “It can’t be you feel sorry for the killer, because you haven’t any heart to feel sorry with. It must be money. If your new theory is right, it’s going to cost you money.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” I said stiffly. “I just don’t like being taken for a sucker.”

The inspector carefully chose a cigar stub from his ashtray, examined it for cleanliness and thrust it in his mouth. Around the stub he said, “Shoot.”

“Let’s start back with the meeting between Lancaster and Knight,” I said. “According to the secretary at Jones and Knight, the two men were arguing over Lancaster’s determination to make a public announcement of some irregularity he had discovered in a company they both had large investments in. It seems that company was Ilco Utilities.”

“How do you know that?”

I told him of my visits to Harlan Jones and to the Mohl and Townsend Investment Company.

“Ilco Utilities is almost certainly the company Lancaster referred to,” I went on. “In the first place, unless Willard Knight was doing his undercover speculation through more than one investment house, Ilco Utilities was the only stock he owned. In the second place, his hurry to unload it at the same price at which he had bought indicates a panicky desire to get out from under.”

“I’ll accept your premise,” the inspector said impatiently. “You needn’t belabor the point.”