Murder Is Suggested (16 page)

“Look here, mister,” Mullins said, but Bill Weigand cut through.

“Not entirely, Mr. Finch,” Bill said. “We're a good deal interested in the private detective who came to talk to you about the accident. Because—Professor Elwell hired him, Mr. Finch.”

Finch said, “What the hell?” in a tone of great surprise.

“No,” Bill said. “I think you knew. Or—guessed. Well?”

“I told the sergeant—”

“I know what you told the sergeant. I think you guessed if you didn't know. Well?”

“What difference does it make? I didn't know. I'll admit I—wondered.”

“And,” Bill said, “wondered if maybe they'd found out more than they told you. About the accident. That you
were
driving and—”

“They couldn't have,” Finch said. “Because I wasn't. And—I don't have to tell you a damn thing more, do I?”

He was belligerent.

“Not a thing,” Bill Weigand said, with no belligerence at all. “All right, Mullins. We'll take him along. Book him and—”

“Book me? For what?”

The belligerence remained, even increased. And sounded—Bill hoped it sounded—a little hollow.

“Material witness,” Bill said. Covers a multitude of sins, Mr. Finch. And—possibilities. Material witness in connection with the murder of Professor Jameson Elwell. And then you won't have to answer my questions. Anyway, not only mine. There'll be a man from the D.A.'s office and—”

“I tell you,” Finch said, “I wasn't driving. Nobody can prove I was driving.”

“That,” Bill said, “is what you hope. Could be, this man Flanagan would have a different story. Could be he passed it on to the professor and the professor gave you a chance to prove Flanagan wrong before he got the case reopened and—”

“You'll never,” Finch said, “make that stick. Anyway—who'd kill anybody for as little reason as that? Suppose I
was
driving. It was still an accident. Suppose something went wrong with the steering and—”

“Suppose,” Bill said, “you had been drinking and fell asleep at the wheel. Doing eighty. Suppose it's held vehicular homicide. You'd get a stretch for that, Mr. Finch. Wouldn't be much of a golfer when you got out, probably.”

Finch had been standing, as Bill Weigand and Mullins had. Now, suddenly, he sat down. They looked down at him.

“Damn it all,” he said. “Liz was—” He stopped and pressed his forehead with the palms of his hands. “She was dead,” he said. “There wasn't anything more could happen to—hurt her. And—” He seemed to catch himself. “She was driving the car,” he said, his tone flat, final. “She wanted to and I let her. Just as I told the police then. And nobody can—”

“Prove,” Bill said. “Perhaps not. It's hard to know about that though, isn't it? And this stirring things up—”

“I've told you all I'm going to,” Finch said. “All there is to tell.”

There is no use pressing too long on precisely the same spot.

“Miss Elwell had a purse,” Bill said. “A gray silk evening purse. It was found in the car. Mr. Finch—did you take anything out of that purse?”

Finch stood up again, abruptly. He said, “Damn it all! Now you want to make me out a thief?”

“Did you take anything out of the purse?”

“I didn't touch the purse. And if you—”

“Mister,” Sergeant Mullins said, “why don't you just sit down? Take it easy, sort of?”

Mullins looked heavily at Rosco Finch. And Finch sat down.

“I didn't touch the purse,” Finch said again. “Something missing from the purse?”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “I'd think so. Finch, did you take a key—perhaps several keys in a holder of some sort—out of Miss Elwell's purse? Did you—use one of the keys yesterday? At about three o'clock? The key to the Elwell front door?”

“I—” Finch began. But there was no belligerence left now.

“Don't,” Bill told him, “tell me you were at the golf club practicing drives. We've checked on that. Nobody saw you there. And—there were people about who would have. So—”

Bill waited. Sometimes you took chances; sometimes tried a bluff. And sometimes the bluff was called.

“I didn't take the keys,” Finch said. “What would I want to steal keys for? She didn't have room in the bag and—”

He stopped.

“What the hell?” he said. “What the hell?”

He seemed to speak in bewilderment, in discouraged wonder at mischance. They waited, saying nothing.

“All right,” he said. “She gave me the keys to carry, because they made a bulge with all the other things she carried in her purse. You know how they are about that?”

“Right,” Bill said. “She gave you the keys.”

“Will you let me tell it?” Finch said. “It's not so good, but let me tell it. Because I didn't kill Elwell. And I wasn't driving the car. I'll stick to that, captain.”

“Right,” Bill said. “You'll stick to that. Stick to both of them.”

“I didn't kill Elwell. Suppose you give me a chance to tell it.”

“The sergeant will make notes,” Bill said. “When we get in we'll type it up. And, as I said, you don't have to—”

“Sure,” Finch said, and the belligerence came back. “You badger me and this sergeant can push me around and—”

“Nobody's pushed you around,” Bill said. “Do you want to tell us about the keys?”

“I'll be—” Finch began, and then the belligerence drained out. “What's the use?” Finch said dully, and seemed to speak to himself. “I—”

He had, he said, been dazed after the accident, partly from shock, partly because he had got a bang on the head. He had forgotten all about the keys at the time, thought of them later and put them in a drawer, forgotten them again in the confusion of other things. “They kept badgering me,” he said. “Nobody asked me about the keys and what had they to do with it, anyway? Believe me or don't believe me, I forgot all about them.”

The whole accident had begun to be dim in his mind—“and thank God for that”—and then Flanagan appeared and brought it back. And then—

“All right,” he said. “I thought maybe Liz's father was back of it. I didn't know. I just thought he might be. And then I did remember the keys. So—”

The keys gave an excuse, Finch said. He would go around to see Professor Elwell, ostensibly to return the keys and to apologize for not having returned them months ago. And—if he could talk to Elwell he could, he thought, tell whether Elwell was back of Flanagan, and had sent Flanagan.

“And,” Finch said, “find out just where I stood. I wasn't going to bring it up in so many words unless I had to. But if it turned out he didn't believe she was driving—I thought maybe I could convince him. Because—well, after Flanagan began nosing around, I nosed around a little myself and—all right, found out about this vehicular homicide. As I say, I wasn't driving but—well, it was my car and the way it happened—what it comes down to, nobody can prove I was driving but I don't know any way I can prove I wasn't and—”

“Mr. Finch,” Bill said. “I'm not a Connecticut policeman. Unless it ties in with Professor Elwell's death, what happened last April isn't any official business of mine. Were you driving?”

Finch hesitated for a moment before answering; looked up at Weigand with slightly narrowed eyes. But when he did answer it was to repeat, with again a moment of truculence, that Liz Elwell had been at the Jaguar's wheel.

Bill shrugged his shoulders at that. He said, “You decided to see the professor, ostensibly to return the keys. And—got around to it yesterday.”

“I didn't say—” Finch was silent for several seconds. “I suppose somebody saw me,” he said.

So that was that. And they might, of course, eventually find somebody who had seen Rosco Finch.

“Go ahead,” Bill said. “You went to the house. Used the key, probably, and—”

Again he was invited to let Finch tell it. All right, Finch had gone to the house. Some time around three. And—

“Hold it a minute,” Mullins said. “When I was here before you already knew Elwell was dead.
And
had this story about practicing golf ready and—”

“All right,” Finch said. “It was on the radio. And nobody wants to get mixed up in things if he can help it.”

Which was true enough of most people; which was obviously very true of Finch.

“Go ahead,” Weigand said. “We'll pick up the pieces later, sergeant,” and Mullins said, “O.K., Loot-I-mean-captain.”

“If you mean,” Finch said, “did I just use the key and walk in, no, I didn't. I rang the doorbell, and waited and rang it again and was just about to give it up when—”

When, from somewhere inside the house, he had heard what sounded like a shot. It had sounded distant, muffled; he had not been sure that it was a shot. But he also was not sure it wasn't and, instead of going away as he had been about to do, he rang the doorbell again—rang it several times. And it was still unanswered.

“Hell,” Finch said, “I liked the old guy. Whatever you think, captain. I liked him. And I thought—maybe he was cleaning a gun or something and alone in the house and had managed to shoot himself and needed help. So—”

So he had got out the leather container of keys. There were half a dozen, and three of them of the type which might fit the lock of the door he faced. He tried them in order, and tried wrong twice. Inside, when the last of the three worked, he had at first called out, and then, being unanswered, begun to look into various rooms, in search of a wounded man. And he had, reasonably enough, started on the first floor.

So it had been at least five minutes after he heard the shot—and perhaps more than five minutes—that he had found Elwell dead at his desk.

“You knew he was dead?”

Anybody would have known that. And—Finch had been a hospital corpsman in the navy during the Korean fighting, and had had plenty of opportunity to learn the look of death.

“If there had been anything I could have done,” Finch said, “I'd have tried it. If there'd been anything
any
body could have done, I'd—I'd have called for help. Believe me or—”

He ended with a shrug which said he supposed they wouldn't believe it and that there was no use arguing.

“O.K.,” he said. “When there wasn't anything I could do, I got out. I didn't want to be mixed up in anything if I could help it. And, considering the accident and everything, I realized it wouldn't—” He shrugged again.

“Look so good,” Bill said. “Right. You lit out. Taking the keys with you?”

He had. And now, unprompted, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a leather key container and, mutely, held it out. It did contain six keys; three of them were for locks of similar type. Which didn't prove anything one way or another. Bill gave the keys to Mullins, who put them in a pocket.

Rosco Finch sat and looked at them and there was speculation in his eyes and uneasiness.

“Do you own a gun?” Bill asked him and he shook his head slowly from side to side. “So,” Bill said, “you couldn't have carried one with you when you went to see Professor Elwell.”

Finch did not answer that, in word or movement. He kept on looking at Bill Weigand.

“How did you get to the house?”

He had gone there in a cab. What kind of cab? One of the little ones, the ones hard to get into. A name on the cab? He didn't remember any. Its color? Yellow, he thought; or yellow and black. Or maybe yellow and red.

“Be fair, captain,” Finch said. “Do you pay attention to what kind of cab you get into? Note down the name of the driver and his number? Most people don't.”

Which was, of course, entirely true. And it was also true that, while time and men could turn up a cab whose trip record showed a stop outside the Elwell house, the time would be long and the men numerous. And, probably, nothing proved, except an approximate time of arrival.

“Describe the way you found the professor. And the room.”

Finch did. He had been there.

“There's a closet door,” Bill said. “Remember it?”

Finch rubbed his chin. He remembered another door, roughly opposite the door he had entered by. Was it open or closed?

“I'd have noticed if it had been open,” Finch said. “So it must have been closed. You mean—somebody could have been hiding in a closet?”

Which might mean that Finch thought it really was a closet, not a passageway, or that Finch was lying about it—or that, in fact, the second entrance to the room had nothing to do with anything.

“After you heard the shot,” Bill Weigand said. “Before you decided to use a key and go in and investigate, I take it nobody came out of the house? Came past you?”

“For God's sake,” Finch said, reasonably enough. “And said, ‘Afternoon. By the way, I just killed Professor Elwell'? For God's sake, captain.”

“And,” Bill said, “you didn't find anybody in the house? Anybody alive?”

Finch merely looked at him, and shook his head in wonder at such obviousness. But then he said, “I suppose there's a back door, captain? And—there was time enough.”

“All right,” Bill said. “Do you know a man named Hunter? Carl Hunter?”

Finch had met him a few times, at Elwell's house. Knew he was working with Elwell. “Something about cats,” Finch said. “God knows why.”

Mullins looked at Finch, momentarily, with something like sympathy.

“What they called an egghead,” Finch said. “Like the professor himself. Psychiatrist, or something like that.”

“Psychologist,” Bill said, absently. “You didn't see Mr. Hunter yesterday?”

Finch said, “Huh?”

“At the Elwell house,” Bill said. “Going away from the house.”