The Body Looks Familiar (10 page)

Captain Martin smiled a good, broad smile, almost a home-use smile.

Harry Weber said, “Of course, the D.A. resigns to start campaigning, Van Lear is appointed pro tem, and he can’t act on either side of the Guild case. Lawyers’ ethics.”

Captain Martin said, “I never said a word.”

“Not a mumbling word,” Harry said. “It’ll never come to trial. Or if it does, it’ll be a strange, bumbling kind of mess. Say Corday decides to prosecute. He can’t use anybody on his staff who is working with his new boss, Van Lear, on anything, or the opposing counsel will jump all over him.”

Captain Martin smiled.

Harry Weber said, “They’d almost have to get an outside prosecutor, someone not in the D.A.’s office at all. Means a special appropriation, and this case wouldn’t justify it. Much easier to drop the whole thing.”

Captain Martin shook his head gently.

Harry Weber snorted. “You can’t be naive enough to think this case will be tried.”

Captain Martin said, “You know—and off the record, though I hate the phrase—it will. Maybe not with Guild as defendant, but it will. And I can’t tell you why.”

Harry Weber started laughing. He said, “I’ll end up with the reporters’ cliché: If you do decide to let the public in on what its servant is doing, don’t forget the
News-Journal.”

The phone rang twice. It was Jake’s signal to his boss:
Urgent.
Cap Martin scooped it up, said, “Martin,” and Jim Latson said, “Understand you want to see me, Marty. Let’s make it right away, before I’m snowed.”

“I’ll be right down.” He hung up the phone, stood up, held out his hand to Harry. “I’ve got to see the brass.”

Harry said, “You’re probably the only man in the city government who doesn’t look in the mirror before that exercise.”

“They don’t hire me for pretty,” Captain Martin said.

The reporter walked along with him as he went downstairs to where the offices were larger, the pickings lusher. But the reporter didn’t talk, and Captain Martin was glad; he had an awful decision to make. If he told Jim Latson he knew about the stalled car, he immediately entered a field of intra-department politics he’d always avoided.

He might possibly enter a field in which the murder of a police captain was not too big a price to pay for silence.

He was still thinking of this when, having passed Jim Latson’s three secretaries without speaking, he found himself in the chief’s office, the door closing pneumatically behind him. He grinned at the thin man behind the desk, and said, “Chief,” falling again into his silent role.

Jim Latson was telling him to sit down, and start talking. “It’s your nickel, Marty. I didn’t send for you. I’m never likely to; you’re the only man in the department completely on top of his job.”

Captain Martin did not return a cynical thanks for the cynical compliment. Instead, he said, “The Guild case.”

Jim Latson yawned and pushed around so his feet could come up on his desk. “Yeah. The DeLisle killing. Tell you about that, Marty. We’re out of it, the department that is, and damn glad to be. Corday’s satisfied that the confession’s all the case he needs; so I’m pulling you and your men off it. I told Dave Corday he could borrow a couple of men if he needed them and direct them himself.”

Captain Martin kept his own feet firmly on the floor, side by side. “I see.”

“Sure,” Jim Latson said, and he yawned again. “Maybe you think I don’t appreciate you? I do. The department does. You’ve put in a lot of overtime on this Guild thing. Well, I won’t have the D.A.’s office overworking my best man. If Corday can’t get a conviction on a signed confession, that’s his hard luck.”

Captain Martin felt a great weight come off his lungs. He knew now where he had to go and what he had to say when he got there. But he took his time about it. He had walked a tightrope for twenty-nine years, and that is a very long tightrope; he had put one foot ahead of the other, and he had never fallen off on either side: the side of outright dishonesty, or the side of such righteous indignation that the machine had to break him.

He was getting off the tightrope now. It had gotten too greasy for his feet.

He said, “The Guild confession is no good, Chief.”

Jim Latson’s eyes were a bright green. They let themselves be covered with the lids for a moment, and then they dulled a little, and looked bored. “What do you mean, no good, Marty? Forged? Gotten under bodily duress? Misunderstood by the signer? Guild’s English is good enough for him to read what he signed.”

“It’s a phony,” Captain Martin said quietly. “It’s a deal, and the dealers can’t deliver. There’s no bail in a murder case.”

“Murder two? Homicide?”

Captain Martin said, “Murder one to me, until proved otherwise.”

Jim Latson shook his head. He clucked a little, his tongue clicking against the back of his front teeth. “Marty, Marty, you’re due for some time off. An old cop like you! You know better. What the D.A.’s office wants to prosecute for, that is what they charge; not us, not the public, not the victim’s family. That is the law, Marty, and you’ve known it—how many years?”

“I’m one short of my pension.”

“Twenty-nine years… But we wouldn’t graduate a rookie from police school who couldn’t tell you the division of responsibility between police, district attorney, magistrate, and grand jury… You’ve slipped, Marty.” Suddenly Latson’s voice got brisker; his feet came off the desk and he leaned forward, openly smiling. “You’ve slipped, and I like you better for it. You’ve been a cold one, Marty, to me. The perfect cop! Well, I never believed in the perfect anything; nobody does, and nobody’d like it if he met it. You’re human now, Marty, and human beings get tired when they’ve been overworking. I’m authorizing two weeks’ leave for you, starting right now, and it’s not to come off your annual leave; it’s in lieu of all the overtime you’ve put in.”

Captain Martin said, “No.”

But Chief Latson went on as though he hadn’t heard. “And when you come back, it won’t be to Homicide. It’ll be to an inspector’s desk and an inspector’s shield; in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division. Chief of all detectives; how do you like those apples, Marty?”

And as he said it, Jim Latson remembered Dave Corday saying he’d lost his taste for apples; but Dave had regained that taste, had hesitated at tipping over the machine’s applecart. Martin wasn’t Dave Corday; but Martin was a man with only a year to go for his pension.

Captain Martin said, “I appreciate the offer, Chief; but I won’t be able to take leave just now. The Guild case needs reopening.”

Latson’s dull eyes brightened again. There was the bite of anger behind his mild words: “Marty, even from you I expect listening when I’m talking.”

“It may not take me long,” Captain Martin said. “But there was a witness to the killing. I want to question him. After that, it will be up to the district attorney and his staff; they can drop it if they want to. But not till I give them this one piece of evidence, this story from the witness.”

Jim Latson leaned forward. “That’s a long speech—for you. This witness got a name?”

“It’s one you know,” Captain Martin said.

“Better than I do my own?” But the mockery didn’t have much depth to it.

“Not better. As well.”

Larson’s right hand slowly curled into a fist; Captain Martin, watching him, wondered if the chief knew. Latson slowly rose to his skinny height, and Captain Martin wasn’t sure that Jim Latson knew he was doing that, either. Latson said slowly, “Why, Marty? With a year more to run, why?”

Captain Martin shrugged.

Jim Latson said, “You think I killed her?”

“I wasn’t there,” Captain Martin said, “so all I know is when she was shot, where she was shot, and with what she was shot—an unregistered Czech pistol.”

“And that I was there.”

Captain Martin looked at the floor. He held his hands out, turned them over, inspected them as though they were strange to him. He said, “You said that, Chief Latson, I didn’t. Here is what I know: that you dated her, from time to time. That a man came home with her. That she had eaten nightclub food shortly before. And that you were in the neighborhood and went to a good deal of trouble to conceal the fact.”

“Illegal trouble. Doctoring of department records. Yeah, Marty, I took her home.”

Captain Martin said nothing.

Jim Latson slowly sat down again. He studied Captain Martin, Captain Benjamin L. Martin, though no one in the department called him Ben, never had. Mart, Captain Martin, commander Homicide Squad. “You’re married, aren’t you, Marty?”

Captain Martin said, “Yes.”

Jim Latson said, “It’s a funny question right now, I know. The reason I asked it, it just occurred to me I know less about you than almost any man in the department. We’ve served together twenty-five years—you were an acting sergeant when I was a rookie—and I don’t know the first damn thing about you. You’ve never brought your wife to a department party, you’ve never had another officer in your home, have you?”

“No.”

Jim Latson said furiously, “You were chatty enough a minute ago—when you were hanging it on me. Why clam up now?”

Captain Martin smiled. It was a slow smile, calculated to enrage a suspect; he had used it often. So, he was sure, had Jim Latson. Shakespeare’s expression, worn to a cliché by its years of aptness, came to mind: “hoist by his own petard.” With the slow, sarcastic smile still on his face, he thought: Latson would know the phrase, or a reasonable approximation of it, but he wouldn’t know where it came from.

“I guess I’m heisted by my own derrick,” Jim Latson said. “If I’d put a poorer man in Homicide and shoved you in Traffic, I’d have been better off.”

Captain Martin waited.

Traffic was distant, headquarters was not on a main street. Some place in the building, the direct wire from fire headquarters rang its bell; a one-alarm fire in the Park district. Rubber-heeled feet tramped in the corridors, and Captain Martin waited.

“Damn it,” Jim Latson said finally, “I didn’t shoot her.”

Captain Martin spared him two words: “I see.”

“But I can’t prove it,” Chief Latson said. He was out of his chair again, ranging the room, flinging his long arms around. “And don’t give me that crap about a man being innocent until he’s proven guilty! You know that isn’t so, and I know it isn’t so. A man’s innocent till the cops decide he’s guilty, and that’s that!”

Captain Martin said, “Is it?”

Jim Latson came to rest. He leaned on the back of one of the easy chairs, his arms folded. He said, “It isn’t with you, is it? An honest cop!” He made it sound like the worst sort of insult. But when it didn’t erase Martin’s smile, he raged again: “Who sold me out? Rein, Page, one of the girls in the log-typing room? Go on, tell me. I can find out. I can find out anything in this department. It’s my work. I built the department up from a lousy, small-time police force, and I run it! Me, Jim Latson.”

Captain Martin was thinking: I’ve got all the time in the world. If I have to pinch the chief, the newspapers’ll explode all around me. I’ll be over my head in reporters for a week, and I’m in no hurry for that. All the time in the world.

Latson was off on another tack, now. “I didn’t kill her! Do you think I did?”

Captain Martin said, “You’re still wearing your gun.”

“And you’d have taken it off me if you thought I was guilty? Not you! Not the longest, sunniest day of your damn smug life! The cop doesn’t live who could take Jim Latson’s gun away. Not here, not in the FBI, not in Scotland Yard.”

Captain Martin thought vaguely that a pipe would be a nice thing to smoke just now.

Jim Latson came as close to pleading as he would ever come in his life. “What’s the percentage, Marty? You haul me in on this and you ruin my career, you maybe get the whole administration thrown out at next election, and who gains? Say you don’t get broken, say you only get transferred to the sticks, and where does that leave any of us? It means the department has a worse deputy chief than it had before, and it means it has a worse head of Homicide. The city’s the loser, the department’s the loser, and who gains?”

“I don’t know,” Captain Martin said. “Who shot Hogan DeLisle?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Jim Latson said.

“Try me.”

Jim Latson came around the chair. He started to sit in it, and then thought better of that, went behind his desk, placed himself in his swivel chair of command; the high-backed, expensive chair of the deputy chief. “Dave Corday,” he said.

Captain Martin reached in his pocket and took out a notebook and pencil. And then the whole story came out; came out in such a rush that the captain had trouble getting it all down, though he had taught himself shorthand.

When it was all through, he closed the notebook and pm it away, put his pencil back in his inside coat pocket. He stood up, and went to the door. “Thank you, Chief Latson,” he said.

Jim Latson was red-eyed, his hair wild about his head. “My God,” he said, “believe it or not, I feel better for getting that off my chest.”

“Sure,” Captain Martin said. “By the way, I want James Rein transferred to Homicide. Detective second grade, till he makes sergeant.”

“Okay,” Jim Latson said. “He’s almost at the top of the promotion list now. Wouldn’t detective first grade be better?”

“This isn’t a bribe,” Captain Martin said. “It’s a promotion for the good of the department.” He walked to the door.

But the chief called him back, as Captain Martin had known he would. “What’s going to happen? I haven’t signed anything, and I’m not going to. You know the truth now, but you can’t use it in court.”

Captain Martin shrugged, an almost imperceptible motion. “Who knows?” he asked. “I’m going to see Corday.” And he went out.

Jim Latson reached down in the double drawer of his desk and got out the bottle with which he entertained visiting brass. He took a shot, all by himself. Then he gathered the half dozen bank books from his locked drawer.

He put them in an envelope, addressed the envelope to Norman Wright, Hotel Plaza, New York. In the upper left-hand corner he put his own name and his apartment address.

If he had to take off, it was simple to go to New York and register as Norman Wright. If he didn’t have to take off, it was equally simple to write to the Plaza and tell them his friend, Mr. Wright, had decided not to go to New York after all, and would they return the envelope to the addresser.