Hell Has No Fury

Chapter Three Homicide Chimes In

When I hit the office next morning, after seven hours in the sack, Kitty was sitting behind her desk with her knees crossed. Her chair was pushed back far enough to give anyone at the side an unobstructed view of her long legs.

The show was good, but the audience was composed of exactly one short, fat guy with popped eyes and a sour, twisted mouth. His fat was saggy, lapping over his collar and belt, and he looked as if he might reach five-six in his socks. Leaning against the jamb of my private door, hands thrust into the pockets of his pants, he divided his attention about equally between the scuffed toe of a shoe and Kitty. As far as I could see, he showed about as much enthusiasm for one view as the other. His popped eyes, the color of skimmed milk, took no notice of me whatever.

“You’re wasting it,” I said pleasantly.

Kitty sighed philosophically. “You never can tell about these reserved guys, they’re deep. Sometimes they crack all of a sudden. This one’s Wiley Shivers. Detective Lieutenant Wiley Shivers, to you. He represents homicide.”

“Smart,” Wiley Shivers said. “You’re a smart pair.”

“We’re really not so bad,” I said. “It’s just that we’re leary of visitors. We’ve had bad luck with some recently.”

His eyes dropped again to the toe of his shoe.

“Joker,” he said. “Some people always reaching for a fast line. You got no call to be funny, counselor. Maybe you better start worrying a little. Maybe you got some more bad luck coming up.”

Already I was sick of him. “Is that a guess or a threat?”

He straightened, rocking forward from the jamb to an unsupported perpendicular. I noticed that his feet was very small, almost like a child’s, so that the balance of his excessive weight always seemed a little precarious.

“Neither. Call it a prediction based on evidence. I’ll come in and talk with you about it.” He rolled his milky eyes at Kitty. “See that no one disturbs us, sister.”

Kitty cackled and put her legs away under the desk. “That’s a very rough assignment,” she said.

I went into my office and sat down in my chair, and Shivers came after me and sat down in the chair that Wanda Henderson had sat in yesterday.

“I hear you were out on South Twentieth last night,” he said.

“That’s right. I went out to see Wash Richert. You’ve probably heard that, too.”

“I hear a lot of things. You see him?”

“No. I saw his wife.”

“Yeah? Platinum dame with round heels?”

“I can vouch for the platinum, not the heels. Maybe you’re better acquainted with her than I am.”

“There you go again. You got a smart mouth, counselor. She tell you where Wash was?”

“No. She gave me a drink and threw me out. She didn’t even give me time to finish the drink.”

“Tough. All your luck seems to be bad. Why’d she do it? Throw you out, I mean.”

“She didn’t like my name. She didn’t like my job. She thought I was nosey.”

“Probably she thought right.”

“You’re not a nice guy, Lieutenant.”

His pale, milky eyes were unaffected. “I’m not paid to be nice. I’m paid to be a cop.”

“Are they incompatible?”

“Usually they are. You telling me you never saw Wash at all last night?”

“That’s right. I saw his wife. Then I went to see Austin Stark. After that, I went home.”

“Well, someone saw him. I thought maybe it was you.”

I looked at his nasty, fat face across the desk, and the pressure was back in my chest.

“Why not come to the point, Lieutenant?”

“Sure. He’s dead — Richert is. Someone smoked him in a room over on the east side. Crummy dump where he’d holed in.”

I stared at him, and my mind was as numb as a blank can be. After a while, I said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Murder never does. Not in the end.”

“Who would want him dead?”

“Hal Decker would.”

I laughed caustically. “Use your head, Lieutenant. Decker’s an ordinary guy, a little guy. He doesn’t have hired hoods to bump off an unfriendly witness for him.”

“He’s got you.”

“I’m a lawyer, not a torpedo.”

“He’s got the dame — the one who took a story to the D.A. — the Henderson dame.”

“So you’ve heard about her.”

“Like I said, I hear a lot of things.”

I massaged my forehead trying to muscle my thoughts into some kind of pattern, but it wasn’t any good. They kept right on milling around in confusion.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’ve never been close to Richert. Not even within shooting distance. And I’d stake my life that Wanda Henderson hasn’t, either. There’s no reason to think she’d have been able to locate him. Damn it, there’s just no one loose who wanted him dead, no one who gave a damn about his testimony against Decker.”

Shivers’ lips twisted with sour sarcasm. “Maybe you think the D.A. bumped his own witness. Maybe that makes sense to you.”

“No. That makes no sense, either. Not a damned thing about this makes sense.”