would they have to lose after the first one?”
He went on watching me, his face very still now. “Has somebody been murdered?”
“Langston,” I said.
“I thought so. But isn’t there a hole in your argument somewhere? We’ve been investigating it for seven months and nobody’s tried to kill us.”
I didn’t like the way it was going, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. He was backing me right into the corner while I watched him do it.
“Well?” he prodded. “Or, wait; maybe I see what you mean. They’re not worried about us, because we’re so stupid we’d never stumble onto ’em anyway.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And of course, there’s always the other possibility,” he went on. The tone was conversational, but I was tuned in on the savagery—still under control—that was behind it. I hoped it stayed under control. Magruder looked at him inquiringly. He didn’t even know what was going on. “I mean, from your point of view, we could have been bought off. All we’d need is a patsy like Mrs. Langston, and even if we couldn’t frame up enough evidence to convict her she’d take the heat off the others. Everything’s rosy, nobody’s hurt, and you don’t have to pay taxes on it. It makes perfect sense when you look at it that way. Doesn’t it? . . . Well, come on; speak up. Say something, you goon son of a bitch—”
He slid off the desk, caught the front of my shirt, and hauled. I had to come with it or have it torn off me. He slapped me backhanded across the mouth, and I felt the lip split against a tooth. He swung again, his face pale with suddenly uncontrollable rage and his eyes tormented and crazy-looking as if he were in pain. I jerked back, stumbled over the chair, and fell. I slid back and got up warily, expecting to have my head torn off, but he turned away abruptly, grinding a hand across his face.
He took two deep breaths, and you could see the battle going on inside him. “Get out of here,” he said raggedly, “before I use a gun barrel on you.”
“Wait a minute, Kelly,” Magruder protested. “We can’t let him go till we hear from Mitch—”
Redfield turned savagely and cut him off. “We know where to find him if we want him! Get the son of a bitch out of here!”
Magruder looked at me. “You heard the man.”
“Yes,” I said. I picked my hat up from the floor and dabbed a handkerchief at the blood in the corner of my mouth. “I heard him.” I went out and walked over to Springer to find a cab, not even particularly angry at him. Or not nearly as angry as I knew he was at himself. He was too good a pro to give way to rage that way, with so little provocation. Somewhere inside Redfield a bunch of mice were eating the insulation off his nerves. But what mice? And where had they come from?
Well, when it came to being jumpy, he had company—plenty of it. If there was ever a place that was wired, this was it. It’d be a poor location, I thought, for the type of practical joker who liked to slip up behind people and say “Boo!” He wouldn’t last till the coffee break.
It was ten minutes to five when I paid off the cab in front of the office. One of the Sheriff’s cars was parked in the area and the door of my room was standing open. I walked over and looked in. The big redheaded Deputy was pawing through one of the chest drawers. He looked up at me without interest, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and pushed the drawer shut.
“Looks like you just haven’t got a gun,” he said.
“Where’s your warrant?” I asked.
“I forgot to pick it up. Want me to go back for it and search you again?”
“No,” I said.
“I’d be glad to,” he said helpfully. “No trouble at all.” “Don’t bother,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to monopolize you.”
“You got a great sense of humor,” he said. He looked around for the ashtray, saw it was on the table between the beds, and shrugged. He ground out the cigarette on the glass top of the chest. “Yes, sir, a great sense of humor.”
“How did you get in?” I asked.
“Maid. I told her you wouldn’t mind a bit. Hell, I told her, a man with a sense of humor