Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,6
and as soon as he learned Captain Romstead was dead, he notified the tax people, the banks, any possible creditors, all that legal bit. The bank in San Francisco told him about that whopping withdrawal, and he immediately notified us. He was worried about the money, of course, but we already had a pretty good idea nobody was ever going to find it.
“We asked the San Francisco police to check out his apartment while we searched the house here to see if we could turn up any trace of it just on the off chance he still hadn’t consummated the so-called deal. There was no money in either place, but we did find evidence of just about what we expected—or that is, San Francisco did. All we found in the house was a thousand Havana cigars stashed in a closet. But the apartment was the payoff.
“It had just been thoroughly cleaned, with the exception of one item he overlooked. In a closet there was an empty suitcase that had some white powder spilled in the lining. The police vacuumed it and had the stuff analyzed. It was heroin, all right, and it had been cut with milk sugar.
“So there you are. All the evidence says he must have been mixed up in smuggling junk when he was going to sea and still had connections. Somebody brought in a consignment for him, he drew out that money to pay for it, but before he sold it as pure heroin to the next bunch of bastards along the pipeline, he cut it, or cut part of it, to increase the take. Sound business procedure, I suppose, as long as you don’t do it to the wrong people. He apparently did, and they caught up with him after he got back here.”
“No,” Romstead said. “I don’t buy it. Maybe in a lot of ways he wouldn’t qualify as Husband of the Year or the thoroughly domesticated house pet, but junk—no.”
“I wouldn’t call you an expert witness,” Brubaker pointed out. “You’ve practically admitted you didn’t know a damn thing about where he was or what he was doing.”
“No, but I don’t see that you’ve got any evidence, anyway. Who says that suitcase was his? You know as well as I do he wasn’t using that apartment alone. Christ, with his track record there could have been a half dozen girls in and out of it at one time or another, any one of ‘em a possible junkie or with a junkie boyfriend on the side.”
“And I suppose he was just keeping those forty boxes of Upmann cigars for some girl? Maybe she didn’t want her mother to know she smoked.”
Romstead gestured impatiently. “Cigars are not heroin.”
“No, but they’re contraband.”
“Only in the United States. He smoked ‘em all the time. Said tobacco had no politics.”
Brubaker removed his own cigar and looked at it. “And I have to smoke these goddamned ropes.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, if Castro was chairman of the Republican National Committee, I still couldn’t afford his cigars.”
“Well, look,” Romstead said. “It seems to me there’s a big hole in your reasoning somewhere. If he bought this crap for a quarter million dollars, as you say, and then sold it to somebody else at a profit, he must have got more than forty dollars for it. It wasn’t at the house, and it wasn’t in the apartment, so what happened to it?”
“Those hoods got it, obviously. The same time they got him.”
“It must have been at the house, then, if they came up here looking for him. Was there any sign of a fight?”
“None at all. But don’t forget, he was playing with professionals. They don’t come on like Laurel and Hardy.”
“You’re convinced of that? Then there’s not much chance of catching them?”
There was a sudden darkening of anger in the chief deputy’s face, gone just as quickly as he got it under control. “Jesus Christ, Romstead, I know how you feel, but look at the hole we’re in. It wasn’t anybody here that killed your father. We’re just a geographical accident; all we’ve got is a dead body and jurisdiction. Everything leading up to the crime and everybody connected with it came from a metropolitan area in another state.
“The police down there are cooperating with us all they can, but they’re shorthanded and overworked the same as everybody else, and every detective on the force has got his own backlog of unsolved cases as long as a whore’s dream. Our only chance