Too Soon Dead by Michael Kurland Page B

from his pocket, muttered, “I gotta quit smoking!” and stuffed it back. “If I were them,” he told Brass, “I’d go for the disowning. Either that or see if Darrow is still taking cases.”
    “So he did it?” Brass asked.
    “His fingerprints are all over the room—”
    “He worked there,” I said before I could stop myself.
    Raab glared at me. “His fingerprints, as I was saying, are all over the room. They are also on the murder weapon. And, we have an eyewitness. If that isn’t enough to get a conviction, I’ll retire to Connecticut and raise sheep.”
    “What kind of sheep?” Brass asked.
    “How should I know?” Raab took the pack of cigarettes back out, glared at it, and thrust it back into his pocket. “Small ones.”
    “Why did he do it?”
    Raab sighed. “So far we got no idea,” he said. “He won’t talk. He says we can beat him all we want to, but we’ll get no information from him. He’s very adamant. I have a feeling that if we did beat him, he’d clam up even tighter. We don’t beat up people anymore. We use kindness. It often startles them into confessing. Back in the days when we did beat people, it wasn’t his sort we beat anyway.”
    “What sort did you beat?” I asked.
    Raab stared at me for a moment. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “When I first joined the force, a while before you were born, I had occasion to apprehend a lad who had been hitting his mother with a baseball bat. When I brought him into the station house, the desk sergeant listened to the charge and then said—it was a sort of accusation—‘There’s not a mark on him. He didn’t resist arrest?’
    “‘No, Sarge,’ I said.
    “‘Well, take him out back and have him resist arrest for a while,’ the sergeant told me. ‘I don’t want to see nobody that beats their mother in here before they’ve resisted a lot of arrest.’ And I did that. And I’ve never been sorry for it.”
    “That’s a good story,” Brass said. “I haven’t heard that one before.”
    Raab thrust his hands deeply into his jacket pockets. “I’m saving it for my memoirs,” he said. “So don’t use it.”
    “Scout’s honor,” Brass said.
    “Somehow the image of you as a Boy Scout is frightening,” Raab said.
    “Then you’re safe,” Brass said. “I never was. Who is the eyewitness?”
    “A Spaniard named Velo who runs a travel agency across the street. He saw Fox enter the building and this von Pilath go in right behind him. And about ten minutes later he saw von Pilath leave with a brown paper bag, which he tossed into a trash can. The Spaniard pointed it out to one of my men, and they searched the can and found the bag. Inside it was a knife with an eight-inch blade, covered with blood.”
    Shine looked up from his telephone. “How do you spell that name, Inspector?”
    Raab sighed a deep and heartfelt sigh. “I didn’t see you sitting there,” he said. “The city didn’t buy that desk for your use.”
    “Come on, be a sport,” Shine said.
    Raab transferred his glare to Brass, and then briefly to me, and then back to Shine, as though trying to decide how to apportion guilt.
“V-E-L-O,”
he said. “Now get off the phone.”
    “Sure thing,” Shine agreed, “whatever you say. I believe in working with the authorities. Say, did you hear the one—”
    “Out!” Raab bellowed. “Up from the desk and downstairs to that little, airless room that we provide for the working press.”
    “Sure thing,” Shine repeated. He murmured into the phone for a last second, and then hung it up and sprung to his feet. “I’ll be downstairs if you want me,” he said to the room at large, and headed out the door.
    After he was gone, Brass asked Raab, “Did Señor Velo see the fat man that Fox was following?”
    “He says nobody else went in or out around the same time. We didn’t ask him specifically about a fat man. We don’t want to go putting ideas into his head.”
    “What an original concept,” Brass