Badge of Evil (12 page)

Next he noticed that the stenographers were drooping. Theirs was a harder job than his, merely mechanical, since they had no inkling of its purpose. He dismissed them with thanks and continued alone, a solitary figure in the vast room. He wasn’t aware of his solitude, however, so complete was his absorption in his task. The cleaning crew arrived about eleven but Holt paid them no heed and didn’t know when they departed.

It was past midnight when, eyes smarting, he gave up for the day. For the first time he was conscious of how much he had done and how tired he was. But along with his weariness there was a certain exhilaration. And, also, a little fear.

He put the accumulation of the day’s work in his brief case. When he had arrived at the Hall of Records, the brief case had been empty. Now he could hardly zipper it shut. It carried all the weight of a deadly weapon. Holt thought it might well turn out to be just that. Slowly, he left the big file room and climbed the stairs to the street level, since the elevators had stopped running hours ago. On his way out, he told the maintenance foreman that he could lock up the Hall of Records now.

“You put in a long day, Mr. Holt.”

“Yeah. I’m glad it’s over.”

Yet it wasn’t over, not quite. As Holt turned into his driveway, he saw an unfamiliar car parked at the curb in front of his house. His stomach contracted with a sure intuition and, when he turned from lowering the garage door, he was not at all surprised to see the burly figure of Sergeant Quinlan hobbling toward him.

They met in the breezeway. There was no moon and Holt couldn’t make out the other man’s expression. There was really no need to, however, because Quinlan’s voice, harsh and bitter, told everything. “Holt, what the hell are you up to?”

Holt matched his bluntness. “I’m looking for the truth.” He indicated the brief case. “I think I’ve found it.”

“Looking for headlines, you mean. The chief called me in this afternoon. You know what he told me?”

“I can guess.”

“I’m not standing still for your smear tactics, Holt. I don’t know what you’re getting at but you’ve picked the wrong patsy.”

“You alone?” Holt interrupted, glancing out at Quinlan’s automobile.

“I don’t need any help to stamp on you. You may think I’m too old and too shot-up but, buster, you got another think coming.”

Holt said carefully, “I wanted to know whether Captain McCoy was with you. Since he isn’t, I’ll give you a message for both of you. This is it. I’m willing to hear your side — but don’t try to scare me.”

“And I’ve got a message for you,” growled Quinlan. He grasped his cane like a club and stepped forward, leaving no doubt as to his intentions. Holt rose on the balls of his feet to meet the attack.

It was averted by the sudden brilliance of the patio lights being turned on, startling both of them. Connie opened the back door and peered out. She wore her bathrobe and slippers. “Is that you, Mitch? I heard voices and … Oh, Mr. Quinlan — I didn’t know you were out here.”

Quinlan slowly lowered the cane. His face was flushed and his eyes behind his rimless glasses glittered angrily. “We were just talking,” he muttered. “Sorry we disturbed you, Mrs. Holt.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I was waiting up for Mitch.” Connie came out to join them. She smiled nicely at Quinlan. “Why don’t you come in? I’ve got some hot cocoa and sandwiches and it won’t be any trouble to put out an extra cup. It’s too cold to stand out here.”

Quinlan looked from Connie’s smile to Holt’s grim expression and back again. Then he made a gesture of angry frustration. “No thanks,” he said and turned away. Over his shoulder, he told Holt, “You remember what I said. Remember it big.” He limped away across the grass to his car.

“What was that all about?” asked Connie, coming up beside her husband.

Holt watched Quinlan drive away. The car’s engine roared viciously, a mechanical expression of its owner’s temper. “I’m not quite sure,” he replied, although he was. He put his arm around Connie’s waist and walked her back to the house. “Connie, I think we’re going to have to delay our vacation a little longer, after all.”

A
S
a rule, Holt dropped his brief case in the front closet or anywhere else convenient. This night it stayed on the bedside table while he slept and by the time he carried it into Adair’s office the next morning at nine it had scarcely been out of his sight.

It was less than twenty-four hours since he had sat in the chair across the desk from the district attorney. At that time, Holt had thought his job nearly over and his vacation ready to begin. This morning, he knew that he was merely beginning the biggest job of his life.

Adair was also viewing matters differently this morning. His greeting to his assistant was brusque and a smile was a long way from his lips. “Glad you dropped in, Mitch,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he really was. “Wanted to talk to you.”

“I guess that’s mutual.”

“I had a talk with Chief Gould yesterday at lunch and, frankly, I’m not very happy about the way it went. I ended up feeling like an ass, bringing out those ridiculous suspicions of yours about McCoy and Quinlan. Gould just laughed himself sick.”

“Quinlan didn’t laugh,” said Holt. “He showed up at my house late last night ready to beat the tar out of me.”

Adair took his news unemotionally and Holt realized that his boss had shifted his position radically from what it had been the day before. His was no longer the judicious you-may-be-right-and-we’ll-see attitude on which they had closed their previous interview. Today Adair was definitely on the other side of the fence. Holt was upset by this reversal and at once began to reason away his first scratches of fear. So the boss was scared. Well, why not? He was a little scared himself. The implications of his findings stretched far out of sight.

“I can’t blame Quinlan too much,” said Adair when Holt finished telling of the stormy midnight interview. “Understand, Mitch, I don’t blame you either. Actually, I blame myself for letting you go off the deep end.” In his magnanimity, Adair permitted himself a smile. “You can be darn persuasive, you know.”

It was a clear invitation for Holt to confess error but he didn’t accept it. “I don’t think that that quite ends it.”

“Don’t you?” Adair toyed with his letter opener. “Gould said a bizarre thing yesterday. He suggested that maybe you have political ambitions now that your picture has been in the papers. I scouted the theory, of course, knowing you.”

Holt sat stunned. He hadn’t seen this coming. Now he began to understand the overnight shift in Adair’s position. Adair’s foremost fear was not the problem itself but that he might be nurturing a rival for the district attorney’s job. This, despite his familiar protestations of his dislike for politics. In a strained voice, Holt said, “That’s ridiculous. I’m not running for office. Sounds to me like Gould was trying to create a diversion and that he may be really worried.”

“Only about our sanity, I gathered. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Holt looked at his boss in a new light, wondering why he had taken him so much on trust. He looked around at the antique western décor of the office and began to believe that the pre-eminent purpose of Adair’s hobby was to provide himself with a political colouring as romantically stalwart as the semi-mythical frontier days. He said, “All I ask is a fair investigation of my findings. I don’t ask that I conduct it personally.”

Adair was busy straightening his desk accessories, his signal that the discussion was closed. “The matter’s been taken care of and that’s that. When you leaving on your vacation, Mitch?”

“I don’t know.” Holt put his brief case on the desk and unzippered it. “I’d like you to look over these notes.”

Adair weighed the heavy sheaf of papers uneasily. “Looks pretty formidable,” he said. “Anything here that can’t wait? I’m due at city council meeting at ten.”

“Then let me summarize it for you,” said Holt. He knew he was being baulky but, against Adair’s evasion tactics, he didn’t know any other way to proceed. Holt was determined that Adair face this problem squarely. “I spent all afternoon and most of last evening down in the Hall of Records, digging into the superior court files over the past ten years. I didn’t cover them all, by a long shot, but I did make a dent in the homicide trials.”

Adair sat back with an expression of pained patience. “What on earth for?”

“I took notes, or had them taken, on all homicide trials where the principal circumstantial evidence was uncovered by McCoy and Quinlan. I also extracted the judge’s instructions where it was indicated that this particular circumstantial evidence tipped the scales for conviction. There’s quite a few of them, as you can see. In each case, the defence denied the existence of this evidence — and in each case, there’s only the testifying officer’s word that the evidence is valid.” He began to leaf through the sheaf of papers. “For instance, in the Whitman case, there was the murdered girl’s lipstick. In the Mortimer case, it was the pliers — ”

“Now hold on a minute,” Adair interrupted him. “Never mind the inventory. Just what are you getting at, anyway?”

Holt drew a deep breath. “McCoy and Quinlan planted the dynamite at Shayon’s apartment. There’s no other way to account for it. It’s my belief that maybe this wasn’t the first time they faked the evidence to make an arrest.”

Adair stared at him as if he had suddenly announced that he was Jack the Ripper. “Mitch,” he murmured, almost pityingly. “For crying out loud!”

“I said maybe,” Holt emphasized. “But if McCoy and Quinlan would fake evidence today — and they did — why wouldn’t they have done it last year, too? Or ten years ago, or twenty years ago? It’s my belief that these two men at some point became the victims of their own reputations. Possibly they never were as good as the newspapers made them out to be and they found themselves in a position where they had to produce — or else. A question of pride.

“Furthermore, you said yesterday that cops sometimes forget that their job isn’t to dispense justice. They become judge and jury as well. McCoy and Quinlan believe that they’re infallible. I can’t picture either of them setting out to frame an innocent man. But if they were sure the man was guilty — just like they were sure about Shayon — they might well feel that they were helping justice along, making certain that the guilty man didn’t wriggle out of paying, for lack of evidence. And maybe they were right most of the time — maybe even ninety-nine per cent of the time. But no man is infallible. We proved that right here with the Linneker case. I hate to think what might have happened to Shayon — and Tara Linneker — if Farnum hadn’t confessed when he did. That planted dynamite — faked evidence — would have been darn near incontrovertible in any jury’s eyes.

“Right now, there’s no way of proving that this sort of situation ever happened before. Maybe every single case in the files is perfectly genuine. I don’t know. I haven’t had time yet to check very far. But there’s certainly a reasonable doubt raised and a shadow cast on every case that McCoy and Quinlan had anything to do with. In the interests of justice, I don’t see that we have any other alternative but to go back and investigate them all.”

Adair had listened to him in silence but now both his face and his voice were stony. “That’s quite an edifice of conjecture that you’ve erected. I admire your imagination if not your conclusions. I’d like to point out one flaw, however. Everything rests on your contention that McCoy and Quinlan faked the dynamite evidence.”

“They did,” said Holt positively.

“I believe you’d have a hard time proving it. You certainly haven’t proved it to me. So there goes your entire case.”

“But if I could prove that McCoy and Quinlan planted the dynamite?” asked Holt. “That would suggest something, wouldn’t it? If Farnum will consent to a lie detector test — ”

“He’s already refused. Besides, the man isn’t a competent witness.”

“Farnum refused because he was intimidated. If you’ll transfer him up to County Jail where he’ll be out of McCoy and Quinlan’s reach — ”

Adair said emphatically, “I don’t intend to do any such thing. I’m at a loss to know where you’ve gotten these melodramatic ideas all of a sudden. We’re not running a side show here. I’m certainly not going to take a chance on blowing our case against Farnum skyhigh just because you’ve got a crazy yen to go raking over dead ashes. You haven’t got a shred of anything to go on and you should be the first to realize it.”

“The same thing could have been said about the Buccio case. But Emil Buccio is now in prison.”

Adair flushed “You said something about a man becoming a victim of his reputation. Don’t let it happen to you.”

“All I want is a chance to prove I’m right — or wrong.”

“The case is closed,” announced Adair coldly and pushed Holt’s brief case back across the desk. With an effort, he adopted a more friendly note. “Mitch, you’re under a strain and that’s understandable. You’ve been working too hard. You go ahead and take your vacation — stay as long as you like, I’ll arrange things — and when you come back you’ll see how foolish this whole hypothesis really is.” He glanced at his watch. “Good God, I’m late already.”

Holt zippered his brief case and rose. He was angry but he tried not to let it show through. “My vacation can wait. This is more important.”

“And if I say it isn’t?” Adair inquired icily.

“I suggest that we get together again tomorrow morning. You’ll have had time to think it over by then.”

“That sounds like you’re giving me a deadline,” said Adair and there was no pretence of friendliness between them now. They faced each other across the big desk like duellists. “I don’t like ultimatums from people who are supposed to be working for me.”

“Maybe that’s our trouble.” This time Holt couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “I thought I was working for the law.”

Deep in disgust, Holt returned to the Hall of Records. Caution and scepticism he had expected, but not outright opposition. Adair’s refusal even to consider his findings embittered and enraged him. Another man in Holt’s present position might have thrown up his hands. But opposition only made Holt more determined. Or pigheaded, he conceded bleakly. Only time would tell.