"So who whispers? Tom Pike for chrissake?"
"It doesn't make much sense."
"When Holton got his call from the whisperer, Tom Pike was flying to Jacksonville. Okay, so Nudenbarger told him about the note, but what would be the point? I mean even if he could make the call. Get Holton all jammed up? What for? Tom Pike isn't the kind to walk out on his marriage, fouled up as it is. And if he's got Janice Holton on the string, what is he proving or accomplishing?"
"Janice was supposed to have a big date with him Saturday, out of town, I guess. But Rick fouled it up by going along, and she couldn't get word to Tom that she was stuck with her husband and would actually have to go see her sister over in Vero Beach."
Stanger said thoughtfully, "I'm not going to fault those two, not for one minute, McGee. Janice is a hell of a lot of woman. Two sorry marriages, and they weren't the ones who made the marriages sorry. Jesus! It's a lot better than if he got involved with the kid sister."
"Who happens to be in love with him."
"Think so?"
"Sure of it."
"Then, Janice could be a kind of escape valve. Well, Tom Pike would step slow and careful, and if we hadn't... you hadn't added it up, I'll bet a dime nobody would have ever found out about it. I'd say one thing, if it isn't like you say physical, it must be a pretty good strain on them. That Janice is more than something ready. It's going to get physical, friend. What have we got? Some damn whisperer trying to make trouble for people."
"Al, out of the whole town, who would you pick as the whisperer? Not by any process of logic. Just by hunch."
"I guess the one I told you about. Dave Broon."
"On somebody's orders?"
"Or playing a personal angle. Turk puts him on a case, he's cute. He's got good moves. He comes up with things. And he's lucky. That's a help in cop work. But he doesn't give a goddamn about whether anything is right or wrong, anybody is legal or illegal. It isn't his business to find new work for the sheriff. If he spotted the mayor's wife shoplifting, he'd follow her home and invite himself in for a drink and a little chat. That kind."
"Could he have found out about that note without you knowing he found out about it?"
"Oh, hell yes. Far as I know he might have the leverage on somebody so that he gets a dupe of every photocopy of any evidence they run through our shop. This whole city and county is a big piece of truck garden to Dave Broon. He goes around plowing and planting and fertilizing, and harvesting everything ripe."
"How is he with bugs?"
"Not an expert but maybe better than average. He has good contacts. If it was something tricky, he'd bring in one of the experts from Miami. He can afford it."
"So we could be bugged?"
"It's possible," he said. "But not likely."
"He isn't too bright, Stanger. Not bright enough to be alarming."
"Dave alarms me, friend."
I showed him the toilet kit and the toothbrush, and the two twenties under the soap dish, and explained the situation. At first it bothered Stanger that if Broon was reasonably sure he had not left any traces, why should he advertise by taking the money? I finally made him see that taking it was the lesser of the two risks, because if I did have some way of learning that my room had been gone over carefully, finding the money untouched would alert me that it was not just petty theft.
"Broon has a family?"
"Never has. Lives alone. Lives pretty good. Recently moved to a penthouse apartment on a new high-rise out by Lake Azure. Usually got some broad living there with him. Big convertible, speedboat, big wardrobe. But on the job he dresses cheap and drives a crummy car. I've worked with him sometimes. He has a way of making the suspect choke up and then get in a big hurry to tell all."
"Description?"
"Five seven, maybe a hundred and forty pounds. Knocking fifty but does a good job of looking thirty-five. Blond, and I think it's a dye job and a hairpiece. Keeps himself in good shape. Works out a lot. Manicures, massages, sunlamp in the winter. Either his teeth are capped or it's a hell of a good set of plates. Gets good mileage out of the accents he uses. All the way from British to redneck. He's in so solid with the party, he just about sets his own work week, and there's not a damned thing Amos Turk can do about it. Couple of years ago one of Turk's big deputies took a dislike to the way Dave was goofing off and making him do the work. Dave was giving away fifty pounds, better than six inches in height and reach, and at least twenty years. They went out into the parking lot. I guess it took six minutes. Didn't even muss up Dave's hair. Then they picked the deputy up and put him in a county car and took him over to the hospital. He never has looked exactly the same and he calls Dave by the name of Mr. Broon, sir. Just say he's tough and he's careful and he's smart enough. The odd job he's best at is if somebody needs a little extra leverage to use on somebody else. Then they get hold of Dave Broon and tell him to see what he can come up with. And it's a rare human person there isn't something about that you can put to use, if you know what it is."
Then I gave him a complete rundown on my talk with Helen Boughmer. He said it sounded as if something or somebody had scared her, and I did not tell him that his appraisal seemed to belabor the obvious.
He reported no progress to speak of on the murder of the nurse. He said, "Trouble with that damned place, the architect laid out those garden apartments for privacy. They kind of back up to little open courts, and there's so many redwood fences it's like a maze back in there. If whoever killed her came to the back door, which might be the way it was because of her being found in the kitchen, I might as well give up on shucking my way through the neighborhood. No fingerprints, but come to think of it, in thirty-one years of police work I've never been on a case yet where there was a single fingerprint that ever did anybody any good or any harm in the courtroom."
He sat in moody silence until I said, "It seems to be tied in to the death of Doctor Sherman."
"Please don't tell me that. I've got a file on him that you can't hardly lift. And there's nothing to go on."
"Maybe Penny Woertz had some casual little piece of information and she didn't know it was important."
"You're reaching, McGee."
"Maybe she'd even told it to Rick Holton and it didn't mean anything to him either, yet. If somebody could play on his jealousy and get him to shoot me after she'd been killed, that puts the two of them out of circulation. Maybe Helen Boughmer knows something too, but somebody has done such a good job of closing her mouth, I don't think she'll be any good to you."
"Thanks. You try to give me a motive for one murder by hooking it up to another one last July. I am going to keep right on thinking the doc injected himself in the arm."
"Got any reason why he did that?"
"Conscience."
"Had he been a bad boy?"
"Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn't do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor's life pure hell on earth. Damn voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn't let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died."
"He arrange it?"
Stanger shrugged. "If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn't miss a trick."
"Want me to beg? Okay. I'm begging."
"Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of groveland. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She'd had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he'd better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He'd pick up a month's supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needlemark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn't forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn't much point in it. I don't remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren't any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn't enough. Also, they'd had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it."
After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smartass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.
It pleased him. "He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?"
"Lovely. And doesn't leave you anyplace to go."
"It's the reason I was willing to lean a little bit toward suicide. Stew Sherman was a pretty right guy. And killing is sort of against everything a doctor learns in school and in his practice."
"And what if somebody else figured it out too and trapped the doctor somehow into admitting it?"
"Strengthens the suicide solution."
"Sure does."
"And I couldn't come up with a single motive for murder. His dying didn't benefit anybody in any way, McGee."
"Right back where we started?"
"I don't know. Sure like to know why that Boughmer girl changed her mind so fast. Or who changed it for her. Isn't she one sorry thing though? Just imagine what she'd look like if you stripped her down to the buff."
"Please, Al."
He chuckled. "When I was little, we had a scrawny little old female cat out at the place. Had some Persian in her, so she looked pretty good. Picked up some kind of mange one spring, and in maybe ten days every last living hair fell off that poor beast. Honest to God, you'd look at her and you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. McGee, now I know that Helen is a sad, ugly, nervous woman, and I'm ashamed of myself, but if I can get to her when her mother can't pull out of the line and block for her, I think I could scare that Helen so bad she just wouldn't know what in the world she was telling me. Suppose I just do that. Tomorrow, if I can. What are you figuring on doing?"
"I might try to have a talk with Janice Holton and see if I guessed right about the boyfriend."
"So what if you did?"
"It will prove it wasn't somebody else instead of Tom Pike. So we can mark that part of the file closed."
"Anything else?"
"Find out if I can why Hardahee brushed me off."
"If he doesn't want to see you, you're not going to see him."
"I can give it a try. By the way, how are your contacts in Southtown?"