Into the Night

She didn’t find the camaraderie at all engaging. After all, to be a professional detective, to trap human beings, trick them, trip them up, send them on to be publicly murdered (instead of privately), was for her money simply a hyperthyroid enlargement of the trait of cruelty and penchant for bullying that are to be found latent in almost all adult males. Only, a professional plainclothesman got a salary for doing it. And even a pension, when he got older.

As she stood there at the phone, waiting to tell them they had the wrong man, she was completely on the side of the man on the other end of the line, on the other end of the line from the law, the one against the millions. Only three crimes were worse than the punishment that was meted out; only three crimes deserved it. A crime against a child, the rape of an innocent woman, and a crime against the whole community which threatened it with extinction (espionage in wartime). The rest were pale replicas of the awful majesty of the law, when it set the day and it set the hour, and it said, “You shall die.”

Smitts’s house was out in a low-wage suburban development, nothing fancy about it but neat and clean as a whistle. It turned out not to be his, actually, but she hadn’t been told that.

He came to the door and let her in.

“You were able to find it all right, I see.”

The partner was in the living room when she stepped in there. They had two copper beer cans with neat digs in their tops, two more without, and two glasses going. But they weren’t drunk and it wasn’t a party, she could tell; they were just relaxing. Some mysterious woman’s touch had placed postage-stamp saltine crackers and diminutive wedges of orange cheese on a large thick blue-patterned plate. No man would have cut the bites that small. Both were in shirt sleeves and tieless. “We meet again, Miss Chalmers,” the partner said, but rather lukewarmly, as though he preferred spending his off-time among people of his own choosing.

She came out with it without wasting any further time. “The reason I had to see you so badly, the reason I insisted on coming out here, is — you’ve got to listen to me, you’ve got to believe me — you’re holding the wrong man in the Nelson case.”

It took a minute to sink in.

“Oh,” he said then.

He looked at his partner.

Then he looked back at her again.

“Oh, we are?” he said this time. He slung one rock-solid hip onto the edge of the large round table. He folded his arms speculatively. “How do you figure that?” he asked her.

A woman’s voice suddenly interrupted, saving her from what would have been a ticklish question to answer, without bringing the knife-in-the-back note into it.

“Smitts,” it called down from the head of the stairs, “Evie’s ready for her good-night kiss now.”

He got up, went outside, and went trooping up the stairs, giving the whole fairly flimsy house the shaking of its life. The chain pulls on the lamps jittered. The very floorboards she was standing on seemed to pulsate a little. Even the water level in the small greenish fishbowl began to oscillate, climbing a little on this side, dipping on that.

“I didn’t know he was married,” she said artlessly. Or artfully artlessly might be better.

“He ain’t,” the teammate said. “He lives with his sister and brother-in-law. This is their house. They’d be happy to have him along for the ride, they think that much of him, but he insists on paying for his lodging. That’s the kind of guy Smitts is. The kid’s crazier about him than her own parents.”

She snickered a little. “That nickname. For a big bruiser like him.”

“He got it the first day he went to kindergarten and it’s stuck to him ever since. He couldn’t say his own name right when they asked him what it was.”

The return trip downstairs was equally dynamic to the ascent, possibly even more so. A thin thread of plaster sifted off one corner of the ceiling like talcum powder. The fish in the bowl looked startled and changed directions abruptly.

“Is he always that noisy?” she asked, wincing.

The teammate gave her a hurt look. “You can’t expect him to go around tippytoeing in ballet slippers.”

“No, but he could tone it down a little,” she suggested.

His partner’s loyalty wouldn’t dim, not by one kilowatt. “At least you always know where he is,” he defended sturdily. “He ain’t one of these sneaks.”

He came in making a remark at a tangent for his partner alone. “That kid gets cuter every day.” Then to her, “Where were we? Oh, about the man being the wrong man.”

“Well, you’re holding d’Angelo, aren’t you?”

“We’re booking d’Angelo, is right.”

“Well, but there was another man in her life.” (And if he asks me how I knew, I’ll simply have to admit I withheld information and take whatever they dish out to me on that count.)