Free Judge Me Not by John D. MacDonald

car?” Morrow asked.
    Captain Leighton looked at him blandly. “Why, I’m going to check this whole place and see if I can find out who left it there. With any luck I’ll cover the whole area before it’s officially found. And then I’ll phone it in myself. If they jug you and Armando can’t get you out, Ritch here will sick the Times on the force. So figure that all you have to do is keep your mouth shut for not more than six or eight hours of pummeling. They won’t be stupid enough to try to charge you with her murder. Isn’t enough to go on.”
    He ambled slowly out, pulling the door shut behind him.
    “Like him?” Seward asked.
    “He’s an odd man, isn’t he?”
    “He wears very damn well, Teed. He settles a lot of department disputes, because they know he’s square. He knows a surprising amount about a surprising number of people, and he never forgets anything. I saw him drunk only once. That was the day three men he’d caught were electrocuted. He talked about murder. He said, ‘No human ever kills another human without also killing himself.’ I questioned that. I told him that a lot of people got away with it. He just gave me that tired smile and said, ‘And there’s a lot of dead people walking the streets.’ I guess in his own way he’s both a sentimentalist and an amateur mystic. I’m glad you told him the truth. He would have found out, and when he did, nothing you or I could say would make him lift a finger for you. He hates a liar.”
    “He’s a tough man to lie to, I imagine.”
    “And a tough man to kill,” Seward said, almost withawe. “He’s got the lead that’s been dug out of him. He keeps it in a glass dish on his mantel. Enough lead so that when you first see it, it looks like a little dish of candy.”
    “Have lunch with me, Ritchie. Then you’ll get an eyewitness report on the way I’m picked up.”
    “Maybe you ought to tell Powell Dennison that you might be picked up. Maybe he’ll jump the gun on all the data you people have collected.”
    “And how would you know about that?”
    “Dammit, Teed, this is my town. The same way it’s Herb Leighton’s and even Lonnie Raval’s. Everybody knows that you and Dennison are hiding in your fort making up a pile of snowballs. A lot of us hope you’re going to have rocks hidden in the snowballs. As long as you come out fast, you’ll have people on your side. When you start to weaken, you two will be almost all alone. One thing in your favor—that’s Andy Trim, the D.A. He’s all wind and ambition. He’s played along with Raval because that has made sense so far. If he sees a chance to dump Raval in a way that will give him a reputation all over the state, he’ll do it. Come on. I’ll wait while you check in with Powell, and then we’ll have some food.”
    He followed Teed in his car on the way back to the Hall.

Chapter Five
    After lunch with Ritchie Seward. Teed went back to the office and tried to work. Dennison had procured abstracts of the sheets from the Assessor’s records. The current project was to check the private-home assessments of the politically faithful against the rebels. For years the Board of Assessors had been one of the most potent weapons of the Raval clique. Step on the wrong toe and you start paying taxes on an assessed valuation of fifteen thousand rather than the previous five thousand. Grievance Day had become a farce.
    But Teed could not keep his mind on what he was doing. He remembered the way he had awakened from the Sunday afternoon nap, content and self-sufficient. Just forty-eight hours ago. Now that precious detachment was lost and he missed it. He realized that for too many years he had been like a man in a crap game using somebody else’s money. Now he was being forced to gamble with his own money, and he didn’t like the sense of participation, the feeling of risk and potential loss.
    He had taken pride in being able to do an honest and workmanlike job at his specialty. But