Free Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson Page A

of the fence. I don’t care what the evidence is, this thing does not make good sense to me. There’s too much that doesn’t jibe. But darned if I know what I can do about it.”
    “You’ll think of something,” Connie told him. “I know you.”
    Holt grunted dubiously and pushed back his chair and searched his pockets for cigarettes. When he did so, his fingers encountered a folded slip of paper. It was the address Van Dusen had given him that morning; he had forgotten about it. Holt sat staring at the scrawl for so long that Connie finally asked him what it was.
    “Nothing,” he said and slowly balled it up between thumb and forefinger. Then, just as slowly, he smoothed the paper out again and studied it. “That is, it’s probably nothing. But maybe I … Connie, would you kill me if I ducked out on you again this evening?”
    “The Linneker case?” she asked and when he nodded, she rose to kiss him lightly. “Hurry back.”
    • • •
    Ernest Farnum’s present address was a working man’s hotel on the fringe of the downtown business district. It was a forlorn area of honky-tonks and pawnshops and other semi-respectable establishments that catered to the helpless and the hopeless. Standing on the sidewalk before the shabby hotel, Holt wondered what had prompted him to leave his comfortable home tonight on such a nebulous mission. What was that mission, anyway? What exactly did he expect to prove — or disprove?
    “Well, I’ve gotten this far,” he murmured as a sop to his good sense. But that was all it was, a sop, because something stronger than logic impelled him onward. It was his mind’s basic need for orderliness. Some people straighten pictures; Holt straightened facts.
    Farnum’s room was on the second floor at the rear of a dusty corridor. A strip of light beneath the door proved that he was at home. Holt knocked but got no answer. He waited and knocked again and finally tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and opened easily. Holt stepped into a melancholy room that smelled of tobacco and dirty clothes and mildewed wallpaper.
    The man who sat in the battered old easy chair by the window didn’t challenge his entrance or rise to greet him. He was an older man, in his late forties, rather small, with black hair like a skullcap and sullen, deep-set eyes. These eyes stared vacantly at Holt as if they were not surprised to see him, or as if they did not even see him at all.
    Holt said, “I’m looking for Ernest Farnum.”
    “You’re a cop, aren’t you?” said the other man in a heavy dull voice. He had been reading the late evening newspaper. It lay in his lap like a napkin. Holt could make out the upside-down headlines, big and black: POLICE NAB BOY FRIEND FOR LINNEKER SLAYING.
    “My name is Holt. I’m the assistant district attorney. I’d like to talk to you — if you’re Ernest Farnum.”
    “I’m Ernest Farnum.” He said it like a confession. “I’m glad you came. I was going to call you. Or somebody, I guess.”
    “Is that so? What’d you have in mind, Mr. Farnum?”
    “What’s going to happen to him?”
    “Who?” asked Holt, puzzled. He began to wonder if Farnum was drunk.
    Farnum consulted the newspaper, bending his head slowly as if it hurt him to do so. “Delmont Shayon. The fellow they arrested today.”
    “I don’t know yet. Nobody does. He’ll be charged and tried and, if found guilty, sentenced. Is that what you mean?”
    “If found guilty,” Farnum repeated. “They could gas him, couldn’t they? I never thought that could happen. I didn’t figure that at all. It isn’t right that he should get into trouble because of me.”
    Holt felt a stab of anticipation, “Mr. Farnum, do you know something about this Linneker case?”
    Farnum looked at him with sluggish surprise. “Why, yes. Isn’t that why you’re here? I killed him, you know. With dynamite, at his beach house.”
    The statement was made so calmly, emotionlessly, that Holt had no immediate