Free Murder Is Suggested by Frances and Richard Lockridge Page A

homicide, if it looked bad enough. Did Finch know your brother was having the thing investigated?”
    â€œHell,” Elwell said, “ I don’t know, captain. If these detective fellows went around to Finch and began asking him questions, he’d know somebody was interested. Maybe they’d tell you who. I don’t know. Maybe—you say it might be homicide?”
    â€œVehicular,” Bill said. “Yes, they might be that rough on him. And certainly he would lose his driver’s license for a long time. You happen to know what he does for a living? I mean, if he’s a salesman, travels by car—”
    â€œHe’s a golf pro,” Elwell said. “Fairly big time. Don’t you play golf, captain?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIf you did, you’d have heard of Finch,” Elwell told him. “Tournament player. Won quite a few. I suppose he drives from tournament to tournament. Most of them do. Be a bit of a problem if he couldn’t use a car, I suppose. So if he thought Jamey—but hell, you get what I’m driving at. Long way ahead of me, probably.”
    Bill was at least up with him. It was tenuous. It was also interesting. Did Elwell know what firm of private detectives his brother had employed?
    Elwell didn’t. Elwell had, Bill thought, told them all he did know—this subject to a detective’s reservations. (“A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive.”— Manual of Procedure, Police Department of the City of New York .) Bill thanked Foster Elwell for his help, repeated expressions of sympathy, said they would get in touch with him if it appeared he might help further; left him in the lounge and went to a telephone booth. Mullins stood outside the partly open door of the booth.
    Would precinct send a man to ask—Bill reached for Mullins’s proffered notebook and read a name from it—if he had lunched with Foster Elwell the day before, and, if he had, at what time he and Elwell had parted? And, how far had they got through the papers in Jameson Elwell’s office? Through, for example, his recent checkbooks?
    They had. Was anything of interest? Did the name of any payee jump at them?
    A few. Checks to Hunter, for example. Checks to one James Elwell. In both cases, these seemed to represent regular modest payments. “Like they were working for him,” the precinct man said. And one other payee had aroused some interest—Investigators, Inc. Bill knew? Pretty good size agency; supposed to be pretty much on the up and up.
    Bill knew. The offices of Investigators, Inc., were in midtown. They might, Bill told Mullins, as well stop by there on their way elsewhere. “Sure,” Mullins said, “only if there was anything like that the State cops would of tumbled to it.” He paused. “You’d think,” he added. He considered further. “Only it would be sorta hard to check out,” he said.
    Miles Flanagan of Investigators, Inc., said they would be glad to do anything they could that would help the police, as weren’t they always? As for example?
    Bill gave him the example.
    Flanagan pulled his lower lip over his upper, indicating judicial contemplation. He said, yes, he had read about the professor. He said that under the circumstances, without prejudice, because normally they didn’t give the names of clients—
    â€œCome off it,” Bill Weigand said and Flanagan looked a little hurt, and said he was getting to it as fast as he could. But he did get there faster.
    Professor Jameson Elwell had employed them to find out what they could about the accident—specifically, to unearth any evidence they could that Finch, not the girl, had been driving.
    â€œLook,” Flanagan said, although Weigand had said nothing, “I told him it was cold—this was three-four months after it happened—and why had he waited so long? He said he realized