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The cops must have turned up at the Court building just as I reached Kirkton's door. I made my way down the stairs to where a couple of coppers in uniform inspecting the bullet holes in the walls. They turned as one as I approached. "Who's in charge here?" I asked politely. "Who wants to know?" one of them growled. I gestured in the direction of the splintered marble tiles and the flattened metal slugs. "I'm the guy who was shot at," I said calmly. The officer in charge looked suspiciously at me across the table in the Interview room. It wasn't Tewel. I hadn't expected it to be; what was there to connect this incident to the murders? I had been wheeled off to the local precinct station after presenting myself. I've gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of police stations over the years, but I don't think I've ever been in this one before. Not that it mattered; these placed are pretty much all the same on the inside. As a matter of course, I had showed the cops the official Private Investigator badge in my wallet, the one that allowed me to do several things, including carry the firearms they had found under my coat. Generally, there's no great love lost between the official police and those operating in the private sector even though, like me, so many PIs were once coppers themselves. The coppers expect even the most fundamentally honest PI to be playing a double game - which I was - while the Private Eyes know that the police are overstretched and undermanned, and therefore tend not to work too hard if they don't have to. I gave the vaguest possible explanation of the incident, a minimal report of what happened, although I did include a very passable description of my assailant. I didn't mention Mayfield at all. I had been on my way to visit Judge Kirkton, to make a report. This was very nearly true; if Cairnie hadn't sprung the trap on Mayfield and I, we would have proceeded to Kirkton's office and sat through the formal reading of the will. There had been nobody around in the lobby when I arrived, I went on, so I found my own way up the stairs. Halfway, I had been jumped by a lone gunman but managed to dive around the corner with bullets whistling past my ears. This was only a slight exaggeration. The police seemed to accept the story especially since a simple check was enough to make it clear that my gun had not been fired and, in any case, the calibre of the ammunition in my weapon was different from those they had dug out of the wall. "So who was the guy?" the officer demanded. "Dunno," I lied convincingly, adding more honestly, "He looked vaguely familiar somehow, but I've never seen him before in my life." "Sure?" "I'm sure. Mind you, I get to meet a lot of people in my game." "Hmmm." I could almost see the thoughts forming in the officer's mind. Some old gumshoe, stuck up by one of his hoodlum associates, or maybe by an outraged husband who had been discovered cheating on his wife and was now stuck with a costly divorce. All plausible explanations, of course, and indeed examples of things which have actually happened to me over a long career. Nothing for the forces of law and order to worry about overmuch; the bullets had missed, the assailant long-gone, the shamus probably deserved it anyway. Too many coppers are divorced and burdened by alimony payments; they tended not to like divorce lawyers or the private dicks that work with them. I didn't volunteer any of this reasoning. I didn't need to. I just waited until the copper had formulated this viewpoint in his own head. "Okay. You can go," he snarled eventually. He didn't seem very happy about it, but he had no grounds to do anything else just at the moment. "Thank you, officer." I knew that the news would get to Sergeant Tewel eventually, of course, although I wanted to be out of here before he found out. I hastily retrieved my possessions and beat a swift retreat through the front entrance. My name - which I couldn't falsify - would flag up sooner or later, but I wanted to meet Mergie Tewel again on my own terms. He had some questions to answer.
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Part 54