* * *
You have to understand something. The reason I get along with almost everybody is because I’m just the type of guy who likes people. I really do. Hell, I can even get along with Henry Hathaway and Glenn Ford. So it was a new experience for me to be in a room with two people I didn’t like: Perkins and Art Corey, the chief of the Tucson homicide division.
We were in McDougall’s room, where his body was found. The body had been removed, but the room was otherwise unchanged. Perkins was examining everything around him, and he was now wearing a cashmere blazer that must have put him back a good bit of change. He was looking very elegant, very graceful, very correct.
Corey was slumped back in his chair, leaning against the wall by the door, smoking a filter-tip menthol cigar. Corey is about six feet and has a paunch that hangs over his gun belt. He wears Western clothes, shirts with pearl buttons and pointed flaps over the pockets, and cowboy boots and a Stetson that he never takes off.
Of course, I had a read on Corey. He was terrified. Until today, he was nothing more interesting than a big man in a small town, strutting around the cattlemen’s clubs and kicking the shit out of a few locals now and then. Then all of a sudden, he’s got a high-profile death on his hands, one that a lot of the country will be watching because it involves Hollywood stars. Corey was in way over his head, and he knew it. Which is why he was watching Perkins with such a mixture of hope and resentment.
Perkins paid no attention to Corey at all. This was my first view of Perkins’s legendary concentration, and it was total. He was like a bloodhound in a cashmere coat—the scent was everything. Even when he started asking questions, he never looked away from the room itself.
“The room hasn’t been touched?”
“Not a bit,” Corey drawled.
“When the body was found, the bed was made as we see it now?”
“Like I said, nothing’s been touched.”
Perkins walked around the bed. “Who found the body?”
Corey flipped open a notepad. “Millicent Pink,” he read, “Five forty-five a.m.; she was coming to his room for some writing he was supposed to be doing.”
“Script revisions,” I said. “She’s the script supervisor.”
“I gathered,” Perkins said dryly. He bent over the bed and looked underneath, then got to his feet again, dusting his hands. “You’ve checked for prints?”
“Checked the whole premises,” Corey said.
“And?”
“No fingerprints. Everything was wiped.”
“Wait,” I said. “Say that again.” I’d been standing by the door, staying out of the way, but after a morning full of stunners, this was the biggest yet.
“You heard me,” Corey said, not bothering to look my way. “The room was wiped.”
Here I was, so sure that McDougall’s death had been an accident, but if that were true,why would someone take all the time and effort to remove every fingerprint?Maybe Appelbaum’s wild rumor wasn’t so wild after all...
But Perkins just nodded, not looking nearly as shaken as I was. Or shaken at all, not even stirred. He seemed completely unsurprised that this accident had just turned into a probable murder.
He crossed the room to the desk. It was the same desk that was in every room, but McDougall had moved his desk away from the wall, apparently to make it easier to work. There was a copy of the script and several sheets of blank yellow paper, and a razor blade and a rolled dollar bill. “This desk is untouched?”
“As I said...” Corey began, sounding weary, “one more time... nothing’s been touched.”
“You search the room for cocaine?”
“We searched for cocaine,” Corey said. “We found no narcotics.”
Perkins unrolled the dollar bill and then released it. It sprang shut again. He said nothing. He peered closely at the desk surface, squinting at it. He picked up the razor blade and examined its edge, then set it down again.
“You find liquor in the room?”
“No.”
Perkins by now was examining the trash basket underneath the desk. He poked around in it, coughing in the stirred-up cigarette ashes. Then he turned to the closet. It contained three tweed jackets and several pairs of neatly folded slacks. Perkins examined each briefly. “They were buttoned on the hangers as they are now?”
“Nothing,” Corey drawled. “Has. Been. Touched.”
