I said: “These cops that picked me up were parked in front of the house where George Talley’s wife lives. They were there before I got there. George Talley is the man who used to be a private detective down here. I wanted to see him. Degarmo knows why I wanted to see him.”

Degarmo picked a match out of his pocket and chewed on the soft end of it quietly. He nodded, without expression. Webber didn’t look at him.

I said: “You are a stupid man, Degarmo. Everything you do is stupid, and done in a stupid way. When you went up against me yesterday in front of Almore’s house you had to get tough when there was nothing to get tough about. You had to make me curious when I had nothing to be curious about. You even had to drop hints which showed me how I could satisfy that curiosity, if it became important. All you had to do to protect your friends was keep your mouth shut until I made a move. I never would have made one, and you would have saved all this.”

Webber said: “What the devil has all this got to do with your being arrested in the twelve hundred block on Westmore Street?”

“It has to do with the Almore case,” I said. “George Talley worked on the Almore case—until he was pinched for drunk driving.”

“Well, I never worked on the Almore case,” Webber snapped. “I don’t know who stuck the first knife into Julius Caesar either. Stick to the point, can’t you?”

“I am sticking to the point. Degarmo knows about the Almore case and he doesn’t like it talked about. Even your prowl car boys know about it. Cooney and Dobbs had no reason to follow me unless it was because I visited the wife of a man who had worked on the Almore case. I wasn’t doing fifty-five miles an hour when they started to follow me. I tried to get away from them because I had a good idea I might get beaten up for going there. Degarmo had given me that idea.”

Webber looked quickly at Degarmo. Degarmo’s hard blue eyes looked across the room at the wall in front of him.

I said: “And I didn’t bust Cooney in the nose until after he had forced me to drink whiskey and then hit me in the stomach when I drank it, so that I would spill it down my coat front and smell of it. This can’t be the first time you have heard of that trick, captain.”

Webber broke another match. He leaned back and looked at his small tight knuckles. He looked again at Degarmo and said: “If you got made chief of police today, you might let me in on it.”

Degarmo said: “Hell, the shamus just got a couple of playful taps. Kind of kidding. If a guy can’t take a joke—”

Webber said: “You put Cooney and Dobbs over there?”

“Well—yes, I did,” Degarmo said. “I don’t see where we have to put up with these snoopers coming into our town and stirring up a lot of dead leaves just to promote themselves a job and work a couple of old suckers for a big fee. Guys like that need a good sharp lesson.”

“Is that how it looks to you?” Webber asked.

“That’s exactly how it looks to me,” Degarmo said.

“I wonder what fellows like you need,” Webber said.

“Right now I think you need a little air. Would you please take it, lieutenant?”

Degarmo opened his mouth slowly. “You mean you want me to breeze on out?”

Webber leaned forward suddenly and his sharp little chin seemed to cut the air like the forefoot of a cruiser. “Would you be so kind?”

Degarmo stood up slowly, a dark flush staining his cheekbones. He leaned a hard hand flat on the desk and looked at Webber. There was a little charged silence. He said: “Okay, captain. But you’re playing this wrong.”

Webber didn’t answer him. Degarmo walked to the door and out. Webber waited for the door to close before he spoke.

“Is it your line that you can tie this Almore business a year and a half ago to the shooting in Lavery’s place today? Or is it just a smoke screen you’re laying down because you know damn well Kingsley’s wife shot Lavery?”

I said: “It was tied to Lavery before he was shot. In a rough sort of way, perhaps only with a granny knot. But enough to make a man think.”

“I’ve been into this matter a little more thoroughly than you might think,” Webber said coldly. “Although I never had anything personally to do with the death of Almore’s wife and I wasn’t chief of detectives at that time. If you didn’t even know Almore yesterday morning, you must have heard a lot about him since.”

I told him exactly what I had heard, both from Miss Fromsett and from the Graysons.

“Then it’s your theory that Lavery may have blackmailed Dr. Almore?” he asked at the end. “And that that may have something to do with the murder?”

“It’s not a theory. It’s no more than a possibility. I wouldn’t be doing a job if I ignored it. The relations, if any, between Lavery and Almore might have been deep and dangerous or just the merest acquaintance, or not even that. For all I positively know they may never even have spoken to each other. But if there was nothing funny about the Almore case, why get so tough with anybody who shows an interest in it? It could be coincidence that George Talley was hooked for drunk driving just when he was working on it. It could be coincidence that Almore called a cop because I stared at his house, and that Lavery was shot before I could talk to him a second time. But it’s no coincidence that two of your men were watching Talley’s home tonight, ready, willing and able to make trouble for me, if I went there.”

“I grant you that,” Webber said. “And I’m not done with that incident. Do you want to file charges?”

“Life’s too short for me to be filing charges of assault against police officers,” I said.

He winced a little. “Then we’ll wash all that out and charge it to experience,” he said. “And as I understand you were not even booked, you’re free to go home any time you want to. And if I were you, I’d leave Captain Webber to deal with the Lavery case and with any remote connection it might turn out to have with the Almore case.”

I said: “And with any remote connection it might have with a woman named Muriel Chess being found drowned in a mountain lake near Puma Point yesterday?”

He raised his little eyebrows. “You think that?”

“Only you might not know her as Muriel Chess. Supposing that you knew her at all you might have known her as Mildred Haviland, who used to be Dr. Almore’s office nurse. Who put Mrs. Almore to bed the night she was found dead in the garage, and who, if there was any hanky-panky about that, might know who it was, and be bribed or scared into leaving town shortly thereafter.”

Webber picked up two matches and broke them. His small bleak eyes were fixed on my face. He said nothing.

“And at that point,” I said, “you run into a real basic coincidence, the only one I’m willing to admit in the whole picture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man named Bill Chess in a Riverside beer parlor and for reasons of her own married him and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake. And Little Fawn Lake was the property of a man whose wife was intimate with Lavery, who had found Mrs. Almore’s body. That’s what I call a real coincidence. It can’t be anything else but, but it’s basic, fundamental. Everything else flows from it.”

Webber got up from his desk and went over to the water cooler and drank two paper cups of water. He crushed the cups slowly in his hand and twisted them into a ball and dropped the ball into a brown metal basket under the cooler. He walked to the windows and stood looking out over the bay. This was before the dimout went into effect, and there were many lights in the yacht harbor.

He came slowly back to the desk and sat down. He reached up and pinched his nose. He was making up his mind about something.

He said slowly: “I can’t see what the hell sense there is in trying to mix that up with something that happened a year and a half later.”

“Okay,” I said, “and thanks for giving me so much of your time.” I got up to go.