I swore at myself inwardly for giving him the opening. But he turned
back to his symbols and said, "By sheer blundering chance you hit it,
though. It was two men and attempted murder."
Donovan wasn't having much to say. Dalrymple threw down the pencil.
"I'll be going now. I have more important things to do."
"Can you give us the names of the two men?" I asked, and again swore at
myself for being over-eager.
Dalrymple gave me a long, disgusted clinical look. "I can, but I won't.
It would take another hour to round out the equation and I don't feel
like doing all your work for you. If you can't take what I've given you
and tie up the case, then you'd better both resign."
He got up and started to leave. At the door, he turned. "I live at the
Crestwood Hotel if you want to get in touch with me again." He sneered.
"Maybe you'll need help some day in tying your shoes."
He left. Neither Donovan nor I made any attempt to stop him. After a
long minute Donovan said, "We can't let him go. He's involved in that
killing. He's got to be. How else would he know?"
"Are you sure he's involved?"
Donovan didn't answer. He picked up the pencil and snapped it in two
with a savage gesture. "The sneering little son-of-a--"
"Besides, we've got no proof he was right in anything he said."
"Let's go find out."
We found out. It didn't take long and we got a citation. We hit Garver
with one question--"Who was in the bar just before Davis entered?" and
he collapsed right in our laps. We got all he knew and it wasn't hard
to trace down two guys named Kinder and Walpole.
They were both drunk when they came in and Walpole had some arsenic
with him that he was going to make a bug spray with. He got sore at
Kinder for some drunken reason and poured some of the stuff into his
drink while Kinder was in the washroom. Then something pulled them back
into the street before they had their drinks. Garver heard metal grind
and thought that was probably it. Once outside, they probably forgot
what tavern they'd been in because they didn't return.
Garver was glad to get rid of them. He hadn't seen the poison-pouring
bit and dumped the shots into the bottle. When Davis keeled over as a
result of the next shot out of the bottle, Garver was scared. He could
lose his job and his boss could have lost his license for serving
drunks and for pouring the whisky back.
So that was the case. A tragic incident, with Walpole not even
remembering what he'd done. And with Davis dead.
* * * * *
We would have been better off leaving it there--charging Dalrymple
off as a crackpot who had made a lucky guess and taking the credit
for breaking the case. We _did_ take the credit, but it was hard to
believe, once he'd gone, that Dalrymple was actually for real. So one
afternoon a couple of weeks later we were passing the Crestwood Hotel.
Donovan braked the car and squinted at the building.
"This is where he said he lived."