The Anonymous Client

came from Bradshaw. As a matter of fact, there is fairly good evidence they did not.”
    “That’s not the point. The police are going to ask where I got that list of numbers.”
    “And you’ll tell them you got it from me.”
    “And then they’ll want to know where you got them.”
    “And you’ll tell them you don’t know.”
    “But I do know,” Taylor said. “Tracy copied them off the ten one thousand dollar bills that came in the first letter.”
    “And how do you know that?”
    “You told me so yourself.”
    “Exactly. That’s hearsay. You don’t know where the list of numbers came from. What I told you is of no evidential value, and they can’t force you to testify to it.”
    “Aren’t there some cases where they can?”
    “Yes,” Steve said. “If they indict me and proceed against me on a criminal charge, anything I may have told you regarding the case could be received in evidence as an admission against interest.”
    “Indict you!” Taylor said. “You’re kidding, of course?”
    “Only half. I’m sure Stams would love to get me, if he could just figure out what to charge me with. But the point I’m making is, you don’t know that the letters have anything to do with the list, so you don’t need to say anything about them. It won’t be that hard because nobody knows about the letters, so nobody’s going to ask you.”
    “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
    “What?”
    “I saw that ten thousand dollars with my own eyes.”
    “Did you compare the numbers on the bills with the list?”
    “No.”
    “There you are. Ah, here are our salads.”
    “I’m rapidly losing my appetite,” Taylor grumbled.
    The waiter served them and withdrew.
    “Snap out of it, Mark,” Steve said. “You got nothing to worry about.”
    “I don’t like it, Steve.”
    “I’m not asking you to like it. I’m asking you to do it.”
    Taylor sighed. He took a big pull of bourbon. “O.K. You win. But you’re going to have to protect me on this.”
    “Of course,” Steve said. “No problem. Now that we got that settled, what have you got on the murder?”
    Taylor shook his head. “Not much. You pulled me out of the office before I could get a line into headquarters. All I know is the desk sergeant got a complaint from a woman in the building that there was a fight going on next door. A patrol car went out to investigate, and the officers were the second ones to discover the body.” Taylor frowned. “I wish to hell you hadn’t found that body.”
    “You and me both. So what about your line into police headquarters?”
    “I got a friendly reporter feeding me stuff. Most of it is just routine, but this guy is friendly with one of the sergeants, so he gets the inside track on the police report.”
    “Think he’d have anything yet?”
    “Hell, he’s overdue now.”
    “Might be a good time for you to check in with your office.”
    “It might for a fact,” Taylor said.
    The food arrived while Mark Taylor was still on the phone. He returned to the table, sat down, cut off a huge slice of steak, and popped it in his mouth.
    “O.K., Steve I got the dope.”
    “From the reporter?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Any visitors in your office?”
    “You mean cops?”
    “Yeah.”
    “No.”
    “That’s strange. Well, what’s the dope?”
    “The police place the time of the murder at 5:30 P.M.”
    “5:30! How can they do that?”
    “The desk sergeant got a call from Margaret Millburn, the woman across the hall, reporting an altercation in Bradshaw’s apartment. That call was logged at 5:28. Now the desk sergeant didn’t want to send a radio patrol car if it was just a family row or something like that. You know how it is with these 911 calls. Over half of them are just cranks. So the sergeant got the guy’s name and address from her. When he hung up, instead of dispatching a cruiser, he called information, got Bradshaw’s number, and called him up.”
    “And got a busy signal?”
    “Exactly. The desk sergeant called him at 5:31 by the police clock. That clock is accurate. Bradshaw’s phone was found on the floor with the receiver off the hook. The police theory is that the phone was knocked off the table during the struggle in which Bradshaw was killed. That fixes the time of death rather neatly. Bradshaw was alive at 5:28, because one obviously doesn’t have a fight with a dead man. He was dead at 5:31 because the phone was knocked off the hook. There’s no word from the medical