Words&Dirt

“Breeze sighed.  ‘Murder and suicide during a drinking spree.  The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy.  I read it in the papers or something.  Is that what you want me to say?’

‘You read it in the papers,’ I said, ‘but it wasn’t so.  What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the D.A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of hours.  There was no inquest.  But every crime reporter in town and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him, but wasn’t quick enough.  Cassidy’s was a contact wound and the secretary’s was not.  The secretary was left-handed and he had a cigarette in his left hand when he was shot.  Even if you are right-handed, you don’t change a cigarette over to your other hand and shoot a man while casually holding the cigarette.  They might do that on Gang Busters, but rich men’s secretaries don’t do it.  And what were the family and family doctor doing during the four hours they didn’t call the cops?  Fixing it so there would only be a superficial investigation.  And why were no tests of the hands made for nitrates?  Because you didn’t want the truth.  Cassidy was too big.  But this was a murder case too, wasn’t it?’

‘The guys were both dead,’ Breeze said.  ‘What the hell difference did it make who shot who?’

‘Did you ever stop to think,’ I asked, ‘that Cassidy’s secretary might have had a mother or a sister or a sweetheart––or all three?  That they had their pride and their faith and their love for a kid who was made out to be a drunken paranoiac because his boss’s father had a hundred million dollars?’

Breeze lifted his glass slowly and finished his drink slowly and put it down slowly and turned the glass slowly on the glass top of the cocktail table.  Spangler sat rigid, all shining eyes and lips parted in a sort of rigid half smile.

Breeze said: ‘Make your point.’

I said: ‘Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine.  Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may––until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can.  Until I’m sure you don’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good.  Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.’

Breeze said: ‘You sound to me just a little like a guy who is trying to hold his conscience down.’

‘Hell,’ I said.  ‘Let’s have another drink.'”

––The High Window, by Raymond Chandler, pg. 119-20