Finch was at once alert. “‘Nothing happened’!” he quoted. “Why, man, do you realize—? Another gun loose in this house, and you say—”
“But it isn’t in this house, Lieutenant. We looked—”
“Never mind where you looked. Come on with me. We’re looking again.” Finch turned to the stairs, but stopped short as a sudden sharp explosion came from the second floor.
Someone had found the automatic.
Lieutenant Jackson reverently raised the lid from a fresh stein. “You see,” “it’s like I started to tell you before you went dancing. This is a very pleasant place, but … Well, the but is this. There’s a lot of talk going the rounds that this is a Nazi hangout, sort of gathering place for secret agents and such. It used to be avowedly a German restaurant. Then when public feeling got strong it changed to Austrian. After the Anschluss it began calling itself ‘The Original Luxemburg Restaurant.’ But it’s been under the same management all the time. A lot of liberals are boycotting it. I don’t know a thing for sure; but Sergeant Levine won’t touch their kosher salami. He says the name on the menu’s a trap to lead him into eating impure food.”
“Then what happened to me this morning—” Drew Furness began excitedly.
Jackson smiled at him. “Do you really believe all that, Furness?”
Furness hesitated. “In this case,” he said “it’s hard to know what to believe.”
“I know. Someday when I write My Fifty Years in the Los Angeles Police Department, this’ll have a chapter all to itself. The Murder Case Without a Killing.”
“Listen,” said Judith. “A polka! Oh, Andy, please.”
A minute later Maureen wrenched her eyes from the athletic choreography of the Lieutenant. “Id like to know just what he meant by that,” she murmured.
“Do you suppose he’s really solved it?” Furness asked nervously.
“‘The murder case without a killing.’ It doesn’t make sense.”
“You don’t imagine that he might mean that Worth wasn’t really killed?”
“But I’ve told you I saw him.” She saw him again in her mind and shuddered. She took a quick gulp of beer but it didn’t help. “I saw him. Do you think a man’s going to get up and just wander away with a bullet in his heart? I saw the blood coming out—here.”
Furness looked at the indicated spot. Blood was not what he saw.
“Don’t you believe me? Is that it? Do you think I’ve just made up this whole thing?”
Drew Furness looked in her face intently. “I do believe you, Maureen,” he said.
Maureen smiled part of a smile. “You’re sweet,” she said gently.
Even a small glass of white wine can work wonders under the proper circumstances. There is no telling what untoward effect that and a part of a smile might have had on Drew Furness at that moment had there not suddenly sounded above the polka the sound of loud and vigorous German cursing.
“It’s Mr. Federhut!” Maureen exclaimed. “He’s in trouble. I think we’d better …”
It did look like trouble. His face alight with exalted indignation, the white-maned refugee faced the headwaiter, holding his ground firmly while waiters bore down on him from all directions.
“‘Raus!” the headwaiter was saying. “Verdammter Judenhund, du! So was darf nicht …!”
“Please,” Furness ventured in hesitant German. “This gentleman is my friend; I am sure that he—”
“From such people,” the Herr Ober snapped in insolent English, “we do not want the friends. He has made an insult which is not to tolerate. He goes, and you with him.” He beckoned the waiters to draw nearer.
“What goes on here?” Lieutenant Jackson shoved his way past the hovering waiters.
“And who are you?” the headwaiter demanded.
Jackson silently showed his badge.
It worked. With true German respect for authority, the Ober smiled and backed. “I give him into your custody, sir,” he said. “But I am warning you: let him not come here again.”
“What happened?” Judith demanded as they led Federhut back to their own table.
“It is most kind of you all to come in this way to my help. I thank you from the heart—all of you.”
“But what happened?”
“It was most unfortunate. The Herr Ober—the head-waiter—he comes over to greet me. Hearing his accent in English, I reply to him in German. He smiles and says, ‘Ach, Sie sind deutsch?’—You are German?—‘Also, Heil Hitler!’ I do not wish to make a scene; I say only in reply, ‘Grüss’ Gott!’ But he would not have it so. He asks questions—why I the Fatherland abandoned, why I his greeting refused, what my thoughts of the Führer are—and as he goes on we grow both more angry. I know not what would have happened had you not come. I did not know I had friends to support me.”
“Hm,” said Jackson. “Sort of settles my doubts about this place, doesn’t it? And also, I hope, Furness’ doubts about you. But the beer is still first-rate. Let’s all have another round and forget our troubles. Will you join us, Herr Federhut?”
But at that moment, through the loud-speaker which amplified the music came a plaintive speaking voice: “Telephone call for Lieutenant Jackson.”
Abruptly Jackson became serious. “I’m afraid that cancels the next round. There’s only one person who knows I’m here tonight. I was half afraid he might want to call me.”
“I’m glad you said ‘he,’” said Judith. “But who’s that?”
“Sergeant Watson.”
Lieutenant Finch went up the dark staircase at the double, service pistol drawn and ready. The heavier Sergeant all but matched his speed.
Even as they ran the lights came on in the upper hall. In their light Finch saw two men—Bottomley and Evans—standing before one of the bedroom doors. The two simply stood there. They said nothing, even when they saw the officers. As Finch reached the door, little Mr. Evans suddenly turned away, still silent, and hurried to the bathroom.
The door was ajar. Looking into the room, Finch had for an instant a terrible feeling of a recurring nightmare. It was Worth’s room over again—the gory RACHE scrawled on the wall, the pool of fresh blood on the floor, the black arm band dropped beside it, even (he was to discover later) the nick on the window sill.
But this time there was a body. Sprawled in the middle of the room, fountain and origin of that blood, lay Harrison Ridgly III.
Chapter 18
“And tomorrow we start shooting already!” F. X. Weinberg looked up in wistful woe from his littered desk. “Never was such a jinx on a picture! Never since I left the fur business have such things been! What’s happening to us, to a dog it shouldn’t happen!”
“How can you start shooting?” Maureen asked. “And I wish to goodness there was some other word for it; Lord knows there’s enough shooting going on. Worth never finished the script, and the Irregulars haven’t had any time to check it over yet.”
“You are giving me this information?” Mr. Weinberg replied with dignity. “Don’t I know we aren’t ready? So A. K. says we must hold to the shooting schedule and keep production costs down. There may be war yet and we lose the rest of our foreign market. ‘So how do we keep the domestic market,’ I ask him, ‘if we make pictures when we aren’t ready to?’ But he doesn’t say anything—just ‘You start shooting tomorrow.’ That young man from England, John Zed, we’ve put on the script; he’ll write along and we’ll shoot it off the cuff.”
The buzzer sounded. “Eleven thirty, Mr. Weinberg,” Miss Blankenship squawked.
Mr. Weinberg reached for the carafe. “So with my headaches I drink bicarbonate! Whisky I should be drinking and forgetting it all!”
The buzzer came again. “More reporters, Mr. Weinberg.”
Maureen slipped off the chromium desk, feeling a little guilty that she hadn’t even been reproved for sitting on it. “I’d better go see them.”
Mr. Weinberg silently motioned her to stay where she was, gulped down his sodium bicarbon
ate, and cleared his throat. “No, Maureen. I’ll send Feinstein to see them. He’ll take over your duties here for a couple of days. Do I need you, my smartest girl, to say, ‘We have nothing to say; sorry’? No. I do not.”
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“Where you belong is in that house—221B. Never in my life will I forget those numbers. Thirteen, people say is unlucky; but does anybody warn me about 221B? No, they do not. So you go there. You keep in touch with these Irregulars and you let me know what happens when and I hope nothing ever happens. Go on now.”
As Maureen left the office, F. X. Weinberg was crouched over his desk, calling plaintively into the speaker for Feinstein. Only on her way to the hill did she recall that Mr. Weinberg had gone through a whole conversation without one double take. Nothing could more thoroughly have attested his worried state.
Maureen was not unworried herself as she approached 221B. All she had known last night was that Lieutenant Jackson had received a sudden phone call, hustled Drew and Federhut back to the house with him, and unceremoniously bundled herself and Judith home in a taxi. Another murder was then the least of her fears. The morning paper had informed her that it was only an attempt at murder, with the victim assured a good chance of recovery; but this lesser fact, though anticlimactic, was not reassuring.
Mrs. Hudson opened the door. In a way, Maureen was relieved; she had feared lest the bell be answered by a large presence in uniform, whom she might have had difficulty in persuading to let her in. But otherwise Mrs. Hudson was not a sight to afford relief. She had changed vastly in two days. No longer was she the cooly efficient housekeeper, secure in the confidence of her B.S. She was now just a worried woman, with some what scraggly hair and purple patches under her eyes.
“Oh, it’s you, Miss O’Breen,” the housekeeper burst out. “I am glad. Somehow you seem to be the only person around here who has any sense, aside from that nice young Lieutenant and maybe Mr. Evans. Won’t you come in?”
She showed Maureen into the living room. The day was hot; but the blinds in this room had not been raised yet. It was cool in here, and likewise rather dank and deserted. Last night’s glasses and ashes had been cleared away (Mrs. Hudson’s efficiency was not so dissipated as all that) ; but the room still looked hung over. It had that air of a place where a good deal happened yesterday and nothing at all since then.
“Where is everybody?” Maureen asked.
“They’re mostly out,” Mrs. Hudson admitted, “but I do hope you’ll stay anyway. The Austrian gentleman had to go to Pasadena on business; Dr. Bottomley walked down to the Boulevard with him, and I think he said he was going on out to that rest home. Mr. Ridgly’s upstairs in bed of course; they thought he’d be better off there than in a hospital. And Mr. Evans is around somewhere. He was talking to me in the kitchen just a few minutes ago.”
“And Mr. Furness?”
“He went out. I’m afraid I don’t know where.”
“Oh.” Maureen hoped her disappointment didn’t show too clearly in her voice. “Tell me—how is Mr. Ridgly? I was so relieved to read that they thought he’d recover. But is it serious?”
“I’m afraid it is, Miss O’Breen. You see—” She broke off as they heard steps descending the staircase. “Here’s Lieutenant Finch. He’ll tell you all about it.”
“I hope,” said Maureen doubtfully.
“And I must get back to the kitchen. Lunch is in half an hour. You’ll stay, of course?”
“Thanks. I’d love to.”
“Thank you, Miss O’Breen. It helps to feel that there’s another woman in this house.”
“And much good I’ve been,” Maureen added to herself.
She heard the footsteps leave the staircase for the level floor of the hall. But they did not turn into the living room. Instead they seemed headed straight for the front door. Maureen hurried into the hall. “Lieutenant!” she called. “Could I speak to you for a minute?”
The little man turned around with his hand on the doorknob. “Oh!” Maureen exclaimed. “It’s you.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Miss O’Breen,” Jonadab Evans replied courteously. “I deeply regret that I am not your handsome young lieutenant.”
“I didn’t want any handsome young lieutenant,” she explained afluster. “I wanted—”
The door opened inward, thrusting the knob out of Mr. Evans’ hand and almost pushing him off balance. In the doorway stood Lieutenant Finch. “Somebody calling me?” he asked. “Oh, hello, Miss O’Breen.”
“I was,” Maureen admitted. “I didn’t know you were outside.”
“Went down the back stairs to have a look around. But why should you think—”
“I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, so I—” Finch turned a baleful eye on the little writer, happy that this was one of the few men over whom he could relatively tower. “So you were upstairs,” he said. “Why?”
“Why?” Mr. Evans hesitated. “Why not? I wanted to see how Ridgly was getting on. After all, even though we did quarrel last night, he is a man whom I like and respect in many ways. I wished to see—”
“If you got as much out of him as I did,” Finch grunted, “you wasted a lot of stair climbing. But I don’t like people sneaking around to see wounded men.”
“But you could hardly call this sneaking, Lieutenant. Your male nurse was there, and Sergeant Hinkle.”
“Look here, goofus. The more you try to talk yourself out of this, the more I’ll think there’s something that needs talking out of.”
“Very well.” Mr. Evans face assumed a dry sort of pout. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have a little chat with Mrs. Hudson.”
“She’s busy getting lunch,” Maureen warned him.
“I might even help,” he said. “Rex Stout isn’t the only novelist who can cook.” This proud assertion seemed to restore his self-confidence; he walked off with something as close to a swagger as a man of his height could well manage.
“I’ve got about ten minutes to spare, Miss O’Breen,” Finch announced. “If you want to step into the living room—”
The living room was not cheery to Maureen. Here she had seen Stephen Worth make his fantastic drunken entrance and heard him hurl vile insults at her. Here she had regained consciousness that awful night—was it only thirty-six hours ago? Here, last night, she had heard those five supposedly civilized men toss wild accusations at each other. What else, she wondered, could still happen in this room, now so cool and peaceful?
Lieutenant Finch looked up sharply from his pipe filling. “I suppose Weinberg sent you?” he began.
“Naturally,” Maureen replied, a trifle nettled by this opening. “But I assure you I’m not spying or anything sinister like that. After all, Metropolis brought these men out here. We have a certain responsibility to look after them.”
“Sure, Peaches, sure” said Finch in a mollifying tone.
“But instead,” Maureen went on, “of seeing the men I’m supposed to look out for, I find that you’ve let them go wondering all over the face of Southern California. Aren’t two shootings enough for you?”
A slow burn was spreading over Finch’s face. “Look,” he said heavily. “You produce a movie about a murder. You have so many suspects—one, two, three, four, five.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Then you keep them all in one place under police guard, in a nice solid clump.” He clenched the five fingers into a fist by way of demonstration. “That’s fine. Then everybody can keep an eye on them—and a camera.”
“And one set,” Maureen contributed, “holds down the budget.”
“Sure. That’s beautiful. But by what law do you do that? We’re just policemen—we aren’t the Cheka or the Ogpu or the Gestapo. The only way we can keep a man in one place is to arrest him. Now we’ve got no evidence to arrest anybody for this murder. Sure, we could hold any one of them as a material witness; but what would happen? Along comes a smart lawyer and pulls him out on a writ—the papers raise a stink all
over the country (these are big men)—and what have we got? Not,” he added in his archaic idiom, “not even magnolia.”
“I guess you’re right. But what happened last night? The papers weren’t very clear.”
“The papers weren’t clear! And wouldn’t I like to know what happened last night? All I know is what they told me, and I don’t believe that.”
“Please tell me anyway.”
“All right. It went like this: first Jackson left. Then you and Furness. Sergeant Watson settled down in the front hall for the night. The kitchen door and the door to the back stairs were locked. Mrs. Hudson had checked them and I’d take her word for it. Ridgly and Evans went to bed—Bottomley was already there—and Federhut goes off to the Rathskeller. Pretty soon Ridgly comes hurrying downstairs to Watson and reports that his automatic’s been stolen. They make a search and can’t find it. That proves nothing—two men can’t go through a house thoroughly enough to make sure. Then everything quiets down again. Meanwhile I get a goofy kind of a hunch and drop in to check up. Watson tells me that nothing has happened—nothing, mind you, except that somebody has a stolen automatic. While we’re talking, there’s a shot. I run upstairs and find Bottomley and Evans at the door of Ridgly’s room. On the floor is Ridgly, streaming blood. And the rest is just what you read in the paper.”
“I thought,” Maureen said slowly, “that some of that might be just a reporter’s imagination. But it was all just like—like Worth’s room?”
“All,” Finch groaned. “On the wall was RACHE written in blood. On the window sill was a nick in the wood. Under the window was the stolen gun, with a book of Furness’ tied to it. On the floor was a black arm band.”
“There were some other things in Worth’s room, weren’t there? There was the brief case with that list of numbers in it.”
“That’s right. No brief case here. And no fragment of glass in the wastebasket either, if you’re going to be so particular. But all the rest was the same. Ridgly was unconscious when we found him, but he wasn’t any more help when the ambulance boys did bring him around. He says all he knows is that he was almost asleep when he heard his door open. He got out of bed and saw a figure step into the room. The light was still on in the hall and the room was dark; so all he could see was a black shape. Before he could even speak, the man fired. That’s the last he knows, or anyways the last he’s saying.”
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars Page 21