by Jerry eBooks
“Go on home and play with your handcuffs, chump,” he had said. “You don’t realize what a break you’re getting by me saying no. But Mignon is my wife. She’s the mother of my son. And she’s going to stay my wife as long as I want her to.”
Blade looked at the picture of Mignon’s three-year-old son on her dressing table. The boy was as dark as his mother was fair. Mignon idolized him. “What was the row about tonight?” he asked.
“Us,” the singer told him. “Harve said he was going to divorce me and take my boy away.” She hesitated briefly. “He—he said that I wasn’t a fit mother.” She added, hopefully, “It was Shad who killed him?”
“It begins to look that way,” Blade said. “You know the little blonde he’s with?”
Mignon shrugged. “She used to be one of Harve’s girls, I think.” Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “You see it didn’t matter if Harve two-timed me. That didn’t make him an unfit father.”
Blade nodded. “Slip on something that will cover up a little more of that white space and come on. I want to see what Westman and Hartley have got.”
The singer kissed him again, hard. “But you love me and you trust me?” she demanded.
“I love you and I trust you,” Blade told her. “You’ll marry me as soon as I can get this case washed up?”
“Perhaps,” she tantalized him.
At the entrance to the hall off which the private dining rooms opened, the maid with whom McManus had been arguing descended on Blade with a torrent of voluble French. He lifted his eyebrows at Mignon.
The singer told him, “She says that she is only the ladies wash room attendant, had nothing to do with the murder and does not see why she should be held like a common criminal.”
Blade said: “Tell her we’re letting them all go in a minute.” He added “She’s new here, isn’t she?”
Mignon nodded. “Harve hired her yesterday. She claims that she used to be a Folies Bergere star.”
Pete Cussack noted the elderly maid’s trim ankles with approval. “About 1917 I bet. I seen the show when I was in France with the A.E.F.” His eyes brightened at. the memory. “Wow!”
The door behind him opened and Shad Rorick staggered out. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded of Lieutenant Blade.
“Murder,” Blade told him crisply. “And it looks as if you’re tagged. You should have stashed the murder gun before you passed out, Shad.”
“What gun?” the racketeer said thickly. “You’re nuts.”
Blade shrugged and walked on down the hall. Coroner Westman was just wiping the hose of a stomach pump with a wad of cotton saturated with alcohol. “You notice what little blood there was, Jim?” he demanded as Blade appeared in the doorway.
“I did.”
“There was a reason,” Westman told him cheerfully. “Exter was dead when he was shot. He had been dead at least five minutes. It seems that someone made him a cyanide cocktail.”
RORICK had followed Blade down the hall. “It wasn’t me,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t kill a guy that way. Besides, I’ve been passed out for an hour. I can prove it by the little chickadee who—” He stopped abruptly, sobered, “Hey! If he was poisoned, what’s this about a gun?”
Blade looked at the fingerprint man. Hartley said: “I found the same fingerprints on the gun that I found on the glass that must have held the cyanide.”
“Rorick’s prints?”
Hartley shook his head. “Hell no,” he exploded a bombshell. “Both sets were made by a dame.”
Blade felt Mignon’s finger bite deeply into his arm. “I. didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,” she cried. “I fought with Harve tonight. I even threatened that I’d kill him.” She began to cry. “But I didn’t.” The elderly French maid took the sobbing girl in her arms. “Non, non, mon chere. You must not cry.” She glared, defiant, at Lieutenant Blade.
He crossed to the table on which Hartley had been working and picked up the pearl-handled gun. “You ever see this gun before?” he demanded of Rorick.
It’s my gun,” the racketeer admitted. “It’s my hide-a-way gun.” He began to curse, deep blistering oaths. Why the dirty, two-timing little tramp.”
“Bring that little blonde in here,” Blade ordered Cussack. “You want to talk?” he asked Rorick.
“I’m not saying a word,” Rorick said, “until I see my lawyer.” He then added bitterly, “But this is what happens to a guy when he tries to give a dame a break.”
Blade pulled the racketeer to him by his coat front. “Then you admit it was you who phoned me?”
“I’m not saying,” Rorick said.
Pete Cussack flat-footed it back down the hall. His voice was shrill with excitement. “Jim! Doc Westman! Come here. She’s dead. The little chickadee is dead!” Westman and Hartley hurried from the room. Blade turned to follow, stopped as Shad Rorick said:
“I’ll be damned! She lost her nerve and did a dutch.”
Mignon raised her tear-stained face from the maid’s bosom. “That proves it. That proves it, Jim,” she sobbed.
“Proves what?” Blade demanded.
The platinum-haired singer said huskily: “Proves that she poisoned Harve.
“I know she did,” Rorick said grimly. “She confessed to me that she had.” He added bitterly, “But I didn’t know that she stole my gun while I was passed out and plugged the dead man twice hoping that the blame would fall on me.”
Blade strode down the hall. The little blonde was slumped forward on the table. She still held a glass in one hand. Hartley was busily printing the fingers of the other.
“Everything checks,” he told Blade finally. “It was her prints that I found on the gun and on the glass in the other room.”
Coroner Westman sniffed the glass then smelled of the dead girl’s lips. “More cyanide,” he said.
Blade merely stared at the girl. There was nothing he could say. There was no way that he could prove it. But it wasn’t a hunch, it was knowledge. He knew that he had been outsmarted. The dead blonde had lost her nerve too conveniently. The solution to murder was too pat.
CHAPTER THREE
Slugged!
MORNING was a dirty gray and two hours old when Pete Cussack pulled up before the pile of melting slush in front of Blade’s hotel. A newsboy on the corner was already bellowing an extra.
“Wuxtra—Wuxtra paper! Whadda ya read—the Tribune or the Sun? . . . . Wuxtra paper! . . . . Blonde dancer kills night club owner!”
Blade stepped wearily from the car knee deep into slush. “The hell she did,” he grunted.
“But we can’t prove it,” Pete said disconsolately.
“At least we haven’t so far,” Blade agreed. “Pick me up in an hour, Pete.” As the squad car pulled away he plowed through and over the windrow of melting slush to the sidewalk, mildy surprised to find no reporters waiting. It was Jim Blade’s considered opinion, and he had gone on record as so saying, that the perfect murder had been committed.
Over his bellowed protests, Shad Rorick had been released on bail an hour before. Shad maintained that he had merely felt sorry for the little blonde and had tried to give her a break by confusing the trail before he had learned that she had stolen his belly gun in an attempt to pin the crime on him. He knew, his lawyer knew, and Jim Blade knew that it was very doubtful if a grand jury would indict him, or a trial jury convict him if they did.
Shad had, so he claimed, merely acted on drunken impulse. He had told his boys of his intention. Jerry Lait and Schlitz Murray had sworn before the Commissioner that Shad had told them that the little blonde had confessed to poisoning Exter and their attempt to pressure Blade had been made in an effort to save Shad from himself. Blade himself had been forced to admit that Shad Rorick had called him from the Club. It seemed incredible that any man really guilty of murder would have done so.
As the final topper for his arguments Shad had challenged Blade to prove a motive for his wanting Harve Exter dead. There was nothing that he stoo
d to gain. The dead man’s widow would inherit his half of the Club. They held no joint insurance made out in each other’s favor. The books were in perfect order. If Shad Rorick and Harve Exter had not been friends, they had not been enemies.
Still, for all of that Shad Rorick would still have been in jail if the turning wheel of the law had not uncovered an illicit purchase of cyanide by the little blonde whose name had proven to be Mary Phillips. A discarded plaything of Exter’s, the girl had ample reason to hate him.
On the other hand it was hard for Blade to believe that even a desperate girl would drop cyanide in Exter’s drink, shoot a dead man twice to lay the blame on another man who was be-friending her—and then fail to wipe her fingerprints off either the gun or the glass. Such things just didn’t happen.
“And to think,” Blade sighed as he stomped across the shoveled sidewalk, “I could have been a C.P.A.”
He got his room key from the desk and walked into the coffee shop. Gertie, the red-haired night switchboard operator, was sitting at the counter reading the Morning Sun.
“Ah! The return of Sherlock Holmes,” she greeted him. “A cup of coffee black, a stack of wheats, and a double order of pork sausage for Lieutenant Blade,” she told the counterman.
Despite his weariness Blade grinned as he dropped down on the stool beside her. “The reporters been here yet?”
“I shooed them away,” she admitted. “I told them that Jimmy didn’t live here anymore.”
Blade thanked her and sipped his hot coffee with relish. Gertie returned to her study of the paper. The Sun had gone to town pictorially. It had a picture of Mignon in little more than a string of beads and breastplates on the front page. Grouped around it were pictures of her three-year-old son, Harve Exter, Shad Rorick and Mary Phillips. Blade leaned over and tapped the picture of Mignon’s boy with his spoon.
“This is a hell of thing, isn’t it, for a lad that age to be mixed up in?” He added, “Or a sweet innocent kid like Mignon for that matter.”
The red-haired operator glanced at him sharply. “What are you stuck for, Jim?” she asked.
“A MOTIVE for Shad Rorick to want Harve Exter dead,” he told her candidly. He continued to stare at the picture of Mignon. “Can you imagine a man wanting to play around with anyone else if he was married to Mignon?” His voice held a note of awe. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she, Gertie?”
“Her curves are in the right places,” the red-haired girl admitted. “But who does her kid take after? He doesn’t resemble her and he doesn’t resemble. Exter.”
Blade grinned: “Meow. You’re just jealous.”
“Perhaps I am,” the red-haired girl admitted with surprising heat. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll let an addle pated blonde make a horse’s neck out of you.”
Before Blade could reach out a hand to restrain her she slipped off the stool and walked out of the coffee shop.
“Those redheads,” the counterman grinned as he slapped Blade’s wheat cakes and sausage before him.
“Those redheads,” Blade agreed. But somehow his appetite had left him. He and Gertie had been good friends before he had begun to carry the torch for Mignon. He shouldn’t have kidded her the way he had. She was, after all, a swell kid and there were two or three cases to his credit at the Bureau that he might never have broken except for her common sense reasoning and advice. Both of them had come up from in back of the yards.
He paid his check and walked out into the lobby but Gertie Covina was gone. The day switchboard operator saw him then and called, “You are wanted on the phone, lieutenant. Will you please take the call in booth three.”
Blade nodded and sat down in the booth.
“Jim?” Coroner Westman demanded. On being assured that it was, Westman added crisply, “I’m calling from the morgue, Jim. I just finished the post. And I’ve been wrong as hell about Exter.”
“In what way?” Blade demanded.
“He was poisoned and he was shot. But it wasn’t the poison and it wasn’t the shots that killed him,” Westman said. “There was more cyanide in his lungs than there was in his stomach. In other words, it was poured into his mouth after he was dead.”
“But you just said,” Blade protested, “that it wasn’t the shots that killed him.”
“They didn’t,” Westman said crisply. “Harve Exter died of being stabbed through the auditory canal of his ear with some thin, sharp-pointed instrumeift that was long enough to pierce the brain. Perhaps a woman’s hatpin or a ground down ice pick.”
Blade fought a sudden wave of fatigue.
“Yes. I’m positive,” the physician snapped in answer to his question. “And if you want my opinion of it, Jim, three different people had a crack at Harve Exter last night. But the lad or lady with the hatpin got there first. The other two missed the train. They thought he was drunk. He wasn’t. He was dead.”
He called the Bureau and asked for Inspector Rican’s extension.
“Blade reporting in,” he said. “You’ve talked to Westman?”
“Just,” the Inspector informed him. “And you had better start rounding up all those possible suspects that you let wander away, lieutenant, or there will be a familiar signature missing from the pay sheet.”
Inspector Rican hung up abruptly. Dry shoes and clothes forgotten, Blade strode out of the hotel and hailed a cab.
“When Pete Cussack comes to pick me up,” he told the doorman who had just come on duty, “tell him that I’ve gone down to the Bureau.”
In the cab he changed his mind and gave the driver the address of the swank apartment building in which Harve Exter had lived. He wanted to see Mignon. He wanted to search through her dead husband’s personal papers in the hope of finding something that might shed some light on this new development.
THE building, on the Drive just below the Drake Hotel, was both new and expensive. A doorman let him in. A second doorman led him to a desk where still a third man demanded his name and business before he would even phone upstairs and inform Mrs. Exter that he was calling.
Blade tinkled his gold shield on the desk and the clerk forgot to call.
“Of course, officer,” he bowed. “Please go right up.”
It was the first time that Blade had been in the building. “What is the number of the Exter apartment?” he asked the elevator boy as he let him off on the eleventh floor.
“Eleven twenty-one, sir.”
Blade strode grimly down the ankle-deep carpet. His salary wouldn’t pay the rent of the mop closet in this building.
He paused, his hand halfway to the ornate bronze knocker on the door of 1121, as a muffled but vaguely familiar feminine voice was raised in anger on the other side.
“. . . and if you think that you’re going to get my man, you two-timing blonde alley cat, you’re crazy. I knew as soon as I saw—”
Blade heard the soft scuff on the carpet behind him—too late. He turned just in time to catch the blackjack, that had been intended for the base of his skull, full on the temple.
The carpet was soft underneath him when consciousness returned. Blade eased himself to his knees, then to his feet. There was no one in the hall. The angry feminine voice behind the door was stilled. Blade raised his hand again to knock, then stopped. It was either an optical illusion or he was standing in front of apartment 1021.
He sat down on the hall window sill for a moment and stared out over ice-locked Oak Street beach at the gray waters of the lake until his dizziness had left him. Then he looked at the number again. It was still 1021.
He strode back to the elevator bank and punched the button.
“Sorry, sir,” the boy said too quickly and too glibly. “I guess I let you off on the wrong floor.”
“So it seems,” Blade said. “Who followed me down the hall?”
“No one that I know of, sir.”
The boy was lying and Blade knew it but he let it pass. There was no way he could prove it. Disdaining the knocker he pounded with his fist on the d
oor of 1121. There was no answer. Worried now for Mignon’s safety, he pounded on the door again.
The door knob turned haltingly. The door opened slowly and seemingly by itself. Blade could see no one in the hall. His hand went instinctively to his gun. “What the hell—?”
“ ‘At’s a bad word,” a small voice on a level with his knees said earnestly. “My mama says it is.”
Blade looked down at his feet. Mignon’s boy in a pair of flannel sleepers was studying him with interest with one eye as a chubby fist dug the sleep from the other.
Blade smiled: “Hello, Bub. Where’s your mama, son?”
“My mama is sleeping.”
Blade looked at the number on the door, then back down the hall. It was possible that he had been mistaken. The tenth and eleven floor were identical. He needed sleep. He needed a drink. The bull fiddles of fatigue were sawing in his brain. “Suppose,” he suggested to the youngster, “you tiptoe in and tell your mother that I’m here.”
The youngster’s lower lip thrust out in a strangely familiar pout. “Who shall I say you are?” the boy demanded. “Are you the man my daddy doesn’t like, the man I heard him telling mama has got to stop coming here when—”
“Jim! How wonderful” Mignon floated across the floor, her well rounded curves emphasized by a clinging sheer silk house coat. “Come in, darling. I am so glad to see you. But what are you doing here this time of morning?” She clung to him and kissed him.
“You’ve been asleep?” Blade asked.
“But of course,” she answered.
“I was certain I heard voices,” Blade said. He explained the mysterious attack outside the door.
Mignon’s eyes grew wide. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “You must have gotten off on the wrong floor, Jim. There’s been no one in this apartment but Sonny, myself and the maid.” She touched the bruise on his temple with her fingertips. “Oh, you poor darling boy. Why don’t you—?”