by Jerry eBooks
“One of your gadgets?” he inquired. “This’s for sticking in your nose!” cried Forbes.
He scooped up his slating hammer and slashed at Fred’s head. The little electrician ducked and dove at the bigger man’s legs. Rell Forbes spilled backward—off the narrow deck of the tower roof! Forbes bounced as he struck the metal gutter at the slate slope’s bottom, then caromed, screeching, off into the ravine on the house’s north side.
Fred winked at his brother-in-law. Beechridge’s news correspondent was pumping him about the case.
“Forbes lowered the rod to the fireplace. With his periscope and the revolver attachment he could fire into the library. He shot Stayn, then made the gun drop beside George’s head.”
The sheriff was warming up now. He brandished his crutch.
“Rell Forbes wanted the fifteen thousand dollars coming to his wife, the widow of Harold Black, from Leonard Stayn. And with George dead, Leonard could pay it. So he tried to make it look like suicide.
The reporter scribbled busily in his blue notebook.
“And you,” he said, “with your foot in a cast, crippled, foiled his plan.”
Mort cleared his throat. “Umm. Yes. Fred helped some.”
PLEASE, I KILLED HIM
Wayland Rice
Detective-sergeant Patrick Kelly caught the murdering jewel thief red-handed, but he just couldn’t prove a thing on him!
SERGEANT PATRICK KELLY heard the crash of shattering glass, halted in his tracks and automatically swung his bright blue eyes and brick-red head, toward the higher reaches of a big apartment house.
A small black object was hurtling downward. Sergeant Kelly yelled to a woman with a baby carriage, did some fancy sprinting himself as the falling object crashed in a welter of glass to the sidewalk near the curb. Kelly picked it up. It was a somewhat battered metal bookend, shaped like an Indian astride a weary looking horse.
It was made of bronze and heavy enough to serve as a lethal weapon. Kelly eyed the angle from the apartment window to the place the object had fallen. It was clear that it had been hurled at someone in the apartment and not dropped to the street by accident.
Kelly tucked the bookend beneath his arm, stepped back and studied the set-up of the apartment house. The broken window was on the fourteenth floor front.
Kelly raced into the building and found an elevator on the ground floor. He was whisked up fourteen flights and he estimated that no more than two minutes—three at the most—had passed since the bookend smashed through the window.
He picked out the correct apartment easily enough and rang the buzzer. There was no answer. He banged on the door and then applied an ear to the panel. He could hear someone moving stealthily about the apartment.
Kelly banged again and added his voice to the din.
“This is the law.” He roared. “Open that door or I’ll shoot the lock off. Open up. Now!”
The hesitating steps came closer to the door. A spring lock turned and a middle-aged man, slightly bald, with a face as white as alabaster, stared at Kelly. His eyes held a haunted hunted look. His hands were trembling and his mouth was slackly ajar.
One other thing Kelly noticed before he looked over the man’s shoulder. The right shirt cuff was freshly stained with bright red blood!
Then Kelly saw the corpse that was stretched out on the floor in front of a very large desk. The body was that of a whitehaired, heavy-set man of about sixty. The eyes were wide open and staring at the ceiling. Imbedded to the hilt, was a knife in his chest.
Kelly grabbed the man in the door with his free arm, twisted him around quickly and held him secure while he searched for hidden weapons.
Finding the man unarmed he propelled him further into the room, kicking the door shut behind him.
“Why did you kill him?” Kelly demanded flatly.
THE MAN gulped, his lips moved and his face turned the color of Kelly’s hair but he couldn’t talk. He tried again and again desperately, then finally a croak came forth.
“I . . . didn’t . . . kill him. Honest, I didn’t do it. Honestly, I swear—”
“Now, look.” Kelly planked the bookend on the desk beside its mate. “I know a murder set-up when I see it.”
“I—I’m not saying it wasn’t murder.” The little man choked out.
“Well, that’s something,” Kelly grunted. “The dead man knew you were going to kill him. He heaved that bookend at you, or maybe through the window deliberately to attract attention. At any rate, you knifed him right after he threw the bookend.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t!” The man screamed. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t do—”
“Look.” Kelly’s patience wasn’t especially noteworthy and it was becoming exhausted very fast. “Here you are in a room, locked from the inside. Here is a man who has been stabbed through the heart. The crime took place less than five minutes ago. Your shirt cuff is bloody. There is no one else in this room except you. It’s a clear case of being caught redhanded. I’ll bet that even your fingerprints are on that knife.”
“Oh, they are. Yes, indeed.” The man seemed a trifle proud of that statement. “Will you let me talk now, please? Let me explain what actually happened.”
“Make it good,” Kelly warned him sarcastically.
“I didn’t kill him.” The man seemed more secure now. “My name is Jan Nixon. I live on this floor. Apartment 14D. That’s far down the hall. I was passing by this door. It was partly open. I looked in and I saw this—this dead man’s feet. So, naturally, I came in. The window was broken. A breeze came through and slammed the door shut. I wasn’t sure he was dead. I—I lost my head. I started to pull the knife out because it looked as if it was hurting him.”
Kelly guffawed. He roared—and brought out handcuffs.
“That’s the goofiest yarn I ever heard. I’ve enough evidence on you to hold you on suspicion of murder. Later, we’ll find out why you murdered him. Who is he, by the way?”
“His name is or rather was Frank Bergson,” Nixon said. “You will discover that I hated him. We were in business together, but he got control of it and threw me out. You haven’t said anything about the note.”
“What note?” Kelly asked, surprised.
“It’s lying there, just under his shoulder.” Nixon pointed to a folded white paper. “There is something written on it. I never had a chance to see.”
Kelly walked over to the body, saw the edge of the note and yanked it free. It was written on plain white paper with black ink inscribed in printed letters.
I KILLED BERGSON BECAUSE HE HAD NO RIGHT TO LIVE ANY LONGER. I HATED HIM FOR YEARS AND THE HATE GREW AND GREW UNTIL I HAD TO ACT UPON IT. FOR THE WRONG BERGSON DID ME, HE NOW GETS HIS JUST PUNISHMENT.
There was no signature. Kelly held the note gingerly by one edge only. He walked to the desk, procured other papers and compared the note with them. The size of the paper, the quality and the water mark matched that used by the killer. The fountain pen in the ornate holder on the desk showed signs of having been used recently. He appropriated this too, carefully preserving any prints that might be on it. Nixon, standing behind him, read the strange note aloud. Kelly faced him.
“Despite all this, Mr. Nixon, you’re still under arrest on suspicion of murder. You can’t blame me for taking you in.”
“No,” Nixon gulped. “No. I—I’d do the same thing if I were in your position. I don’t see how I can prove my innocence. But then,” he added brightly, “I can’t see how you can prove I’m the actual murderer either. No one saw me kill this man.”
Kelly phoned Headquarters and had a detail sent out. Upon their arrival, he turned the apartment and the evidence he had gathered over to them. He kept the note, and conveyed Jan Nixon to Headquarters. After booking Nixon on suspicion of murder he questioned him for two hours without gaining the slightest additional evidence.
Captain Donahue, grizzled, tough and wise, took over after Kelly had explained the case to him. Two more hours went by and Dona
hue came out of the questioning room with a puzzled frown on his wet face. He mopped his brow and shook his head.
“I don’t know, Kelly.” He said tiredly. “I honestly don’t know. I sweated that guy. Threw everything I had at him and still he didn’t crack. He just says over and over again he didn’t do it and try and prove he did.”
KELLY ran fingers through his red hair. “Captain, of course he did it. I was on the scene in two minutes. Nixon had no chance to get clear. He took a devil of a long time in opening the door if he was an innocent man. I’m sure he used that time for thinking hard. Nixon is clever. He never lost his head once and I laid plenty of traps for him.”
Donahue nodded.
“He’s either innocent or the coolest murderer we ever had on the mat. He told me, very frankly, that he hated Bergson enough to knock him off and in the same breath tells me, for the sixty-seventh time, that he didn’t do it.”
“I’ll have to pick up more evidence.” Kelly sighed. “Suppose you talk with the D.A. while I do that.”
“Go ahead.” Donahue shrugged. “Check on his character. Try to trace the knife. By the way, there were no prints on anything in the room except the knife handle. Nixon’s fingers were all over that.”
“No others?” Kelly asked with a frown.
“No—should there have been?”
“I don’t know, Captain.” Kelly was thinking hard. “I don’t know a blasted thing about this except that we have a prisoner who committed murder and next to nothing to convict him on. I’ll see you as soon as I get a line.”
The phone rang and Captain Donahue answered it. He handed the instrument to Kelly. A man’s voice was at the other end. A voice that spoke in a flat monotone.
“Sergeant Kelly. You are making a grave error. Jan Nixon did not murder Frank Bergson.”
With his free hand Kelly signaled wildly to Donahue to trace the call.
“How do you know?” He asked into the phone, searching vainly for recognition of the voice.
“Because I killed Bergson. Look here, Sergeant,” the ‘voice droned on, “I could not have been in the apartment after you arrived. So if I tell you certain facts, you will know they are true. First of all, Bergson threw a bookend out of the window. Bergson lay on his back directly in front of the desk, a knife through his heart that wasn’t really a knife. At any rate, it was on his desk before, being used as a letter opener. I placed a note under his left shoulder. The shoulder closest to the desk.”
“What was in the note?” Kelly asked. He could see his case against Nixon evaporating into thin air.
“It read,” Smug and confident, the voice recited, “ ‘I killed Bergson because he had no right to live any longer. I hated him for years and the hate grew and grew until I had to act upon it. For the wrong Bergson did to me, he now gets his just punishment’.”
Kelly took a long breath.
“Why don’t you come down here and talk to me?” He asked, stalling for time.
“And be locked up?” The voice laughed easily. “Sergeant, you surprise me. As it stands now, I have nothing to fear. You can’t possibly trace me. But I do not want an innocent man locked up for a crime I committed. Good-by, Sergeant. I have to leave here fast. I imagine all sorts of radio cars are converging on this place right now.”
The phone clicked. Kelly hung up. Donahue, on another wire, ordered the patrol cars to the address of a drug store at least a mile away. Kelly raced out to the garage, appropriated the fastest police car there and opened the siren wide as he hit the road.
Well ahead of him, radio cars had closed the streets and uniformed men were around the drug store. Kelly glanced at his watch. Not more than five minutes had passed since he had pronged the phone.
He entered the store and went directly to the bank of phone booths. He found the one matching the number of the wire the caller had used. Kelly felt the little overhead light bulb. It was still warm. He stepped out of the booth and closed the door. He sent a patrolman to call for fingerprint men to dust the booth and the instrument.
Kelly went up to the astounded druggist. “Who used that phone five or six minutes ago and blew out in a big rush?” He asked.
“Why—it was a man.” The druggist replied. “Just a man. Medium-sized. I didn’t see his face.”
“How was he dressed?” Kelly was pleading for a lead. “Be careful now. He is a wanted murderer.”
“Why, I think his suit was grey.” The druggist said slowly. “Or maybe it was greyish green. He had on a brown hat. Yes, I’m sure of that. Light brown. A snap brim. That’s all I remember.”
“Okay,” Kelly exhaled slowly. “I don’t blame you, doc. That guy meant nothing to you. Thanks, anyhow.”
HE HUNG around until the fingerprint boys arrived and reported negative results. Then he returned to headquarters, more disgusted and puzzled than ever. What had seemed to be a very simple case, had turned into a mighty tough one. Captain Donahue had some news too. “I talked to the D.A. and he says, in view of that phone call, we can’t hold Nixon. Maybe he is guilty, but there is someone in the mess with him and there isn’t enough proof to hold Nixon alone. Our job is to land the man who phoned.”
“Nixon did it,” Kelly said stubbornly. “I know darned well he did it. I think, in some way, he flashed signals to a pal. This pal got the drift and made that phone call. It has to be that way. Not a soul except Nixon, you and I saw that note.”
“If the guy on the phone wrote it, he saw it,” Donahue said slowly.
“That note was written by Nixon,” Kelly said adamantly. “While I banged on the door of the apartment he printed the note. The pen was wet and the ink on the paper had hardly dried. And I’m going to prove it.”
“I don’t see how, unless you make Nixon crack.” Donahue wagged his ponderous white head. “Pat, couldn’t you be wrong about him? How could he signal to anyone now?”
“There are ways,” Kelly said. “Cap, will you get me someone familiar with Morse? Another man who can talk with his fingers and still another who can read lips. Nixon might have signaled by anyone of those three methods. He had plenty of chances for that.”
Donahue nodded.
“I’m willing to play ball up to a certain point, but if you find out he doesn’t know any of these systems of signaling, I’ve got to let him out on bail, at least. He’ll have a mouthpiece here in no time. We can’t hold him more than twenty-four hours.”
Kelly walked to the door.
“Keep the lawyer away from Nixon for a little longer. I want to try my experiment first,” He said.
There were three experiments and none of them worked. They didn’t get the slightest rise out of Nixon. The man who knew Morse was planted in a nearby cell and ordered to send signals, as if he were Nixon’s pal. If Nixon heard the tapping, he paid no attention.
Then a man who could read sign language entered the cell room, presumably as a visitor to another prisoner. He wagged his fingers furiously and Nixon just gaped.
The lip reader went at him last and came away convinced that Nixon knew nothing about lip reading.
“Let him go,” Kelly groaned. “Maybe if he’s free, I can trip him better.”
“It’s our only chance, Pat,” Captain Donahue agreed.
Kelly went out front to the desk sergeant and asked for Nixon’s envelope of possessions. He went through these without finding anything of interest. But he noted, Nixon in didn’t seem to have too much money from the dunning bills in the folder.
Kelly fingered a gold key fitted to a thin gold chain. A Phi Beta Kappa key. He winked at the desk sergeant, gave the key a hard yank and broke open the link on the chain. He tucked the key into his pocket and prepared to leave the station.
Before he departed, Captain Donahue called and stated that Nixon was being allowed his freedom on bail. Kelly jammed on his hat and hurried to the apartment house where the murder had been committed.
As he pulled up in front, he saw a man lounging easily at the entrance, whom he
recognized as a private detective named Danny Clark. Clark gave him a lazy salute.
“How’s it coming—that kill?” he asked.
“Are you interested in it?” Kelly’s voice was tinged with suspicion.
“Only because I happen to live in this building too.” Clark said. “On the eighth floor. I knew Nixon slightly, but he certainly never struck me as being a killer. I knew Bergson too and that guy was a human rat. He had plenty of enemies.”
“I’m glad I met you, Danny,” Kelly said. “Perhaps you can give me a line on Bergson.”
“I can tell you what I know.” Clark seemed eager to talk. “Bergson and Nixon used to be partners in a jewelry appraising and sales business. They took gems on consignment and tried to peddle them. As I understand it, Nixon loafed too much and Bergson made all the dough. He finally got sore and heaved Nixon out.”
“Nixon told me that himself.” Kelly nodded. “What about these enemies?”
“Business enemies,” Clark answered slowly. “Hatred caused by jealousy. Bergson was a shrewd dealer. I guess he put one over a few times. For actual blood-hating enemies, I can give you one man. The super of this apartment house. Name is MacDougal. About four months ago, Bergson accused him of swiping some stuff and they had a battle royal. MacDougal got the daylights whacked out of him. Then, a week ago, they had another fight and MacDougal came out about sixth by the looks of his puss.”
“Thanks.” Kelly said. “I’ll look in on MacDougal. We haven’t much on Nixon, you know.”
“I thought you caught him cold.” Clark shrugged. “Wish I could be of more help, Sarge. I don’t envy you guys.”
GRINNING briefly, Kelly went into the building and descended to the basement. MacDougal, it appeared, was a single man who occupied a furnished room in the basement. Kelly knocked, got no answer and used a skeleton key on the door.
Quite methodically and with the benefit of long experience, he began searching. He didn’t quite know what he was looking for, but in a tin can in a tiny pantry locker, he found three mediumsized, uncut diamonds. He was studying these when the super came in, stood stockstill for a second, then dove for a heavy wrench that stood against the wall.