by Jerry eBooks
I heard a door close softly somewhere. Not far away. I jumped for the hall. A man’s shadowy figure darted acrossthe opening at the north end of the hall.
“The killer!” I screamed at Roberts, who had followed me. “Let’s nab him!”
The unknown was faster than a shadow. He moved like a cat. I skittered across the Orientals like a kitten on a tin roof, trying to keep my balance on the polished floor. I dived. My hands grabbed the unknown guy’s jacket. He squirmed and gave me a straight-arm that made my tonsils bounce in my throat. And my feet slipped from under me and I hit the floor with a crash that made my teeth rattle.
My quarry was out the side door and streaking down the east lawn like all the demons were after him. He took that low brick wall without breaking stride and vanished into the timber. He could have topped the record for the four-forty hurdles on any college cinders in the country.
I had a little brown-colored metal ring in my hand that I’d torn off the shadow’s jacket. A metal ring about an inch in diameter. I looked at Roberts.
“Where was the guy hiding?”
Roberts pointed, his face still green with fright.
“There’s a clothes closet under the stairway that leads to the second floor. Behind the closet is a door that leads down stairs to the garage.”
I opened the closet door. A light clicked on automatically. The closet was empty, except for a cheap raincoat on a hanger and some hat boxes on a shelf. On the floor was a tiny blob of white stuff that felt like ground glass, and half of a light brown coat button. I gathered the stuff and put it in my handkerchief.
Roberts was nearly tongue-tied with fright. “Where’s Elkins?” he chattered. “Where’s Mrs. Fanner? Are they dead, too?”
I thought the guy was about ready to keel over, he was that green around the gills.
“Take it easy, chum,” I said. “One corpse at a time is par for the course. There’s nothing to suggest the killer was in the wholesale business.”
“What are you going to do? You’re a detective.”
“Right now I’m gonna call the cops. Homicide’s their headache, not mine. I’m only a private eye—with a client rubbed out—and me two hundred bucks poorer than I ought to be.”
CHAPTER II
HOMICIDE TAKES OVER
I called Homicide at City Hall and told one of Fleming Morf’s stooges that there was a little matter of a dead millionaire demanding their attention. Roberts sat on the edge of a chair while I was calling. He puffed on a cigarette and gawked nervously at everything in the room except Dilweg’s body. I felt sorry for the guy. Sudden death was too much for him.
“Let’s take a look around the dump,” I said.
He followed me like a lost dog. We went through everything upstairs and then repeated downstairs. Nobody was in any of the rooms, and it didn’t look as if anybody had ransacked the joint for dough. Maybe the killer had got what he wanted in that safe in the study.
We went downstairs to the garage. Roberts turned on a light somewhere. The garage was a concrete-floored room thirty feet square, with heavy wood-paneled walls. There wasn’t a thing in the room except a black four-door peerless, license 408-284. No bench, no oil drums, no tools, no cabinets, no nothing.
Raindrops still glistened on the black finish of the car, and the windshield was still smeary except where the twin windshield wipers had swept the rain away. I knew that sedan hadn’t been there long. It had stopped raining only fifteen minutes ago, just before I’d gotten off the Noble bus.
I got in the car and sat behind the wheel. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. I could see Roberts standing behind the car, lighting another cigarette. His hands were shaking. I hated to think how he would crack up when Detective-lieutenant Fleming Morf and his rubber hose boys started working on him.
I got out and walked toward the bare wall in front of the car. When I got three or four feet away, I heard something click. A wide wooden panel slid sideward in the wall and there was a yawning black opening, paved with concrete, sloping gently downward.
Roberts was at my shoulder. “That’s a special driveway that goes under the house and comes out on the north side of the grounds,” he told me. “It allowed Mr. Dilweg to drive out of the grounds without backing. The door operates with an electric eye. You opened the door when you broke the circuit with your body. The outside garage doors operate the same way.”
“Are millionaires too proud to back a car?” I asked.
“I take it you’ve never met Mr. Dilweg in person,” Roberts said.
“No. He hired me by telephone.”
“He had a stiff neck. He couldn’t turn his head without turning his whole body. It happened in an oil-well accident several years ago.”
I heard footsteps on the hardwood upstairs and I felt sorry for Roberts.
“Let’s go up and face the inquisition, chum. Morf and his stooges are on the scene.”
We went up quietly and walked to the study. I expected to see Morf and his muscle men, but what I saw was a guy kneeling by Dilweg’s body. His eyes were staring. He was skinny and tall and neat in a brown suit and a brown hat, but he had on a black bow tie on a white shirt. His face was as pale as paper and his Adam’s apple jumped in his throat when he saw us.
He got up. “I just came back from the bank,” he stammered at Roberts. “I wasn’t gone more than half an hour. Then—this. It was my fault—for leaving him alone.”
I had an idea that this guy wasn’t shedding any tears over Dilweg’s demise.
“We found your employer just a few a minutes ago, Elkins,” Roberts said. “Mr. Starch and I.” He introduced me to Dilweg’s butler.
I grunted at Elkins. I didn’t like the waver in his eye and the oil in his voice. “What bank did you go to?” I asked him.
“The First National.”
I looked at my wrist-watch. “Come again. That bank closes at two-thirty.”
“I just made it,” he said, “and I just got back on the Noble bus.”
“Was Dilweg here when you left?”
He hesitated for a long time, like a swimmer getting ready for cool-off. Then he made up his mind to answer.
“No, sir. Mr. Dilweg was just driving in the south gate as I got on the bus to go to the bank.”
“How’d you know it was Dilweg you saw?”
His thin face got red. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or cagey.
“I know the license number. Four-o-eight, two-eight-four. Then he said, emphatically, “It was Mr. Dilweg, all right.”
“I’m only a private eye, Elkins,” I said, “but I’ve got a two-hundred-dollar stake in this murder. Is Joe Briggs still working for Dilweg?”
“No, sir. Briggs has not been working here for several days.”
“Fired?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Was Briggs a visitor here today?”
Again that queer hesitation, like he was weighing his words on a scale of caution. “Briggs was here early this morning,” he said then, “but I really don’t know whether he wanted to see Mr. Dilweg or Mrs. Franner. Briggs said he’d return later.”
This guy was cagey. He didn’t throw in much information for free.
“Did Briggs come back any time before you left for the bank?” I asked.
“No, sir.”
I had never seen Joe Briggs wearing eyeglasses, but a guy can never overlook anything in a murder case.
“Did Briggs ever wear eye-glasses, Elkins?”
Elkins said, “No, sir” emphatically, and one of my theories went out the window. Maybe the ground glass I’d found in the closet where the killer had been was an eye-glass lens, but if Briggs didn’t wear glasses then he wasn’t the guy that had scissored Dilweg to death . . .
Two of Morf’s baggy-pants stooges came into the study first, like a vanguard. They acted like two-bit dicks act on hardwood floors and Oriental rugs.
Detective-lieutenant Fleming Morf brought his cock-sure, overbearing fat swagger into t
he room like a calliope following the elephants. His round head was like a pool ball with ash-tray hair clipped short so that it stuck up like a curbing on his wrinkled street of forehead. His eyes were cold, and they got colder when he saw me. He grinned without humor at the stooges, who watched him.
“The foul-ball is here,” he said.
I patted my hands together. “Clap hands—here’s the hero. Where’s your rubber hose and your brass knucks, tough guy?”
Morf ignored me. He looked at Dilweg’s body like it was a piece of cold fish on a platter. He made a face at his stooges and they started to go over the joint like a vacuum cleaner. Then he looked at me.
“Start talking,” he said.
I told Morf all about finding the body. I told him all I knew about Carson Roberts and John Elkins and Joe Briggs and Mrs. Lilli Franner. I told him about the wet four-door sedan downstairs and about the guy Roberts and I had flushed out of the closet. I even gave him my handkerchief with the broken button and the ground glass I’d scooped off the closet floor. And I gave him the shiny metal ring I’d grabbed off the guy’s jacket.
He put the stuff in his pocket. “Why can’t you cheap divorce dicks keep your paws off evidence in homicide cases?” he growled.
I got white around the lips. “Some of these days I’ll divorce you from your teeth, chum. Me pickin’ up the stuff didn’t change it any.”
“Keep your shirt on.” His eyes glinted. “The guy you traced for Dilweg? Is he around? Does he wear glasses?”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said. “The guy in the closet wasn’t Joe Briggs. Briggs don’t wear glasses. And Briggs misses on another count.”
I didn’t tell Morf, but the metal ring I grabbed was off an Army jacket, and so was the broken button. I know a little about them. I wore one.
Morf passed the dirty crack without comment. “If you looked for the guy in the closet what kind of a guy would you look for?”
“One about five-feet-eight. Medium build. Wears glasses. He’s a war veteran. And he probably wears leather heels on his shoes. Rubber ones wouldn’t crush an eye-glass lens to powder. And if you see him, you better move fast. He can run plenty fast.”
“That story fit in with yours?” Morf growled at Carson Roberts.
Roberts had quieted down a lot. He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Why’d you come here to see Dilweg?”
“I had an appointment with him,” Roberts said.
“What about?”
Roberts’ answer surprised Morf so much he nearly swallowed his tonsils.
“The purpose of my visit is none of your business, but I have nothing to conceal. It had to do with Handicap Haven, Incorporated. Mr. Dilweg has been very generous to the project.”
Morf’s face was red as a spanked baby’s behind. “What’s Handicapped Haven, Incorporated?”
“A charitable rest home in East St. Louis for the needy blind, deaf, epileptic and crippled. We take them in and try to rehabilitate them and make it possible for them to learn to take care of themselves.”
He said it with a gleam in his eyes and a flush on his face like it was something swell and he was proud of it. Morf’s looked ashamed of himself, and for Morf, that was quite a job.
To save face, and keep his rep as a tough mug he whirled on John Elkins and punched the butler’s thin chest with a stubby hand for emphasis.
“Where’s the old man’s housekeeper? This Mrs. Lilli Franner. Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” the skinny butler said. He backed away from Morf’s threatening face and he was trying to gulp down his Adam’s apple.
Morf dogged him and his heavy fist curled into a tight ball and he shoved Elkins roughly backward.
“Come on. Skinny, don’t act cagey with me. With one woman alone in a twenty-room house with you and Dilweg, you don’t lose track of her. Where is she?”
Elkins’ face was green with fear, and his scrawny arms went up to shield his face. Morf’s left hand jabbed hard at Elkins’ chest and the skinny guy went backward on to the leather davenport. Morf glared at him.
“Do I have to let the boys work you over?” Elkins cowered back, trying to squeeze his body into the cushions.
“She’s gone,” he got out. “Talk, Skinny! And you better make it good!”
“Mrs. Franner. Mrs. Lilli Franner. She came here in answer to an ad I put in a matrimonial paper. I got her a job it with Mr. Dilweg as a sort of housekeeper. We were going to be married, and then go into business together with our savings.”
Morf grinned as if he enjoyed Elkins’ misery. “So you fell for that moth-eaten one? Now your savings have gone blooey, I bet. Along with the dame. Give me the story. From the beginning.”
Elkins sat up, trembling. “She had six thousand dollars in cash. If I would put up the same amount, we’d put it in a safe deposit box I had at the bank. Then we’d get married and go on our honeymoon. When we got back—”
Morf grinned some more. “Go on. This is gonna be rich.”
“We went to the bank,” Elkins stammered. “I put my money in a big envelope. I asked for hers. She blushed, and said it was pinned inside her dress. She took the envelope with my money in it and went into a private booth, and when she came back the envelope was sealed and she’d written across it, ‘Property of Mrs. and Mr. John Elkins’.”
Morf said, licking his lips, “Go on.”
“I wanted to buy a little delicatessen I know about, but she kept putting it off. I started to worry about it. I even wondered about the money. But the box was in my name and I had the only key. This afternoon I went to her room to talk to her about it. I found a note on her dresser saying that she’d been called to Duluth by the sudden illness of her sister. All of her things were gone, like maybe she didn’t intend to come back. Then I remembered that she had told me once before that she had no relatives except a brother.”
“You’re slow on the up-take, Skinny. Then what did you do?”
“I went to the safety deposit box at the bank. The envelope was there, just like I’d left it. But inside was only a thick pile of white paper cut to exactly the same size as paper money. There was a good bill on the top and the bottom of the pile—the rest was just paper.”
Morf laughed, and I could have punched him in the nose.
“The gal’s plenty clever,” Morf said. “Switched the bills out and the dummy paper in while she had you buffaloed with blushes. She put a good bill on each side of the pile in case you got suspicious and tore the envelope.”
He acted more like he’d found six grand than just learned that Elkins had been fleeced out of that much.
“You’re out six Gs, my skinny friend,” he said, “and I’ve got an idea that your blushing violet might have stuck Dilweg with them shears, too. Scissors come natural to women. And I ain’t positive but what you and her was in cahoots.”
“I want my six thousand dollars back!” Elkins said.
I butted in. “I lost a client when Dilweg got himself punctured, and I lost two hundred bucks. What’s it worth to you if I get back your six Gs, Elkins?”
“Five hundred dollars! Five hundred dollars!”
“Make it two Cs, chum,” I said. I got a stake in this now, showing up our muscle-brained Homicide here.”
Morf grunted. “I’ll get your six Gs, Skinny, at the same time I pick up the killer. And I got an idea that Duluth’d be a good place to start looking.”
CHAPTER III
THE LADY IN THE LITTLE HOUSE
A bunch of guys came in then—a couple of pencil boys from the Journal and a photographer. The flash bulbs popped with me and Roberts and Elkins and Morf looking down at Dilweg’s body. The reporters talked to Morf for about ten minutes, then lifted the phone and called their city desks.
While they were busy on the phone a couple guys came in with a big wicker basket and they dumped the millionaire in and carried him away. When you’re a croppie, it don’t make much difference to the coroner whether you got
ten million or ten cents.
Morf glared at the coroner. “A dame flew the coop. Think she could have eased that shiv into Dilweg?”
“Nix,” the coroner said. “No soap. Whoever pushed that scissors had a lot of push. The wound was bruised where the handles sank into the flesh. I’d say it was a man did the job.”
I had a different idea myself, but I grinned at the detective from Homicide.
“You’d better hurry your bloodhounds to Duluth, Rover Boy.”
I started for the door. “Hold it, Divorce Dick!” Morf said. “Where you think you’re going? I haven’t given you a clean slate yet.”
“Are you goofy?” I said. “Dilweg owed me two hundred bucks. But that ain’t motive enough for me frying in the chair. You’ve done your dirty deed for the day. You’ve got a corpse and you think you’ve got a suspect. Do your stuff. I’ll be at my office any time you want to get me so you can four-flush some more.”
I left Dilweg’s mansion and hopped the Noble bus back to the loop. I went to the local library and spent an hour in the newspaper reference room. There wasn’t too much stuff on Dilweg, because he hadn’t gone much for publicity, but there was enough for me to piece together a few facts.
Dilweg had been raised and educated to the law in East St. Louis. In his early days he specialized in corporation law and managed to starve to death. Then he got into politics and did all right. He wound up as state’s attorney for St. Clair County. Then he got into the oil business, and horse-shoes and four-leaf clovers rained all over everything he touched, and he got to be a millionaire.
He had married young, he had no kids, and his wife had died about twelve years before. He had been about sixty-nine years old. He had traveled a lot and had seldom been at home in the big mansion. He had spent almost a year in Canada before he had returned to his mansion less than a month before. He hadn’t been back to East St. Louis in more than ten years, although his only charity was the Handicap Haven, Inc. that I’d heard about from Carson Roberts. There was one item showing a picture of him writing a check for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in favor of Handicap Haven, Inc.