by Jerry eBooks
“Yes, indeed, Hatfield, if there is any goat, you are tagged,” said Howard. “Here’s how I reconstruct your actions on that night: You waited outside the penthouse door for Rumley to come out. You slugged him over the head with the large monkey wrench. Then you dragged him back to the penthouse and closed the door. Next, you waited for all the delivery men to leave the platform, then you carried the body of Rumley downstairs to his own car and drove to the spot where you planted him.”
“That’s not true!” exploded Hatfield. “You are trying to frame me!”
“If you are being framed,” I said, “it is with your own picture in the middle.”
HOWARD raised his hand for me to shut up. He never lets me get into the act. “Another thing,” went on Howard to Hatfield, “when you jacked up the car you must have had a hell of a time, because the top cog on the jack was broken. More, it would take a strong man like you to work it. Rumley didn’t have the strength to operate it, not with his makeup. And still more, you evidently got nervous and pulled another boner. You jacked up the right wheel, after you had punctured the left wheel.”
That did it. The wrap-up was complete. Hatfield was silent.
“Okay,” said Hatfield. “So I did kill Rumley!”
“And your motive? I admit I would like to know that.”
“My wife. She is the cashier in the restaurant where Rumley has his lunch. I got a tip that she was dating him, and went up to the penthouse while I was off duty. So one night, when she thought I was home painting the kitchen, she got off from the restaurant, and went to the penthouse. I know, because I was there and I saw her with my own eyes. I loved that woman and didn’t want to lose her.”
“Listen, buddy,” I butted in, “didn’t anyone tell you that no dame is worth taking a seat in the chair for? And listen, why kill the guy in the affair? In nine such cases out of ten, the woman is the lead-on. Did Rumley force her to go to the penthouse with him? Did he assault her and carry her up to the penthouse? Or did she go of her own free will? Besides, since you were dumb enough to commit murder, why not knock off both? You will get only one sit-down in the chair for one or twenty murders.”
“Don’t mind junior,” said Howard. “He thinks he’s a sage.”
Howard turned to Hatfield, and went on, “When you found that your wife was going with Rumley, didn’t you remonstrate with her about it?”
“Yes; I did. But she said she was tired of going with a cheap guy like me and what was I going to do about it? She even asked for a divorce.”
Hatfield paused a moment, then mused, “I guess a fellow is a sucker to kill over a woman like that.”
Howard called in Detectives Papy and McNeill and had them take Hatfield to the can, charged with murder in the first degree.
“Hey,” said Rundell, “what about the shirt and pants? Where did you get them?”
“Believe it or not, I actually did some story-book detective work on that deal,” grinned Howard. “One of the things that puzzled me was how the killer got back to town after the crime, after he took Rumley out there on the Trail. So I searched the neighborhood and found a house a mile from the scene. I also learned that the little frame house had been bought recently by Hatfield. Get the idea, boys? He didn’t have to go back to town.”
“I’m asking what about the shirt and pants.” demanded Rundell.
“Where did you think I found them, in the Herald building? I found them in Hatfield’s house, of course. A test showed the blood on both was the same as the blood type of Rumley.”
“Swell!” said Sandy Schnier. “Just like a movie!”
“Movie—hell!” snapped the chief. “This was the real stuff.” He tossed his nail file into the air and walked out.
DEATH OF A DEJECTED EDITOR
Dennis Wiegand
Nicholas Nocturne was far too egotistic to take his own life—even in the spectacular way he died. Obviously, he had had a bit of help in falling out that window . . .
DETECTIVE Sergeant Ralph Oliver was quietly seething as he hustled Policewoman Sally Ryan along the crowded pavement. The heavy going against the flood of noontime traffic did nothing to ease his spirits.
“But I don’t get this, Buster,” Sally protested. “All the man said was ‘Let’s lamp the gams, sister’, I didn’t think people really said that. And the way he chewed on that cigar; and that derby hat! I think he was precious!”
“I should’ve dipped the lug,” said Oliver tersely.
“Well, after all,” said Sally, reasonably, “if you go night-clubbing at high noon and catch the floor show in rehearsal, can you blame the impresario for thinking you want a job in the chorus line?”
“Fifty-Seven Varieties!” snorted Oliver. “What a corny name for a night spot! If I was back on the Vice Detail I’d padlock it just on the strength of that.”
Sally laughed lightly; bright blonde and built on almost over-ripely lush lines, she was accustomed to being mistaken for a showgirl or a hood’s moll. In fact, she did everything she could to encourage this common mistake, since she found it extremely useful to her career as a policewoman.
“Come on, Olly-Wolly,” she soothed him, “let’s give it up and find a nice little French restaurant for lunch. It’s a waste of time to try to make the rounds of the joints in the middle of the day.”
“But when else can we have a date?” he complained. “Both of us working nights like this?”
“Dig up a hot lead,” she advised, “and then request Lieutenant Corcoran to assign me to the case. We’ll do our dating on the job in some opium den. What could be cosier?”
“Corcoran,” said Oliver. “What’re you trying to do, spoil my appetite? If it wasn’t for that glorified file-clerk I’d be back on the Vice Squad knocking pimps around.”
“Now, now, Buster,” she chided. “After all, these hopheads blow up and give you a little action now and then. Anyhow, what you need is more practice using your brain instead of your brawn. You still don’t believe me when I tell you that you’re brainier than you are brawny . . . not that you aren’t cute, in a bulldozer sort of way.”
“I wish you’d stop parrotting Emmett Corcoran’s police college line of guff,” he said testily. “After all, there’s no getting away from the fact that . . .”
There was a sudden nauseous squelching sound and then a quick flurry in the crowd just ten paces ahead. Instinctively, Sgt. Oliver darted forward, dragging Sally with him. Within seconds he was palming his badge and thrusting stupefied pedestrians aside. Already several of the spectators were being sick in the gutters, and leaning against lamp-posts.
Somebody had taken a dive off a building. A good high one, judging by the sound he made in landing. Oliver chopped at a ghoulish smart-aleck youth with the edge of one hand. The kid squealed and clapped a hand to his numbed neck, and forgot about his souvenir collecting.
“Honest, copper,” protested Sally, “I didn’t do it. I gotta witness, I tell yuh; yer bustin’ me arm!”
Ralph Oliver relaxed the grip he had unconsciously locked on her arm. He spun her around and headed her toward the building entrance.
“Beat it, kid,” he ordered. “You don’t want to see this.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” she complained. “You’re forgetting that I’m a cop, too, and from a long line of cops . . . not the least important of whom is my father, Patrick A. Ryan, our beloved precinct commander.”
“Right now,” he said coldly, “I’m in command here. You go call your old man; this is a good two blocks inside his precinct.”
“Nuts!” she replied, snatching two folded newspapers from under the arm of a dumbfounded bystander. “These are being commandeered by the police,” she told him. She thrust the newspapers at Oliver.
“Here, you cover him up,” she advised. “It’ll give you something to do till the thinkers get here.”
IF ANYONE of the stunned spectators overheard this unseemly squabble between the police officers he must have considered it the effect of the s
hock. But as Sgt. Oliver efficiently maintained a tiny island of clear side-walk in a growing, pressing, heaving ocean of people, Sally went the rounds of the inner circle of spectators writing names and addresses into her notebook.
In an incredibly short time, summoned by a flood of telephone calls from the surrounding office buildings, the rising whine of a flotilla of police cars converged on the spot.
The crowd melted away from the curb side as the first of the squad cars and an ambulance pulled up. Even the smartly-uniformed Lieut. Emmett Corcoran, whose principal duties were personnel administration, had been lured from his desk in precinct headquarters by the address of the building from which the death leap had apparently been made.
Before higher brass from downtown police headquarters had arrived to take over command, Lieut. Corcoran managed to maneuver Oliver off the scene with an order to check the huge building for the springboard of the suicidal jump.
“He ought to know I’m not on duty,” growled Oliver, pressing his way through the mob blocking the entrance to the building.
“Never mind, Buster,” advised a voice from behind his broad, battering shoulders. “I’m still with you. My dear old childhood playmate, Emmett, didn’t see me.”
Sgt. Oliver grinned broadly and felt better about being dismissed from the scene so that Corcoran could hog the show when the headquarters men arrived to make a check on precinct handling. Apparently, he thought with satisfaction, the coldly efficient Lieut.
Corcoran still lacked a certain something. How an ungainly and ominous heap of newspapers lying on the sidewalk could distract the attention of even the most duty-bound policeman from Sally’s bright banner of blonde hair was hard to understand.
Locating the starting point of the fatal leap proved to be an easy matter, despite the vastness of the hive of offices. Sgt. Oliver found one of the staff of janitors waiting for him with the information that a window was apparently out on the 14th floor. The bank of thermostats in the basement, controlling the air conditioning system, had telegraphed that something drastic had happened to temperature and humidity control on the 14th floor.
That meant the offices of The Gasp Group, Inc., which occupied the entire 14th floor, explained the janitor as he rode up in the elevator with them.
Ralph Oliver didn’t have to be told that GASP! was a highly successful magazine based on reports of actual crimes, preferably murders heavily buttered with sex angles and liberally garnished with frank photography.
“Must be somebody busted a window in one of the offices along the front of the buildin’,” continued the janitor garrulously. “And that means one o’ the big shots. Like an executive editor, maybe.”
“Oh, brother,” breathed Sally fervidly, “won’t Daddy love to see what GASP! does with this story! He can’t stand that magazine because they jazz up the facts of a case too much; and they positively loathe him, because he refuses to talk to their reporters.”
“Oh, GASP! is just one o’ their string, Miss,” explained the janitor. “They got a whole flock’ o’ other magazines. They put out Murder Monthly, too . . . a real fav’rite o’ mine.”
THEY SWUNG through a wide double door, lettered from top to bottom with the names of magazines published by The Gasp Group, Inc. and entered a smartly modern reception room. A burly man with a shock of long, greying hair and a gone-to-seed moustache was waving a brief case under the pertly turned-up nose of a sleek and slender brunette.
“I tell you Mort,” she was protesting, “I know Nick had this luncheon appointment with you. After all, I marked it on his calendar myself. But he told me to cancel it a half hour ago; said something more important had come up and he didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“You could have called me, couldn’t you?” raged the man. “This guy Nocturne not only swipes my plots, but now he wastes my time. I ought to send him a bill for what I would have written if I hadn’t knocked off early to rush into town for this appointment.”
“I did call you, Mort,” the brunette placated him, “but you know how that rural line is out there. And by the time I did get through, your wife said you’d already left. I’m terribly sorry, Mort; but you know the great Nicholas Nocturne.”
“If you think you’ve got a beef,” she added bitterly, “just remember the raw deal he gave me.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” cut in Oliver, palming his badge, “but somebody’s just taken a dive out of one of the front windows on this floor. Who would it be? And who around here would be able to identify any of the guys who had one of the front offices?”
“Why, why . . . I don’t quite . . . ,” fluttered the brunette. With a visible effort she drew herself together. “I’m Miss Slarr . . . Gretchen Slarr. I’m secretary to Nicholas Nocturne, executive editor of our fiction magazines in the detective field. He has a front office; in fact, I believe he’s the only one of the senior executives still in the building right now.”
“In his office, eh?” said Oliver. “Come on, let’s so see him. Which way?”
Gretchen Slarr swung her lithe shape from behind the kidney-shaped reception desk and led the way down a corridor which lay behind a plain, unmarked mahogany door. The irate man with the briefcase followed unobtrusively, although he seemed more interested in what was going to become of Sally Ryan than he was in what might have happened to Nicholas Nocturne.
“This is my office,” explained Miss Slarr, opening a door, “and that door leads to Mr. Nocturne’s office. I had just taken over the reception desk for a few moments for the regular girl. She had to . . .”
She hesitated, flustered. Then she said, almost plaintively, “Nick, I mean Mr. Nocturne, gave me strict orders not to disturb him. I’d rather you’d just go right in by yourself. After all, the police . . .”
But Sgt. Oliver already had the door to the executive editor’s private office open.
“Jackpot,” he said tersely. “Sally, call the transmitter and have them tell the boys downstairs to send the brain trust up here. You, Miss Slarr, get busy on that phone and get me somebody responsible who has a front office in the building across the street.”
Having arranged with the police radio transmitter to call the squad cars downstairs, Sally stood gingerly on the threshold of Nick Nocturne’s plushy private office. The janitor was peering eagerly over her shoulder.
“That window sure is busted out,” he commented. “Figured it would be. All these windows’re fastened shut so’s the air conditionin’ works right. On’y time they’re ever . . .”
“No other windows broken or open on the facade of this building,” said Oliver returning from his telephoning. “Talked to two lawyers and a doctor who have front offices in the building opposite.”
“Look,” Sally pointed out, “there’s his lunch on a tray. He didn’t eat it. Pathetic, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sgt. Oliver brushed the sentiment aside.
“Also very fishy,” Sally added.
“Nothing so fishy about it,” said Oliver impatiently. “Guy’s going to take a high dive, he’s too nerved up to eat. Wish those bookworms’d get up here so we could go get some lunch.”
THE DETECTIVE strode impatiently out into the corridor to meet the ranking officers who’d conduct the routine investigation.
Gretchen Slarr sat behind her desk, ashenfaced and wilted; Sally turned to look at her just in time to catch the consoling pat on the back the bushy-haired character was giving her. He quickly withdrew his hand.
“I’m Mort Gage,” he told Sally. “I write for this outfit. Detective stories. But this is the first time I ever heard of a police detective taking his girl friend out on the job. It’s an angle I’ll have to try.”
Sally ignored him and gave the secretary a warm smile of womanly sympathy. Bearing down on the throaty, chorus-girl tone of voice she had found so useful in dredging up confidences in powder-rooms, she said, “He wasn’t such a bad guy, after all, was he? Guess that’s the way it is with that charming-heel type of guy. Know jus
t how you feel, Honey. Go ahead and cry.”
Gretchen Slarr said nothing, which told Sally approximately what she had wanted to learn. She turned her attention to Mort Gage. “I’ve always wanted to meet a real, live writer,” she cooed huskily. “I’m just crazy about detective stories, but I don’t think I’ve ever read any of yours.”
“Must have,” said Gage; “couldn’t help it. I write more of ’em than any other guy in the world; just don’t use my name.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Sally sympathized.
The pale blue eyes, set deep in the wrinkles of the writer’s face, seemed to turn several shades darker.
“Might pick up some back copies of Murder Monthly,” he advised. “Almost anything under the name of Nick Nocturne will do.”
“That’s not fair, Mort!” cut in Gretchen, aroused. “You were paid a bonus for all that Nick Nocturne by-line stuff.”
“Not all,” he emphasized curtly. Sally’s more or less aimless probing of the world in which Nick Nocturne had lived and had his being was cut short by the arrival of Lieutenant Emmett Corcoran and a lieutenant from Headquarters together with an impressive entourage of harness and plainclothes officers.
“What’re you doing here, Sally?” said Emmett Corcoran in surprise.
The lieutenant from downtown shot him a peculiar glance which plainly said that he wondered how Corcoran, a notorious bluenose, had come to know this dish.
“Nobody’s been inside this room?” Corcoran asked her.
“Not since we’ve been here,” Sgt. Oliver affirmed.
“Right,” snapped Corcoran. “You’re relieved now, Sergeant; sorry your off-duty time was curtailed.”
The police cortege filed into the private office and fingerprint men flanked off, carefully sifting the room for fingerprints which it was almost certain would never figure in an investigation.
Ralph Oliver took his second dismissal from the limelight in good humor. What did it matter that the guy was a big shot and there’d be a flock of publicity? It was still just a dumb thing for any guy to do; and it didn’t provide a chance to trade punches with anybody.