Tweak the Devil's Nose

by Deming, Richard

  “You’ve got two cigars sticking out of your breast pocket!” he snapped.

  “Stolen apples taste better.” Biting off the end of the cigar, I unsuccessfully felt in my pockets. “Got a match?”

  All that got me was a glare. Shrugging, I decided to chew instead of smoke.

  “I won’t take much of your time,” I said. “I only came in for two things. The first I already asked you.”

  “You mean about Miss Moreni? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t get coy with me, Inspector. We’ve known each other too long. You know as well as I do that statement of Fausta’s is meaningless. Why play it up?”

  “Meaningless?” he asked. “You mean it’s a false statement?”

  “Oh, for cripes’ sake, Inspector!”

  He gave me a smile like a cat with feathers in its whiskers. “When a witness signs a statement, Moon, I have every right to assume it’s the truth. Of course she can repudiate it, but in that case I’d have to accept Robert Caxton’s statement and take you into custody.”

  I said disgustedly, “You don’t believe either statement. You’re using Fausta to try to smoke out the killer. I suppose your next move will be to let the eyewitness’s identity leak.”

  Day looked wounded. “We’re not that crude, Moon. You think we’d deliberately set up a young woman as a target?”

  “Yes.”

  He examined me in silence for a minute. “It’s none of your business,” he said finally, “but just to relieve your mind, I’ll tell you what we’re doing. I have tails on that taxi driver and doorman.”

  I looked at him blankly. “For what?”

  “Put yourself in the killer’s place,” he said irritably. “You read in the paper a witness has seen your face. The name isn’t given, but the names of three other witnesses who didn’t see your face are. Possibly these witnesses, or at least one of them, knows who the fourth witness is. Is it worth the risk of approaching them one at a time in an attempt to learn the fourth witness’s identity?”

  I thought of something. “Have you got a tail on me too?” I demanded.

  Day shook his head. “If the killer bites at all, we figure he would steer away from a private detective except as a last resort. And even if he did approach you, we assume you’d have sense enough to sit on him and give us a buzz.”

  I thought of something else. “The other witnesses actually do know who the fourth is, because we were all present when Fausta made that silly statement. Suppose the killer does contact one of them, gets the information he wants, and your man loses him?”

  Warren Day frowned, opened his mouth and closed it again. Finally he rumbled, “We don’t make mistakes like that.”

  I emitted a polite horse laugh.

  “If we figure Miss Moreni is in any danger, we’ll take her into protective custody,” he snapped.

  “Swell,” I said bitterly. “Put her in jail.”

  “Better than being dead,” he offered in a reasonable tone. “Get on with the second thing you want. I’m pretty busy.”

  “I want to help you,” I told him. “As a patriotic citizen I feel it my duty to do something about this blot on our city’s honor.”

  Day regarded me suspiciously. “Do you know something you didn’t tell last night?”

  “Not yet,” I admitted. “I plan to crack the case as soon as you tell me what you’ve got so far.”

  He glared at me with sudden indignation. “You’re on the case? It’s not enough I got the district attorney, two governors and every newspaper in the country on my back. Now you want to breathe down my neck. Go away.”

  He dropped his eyes back to the reports on his desk. I sat quietly chewing my filched cigar. Finally he looked up again.

  “Who’s your client?”

  “The governor of Illinois.”

  He snorted. Searching his ashtray, he found a long cigar butt, blew the ashes from it and stuck it in his mouth. I waited for him to produce a match, but he preferred merely to chew also.

  “Laurie Davis was seen in town this morning,” he said, eying me expectantly.

  “He was?”

  “Is he your client?” he demanded.

  “My client wants to remain incognito.”

  He started to glare, but let it deteriorate into what was supposed to be an ingratiating smile. I can’t describe what it actually was, but a close approximation would be the grin of a weasel with a stomach-ache.

  I knew what was going through his mind. If my client actually was Laurie Davis, he could hardly afford to be unco-operative, for even the governor might listen attentively if the political boss of a neighboring state decided to make a complaint. And with pressure on the department already tremendous, Day had no desire to make it any worse.

  Apparently the inspector decided to take no chances, and the decision brought about one of his abrupt changes in manner which never fail to fascinate me. All at once he was full of wheedling friendliness.

  “We’re always willing to co-operate with you private fellows when you co-operate with us, Manny. I’ll be glad to give you the little bit we got, if you’ll promise to turn in everything you find out the minute you find it — not a week or two later, as you sometimes do.”

  “Let’s make a deal,” I said.

  Immediately he was suspicious again. “What kind of deal?”

  “I’ll hold nothing back at all from you, if you’ll promise the same treatment.”

  “Sure, Manny,” he said, relieved and a little surprised, for he seemed to hold the erroneous impression that he generally came out second when we horse traded.

  “There’s one qualification,” I said. “I want you to agree that regardless of which one of us breaks the case, we keep the arrest secret for twenty-four hours.”

  Straightening in his chair, he looked at me with amazement. “Why should I agree to a silly thing like that?”

  “There’s a political reason,” I said casually.

  Day opened his mouth, closed it again and glared at me speechlessly. The two things in the world he understands not at all are women and politics, and it is a tossup as to which frightens him more.

  “No politician is going to tell me how to run Homicide,” he declared unconvincingly.

  “None wants to,” I assured him. “You’ll have your killer and no one will interfere with the legal prosecution. All I’m asking is he be held as a material witness or some such thing for twenty-four hours. Assuming we ever catch him, that is. If he can’t, we’ll have to work independently, because I’m committed to work on that basis only.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am. Do we co-operate, or do I tell Laurie Davis I’m on my own?”

  I let the name slip deliberately, and watched Day’s reaction to the confirmation that my client was who he suspected. A faint spot of white appeared at the tip of his nose. Around headquarters Warren Day’s nose is surreptitiously referred to as the “rage gauge,” for it exactly meters his degree of anger. When it becomes dead white, he is just short of homicidal.

  “For an old friend like you I think we can arrange that,” he said in a choked voice.

  So our agreement was made and the inspector proceeded to bring me up to date.

  As I had surmised from the double wound, the bullet which killed Lancaster had passed entirely through his body. The spent slug, too badly battered from striking a rib on the way out to make comparison tests possible in the event the murder weapon was ever found, was located lying on the gravel drive only a few feet from the body. Since no ejected casing was found, it was assumed the weapon had been a revolver rather than an automatic.

  A thin coating of dried leaves from the previous fall had been spread over the close-cropped grass as fertilizer by El Patio’s gardener, and the resulting spongy turf left no footprints. However, muzzle flash had singed a bush at the edge of the drive, so it had been possible to determine where the killer had been standing.

  At this point I interrupted
. “Then my story is verified without Fausta’s statement. If she repudiates it, that taxi driver’s imaginings still don’t mean anything.”

  Racketeer Barney Seldon had been held for questioning as a matter of routine, the inspector went on unper-turbably, but since he was still seated at his table in the midst of over a hundred other diners when the shot was fired, he was not even booked. It developed that he was a habitué of El Patio, dining there several nights a week, so there was nothing unusual about his being present at the time of the murder. Except for his reputation for violence, the police had no reason to connect him with the affair.

  “Right after you left I sent Hannegan over to Carson City to break the news to Lancaster’s wife,” Day went on. “A lousy job, but somebody always has to do it. He found out from Mrs. Lancaster the dead man’s purpose in being this side of the river was a business meeting with some investment brokers, and she had expected him home last night. He also found out practically everybody knew Lancaster would be at El Patio last night. During a luncheon speech in Carson City a few days back he made a humorous reference to a charge by a political rival that he was in the pay of a restaurant-owners’ lobby which was trying to get the state sanitary code relaxed. He said his influence among restaurateurs was so great that when he phoned El Patio a week in advance for a seven-thirty dinner reservation for last night, he only had to argue about twenty minutes in order to get himself fitted in an hour later than he wanted. The speech was reprinted in the Carson City Herald, so anyone who can read could have known he would be coming out of El Patio about nine thirty.”

  “Who were the investment brokers he met with?” I asked.

  “Jones and Knight Investment Company on Broadway. I sent a man over this morning and he talked to one of the partners. Guy named Harlan Jones. According to him, Lancaster left the brokerage office alone at five P.M.. Offhand this looks to me like a political assassination by some fanatic.”

  I said, “Remember a while back when a couple of pot shots were taken at Laurie Davis?”

  He nodded. “Before he hired that ex-FBI fellow as a bodyguard.”

  “There’s a probability Barney Seldon was behind those attempts.”

  Day peered at me over his glasses. “How would you know a thing like that?”

  “I don’t,” I told him. “It’s only a guess. But it’s a guess founded on pretty sound reasoning. Did you know Laurie Davis ran Seldon’s rackets out of his county?”

  “No. I don’t pay much attention to Illinois crime. I’ve got enough troubles of my own.”

  “Well, he did,” I said. “And if you read the papers, you’d know Davis literally hand-picked Walter Lancaster for lieutenant governor. Maybe Barney was striking back at Davis by having his protégé knocked off.”

  “A little roundabout for a hood like Seldon,” Day said dubiously. “He’d be more likely to have Davis himself bumped. Besides, he has a perfect alibi.”

  “So what? He wouldn’t do his own gun work. He probably has a dozen gunnies he could call on.”

  The inspector gave his head a shake of disagreement. “We’ll watch for him to come across the river again and go over him some more, but I can’t see Barney Seldon behind this. If he ordered it, he wouldn’t go out of his way to be on the spot. He’d have a perfect alibi a hundred miles from the murder.”

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “that’s exactly what he figured the police would think.”

  5

  A slightly inebriated associate professor of philosophy I met in a barroom one night explained to me the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. The former is the method employed by that galaxy of fiction sleuths who make their livings solving crimes without ever getting out of their chairs. When fictional homicide chiefs humbly call on a fictional deductive reasoner to lay before him problems they are unable to solve themselves, he leans back, closes his eyes and thinks. And simply by putting in logical order the information the police already have, he pops up with an answer.

  The French philosopher Descartes is an example of pure deductive reasoning, the philosophy professor told me in exchange for buying him a boilermaker, and when I only looked at him blankly, he came down to my level by putting C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes in the same category.

  The inductive reasoner is not satisfied with merely known facts, he further instructed me. He attempts to dig up all possible facts related to the problem, and when he has them all, he expects certain conclusions to appear as self-evident without having to link his facts together into a logical chain. This, the professor expounded, is both the method of modern science and the method of modern criminology.

  I was pleasantly surprised to discover I was so modern, for I was an inductive rather than deductive reasoner even before I met the philosophy professor. No doubt I could use the deductive method if some humble homicide chief would call to feed me facts, but the only homicide chief I know is Warren Day, and while he sometimes calls at my flat, usually it is because he is thirsty. Consequently I depend more on my car and my feet than I do on cold logic.

  My routine is simple in a case like Walter Lancaster’s. I simply interview everybody I can think of who might know something about him.

  My first move was to see the murdered man’s family in Carson City, which in spite of being only a few miles distant, took most of the afternoon by the time I had fought bridge traffic both coming and going. I did not anticipate the visit would be very fruitful, since Hannegan had already interviewed the widow, and the stocky lieutenant rarely misses a bet. It was just as fruitful as I anticipated.

  The widow was a rather plain woman of middle age, dry-eyed and controlled, but obviously grief stricken. The son, a redheaded youngster named Rodney, impressed me as being more angry than sad. He had driven home from the University of Illinois, where he was a sophomore, the moment he heard the news, and was raring to tear somebody apart for shooting his dad.

  From neither of them did I learn anything which seemed to me at the time to possess value. I did get verification of Laurie Davis’s statement about Lancaster having been a director of four corporations aside from Illinois Telegraph before he resigned all directorships to run for lieutenant governor. But neither Mrs. Lancaster nor Rodney had more than the vaguest understanding of his business affairs.

  From the widow I also learned Lancaster had seemed rather upset his last few days, and she got the impression his pending meeting with Jones and Knight Company was what bothered him. Since he never discussed business matters at home, she had no idea what the meeting was about, but she volunteered the information that one of the partners was an old friend of Lancaster’s. Her husband and Willard Knight had attended the University of Illinois together, she said, and though in recent years they had only rare contact, on the infrequent occasions her husband mentioned Knight’s name, he always referred to him as though he were a close friend. Actually the two men had not been close at all since college days, she added. As a matter of fact they saw each other so rarely, she had never met Knight herself. She had a vague recollection of her husband mentioning only a week or two back that he had encountered Willard Knight somewhere by accident and the two had lunch together.

  Aside from that the trip was a waste of time. Neither could suggest any reason whatever why anyone would want to kill Lancaster. And to make the afternoon a complete fiasco, I had to let the last person in the world to whom I cared to be indebted save me from being run over.

  The Lancaster home was right on Carson City’s main street, which is also part of a through highway. I had parked across the road, and I started back across to my car just as a couple of kids in a convertible roared through town at what must have been ninety miles an hour.

  I always look before crossing streets, just as I was taught in kindergarten, checking first to the left and then to the right. The highway was clear when I glanced left, but in the half second it took me to glance right and take one step into the road, the convertible lifted out of a dip a hundred yards away
and bore down at me with its horn screaming.

  My reactions are fast, but a false leg is unpredictable. My nerves activated the proper muscles in plenty of time to get me out of the way, but the leg picked that moment to buckle. Slipping to the knee of my good leg, I tried to scramble to the curb on all fours, realized I wasn’t going to make it, then suddenly was jerked clear by a pair of hands which gripped both biceps and nearly tore my arms loose from my shoulders.

  Since I couldn’t stand until my leg was refastened, I didn’t bother to look at my rescuer until I had rolled up my trouser leg, readjusted the straps above and below my knee, rolled down the trouser leg again and dusted myself off. Then I climbed to my feet and looked into the bucktoothed face of Farmer Cole.

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked sourly, then added reluctantly, “Thanks.”

  “I live in this town,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks again.” I tried to make this one more enthusiastic, but it still came out sour. Even after the guy had saved my life, I couldn’t shake the feeling of tense watchfulness his nearness induced in me.

  Subduing an odd reluctance to put my back to the man, I turned to try the crossing again.

  “Want me to help you across?” the Farmer asked.

  Slowly I turned to look at him. “That crack makes us even, Farmer. You saved my life; now I’m saving yours by ignoring the crack.”

  He grinned at me, a grin as sardonic as Bugs Bunny’s. With dignity I crossed to my car, first looking carefully both ways, climbed under the wheel and glanced back to where he had been standing.

  He had disappeared.

  Since the only lead I had picked up in Carson City was the widow’s vague idea that Lancaster had been worried over his impending conference with the Jones and Knight Investment Company, I decided to take a chance on finding someone still at the company office, even though it was just five o’clock when I drove off the bridge on my own side of the river. Stopping at the first tavern I saw for a glance in the phone book, I discovered the office was only a few blocks up Broadway, just south of the Federal Reserve Building. I made it by ten after five and found a parking place right in front of the entrance.