Sidney Zoom loved the night. He was particularly fond of rainy nights. Midnight streets held for him the lure of adventure. He prowled ceaselessly at night, searching for those oddities of human conduct which would arouse his interest.
The police dog growled, throatily.
Sidney Zoom paused, stared down at his four-footed companion.
“What is it, Rip?”
The dog’s yellow eyes were staring straight ahead. His ears were pricked up. After a moment he flung his head in a questing half circle as his nose tested the air.
He growled again, and the hair along the top of his back ruffled into bristling life.
“Go find, Rip.”
Like an arrow, the dog sped forward into the night, his claws rattling upon the wet pavement. He ran low to the ground, swift and sure. He leaned far in as he rounded a corner, then the night swallowed him.
Sidney Zoom walked as far as the comer where the dog had vanished, then stood, waiting. He heard footsteps, the rustle of a rubber raincoat and a dark figure bulked upon him.
A flash light stabbed its way through the darkness.
“What are you doin’ here?” grumbled a deep voice.
The hawklike eyes of Sidney Zoom stared menacingly at the flash light.
“Who are you? — and put out that damned flash!”
The beam of the flash light shot up and down the long, lean, whipcorded strength of the man, and the grumbling voice rumbled again.
“I’m the officer on the beat. It’s no time for a man to be standin’ out on a street corner, all glistenin’ with rain, an’ lookin’ into the night as though he was listenin’ for something. So give an account of yourself, unless you want to spend a night in a cell.”
Sidney Zoom turned his eyes away from the glare of the light, fished a leather wallet from an inside pocket, and let the officer see a certain card.
That card bore the signature of the chief of police.
The officer whistled.
“Sidney Zoom, eh?” he said in surprise. “I’ve heard of you an’ of your police dog. Where’s the dog?”
Sidney Zoom’s head was cocked slightly to one side, listening.
“If you’ll quit talking for a moment I think we can hear him.”
The officer stopped stock-still, listening. Faintly through the night could be heard the barking of a dog.
“It’s around the other comer,” said Zoom.
The officer grunted.
“What’s he barkin’ at?”
Sidney Zoom’s long legs started to pace along the wet pavement. A sudden shower came rattling down upon the hard surface of their shiny raincoats. Water streamed from the rims of rubber hats.
“The best way to find out,” said Sidney Zoom, “is to go and see.”
The officer was put to it to keep pace with the long legs.
“I’ve heard of some of your detective work,” he said.
He gave the impression of one who wished to engage in conversation, but the pace was such that he needed all of his wind, Sidney Zoom said nothing.
“And of your dog,” puffed the officer.
Sidney Zoom paused, motioned to the officer to halt, raised his head and whistled. Instantly there came an answering bark.
Zoom’s ears caught the direction of that bark, and he lengthened his stride. The officer ceased all efforts to keep step and came blowing along, taking a step and a half to Zoom’s one.
A street light showed a huddled shadow. The dog barked again, and Sidney Zoom pointed.
“Something on the sidewalk,” he said.
The officer started to say something, but thought better of it. Such conversation as he might have could wait until he had more breath to spare for it.
Zoom’s stride became a running walk. His lean form seemed fairly vibrant with excitement.
“Some one lying down,” he said.
The dog barked once more, a shrill, yapping bark, as though he tried to convey some meaning. And Sidney Zoom interpreted the meaning of that bark.
“Dead,” he said.
The officer grunted his incredulity.
But Zoom had been right. The man was quite dead. He lay sprawled out upon the pavement, on his face, his hands stretched out and clenched, as though he had clutched at something.
There was a dark hole in the back of the man’s head, and a welling stream of red had oozed down until it mingled with the water on the sidewalk, staining it red. The hat was some ten feet away, lying flat upon the sidewalk.
The man had on a coat, trousers, heavy shoes. But there were pyjamas underneath. The bottoms of the pyjamas showed beneath the legs of the trousers, and the collar of the pyjama coat showed through a place where the coat lapel had been twisted backward.
The officer ran his hands to the wet wrists of the corpse.
“Dead,” he said.
“That,” remarked Sidney Zoom, dryly, “is what the dog told me. He’d have come running to me, urging haste, if the figure had still had life.”
The officer looked up with glittering eyes.
“You kidding me?” he asked.
Sidney Zoom shrugged his shoulders. Experience had taught him the futility of seeking to explain canine intelligence, highly developed, to one who had had no experience with it.
The officer turned the figure over. Zoom’s hand thrust out, caught the officer’s arm.
“Wait,” he said, “you’re destroying the most valuable clew we have!”
The officer’s eyes were wide.
“I’m just turnin’ him over.”
He had paused, the corpse precariously balanced upon one shoulder and hip, the head sagging downward.
Zoom nodded.
“Precisely,” he said. “But you’ll notice that the shoulders of the coat, on the upper part, around the neck, ate quite wet. That shows that he’s been out in the rain for some little time. But the back of the coat is almost dry.
“That means he was walking, facing the rain, that he hasn’t been lying very long on his stomach here. Otherwise the back of the coat would have been quite wet. But if you turn him over before we check on these things, and the back of the coat lays on the wet pavement, we’ll have no way of determining the comparative degree to which the garments are soaked.”
The officer grunted.
“You’re right about the shoulders,” he said, feeling them with an awkward hand. “And the front of his coat is sopping wet. It looks as though he’d been walkin’ toward the wind, all right.”
Zoom ran his fingers over the garments. His eyes held that hawklike glitter of concentration which marked his arousing interest.
“Now the wind,” said Zoom, “was blowing in the same direction the head is pointing. Which means that he was either turned around, after the shot, or that he had changed the direction of his walk. You’ll notice that he has no socks on, that the shoes are incompletely laced, and the strings hastily tied about the ankles.
“Apparently the man had retired for the night, when something aroused him, sent him hurriedly out into the rain with just the very barely essential clothes on.
“He was shot in the back of the head. Probably the shot coincided with a clap of thunder, since no one seems to have heard it, and it’s a district where there are apartment houses. He probably has been dead less than quarter of an hour.
“Let’s have the flash on his face, officer.”
The beam of light played obediently upon the cold face.
They disclosed features of a man somewhat past the middle fifties. His face was covered with gray stubble. His hair was thin at the temples. The high forehead was creased with scowl wrinkles. The mouth was a firm, thin line, almost lipless. Deep calipers showed that the corners of the mouth were habitually twisted downward.
“A man,” said Sidney Zoom, “who seldom smiled.”
The officer’s hand went to the coat pocket.
“Lots of papers in this pocket. You go notify headquarters. I’ll stay here and watch.”
> Zoom’s eyes focused upon the wet pavement, some three feet beyond the corpse.
“Officer, raise your flash light a bit — higher — there!”
“What is it?”
Chapter II
The Scattered Beads
The rays of the flash light were caught, reflected back by something that glowed an angry red. Zoom walked over to it, stooped, picked it up.
“A red bead, or a synthetic ruby, pierced for stringing on a necklace,” he said, “and I think there’s another one a little farther on. Let’s see.”
The officer obediently elevated the flash. Once mote there was a dull gleam of angry red from the darkness.
“From the direction he was travelin’,” said the officer.
Zoom picked up the second bead, stalked back to the corpse.
“Look in his hands,” he ordered.
The officer pried open the left hand. It was empty. He pulled back the fingers of the right hand. Half a dozen red beads glittered in the reflection of the flash light, glowing red and angry, their color suggestive of drops of congealed blood.
Sidney Zoom scowled thoughtfully.
“Is that a bit of white thread there?” he asked.
The policeman bent forward.
“It is that. What do you make of it?”
Zoom stared in unwinking thought at the small cluster of red gems. “They may be genuine rubies. I doubt it. They look like synthetic rubies. Notice that they graduate slightly in size. Evidently they were strung on a necklace. There’s a chance, just a chance, that the necklace was worn by the one who fired the fatal shot, that the man clutched at this person, caught the necklace in his hand and ripped out a section of it.
“Then, when that person fled from the shooting, there were more of the rabies that dropped... but I doubt it.”
The officer lurched to his feet, letting the body slump back upon the wet pavement.
“It’s gettin’ too many for me,” he said. “I don’t want to leave the body, even if I do know you’re all right. You go in that apartment house and get a telephone, notify headquarters.”
Zoom nodded.
“Stay there, Rip,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
The dog slowly waved his tail in a single swing of dignified acquiescence, to show that he understood. Zoom crossed the street to an apartment house.
The outer door was locked, the lobby dark.
Zoom’s forefinger pressed against the call button below the apartment marked “Manager” until he had received a response. When a fat woman with sleep swollen eyes came protestingly to the door, Zoom explained the situation, was given a telephone, called headquarters and reported the finding of the body.
Then he returned to the officer. The dog was crouched down upon the wet pavement, his head resting upon his paws. He thumped his tail upon the pavement by way of greeting, remained otherwise immobile. The officer was going through the papers in the pocket.
“Seems to be a man named Harry Raine,” he observed. “There’s a bunch of letters and papers here. Looks like he tried to carry all his correspondence in his pocket. The address is here, too. It’s out West Adams Street, 5685. And here’s some legal papers, looks like he’d been in a lawsuit of some kind.
“The papers have been carried around for some time. You can see where pencil marks have rubbed off on ’em and polished up until they’re slick.”
Zoom nodded. He was studying the face of the dead man.
“Ain’t you interested in these papers?” asked the officer.
Zoom’s expression was one of dreamy abstraction.
“I’m more interested in the possible character of this dead man,” he observed. “He looks to me like an old crank, a man who never smiled, who had no compassion, no kindness. Look at those hands! See the gnarled grasping fingers... Do you believe in palmistry, officer?”
The policeman grunted scornfully.
“Baloney,” he said.
Zoom said nothing for a matter of seconds.
“It’s strange,” he remarked, “how character impresses itself upon every portion of a person’s body. Hands, feet, ears, shape of the nose, the mouth, the expression of the eyes... everything is shaped by that intangible something we call a soul.”
The officer, squatted on the wet pavement by the side of the corpse, lurched to his feet.
“You’re talkin’ stuff that don’t make sense,” he growled. “This here is a murder case, and the law has got to catch the person that did the murder. What’s the character of the dead man got to do with the thing?”
Sidney Zoom’s reply consisted of one word.
“Everything,” he said, and then reached for the papers which had been in the pocket of the corpse.
The officer grunted his disbelief.
“Murders,” he observed, “are everyday affairs. Handle ’em as routine an’ you get somewhere. Identify the dead guy, see who wanted him bumped, round up the evidence and maybe give a little third degree at headquarters, an’ you’re ready for the next case.”
Sidney Zoom said nothing. In the distance could be heard the wailing of sirens.
“There are powder marks on the back of the head,” said Sidney Zoom, after the siren had wailed for the second time. “Let me see your flash light.”
The officer handed him the flash light. Zoom circled the gutter with its rays, steadied his hand abruptly, pointed.
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The empty shell. See it, there in the gutter? He was shot with an automatic. The ejector flipped the shell out into the street, the running water from that last burst of rain washed it down into the gutter.”
The officer bent himself with an effort, picked up the shell.
“You’re right. A forty-five automatic.”
The siren wailed again. Lights glittered from the wet street, and the first of the police cars swung into the cross street, then hissed through the water to the curb.
Another machine, followed close behind. Then there sounded the clanging gong of an ambulance. Thereafter, events moved swiftly.
Chapter III
The Girl in Apartment 342
Detective Sergeant Gromley was in charge of the homicide detail, and he heard the officer’s report, checked the facts from Sidney Zoom, and started the men gathering up the various dews.
They started tracing the trail of the blood-red beads, found that they led to an apartment house some fifty yards away. They were spaced almost at even intervals, and they glistened in the rays of the searching spotlights.
The district was largely given over to apartment houses, and the wailing sirens had brought watchers to the windows. The cloud rifts drifted into wider spaces and tranquil stars shone down upon the concrete canon of the sleeping street.
Officers started checking details, trying to find if any one had heard the shot, if any one had noted the time, if there had been any sound of running feet.
Sergeant Gromley scanned the apartment house where the trail of red beads ended and uttered an exclamation of triumph as he pointed to the row of mail boxes in the vestibule, each faced with a printed name cut from a visiting card.
“Notice the apartment 342,” he said. “The name’s been torn out of there within the last half hour or so. See, there’s a wet smear on the cardboard backing, and... it’s a little smear of blood. See it?”
He turned toward the lobby where a man in a bath robe was peering curiously.
“Where’s the manager?”
“I own the place. My wife and I run it.”
“Who’s the tenant in apartment 342?”
The man scowled, ran his fingers through his tousled hair.
“I ain’t sure. I think it’s a woman. Rainey or some such name. That’s it, Raine, Eva Raine, Ain’t her name on the mail box?”
The officer laughed. “Come on,” he said to the little cluster of broad shouldered assistants who had knotted around him in a compact group. “Let’s go.”
/> They went, crowding into the elevator. Sidney Zoom took the stairs, his dog at his heels.
“Here, you,” grunted the man in the bath robe, “you can’t bring the dog in here!”
But Sidney Zoom paid no attention. His long legs were working like pistons as he went up the stairs, two at a time.
But the officers were debouching from the elevator as Zoom reached the upper corridor. The stairs emerged at the end opposite from the elevator shaft, and the apartment they wanted was close to the elevator.
One of the men pounded upon the door.
It was opened almost immediately by a girl in a kimono. She stared at them in wide eyed silence.
“Oh!” she said, after a moment.
Sergeant Gromley pushed unceremoniously past her.
“We want to ask you some questions,” he said.
The others crowded into the little room, which was used as a sitting room during the daytime, a bedroom at night. The wall bed had been let down, apparently slept in, but the sheets were folded neatly at the corners. The girl must be a quiet sleeper, or else had not been in bed long.
She was robed in a kimono of bright red which enhanced the gleam of her eyes, the red of her lips, the glitter of the lights upon her hair, glossy black as a raven’s wing.
“You’re Eva Raine?” asked Sergeant Gromley.
“Yes. Of course. Why?”
“Know Harry Raine who lives at 5685 West Adams?”
“Y-y-yes, of course.”
“Why say ‘of course’?”
“He’s my father-in-law.”
“You married his son?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the son’s name?”
“Edward.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“When did you see Mr. Harry Raine last?”
She hesitated at that, made a little motion of nervousness.
“Why, I can’t tell. Yesterday afternoon, I think. Yes. It was yesterday afternoon.”
“Weren’t very certain, were you?”
She lowered her eyes.
The Casebook of Sidney Zoom Page 14