Hollow Needle

by George Harmon Coxe

“Sure, I’ve got keys,” Fenner said. “And every time I use them I’m technically breaking and entering. I’ll use them if I have to, but—”

  He broke off as footsteps became audible in the semi-darkness behind him. Presently a thin, long-nosed man materialized from the lower hall. He wore khaki trousers and an old flannel shirt, and his leathery skin was well hidden by a two days’ growth of beard.

  “Lookin’ for somebody?” he asked, eyeing them with mild suspicion.

  “Are you the janitor?” Fenner said.

  “Sort of,” the man said. “I run the place.”

  Murdock knew that Fenner had a badge that looked official even though it had very little authority. Under certain circumstances a bluff might bring out the information he wanted, but with some people such a display served only to make them more tight-lipped than ever. He decided to do it another way.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re looking for Mr. Neely. He was supposed to come to town last night and he told us to drop by sometime this afternoon.”

  “He ain’t here,” the man said. “I don’t know if he came last night or not. He was here this morning but he went out about an hour ago.”

  “We heard he might be giving up the room,” Fenner said, carrying the ball for a while, “and we thought we might be able to rent it”

  “He ain’t said nothing to me.”

  “His rent’s all paid, huh?”

  “By the month,” the man said. “He only used to come up about one day a week, but he said he wanted to keep it on account he wasn’t so sure his out-of-town job would last. Anyway, he’s paid to the first. You want I should tell him you called?”

  “We’ll be back,” Murdock said.

  He nodded to Fenner and they went down the steps, walking briskly to the corner and turning out of sight before they stopped.

  “Now I suppose I’ve got to watch the joint until Neely comes back,” Fenner said without enthusiasm.

  “Not now.” Murdock was looking for a taxi. “I’ve got another fellow I’d like to check up on. Come back to the paper with me and I’ll tell you what I want.”

  At the Courier-Herald, Murdock went directly to the library, and after a short search he came up with a photograph that had been taken of Arthur Prentice at the time he married Larry Alderson’s mother, the one-time Evelyn Caldwell.

  “Who is he?” Fenner asked when he saw the photograph. “And What do I do about him?”

  Murdock took time out to think. He wanted to see Prentice for a few minutes. He did not know where to locate him, but he had an idea there was someone who could do the job for him. Monica Sutton had been very worried the night before, not only about herself, but about Prentice. The future of both was tied up in the report that Mike Quimby’s office had made, and Murdock thought it was possible that a properly worded telephone call to Monica might result in her relaying certain points to Prentice.

  “His name is Prentice,” Murdock said. He looked up Monica Sutton’s telephone number and address and gave them to Fenner. “All you have to do,” he said, “is park somewhere near this number and wait until he shows up.”

  “Of course he’ll show up just because you want him to,” Fenner said dryly.

  “Of course.”

  Fenner threw up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “I go to Miss Sutton’s place—is she any good?—and Prentice shows up. Then what do I do?”

  “You phone me.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Then you come down.”

  “Right.” Murdock grinned. “And as for Miss Sutton, she is very good indeed.”

  “If she is,” Fenner said, “this will be the kind of job where I never get close enough to her to get introduced. Okay,” he said resignedly, and went away.

  Murdock went to the telephone in the corner of the library. He knew that it would take Fenner no more than ten minutes to get to Monica’s address, so he called her now. His luck held and she answered almost immediately.

  “Hello,” he said. “This is Kent Murdock. How are you today? I’ve been doing some checking up,” he added when she said she was fine. “I thought you’d like to know what I learned.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

  He hesitated, aware that what he had to say might not be exactly news, but determined to make it sound important enough to worry her.

  “I know where the third copy of that report is.”

  Her reply was delayed, as though she was making up her mind just how she would react. “Report?” she said finally, and then, as if it did not particular matter: “Oh, yes.”

  “Also,” said Murdock. “I got a line on Ross Neely. You know, the guard down at Caldwell Manor.”

  “Neely? But what has he to do with the report?”

  “It ties up, in a way.” Murdock hesitated again to give her time to chew on the implication. “I thought maybe you and Arthur Prentice might want to talk things over,” he said. “That way you could let me know what you want to do.”

  There was uncertainty in her voice when she replied, a hint of breathlessness and agitation. “But—I don’t understand.”

  “You will once you’ve had a chance to think it over. I’ll stop by your place later on this afternoon. Maybe we can work something out.”

  He hung up before she could answer, and as he went along the hall and down the stairs to the studio, he was pretty sure that the things he had told Monica had the proper overtones and were sufficiently enigmatic to produce the desired state of mind.

  Sam Tyron, one of Murdock’s older and more dependable photographers, usually took over the job of picture chief when Murdock was out of town, and apparently he had been assigned to handle the work for the day because he was sitting at Murdock’s desk talking on the telephone.

  “Hi, chief,” he said when he hung up. “Didn’t expect you in today. Heard the latest on Eddie?”

  “I called the hospital this, morning and—”

  “We just got word he regained consciousness. They won’t let anybody see him, and he’s sleeping now, but we can see him in the morning. Did they get the guy that slugged him?”

  Murdock said he did not think so. He did not know how much Tyron knew, and he offered no information as the older man vacated his desk chair and motioned him to sit down. He noticed now that there was a clean blotter in the leather-cornered pad on his desk, and remembering how he had made a note about ordering one the night before, he spoke about it and thanked Tyron for getting it.

  “Yeah,” Tyron said. “I saw your note.” He was a chunky man who wore glasses and baggy suits, and now his eyes took on an odd squint and he reached for the center drawer. “I found something,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do about them, but I figured you must have wanted it kept quiet, so I stuck them in here out of sight.”

  Murdock didn’t know what Tyron was talking about. He could not follow the ungrammatical sentence so he stood there, scowling, watching Tyron pull out some eight-by-ten prints. He sat down in the chair Tyron had vacated, and then nearly fell out of it when he turned the prints over and saw what they were.

  For these were the photographs he had taken at Caldwell Manor the night before; these were the prints that Eddie Kelsey must have made before he had been slugged, and though a glimmer of understanding fought its way through the incredulity and confusion in Murdock’s mind, he still did not quite believe it.

  “Where,” he said when he could, “did you find them?”

  “In the blotter pad. Beneath the old blotter and the pad.”

  “Did you tell anybody?”

  “No.”

  Murdock turned the prints face down. What he was about to do was a dirty trick to play on Tyron, who must be burning up with curiosity, who must somehow suspect that these pictures had a definite connection with Eddie Kelsey’s injury. Yet at the moment Murdock did not want to talk to Tyron, or to anyone else; he wanted to think.

  “Don’t,” he said. “It’s between you and me, Sam. I’ll
tell you about them later, but right now why don’t you go out and get a beer?”

  Sam looked hurt. He shrugged and started to go, and then he stopped at the door.

  “Is that why Eddie got slugged?”

  “Yeah, Sam,” Murdock said. “And when we get a chance to talk to Eddie we’ll know for sure who did it.”

  Sam went out then, still not liking it, and Murdock turned the prints face up on the desk, paying little or no attention to the two pictures he had taken in Larkin’s room but concentrating on the one he had made in the hall. Then the excitement that had been spreading through him died, and a feeling of weariness and depression settled over him.

  For the picture of the hall was that and nothing more. The lighting was inadequate, except for the first twenty feet or so. The distortion was as expected, the details of the walls and near-by doors quite clear, but the distant opening of the center hall foggy and dark and quite empty.

  Murdock blew his breath out and sat back in his chair, disconsolate and no longer interested until he stopped to think; then he realized that he had expected just this, that he had at no time been hopeful that he had caught the murderer in his lens. Now that he was. sure, he gradually became aware of the grim irony of the situation, not only regarding Eddie Kelsey, but the murderer as well.

  For it seemed clear that Eddie had made three prints soon after Murdock had gone up to the city room. He had taken them from the dryer and, remembering that Murdock had cautioned him to put them somewhere out of sight, had selected the space between the blotter and pad as an ideal hiding-place. It must have been right after that that Neely had come in, probably with a gun.

  Neely knew photography. He had found the negatives without difficulty. He had probably asked for prints before he searched the desk, and Eddie had insisted that there were none. What happened then could be told only by Eddie, and his story would come out in the morning when the doctor let him talk.

  For now it was enough to know that the murderer had gained nothing at all by his desperate attempt, and had, in fact, jeopardized his position. He had Neely to contend with now. It was unlikely that Neely had any proof as to the killer’s guilt, but Neely could tell by the negatives that the man who sent him here was concerned with the death of Larkin, and for a man like Neely such information could be very valuable indeed.

  These things went through Murdock’s mind as he sat there, and when he had come to the end of his speculation, he glanced again at the photographs of Larkin’s room. He needed no pictures to recall this scene, and presently he stood up. Not wanting Sam Tyron to know what he had done with the prints, he walked to the filing-cabinet in the corner and tucked them far back in a lower drawer. He was back at his desk chair when Tyron returned, and before anything was said the telephone rang.

  Murdock vacated the chair, motioning his assistant to take the call because he thought it might have to do with an assignment and he did not want the city room to know he was around. Tyron spoke briefly, scribbled a few words on a pad, and hung up. He tore the sheet from the pad and jammed it on the assignment spindle. The telephone rang again as he did so, and this time he turned to Murdock.

  “For you.”

  “The desk?”

  “An outside call.”

  Murdock accepted the instrument, and when he said hello, Jack Fenner’s voice came back to him.

  “You do all right,” the detective said. “Your blond boy friend has arrived.”

  Murdock thanked him. He said to stay there and he’d be right over.

  16

  MONICA SUTTON’S APARTMENT occupied the third floor of one of those narrow-front, old brick houses on the Hill that had once been private residences but had in recent years been converted into small but convenient flats. There still remained about them an individuality of design, and this particular one had been built flush with the sidewalk so that the entryway was recessed and at sidewalk level. There were wrought-iron grills fastened to the lower halves of the windows on the first two floors, the trim was dark green, and there was an overall air of respectability and neatness that gave the house an individuality of its own.

  The street was narrow, like the houses, a one-way affair with a steep grade that pointed upward toward the gold dome of the State House, and Fenner’s coupé was parked diagonally below the address Murdock had given him. Walking past it now, Murdock hesitated only long enough to ask if Arthur Prentice was still inside. Informed that he was, Murdock said, “Stick around. If he comes out before I do, keep on his tail.”

  He crossed the street and moved into the tunneled entryway. He pushed the proper button, and presently Monica’s voice came to him over the speaking-tube. Seconds later the lock on the heavy inner door clicked back and forth and Murdock, grabbing the knob at the right time, went into a narrow, carpeted hall and started climbing the steep, age-worn stairs.

  Monica Sutton was waiting for him when he reached the third-floor landing. Her smile, superficial though it may have been, was a bright welcome, and from the way she spoke, one would have thought that she was receiving an old friend.

  “Come in,” she said in her husky way. “Take off your coat.”

  Murdock returned her smile and said he would only stay a minute, and then he was in a long, narrow room, expensively furnished and brightly decorated with its cheerful slip covers and pastel walls and gay prints. Monica was very busy for a few moments straightening ash trays and emptying others—a chore she should have thought of before, since he noticed that some of the butts bore lipstick stains and some did not—and finally sitting down on the sofa as she motioned him toward a chair.

  She wore navy-blue slacks and a close-fitting pullover sweater that did exciting things to her statuesque torso. She wore no stockings, and her feet were clad in ballet-type slippers, which she tucked under her when she sat down. She was ready now to inspect him with her artfully shadowed eyes, but here, where the light was better, the superficiality of her gayness was more apparent and Murdock knew that there was no point in continuing the performance. He expected to be highly unpopular very shortly, and he thought he might as well get about it.

  “Why don’t you ask Mr. Prentice to come in now?” he said. “He might as well be in on this, too.”

  A door which had been slightly ajar opened suddenly behind the woman and Prentice strode in, his color high and angry lights in his eyes. Ignoring Monica, he moved toward Murdock, and the photographer watched him come, not rising, not even moving. This lack of interest seemed somehow to infuriate Prentice and at the same time upset him, for he slowed down near the center of the room and his manner became less threatening.

  “You knew I was here,” he said accusingly. “How?”

  “I hoped you’d be,” Murdock said. “That’s why I telephoned Miss Sutton.”

  Prentice glared at him, bristling. He had the height and weight to make such demonstrations effective, and he seemed the type who would resort to bluster when nothing else was left.

  “I’ve got a damn good notion to throw you out right now,” he said.

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort, Arthur.” Monica’s tone was cool and crisp. “You’ll sit down like a good boy, and then we’ll see what Mr. Murdock has to say.”

  Prentice gave her a look of quick annoyance, but he sat down on the sofa and shot his cuffs. By now he had things under control and, his voice businesslike, he came directly to the point.

  “All right, Murdock. Let’s have it.”

  Murdock had been wondering what he was going to say. Experience with the police investigation of other murders had taught him that oftentimes a careless word resulted in a valuable clue or tip, and while there was something like this in the back of his mind, there was also a definite reason why he wanted to see Arthur Prentice. He had been unable as yet to make the inspection of the man’s hands he wanted to make, but there would be time for that later. Right now he was sorting things out in his mind, trying to remember what he had told Monica the night before, estimating just
how much Prentice was supposed to know.

  The other, apparently misconstruing this silence, said, “If you’ve got the third copy of that report I’ll buy it. How much do you want for it?”

  Murdock looked at the woman. “Is that what you told him. That I had the report?”

  She blinked her long lashes. “Why—I—”

  She couldn’t quite make it, and he said, “I told you I knew where it was.”

  “Oh.” Prentice’s tanned face was first puzzled and then suspicious. “Well, where is it?”

  “Don’t you know?” And even as Murdock asked the question he seemed to realize that Prentice did not know. Monica Sutton did not know, either, and with this knowledge he was able to understand just how secretive and crafty Old John Caldwell had been. Having used Mike Quimby’s agency for something like ten years, he had kept the arrangement sufficiently private so that at no time did those he wanted investigated know who was doing the job. “I guess you don’t know at that, do you?”

  “Would I be fooling around with you if I did?”

  “You never heard of Mike Quimby?”

  Prentice leaned back and crossed his legs. He put on his best society manner, and a slight accent crept into his voice.

  “Look, old man,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere this way, are we? Take my word for it. I don’t know any Mike Quimby, but I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me about him.”

  So Murdock did, tracing a sketchy history of Quimby’s background and explaining how he happened to work for John Caldwell.

  Prentice shook his head. He exchanged glances with Monica and looked back at Murdock. “Well,” he said finally. “That’s news to me. I had no idea the old boy went in for that sort of thing.” He hesitated, coloring slightly. “That is, until I found out about that report.”

  “You knew Ross Neely.”

  “But not that he was employed by this Mike Quimby. If I thought about him at all I assumed that he was assigned there by the police officer at the plant.” He tipped one hand, let it fall back against his thigh. “But what has this to do with the report you spoke about?”