* * *
—
“Not at all,” contradicted the inspector flatly in his office when they’d returned there with the one-hundred-and-fifteen thousand that had come to light. “It proves he didn’t get Wontner’s hoard, and that’s all it does prove. It doesn’t prove he didn’t commit the murder, not by a damn sight! We missed this cache ourselves, didn’t we? And we had whole days to turn it up in. He only had a few hours, from four until daylight. It took the vandals’ depredations and an accidental fall on your part to lay this sub-cellar bare. There are any number of ways of getting around it. He may have been frightened away before he had time to search the premises thoroughly. Or he may have searched thoroughly and still failed to find it. Or he may have been contented with the two thousand he found out in the open, been misled into thinking that was all the old bird had, and not troubled to search any further.”
He smoothed the large old-fashioned bills into some semblance of symmetry. “This still don’t get around that shoe-print, White, or that sudden burst of extravagance within a week after Wontner’s death. You’re overlooking a few things. Quite a few.”
“Sorry,” White said stubbornly, “I’m sold on it that we’ve sent the wrong man up for it. You mean you’re going to let him go to his death Thursday night, after this has come to light?”
“I’m most certainly notifying the District Attorney’s office at once of what we’ve found. It’s in their hands, not mine. I’m just a police officer. But I know how these things work. This’ll never get him a new trial, if that’s what you think. This isn’t new evidence, not by any manner of means. This is only evidence that he didn’t get what he was after. I doubt they’ll even grant him a postponement of execution on it.”
White flared hotly, “Then it’s going to be the worst case of a miscarriage of justice in years! It’s going to be legal murder, that’s what! You can’t see the forest for the trees, all of you! Footprints, a few old-fashioned bills, a shoeshine; where does any of that stack up against this? He was sent up on a circumstantial case entirely, and nothing else but. It was a good case, I’m not saying it wasn’t. But this, what we’ve found here, was supposed to be the whole mainspring of it. Where is the case now? It hasn’t got a foundation. It’s just a lot of disconnected little coincidences floating around in the air!”
“Then if you feel that way about it,” said the inspector coldly, “and I must say that I don’t agree with you, apart from the fact that it’s none of your business any longer—”
“It’s certainly my business!” shouted the detective. “I don’t want that man’s blood on my conscience. I helped put him where he is, and it’s up to me to do all in my power to get him out of where he is. And if you’re all too short-sighted to feel the way I do about it, then it’s up to me to go it alone.”
They were definitely hostile, thought he was showing off.
“It’s the Christmas spirit,” somebody murmured. “He’s trying to play Santa Claus.”
“Go right ahead. Nobody’s stopping you,” assented the inspector ironically. “If you feel Quinn’s the wrong man, bring me in the right one. That’s all you’ve got to do. That’s all that can save him, I’m telling you now. My desk telephone’s here at your disposal anytime you’re ready. I’ll get in touch with the D.A.’s office at a minute’s notice for you, anytime you bring me in the right man. They’ll phone the governor and get Quinn a stay of execution; they’re not any more anxious to send the wrong party to his death than you are or I am.” But the mocking tone in which it was said showed that he didn’t expect anything to come of it. “Quite a large order, I’d say,” he went on, giving one of the others the wink. “He’s due to light up on Thursday night, you know, and this is one o’clock Tuesday morning. D’you think you can do all that inside of three days? And you better make sure it’s the right man, White. Don’t make a fool out of yourself.”
Bob White grabbed up his hat, pulled the door open. “There’s nothing like trying,” he said grimly.
Somebody jeered softly, “Bob White, wotcha gonna sing tonight?” as the door closed after him. They all had a good hearty laugh over it, in which the inspector joined. Then they promptly forgot him.
* * *
—
A light-switch clicked on the other side of the door after he’d been knocking for some time. Quinn’s wife, a scarecrow in a wrapper, past all fear, alarm, hope, any sensation at all now, opened it.
“Didn’t think you’d still be living here,” he said. “Glad I found you.”
She said expressionlessly, “Did it happen already? Is that what you came to tell me? I thought it wasn’t until Thursday night.” But only her lips did the talking. Nothing could reach her any more. The change that had taken place in her since he’d last seen her at the trial threw a wrench into him, although he wasn’t particularly soft-boiled, his squad-mates to the contrary. Her hair was tinged with gray now, her face had set in lines of permanent despair.
“I know it’s late. Sorry to get you up at this hour.”
“I don’t sleep any more,” she said. “I sit by the window in the dark, these nights, all night long.”
“Can I come in and talk to you?”
She opened the door wider and motioned him in dully, but all she said was, “What about?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s about your husband, of course; but I mean, I don’t know what there is to talk about any more. I left my precinct-house in a huff just now, stopped by here on an impulse.”
She just sat there looking at him, hands folded resignedly in her lap.
“You don’t believe he did it, do you?” he blurted finally. “Well, I’ve come here to tell you that—I don’t, now, myself.”
He waited for some sign. No surprise, no interest, no hope.
“We found one-hundred-and-fifteen thousand dollars in that house tonight. The whole thing looks different now. To me it does, anyway.” He waited again. “Isn’t there some little thing you can tell me? Something you didn’t tell them? Don’t mistrust me. I’m on your side now.” He lowered his shoulders, brought his face down to the level of hers. “Don’t sit there looking like that! There isn’t much time. Don’t you realize it means your husband’s life?” And then, baffled by the continued stoniness of her expression, he cried almost in alarm: “You don’t think he did it, do you?”
“I didn’t in the beginning, I didn’t for a long time,” she said hollowly. “Now I—”
“His own wife!” he muttered, appalled. “You mean you do now?”
“No, I only mean I’m not sure any more. I don’t know any more. You, the police, and the public, and the whole world, said he did. They proved he did. I guess they ended up by—nearly proving it to me too. They planted doubts in my own mind, by the time they were through.”
He gripped her anxiously by her bony shoulders. “But he never said he did it, did he? He never told you he did it?”
“No, the last thing he said to me, when they took him away, was that he was innocent, that he didn’t do it.”
“Then we can still save him! You’ve got to help me. That’s why I came in here tonight. You were living with him, in the days and weeks and years before it happened. I wasn’t. There must be something, some little thing, that you and you alone can dig up that’ll turn the trick. Try, please try. Look: there are two things blocking us. One is that footprint. The other is the wallet of money he found. The footprint is the important thing. The other’s nothing, won’t stand against him by itself. They can’t prove he took that money from Wontner. They can prove his shoe made that print outside Wontner’s house. They have already. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. I worked on that angle of it myself. The Supporta Company was able to convince me, by showing me its records, that no other pair of shoes but the ones they sold your husband could have made that print. There was no possibility of duplication. They use an ind
ividual cast for each one of their special customers with defective feet, individual mechanical appliances in the arch. No two cases alike. It looks pretty insurmountable. And yet we can level it down. We’ve got to. Now first, what did he do with his old ones, what did he do with them each time when they were worn out and he was ready to discard them?”
“Just kept them. Couldn’t bear to part with them on account of how expensive they were originally. I can show you every pair he ever owned, since he first started wearing that kind of shoes.” She led him into the back room, opened a closet-door, showed him three pairs of shoes in varying stages of deterioration. Their soles, as he picked them up one by one and examined them, were worn paper-thin. One had a hole in it the size of a dime, one the size of a quarter, one the size of a half-dollar.
“None of these made that print,” he said. “It distinctly showed an intact, unbroken sole in perfect condition, heel scarcely run down at all. And the testimony of that bootblack proved it was that current pair that had the clay on its bottoms, anyway; I’d forgotten that.” He let his hand roam helplessly through his hair. “It looks like we’re up against it. I’d been playing around with the possibility, vague as it was, on my way over here, that one of his old, discarded pairs had passed into the possession of somebody else; been thrown out, let’s say, and picked up by some prowler or derelict, worn around the vicinity of Wontner’s house. But since they’re all accounted for here in the closet, that won’t hold water. Can you recall his current pair, his new pair, passing out of his possession at any time, between the time he bought them and the time of the murder? Did he send them out to be repaired at all?”
“No,” she said despondently, “they didn’t need it. They were only a couple months old, in fairly good condition.”
He shoved the closet door closed disgustedly, strolled back to the front room. “I’m in for it. I want to get some sleep at night for the next ten years, and I won’t if he—”
He put his hand on the doorknob, ready to go, stood there motionless with his head lowered. “I don’t change my mind easily, but when I do it stays changed. I’m convinced he didn’t commit that murder, Mrs. Quinn. But I’ve got to have more than my own conviction to go by. I don’t know what to do.”
She just sat there, apathetic. Emotionally dead, if not physically. A widow already, though her husband was still alive in the Death House.
In the two o’clock silence of the world around them, a sound filtered in from somewhere outside, from the back of the house. A faint wail, eerie, lonely, dismal.
“What’s that?” he asked absently, hand still on doorknob.
“Cats. Cats on the back fence,” she murmured tonelessly.
He shrugged hopelessly, opened the door. “No good hanging around,” he muttered. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” He went out into the hall, said to her over his shoulder as he pulled the door to after him, “You can reach me at the precinct-house, Mrs. Quinn, if you remember anything you want to tell me. White’s the name.”
She just nodded lifelessly, fixing her dead eyes on him, sitting there huddled within the lighted room like some kind of a mummy, that had power of understanding and nothing much else.
He closed the door and went slowly down the outside stairs, a step at a time, flexing his knees stiffly like an automaton, chin down. Some of the flat-doors on the lower floors had cheap Christmas wreaths on them already, for tomorrow.
It had been so easy to put Quinn where he was now. It was so hard to get him out again, once there. But he couldn’t let him die. His own peace of mind was too valuable to him. He couldn’t let him die—and yet how could he prevent it?
He passed through the vestibule into the icy cold of the deserted street, turned his coat-collar up against it, spaded his hands deep into his pockets, trudged dejectedly up the street toward the corner. As he turned it, he thought he heard a drunken woman calling out shrilly from the upper story of one of the tenements behind him, but a taxi flitted by just then along the lateral avenue carrying Christmas Eve revelers, and drowned the sound out. He went obliviously on his way.
It was too cold a night to walk far, or wait for a train on an underground platform. He decided to take a taxi, himself, back to his room. He spotted one on the other side of the avenue, hailed it, and it executed a U-turn, came coasting around beside him. He got in, closed the door, gave the driver his address. The latter hesitated, hand on gear-shift, asked knowingly via the rear-sight mirror: “Want to lose her, boss, or is it all right to wait a minute?”
The cab-door pulled open again and Tom Quinn’s wife stood reeling there outside of it, still in the inadequate wrapper she’d worn in the flat just now, head bared to the bitter night air, naked feet to the frozen ground. A pennant of steam trailed from her lips, but she couldn’t articulate.
He thought she’d suddenly gone out of her mind. He lunged at her, hauled her bodily into the heated cab, shed his ulster and wrapped it protectively around her. He expected violence, a struggle, but she just sat there panting.
“Back around the corner quick, number 324,” he told the driver.
“What’s the matter with you, trying for pneumonia?” he barked at her.
She said, still in that flat, dead voice, but with her chest rising and falling from the run after him, “It isn’t anything, I guess, is it? I remembered now, though, hearing them. I’ve heard them many times since, but it came back to me only now, because you asked me what it was, I guess.”
Delirium, he thought. “What what was?” he asked her.
“The cats. The cats on the fence. He threw them at them one night. His shoes. Just before it happened, sometime around that time. It isn’t anything, though, is it? It won’t help you any, will it?” But he could detect a note of pleading in this last. She was thawing a little, not from this outer immediate cold, but from the numbness of soul that had gripped her all these weeks.
“Threw them both?”
“First one and then the other.”
“How soon did he get them back again?”
“He went down right away, but he didn’t get them back that night at all. He said he couldn’t find them. I came upon them next day at noon, outside our door, wrapped up in newspaper.”
He jolted. But it wasn’t because the taxi had stopped. It was still only coasting to a stop just then. “Allah’s good—even to a poor detective,” he murmured fervently. Then he turned on her almost savagely. “And you didn’t mention this till now! What’s the matter with you? Did you want your husband out of the way? Was he anxious to die?”
“I never remembered it until tonight. It was such a little thing. I didn’t think it was anything.”
He hustled her across the sidewalk under his ulster. They plunged into the building again, went jogging up the stairs. “Anything? It’s the whole thing! It’s the whole mechanics of the case! The rest is just pedestrian. A rookie could go on from there.” He dived in ahead of her, hustled through to the back room. “Which window was it? This one? Down a jolt of whiskey, so you don’t get a chill. Then come in here and help me with this.”
They were still serenading down there on the dividing fence. She followed him in in a moment, coughing slightly, brushing her hand across her mouth.
“You see what I’m driving at, don’t you?” he said curtly. “Somebody else had them between the time Quinn pitched them out of here and the time you found them at your door next day. That somebody, while he had them on, went and killed old man Wontner in them. Then, frightened, sensing that they might betray him in some way, saw to it that they got back to you people anonymously. Or maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was deliberate, a vicious and successful attempt to direct suspicion toward the wrong man, and thus win complete immunity for himself.
“It must have been the same night that the murder took place he threw them out. I don’t care whether you can remember it or not it must have b
een that night. There’s no other possibility. That cat-bearing fence down there is not more than six or seven feet above the ground. If he didn’t find them in either yard when he went down to look, it’s obvious what became of them. This was August, windows wide open top and bottom. They went in one of those two ground-floor flats in the house directly across the way. No matter how sore he was, no matter how lousy his aim was, they couldn’t have gone in any higher than that—he would have had to throw them straight out instead of down.
“All right. Somebody in one of those two back rooms had been thinking the Wontner thing over for a long time past, was all primed for it, was only being held back by fear of the consequences. The shoes, dropping into his room like something from heaven, spurred him on. Gloves or a handkerchief would do away with fingerprints, and with a peculiarly-constructed pair of shoes like this to direct suspicion elsewhere—what more did he need? He must have watched your husband looking for them out there. When he didn’t come around and ring the front doorbell asking for them, when this man saw your flat-light go out and knew you’d given them up for lost—for that night anyway—he put them on and carried out his long-deferred scheme. I’m sure now that so-perfect footprint wasn’t accidental, was purposely made, left there for us to find and draw the wrong conclusion from. To return the shoes to your door, unseen, next day involved a certain amount of risk, but not much.” He made a delighted pass at his own chin. “That takes care of the footprint. The money in the wallet will take care of itself. But never mind all that now. I’m wasting time up here. I don’t need you any more. You nearly waited until it was too late, but you came through beautifully.”
She tottered after him to the door. “But isn’t it too late? It’s—it’s over four months ago now. Isn’t he—won’t he be gone long ago?”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 11