“Sure,” I said. “He fell down when he hopped out that window.”
“Furthermore,” the attorney went on coolly, “the police found no fingerprints on the lethal weapon. Now do you really believe that a drunken Negro boy, a young fellow who is not very bright anyhow, would have the foresight to wear gloves?”
“The prints were probably smeared,” Willie Blake suggested.
“There were no prints,” Forsythe stated flatly, “smeared or otherwise.”
And that was that—for a while.
III
Jim Brown was arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder the next day and his preliminary hearing was set for a morning three weeks hence.
A little before nine on the morning of the preliminary, Katie Blayne showed up at the press room with a confident smile and a breezy, “Good morning.”
“I have here,” she announced to Pete Zerker and Willie Blake and me, “a hundred dollars which says that the case against Jim Brown will be dismissed before noon today. You may have all or any part of it.”
“You’re pretty confident, Duchess,” Pete growled.
“You must be nuts,” Willie said. “With the old dame identifying him he’s a cinch to be bound over to the superior court. If I were you, Duchess, I wouldn’t risk my money on a crazy bet like that.”
“You let me worry about my money,” Katie shot back. “How much would you like, Willie?”
Willie gulped, shrugged, said: “I’ll take a fin.”
“Pinky?”
“I’ll take ten,” I said without enthusiasm.
“Pete?”
“I’ll take vanilla,” Zerker snapped.
At ten o’clock we were all at the press table in the justice court. The D.A. and a couple of his staff came in, looking blustery and important. Then John Forsythe wandered down the aisle, looking very cool and confident, nodding to his friends among the spectators and at the press table.
The judge arrived and finally the bailiff came trailing in with the prisoner, a big, poorly dressed, frightened-looking colored boy who sat down awkwardly beside John Forsythe.
The hearing got under way with the D.A. making a brief statement of the case and calling Miss Malvina Perkins to the stand. The thin, tall old lady bustled over to the witness chair and sat down. Her lips were thin and pressed tightly against her teeth. Her eyes were glittering, too bright. A shrewish, vindictive, bitter old woman, and could you blame her?
After she was sworn, the district attorney rose and with gentle deference began his examination.
“Miss Perkins, please tell the judge what happened in your home on the night of June fourteenth.”
“I was in my room on the upper floor,” the spinster began in a shrill voice. “It was a few minutes before midnight. I heard my sister ring for me. Frantically. She was an invalid and sleeping on the lower floor. I ran downstairs and into her room. I saw a man, a big Negro, run across the room and leap out the window. My sister was dead, beaten to death.”
The D.A. slowly nodded. “Did you see this man’s face?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Clearly?”
“Clearly.”
“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”
“I certainly could.”
“Do you see him in this room?”
“Yes!” the old woman hissed.
“Please point him out to the court.”
Miss Perkins leveled a skinny finger at the black boy beside John Forsythe.
“That’s him!” she screamed. “That’s the monster that killed my poor crippled sister.”
“Are you absolutely positive, Miss Perkins?” the D.A. persisted gently.
“Certainly I’m positive!” the old lady shot back. “Do you think I could ever forget his horrible face?”
Everybody stared at the prisoner. His face wasn’t horrible at all. It was just the face of a bewildered kid.
John Forsythe was whispering to him. The black boy was nodding his head.
Abruptly I felt an electric tension in the room. I forgot to listen to the D.A., to Miss Perkins’ testimony.
I watched John Forsythe and the black boy. The kid was grinning now. Forsythe whispered to him again and he wiped the grin away with the back of his hand.
I glanced at Katie. She, too, was watching Forsythe and the prisoner. And there was something in her blue eyes that told me I had lost ten dollars.
She leaned toward me and whispered: “Cover up your ears, Pinky. The dynamite is going off in just a second. See? Mr. Forsythe is lighting the fuse.”
I looked around at Forsythe. He was standing now, placidly buttoning the lower button of his neat double-breasted coat.
“If it please, Your Honor,” he said.
* * *
—
The district attorney swung around, glaring. “You may have the witness in due time,” he snapped. “Until I am finished with her—”
“If the court pleases,” Forsythe broke in. “I believe a most regrettable error has been made.”
“Error?” The judge glared down over the rims of his spectacles. “What manner of error, Mr. Forsythe?”
“Your bailiff has brought in the wrong prisoner.”
“The—the which?” the district attorney gasped.
“I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding, Your Honor,” Forsythe went on smoothly. “But this young man here is one Ed Higgins, who has just finished serving a sixty-day sentence for assault and battery. On the night Miss Alva Perkins was murdered, Ed Higgins was in jail.”
The judge leaned forward, staring at the black boy. “I remember. I sentenced him myself.” He swung on the bailiff. “Where is Jim Brown?”
The bailiff winced. “I guess, Your Honor, he’s still in the city prison. I—I—”
The judge silenced him with a wave of his hand.
I whispered to Katie: “What did it cost Forsythe to have the wrong prisoner brought in?”
“S-s-s-sh!”
The judge had turned on the white-faced Miss Perkins. “Madame, you are an old woman. And I recall an old song to the effect that all colored people look alike. I could point out that your testimony might have sent an innocent man to the gallows, but I don’t think it is necessary. Mr. Forsythe, I don’t know how you engineered this coup and I am not going to inquire. The end, certainly, justified the means. Do I hear a motion requesting the case against Jim Brown be dismissed?”
“I make such a motion, Your Honor,” Forsythe smiled.
The judge looked over at the D.A. We all looked at the D.A. And saw that that smug gentleman had collapsed in his chair.
“Any objection?” the judge asked.
“No,” the district attorney said sadly. “No objection.”
The gavel banged. “Case dismissed!”
Back in the press room Katie didn’t rub it in—much. She took my ten-spot and Willie’s five.
“Thank you kindly, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m only sorry it wasn’t more.”
“If it had been any more,” I grumbled, “I wouldn’t eat until next pay day. Look here, people. How do you figure that Miss Perkins?”
“Ask me a tough one,” Willie Blake said. “That dame deliberately identified the first suspect the cops dragged in. Why? Because she polished off her sister herself. Right, Pete?”
“Wrong, Willie,” the Bulletin’s reporter came back. “I figure the poor old woman was so overcome with grief and hysteria and a very natural vindictiveness that she really thought Jim Brown was the man she’d seen jumping out the window.”
“Well, Duchess?” I asked. “What’s your theory?”
“My theory,” said Katie, “is not for publication.”
“Getting exclusive, huh?�
�� Pete Zerker jeered.
“I have always been exclusive,” said the Duchess with a toss of her shapely blond head.
In the days that followed the police went on looking for a big Negro whom Miss Perkins could positively identify, the gang in the press room went on with its routine run of crimes and accidents, and the Duchess went on being mysterious.
And I was worried. I think about as much of Katie Blayne as I do of my right eye, despite the fact that she treats me like she’d treat a nice soft rug—just something pleasant to walk upon.
I was worried because I know Katie, know her every mood. She was getting ready to put something over on us. And when Katie gets that watch-me-pull-a-fast-one look in her big blue eyes, I get ready to drag her out of trouble by the hair of her very lovely head. Of course, there have been occasions when she turned the tables and dragged me out of trouble, but we needn’t go into that.
I took Katie out occasionally during these weeks and one night, starting home from a movie in my car, we picked up a two-alarm on the police broadcast.
“Want to go?” I asked, thumbing through my list of stations.
“Did you ever know me to pass up a fire? Where is it?”
“Fourth and Polk.”
“Let’s get under way.”
IV
Fourth and Polk is in the factory district. It took us twenty minutes to get there. We watched a rattan factory go up in smoke and it was about midnight when we ran into Spike Kaylor and Jeff Gervin.
“Hey, you lugs,” Jeff called. “How’s about a ride back to the Hall?”
I looked at the Duchess. Though now they worked on the same paper, Katie and Jeff, as you may have guessed, were like a couple of strange bulldogs.
“It’s all right with me,” she shrugged. “Jeff, did you get the name of that fireman who had his hand cut?”
“Did I get—Listen, Duchess! Are you telling me—”
“Skip it. Both of you,” I ordered. “Here’s the car. Get in, you two.”
Jeff and Spike got into the rear seat. As I started off I switched on the radio. It warmed up, the hum died and we heard:
“…Car 19. Calling Car 19. Go to 748 Myrtle Street. That’s the house where Alva Perkins was murdered two months ago. A citizen just phoned he saw a Negro leaving the house. Step on it, boys.”
Spike whistled. “Boy, they got the other old maid! Sure as shootin’ they—”
“Oh, Pinky, Pinky!” Katie Blayne cried in a voice choked with pain and horror. “Something has gone wrong! Something terrible has happened!”
I shot a quick look at her. Her face was dead white. Her mouth was slack, her lips trembling. There was terror in her eyes.
“That poor old woman!” she groaned, twisting her hands. “That poor old woman!”
“Step on it, mug!” Jeff Gervin snapped. “Get us out there to 748 Myrtle. Open her up, damn it! Won’t this crate do better than forty?”
Katie’s fingers were suddenly biting into my arm.
“No, no, no!” she cried. “The Western Chemical Works! Quick! Turn around!”
I smelled the whiskey on Jeff’s breath as he leaned forward and yelled into my ear.
“To hell with that! Keep going, Kane!”
“Please, Pinky,” the Duchess begged. “Please do as I ask you. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m right.”
“Take us out to Myrtle Street, I tell you,” Jeff ordered angrily.
“I’ll take you where I damn well please,” I retorted. “If you want out, hop when I swing this corner.”
I swung the corner and he didn’t hop. We were, then, only half a mile from the Western Chemical plant and I made it in thirty seconds. I drove the car around to the rear of the four-story building, slammed on the brakes and cut the motor.
“Well, we’re here, Duchess,” I said. “Now what?”
“Come on,” she called, and was out of the car.
We trailed her around to the front of the building and she opened the door with a key she pulled out of her handbag. We went in behind her and she closed the door.
“Where’d you get the key?” I asked.
“The plant manager.”
She walked straight down the hall to the time clock. There was a card in the slot. Katie took it out and I saw it was John Perkins’ card and was stamped 12:01 A.M.
And then I saw several other things. One was a cheap alarm clock standing on top of the big time clock. The alarm bell had been removed and a spring device attached to the clapper. Hanging from the lever at the side of the time clock, at the end of a two-foot rope, was a window weight.
“He set the alarm clock at midnight,” Katie said breathlessly. “When it went off, that spring tripped the window weight.”
“And the weight fell about four feet,” I said, “and jerked the lever which stamped Perkins’ card. Neat.”
“All of which,” Jeff Gervin grumbled, “adds up to what?”
Jeff was a bit drunk and slow on the pick-up. Nobody answered him.
“Maybe,” I suggested half-heartedly, “he just rigged it to get himself a couple of hours sleep. We could look, anyway.”
We started down the dim corridor to the stairway.
“This is awful,” Katie said, with a catch in her voice. “Someone has made a horrible mistake.”
“Hold it, guys!”
It was Spike Kaylor. I checked myself, startled at the tension in Spike’s voice. He had dropped to his knees on the stained and rather dirty concrete floor. He rubbed a dark damp spot with his finger, held the finger close to his eyes.
“Blood,” he said calmly.
* * *
—
A little chill of apprehension and bewilderment swept down my spine. All at once I didn’t like this great dimly lighted chemical plant with its strange and acrid smells.
Spike was crawling along the floor on all fours.
“More of it,” he said. “It’s smeared. Like something was dragged over it.”
“The something,” I said, “being a body.” I looked sharply at Katie. She was biting her lower lip. There was horror in her fine eyes. “Whose, Duchess,” I asked.
“The man who has been tailing Perkins for nearly two months,” she said heavily. Then she started forward. “Hurry! He might not be dead yet.”
We all ran down the corridor to the stairway which led to the basement. Katie got there first, cried: “Good grief! Look!”
The wide stairway was jammed almost solid with broken crates and boxes, pasteboard cartons, and excelsior.
“One match,” Spike remarked, “and this dump would go up like a skyrocket.”
Katie hurled aside a smashed crate and started down the stairs. The rest of us turned to and in three or four minutes we cleared enough of a path to worm our way into the basement. There was a light burning in the watchman’s little room.
On the floor, sprawled grotesquely just as it had been dumped, lay the body of a man in a blue serge suit. His hat was gone. The top of his bald head was red and pulpy. We knew, by the set and tortured look on his face, by the glassy stare in his eyes, that he was dead.
“You know him, Katie?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s a private detective by the name of Jones. My paper hired him.” She wrung her hands. “Oh, if only Captain Wallis had listened to me! I knew, I knew, that the first murder was planned! And there was only one man who had anything to gain by killing those old maids.
“But Captain Wallis only laughed at me,” Katie rushed on hysterically. “Said there was no evidence against Perkins. Said it was just another one of my pipe-dreams. So the Sun hired Jones to keep watch on Perkins. And Perkins must have found out he was being watched, and sneaked up on this poor man and—and killed him brutally.”
Katie bur
ied her face in her trembling hands.
Spike said: “And then Perkins rushed home and killed his other aunt. He figured to get back here, recover his time card for an alibi and then fire the joint. A neat plan. The dicks picking up that Negro kid right after the first murder was just coincidence. Only—”
“Malvina swore she saw a Negro leap out of her sister’s window,” I pointed out.
“Of course!” Katie exclaimed. “That was all part of his plan. With the police believing the first old maid was killed by a Negro, they’d naturally suppose that the other had been killed by the same man.”
“Yes, but—” I began.
“S-s-s-sh!” Jeff Gervin hissed. “You guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” I whispered. If I heard anything, it was my own knees knocking together.
“Somebody,” Jeff rasped, “just shut the front door!”
My heart came up in my throat as I thought of that pile of tinder blocking the stairway.
“Let’s go, gang!” I yelled.
I kicked a box out of the way and shoved the Duchess up two steps. Then, for some reason, I looked up.
And peering down at us over the pile of tinder that clogged the stairway was a big black Negro!
No, not a Negro! Just John Perkins, his coat thick with padding, his thin face coated with burnt cork!
John Perkins’s head and shoulders disappeared. Then I heard his feet strike the concrete floor three times as he hurled his weight against the pile of broken crates and boxes which filled the stair well.
“Look out!” Spike yelled.
I jerked Katie backward off the steps, lost my balance and fell against Spike and Jeff.
As I scrambled to my feet I saw that the stair well was clogged solidly.
“Look, you lugs!” Jeff Gervin sputtered. “We gotta get out of here!”
“Are you telling me?” Spike snorted. “Where does this corridor lead to?”
V
It led, as we could readily see, to a brick wall at one end and to a steel fire door at the other. It was a cinch the fire door was bolted, but it was our only chance of getting out of the trap we’d blundered into.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 45