The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  Downstairs, I got a nickel and telephoned Poppa Hanley. I got through to him, and said, “Poppa, this is Daffy.”

  Poppa Hanley, for those who came in late, is Lieutenant William Hanley, the homicide bureau’s claim to fame and second in command only to Inspector Mike Halloran, who is as tough a walrus as ever came out of Athlone, Eire. “Hello, Daffy,” Hanley said cautiously. “Have you heard about Dinah?”

  “Sure I’ve heard about Dinah,” I stormed. “What does it all mean, Poppa? I hope your hands are clean or I’m going to be awfully sore at you!”

  “Shh,” Hanley said. “It’s Halloran’s case and he’s burned. It would have been all right except Dinah was trying to get a news story together instead of calling the cops. He knows she didn’t do it, but he’s trying to scare the daylights out of her so she won’t be a naughty girl again.”

  “What’s the charge?” I said. “Has she been arraigned?”

  “No,” Hanley said. “And there won’t be any charge. He said something about obstructing justice, but he wouldn’t dare pull it because the Commish would say he was stalling and for him to get the real killer of the dame. You get a writ of habeas corpus and you’ll spring Dinah like a mousetrap.”

  I went up and saw Watson, the Chronicle mouthpiece, and there was a lot of fixing and finagling and we saw a judge named McCall and got the writ okayed and then we trooped over to Centre Street, thus armed with heavy legality, and we burst in upon Inspector Halloran and slapped the writ on his desk, and Watson said, “Charge her up or put up, Inspector. Crime or no crime?”

  “Oh, get the dame out of here,” Halloran said, growling. “I’m glad to get rid of her. But you tell her to keep her nose out of police business, Daffy, or the next time I’ll run her into the ground. Why, that dame was using all the clues and evidence in the room for a cheap news story, spoiling all my leads. I ought to jug her for a year. Get her out of here and tell her to stay out of here.”

  Hanley was in the hall outside, grinning. “Was Dinah scared?” I said. “I’ll bet Halloran really gave her the works.”

  “Scared?” Poppa said, tugging at a droopy ear lobe, his homely face very much amused. “The old boy told her she was going to fry in the chair and Dinah said, ‘I regret that I have but one life to give for my newspaper.’ Boy, did he have a slow burn.”

  So we finally got Dinah out of hock and Verne took a couple of shots. Dinah was very gay. “I wasn’t a bit scared,” she said. “I knew you had a lot of friends in the police department and that they wouldn’t dare electrocute me and take a chance of offending you that way.”

  Dinah, you see, still believed in Santa Claus.

  CHAPTER II

  Between the Eyes

  You might have thought it was old home week back at the Chronicle city room. Dinah Mason sure looked like the most popular girl in the racket. Dinah is the light of my life, the cream in my coffee, and the nail in my shoe. She managed both phases nicely. She wouldn’t marry me, and she wouldn’t let me marry anyone else either, not that I wanted to.

  I can remember back in the days when Dinah first came to the Chronicle. She wanted to be George Jean Nathan in those days, fresh out of Alabama U. The Old Man who has the heart of a stone—nay, a cold Siberian stone—promptly put her to receptioning at the telephone of the paper. But Dinah had the stuff, and she worked her way up into the movie department until she now handled not only the cinema reviews, but also interviews and dramatic gossip.

  She was sitting on a desk—it was McGuire’s—and the rest of us crowded around her in a circle. Even the Old Man. He put his pride in his pocket and came out and he made sure that Kendrick of rewrite was getting everything down in black and white.

  “Well,” Dinah said, “you could have knocked me over with a bee’s slipstream. Here I was this afternoon, writing a review on a stinker called Shadows Over Shanghai when Marian Hans called and said she felt lower than a snake in quicksand, and would I help her out.”

  Marian Hans was the society editor of the Chronicle. The “cocktail” reporter, as we tab those gals and guys who follow the blue-bloods, not-so-blue-bloods, and merely-rich-bloods. I thought to myself that Dinah looked beautiful up there on the desk, her blonde hair looking like a halo under the light, the devil!

  “She had a touch of grippe. Well, you know how Marian and Jane Willis went around together and it seems they had a working agreement to split any real stuff which they dug out. That way, they could both devote more time to covering different assignments and then split them.”

  “I’ll see her about that!” the Old Man said. “No reporter of mine splits news with any rival sheet.”

  “Turn your damper down,” I said. “If you cut it out this rag will be running out of news in a week. Society news anyhow. Marian is a truck horse compared to Jane Willis in news garnering. That gal was good. She knew how to dig. I had one date with her, and she was a very nice female, if you like brunettes. I made one pass at her on that date and she jiu-jitsued me into a snowbank. Yeah, Jane Willis was all right.”

  “Hmm,” Dinah said. She studied me coldly before she continued. “So I told Marian I’d cover for her, and she said that Jane Willis was up in the Hotel St. Clair where she had two rooms, and that she had a mild scoop in the society bracket and was splitting the story with Marian. And would I go up and get it for her and write it and give her the by-line. So I did. I went up there. Was I surprised!”

  “What happened?” the Old Man said. “Get all this, Kendrick.”

  “I’m getting it,” Kendrick said wearily.

  “Well,” Dinah went on, “I didn’t bother to telephone up from the lobby, Marian had told me the room, so I just went up. And when I got to 414 I knocked on the door and there wasn’t any answer. I noticed the door was ajar so I walked right in. Well, you could have—”

  “—knocked you over with a crowbar,” I finished. “We know all that. Get on to the business.”

  “Listen,” Dinah said evenly, “this is my story and I’ll tell it the way I want to tell it or not at all.”

  “Don’t be a woman,” snapped the Old Man. “Keep talking.”

  “Well, she was dead. She was lying right there on the floor. She was on her back, staring straight up. Her eyes were open, and she—just looked—dead. You know that awful yellow color. I felt all dizzy for a minute, and then I saw her typewriter and I saw that she’d been writing a story and I went over and read it. It was just the lead on the Myers-Whittaker marriage, but the lead had the dope. Then the police were there and I was nabbed. If I’d had any brains, I’d have realized that someone had already spotted the corpse and gone for the police. That door was ajar.”

  “If you’d had any brains,” the Old Man sniffed, “you could tell me why Jane Willis was supposed to be murdered. As far as I can see, you walked in and found her dead. She could have dropped dead from shock or surprise.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe a city editor raised her salary.”

  “Oh, she was murdered all right,” Dinah exclaimed. “She was shot.”

  “Are you getting this, Kendrick?”

  “What there is of it.”

  “She was shot right between the eyes,” said Dinah blithely. “Didn’t I tell you that? Oh, sure, lads, you could see the bullet hole right there, a little blue hole. I didn’t see any blood, only a sort of bubble.” She shuddered. “It was no picnic for a gal who gets seasick like I do. And when the police came, they found some splintered glass near her and they said it was a clue but they didn’t know what it meant. Just tiny specks of it. They thought the killer had had his cheaters knocked off in the tussle and that maybe the specs had been busted. They were going to check with oculists around town. The four-eyed killer. Hot stuff, chief.”

  “Good enough,” the Old Man admitted. “Anything else?”

  “Well, Halloran trie
d to pin it on me at headquarters but his heart wasn’t in it and I could see he was scaring me for trying to pull a fast one and report it to the Chronicle before I reported it to the police, so—”

  “Telephone, chief,” said a copy boy.

  * * *

  —

  The Old Man took it at McGuire’s desk. “Eh?…That’s too bad….Well, it means money but it’s worth it. This story will last a week at least. Okay, Hammy, come in, come in wherever you are.” He hung up and turned. “Dinah, you need a rest. You need sunlight.”

  “Sure I do,” Dinah said, surprised. “But how come you recognized the fact, Rasputin?” She coughed. “There’s a rat in the kindling box somewhere.”

  “That was Hammy. We can’t get an interview out of Fletcher Whittaker and his wife because they’re not in New York. There’s no point in telephoning them either, just a waste of time and dough. They won’t give out by long distance. They’re in Miami, Dinah, and you’re going down and break through. I want to hear what America’s finest family has to say about the heiress marrying the gunman. Nice copy. You get your things together and grab the first plane south this afternoon. I’m calling Kenyon and giving you an expense account but I want the interview first, Dinah, and the suntan second, understand, so snap into it.”

  “Hey,” I said. “You can’t do that! How about me?”

  “How about you? You’re in this burg to stay and you can rot here until you scare up Al Myers and his glamor-girl wife. They’re in New York. The police probably want them, I want them, you want them. We want a statement out of them. It looks like Al shot his former wife to keep the news from breaking.”

  “Hooey,” I said. “He would have taken the copy out of the machine. And he doesn’t wear glasses. And a newly married guy doesn’t take time off from a honeymoon to slip a slug into some one.”

  “Don’t give a hoot. You find Myers and get his story. It ought to be hot. And you find him before the cops get to him or we’ll get stale beer instead of champagne.”

  CHAPTER III

  The Upside-Down Smudge

  Dinah and Smootsy Dobbins (for a fotog) left on the five o’clock plane for Miami, and I went over with them to see them off. Poppa Hanley came too, which touched Dinah no end. Poppa told the pilot he’d better be careful with the cargo or things would happen. The pilot took one look at Dinah and got the point. You could see he would enjoy the trip. I burned.

  Then Poppa and I came back to the big town and we went up to the Hideaway Club and had dinner with Bill Latham. The evening papers were out with the story then, and we had a Chronicle sent in. It was a good story but it looked funny to see the by-line Dinah Mason under a yarn like that when it should have read Daffy Dill.

  Well, I thought, Dinah has taken over the cocktail reporter end of it now, and I can settle down to following the killer.

  But it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that.

  Poppa Hanley took one look at the Chronicle story and had himself a fine laugh at Dinah’s expense. “What’s so funny?” I said, annoyed. I was secretly kind of proud of the little woman. “I read it and it seemed like a nice little yarn to me.”

  “Oh,” Poppa said sagaciously, “it’s a fine yarn. A very good story indeed. Only it ought to be in a fiction magazine.”

  “I don’t get you,” I said.

  “Well, it’s true that Jane Willis is dead. And it’s true that she was murdered. And it’s true, we did find glass on the floor, the only clue around the dump. But if Jane Willis was shot between the eyes, Doc Kyne and Inspector Halloran are certainly working on the case in blissful ignorance.”

  I stared at him. “Poppa, I don’t get you!”

  “Jane Willis wasn’t shot between the eyes, dear. I can see where Dinah got fooled, because it may have looked like that, but it wasn’t that.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I guess when she felt herself going she put a hand to her face. It’s an instinctive gesture.” He made believe he was passing out and naturally enough, raised a hand to his head to steady it. “Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Well, the dame had just finished putting a new typewriter ribbon in her machine. We found the old one in a wastebasket. Her fingers were full of blue-black ink. It so happened she plugged a bullet hole of typewriter ink squarely between her eyes. It did look like a slug hole, blue but no blood. Maybe Dinah saw one like that some place before. But Jane Willis wasn’t shot.”

  “What happened to her, you old goat? Cut out the stalling. I’ve got to call the Old Man and kill this story and rewrite it. He’ll have a fit. Boy, Dinah ought to be glad she’s on the way to Miami, for even at that distance her ears will burn when he starts calling her four kinds of dope. What happened to Willis? I’m on this case now, you know. It’s my assignment.”

  “It’s mine too,” Poppa Hanley grunted, looking dour and pulling on one of his droopy ear lobes. “Inspector Halloran handed it to me. I expected I’d get it….Willis? Hmm. Stabbed.”

  “A chiv, hah?” I said. I shook my head. “Dinah must have been more scared than you looked. Tell me more quickly.”

  “Stabbed. What more do you want? Someone clipped her through the eardrum with a needle of some sort and plugged her brain. It was a kind of neat thing when you look at it. That’s all I know. The weapon wasn’t found. We reconstructed it so that Jane Willis was working at the machine on that story when someone drove the needle home.”

  I said, “But that means the killer was with Jane Willis all the time. Jane knew the guy. Knew him well enough to have him standing there while she wrote a prize yarn. And while she was typing he drove the needle home.”

  “Sure,” said Poppa Hanley. “You’re thinking Al Myers. Married to her once. Divorced. Knew her well enough. Well, there’s an alarm out for Al, and he’ll get picked up sooner or later. A three-state alarm now with descriptions of him and this Elsie Whittaker and her car and his car. But I can take Myers or leave him alone. For one thing, if Myers had done the jabbing with that needle, he wouldn’t have left that lead story on his elopement with the Whittaker heiress right in the machine where the cops would grab it. That’s no way to keep a marriage secret, and it’s a motive for killing the dame. So take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll leave it,” I said. “Sit tight.”

  * * *

  —

  I telephoned the Chronicle. The Old Man had gone home, so I talked with Kendrick and had Dinah’s story pulled out and reinserted with the McCoy in news. Then I went back and joined Poppa again and asked him about the needle. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Doc Kyne is working on the dame now. We can go see her if you’d like.”

  “I’d like,” I said. “But first tell me about the glass you found on the floor. Dinah said glass from a pair of cheaters. You think the killer wore glasses?”

  “Naw.” Poppa Hanley dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. “Dinah has an imagination like a dictator.”

  “Maybe a flash bulb burst. White glass? Burned white from the heat? A fotog?”

  I was thinking of Jimmy Verne having had lunch with Jane Willis a couple of hours before she got clipped.

  “Nope,” said Hanley. “I don’t know what but definitely not those. Maybe you and me had better run downtown and I’ll show you the stuff, Daffy. Then we can start clean.”

  We finished dinner and rode Hanley’s cruise car down to Centre Street. When we went inside, at the lab, we found Doc Kyne washing his hand and cleaning up. “Well, well,” I chirped. “If it isn’t the Buzzard. Have you been playing with visceras again?”

  “Ha-ha,” said Dr. Kyne sourly. “Pardon my ghoulish laughter, Mr. Dill, but I think you are so funny. In a pig’s eye.”

  “Gosh,” sighed Hanley, “can’t you two guys ever speak civilly to each other?”

 
“He hasn’t any sense of humor,” I said.

  “My sense of humor is perfectly all right,” Dr. Kyne said, “but it’s no fun trying to measure the depth of a thrust through an eardrum; Hanley, that was a long needle killed this girl. It went into her a good six inches. Looks like an ice-pick but the wound seems a trifle finer than an ice-pick. Like a hat pin.”

  “Let’s see her,” I said.

  I will spare you the details because when you have been autopsied by a medical examiner, you don’t look like anything much except something that has a crying need for the beautifying touch of an expert mortician. Jane Willis looked pretty bad. Death was hard on her. Her face had always been a trifle on the rough-an’-tough side, and the hue of death, hard and uncompromising, brought out her rugged jaw. The smudge was still apparent on her forehead. I could see how Dinah was fooled.

  Even so, there was something funny about the smudge that I couldn’t make out just then. It looked sort of silly, not like a print should have at all.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I thought you said Jane Willis put her own hand to her head.”

  “But it’s true,” said Hanley. “We even found the old typewriter ribbon in the basket where she’d thrown it when she put in the new one.”

  “That may be,” I said. “I’m not saying that Jane Willis didn’t put a new typewriter ribbon in her machine. All right, she did. But then she got up and went in and washed her mitts. Why? Because that isn’t a typewriter ribbon smudge on her fingertips. Take a look at it. Here, watch.” I took out a piece of paper and raised her cold hand and pressed the fingertips against it. There was no smudge on the paper.

  Hanley grunted. “What’d you expect, a print? She’s dead. Dead men don’t give off prints. The body oils of a healthy living woman would, but she’s not secreting body oils any more.”

  “I’m not talking about a print. I’m talking smudge. That smudge on her fingers doesn’t need body oils to come off. Not if it’s wet typewriter ribbon ink, as it is supposed to be. But it isn’t that. She washed her hands. And she didn’t make the smudge on her forehead. What you see on her hands is ink from a fountain pen. It’s dry now. That’s why it won’t smudge off.”