“My, my,” murmured Miss Withers. “Death loves a shining marksman, doesn’t he? But Oscar, while we’re here, I believe I would like a word with the attendant.”
“That you’ll have,” said the Inspector, and led her into a little cubby of an office beneath the stair, where they faced a paunchy old man in police uniform but without the badge. He had a day’s beard and a handsome, ruined face with eyes, the schoolteacher thought, like cold boiled onions. “This is Captain Halverstadt, retired,” Piper introduced them. “Hal’s in charge of the lower floors of the Criminal Courts Building here. Tell us about it again, oldtimer.”
The voice was cracked and whining. “Well—you see, we got orders not to let just anybody into the Museum, on account we don’t want any of the weapons filched and maybe used again. So we sorta give conducted tours, usually at ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Comes two o’clock today and only Mr. Holcomb, that’s the victim, showed up. But at the last minute the two others arrive—”
“Together?” demanded Miss Withers.
“No, ma’am. One of them as we was coming down the stairs, and the other just as I unlocked the Museum door. Mr. Thayer, it was, who came last. I got them inside and was just going into the little spiel I always give when I heard the phone ringing here in the office. So I had to excuse myself for just a minute. But to make sure that nobody got away with anything, I locked the door behind me when I went out.”
“How long were you gone?” Piper asked.
“Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
“And when you unlocked the door you didn’t notice anything that would help us to figure out which man was telling the truth and which was lying?”
“No, Inspector. Both of them looked scared and excited. But neither man was rumpled up any. They were both talking all at once, so I couldn’t make much sense of it. But I saw the corpse, so I held ’em both while the boys got here from across the street.”
“I see,” said Miss Withers in a faraway voice. “ ‘I see, said the blindman….’ By the way, Captain, do visitors to the Museum have to give a reason for wanting to see the place?”
Captain Halverstadt hesitated. “Well, I got orders to make sure they’re not wrongos, looking for a gun to snatch. Now this Mr. Holcomb, he had a good reason. He said he used to be maître d’hôtel at the Grande, and he wanted a look at the broken bottle that figured in a murder when he was working there. Mr. Thayer said he was interested in studying crime prevention because he was running for office on a reform ticket, and Mr. Moore said he was hipped on old guns and heard we had an 1854 derringer here. With people like that we don’t ask much….”
“Not even enough,” Miss Withers observed softly. “Tell us, Captain. Do you have any ideas? What is your theory about the case?”
The old man blinked. “It’s not really a theory, mind. It’s just that the place gets you, when you have to be in there alone so much like I do. You get to thinking and—and hearing things. All those bloody knives and old guns and so forth, they were made for killing and they were used for killing, and sometimes you sort of hear them whispering in the back of your mind. They sort of say ‘Go on, use me again, I want to do it again….’ ” He shook his head. “Excuse me, I was just day-dreaming out loud.”
He watched them through his rheumy eyes, still shaking his head, until they were up the stairs. “Batty as a bed-bug,” the Inspector decided.
“There are more things in heaven and earth…” put in the schoolteacher.
“Well, now for the suspects. That is, if they’re not being beaten into unconsciousness with a rubber hose in the back room somewhere.”
The Inspector grinned. “I only wish we could settle it that easy, but the old days are gone. Besides, these suspects aren’t people you can work over with a rubber hose. Come on, we’ll take the short cut.”
He led the way up another flight of stairs, and then across the covered bridge to Headquarters. Then instead of turning down the hall to his own office he took her past a grilled, guarded door and finally down a hall to another door bearing the legend: Detective Bureau, Preliminary Investigation—Private. At that moment the door opened suddenly and there emerged a small untidy lawyer with a big cigar tilted skywards. “Oh, oh,” said the Inspector. In tow of the little man was a handsome figure with a tanned face and wavy gray hair.
“Evening, Inspector,” said the lawyer. “As you see, I got a writ. Book ’em or let ’em go, I always say.” He touched his client’s elbow. “Come on, Mr. Thayer.”
But the man held back, drew himself up to his full height, and faced the Inspector. “Just a moment. I wish to make two things clear. As candidate for the Assembly I have the right to ask that you take special care in any releases you may make to the press. And I ask you to make clear the fact that I have not been under arrest, that I have made a detailed voluntary statement, that I will hold myself in readiness to cooperate with the police at any time of the day or night, and that I can prove that I have never met the victim of this infamous murder in all my life.” He paused.
“Come on, Mr. Thayer,” urged the lawyer, a little uneasily.
“Good evening, Inspector,” said Charles Robin Thayer, and departed.
Miss Withers stared after him. “He might have said good evening to me, too. Women have the vote in New York State. At any rate, Oscar, he doesn’t look like a murderer. So few of them do, though.”
The Inspector led the way into the office, where a desk sergeant quickly stood up, shaking his head at the implied question in his superior’s eye. “Nothing new in his statement, sir. Claims he didn’t touch a single object in the room—was just looking, getting material for a talk on crime prevention, and all of a sudden he turned his head and saw Mr. Moore laying Mr. Holcomb’s body down at the other end of the room.”
“I know, I know. Look here, Hildegarde.” The Inspector led the way across the office and slid back a wooden panel in the wall. Behind it was a sheet of cloudy glass, through which they could see a small room bright with one glaring lamp that shone into the eyes of a tanned, dapper man who sat on the edge of a hard chair, surrounded by three detectives. He looked far less worried than his inquisitors. “This thing,” continued the Inspector, “is a mirror on the other side. They can’t see or hear us.”
“I gather,” asked Miss Withers, “that this is Dexter Moore, the sole remaining suspect?”
He nodded. “Was overseas for Midwest Press for four years in the European theater. An expert on guns, to hear him tell it. He likes to collect them from dead Germans, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and anybody.”
“Nice and ghoulish, isn’t he?” Miss Withers squinted closer. “Not as handsome as the other suspect, but rugged and useful looking. He seems quite pleased with himself.”
They watched the pantomime, as the detectives, obviously referring to a typed statement, hurled barrage after barrage of questions at the man in the chair. Now and again he shook his head, with amused patience.
“Moore will have to be turned loose in a minute,” Piper decided. “His statement is exactly the same as Thayer’s—but in reverse! Besides, we can’t hold a man on suspicion when he’s got three medals and is a front-page hero. But blast it, somebody committed that murder! Holcomb didn’t murder himself!” The panel closed. “And if I don’t get busy, I’m going to be hunting a job.”
Silently the schoolteacher followed the Inspector back to his own office, where he sank unhappily into the chair behind his desk and picked up carbon copies of the twin statements signed Dexter N. Moore and Charles Robin Thayer. He read them through, then tossed them aside. “Moore’s has more adjectives, but Thayer winds up with a better climax. They both add up to the same thing.”
The schoolteacher glanced at them, and nodded. “They read like truth. Which is natural, because whichever was the guilty one, he was smart enough to pull a complete switch of viewpoint.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah. If I had a motive, just a tiny little motive.”
Miss Withers, who had been staring at a nearby brick wall through the open window, now turned quickly. “Oscar, an innocent man might lie—I mean a man innocent of murder. He might hate somebody so much that he would try to incriminate him….”
“Look, Hildegarde. They don’t even know each other. We’ve proved that, as clearly as anyone can. They never met. Thayer was secretary of an educational association upstate when Moore went overseas. Moore’s only been back four days. I don’t see—”
“Oscar, do you remember the impression the Black Museum made on us both? Isn’t it within the realm of possibility that a mind might snap from the sheer weight of the exhibits, from the poisonous aura they give off?”
The Inspector was amused. “Look, Hildegarde. You saw Thayer and Moore. They’re not the type to change into murderous maniacs instanter, just from being in a museum like that. They’re hard-headed, ambitious citizens. Try again.”
“Perhaps I will. By the way, Oscar, has it occurred to you that the murder would never have happened but for the accident of that telephone call. If there ever was a telephone call….”
Just at that moment the telephone rang, with a loud angry clang. “Yes?” said the Inspector. “Oh, yes, Commissioner. Yes, I know—”
Miss Withers waved good-bye at her unhappy sparring-partner, and then went quietly out of the room.
* * *
—
Later that night, back in her own little apartment on West 73rd Street, the schoolteacher bent over her aquarium of fancy tropical fish and soberly addressed a fantastic and ornate scalare, who stared back at her and worked its shark-mouth foolishly. “The main problem,” she was saying, “is the motive. Why should anybody want to kill a harmless little retired hotel employee?”
A black mollie, fat and sleek, swam past the angel-fish, who took out furiously after it, snapping at fin and tail. “Or,” continued Miss Withers to her oblivious audience, “did somebody just have an overwhelming urge to kill, and take the nearest victim?” The schoolteacher sighed and snapped out the overhead light, reducing fairyland into a muddy puddle of water, sand, and weeds, peopled by nondescript gray minnows.
The lightless pool, she fancied, was like her own mind at the moment—a dark and clouded place. Well, she might as well sleep on it. “To sleep, perchance to dream, I hope,” said she, and went off to bed.
Dream she did that night. As a matter of fact, the Inspector was of the opinion that she was still dreaming when she stalked into his office shortly after nine o’clock next morning, announcing that a substitute was taking over her little charges at Jefferson School, and that she intended to devote her time to saving his precious skin.
“Don’t you worry,” she told him. “My subconscious worked it all out for me in my sleep. I dreamed—”
“My old father, good man that he was, always said he would rather hear rain on a tin roof than hear a woman tell her dreams,” interrupted the Inspector. “And for your information, if you’re still worrying about that telephone call, it was on the level all right. Those calls all pass through the Headquarters switchboard, and Cap Halverstadt had a call just after two yesterday. It was from Western Union, a long complicated telegram about a three horse parlay at Rockingham, signed Sam.”
“Oh,” said the schoolteacher. “Well, about the dream. I dreamed I was playing cards with two suspects and there came time for a showdown. But one of them refused to put down his cards—and that one was the murderer! Only I don’t remember which of them it was.”
“Marvelous, Hildegarde!”
“Well, the meaning is clear. Oscar, an innocent and a guilty man must react in different ways to the same stimuli. That’s the principle of the lie detector.”
“Sure, sure. And I get booted out of the Force if I don’t wash up this case before the Commissioner has his second cocktail tonight. And all because of the killing of a useless little old guy who was good for nothing but the writing of some reminiscences of the Good Old Days, that nobody would want to read about….”
“Oh, Oscar!” cried Miss Withers. “Sometimes you are brilliant!”
A pleased but vague smile crossed the Inspector’s face, but it died away as he heard the door close behind his visitor. Nor did he hear any more from her until a short time after noon that day, when she called on the phone and requested that he show up at her apartment as soon as convenient. Curiosity, and the lack of any other hopeful portent, brought him there within fifteen minutes. He found the maiden schoolteacher leisurely removing signs of unwonted make-up from her face. She had combed her gray-brown hair back into a violent upsweep hair-do, and otherwise attired herself fearfully and quite wonderfully.
“For God’s sake, Hildegarde, you look like Carrie Nation!”
“Well put, Oscar. Permit me to introduce myself. I am none other than Miss Miriam Whitehead Jones, world-famous impressionist poet. In impressionist circles only, of course. Having laid aside my fading laurels I have decided to set down on paper the memories of a busy life, filled with reminiscences of the great and the near-great who have been my friends and my—er, my intimates. I have been seeking a publisher for my memoirs. And since they will naturally be a bit on the racy side, I had to find one who was not too squeamish about the danger of libel suits.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“You will. I happened at last to be successful, Oscar, although I was forced to spend the entire morning tramping up and down Madison Avenue. But I finally located a Mr. Hoppman, of Klaus Hoppman and Sons, who seems just the perfect publisher. You would not care for him, Oscar. He is a dusty little man, with a scrawny neck and a head as bare and reptilian as a turtle’s. But he seems to specialize in the publication of memoirs such as mine will be, especially when the author contributes most of the expense. Indeed, I have learned that he has already set in type the first volume of ‘Forty Years of Scandals at the Grande Hotel,’ by Hubert Holcomb.”
The Inspector took a deep breath, and nodded. “You figure you got a motive—that somebody might not want to be included in Holcomb’s memoirs. And that somebody—”
“Oscar, if we were at 221B Baker Street I should ask you to take down the commonplace books and the indexes, but lacking Sherlock Holmes’s library, do you know any local newspaperman who could sneak me into the paper’s morgue?”
Piper hesitated. “Well, I know Weatherby over at the Brooklyn Falcon. He’s been there since the year One. But what you expect to find—”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’ll find it all the same.”
A short time later she found herself seated at a battered oak table in a small room crowded with musty, tattered volumes. Miss Hildegarde Withers sneezed, sneezed again, and began to shuffle through interminable envelopes filled with dry and brittle press clippings. But her progress was very slow, and the hands of her watch moved swiftly.
The Inspector, a very worried man indeed, met her by appointment at her own apartment shortly before five. “Not that your wild ideas will do any good. The Commissioner means it this time, too. I had my boys pick up Cap Halverstadt, just in case he might have gone nuts from being in that place too long, but they couldn’t get anything on him. We’ve been watching Moore and Thayer, too, but they’re acting like completely innocent bystanders.”
“Did your men report that both Mr. Thayer and Mr. Moore received special delivery messages this afternoon? Because they did, and the messages were from me. Asking them to drop in here. I think they’ll come, too. Because I hinted to each of them that he would meet an eye-witness to the murder. Meaning the other, of course. You see, Oscar, in the newspaper files I found what I had hoped to find. Voilà, the motive.”
The Inspector eagerly seized the yellow clipping which she produced from her capacious bag. “German-Americans Affirm Faith in Future Amity,” he read. “At a gala din
ner in the Hotel Grande last evening, prominent New Yorkers representing the German-American Bund, the Brooklyn Turn-Verein, and other organizations interested in German-American cordiality, met to toast the New Germany….”
“You can skip down to the last paragraph,” Miss Withers said. “See here? ‘Among the speakers were Hans Von Drebber, of the German Embassy in Washington, Ludwig Kraus, the famous author, and Carl Thayer, well-known Albany educator.’ ”
“I begin to see,” said the Inspector.
“Just suppose,” Miss Withers continued triumphantly, “that in his memoirs Hubert Holcomb happened to remember that early Nazi dinner at his hotel, and mentioned prominent guests? Suppose that Mr. Hoppman, the publisher, realizing that disclosure of such leanings on the part of Thayer would at this time wreck his political career, attempted a quiet bit of blackmail before publication?”
Piper nodded. “But Hildegarde, now that you’ve got a motive for Thayer, why not call off the invitation to Moore?”
“It’s only fair that since the man has been under suspicion, he is here to see himself cleared. Besides, there are a few points that aren’t worked out quite right as yet. I’m counting on you for that. Remember, I’m only an amateur, a self-appointed gadfly to the police department, as you so often remind me. You’ll have to take over at the proper time. By the way, did you bring what I asked for?” The Inspector felt in his pocket, and then produced the silken noose which was to be, he hoped, Exhibit A in the case of the State of New York versus the murderer of Hubert Holcomb. The schoolteacher took it gingerly and placed it on the table, directly under the rays of the lamp.
Then came a hammering of the door-knocker. A moment later Dexter Moore was facing them. He wore a debonair, quizzical smile, a little too much on the Richard Harding Davis type, Miss Withers thought. She preferred her foreign correspondents to be like Ernie Pyle.
“I thought this was to be a private interview,” he said stiffly.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 134