Murder for Two

by George Harmon Coxe

  The door opened and Dineen looked in. “Lawson,” he said, and when Logan nodded, stood aside.

  Matt Lawson took in the room in one swift glance and began to remove his gloves; when he looked up again his small, deep-set eyes were flat and expressionless.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Took you long enough,” Logan said.

  “I was detained.” Lawson cleared his throat but it did not do much good. His voice still sounded as if something had rusted in his larynx. “Unavoidably.”

  “That’s too bad,” Logan said. “Now you’ll have to make a trip to the morgue.”

  “Is that so? Why?”

  “To identify a guy that used to work for you. Name of Henry Byrnes. Remember him?”

  “Byrnes?” Lawson flexed his thin lips, scowled at his gloves. “Yes. For the moment—but yes, certainly. He was my secretary for a time.”

  “He took a room here last night. Somebody shot him in the back of the head.”

  “Oh.”

  Lawson folded his gloves and put them in his coat pocket. It was a double-breasted coat, light gray and expensive-looking. It added power and fitness to a torso already thick—until he unbuttoned it.

  “Was that all you wanted, Lieutenant?”

  “Not quite all,” Logan said. “Sit down. Tell me about Byrnes. We’ve been going through his bags. He’s got a brother up in Canada but you probably knew him as well as anybody around these parts.”

  Lawson hesitated. He did not look very pleased, but he finally sat down on the bed and took off his hat. His thinning black hair was combed straight back and his scalp and face were pink and freshly barbered.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Of course it’s been some time since he was with me—”

  “How long?”

  “Oh—more than a year.”

  “How much more? I’d like it as exact as you can make it.”

  “A month or two. That’s as close as I can come without looking up the matter.”

  “Fire him or did he quit?”

  “He quit.”

  Logan rocked on heel and toe. He nodded thoughtfully.

  “Let’s see. That would make it about the time John Perry went to prison, wouldn’t it?”

  Lawson’s brows came down. The pink in his face turned to red and then clouded over.

  “What the hell’re you driving at?”

  “You’ll find out,” Logan said. “Would it, or wouldn’t it?”

  “Look.” Lawson leaned forward, his hoarse voice taking on emphasis. “If Byrnes was murdered I’ll be glad to do whatever—”

  “Yes, you will.” Logan’s lip curled; he allowed himself a mirthless chuckle. “All right, skip that one. I know and you know, so what’re you getting steamed up about? If I slander you, sue me.—Any idea what Byrnes has been living on since he left?”

  Lawson settled back and took a gold cigar case from his pocket. “I believe he came into a small inheritance,” he said and now he had control of things and his voice was casual.

  “That’s why he quit, huh?”

  “He liked to paint. I believe he wanted to give it all his time.”

  “See him lately?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you this morning?”

  Lawson lit his cigar, spoke past it. “When this morning?”

  “Any time.”

  “Home probably. I had a late breakfast. As a matter of fact, I was still there when you called.”

  “At two-ten, huh? Well, we’ll find out about that too.” Logan went to his coat and took out a rolled photograph. He went over to Lawson, nodding to Casey to join him.

  Casey got up, one eye on Logan, the other on the picture. When it was unrolled it became the one Karen Harding had taken the night before with her blackout bulbs and showing Byrkman with Blondie and Harry.

  “Know any of these guys?” Logan asked.

  Lawson looked at the picture. “Certainly. The one in the middle is Byrnes.”

  “He calls himself Byrkman now,” Logan said. “What about the others?”

  “They’re strangers to me.”

  “The hell they are. What about the big guy?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  Lawson jumped up and reached for his hat. Logan examined him with hard, deliberate eyes. He turned to Casey. “Tell him where you saw the big guy.”

  “I saw him first yesterday afternoon in Matt’s office.”

  Lawson put on his hat and his stare was cold and malignant. “I don’t have to take this from you,” he said to Logan. “This kind of stuff might work with some gutter rat or petty crook—”

  He broke off when Logan stepped up to him. Logan stood very close. He was taller than Lawson but not so broad, and he put out his hand and twisted it tightly in Lawson’s lapel. For a moment Casey thought the shorter man was going to swing but he didn’t and from the look on the lieutenant’s lean, dark face it was probably a good thing.

  “They tell me you’re selling things to the government now,” Logan said. “I understand you’re cleaning up. You’re a big shot. You got pull and money and influence—they tell me. But you were a crook ten years ago—and a vicious, petty one at that—and for my dough you’re still a crook, Lawson. If I can bust that alibi I’m going to nail you; I don’t care if you get forty lawyers.”

  Lawson’s mouth was rock-hard and white at the corners. “Take your hand off me, punk,” he said in that low, hoarse voice.

  “You take it off,” Logan said and waited to see if Lawson would. Lawson didn’t. Logan said, “Casey. Make with the camera. Let’s get a brand new picture.”

  Casey jumped for his plate-case. Logan let go of the lapel and it stayed wrinkled. He stepped in front of the door, one hand on the knob. Lawson looked at Manahan; he looked at Casey and was staring slit-eyed at the camera when the flashbulb went off. Logan opened the door and Lawson went out.

  “Wow,” Casey said. “How you talk.”

  Logan bent a scowling brow at him. He was still hot and it was going to take him a few seconds to think and speak reasonably.

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Manahan said. “Did you, Murph?”

  The plain-clothes man said, “Nah. Did you, Casey?”

  “Send that print over as soon as you get it,” Logan said. “With the film. A lot of guys are going to be taking looks at that pan in the next twelve hours.—If I could only find those two hoodlums—”

  He walked across the room and stared out the window. Casey put his camera away, deciding maybe now he could get some information.

  “Who found Byrkman?” he asked.

  “The maid. About one-thirty. He’d been dead around an hour, hour and a half.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “It was on the desk. A .25. We’re checking the number now and it’s probably the same one that killed Rosalind Taylor.”

  “You think it was Lawson?” Casey asked.

  “Who else had anything against Byrkman?” Manahan said.

  “He had an alibi for Taylor—or didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Logan said. “Those two gunmen did that other.”

  “They kept the gun,” Casey said. “Why didn’t they do this? Why didn’t they do it last night?”

  Logan started to answer, then closed his mouth. He pushed his hat back and made a great show of patience.

  “Look, Casey,” he said. “I’ll answer those two if you’ll leave me alone. I’ve got a million things to think of and the Super is riding me and the papers are riding the Commissioner, and I should have tossed you out before. But since you’re here, I’ll tell you what I think:

  “Lawson had one idea only last night and that was to get Byrkman where we couldn’t find him. The two hoodlums got him and brought him here and one of them—the little one—came in with him.”

  “Harry,” Casey said.

  “You can figure that Harry didn’t want to go up then and do the job an
d have the clerk identify him, or you can figure this way—and I like it better. Lawson wasn’t sure last night whether Byrkman had to be killed or not. He or somebody came here this morning and had it out with Byrkman and something the guy said or did tipped off Lawson that he couldn’t take a chance with him any longer. Byrkman knew we were after him and knew we had the beginning of a case. He may have made the mistake of saying so and showing he was scared.

  “Hell, Lawson has been running around with gunmen all his life. He could do a thing like that himself and don’t think he couldn’t. He could have got the .25 from those other guys and used it, or he could have sent one of them back to do it for him. Either way is all right with me. Just give me your two pals, or let me find somebody in this hotel that saw Lawson here about the right time. That’s all, brother. Just give me that much.” He paused, brought his attention to Casey, and jerked his head toward the door.

  “Now shove off, will you? Send that picture over to my office and if you think of anything else, let me know. If Lawson brings charges against me, you may be a witness, kid. How would you like that?”

  Casey grinned as he opened the door. “So I can’t hang around with you any more?”

  “The press and I probably won’t be on speaking terms after today,” Logan said, “and you’re the press. Of course you’re a nice guy and you’re lucky. I like you especially when you get lucky. Fall into something that counts and you’ll get a picture or two. That’s a promise.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  NOTHING STOPPED ROSALIND

  CASEY WENT BACK to the office and developed the picture he had exposed in the hotel room. While he was waiting for the film to dry he tried to think of something he could do and that brought him to the list of telephone numbers he had taken from the back of Henry Byrkman’s book. There were three left and when he got the first one he hit pay dirt.

  “I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice said when he asked if this was Johnson’s Market, “you must have the wrong number.”

  “Isn’t this Crescent 9372?”

  “Yes, but it’s not Johnson’s Market. It’s Morris Loeb’s office.”

  Casey looked up Morris Loeb. When he discovered that he was a lawyer with offices in the Bacon Building, his interest quickened. “This could be something,” he breathed and when the remaining two numbers turned out to be a fuel company and a garage, respectively, he felt quite sure of it.

  He made a print of Lawson’s picture, rang for a messenger, and sent the film over to police headquarters; then he got out the film he had taken of Henry Byrkman the night before and made an extra print. When it was dry he put it in his plate-case and went out.

  It was four-thirty when Casey walked down the third floor hall of the Bacon Building and opened the frosted glass door which bore the number 322. A skinny blonde, faded and no longer young, looked up from her magazine; after a second look she stopped chewing her gum and smiled.

  She sat in a little railed-off space with a typewriter desk and beyond her the door to the main office stood open. That gave Casey his answer but he put the question anyway.

  “No,” the woman said. “He isn’t in this afternoon.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “I couldn’t say. He had to go to Providence this morning. I’ve been expecting a call from him but it doesn’t look as if he’s coming in.”

  Casey started for the door, turned back. “Maybe you could help me. Do you know if Mr. Loeb had a client by the name of Byrkman? Henry Byrkman?”

  Suspicion veiled the smile. The jaws began to work again. “I couldn’t say,” she told him. “You’d have to ask Mr. Loeb.”

  Edward, the night operator at Rosalind Taylor’s apartment house, was on from four until midnight and he remembered Casey right away. Casey said he was fine. He said, no, there wasn’t any news about the murder.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said. “You saw Miss Taylor go out last night, didn’t you? And it was about twenty-five after nine?”

  “Just about,” Edward said. “I was listening to the radio”—he pointed to a miniature set under the desk from which muted strains of music came—“and it was just about five minutes before a station break.”

  “And you said a stranger came in about five minutes or so after that. He didn’t give his name but he went up in the elevator and came down again a few minutes later. What did you mean, a few minutes?”

  Edward shrugged. “Gosh, I don’t know. Three or four.”

  Casey had already taken the picture of Byrkman from his plate-case and now he showed it to Edward.

  “Would this be the guy?”

  Edward took the picture. He studied it, eyes widening a little, and then looked up at Casey.

  “That’s him, all right.”

  “You’re sure, are you?”

  “Yep. That’s him. Who is he, anyway?”

  Casey said he didn’t know who the man was but he was trying to find out.

  “Is Miss MacKay in?” he asked, when he had shouldered his plate-case. “Phone her then, will you? Tell her I’m on my way up.”

  Helen MacKay was dressed for the street and again she looked like a million.

  “Got a date?” he asked when she said hello.

  “For cocktails.”

  “With what’s-his-name?”

  “The name,” Helen said with some amusement, “is Stanley Furness. If you can’t remember it any better than that you’d better come along with me and meet him. He’s a very nice guy. You’d like him.”

  Casey thought about the picture. “I’ll ride down with you anyway. There’s something I want to ask you but—”

  “Come in then. I don’t have to run this minute.”

  “I can do it just as well in a taxi,” Casey said. “Come on, don’t you know boy friends don’t like to be kept waiting?”

  “This one doesn’t mind,” Helen said, “but, all right, if it doesn’t matter to you.”

  When they were in the taxi Helen MacKay sensed the somberness of Casey’s mood, and when he did not say anything she put a hand on his arm.

  “Have they found out anything, Flash? Have they done anything about it?”

  “If you mean the cops,” Casey said, “they’re going around on their heels talking to themselves.”

  He thought about Byrkman’s murder, and Lawson. He thought about Logan too and knew he shouldn’t tip the lieutenant’s hand until he was ready.

  “But if you mean have they got a case, they haven’t. Logan likes Lawson and the two guys that jumped you—and who doesn’t—but we haven’t found them and that’s the way it is.”

  Helen MacKay grew thoughtful. “They didn’t seem to find anything this morning, either, after you’d gone. But what about the folder the lieutenant took away? That was about Byrkman. Did you find him?”

  “We found out where he lived,” Casey said. “He wasn’t there.” He pulled the picture out and showed it to her. “Ever see this guy before?”

  Helen MacKay took it, a tiny frown touching the bridge of her nose. She held it closer to the window, then looked at Casey, her eyes serious and concerned.

  “I don’t think so, Flash.”

  “That’s Byrkman,” Casey said. He watched her red mouth form an O and then curve back into place. “He came to see Rosalind last night. At least that’s what it looks like. Edward, the kid on the switchboard, just identified him. I wondered if he could have been one of those gunmen that walked in on you.”

  “Oh, no.” Helen MacKay shook her head. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t see much of their faces but—no, I’m sure he wasn’t one of them. But if he did come to see Rosalind—What time was it?”

  “About nine-thirty.”

  Helen MacKay thought it over. Then she sat up, one hand flying to her mouth. “Yes,” she said. “It must be that way. Listen, Flash. The first man came right after Rosalind left.”

  “That was the dark one.”

  “Yes. And it couldn’t have been more than two o
r three minutes later. He came in, pointing that gun, and I got scared and then angry and I told him to get out and that’s when he cuffed me and knocked me down. When I came to in the hall, and that couldn’t have been much later because he hadn’t tied my ankles yet with that wet towel—”

  Casey got it then. He didn’t hear what she said next because he was remembering the story she had told Logan the night before. Harry was getting ready to tie her ankles when the buzzer rang. He answered it. She’d heard him talking, and he came back and finished his job. Shortly after that the buzzer rang again and this time she saw the second fellow as the two went into the office.

  “The buzzer sounded twice,” he said.

  “Yes.” She paused to get her breath, one gloved hand on Casey’s knee and her face close. “I knew I had heard it twice but I never even thought there might have been two men. I thought the second one had buzzed, and had been told something by the first, and then had come back again a couple of minutes later. What must have happened is that this Byrkman came and rang and the dark man gave him some story and Byrkman went away and the second one came a minute or two later. Does that make sense, Flash? It never occurred to me that there could have been three men, but if Byrkman did come up—”

  “Yeah,” Casey said. “It makes sense. The first lad had to get rid of Byrkman because he knew his pal was coming up the back way and was due any minute.” He thought of Byrkman with the hole in the back of his head and a larger hole in the front and he said, “It makes sense, but it doesn’t help much now.”

  And Casey thought of other things as the taxi pulled up in front of the Carlton. He thought of the story Byrkman had told Logan. Byrkman had lied when he said his date with Rosalind Taylor was to have been at his place. He had come to the apartment to see her and had had the bad luck to be too early—or too late; to have come at the one time that was fatal. Thinking about this, Casey realized now that though the man was murdered today, his death had been assured even while he had talked to Logan the night before. That it had been postponed for some reason was beside the point now. Casey didn’t know the reason, nor care.

  “What?” he said when he heard Helen MacKay speak to him.