Murder for Two

by George Harmon Coxe

  Jim opened it. He sighed and glanced over his shoulder at his partner. “He’s back, Larry.—Look, Mister—”

  “Okay,” Casey said. “I’m entitled to a re-match, ain’t I? Hey, Dinah,” he called. “Can I come in?”

  Dinah King was watching him between the two sets of square shoulders and no matter what had happened before there was a half-smile in her mascaraed eyes now. Deep down, conflicting emotions battled there and when she hesitated, Casey said:

  “If I behave?”

  He waited, his broad face creased in his crooked, knowing smile. Dinah shrugged.

  “All right.”

  “If you say so, Dinah,” the pair said.

  Casey went in and got rid of his plate-case. He looked at the youths and they looked back, warily grinning.

  “What are you guys, wrestlers?” he asked.

  “Jim stroked the crew,” Larry said.

  “And Larry pulled number seven.”

  “I guess they got courses in mayhem at Harvard now,” Casey said.

  “Modified mayhem,” Larry said. “You get a little of it in our officer’s training course. I guess you could have made it tough for us, though, if you’d really wanted to.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t,” Casey said. “Wouldn’t I look funny going around with a couple of broken arms.—What do you do to get a drink around here, Dinah? I guess I ought to buy one.”

  Dinah pushed a button and presently a colored maid came in. Casey ordered rye for himself and Scotch for Dinah. The two youths ordered beer. By the time it arrived they had warmed up to Casey because he was that kind of guy. He asked questions about their work and had to tell them who he was and what he did. They said they’d heard about him and now they were a little awed, as though realizing what a job they had done in throwing him out.

  “Will you do me a favor?” he asked when the drinks were gone. “I want to talk with Dinah a couple of minutes privately. Wait in the hall if you like. And if you hear her raise her voice you can come in and toss me out again.”

  They got up without question. They said, “Sure,” and thanked him for the beer.

  “I guess you didn’t know I had that folder,” Casey said when the door closed. “I guess Gifford didn’t tell you?”

  “No,” Dinah said.

  “How I got it doesn’t matter and I wanted to tell you the same thing I told Gifford. I don’t go around getting people in jams, but you’re in this country illegally and you’re technically at least an enemy alien. I guess you couldn’t be deported because there’s no place to deport you to now. But you’re guilty of fraud on that passport violation and that’s what they can throw you in jail for.”

  “I know,” the woman said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing, I hope. Unless I get an idea you had something to do with Rosalind Taylor’s murder and then I guess the passport business would be small potatoes, wouldn’t it? Now how about that autograph?”

  He held out the envelope again, offered her a fountain pen. “Never mind what I want it for. You can’t be hurt if you’re innocent, can you?”

  “No one is ever entirely innocent,” Dinah King said, but she took the paper and pen and wrote her name for him.

  He thanked her and said he was sorry he’d got tough about it. She went to her dressing-table and began to make up her face. She didn’t look at him again, nor speak as he went out.

  Outside the night was blustery and there was a bite in the wind that whipped in from the Atlantic when Casey stepped from the dimly lighted marquee and started along the narrow street. He had no particular destination in mind and so it happened that when he reached the corner and turned left he saw the Bacon Building a block away and thought at once of Morris Loeb.

  He had phoned police headquarters earlier in the evening, to tell Logan about the lawyer, but Logan could not be located. Now Casey started for the building, with no great hope of finding Loeb there now, at ten o’clock, but simply because the office was close.

  It was a small building of four stories and the wind half-pushed him into the foyer when he opened one of the glass doors. There was but a single elevator, operated during the day by a man and automatic at night, and Casey stepped in and pushed the button marked 3.

  The third floor hall was quite dark save for the single bulb which burned halfway along its length and it took him a second to see the shadowy figure at the far end. When he remembered that Loeb’s office was down that way, he quickened his step, trying to peer past the light until he walked under it and had it at his back. Then he saw the figure was a woman. A cleaning-woman apparently, for she had a mop and pail, and she was just about to unlock the door of Morris Loeb’s office.

  She turned, hearing his heels pounding toward her, and waited, a heavy-set woman with straggly white hair and tired eyes. Casey stopped in front of her, realizing now that no light came through the frosted glass panel.

  “Hello, mother,” he said. “I guess Mr. Loeb’s gone for the night, hasn’t he?”

  “I guess so, sir,” the woman said. “He’s almost never here when I come along. You might get him at his home, though.”

  “Yes,” Casey said. “Well, I just thought I’d stop since I was down this way. Good-night.”

  “Good-night, sir.”

  Casey started back along the hall, hearing the door being unlocked and then, faintly, the click of a light switch. He was twenty feet from the elevator when he heard the scream, high-pitched in horror and slamming down the corridor to stiffen him and send his scalp crawling.

  He spun instantly. He saw the light spilling out into the hall from the open doorway; then the scream came again and he started to run.

  He hit the doorway, bounced through. Beyond, the inner door was open and the woman was standing there, her hands at the sides of her face. Somehow he got through the gate and into the room before the woman screamed again. That was when he saw the man on the floor before the open safe and the dark stain on the carpet beneath his shoulder.

  Chapter Seventeen

  NOT QUITE DEAD

  THE WOMAN had opened her mouth to scream again when Casey reached her side and for a few seconds he had to ignore the man on the floor and pay attention to her.

  “Stop it!” he said, and when she looked at him with blank eyes and moaned, he took her shoulders in his hands and shook her. “Now, now, mother,” he said. “You’re all right.”

  She said something then but the words were garbled and Casey turned her firmly toward the anteroom.

  “Come on,” he ordered. “I’ll take care of him. How am I going to get a doctor if you don’t pull yourself together?”

  He got her into the stenographer’s chair, drew a cup of water from the cooler, and made her drink it. “Now you sit right there, understand? That’s a good girl.”

  She looked at him then and recognition touched her glance. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll be all right. But Mr. Loeb—”

  “Sure,” Casey said and went into the office.

  The man, if he was Loeb, was short, plump, and baldish. He lay partly on his side and partly on his stomach and when Casey knelt beside him he could see that the vest was blood-soaked. He touched the face and found it warm. He saw then that a pulse beat feebly at the temple and felt a wrist for corroboration. Then, swearing softly, he jumped up and reached for the telephone.

  “Hello,” he said when he had the Express operater. “This is Casey, honey. I want a doctor—and don’t interrupt me, will you? Get the one the office uses if you can, but get somebody, anybody, and quick.” He gave her the address and the office number. “And while you’re at it,” he said “connect me with the studio.”

  Tom Wade answered. “Okay,” he said when Casey told him what he wanted. “I’m on my way.”

  Casey went out to take a look at the cleaning-woman. She was right where he left her. He asked if she wanted more water and she shook her head.

  “There’ll be a doctor right along.” His voice was understanding, c
alm. “Mr. Loeb isn’t dead, you know. He’ll probably be all right. Do you want to go somewhere and lie down, mother, or do you want to stay here?”

  When she said she’d stay there awhile, he went into the office and sat on the edge of the desk, the telephone in his hands. He made himself wait three or four minutes. This wasn’t murder yet, he told himself. The doctor was on his way, which was the important thing; the next important thing was that he get a picture while he could. Maybe he’d use it and maybe not, but this time he wasn’t going to be gypped out of it by the police.

  “You want to come over to room 322 in the Bacon Building?” he asked when he had been connected with Lieutenant Logan.

  “I might,” Logan said. “You got something?”

  “A lawyer named Morris Loeb. I think he was Byrkman’s lawyer and somebody shot him.… How do I know when? I’ve got a doctor on the way.… Sure, he’s still alive.”

  Logan made an explosive noise in the receiver and hung up. Casey put down the telephone and went over to the door just as the doctor came pounding down the hall with Tom Wade at his heels.

  Wade did not ask many questions, nor did the doctor. He made a superficial examination and put an emergency dressing on the hole in Loeb’s chest while Wade took pictures.

  “I’ll have to report this to the police,” he said.

  “I already have,” Casey said. “What do you think his chances are?”

  “It’s hard to say. He has a chance, of course. If that slug didn’t smash up some bones—well, you never know. He’s lost a lot of blood. We’ll get him over to the hospital and then we can tell better.”

  He went to the telephone and made a call and Casey told Wade to get back to the office.

  “I could take a couple more,” Wade protested.

  “You could have some cop take them away from you, too,” Casey said. “Go on, will you? You’d better use the stairs, and be damn careful going through the lobby.” He ushered Wade to the door and pushed him down the hall. “Make prints,” he said, “and hold them for me until I find out what the score is.”

  Lieutenant Logan and Sergeant Manahan missed Tom Wade by perhaps two minutes, and while they were talking to the doctor the ambulance arrived and Loeb was carried away.

  Logan didn’t waste much time on the cleaning-woman, questioning her just enough to see that she knew nothing about the matter and then sending her about her business. When she had gone he looked up Loeb’s home address in the telephone book and called it, asking if he was speaking to Mrs. Loeb, then telling her that her husband had met with an accident. He told her what hospital he had been taken to, said he didn’t believe it would be too serious, and asked her if she knew the address of Loeb’s secretary. When he had written this down he turned to Casey.

  “Now what do you know about it?” he asked.

  “Not much.”

  “I expected that—but how much?”

  Casey told how he had come over from the Club 17, how the cleaning-woman had screamed, and how he had come back and called the doctor when he found the lawyer was alive.

  “How did you know he was Byrkman’s lawyer?”

  “I’m not sure he was,” Casey said. “I was here this afternoon but his secretary said he was out and she ducked the question when I asked her if Loeb handled Byrkman’s affairs.”

  Logan inhaled slowly and remained pointedly patient. “Okay, but why should you come here this afternoon at all?”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  Casey took out the page from the back of Byrkman’s telephone book and passed it to the lieutenant, explaining how he got it. He could see the storm clouds gathering and presently they broke. Logan’s neck bulged in anger and his jaw got hard.

  “God damn you, Casey,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  And then Casey got sore too. He hadn’t meant to, but Logan’s rage was so obvious and his voice so mean that Casey’s anger flared, hot and unreasonable.

  “Why the hell should I?” he said. “Did you think to look there? Do you call me up and say, ‘Hey, Flash, I’ve got an exclusive shot for you’? Like hell you do. Why should I—”

  “Damned if I know,” Logan said and his anger went away as suddenly as it came. He glanced at Manahan and shrugged. “Who the hell am I,” he said wearily, “to look a gift horse in the mouth? You found the lead that I should have found and I crab. Of course you might have passed it along sooner—”

  “All right,” Casey said, ashamed now of his own outburst. “I did try once. You think I tried to outsmart you this morning, but I didn’t. That list didn’t mean anything as it was and you had plenty to think about without that so I figured I could run it down and if anything happened I’d let you know.”

  “Okay,” Logan said. “I’m through crabbing.”

  “I got partway through the list before you found Byrkman. I didn’t find out about Loeb until almost five. I came over here and talked to the girl and then I forgot about it. I remembered it again around seven and phoned but you were out and nobody knew where you were. It didn’t bother me any. Hell, you had all of Byrkman’s things to go through and I had an idea you’d probably find something that would tell you the same thing. If you had and I’d called up with my little find, do you know what you’d have done?”

  “Yeah,” Logan said. “I’d probably have razzed you about being a detective.” He sighed. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Always a chump. Always knocking myself out.—As a matter of fact we found a safe-deposit key and we got a court order to open it. Only by then it was too late to do anything more about it until morning. There’ll be a will in there probably, but if you hadn’t found the guy tonight—”

  “I didn’t find him,” Casey said. “The cleaning-woman found him. You’d have heard about it just the same. I just happened to be here and—”

  “You happen to be a lot of places at the right time,” Logan said, “because you never stop trying. Now if you could only give me some idea as to why Loeb was shot, I’d buy you a drink.”

  Casey said he didn’t know.

  “Neither will we,” Logan said, “if that guy dies on us. That would be all I’d need. That would really be my sort of luck.”

  Manahan had been rummaging in the wastebasket by the desk and now he came up with the two flashbulbs Tom Wade had used. Logan glanced at them. He looked at Casey from the corner of his eye.

  “Put ’em back,” he said. “The guy has to take pictures, I guess. He found Loeb. Why shouldn’t he have a couple?”

  “Do you feel all right?” Manahan cracked.

  “I feel awful,” Logan said. “Well, we’d better get somebody over here and fingerprint the joint. And that secretary—” He looked down at the address he had been given. “Where’s Merrill Street?”

  “I think there’s one in Dorchester,” Manahan said.

  “She’d have to live out there, I guess,” Logan said sardonically, and went to the telephone. He was put through to the Dorchester station and told them what he wanted. “If you can locate her,” he said, “tell her her boss was shot tonight and bring her into Berkeley Street if it isn’t too late when you find her.… Yeah. Just an informal questioning to see if we can get some angle we can use.”

  He returned to Manahan when he hung up. “You stay here. Get somebody on the fingerprinting and seal it up when you leave. I guess we might as well go along to the hospital,” he said to Casey. “Unless you’ve got something else to do. With your luck, maybe if you just hang around the place, the guy won’t die.”

  Morris Loeb was still unconscious when Casey and Logan arrived at the hospital. The house surgeon said they would have to operate but they had to wait until they found out how the man reacted to the transfusion. He had lost a lot of blood and his condition was grave but not hopeless.

  “What are his chances?” Logan asked, and when the doctor thought it over and said sixty-forty, Logan said, “In whose favor?”

  “Not the patient�
�s, certainly.”

  Mrs. Loeb had arrived by this time and while Logan talked to her, Casey went down the corridor, and out on the porch which was used for convalescents, and had a cigarette.

  “Does she know anything?” he asked later, when Logan joined him.

  “Some man phoned the house twice,” the lieutenant said. “The second time Loeb was home. His wife doesn’t know what the conversation was about, but she does know Loeb agreed to go to his office and meet the guy at nine.”

  They smoked awhile in silence. In spite of the dim-out regulations there was a faint sky glow over the city which made the tree tops on the grounds stand out against the night, and Casey wondered if this glow was visible at sea. He thought about this quite awhile but eventually his mind brought into focus the shooting and its connection with Henry Byrkman.

  “You haven’t picked up my two playmates yet, huh?”

  “No.” Logan snapped his cigarette over the railing. “You think they did it?”

  “If they didn’t, I don’t know who would. Find anything more about Lawson?”

  “Yes,” Logan said. “And that’s the one thing that makes me think I’ve got a chance. According to the medical examiner, Byrkman was probably shot between twelve and one. And there’s a bellboy down there at the Walters who used to work in a joint out Revere way that Lawson had a piece of. He knows Lawson by sight and according to him Lawson was at the Walters at just about the right time today.”

  “Oh-oh,” Casey said.

  “Yes. The kid says Lawson came in somewhere around twelve-thirty—he’s not sure of the time and it could be five or ten minutes later—and went out about five minutes or so after he came in.”

  “You’d better take care of that kid,” Casey said.

  “You can say that again. That kid is on a leave of absence. We got him a nice room and he’s going to have free board until we find out where we stand.”

  “You broke the alibi. You’ve got a motive.” Casey grunted softly. “Hell, if Lawson was just some ordinary guy without connections and a bankroll you’d have him indicted by now.”