The Fourth King

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Yes, your honour,” said Parkley, his face dark at the way Kelsey had been occupying the stage, his tone of voice sullen and a bit caustic. He directed his words towards McIlroy. “Bresloff hadn’t scared Paddon in the least, but he thought he’d have better luck with Rothblume, particularly since one of the thirteen crooked kings was now cancelled, and this fact might lend some weight to his threat. He sent Rothblume another letter, slightly different from the first, and with it a deck of cards containing a missing king. But Rothblume didn’t scare in the least. Evidently thought it a joke. So Rothblume’s Wesselton car in turn got fixed for the tragedy some time on the day of August 21st. If the car had been sold to this fellow Wainwright that afternoon, we might have had a puzzling affair with Wainwright the victim instead of Rothblume.”

  McIlroy nodded. “All right. Now for you, Kelsey. Let’s follow Rothblume.”

  “Rothblume,” declared Kelsey, taking up the thread of the narrative, “didn’t go to examine any property at all. What he undoubtedly did do was to drive east to Michigan Avenue and turn north to go home by way of that smooth boulevard, like all well-behaved autoists. It was about ten o’clock at night, more or less. He must have gotten into trouble at the junction of North Michigan Avenue with the Chicago Avenue street car line. Perhaps he narrowly escaped colliding with a street car. Whatever it was, he jammed the footbrake down hard for the eight — tenth — twelfth — who knows? — time. At least that was where the bulb must have first sliced open. He must have gotten a good choking of the adulterated gas at least, before he dropped the left hand window and zigzagged the machine diagonally across the cart-tracks and up to the kerb on the north side of Chicago Avenue, which would be the south edge of Tower Square. There he stumbled out, knowing that something terrible was wrong with him. Leaving the right-hand door of the machine, from which he had emerged, open, he tottered across the sidewalk in the darkness and into Tower Square, intending perhaps to sit down on one of those benches along that cement walk which beyond doubt was deserted this cold rainy night. But he must have felt himself getting weak so rapidly that he changed his mind and decided to stagger across Tower Place to his piece of property and summon help from whoever lived there. But he never made his objective, for some rods away he dropped unconscious in the grass and shrubbery on the west edge of the square. The machine stood there at the kerb, in the darkness, belching out its fumes, until the tyre on the rear was empty. The weather bureau reports a strong north wind that night. That wind, through the open door to the right and the open window to the left, must have cleared out the interior as though with a broom. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because along came somebody of some slight interest to our department, chief. Who? Jimmie Kazan, under indictment as one of the most prolific automobile thieves in Chicago. With his sidekick, Bennie Porvitz, Jimmie was in a Stutz they’d just lifted on Van Buren Street. He piped this beautiful limousine which looked so lonesome, standing there with a deserted park on one side, its left window open, its door swinging wide. Out he jumped a block or so beyond it, and came back and looked it over. It must have rated up to Jimmie as what he’d call a leadpipe cinch. Perhaps if he’d come along a while earlier, we might have had one less auto thief in Chicago. But such wasn’t the case. In hopped Jimmie and drove the machine off in a hurry to that make-over plant he had on Sheffield Avenue, where he spent the night re-enamelling it and changing the licence number. He must have scratched his head a good bit at the funny fandangus he found attached to the machine.

  “Now there, chief,” Kelsey commented, “was one fellow in Chicago that might have thrown some light on these murders, if he could have related what he found on that stolen car. But no chance, of course. He was an automobile thief, and he wasn’t going to throw light on anything that could help send him over the road. Now I put a man at midnight to working on that record of names and addresses and dates that was taken off of Jimmie Kazan when he was pinched a week ago, and this time we got somewhere. The car that was in possession of Mrs. Gertrude Hempel out on Gale Avenue, which she protested all along was a legitimate purchase, and which we couldn’t seize so long as nobody claimed it, was the Rothblume limousine and had the original monogram ‘M.L.R.’ under the coat of enamel. Going back once more to the night of August 21st, Rothblume, in the meantime, was picked up in Tower Square, where he died a short while later in the Nurse Cavell Memorial Hospital near by. His widow surmised that he had gone over there on foot to look at his property. We know better now, especially since Bennie Porvitz, still locked up and unable to raise bail, has condescended to talk a bit on the events of that night. Thus ends Maurice L. Rothblume. Now we’ll jump to Johnstone Lee.

  “Johnstone Lee, who had received a threat like Rothblume, and a deck of cards with two kings missing, presents a puzzle,” continued Kelsey, “but a puzzle with a simple solution. Let’s present the puzzle first. Lee lived in The Bellingham Arms, a court apartment building on South Park Avenue. His apartment was in the left wing of the building, and his entrance was the one directly on the sidewalk instead of in the court. Now to the left o’ The Bellingham Arms is a long row o’ classy-looking stone private garages with red-tiled roofs, rented out only to tenants of the building. Each one holds one car, and they are lettered A, B, C, D, and so forth. They begin at the left o’ the left wing and run some hundred and fifty feet to the left. Johnstone Lee’s garage was ‘A.’ The entrance of that little red-tiled building is a good twenty-five feet from the vestibule. Its door has a spring Yale lock on it, slides in and out, and is pretty heavy and solid. Now the night Lee was picked up in his vestibule dying, his car that he’d come home in was safe and snug in the garage, and the door locked tight. And for that reason, plus the diagnosis of the doctor they called in, his sister never even thought to mention the fact of the car.

  “How did Lee, if he drove out home on that night of September 9th, manage to poison himself — kill himself, in fact — and yet put away his car, lock it up, and then reach his vestibule? Let’s follow his course. He left the Loop garage that night in an old-fashioned Kraley six-passenger car with the top on, all the side flaps buttoned up by our friend Bresloff, and the wind-shield jammed as usual. He managed to run practically all the way to his home without exceeding the number of brake depressions which would cut the final distance into the rubber bulb. His death, to all intents and purposes, should perhaps have taken place next morning after he had started out again, except for something happening there and then.

  “Drawing up finally at Garage A, next to where he lived, he jumped out, opened the door with his Yale key, slid the heavy rolling contraption back, and then stepped back into his waiting car.”

  Kelsey paused a moment and then went on: “At the further end of that garage, however, was nothing else, chief, but a delicate mahogany and glass tea-cart which Miss Annabelle Lee had bought to give to her sister up the block, and which she had to hide in the garage so the sister wouldn’t glimpse it in the flat before her birthday, when she was to be presented with it. Lee drove in, but put a little too much force on his machine, and what did he have to do but jam on his brake with all his might to keep from running the heavy car plank against the opposite end of the garage and smashing that tea-cart into kindling wood. Then what? We know full well now that he must have sliced into the bulb with that last action. And we know that the dia-cyanosine was rushing out into the car pell-mell. Now Johnstone Lee was a bit deaf. And Johnstone Lee, as he sat there, unbuttoning the flaps of the car, to have it ready for next morning, didn’t know that he was monkeying around in a little enclosure which was rapidly filling up with a gas that meant death. We do know that he got two of the flaps unbuttoned, for Miss Lee found them that way next morning. Of a sudden Johnstone Lee must have got deathly sick and weak. He staggered to the open door, weakly got himself through it, and tottered along the sidewalk till he reached his vestibule, where, like Rothblume, he collapsed completely.”

  “And how about the diagnosis of ptomaine poisoning?” asked McIlr
oy. “And how did the garage get closed again? Also how did Bresloff expect to remove the evidences of his crimes? There’s lots to be explained here yet.”

  “Yes,” assented Kelsey. “About the first question, I talked to Dr. LeMoyne, the toxicologist of North Western University, this morning, by ‘phone. LeMoyne says that Lee must have swallowed the gas as well as breathed some of the mixed air. If he did the former, chief — well, there you’d get gastric symptoms, not unlike taking cyanide by the mouth. And gastric symptons, in the hands of a young medico such as they called for Lee, are likely to be put down as ptomaine poisoning.” He paused. “About the second question: How did the garage close itself? It didn’t. I had Roberts interview every janitor, window washer, and houseman in that neighbourhood early this morning. I figured that somebody — a menial necessarily, and somebody that knew Lee — must have come along and closed that door. And sure enough, Joe Niblo, an old white-haired negro whom Lee had hired often to scrub out the garage and wash the two windows at its rear, and who lives in an alley near there, proved to be the key. He was coming along that night. He saw the garage door open, and nobody in it. He thought Lee must have forgotten to close it. So he shoved it to — and it locked itself with the spring lock. Thus ends the case of Johnstone Lee, all but the answer to your third question: How did Bresloff expect to remove the traces of his crimes?

  “Bresloff,” continued Kelsey, “in each one of his murders was gambling that his method was so unique and so unthought-of, that he could locate the car in its owner’s garage that night, where the police or relatives would presumably run it. He knew that in the excitement of a man crawling out of a car and staggering across the street to drop dead, a car would stand for hours under the eye of the nearest traffic officer, where it would discharge its tyreful of compressed death and then air out. After that it would be removed to its owner’s garage. All that was required for him was a trip that night, a little window jimmying, and a clipping of the tube off of the fatal tyre. But Bresloff had rare luck, I’ll say. In the first place, Paddon went into the river and the dredgers pulled up the tyre and threw it back again. Rothblume’s car disappeared and was never heard of again; and the secret, even granting that Jimmie Kazan ever guessed it or worked it out, was locked up in a crook’s mind. As for Johnstone Lee, Bresloff went down to his garage late that night, after coolly calling up for him and finding he had died. Dia-cyanosine, it seems, is much heavier than air, and while chances looked very good that the gas had all dissipated itself by that time, and flowed out under the wide crack of the big rolling doors in front, and the like open spaces under the rear entrance, Bresloff nevertheless put on a simple gas mask made out of a canister containing cotton saturated with a cyanic filter of some sort. And having removed a pane of glass from the window in the rear, he crept in, cut off the tube and bulb, rolled ‘em up, and took his departure. The only clue left was one that no woman, like Annabelle Lee, could ever make anything out of: A rubber tyre with a round hole in it and an inner tube the same. That’s all.”

  Kelsey turned and surveyed Parkley, the stenographer, a bit quizzically. “Well, youngster, I’m done,” he assured the latter. “If that dark thunder-cloud don’t get off your face, I’m thinking we’re going to have rain before evening!” He laughed “Go on with the rest of the yarn that the chief is looking for.”

  “Where were we, chief?” asked Parkley, haughtily, ignoring Kelsey’s facetiousness.

  “We’re ready now, I guess, to go ahead with the fourth murder — the case of Eaves,” ventured McIlroy. “Now why was Eaves marked for death, threatened with a letter and a deck of cards with three kings missing, and killed when he wasn’t one of the original thirteen kings? Tell me that first.”

  Folwell broke in for the first time at this point. “Yes, there is the question that puzzled even Eaves himself. He had been made the fourth king, by the warning nature of the message he had received, yet neither his name nor picture had been included in that display in Riswold’s Magazine. Why Bresloff appointed him as the fourth victim when, as Mr. Parkley has stated, still two more of the Riswold’s Magazine kings kept their machines in Johnston’s Loop Garage; why Bresloff in turn killed him by the knife rather than in the automatic mantrap; and how Bresloff knew Eaves was in the office that night when he had seen me drive away in Eaves’s car dressed as Eaves — all these are questious to be cleared up.” He paused. “And the death of the girl, Roslyn Van Etten, reported to be Avery Reardon. Is that a chance incident — or is it, too, involved in some way in Bresloff’s murder scheme?”

  Parkley stared in his direction for a moment, then dropped his eyes to the typed sheets in his hand. He continued to speak in the direction of his superior only. “All these questions are cleared up entirely by Bresloff’s statement. After he had disposed of three of the thirteen kings in succession, he discovered a surprising thing: he found that prosaic American business men refuse to scare, even when the scare is embellished by red, blue, green, and gold playing cards. The secret method he was using was a successful one, but he hadn’t counted on having to kill the whole thirteen off in order to clean up the street. Then, too, I wonder personally, chief, if that exhibition of power that Dr. Goldbeck speaks about wasn’t losing its novelty. Whatever it was, Bresloff suddenly turned his activities into practical money-making channels. It seems, chief, that Bresloff owned a promissory note for five thousand two hundred and sixty-five dollars, secured by twenty-five per cent. of the stock of the National Industrial Securities Company, Eaves’s promotion company. For some time Bresloff carried the delusion that his $5,265 was secured, but one day he got suspicious that he was holding an empty bag. He went to Gurnow’s detective agency, that private Russian agency on Van Buren Street, chief — and paid ‘em thirty-five dollars to look up the status of that company.

  “They put an operative on the case, and this man, taking the part of a foreign stock promoter seeking an assistant, got in with one of the confidential employees of Eaves’s company, Meier by name, and pumped him to a fare-you-well. From the report rendered, the stock was worthless, for every cent made by the company was paid out in fictitious expenses to Eaves himself, and the rest drawn by him in salary as general manager. Eaves himself was well fixed, and the company itself had perhaps thirty thousand dollars in assets, consisting of claims, options, grants, leases and elaborate furnishings. Bresloff, sore, was in a queer position. The man who had signed the note owned nothing. But Bresloff knew a way to collect on it, nevertheless. It was this: simply force Eaves out of business by a threat that would scare him into quitting the game and dissolving the corporation, in which case he would either have to apportion up the assets of the company to the stockholders or, what was more likely, buy in their stock. In that case Bresloff could have attached the stock he held and come forward as a stockholder, selling his stock for not less than the amount of the note which it was securing: Fifty-two hundred and sixty-five dollars.

  “There was still another way, however, if Eaves refused to scare. The operative who had investigated conditions for Bresloff found on record at the County Building a pre-nuptial contract between J. Hamilton Eaves, president of the company, and one Mrs. Mariella Pettibone of Chicago, in which all of Eaves’s property, real and personal, in case of his death, was to revert to Mrs. Pettibone’s son. Thus if Eaves was killed off, the drawer of the note would be heir not only to Eaves’s company but to all the property and money Eaves had accumulated. Then the note would and could be paid in full.”

  “Then,” said McIlroy sharply, “the drawer of the note was Eaves’s stepson, Lionel Pettibone?”

  Parkley nodded. He was enjoying his position in the centre of the stage immensely. “Bresloff had some sort of dealings with Eaves’s stepson, which had resulted in young Pettibone giving him a note and securing it. Bresloff does not give the details, and claims they have no connection with matters. He does say, however, that through the report which the Gurnow agency gave him, he learned for the first time that the presi
dent of the company which the stock represented had a stepson who was no other than the drawer of the note.”

  “Bresloff’s cautiously hazy about the financial relationship between him and Pettibone,” shrewdly commented McIlroy. “It sounds like blackmail of some sort to me. And I’m thinking he intends to carry it further even in jail.” He paused. “What does Bresloff say about the girl? And about how he killed Eaves that night?”

  “First the girl,” declared Parkley. “Bresloff claims that the day on which Eaves’s time of grace expired was a cold, rainy one. And so he fixed the car early that afternoon to kill Eaves off by the dia-cyanosine route that night. But he was against a new proposition with respect to Eaves’s Durck-Palmer coupé. It had the very newest of new four-wheel brakes. A single touch of the foot-pedal was enough to give tremendous brakage. It was possible that the pedal wouldn’t be depressed to full extent more than a couple of times at best, between the Loop and Clarkson Court where Eaves lived. So he got a softer, thinner bulb this time. And he ground down his knife-blade till it would shave the very hairs off his forearm. The angle of the brake in this car would ensure a perfect slicing motion across the bulb. And he was going to ensure himself that one full depression of that brake — one traffic snarl — one motion of knife edge across bulb — and that bulb would be cut apart. Well, all that was very nice, but a complication happened that afternoon. A telephone message from Eaves came into Johnston’s garage at four-fifteen. It was from Eaves himself. He had promised to send a taxi-cab for a girl employee of his, Avery Reardon by name, living at 380, Wisconsin Street, who was taking a night boat out of Chicago at six o’clock. He had told her over the ‘phone at noon that he would personally see that a machine would call for her at a quarter of five. Now, last Monday afternoon, you’ll remember, chief, was the afternoon of the morning when the Chicago taxicab drivers went out on strike for two days, and we had so many slugging and shooting affairs to handle from here. It seems that Eaves had tried every taxicab company in Chicago, and there wasn’t a chance to raise a machine anywhere. He asked Johnston, who had answered the ’phone, if he could send out an employee of the garage in Eaves’s two-passenger Durck-Palmer coupé to get the girl and take her down to the Goodrich docks. Johnston, who was half-way sober now, and was anxious to please his customers, came out into the garage proper and ordered Bresloff to get out of his overalls, wash up and comb his hair, get into a neat, dark-blue livery that the garage owned and go to the address that Eaves had named and get the latter’s friend.