The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Zenith Brown

  And another man spoke. “That’s a manuscript number. It’s attached to the manuscript up in the composing room. How the hell did it get down here?” It was a tall young beanpole of a man speaking. He was so loosely jointed, it was surprising he stayed together. “I’d better phone up to Composition,” he said. “That’s off of Kane’s profile of Judge Whitney. Where in hell’s the manuscript?”

  Where indeed, I thought. I tried to look as if I was as surprised as everybody else. But I knew before Bob Fuoss came back from the telephone that Myron’s profile of Judge Whitney had disappeared.

  “All I need now is for somebody to tell me Benjamin Franklin took it,” Captain Malone said gently.

  7

  That numbered slip of yellow-colored paper that Captain Malone held in his hand looked very small and innocuous, but in effect it was a streak of chain lightning. In one flash it linked the murdered body of Myron Kane, lying there beside the goldfish pool in the marble lobby of The Curtis Publishing Company in Independence Square, in front of that glass mosaic of a sunset garden, with the manuscript of his profile of Judge Whitney and with the Whitneys themselves, due west in Rittenhouse Square. Or so it seemed to me, with the background of the last twenty-four hours that I had. It apparently wasn’t that simple to the chief of the homicide squad. Captain Malone listened quietly when Bob Fuoss, the managing editor, came back from the telephone at the reception desk.

  “I called Composition, on the ninth floor,” he said. “That’s off of the manuscript of Kane’s piece on Judge Whitney. It was sent to the monotype keyboard this morning. The foreman—Alexy—says it was in his basket on his desk when he went out for lunch.”

  Captain Malone’s eyes moved slowly toward the pool and to the knife with its razor edge and stiletto point that somebody had put on the refectory table in the center of the lobby. A little green scum from the bottom of the pool was clinging moistly to the gunmetal-colored adhesive tape wrapped around the handle. “Ninth floor,” he said meditatively. He nodded at the knife. “And that came from the ninth floor too?” He was deliberate and quiet-spoken. “I guess somebody knew his way around. I went through the plant once, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it myself.”

  He seemed to be listening, and it wasn’t till I noticed that that I became aware of the low rumble of the presses that throbbed and vibrated all around us, like the roar of far-distant but continuous thunder. You didn’t notice it at first, and when you did, it was hard to tell whether you were hearing it with your ears or feeling it through the soles of your feet. I found out later, when I went over there, that the thick, fireproof wall behind the bronze doors of the elevators, extending from Walnut Street clear through the building to Sansom Street and dividing manufacturing from the editorial and business divisions, was what kept it from being completely deafening.

  Captain Malone turned to Fuoss. “I’ll start at that end, and I’ll need somebody to show me around. You get your people back where they belong. I’ll be around after a while.”

  Four men came through the plate-glass double doors—one of them with a camera, two with a stretcher. Captain Malone motioned the little group of Post editors and Colonel Primrose and me toward the elevators. We stood there avoiding one another’s eyes as the four men set to work. They didn’t know Myron Kane. He was nothing now; he could be pushed around and carted off as a part of the job they made their living at. It didn’t seem that that ought to happen quite that way to Myron Kane, with his Homburg and his stick and his London-tailored overcoat, just as it happened to anybody who’d never seen a sultan or told an ambassador what a prime minister had said. All the arrogance and ego and ability that had made Myron a dramatic figure, whether one had any affection for him or not, were gone, and I think we were all a little ashamed that that was the way it was.

  Malone’s fatherly gaze rested on the editors. “Just give your names to the sergeant here,” he said. “Go on about your business. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  I had the idea there was a feeling of relief that I wasn’t the only one to share. I saw one editorial Adam’s apple that had been traveling like an agitated plumb bob over an open shirt collar and loosely knotted orange-and-black: knit tie take a sudden nose dive and flutter back to normal. There was a deliberate and well-mannered exit into the elevator—I mean, no editor trampled on any other to get in—but it was done with extraordinary dispatch. They stood waiting for Ben Hibbs, who was talking to Colonel Primrose—a very sober and moist-browed group of men, uncomfortably aware of the relentlessly paternal eye of Captain Malone fixed on them. I could see them visibly relaxing as the bronze door closed at last, leaving Colonel Primrose and me still down there with the chief of the homicide squad and the man who had seen Benjamin Franklin.

  I gave my name and Abigail Whitney’s address to the sergeant. The man at the desk wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked at me.

  “They think I’m crazy,” he said hopelessly. “But I tell you I was sitting here sorting out the cards.” He pointed at the stack of interview cards by the house phone on the desk. “A lot of people came in all at once, right after lunch. Then I was filing the duplicates we keep to check up on anybody still in the building. I just happened to look up, and there was Benjamin Franklin—funny clothes and all.”

  He pointed to the candelabrum with the carved pedestal next to the fluted pillar and the bust of Franklin.

  “He was walking right across there. I thought it was funny, but you get used to all sorts of cockeyed gags around this place, and he looked like he knew where he was going, all right. He gets over in front of the table and stops and looks all around, and walks up on the terrace behind all those trees they got stuck around, and in a minute he comes out and walks on over there toward Personnel, and then he just disappears. I don’t see him go or anything. I think to myself, Gee, that’s funny, and first thing I know, I turn around, and here he is right by me. He’s looking straight through the columns, and his arm’s up, pointing over at the pool, I guess. I look over and I don’t see anything. All I see is those two guys coming in the door.”

  He nodded toward the ink and paper salesmen talking to the detectives by the window.

  “I look around again, thinking I must be going bats, and he’s gone again. There’s a girl coming down the stairs.” He pointed to the narrow flight of steps going up at the side of the elevator shaft. “I say, ‘Did you meet anybody going upstairs?’ and she says, ‘No,’ and goes on across over there, just when those two fellows start over to look at the mosaic picture. She goes right on past them, and all of a sudden one of them lets out a yell, and that’s the first I know anything happened to Mr. Kane.”

  As he talked, he kept shuffling the small stack of unfiled appointment cards. I could see the names on them, and I saw Myron’s, but no other that I knew.

  Captain Malone and Colonel Primrose came over.

  “You keep a record of everybody who comes into the building?”

  The man opened a drawer and took out a small file. “These are today’s,” he said. “Before one o’clock.”

  “I suppose there are other entrances,” Captain Malone said.

  “Just the two in Sansom Street. They keep a check there too. Nobody can get in without giving his name.”

  “Except the people in the building. How many? A couple thousand of ’em?”

  “But they’re all known,” the man said. “Or if they aren’t, they have to show their passes. We know everybody this side. Only first-register people come in here. That’s executives, editors and their private secretaries. They use this elevator. There’s another one for second-register people over there on the other side for office employees who come in at Sixth and Sansom. The men in the plant use the one at Seventh and Sansom.”

  “When did Kane come in?”

  “Half past one.”

  The man picked out Myron’s card and handed it to him.

  “To see Mr. Fuoss,” he said. “That’s the tall, lean one.”
/>   “Did you see him come down?” Captain Malone asked.

  “No, sir, I didn’t. There was a crowd of Circulation people in around two, and he could have come down in the elevator while I was writing down their names. They were all here at the desk, and you have to call up and see if it’s all right for each one of them to go up. They don’t let anybody be in the place without knowing about it.”

  Captain Malone had been going through the cards in the morning file. As he put them down on the marble-top desk and reached for the afternoon stack, his coat sleeve knocked the pile a little crooked. The one on top was for somebody named Bergman. The one underneath was also staring me in the face. It was for Mr. Samuel Phelps, to see Mr. Fuoss. The appointment was for 12:05. Mr. Samuel Phelps, I thought. Soapy Sam. Elsie Whitney’s husband.

  “I don’t see,” Captain Malone said benevolently, “if the manuscript they’re talking about was swiped between twelve and twelve-thirty, how anybody could hang around here until two o’clock to murder this fellow unless he belonged here. It looks to me——”

  The house phone buzzed. The man picked it up, listened for an instant and handed it to Captain Malone.

  He listened silently. “Okay, hold everything,” he said. “I’ll be up.”

  He turned back to Colonel Primrose. “It looks the same way still,” he said placidly. “The knife disappeared at lunchtime too. The fellow that owns it had to borrow one when he got back at twelve-thirty. I don’t like to disagree with you, colonel, but, so far, it looks like an inside job to me. Anyway, the Whitneys are high-class people. But we’ll go into that.”

  Sam Phelps’ appointment card was still lying almost full-face at the top of the pile, but neither of them had so far connected it with the name of Whitney. It would happen sooner rather than later, I knew from long experience.

  Captain Malone looked at me. “Colonel Primrose tells me you’re staying at Judge Whitney’s sister’s house and that Kane was there, too, Mrs. Latham. If you’ll stop around at the police station, Twelfth and Pine, tomorrow morning, let’s say, if that’s convenient, I won’t keep you now.”

  He went on, taking with him the file with Sam Phelps’ name in it, and I looked at Colonel Primrose. I was still too astonished and too upset to think of anything to say. I couldn’t have been more taken aback.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said curtly. “You’re not in Washington, and Malone’s not Captain Lamb. This couldn’t be kept away from Rittenhouse Square, and there’s no use trying. We’re going up to the Post now.”

  “I,” I said, “am going back to Rittenhouse Square.”

  “That’s exactly where you’re not going. You’re coming with me.”

  The elevator door clanged shut behind us. “Sixth floor,” Colonel Primrose said. We went up in a grim silence.

  In the marble foyer on the sixth floor, another bust of Benjamin Franklin stood on another pedestal at the left. There was a narrow staircase at the right, the continuation of the one the receptionist thought Benjamin Franklin must have gone up, but that the girl coming down hadn’t met him on. It extended up to an iron-railed raised platform across the end of the foyer. Under it, an iron grille was set in the wall. Men’s voices were coming through it, their owners obviously unaware they could be heard outside, and reasonably, I suppose, as it turned out to be the men’s washroom. And it was hard to believe that they were part of the same subdued and silent group that had been wilting under Captain Malone’s spurious benevolence downstairs less than ten minutes ago. They were all talking at once.

  “. . . been asking for it . . . first-rate heel.”

  “Where’s Pete?”

  “Pipe down about Pete.”

  “Did you see the royal brush-off he gave the colonel?”

  “A primrose by a river’s brim, a simple Primrose was to——”

  “I don’t get who’d want to murder the guy.”

  “Me.”

  “Me too. I hated his——”

  “He burned me up.”

  “Who pinched the script?”

  “. . . who’d know the ropes?”

  “Pete——”

  “I said pipe down about Pete.”

  “Come on, you goons; the dicks’ll be up here——”

  “. . . and shut up about the row.”

  “We’ll all be in the clink if you don’t pipe down.”

  Colonel Primrose had stopped and was listening, deliberately and intently, his face oddly uneasy. I didn’t understand. It was quite obvious that none of the three men whose voices we could hear was seriously perturbed about himself or any of the immediate Post staff.

  But that was before Captain Malone had had any of them over at 12th and Pine, of course, and before his men had found the graphite smudges on the washroom door, and before they found out where the man they called Pete had really been.

  The Post editorial offices make a sort of hollow half rectangle along the 6th Street front of the building. Outside the editor’s office is a dark wood rail barrier past a reception desk and a Gargantuan soft-cushioned sofa, and the swinging gate has a defective hinge. It hippity-hopped and limped shut behind Colonel Primrose and me. In Ben Hibbs’ office, a desk stood in front of the windows, with an easy chair by it, complete with ottoman for the editorial legs to stretch out on. There seems to be something about reading manuscripts that makes it impossible for editors to keep their feet on the ground. At the moment, however, with a manuscript missing and the author of it dead, nobody was concerned with reading. The Editor, Bob Fuoss and Erd Brandt, the senior associate editor, were in a huddle at the end of a long table in the center of the Chinese rug. They stopped talking abruptly.

  “We’re going to try to figure this out,” Ben Hibbs went on then. “That doesn’t mean you birds are going to turn into amateur detectives. Colonel Primrose will handle that. And the fewer wisecracks anybody makes, the less trouble we’re going to have with Captain Malone’s gang. And no talking outside.” He nodded to Colonel Primrose.

  “Are all the members of the staff here?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  “Here or accounted for,” Bob Fuoss said. “Stu Rose is in the hospital with a gentleman rider’s busted vertebra. It’s Bob Murphy’s day in New York getting fiction material. Warner Olivier’s in Washington for the week. Fred Nelson and Marion Turner are extremely busy. They’ll be available as soon as the daily double’s in. Now, if Kane had been editor of the Racing Form——”

  “Where’s Pete?” Colonel Primrose inquired placidly.

  There was a short silence.

  “You mean Pete Martin?” someone asked, and someone else said, “He’ll be here in a minute.”

  I thought there was a tinge of uneasiness in the air.

  Colonel Primrose turned to Fuoss. “Kane was in to see you, I understand. What time?”

  “He came in at half past one. He wanted his script on Judge Whitney to make some corrections. I told him he could wait and make ’em in proof, because it had gone to the composing room. I was beginning to get sore, because he’d already called my secretary this morning and been told the same thing. He was nervous as a cat. I asked him if he’d put anything in that would get us in trouble, and he said no, he just wanted to polish it a little more. I told him it was a hell of a time to think of that, but he could polish the proof. Then I told him I was busy, and to get out, and he said he was waiting for a phone call. I told him he could wait somewhere else.”

  Another man who had just come in spoke. “He waited in my office, next door. But that’s all right. I’m used to it. Everybody waits there. I don’t have to make my living.”

  This was Day Edgar, I learned, and he spoke with a solemn and plaintive note of long suffering. He also spoke with one of the voices we’d heard through the grille in the washroom.

  “He got his phone call at ten minutes past two. I had one to make, and I had to go into Stuart Rose’s office to make it. He was gone when I came back.”

  More editors had come in.

&n
bsp; “I saw him go to the elevator—my door’s directly in front of it,” one of them said. It was Jack Alexander, a quiet, plumpish young man who was contemplating the point of his pencil on the pad in front of him. “I didn’t see him go down, because I went into Art Baum’s office, so he wouldn’t see me and come back and talk all afternoon. That was about a quarter past two. If Kane ever got in and started shooting the breeze, you couldn’t get him out.”

  “He was alone at the elevator?”

  “So far as I know, he was.”

  “This profile of Judge Whitney,” Colonel Primrose said. “Have you got a copy here?”

  Bob Fuoss shook his head. “We had only the one that was on the ninth floor.”

  There was a copy at my house in Georgetown or in the mail on its way there, I thought suddenly.

  “How many of you read it?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  Five of them had—the Editor, Bob Fuoss, Jack Alexander and Art Baum, all article men, and of course Harley Cook. None of the associate editors primarily concerned with fiction had read it.

  “Was there anything explosive in it?”

  All shook their heads.

  “We wouldn’t have taken it,” Fuoss said. “So far as I could see, it was a straightforward and interesting piece. There were a few cracks at the family. They were amusing, and not so malicious as Kane’s stuff usually was. I’d told him we weren’t interested in taking the hide off anybody.”

  Colonel Primrose had started to speak, when Fuoss suddenly brought his chair down on its front legs.

  “Phelps!” he exclaimed. “Mr. Samuel Phelps. Judge Whitney’s son-in-law. He was here this noon. Who saw him?” He looked around the blank faces at the table. “They called up from the lobby and said he was there and wanted to see me, just before twelve. He never showed up. You don’t think——”

  He broke off abruptly, pushed back his chair and was out of the room in a couple of strides. In a second, he was back again.

  “He never showed up at all,” he said. “Miss Ganz waited for him till a quarter to one. She called the desk back, but they hadn’t seen him.”