The Philadelphia Murder Story

by Zenith Brown

  In the instant before he said, “Get back, Mrs. Latham,” I saw what he had seen. It was Albert Toplady. He had a blue automatic in his hand, and his hand was raised. His face was gray and terrible as he stared at us, his hand shaking so that the gun was aimed God knows where. All I know is that I saw the muzzle of it, and it was aimed Colonel Primrose’s way then. And—well, I’ve always underestimated him, I guess. He walked deliberately across the room toward Mr. Toplady, the little man backing off into the corner, his finger trembling on the trigger of the gun.

  And I heard Colonel Primrose saying quietly, “I’ll take that, Mr. Toplady. It might go off.”

  He went up to him and took the pistol out of his hand, and then, as Albert Toplady suddenly collapsed, he caught him, moved a chair with one foot and let him gently down into it. I came on in, rather more than half paralyzed. That’s when I became aware of the room itself, and I was so dumfounded that I didn’t hear Colonel Primrose tell me to close the door until he came back and did it himself. He put up the window shades then, and I could see everything clearly in that unbelievable room.

  It was a shrine to Myron Kane. There wasn’t a foot of wall space that didn’t have his picture on it. They were all framed, and there were framed newspaper clippings. Some of the pictures had been cut from newspapers, others photographed from newspapers and book originals. Some of them were so enlarged that they were gray and indistinct. On a table against the wall was a large, thick, green-covered scrapbook. It lay there like the family Bible, and printed on it was WRITINGS OF MYRON KANE, THE GREAT CORRESPONDENT. And more. Lying across the table by the scrapbook, beside copies of the three books he’d written, was Myron Kane’s ebony walking stick with the silver presentation plaque on the crook handle.

  Mr. Toplady, gray and shaking, stared down at the floor, his hands moving aimlessly. I looked blankly at Colonel Primrose. He was standing there, his eyes moving slowly over the rows on rows of the handsome face on all the walls. He looked down then at the little man.

  “He was your son?” He asked it as gently as if he were speaking to a sick child.

  A convulsive tremor shook Albert Toplady’s body. “I never told anybody,” he said. “He thought I did. But I wouldn’t disgrace him. I’ve never said anything, not to anybody.”

  It was so horribly clear, then—Myron’s collapse when he didn’t get the letter I’d brought for him, and he thought the Whitneys would know. The snob, the beastly snob, I thought, and I tried to avoid the confident arrogance of the face plastered on the flimsy walls of the pathetic jerry-built little house.

  Mr. Toplady sensed what we were thinking, for Colonel Primrose must have been thinking it too. He looked up with a kind of pitiful appeal.

  “It wasn’t his fault. It was our fault. He couldn’t sign himself Albert Toplady—people would laugh. Myron Kane was his mother’s grandfather’s name. He was like him, big and handsome. He took it at school because the boys made fun of his name. We sent him to private schools, so he’d make influential friends. We wanted him to know important people and get ahead in the world, not be kept down to our level. We didn’t realize, until it was too late——”

  He put his head down on the table, one hand resting on Myron’s stick, his shoulders racked and shaking, sobbing without making a sound. It came to me suddenly, and not unkindly, that he had got what he wanted, in a way, because the silver plate on that stick bore the donor’s name, and it was a very important name indeed.

  Colonel Primrose was talking to him as I went out. I had to leave. I couldn’t take it any longer. Not when everywhere I turned I had to look at Myron while I had another picture of him in my own mind—the morning he came back to Abigail’s, unshaven and bitter against the Whitneys and the world. I knew now where he’d been; he didn’t have his stick then, and he had had it the night before when he’d slipped on the ice in front of Travis’ door. He was still saying, then, that he’d be ruined. It wasn’t his father so much, then, as the front he’d built up, in the Press Who’s Who that Colonel Primrose had once quoted from, and his perjured passport, and those sketches of his life on the dust covers of his books. It would be ridicule that would ruin him, if it ever got out.

  I walked out to the picket fence and stood there a little while. I’d started to go back in when I heard the telephone ringing inside, and I stopped as I heard Colonel Primrose.

  His voice was grave and urgent. “. . . he would call. If it is him, Mr. Toplady, tell him what I told you, and tell him you’re leaving here at once. Your life depends on it.”

  I went back, quietly and quickly. I had a sudden overpowering desire not to be even within telephone earshot of a voice I might be able to recognize. It seemed to me that what Myron Kane had got had been definitely coming to him. He was too intelligent and too able a man to have let himself live in a glasshouse that any chance stone could bring shattering down around his head. I looked back at the little house. Myron’s income had been enormous from his syndicated stuff and magazine articles and radio and books. He could at least have repaid what had been spent on him at the fancy schools or he could at least have sent one picture autographed with the flourish that was on the quite unsolicited one that I had in a drawer at home.

  As I went out the gate to get into the taxi, the door of a house across the street opened and Sergeant Buck came out. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been Daniel Boone or the Duke of Wellington. I’d reached the point of saturation. Sergeant Buck spat at some microcosmic detail in the middle of the street and I’m sure hit it on the nose, came on over and went in through Mr. Toplady’s gate, brother to the insensate rock, and only irritating to me when I suddenly thought how easy it would have been for Mr. Toplady’s aspen-leaf fingers to have sent Colonel Primrose permanently to Arlington.

  Colonel Primrose came out and got into the taxi.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Don’t do what?” Then he said, “Oh.” He shook his head soberly. “He’d have blown his brains out if I hadn’t. . . . Curtis Building, driver, and as quickly as you can, please.”

  He looked back, and I did too. Sergeant Buck was stationed out on Mr. Toplady’s porch. It’s the nearest I’ve ever come to seeing a man literally as big as a house.

  “How did you know about Myron?” I asked as we turned out of Pepperell Street.

  “You practically told me,” he said. “You know, I’ve always thought there was something phony about Myron. With that Who’s Who record, he just couldn’t have been such a damned snob. The idea occurred to me when you told me about Toplady, and the awe in his voice when he said Mr. Kane was right there in the same house with Mrs. Whitney. The odds were heavy on something personal in that. Of course, when I first saw all those pictures——” He stared ahead very gravely for a moment. Then he looked at me and smiled. “That isn’t why I came out. You’re making the same mistake Myron made. We’ve got a picture here with murder in it, Mrs. Latham, and nobody in the picture gives a damn who Myron’s father is. Incidentally, if they’d brought him up at a public school and taught him, at home, to respect decent and honest people, he’d have gone a lot farther than he did, because at the age of forty-two he’d still be alive.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded.

  “If Myron had been—well, let’s say a better man, he wouldn’t have taken advantage of a situation he found himself in, to do harm to another person. Thereby goading said other person into sticking a knife into him. That’s all I mean. Myron believed in living, but not letting live, and it backfired. And now, Mrs. Latham, be quiet. I really need to think this time. We’re meeting Malone at Curtis’.”

  But I couldn’t be quiet at that point, even though I saw clearly that not doing so meant a complete reversal of my own position when I’d fled from the front porch to the taxi. This sounded too much like Abigail’s speech, via me, to Laurel, about destroying a useful life. Myron wasn’t the only one who believed in living but not letting live.

&
nbsp; “Are you holding a brief for murder?” I demanded.

  He looked around at me with annoyance at first, and then sharp intentness. “Not at all. I expect to get Myron’s murderer before—— But that’s not what you mean?”

  I caught myself just in time. If I could only learn to be quiet when I was told to be, I thought.

  “He’s the only person who’s been murdered, isn’t he?” I said.

  He looked at me very oddly for an instant. Then he looked at his watch. “It’s twenty-five minutes past three,” he said. “Malone’s meeting me at the Post as soon as we can get there. Now, if you think you can keep still for about five minutes—— I don’t want to tax you unduly, of course.”

  The man who had seen Franklin was at the desk in the marble lobby. He told us to go on up, that Captain Malone was on the sixth floor, waiting. Captain Malone was on the sixth floor, but he wasn’t waiting. He appeared to be going right ahead. He’d taken over Day Edgar’s cubbyhole on the Walnut Street side and was looking down at that moment, very sardonically, at a pile of reports in front of him. He nodded to Colonel Primrose and gave me an odd glance, but he even pushed a chair up for me after he’d closed the door.

  “I’ve had the boys getting a line on all these people,” he said. He shuffled through the papers on the desk. “Here. Take a copy of the Post and turn to the masthead in back.”

  He pushed a copy of the magazine over to each of us.

  “There’s a sign over in the promotion department that says ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’ I suggested they move it over here. They had a cold-blooded murder in the lobby here a day ago, and this is the sort of thing they do after hours, as of last night. These are the ones that haven’t got an alibi they can prove backwards and forwards. They sure lead a blameless and uneventful life.” He looked at the masthead. “Benjamin Franklin’s first. No alibi. He parked his clothes in Mr. Nelson’s filing cabinet and disappeared.”

  He gave us a dour smile.

  “I’m skipping all those can prove alibis. E. N. Brandt. He left early and went over to the Franklin Institute and shepherded eleven kids through the place. He went home, ate dinner and went down in the cellar to rig up a periscope so a guy flat on his back could read in bed. That was for the next one, Stuart Rose. He’s in the hospital. Mr. Brandt was all right about being tailed, but he got a little sore when he found out one of his kids had showed my man his boxful of decorations from the last war. . . .

  “W. T. Martin. We’ll take him later.”

  He laid one of the reports aside.

  “Jack Alexander. No alibi. We thought we had something on him. He left here and met a beautiful blonde. They went to an Italian restaurant and then headed for Delancey Place. But it turns out the beautiful blonde is his wife and they went to Delancey Place because there’s a house there they’re thinking of buying.”

  Captain Malone shook his head.

  “Frederic Nelson. Some damn fool over at the second division had him try on the clothes in his filing cabinet. The coat would have been enough, almost. He headed for the Main Line last night, took his two English refugees to a movie and left his daughter at a school party, aired the cocker spaniel and spent the rest of the evening trying to fix the hot-water tank until my man felt sorry for him and fixed it. I might as well run a plumber’s shop.”

  He took another report.

  “Arthur Baum. He went out and ate supper and came back here. That looked interesting, but he went to his office, read a manuscript for a little while and then went out to that long sofa out there and went to sleep. He woke up at nine-thirty and went to a hotel and went to bed. Seems he likes to stay in town, so as he can work nights, because he lives on a farm up in Bucks County.

  “Next is Harley Cook. He’s got one of my best men in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia. He snakes out of here without an overcoat, so my man follows with just his hat on. They start out walking, and my God, they end up ten miles out in the country. How in the hell’s—pardon me, Mrs. Latham—my man to know Mr. Cook’s just taking his evening stroll? It’s twenty-eight degrees, and by the time my man gets back, he’s out like a light. Mr. Cook does some homework, and bless me if he doesn’t walk back in here this morning, and still no overcoat.” He looked grimly down at the report.

  “I take it,” Colonel Primrose said blandly, “that you’re closing in on Pete Martin?”

  Captain Malone looked at him. “The defense,” he said imperturbably, “to be temporarily unsound of mind. Do you know what he did last night? He beat it straight from the office to the train and went to Chester. Do you know what he did in Chester? He went to a roller-skating rink. Well, if he likes to roller-skate and talk to those half-pint Jezebels that hang around roller-skating rinks, I guess that’s his business.” He shuffled through his papers and took one out. “This,” he said, “is more like my business. Round ten o’clock on the day Kane was murdered, he went to Joe Moscowitz’s and hired the Benjamin Franklin outfit. He waited while Joe let out the belt and shoulder seams. He got the wig there too. He came back through the Seventh and Sansom Street entrance on the other side and took the elevator up to the ninth floor. That was around a quarter to twelve. He stopped and talked to Andrew Hesington—that’s the boy whose knife did the job. Hesington was just knocking off to go to lunch, and he remembers now that Martin didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Well, Mr. Martin had to go through the composing room to get over to this side. The boy on the elevator remembers bringing him down to the sixth floor with a bundle under his arm. He asked if the Post crowd had gone to lunch yet, and the boy told him he’d just taken a bunch of them down. He got off at the sixth floor and went into the washroom. He left a half dozen fingerprints on the woodwork. They look like graphite smudges, but they come out clear enough to make me believe in Santa Claus again. He washed up, apparently, and then he went to his office. His secretary saw him when she came in from lunch at one o’clock. He gave her some work, and nobody remembers seeing him again until considerably after Kane’s body was found. Except——”

  He looked across the desk at Colonel Primrose.

  “This afternoon, when Miss Frazier learned that the initials on the handkerchief she tried to burn weren’t MTW, but W T M, she admitted to me she found it in a phone booth on the second floor.”

  “May one inquire what Miss Frazier was doing in a phone booth on the second floor?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  Captain Malone nodded. “She’s anxious the judge doesn’t know, and I promised her I wouldn’t tell him. She’s decided to quit her job as his secretary, and came down here to apply for one. She came in the entrance at Sixth and Sansom, and was sent up to be interviewed by the lady in charge of personnel on the ninth floor. When she was on her way down, she heard Myron Kane had been killed. She got panicky and got off the elevator and came down the stairs. She saw a man dressed like Benjamin Franklin dodging into the phone booth, and she dodged into the women’s washroom and waited till she heard him running up the stairs. She started on down, but she heard somebody coming up, so she dodged into the phone booth, and that’s where she found the handkerchief.”

  “Does she say why it occurred to her that——”

  It was as far as Colonel Primrose got. The sound of running feet came nearer on the other side of the door, out in the foyer, and the door burst open and a red-faced detective from the second division headquarters at 12th and Pine was there. And that’s when we learned that Elsie Whitney Phelps’ dead body had been found on the frozen bank of the Wissahickon, and that it had been there since shortly after noon, concealed behind a clump of laurel bushes. I think the strange part of it was that at that very moment Captain Malone had picked up the heavy bronze medallion with Franklin’s head on one side and the Curtis Building on the other that in 1928 had commemorated the two-hundredth anniversary of The Saturday Evening Post, and that was now holding down some unfinished business on the side of Day Edgar’s desk. He was turning it round and round in his hands
, like a small heavy wheel. It was a mate to the one that had been used to put an end to Elsie’s irritating but no doubt useful life.

  Captain Malone sat there perfectly still for a moment, staring at the red-faced detective. He gathered his papers deliberately together, with the most remarkable composure, put them into his brief case and snapped it shut. He looked at Colonel Primrose.

  “You may be on the right track, colonel. I don’t know where Mr. Martin has been since he left Twelfth and Pine at ten thirty-five this morning. I’ll get in touch with you later. Sorry I can’t take you along now.”

  When Captain Malone had gone, Colonel Primrose sat there looking at the wall for a long time. He turned to me, his face troubled and very grave.

  “I’m wondering if I could have saved her,” he said. “I think not. She must have been a very stupid woman.”

  He went over to the window and stood looking down on Washington Square.

  “They say it’s greener than any other square because it was Potter’s Field in Revolutionary times,” he said. He was talking about the square, but I knew he wasn’t thinking about it, and he didn’t say anything else for quite a long time. Then he said, “It’s strange the way a very bright man will believe anything a red-headed girl wants to tell him.”

  He turned around.

  “I’m sorry about Elsie Phelps,” he said quietly. “And about her husband. I hope Soapy Sam’s alibi today is as watertight as the one he had yesterday.”

  I was still too shocked to say anything.

  “We’d better go and see your friend Abigail,” he said quietly. “I don’t quite understand that old woman.”

  We went out through the swinging gate. It limped to a stop behind us. There was no one around until we got to the door going out to the elevators, and then a girl came quickly through the partition that closed off the row of editorial offices.

  “Colonel Primrose,” she said, “Mr. Martin would like to see you, if you have time.”