by Paul Ernst
Ryan’s gray eyes got a touch of green in them. His cigarette had stopped halfway to his lips, and his hand stayed poised there holding it.
“You what?”
Whether or not Ellen had meant to blurt out the infuriating idiocy, I couldn’t know. But blurt it she had, and now her lips tightened in perverse obstinacy and I breathed, “Oh, Lord.”
“I came to see her about a mermaid,” Ellen repeated, cutting her throat twice in the same spot.
A look of unlovely satisfaction touched the lieutenant’s face, and I thought I could read his mind with fair accuracy. One of his suspects, perhaps the first on his list, was this close relative of a well-known politician, a person to be handled with velvet-padded tongs if he knew what was good for him.
But if she made a fool of herself? If she proved uncooperative, flippant, defiant? That let him off the hook. So possibly he’d hoped for something of this sort from the Senator’s niece. At any rate, he had it.
“So you came to see Rose Rosslyn about a mermaid,” he said. “That’s very interesting. Better even than the one about a dog. We’ll take it up some more at Headquarters.”
The last remaining color went from Ellen’s face. She could see the pictures just as plainly as I—Night Club Dancer Murdered, Senator’s Niece Held For Questioning.
In no event could Ryan hold her long, but he could hold her for a while, at least, and with no kickbacks. “I know who she is and what this means, but she wouldn’t help. I ask some questions and she as good as tells me to go to hell.”
It was Ryan’s way of whittling a senator’s niece down to size. Howard Denham was almost as hot to handle. Now if he could shave Denham down, too, his bliss would be complete. He would be let alone, to handle this like any other murder case…
The door opened. A patrolman came in with Checckia.
Ryan turned on them like a snapping turtle, quietly furious at the interruption. The man said hastily, “Rose Rosslyn’s suitcase. This guy—” he jerked his head toward the manager—“just found it. In the checkroom.”
Ryan had been sitting on the straight wood chair before the dressing table, legs straddling it, arms on its back. He got up now as if a bee had suddenly been inserted between the chair’s seat and his, and he reached for the case.
It was a standard overnight bag with the cosmetics compartments cleared out for space; Rose had had enough of that equipment in her dressing room. It was plain black, good but not fancy, and I could tell by the way Ryan picked it up that it was nearly empty.
Nearly empty, but not quite.
He put it on the dressing table and flipped the catches open. He lifted the lid, and there was a yellow satin dance costume, taking up a very little space, and a plain cardboard box about the size and shape of one which might hold a large chocolate egg at Easter time. There was also a small envelope. That was all.
“This was found in the checkroom?” Ryan repeated, lifting out the box. It seemed quite heavy for its small size.
“Yes,” said Checckia. Healthy looking with his roof-top tan, in good trim, not overweight or soft, he was sweating like a fat man in an obstacle race.
“Who does the girl there say she took it from? Rose?”
“She didn’t know it was there,” replied Checckia. “It was in back, with some boxes and stuff. Rose must have come in before she was at the counter, and put the bag there herself. I knew she’d come early tonight,” he added, “but I didn’t know it was that early.”
“Why did she come early?”
Checckia moved his shoulders, very calm and easy—except for the sweating. “I don’t know.”
Ryan opened the cardboard box and I saw him stiffen slightly. One of his rare moments of surprise. Some color came back to Ellen’s face and some relief to mine.
The thing he’d taken from the box was a small bronze statuette. Or possibly plaster with bronze gilt over it. The figure of a mermaid.
4
IT’S funny how things break so fast when they start breaking. You drone along, ask questions, pry and poke. It’s routine and nothing’s ever going to happen—and then, bang! A question gets an answer to take your hair off. And there is another break, and swiftly, still another.
The second break in this case came while Ryan was still staring—with, I am sure, a lot of disappointment—at that little figurine. So Ellen Keppert had come here to see a girl about a mermaid. No matter why—she had. She wasn’t uncooperative, flippant, all the rest he’d counted on throwing at an agitated D.A. when he messed with these big names.
The door opened again and Howard Denham entered, with Stengel behind and prodding him. The look was so thoroughly one of arrester and arrestee that I could almost see the handcuffs.
“Got this stuff from him,” Stengel said, spreading a small pile of things on the dressing table beside the opened overnight bag. Denham looked as if he might make a break for the pile, but managed to contain himself.
It was the usual conglomeration to come from a man’s pockets—change, wallet, lighter, small knife, etc. Plus something that did not usually come from pockets, at least those of a dinner jacket.
Two heavy brown-paper envelopes, not large, of private correspondence size, but bulky.
Ryan opened them.
In each were fifty one-hundred-dollar bills—ten thousand dollars.
“Inner pocket on each side of his coat,” Stengel explained. “An envelope in each.”
Ryan joined the rest of us in staring at Denham. “Howard—” Ellen whispered thinly. Then her mouth closed and I knew that from that moment on it would stay closed. Checckia dabbed at his perspiring face with a not-so-snowy handkerchief.
“Okay,” Ryan said to Denham. “Why?”
Denham smiled. It was a taut smile, the kind that frequently precedes a left hook to someone’s jaw. “About now,” he said, “I think I’d better say, ‘I want to see my lawyer.’”
“You’d rather have me make all I can of this, maybe make things a lot worse because I’ll be feeling around in the dark, than tell me about it?”
“I’d like to speak to my lawyer,” Denham said.
Ryan’s lips opened, and closed. He nodded. Let Denham speak to anyone he chose; it wouldn’t matter much, now.
Denham also had been whittled down to size by the strange appearance of that ten thousand dollars. Ellen had bobbed back a bit with the bizarre discovery of the little bronze mermaid, but Ryan had enough on her. Big name or no big name, he had enough. He could follow his accustomed efficient procedure with them, at leisure, gloves off…
For quite a while something had been trying to tell itself to me, and I hadn’t been able to place it. I’d been sitting here in this plywood-walled cubicle where a girl had been shot, and listening to sounds penetrating from all four sides, and still I hadn’t caught it. Too obvious, maybe. Now, I did; perhaps the sight of Ellen’s scared but determined face sharpened me.
“Ryan!” I exclaimed.
He was a second late in turning; Sam Cates, Home Protection Insurance Company, had been out of his mind and calculations for some minutes.
I combed the voice straighter. “Come outside a minute, will you?”
His lips took on an exasperated look. “Now, really,” that look said, “let’s keep things in proportion, shall we? Just because I’ve let you stick around doesn’t mean you can butt in—”
“A thought,” I said, as casually as I could. “I’ll tell you here, if you like. But I think it had better be for you alone.”
Checckia, Stengel, Ellen, the patrolman, Denham were staring at me. Ryan’s gaze said, “This had better be good.” He nodded, and we went out to the corridor. He closed the door and stood with grim expectancy.
“We’d better move up the hall,” I told him. “You can hear right through that door. And the walls.”
He went toward the supper room with me. I stopped near Checckia’s office door. “And that’s the payoff,” I said. “That’s the thought I had.”
“L
ook here—” he began, jaw hard.
“The door and walls of Rose Rosslyn’s room,” I said. “Paperboard. Yet she was supposed to have been shot in there.”
His eyes were narrowed, steady on me in the dimness of the corridor.
“She couldn’t have been shot in there without its being heard all over the place,” I said. “It couldn’t have happened in any of the dressing rooms—you can hear a sneeze through any of the walls. There’s only one room back here where a shot could be fired and probably not be heard.”
Ryan took a long breath. In a curiously resigned way he opened the door marked, Manager, Mr. Checckia. I said, “Yes. In here. Soundproofed so the club racket wouldn’t get in—and just as good at keeping noise inside from getting out.”
We went into Checckia’s office, and he shut the door. “If the girl was killed in here, how did she get to her dressing room?”
That was my point. That was what had come to me when Ellen’s face beseeched somebody to do something. Preferably somebody named Sam Cates.
“Someone carried her from here to there,” I said. “And I don’t think Ellen Keppert could have been the one. Do you see her, small as she is, carrying a load like Rose Rosslyn across a hallway and into another room? In a hurry?”
“If,” Ryan said, “Rose Rosslyn was shot here.”
“Let’s find out,” I said, and got down, hands and knees, on the dark carpeted floor.
There must have been more blood from Rose’s mortal head wound than had showed in her dressing room, and if she had been shot in here there ought to be some evidence of it. She had been carried out to hide the fact that the murder had taken place in Checckia’s office; correspondingly the carpet would also have been thoroughly cleaned…
I found it near the desk. Between it and the safe. A damp spot, not showing in the carpet’s nap, but larger than the damp spot in the dressing room.
I said, “Here,” and Ryan bent beside me.
He took a small envelope from his pocket. “I’ll clip some of the nap and send it to the lab. They can tell us in the morning if there are traces of blood.”
He didn’t seem quite interested enough, and I looked sharply at him. Was I making an already made discovery? Had Ryan thought this out long ago and said nothing because it might destroy his advantage over the Keppert name? I didn’t know. But now, looking closer, I could swear a bit of the carpet nap had already been clipped.
“You knew before that Rose was killed in here,” I said. “You knew it, and sat on the knowledge.”
“How you talk,” said Ryan, folding the envelope over the nap clippings.
“You sat on it because it puts Ellen Keppert in the clear.”
“Does it?”
“She couldn’t have carried…”
“Maybe not. You’re underestimating the things a person can do if her life depends on it, but maybe not. However—Denham, her intended cousin-in-law, could have.”
It left me without a reply. Denham could have. And it still seemed odd that he should be here tonight along with Ellen. Somewhat more than odd when you thought of the money found on him!
I looked around the little office. The ceiling. The walnut paneling. I saw it high on the paneling, though you would have thought the ceiling would be the place.
A little pocket in the wood, an indentation that could have been made by the rounded head of a ball peen hammer, but which had pretty certainly been made by a bullet. I stood on the damp spot and tried to slant my head so that a bullet entering under my chin and going out through the top of my head would hit that pocket in the wood. It took a grotesque angle to do it.
“If you pointed a little twenty-two at me,” said Ryan, “and I grabbed your wrist and twisted it up, bending you backward at the same time, it might go off in your hand. And the slug might wind up there.”
“If I’d pointed a gun at you,” I retorted, “you could plead self-defense.”
And this, it came to me, was why he’d not been too quick to announce that the dead girl had not been killed where she’d later been found. If, as I thought, he had made this discovery before me. Ryan was an honest man, but he was a hard man, too, impatient of restraints caused by celebrated names. Let this part of the investigation come out a little later, after he’d had his shot at Howard Denham and Ellen Keppert.
He said something about pleading self-defense, perhaps, but pretty certainly not getting away with it; and he steered me out the door. In the corridor he said casually, “I guess you can run along now. I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow. Thanks for the…”
“This still may be part of my case,” I said quickly. “It was helpful of you to let me sit in so far. I’d like to keep on, if you don’t mind.”
His look told me his opinion of that. He didn’t like any part of me and he had got off on the wrong foot when he included me in, playing it smart, in the beginning. Having done so, however, he could hardly reverse himself now without admitting a mistake.
“Sure, sure,” he said, through his teeth. “If you want it that way.”
I thanked him, playing it straight, as he had, and we went back to Rose Rosslyn’s dressing room.
Checckia, Stengel, Ellen and Denham were still crowded in Rose’s dressing room when we returned. They looked swiftly at us when Ryan opened the door, but none of them said anything; each—save Stengel, of course—was no doubt saying to himself, “The less I talk the less chance I have of spilling something I shouldn’t.” And I had begun to think by now that every one of them had things he or she could have spilled that would make interesting hearing.
Ryan said, “Miss Keppert, Mr. Denham, we won’t need you for a few minutes. Will you wait in the other room, please?”
Denham nodded, tight-lipped, and went out with no glance at either of us. Ellen looked at me as she passed us near the doorway, asking with her eyes, “What’s up? Why did you and Ryan go out of this room and what did you find while you were out?”
The two turned left and went to the big supper room. Ryan closed the door on Stengel and Checckia and me and himself.
Ryan said to Stengel, “You told me, I think, that the door to Checckia’s safe was closed but not locked when you first looked around his office.”
Checckia jumped a foot, then clamped control on himself. Stengel nodded. “Yeah. Somebody, Checckia, I suppose, had shut the safe door but hadn’t twirled the knob.” Ryan looked at Checckia, who was staring at his fingernails as if he’d never seen things like that before.
“Don’t you usually keep your safe locked?”
Checckia cleared his throat. I got the feeling that inwardly he was exploding in all directions under the press of some new tension. “Yes. I usually do.”
“But, tonight,” said Ryan, “it was open for anyone who wanted to get into your safe.”
“I forgot to turn the knob, I guess. Sometimes I do.” Checckia cleared his throat again. “But that’s not as careless as it sounds. Almost always I keep the safe locked, so anybody just looking at it would think it was locked tonight, even though it wasn’t—”
“When was the last time you opened the safe tonight? Can you remember?”
Checckia thought a minute. And I mean he thought! You could tell. He wasn’t just putting on an act for Ryan’s benefit. The announcement that Ryan’s man, Stengel, had begun the investigations by finding Checckia’s safe door unlocked had jolted the hell out of the manager.
“I opened my safe at nine-thirty,” he said after a minute. “The cashier needed some more small bills to make change with.”
“Your safe was locked at nine-thirty?” said Ryan.
“Yes—Yes! I’m sure of it. I remember unlocking it.”
“You got the cash, closed the door, and forgot to turn the knob?”
“I must have. Yes.”
“Did you go into the safe after that?”
“No.”
“So it was closed, but not secured, from then on.” Ryan lit a cigarette. “And anyone who tried the do
or could have opened it.”
Checckia nodded, and moistened his lips.
“I wonder,” said Ryan softly, “why you forgot. Did something happen at about that time to distract your attention? Or did someone come to your office that you hadn’t expected to see?”
“Nothing happened,” replied Checckia. “I opened the safe, got out the money for the cashier, closed the safe, and forgot to turn the knob. That’s all. As I said, I’ve done it before, sometimes.”
Ryan nodded as if satisfied, and suddenly shifted his line of fire entirely.
On the dead girl’s dressing table were the little bronze mermaid and the small envelope which he had taken from Rose’s overnight bag. Ryan opened the envelope and took a snapshot from it. It was a picture of a smiling, good-looking young man with a vaguely familiar face. He was leaning against something and it was a hot-weather picture because he was in sport shirt and thin slacks, both whipped against his body by a breeze. Behind him, as background, was a glimpse of an iron railing, and then the ruffled plate of a lake or of the ocean.
The thing he was leaning against was a full-sized replica of the little statuette. A more than life-sized statue of a mermaid, assuming mermaids are about the size of people.
“You know this fellow?” Ryan asked Checckia, showing the perspiring manager the snapshot.
Checckia nodded almost before looking. “Yes. It’s Dick Rosslyn, Rose’s brother.” Which explained the faintly familiar look of the young man’s face; the features were a bit like his sister’s.
Rose Rosslyn’s brother. Died last year, I remembered Mansfield telling us.
Ryan remembered, too. “Dead now?”
“Killed about a year ago in an auto smash-up.”
“Was he working for you last year when he was killed?”
“Not just at that time. But he was working for me before, and would have come back to me. He and Rose were a dance team, and a pretty good one. Then Dick said he wanted to fill a three-weeks’ spot at some Jersey place. I didn’t want to let him go, but he said he’d quit if I didn’t. So I let him off, while Rose did a solo number to fill their spot. And a week later I got the notice that he was dead. But what’s all this got to do with Rose?”