by Paul Ernst
I sat up and rubbed my head. This was a mistake. I yelped when my fingers collided with the first of three large, beginning lumps and snatched my hand down again. I sat there a minute while the dizziness subsided, and I would have been literally a sitting duck for more trouble had my uninvited guest been still hanging around.
There was no trouble; it seemed I was as alone as I’d witlessly taken it for granted that I was. My entrance into the bedroom had scared the intruder out of the place—or else he thought he’d killed me with those cracks on the head and had run away as quickly as possible from a supposed corpse.
Groaning, I stood up, leaning against the wall till the pinwheels stopped twirling behind my eyeballs. Then I tottered to the bathroom and turned the lights on.
Blackjack? Could be. Or something with at least a little yield to it. For although the three lumps daintily rising like Himalayas from my skull testified to the force of the blows, there was no blood from two and only a few drops from the third. I wet a towel with cold water and held it against the lumps.
This was the kind of thing, I reflected, that my company insured people against—breaking and entering, and theft. And here it had happened to me. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that I might be as vulnerable as the clients, but it hadn’t. And another thing that had never occurred to me was to get insured myself. If anything was missing, it would be Master Sam Cates who replaced it…
But what might be missing? I didn’t own anything of real value, I had no jewelry other than a signet ring, which I was wearing, and a wrist watch, ditto. And I carry no more cash in my pockets than most men.
This meandering train of cotton-wool thought led logically to the question: What the devil had a burglar thought he’d get in here? Too stupid to case a joint before he took the risk of entering? Or had the marauder been just some hopped-up kid?
And why monkey around in a clothes closet? You don’t keep things of value in a clothes closet, other than fur coats. And a simple glance at my name on the bell downstairs would reveal that I was single and probably not addicted to mink.
I wet the towel with fresh cold water, wrung it out, and put it turban fashion around my aching sconce. I went back to the bedroom and a glint of glass on the floor caught my eye. It took about as little effort to stoop down as it might take to play all four quarters of a professional football game, but I made it, and straightened up with the glass fragment in my hand.
A bit of glass with one side rounded, like part of a large watch crystal. Only thicker. Flashlight glass, that was it. The glint of metal I’d seen had been from a flashlight held in the thief’s hand. And it was with the flashlight, probably a sturdy two-cell job, that I’d been pounded. Fine. Brilliant deduction. And where did that leave me?
The throbbing under my scalp was subsiding into nothing more severe than a splitting, steady headache. I went to the opened bedroom window and leaned my forehead against the cool glass. Looking down, I could see the narrow ledge leading from the window toward the building corner on the right and to a fire escape on the passageway to the left. Easy enough to skulk up the escape and into my window.
But why?
I went to my dresser and looked in the top drawer where I keep cigarettes. There were none in there, and I remembered I’d used the last of a carton two days ago and forgotten to get another. I don’t smoke much; just after a meal and, sometimes, when a crisis arose and a cigarette might help me to concentrate. Like now.
I went, still feeling dazed and stupid, to the closet where I’d hung the suit coat I’d worn at the Club 50. Dark brown, summer weight. There was half a pack of cigarettes in that.
I fumbled for the right-hand pocket. I’ve said I was methodical; I always keep cigarettes, when I’m carrying them, in the right-hand pocket of a coat along with the matches.
The coat was facing me on its hanger, reversed, so my right hand was at its left side, and I reached foggily into the wrong pocket. My fingers, of course, touched no cigarette package. Instead, they came across something small and alien that made no sense to them at first and then sent a sudden shock up them and along my arm.
A small, hard, heavy thing, vaguely oval in shape.
I drew it out, gaping at it like a child at its first giraffe. Pear-shaped, dangling from a platinum chain as thin—and strong for its size—as cobwebs, shooting reflected light around the room in bright prismatic colors.
The Duysberg diamond.
I sat there looking at the crystal-pure lump of carbon which had made so much trouble for so many people through a couple of centuries. Stolen from the Kepperts a month ago and now turning up in my pocket after a brief stay at the Club 50 last night. Was its presence at the 50 coincidental, or had it something directly to do with the murder of Rose Rosslyn? No matter. It had been there, brought by persons unknown, and carried innocently away by me.
Brought to the 50 by persons unknown? The identity of the carrier was dismally probable, much as I hated to admit it.
Ellen Keppert.
She had said lightly, “I’ll confess, Mr. Cates. I took the diamond.… I’m here now to dispose of it.” I’d just about believed her at the time, wondering if she were going on the theory that incredible truth could throw a person off more than an attempted lie. Now I certainly did believe her; and out of the belief I could weave a fairly logical story.
Ellen’s yarn about the hold-up at the Keppert apartment had been quite as phony as I’d sensed it was. She had taken the diamond herself, then had herself tied up and gagged—by one of the servants working with her in the theft, perhaps? Afterward, she’d lain low for a month. With the claim okayed by the insurance company, she had come by appointment to the 50 to get some money out of it. From Allen Siltz? Quite likely. Or—from Howard Denham? The ten thousand in cash he’d carried to the club had yet to be explained.
Anyhow, say Ellen had brought the diamond to the 50. Then a show girl had been murdered and the place pinched. Police all around, searching everyone, and here was Ellen with the diamond on her. No wonder she had appeared agitated! What to do? Well, here also was Samuel Kick-me Cates, apparently enjoying a measure of Lieutenant Ryan’s confidence. Drop the thing in his coat pocket and be rid of it. Afterward…
There I bogged down. It had been no girl I’d seen at my closet door, and it had not been a girl with whom I’d tangled and by whom I’d been banged on the head with a flashlight. It had been a man, and a muscular one. The presumed servant accomplice? Maybe. Ellen might have got in touch with him after I left her earlier in the evening, and could have told him where she’d cached the stone.
But I’d been with her almost an hour. Why hadn’t she made some effort to retrieve it herself? And how had she got in touch, at two in the morning, with a servant who did not live in at the Keppert place? She couldn’t phone from home without risking being overheard by Marylin; and by the same token it would look more than odd if Marylin happened to catch her going out at that hour to find a phone at some all-night joint.
I dismissed the servant as improbable, and started over again from another angle.
Herblock Bohr had been the first of Ryan’s suspects to be searched. Then Allen Siltz. Then I’d volunteered. So neither Bohr nor Siltz could have slipped the diamond into my pocket or it would have been found there later by Ryan. (I perspired a little. Wouldn’t that have been nice!) I had been presented with my unwanted gift after I had been searched. And who came after that?
After that had come Howard Denham—and Ellen Keppert. But how either could have transferred the Duysberg diamond from his or her person to mine under the cool grilling, and stare, of Ryan, was more than I could figure out. There’d been no distraction of any kind under cover of which Denham or Ellen could have made such a move…
But—wait a minute. With Ellen there had been. While she was in Rose’s dressing room under Ryan’s unblinking scrutiny, there had been a distraction. One of Ryan’s men had come in with Checckia bearing the dead girl’s dressing case, jus
t found in the checkroom. And Ryan had turned toward them and then gone over to them.
In that period, it might have been possible for Ellen to get rid of the diamond so that, a little later when she was searched in her turn, she was clean. I could think of no one else who’d had the opportunity.
Everything—but everything—pointed to the girl with the tawny blond hair and nice mouth and eyes. Except the attempt at recovery of the diamond. Who besides Ellen could have known the thing was in my pocket? And, again, why hadn’t she tried some trick herself to recover the diamond while I was with her? She couldn’t assume that I’d keep my hand out of that pocket indefinitely. With the murder, had she given up entirely on the diamond, wanting now only to be shut of it?
I gave it up and started some breakfast. The diamond I put in a little Home Protection Company envelope; I’d take it first thing in the morning to Lieutenant Ryan.
I went to the office of the Homicide Squad at nine, after phoning to see if Ryan would be in. He was. Apparently he operated on the theory that the less sleep you have the less you’ll need. I was shown through the big outer office to his small one. He came around from behind his desk, kicked the door stop aside and closed his door. He was pressed and immaculate as usual, jowls pink and clean-shaven, eyes clear. And cold.
He said, “You have something to tell me about the Rosslyn case?”
I nodded. “Our idea that maybe my Keppert case was somehow tied in, was sound.” I tossed him the envelope.
He opened it and took out the big diamond. He looked at it for half a minute, turning it in his hand. Then he looked with raised brows at me.
“In my coat pocket,” I said. “I found it at about four-fifteen this morning—after someone else had tried to find it first.”
I told him what had happened in my apartment, and he took it all in while he stared at the diamond again. But though there wasn’t a recognizable expression on his face, I began to hear my own story sound as fishy as had Ellen Keppert’s.
“You think somebody slipped it into your pocket after you were searched last night?”
I shrugged. “How else could it get there?”
“An interesting question,” Ryan said. “Of course one answer could be that it had been put there with your knowledge. Or even possibly by you, after your innocent demand to be searched.”
“So why do I bring it in this morning and hand it over to you?” I said.
It was his turn to shrug. “Maybe you had a few second thoughts last night. Some sensible second thoughts. There’s been a murder. The risk of keeping that diamond around is now too great to take.”
“If all I wanted was just to get rid of it, why didn’t I simply throw it down the nearest sewer grating?”
“Better to make a gesture of getting rid of it,” Ryan said. “A gesture like the one last night when you insisted on being searched along with the others.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “I brought the diamond to the Fifty last night. Foreseeing that we’d all be searched, I gave it to Dodge Duffy to hide in his baton. Later I took it back from him. Then I got to thinking that maybe it was now too hot to handle, and I brought it here this morning.”
“That’s easier to believe than the statement that somebody slid it into your pocket and for three or four hours you didn’t find it out. Do you go around with your pockets sewed up, that you never happen to reach into them for something?”
I looked at Ryan and I’d noticed before that he was right-handed, and I could see the slight bulge of a pack of cigarettes in the customary pocket, on that side.
I said, “When was the last time you reached into the left-hand pocket of your coat?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. I went on. “I gave some thought to the subject of pockets after I’d found this, and came up with something rather surprising. To me, anyhow. Unless it is his habit to carry cigarettes there, or something else in frequent use, I don’t believe the average man dips into his left-hand coat pocket once a day. I’ll bet that right now you don’t know what’s in yours.”
“There’s nothing in mine.” Ryan put his hand into his pocket. “Nothing—” He drew out a parking lot ticket. I got a glimpse of it. It was dated day before yesterday. Ryan tossed it into the wastebasket, and I had sense enough not to say anything or to grin a little, as I felt like doing. In the general scheme of things, the point was unimportant.
“Who do you think could have dropped the diamond into your pocket?” Ryan asked evenly.
“I don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I didn’t know that Ellen Keppert had.
Ryan tapped his fingertips against his desk. “You’re not in a good spot, Cates. Here we have a girl who tells a tale of robbery, the insurance man who clears the story, and the diamond that’s supposed to have been stolen. All together in a second-rate night spot where a show girl is shot through the head. Along with a diamond broker named Siltz.”
I got a little sore, having come here with the diamond all wrapped up in the feeling that I was doing a good deed as a conscientious citizen.
“Aren’t you getting a bit off the track?” I said coldly. “You’re Homicide. Remember? You’re working on a murder, not a theft. And no matter what ideas you get about me, the fact remains that I was not backstage last night and so I could have had nothing to do with Rose Rosslyn.”
“A bull fiddle player doesn’t remember seeing you go back to the dressing rooms,” Ryan corrected me. “That’s negative evidence if I ever heard it.”
I clamped my tongue between my teeth for a minute. No sense in losing my temper. “To get positive,” I ventured, after the minute, “What does the police lab say about the carpet nap you clipped in Checckia’s office?”
Ryan didn’t hold back, I’ll give him that. “Blood,” he admitted. “It looks as if the girl was shot in there.”
“And the gun and bullet? You didn’t find them?”
Ryan’s mouth shifted as if he tasted something sour. “We found the gun. After going through the place with everything but a Geiger counter it finally occurred to one of my master minds that if it wasn’t in the place then it must have been carried out, and that only one thing had been carried out around the time the gun might have been used, and that that was garbage. The garbage cans had been collected by then so we strained through a truckload of refuse and found the gun. Also a scarf, identified as Rose Rosslyn’s, bloodstained. No bullet, though. And we wanted that.”
“The gun?”
“Gar Checckia’s.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s dandy. You put me through the wringer and all the time you have this under your hat. The girl was shot with Checckia’s gun, in Checckia’s office…”
“And Checckia says he knows nothing about it, and not till he went through his safe, with our permission, did he know his gun was gone.”
I suddenly remembered the night club manager’s agitation when he plowed through his safe. Something gone. And not money. This could explain the drops of sweat on his tanned forehead. His gun gone. And a girl shot. “Do you believe Checckia?” I said.
“I don’t believe anybody in this business,” Ryan said, looking right at me.
“Checckia shot Rose. Then he cleaned the carpet with her scarf and water from his desk carafe, and pried the bullet out of his paneling. He shoved gun, scarf and bullet into a garbage can due to be carried out, and took Rose back to her own dressing room. Then he went out front and acted innocent till time to call the police. Don’t you like it?”
“A man ransacked your apartment last night—to hear you tell it. Suppose you’d given a girl a key and told her you’d meet her later there. She goes in, surprises the thief, and he kills her with a gun found in your bureau drawer. So there is a girl shot in your living room with your gun. Do you like it?”
“What’s this strange affection you have for Checckia…”
“I don’t have to tell you that what we have on Checckia is completely circumstantial and that hi
s lawyer can shoot hell out of it. And don’t think he doesn’t know it. I had quite a session with him after you and Miss Keppert left. He wasn’t talking. His lawyer,” Ryan added unhappily, “is Ryskind.”
“Mine,” I said, “is the whole legal staff of the Home Protection Insurance Company.” I just said it, though. The whole staff wasn’t worth Ryskind. And the evidence against Checckia was circumstantial and it didn’t put me in the clear. Nor my alleged, as the papers would say, little jewel thief, Ellen.
Thinking of the latter I said maliciously, “Anyhow, Miss Keppert did come to the Fifty last night to see a girl about a mermaid.”
I once had a pair of agate cuff links. The gray stones seemed warm and human compared with Ryan’s eyes. “Yes,” he said softly, “and a girl was murdered about the time Miss Keppert went to see her.”
I cleared my throat. Wrong, Cates. “You figure the mermaid had something to do with this?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The interview was over. I got up. “If you’re going to put a tail on me, introduce me to him now so I’ll know him and can make it easier for him.”
“You’ve been seeing movies,” said Ryan. “Stay in town, that’s all.”
As though it were an afterthought, I said, “Can I have a look at the mermaid and snapshot?”
The agate cuff links regarded me for thirty seconds. Then Ryan opened a desk drawer and took out the bronze figurine and envelope.
I looked at the snapshot. Symmetrical young man leaning laughingly against the mermaid statue with the ocean as back drop, and the shadow of the mermaid dark beside him.
I looked at the figurine. Nowhere on it was the legend, Sea City, New Jersey. However, it was lacking a base, perching instead on a flat spot on the underside of the tail. I thought that probably the lettering had been on the base.