by Paul Ernst
“Sure. I’m swearing now.” He held the door open. “I’ve got to get going, Holmes. You can come along with me if you want to ask any more questions.”
I didn’t. I’d had this little doubt in the back of my mind since last night—Ryan had, too, quite expectedly—and I’d come here to work it over a little.
Barkasy was prepared to swear as to who had gone back down the corridor last night. Who was prepared to swear that Barkasy himself hadn’t slipped back there? Well, Hallwig, it appeared.
I said good night to the trumpeter and went home to kill some time; my next call was to be a late one.
It started raining at about half-past nine, and I listened to the stuff beat against my living room windows, and I tried to get interested in a book and couldn’t, so I got scientific. All detectives get scientific at some stage of their investigations. I read it in a book. Like making out a timetable of the movements of suspects during the period in which somebody is thought to have been knocked off. Then he peers owlishly at this and comes up with wonderful answers.
I thought I could be as owlish as the next guy, so I set down on a sheet of paper the times last night when various folk went backstage at the 50, adding any other notes or thoughts I had in mind.
Ten-ten last night. One of the Misses Club 50, girl named Edna, saw Rose alive. “She seemed to have something on her mind,” the girl had said. “She seemed kind of mad.”
Ten-fifteen. Larry Mansfield came out for his number and allegedly sang. Piano and guitar with the rest of the orchestra silent save for the breaks.
Ten-twenty. Columnist Bohr to see Checckia, who was in his office at that time. “Come back later. There may be a story about an entertainer and a dame.”
Ten-twenty-four or -five. Allen Siltz to see Checckia. To examine the Duysberg diamond and make sure Ellen wasn’t trying to pull a fast one? That was Bohr’s opinion, and I was inclined to agree. But the diamond hadn’t yet been delivered, and Checckia wasn’t in his office.
Ten-twenty-seven or -eight. Howard Denham to see Checckia. The man was in his office this time—he’d apparently bounced hither and yon like a flea on a harp string. Short drink with Checckia, and then exit Denham.
Ten-thirty-three. End of Mansfield’s number. And about time! Mansfield back behind the curtain for a moment, then returning to the supper room and to a table where a lady awaited his charms.
Ten-thirty-five. The cancan number.
Ten-forty. Ellen back to see Rose. Saw her, all right. Dead. In her dressing room, though she’d been killed in Checckia’s office.
Ten-forty-three or -four. Rose’s body found by Miss Lang, the singer in white, who reported to Checckia, who reported to police.
I looked at my timetable, all shipshape and scientific. I got up and paced. Owlishly. I sat down and drew borders around the sheet of paper. No go. It seemed to me that anyone, from Edna to Miss Lang, could have killed Rose. I guess I haven’t played enough chess in my life.
I’d started with the preconceived notion that the guilty guy was Checckia; I ended the same way. And by then it was well along toward midnight, so I slid into a raincoat and put on an old hat and headed forth into the rainy night.
The Club 50 was a gloomy place. A murder is no kind of advertising for such a spot. Add to this the fact that it was a rainy and unpleasant night and you can guess at the attendance. The checkroom hanger poles held two bare hangers for every coat. The supper room wasn’t a third filled, and over the too scanty buzz of conversation you could hear the rain beating down somewhere in the rear.
The orchestra was on its dais and as I walked in Dodge Duffy, all smile and wavy hair, raised his baton and whipped it down, and the orchestra started playing “In the Clouds with You.” I thought I could sniff his hair lotion clear to here.
I went to a side table and sat down. A waiter came, and I ordered a Scotch and soda. Then I changed it to a B and B, remembering the Scotch I’d had here last night with Ellen. He paddle-footed away and Duffy’s brave men played “In the Clouds etc.,” and I watched them glumly.
The sax player looked like somebody smoking an oversized pipe. Hallwig raised his trumpet, blew, lowered it and stared into space. Drums, guitar, piano sent it out. Barkasy’s right hand leap-frogged over the strings of his bull fiddle while his left jerked cricket-like along its neck.
The orchestra stopped and the several couples dancing stopped. The lights went down, the spot went on, and Larry Mansfield came out of the curtained doorway about which there had been so much talk and speculation last night. It was a depressingly bare and quiet house to play to, but he sang with all the quavers and gestures he had used last night. He looked good with his boxer’s build, tapering up to the big shoulders. I suspected he might be wearing the male version of a girdle, but it didn’t show.
There was meager applause. He swelled its meaning into a request for one encore, and then went back through the curtained doorway at Barkasy’s elbow. The lights went up, and Duffy’s boys swung into another dance tune.
The curtain moved again and Checckia came out, turning left to walk around the edge of the room and to the door.
The manager of the Club 50 did not look gleeful. I mean, he would not have looked hilarious over the emptiness of his pleasure palace in any event; but it seemed to me that he appeared even unhappier than the material circumstances warranted. Sun-lamp tan or no, he looked pallid, and the corners of his mouth were pulled down savagely.
They pulled down even farther when he got to my table and saw me. He stood a moment as if contemplating a rabbit punch, then dropped into the chair across from me. “What are you doing here?”
“Drinking a B and B.” I touched the little glass.
He breathed out heavily through his nose. “Don’t I have enough trouble with the New York police force without getting you on my neck, too?”
“You’ve been having trouble with the New York police force?” I asked.
“A couple of men here all day. And Ryan at me half the afternoon at my apartment. And look at the joint! Not enough money to pay for the breakage.”
“So you and Ryan had a talk. A jolly fellow, isn’t he?”
“Jolly like a bear trap.” Checckia shot me a mean look. “Why don’t you go home?” the look said.
I smiled blandly and thought how much I disliked this man. “Well, after all, you’re suspect number one. Why would Ryan put himself out to be chummy with you?”
“What do you mean, I’m suspect number one?” he snapped. His eyes had gone snaky, and his mouth had an ugly twist.
I didn’t know whether Ryan had admitted knowing that Rose had been shot in Gar’s office with Gar’s gun. If not, I didn’t want to spill the beans.
I said, “Who were Dick Rosslyn’s personal effects sent to after he was killed last June?”
His eyes got very still and so did his hands, which had been fooling longingly with a table knife. “Dick’s stuff? Why do you ask that? Ryan didn’t ask that.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
“I don’t know who his things were sent to. Rose, I’d guess.”
“You’re sure?”
“I said I was guessing.”
“They weren’t sent to you?”
“No, they weren’t sent to me. And what about it if they had been? What have Dick Rosslyn’s shirt or dancing shoes or hair brush got to do with what happened to his sister?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Well, I can’t. And wouldn’t if I could.”
I said, “Did Dick Rosslyn have an agent?”
“No.”
“Do you have the same number of entertainers here now that you had last year?”
“Yes. Except for Rosslyn. Some of the people are different, but the number is the same.”
“Then where did Dick dress? You don’t have any empty dressing rooms.”
“He was in with Larry Mansfield.”
“How did you first learn of Dick’s death? I mean, did you read
about it, or did somebody tell you? And if so, who told you?”
Checckia got up, and I think he was having trouble keeping his hands off me. If I’d hoped for definite reactions, I had got them.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said.
“Okay.” I shrugged. “This is not the place to tell you what I want to, anyway. How about later in your apartment? Next door, isn’t it?”
“I don’t have anything to take up with you—”
“Yes, pal, you have. Something damned important. To you.”
He stared at me, making heavy with the nose-breathing again.
“You’d better believe me,” I said softly.
He didn’t believe me. But his eyes said that he was afraid to disbelieve me to the point of refusing to see me. He said finally, “All right. Three o’clock. And there’d better be a reason.”
He went along, and while the waiter was getting my change for me I looked at the chair he’d just vacated.
Checckia had searched through his safe and found his gun gone after a girl had been shot? That wasn’t what had turned him around with that sick look on his pan. That wasn’t what he’d found missing.
The first thing he’d reached for in his safe when Ryan finally let him go through it had been a small, flat tin box. Not the kind of thing you keep a gun in. The kind of thing, rather, in which you keep papers. Special papers, that don’t belong in mixed company.
Special papers.
The dope he had on Ellen Keppert. Gone. Stolen. And in that first instant Checckia had known it and gone crazy down inside himself.
The blackmail pictures, motel registration card, whatnot—taken from the safe. By whom? Checckia would doubtless have given five years of his life to know that.
And so would I.
The waiter came back with my change, and I went out and to a Sixth Avenue bar to pass the time till my meeting with Gar at three o’clock. Killing time. Apparently there’s as much of that in detecting as there is in war. Long waiting, between brief moments of action. But when the moments come—oh, brother!
I couldn’t wait till three o’clock. At twenty-five after two I back-tracked through the black, wet, early morning toward Checckia’s place. He ought to be there before now; he’d almost certainly close the club early, with so few cash customers there.
One reason I couldn’t wait was because I now had such an excellent story.
Last year after Dick Rosslyn’s death, his effects had fallen into Checckia’s hands. Among his things had been some careless snapshots of him and a girl at the town of the mermaid, probably some showing the two at the Crescent Motel cabin. Even in the snaps, the girl had looked expensive, so Checckia made it his business to find out who she was.
Ellen Keppert, niece of a wealthy U.S. Senator.
Checckia went to Sea City and bribed the man at the Crescent Motel into giving up the registry card of last June for Mr. and Mrs.—whatever name Dick might have signed. Then blackmail, till Ellen was drained of cash. Finally the jackpot demand. No money? All right. Bring me the Duysberg diamond—for which Allen Siltz has an undercover customer—and we’ll call it quits.
So far, so good. But in the last month something had aroused Denham’s curiosity. Perhaps in calling on Marylin he had seen something of Ellen’s to make him suspicious; perhaps he too knew Rose and had glimpsed the mermaid and snapshot she owned. Anyway, he’d gone to Sea City and come back with the same information that Checckia had.
Last night he had come to have a showdown with Checckia.
And last night Ellen had come, as commanded, with the diamond.
Sometime before Ellen and I entered the supper room, Denham had caught up with Checckia in his office. Faced with Denham’s demands, Checckia had cut him in, paying him ten thousand dollars from the office safe for his silence. It was then, in his anger and frustration, that Checckia had forgotten to turn the combination knob on his safe door.
Meanwhile, before coming for the final payoff, Ellen had remembered the little bronze mermaid and the snapshot of himself which Dick had sent his sister from Sea City. Fearing that these, innocent as they seemed of themselves, might rouse someone’s curiosity in the future—they had indeed sparked Denham and me—Ellen had phoned Rose earlier and asked her to bring them to her at the 50 that night. Something in tone or word had given away to Rose why Ellen wanted them.
It was the first Rose had known of blackmail. Wild with anger, she’d gone to Checckia’s office to have it out with him. Checckia wasn’t in his office, and she started searching for the pictures. Found them, too, after discovering that the safe opened to an experimental tug at the knob. And then Checckia had come in and caught her.
More courageously than sensibly, she had snatched up a gun she’d come across in her search, and Checckia had tried to get it away from her, and she’d been shot.
That was my story and I thought it a very good story, and there was only one hole in it.
If it were all true, then Checckia would still have the blackmail papers. And I was convinced that he hadn’t, that somehow, somewhere along the line, he’d lost his golden goose…
Oh, well, it was a swell theory except for that one flaw. Forget the flaw, then, and go to work on Checckia.
How?
Oh, I had that all figured out, very methodically, very cleverly.
There was one way, I thought, to throw the fear of God into him and maybe startle him into betraying himself. Tell him the story I’d dreamed up. Even if a few details were wrong, in the main it must be true and must soften him up quite some. Then—the hooker.
I was going to say that I had the snapshots and registry card. Never mind how. I had them—and what would it be worth to him to get them back?
If he didn’t crack somewhere along the line, I was a pelican’s aunt.
It was twenty-five of three when I got to the building housing the Club 50. Five floors, with the club on the ground floor. Checckia’s apartment and some storage space on the second, and small offices for stray business enterprises on the third, fourth and fifth. There was no night man. At eight o’clock or so the departing elevator man locked up and any tenant wanting in after that could use his key.
I went to the dark door at the east end of the building. There was a bell button with Checckia’s nameplate. As the one tenant living there and to whom late hours were routine, he’d have to have some way of being summoned if friends called after locking-up time.
I started to punch the bell button, then saw that the door seemed not quite closed. I pushed at it and it opened, and I went in.
The narrow building lobby was dimly lit. The elevator had stopped functioning many hours ago, of course. I turned into the narrow stairway next it and began going up.
There was no light here other than receding traces of the dim one in the lobby. I practically had to feel my way up the stone stairs till I got to the second floor. Then I stopped moving, and almost breathing, because I heard steps on the other side of Checckia’s door.
Checckia going out again? Or some visitor, perhaps a significant one, just leaving? I hotfooted it up another flight and then peered down to see what I could see.
The second-floor door opened cautiously and a figure came out so muffled against the rainy night that I couldn’t even see a face, let alone identify it. Then the door closed and all I saw was a shapeless dark bulk.
I leaned over the third-floor railing to try to see better—and my wet raincoat made a little slapping sound. I did hold my breath, then; but in a moment the black shape started down the stairs, and its indifference to the sound of footsteps indicated that I’d not been heard.
I moved from the rail, to start down as soon as I heard the outer door close and see if I could identify Checckia’s caller, on the better lighted sidewalk.
The lobby light went out.
There was no sound of the street door opening. There was only a stillness as complete as the blackness in the stairwell.
10
I HE
ARD a slow step in the blackness. A bare slither of sound halfway up the first flight of stairs. So the small slap of my raincoat had been heard, and the black shape down there was coming back, in pitch darkness, to investigate.
With what in mind? I didn’t know—though the feeling in the back of my neck, as if somebody had opened the door of a deep-freeze a couple of inches away from it, was trying hard to tell me.
I slid silently out of my raincoat, held it over the third-floor railing, and let it drop. I heard it hit, and an instant later my eardrums bent inward with the thunder of a shot in the airless, windowless stairwell.
The silence of stealthy investigation, a whispered four-letter word, and then a faint rasp at the bottom of the third-floor stairs. Coming up. Coming after the owner of the coat. And he had a gun and I hadn’t, and I knew now what he had in mind.
A floral wreath for Cates.
I tried the third-floor door. Locked. Any tenant wanting in at night could unlock his floor door as well as the street door. I’d been afraid it might be like that, but it hadn’t cost anything to try.
Black as a coal mine at midnight. I couldn’t see the stairs I tiptoed on, with nowhere to go but up. Fourth floor. Door locked. And now the distinct sound of a step below me…
And what did that mean? So damned anxious before to make no noise that might hint where he was, now letting his foot down audibly.
But that was easy.
He had shot when my coat hit the floor, and I had made no answering sound of any kind. Was I obliging enough not to have a gun, then? Let’s find out. Let’s make a noise. No shot? Then probably I had no gun. Nice. That saved a bit of trouble.
I finished the stairs. No more up. Fifth and last floor, end of the line. I faced the stairs and listened, and heard a stealthy sound below. Crouched in the blackness with my arms spread so they spanned the staircase, I gave him time to get about halfway up.
Then I dove. Head first down the stairs, arms out to grab at anything I touched.
I almost touched nothing but thin air. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t be around bothering the customers today; I’d have swan-dived down head first against the building wall. But just as I had the flashing fear that somehow I’d missed my man, my right hand brushed cloth and clamped onto it literally for my life.