I put the finger on Jack Wagener. Disappointment came into Blanche Eveleth’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said. “That’s not he.”
Garren scowled at her. It was a pipe that if the Toplins were tied up with young Wagener, they wouldn’t identify him as the robber. Bill had been counting on that identification coming from the two outsiders—
Blanche Eveleth and the janitor—and now one of them had flopped.
The other one rang the bell just then and the maid brought him in.
I pointed at Jack Wagener, who stood beside Garren staring sullenly at the floor.
“Know him, McBirney?”
“Yeah, Mr. Wagener’s son, Jack.”
“Is he the man who shooed you away with a gun last night?”
McBirney’s watery eyes popped in surprise.
“No,” he said with decision, and began to look doubtful.
“In an old suit, cap pulled down, needing a shave—could it have been him?”
“No−o−o−o,” the janitor drawled, “I don’t think so, though it—You know, now that I come to think about it, there was something familiar about that fella, an’ maybe—By cracky, I think maybe you’re right—though I couldn’t exactly say for sure.”
“That’ll do!” Garren grunted in disgust.
An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods. A lot of people who don’t know any better—and some who do, or should—have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony. Take any man you like—unless he is the one in a hundred thousand with a mind trained to keep things straight, and not always even then—get him excited, show him something, give him a few hours to think it over and talk it over, and then ask him about it. It’s dollars to doughnuts that you’ll have a hard time finding any connection between what he saw and what he says he saw. Like this McBirney—another hour and he’d be ready to gamble his life on Jack Wagener’s being the robber.
Garren wrapped his fingers around the boy’s arm and started for the door.
“Where to, Bill?” I asked.
“Up to talk to his people. Coming along?”
“Stick around a while,” I invited. “I’m going to put on a party. But first, tell me, did the coppers who came here when the alarm was turned in do a good job?”
“I didn’t see it,” the police detective said. “I didn’t get here until the fireworks were pretty well over, but I understand the boys did all that could be expected of them.”
I turned to Frank Toplin. I did my talking to him chiefly because we—his wife and daughter, the maid, the janitor, Blanche Eveleth, Garren and his prisoner, and I—were grouped around the old man’s bed and by looking at him I could get a one−eyed view of everybody else.
“Somebody has been kidding me somewhere,” I began my speech. “If all the things I’ve been told about this job are right, then so is Prohibition. Your stories don’t fit together, not even almost. Take the bird who stuck you up. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with your affairs. It might be luck that he hit your apartment at a time when all of your jewellery was on hand, instead of another apartment, or your apartment at another time. But I don’t like luck. I’d rather figure that he knew what he was doing. He nicked you for your pretties, and then he galloped up to Miss Eveleth’s apartment. He may have been about to go downstairs when he ran into McBirney, or he may not. Anyway, he went upstairs, into Miss Eveleth’s apartment, looking for a fire escape. Funny, huh? He knew enough about the place to make a push−over out of the stick−up, but he didn’t know there were no fire escapes on Miss Eveleth’s side of the building.
“He didn’t speak to you or to McBirney, but he talked to Miss Eveleth, in a bass voice. A very, very deep voice. Funny, huh? From Miss Eveleth’s apartment he vanished with every exit watched. The police must have been here before he left her apartment and they would have blocked the outlets first thing, whether McBirney and Ambrose had already done that or not. But he got away. Funny, huh? He wore a wrinkled suit, which might have been taken from a bundle just before he went to work, and he was a small man. Miss Eveleth isn’t a small woman, but she would be a small man. A guy with a suspicious disposition would almost think Blanche Eveleth was the robber.”
Frank Toplin, his wife, young Wagener, the janitor, and the maid were gaping at me. Garren was sizing up the Eveleth girl with narrowed eyes, while she glared white−hot at me. Phyllis Toplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeble−mindedness.
Bill Garren finished his inspection of the girl and nodded slowly.
“She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion, “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Exactly, my eye!” Phyllis Toplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence−school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face—real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know, it’s not in a play!”
The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.
“Phyllis is right.” Frank Toplin backed up his offspring. “He was a man—no woman dressed like one.”
His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.
But I’m a bull−headed sort of bird when it comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.
“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.
She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.
“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”
Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.
Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.
“Here! Here!” Bill Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.
“Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Mike, Alec, or Rick.”
I hauled her (or him, whichever you like) to his or her feet and asked it: “Feel like telling us about it?”
For answer I got a snarl.
“All right,” I said to the others, “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for a man, why couldn’t the robber have been Blanche Eveleth before and after the robbery by using a—what do you call it?—strong depilatory on his face, and a wig? It’s hard for a woman to masquerade as a man, but there are lots of men who can get away with the feminine role. Couldn’t this bird, after renting his apartment as Blanche Eveleth and getting everything lined up, have stayed in his apartment for a couple of days letting his beard grow? Come down and knock the job over? Beat it upstairs, get the hair off his face, and get into his female rig in, say, fifteen minutes? My guess is that he could. And he had fifteen minutes. I don’t know about the smashed nose. Maybe he stumbled going up the stairs and had to twist his plans to account for it—or maybe he smacked himself intentionally.”
My guesses weren’t far off, though his name was Fred�
��Frederick Agnew Rudd. He was known in Toronto, having done a stretch in the Ontario Reformatory as a boy of nineteen, caught shoplifting in his she−make−up. He wouldn’t come through, and we never turned up his gun or the blue suit, cap, and black gloves, although we found a cavity in his mattress where he had stuffed them out of the police’s sight until later that night, when he could get rid of them. But the Toplin sparklers came to light piece by piece when we had plumbers take apart the drains and radiators in apartment 702.
ANOTHER PERFECT CRIME
Although convicted of Boardman Bowlby Bunce’s murder, I did kill him. I forget why; I dare say there was something about the man I disliked. That is not important; but I feel that the attentiveness with which the public has read the interviews I did not give and looked at photographs of photographers’ personal friends entitles that public to know why, here in the death cell, I have made a new will, giving my fortune to the fiction department of the Public Library. (Before starting that, however, I wish to state that while I do not object to having been born in any of the other houses pictured in various newspapers, I must, in justice to my parents, repudiate the ice-house shown in Wednesday’s Examiner.)
To get on with my story: when I determined, for doubtless sufficient if not clearly remembered reasons, to kill Boardman Bowlby Bunce, I planned the murder with the most careful attention to every detail. A life-long reader of literature dealing with the gaudier illegalities, I flattered myself that I of all men was equipped to commit the perfect crime.
I went to his office in the middle of the afternoon, when I knew his employees would be all present. In the outer office I attracted their attention to my presence and to the exact time by arguing heatedly that the clock there was a minute fast. Then I went into Bunce’s private office. He was alone. Out of my pockets I took the hammer and nails I had bought the day before from a hardware dealer who knew me, and, paying no attention to the astonished Bunce, nailed every window and door securely shut.
That done, I spit out the lozenge with which I had prepared my voice, and yelled loudly at him: “I hate you! You should be killed! I shall injure you!”
The surprise on his face became even more complete.
“Sit still,” I ordered in a low voice, taking a revolver from my pocket—a silver-mounted revolver with my initials engraved in it in four places.
Walking around behind him, carefully keeping the weapon too far away to leave the powder-marks that might make the wound seem self-inflicted, I shot him in the back of the head. While the door was being broken in I busied myself with the ink-pad on his desk, putting the prints of my fingers neatly and clearly on the butt of the revolver, the handle of the hammer, Bunce’s white collar, and some convenient sheets of paper; and hurriedly stuffed the dead man’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief into my pockets just as the door burst open.
After a while a detective came. I refused to answer his questions. Searching me, he found Bunce’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief. He examined the room—doors and windows nailed on the inside with my hammer, my monogrammed revolver beside the dead man, my finger-prints everywhere. He questioned Bunce’s employees. They told of my entrance, my passing into the office where Bunce was alone, the sound of hammering, my voice shouting threats, and the shot.
And then—then the detective arrested me!
It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent.
BER-BULU
Say it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis. That would make Jeffol a Moro. It doesn’t really matter what he was. If he had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison’s arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. Dinihari’s race matters as little. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade; but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time.
She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became a part of her—-a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn’t with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn’t belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison’s.
She was Jeffol’s first. I don’t know where he got her. Her dialect wasn’t that of the village, but you couldn’t tell from that. There are any number of dialects down there—jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything—except fish.
Jeffol was a good Moro—a good companion in a fight or across a table. Tall for a Moro, nearly as tall as I am, he had a deceptive slimness that left you unprepared for the power in his snake-smooth muscles. His face was cheerful, intelligent and almost handsome, and he carried himself with a swagger. His hands went easily to the knives at his waist, and against his hide—sleeping or waking—he wore a sleeveless fighting-jacket with verses from the Koran on it. The jacket was his most prized possession, next to his anting-anting.
His elder brother was datto, as their father had been, but this brother had inherited little of either his father’s authority or his father’s taste for deviltry. The first had been diluted by the military government, and Jeffol had got most of the second. He ran as wild and loose as his pirate ancestors, until Langworthy got hold of him.
Langworthy was on the island when I came there. He hadn’t had much luck. Mohammedanism suited the Moros, especially in the loose form they practiced. There was nothing of the solemn gangling horse-faced missionary about Langworthy. He was round-chested and meaty; he worked with dumb-bells and punching-bag before breakfast in the morning; and he strode round the island with a red face that broke into a grin on the least excuse. He had a way of sticking his chin in the air and grinning over it at you. I didn’t like him.
He and I didn’t hit if off very well from the first. I had reasons for not telling him where I had come from, and when he found I intended staying a while he got a notion that I wasn’t going to do his people—he called them that in spite of the little attention they paid him—any good. Later, he used to send messages to Bangao, complaining that I was corrupting the natives and lowering the prestige of the white man.
That was after I taught them to play blackjack. They gambled whenever they had anything to gamble for, and it was just as well that they should play a game that didn’t leave too much to luck. If I hadn’t won their money the Chinese would have, and anyway, there wasn’t enough of it to raise a howl over. As for the white man’s prestige—maybe I didn’t insist on being tuaned with every third word, but neither did I hesitate to knock the brown brothers round whenever they needed it; and that’s all there is to this keeping up the white man’s prestige at best.
A couple of years earlier—in the late ’90’s—Langworthy would have had no difficulty in getting rid of me, but since then the government had eased up a bit. I don’t know what sort of answers he got to his complaints, but the absence of official action made him all the more determined to chase me off.
“Peters,” he would tell me, “You’ve got to get off the island. You’re a bad influence and you’ve got to go.”
“Sure, sure,” I would agree, yawning. “But there’s no hurry.”
We didn’t get along together at all, but it was through my blackjack game that he finally made a go of his mission, though he wouldn’t be likely to admit it.
Jeffol went broke in the game one night—lost his fortune of forty dollars Mex—and discovered what to his simple mind was the certain cause of his bad luck. His anting-anting was g
one, his precious luck-bringing collection of the-Lord-knows-what in a stinking little bag was gone from its string round his neck. I tried to buck him up, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. His security against all the evils of this world—and whatever other worlds there might be—was gone. Anything could happen to him now—anything bad. He went round the village with his head sagging down until it was in danger of being hit by a knee. In this condition he was ripe fruit for Langworthy, and Langworthy plucked him.
I saw Jeffol converted, although I was too far away to hear the talk that went with it. I was sitting under a cottonwood fixing a pipe. Jeffol had been walking up and down the beach for half an hour or more, his chin on his chest, his feet dragging. The water beyond him was smooth and green under a sky that was getting ready to let down more water. From where I sat, his round turban moved against the green sea like a rolling billiard-ball.
Then Langworthy came up the beach, striding stiff-kneed, as a man strides to a fight he counts on winning. He caught up with Jeffol and said something to which the Moro paid no attention. Jeffol didn’t raise his head, just went on walking, though he was polite enough ordinarily. Langworthy fell in step beside him and they made a turn up and down the beach, the white man talking away at a great rate. Jeffol, so far as I could see, made no reply at all.
Facing each other, they suddenly stopped. Langworthy’s face was redder than ever and his jaw stuck out. Jeffol was scowling. He said something. Langworthy said something. Jeffol took a step back and his hand went to the ivory hilt of a kris in his belted sarong. He didn’t get the kris out. The missionary stepped in and dropped him with a hard left to the belly.
I got up and went away, reminding myself to watch that left hand if Langworthy and I ever tangled. I didn’t have to sit through the rest of the performance to know that he had made a convert. There are two things a Moro understands thoroughly and respects without stint—violence and a joke. Knock him round, or get a laugh on him, and you can do what you will with him—and he’ll like it. The next time I saw Jeffol he was a Christian.
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