“Well, first of all, what are you doing here?”
Here it came. “I’m on a case,” I told him. “Three of these people hired me yesterday for an investigation.”
“Get this down, Roberts, eh?” Davis said to the cop who had recognized me. “What three?”
“James Maddigan, Arthur Roget and Harold Shulman,” I said, and half closed my eyes in anticipation of the blast.
“Harold Shulman! You mean that stiff out there is a client of yours?”
The other detective laughed nastily. “Oh, brother; anybody that hires this character ought to take out life insurance.” He was a beefy cop, with thick neck and shoulders and a red, perpetually grinning face. His eyes were big and they popped.
“Shut up, Mike,” Davis snapped. “What were you investigating for them?” he growled to me.
I took a deep breath; this was it. “They hired me to investigate the presence of space travelers on earth.”
There was a pregnant silence. Only three of them had been listening to me, but now the other patrolman looked up and said, “I thought he said …”
Davis said softly, “He did. Evidently we’ve got a wise guy here, eh? He’s been reading about how private eyes make monkeys out of the police force. He wants to make like Sam Spade.”
I held up the palms of my hands. “You asked me. I told you. Maddigan, Roget and Shulman came to my office yesterday afternoon. They gave me a long song and dance about being suspicious of alien life forms here on earth. They wanted me to check up at their club meetings.”
“Go on,” Davis rasped; “keep on cracking wise. You’ll wind up the night in a cell.”
“So help me, Lieutenant,” I told him desperately. “They figured if there were any aliens from space — that’s the way they put it — on earth secretly, that they’d be hanging around the science fiction clubs checking to see that nobody got on to them.”
Without taking his pale eyes from me, Davis took a small bottle from his vest pocket, unscrewed the top and shook out a pill. He said finally, “Mike, go get this Maddigan and Roget. On your way back, bring me a glass of water, eh?”
Mike left. Davis leaned back and brooded at me with empty eyes. “How well did you know this Shulman?” he asked.
“Not until yesterday.”
“What killed him?”
“You know better than I do. What did the deputy coroner think?”
“None of your business. What did you think, eh?”
Nobody had asked me, but I was rapidly getting the impression that this was going to last for a while, so I pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down, reaching into my coat pocket for pipe and tobacco.
I said, “He looked to me as though he’d fallen from a great height.”
He fingered his pill. “How great? Don’t light that damn pipe. It’s thick enough in here already.”
The air in the big living room was perfectly all right, as far as I could notice, but I stuck the pipe back into my pocket. “I don’t know,” I said. “I saw a guy in France once whose parachute didn’t open; he looked quite a bit like Shulman does.”
The detective named Mike came in again with the glass of water. “The other two are outside, Lieutenant.”
Davis took the glass of water, popped the pill into his mouth and emptied the water down over it. He said, “Okay, Mike, show them in.” He looked back at me. “You suggesting that he fell from an airplane, eh?”
I rubbed the sweat in my left palm with my right thumb and shook my head. “No. I just said that he looked the same as …”
He cut me off as Maddigan and Roget entered. Maddigan’s jowls were still quivering and Roget didn’t look as though he’d ever regain that grin of his. Their eyes went nervously all about the room, coming back finally to rest on me.
Davis growled, “You didn’t tell me earlier that you’d hired Jeb Knight, here.”
Neither of them answered him; but for that matter, it hadn’t exactly been worded as a question.
Davis said, “Evidently, Knight has some reason for attempting to hide the purpose of you three — counting Shulman — going to his office yesterday. I shouldn’t have to tell you that this is homicide, murder. And when murder comes along …”
Maddigan said nervously, “You don’t understand. We don’t mind at all telling you about it; we just didn’t think it was important.”
Roget said, “No, sir.” He looked like a grammar school kid up before the principal.
Davis’ voice hardened. “Leave it to us to decide what’s important and what isn’t, eh? What was wise-guy Knight hired for?”
“To investigate the presence of alien life forms on Terra.”
There was silence again.
Davis said finally, “Mike, get me another glass of water, eh?” He ran his eyes over Maddigan and Roget, giving them a thorough appraisal. “You look halfway intelligent,” he muttered, “but you must be off your rockers or you wouldn’t waste your money on Knight, no matter what you wanted investigated. Now give me the whole story, eh?”
Roget said hesitantly, “It all started because of the Convention, the AnnCon. We’re on the entertainment committee.”
Lieutenant Davis slowly took the bottle from his vest pocket again and shook two pills into his hand. He said softly, “I continually get the impression that I came into this conversation late; either that, or you guys are ribbing me.” His voice suddenly became sharper. “I hate wise guys,” he rasped. “Start making sense, dammit.”
Maddigan took over. “The tenth anniversary of the first World Science Fiction Convention is to be held here in this city in a few days, Lieutenant. We call it the AnnCon as an abbreviation of Anniversary Convention. The Eighth Convention, held in the Northwest, we called the NorWesCon; the one in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the NolaCon, and …”
“Okay, okay, so you’re going to have a convention here; so what?”
Maddigan was flustered, but he went on, “As Art just said, he and I — and Shulman — were on the entertainment committee. We wanted to have something different, some skit — well, not exactly a skit — but something with a stf.…”
“Eh?” Davis scowled.
“A stf. Scientifiction abbreviated. We wanted something different. Well, we thought that for only fifty or seventy-five dollars we could hire a private detective to investigate the presence of aliens from space here on earth. We’d have him do up daily reports and then we’d read the reports before the convention. We thought that if we were able to convince him we were sincere, he’d make a serious attempt to do that for which we hired him.” Maddigan ended lamely, “We thought it would provide considerable amusement at the convention, reading his reports.”
Davis said, still unbelievingly, “Well, why’d you hire a jerk like Knight, eh? Why didn’t you get a decent agency? Didn’t you read about him in the papers last month?”
Art Roget shot an embarrassed look at me. “We were afraid that the larger agencies wouldn’t take the assignment.”
I flinched, probably noticeably.
The plainclothesman named Mike had returned with the water. Now he started to laugh. “Oh, brother. What he means is, he didn’t think anybody but a sap like Buster, here, would take on such a case!”
Even Davis grinned sourly. “Shut up, Mike,” he growled. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.” He went back to Maddigan. “Okay. So you hired Jeb Knight to check up on whether or not there were any Martians here on earth, just for the gag, eh? What was he doing here tonight? Never mind, I get it. This was where the investigation started, eh? And he hardly got here before this Shulman kid was found dead.”
He rubbed his chin reflectively. “Who was the last person you saw with young Shulman, Roget?”
The eyes of both Roget and Maddigan went to me.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I protested, “I hadn’t been around him for more than an hour.”
Roget said, “The last I saw Harry, he was taking Mr. Knight around introducing him to the differen
t members.”
Maddigan cleared his throat uncomfortably. He looked at me with more or less apology, as though that did any good. “That is correct,” he said. “I am afraid that I must report the same. The last time I saw Harry, he brought Mr. Knight to a small group of us who were discussing whether or not Kuttner predominated in his collaboration stories with his wife.”
Lieutenant Davis came to his feet and walked around behind the couch. He leaned down, placing his elbows on its back and turned his gray eyes on me thoughtfully.
“Knight,” he said, “I’ve been wondering about you ever since that Holliday case. What kind of a discharge did you get from the army, eh?”
“Not a medical one,” I snapped irritably.
CHAPTER FIVE
I got home late that night, very late; but I was at the office at my usual time in the morning. I hadn’t slept much. I’d felt cold sober by the time I got home, but morning greeted me with a skull-cracking hangover anyway. It started in at about five o’clock, and at six-thirty I gave up any thoughts of further sleep and groaned my way out of bed.
All the endless questions on the part of Detective Lieutenant Davis and his boys hadn’t brought out much the night before — not that I knew of, at least. As far as anyone had seemed able to remember, I was the last person seen with Harry Shulman, and that had been an hour before he was found dead. It might even have been more; at that type of party it’s hard to keep track of the passage of time.
I hadn’t heard the coroner’s report, but I had no doubt about the cause of death. It might have been faked — possibly — but I would have laid my bottom dollar that Harry Shulman had fallen from a tremendous height to his death.
Unwilling to risk anything more than coffee on my stomach, I was out of the apartment by seven-thirty and five minutes later into Tiny’s for the morning papers. It was early, but there were already two early-bird kids at the comic stands seriously studying the latest exploits of Sheena, the Jungle Girl. I caught up the papers and brushed past them to where Tiny sat on his stool, monarch of all he surveyed. He leered at me when he saw me come in; he’d obviously been at the papers already.
“Shut up,” I said, before he could get a dig into me.
He took the cigar from his mouth. “Sure, Jeb,” he said, ignoring my demand, “but why don’t you drop out of the private eye game and get a job as a — well, as a matter of fact, off hand I can’t think of anything you could do.” His wizened face grinned, monkey-like, at me; he was having the time of his life.
“Shut up,” I told him again, handed him the money for the papers and left. The kids swayed unconsciously out of my way as I approached and swayed back as soon as I was by.
At the corner of Herkimer and Greene, I waited momentarily as the proprietor of Ted’s Dispensary opened his front door. I followed him in and bought myself a fifth of fifth rate whiskey. He said something about the weather and I agreed it was going to be hot again. Evidently he hadn’t read the papers yet; at least I got no cracks from him.
I crossed the street and waited for a bus to take me down to City Center. Three passed before a driver decided there was even enough standing room to let me on.
Fifteen minutes later found me unlocking the door of Lee and Knight, Private Investigations. I entered, put the bottle on the desk with the newspapers, and tossed my hat to the coat rack. I went around behind the desk and sank into my swivel chair, allowing myself a faint groan.
I could feel something uncomfortable bulging in my inner coat pocket, and pulled it out. It was Off Trail Fantasy, Harry Shulman’s amateur magazine. I’d forgotten about having it. I grunted and tossed it into the desk’s second drawer which is reserved for things that some day I want to take another look at.…
I sat there a while, staring up at the framed license on the wall, the document that stated that Lee and Knight were detectives.
That’s what it said.
I took up the first of the three papers I’d bought. They were having at me again in great style, but great. The News wanted me thrown into the cooler; the Tribune was more conservative: all they wanted was my license revoked. The Chronicle mentioned casually that in the old days — the tone of the editorial suggested that they were the good old days — an aroused citizenry would have escorted me to the city’s limits on a rail and garbed in the latest in tar and feathers sportwear. All three of the rags devoted more space to me than they did to the killing. That was the angle they latched onto — the dead boy was a client of mine — they rehashed the Holliday case, happily.
To my moderate surprise, the science fiction angle was left out of it. The Scylla Club was mentioned, but none of the papers went into a description of the nature of the outfit. Not that it was of any interest to me.
I got up and got myself the glass that stands on the wash bowl behind the screen. It was dirty, so I gave it a quick rinse and brought it back to the desk, reaching for the bottle.
A shadow fell on the opaque glass of the hall door.
I stashed the bottle and glass away into the large bottom drawer and said, “Come in,” almost before the knock sounded.
It was Ross Maddigan, a worried frown on his open face instead of the easy friendliness of the night before. His coat and pants still didn’t match, but the jacket wasn’t quite as loud as the one he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him.
“Hello, Ross,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Come on in.”
He shook the hand, looked around for a chair, found one and slumped down into it, holding his hat by its rim with both hands. I walked around behind the desk and got seated myself.
I figured it was his turn to talk; he hadn’t said anything yet. Finally he made a face and looked up at me. I just sat there. He tossed his hat to the desk and rubbed the back of his head with his right hand. His face had ruefulness on it.
He said, “You didn’t tell me you were a detective last night.”
“Private detective,” I told him. “It was part of the game, evidently, for nobody to know at first.”
“What game?”
“I thought you knew by now. Your uncle, and Roget and Shulman, hired me for a gag they wanted to put on at some convention.”
“The AnnCon?”
“I guess that was it. Anyway, the idea was for me to investigate the possibility of extra-terrestrials hanging around your club meetings. They were going to read the reports I made on my progress before the convention.”
Some of the worry left his face momentarily, but he didn’t quite get to the smiling point. “It would have made a pretty good gag,” he said absently.
“I guess so. It’s easier for the next guy to get it than it is for me. For me it wasn’t so funny.”
He hadn’t heard that, I suppose. He said slowly, “What happened last night, Jeb?”
My eyebrows went up. “Harry Shulman was killed.”
“It coudn’t possibly have been an accident?” He said that very slowly.
I shook my head. “I don’t know what the medical examiner’s report was, but from the looks of that body, it couldn’t have been an accident.”
“Why?”
“He looked as though every bone in his body was broken, but there he was beneath the branches of that tree. H’d died somewhere else and was moved to that spot.”
I anticipated his next question and beat him to it. “He was too broken up to have died merely from falling from the tree. Besides, there would have been signs of his fall; broken branches, twigs, and so forth.”
He said suddenly, “I want you to investigate it, Jeb.”
“Who, me?” I stared at him unbelievingly.
He didn’t say anything, so I laughed, with a touch of bitterness, and added, “Listen, Ross, the police are investigating Shulman’s death and they’re doing it a damn sight better than any private operator could, not to speak of doing it better than I could.”
Ross Maddigan shook his head earnestly. “I know the record of the police department on homicide cases. Les
s than half of them are solved in this city. Harry Shulman was a friend of mine; besides that, he was a guest at my home when — ”
I shook my head at him negatively. “Listen, Ross,” I said, “you’ve got the wrong idea. In the first place, you’ve picked up the belief that private detectives solve murders and that police departments don’t. You’re wrong on both counts. Private detectives very seldom, if ever, get tied up in homicide cases. You’re right in thinking that a lot of murders are never solved, but the kind you’re thinking about are usually the gang killings and such. This personal type of homicide is almost always cleared up by the police.”
He wasn’t convinced.
“Listen,” I said. “They’ve got the facilities, the manpower, the laboratories, the resources, to do these things right. All I am is one private detective and not a very good one at that. Don’t you ever read the papers? Get a load of the panning I take.”
“Yes,” he argued, “but you were on the scene and — ”
“And still don’t know what’s going on,” I finished for him. “Hell, Ross, even if I wanted to work on this for you, I couldn’t. The police wouldn’t let me. They don’t want private investigators messing around in homicide cases, and what’s more, they won’t stand for it.”
He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand ruefully. “I guess you’re right. I must be too worked up about this; but every time I think of Harry lying there under that tree — ”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of offering him a drink, but deciding it was too early for decent people to be drinking. I came to my feet suggestively; and he picked up his hat from the desk and followed my lead. I led him to the door. Ross Maddigan was a nice enough guy, and I didn’t mind talking to him, but I wanted to get back to my bottle. “Thanks, anyway, for thinking of me,” I said, hitting him lightly on the shoulder in a spurt of camaraderie. “It was a pleasure to meet you last night — even if the evening did wind up in tragedy.” I told myself I sounded as though I were making a speech.
“Yeah, sure, Jeb,” he said. “Well, so long.”
“So long, Ross,” I told him.
The Case of the Little Green Men Page 4