The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 1: 1931-32

by Frederick Nebel

  There were voices in the living room and a cop said that some people had come in with the manager. Fitz strode briskly from the bedroom, struck at each new face with a swift, bitter glance.

  He said: “There was a murder committed here between five-thirty and ten to six. Anybody hear anything?”

  No one had. Fitz seemed angry. He whirled suddenly and drove a kick to the seat of a man who was training a camera through the bedroom doorway. The man turned around, grinned and tipped his hat.

  “Sorry, lieutenant.”

  “Get the hell out!” Fitz bit off.

  The news photographer went out with mincing steps.

  Fitz turned back to the group. “’Well, then, did anybody see anybody in the halls, or hear anybody about that time going up or down? Speak! Don’t look scared, dammit—I’m not going to bite you!”

  “Well,” ventured a spinsterish little lady and paused to make a gentle curtsey.

  “Well, madam?” said Fitz stonily.

  “Well, I live directly beneath this apartment. I was coming in at about twenty to six. It was rather dark in the hall. So I had a time finding the keyhole and when I finally found it I saw a woman come down from this floor and go on down toward the lobby.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Well, sir, the only thing I know was she was wearing mourning. There was half a veil hanging from her hat, and she was kind of tall, I would say. I mind I listened, rather fascinated, to the way her steps were going down the stairs—slow and measured kind of. I felt sorry for her, sir.”

  “You didn’t see her face?”

  “No, sir.”

  Fitz snapped: “Anybody else see this woman?”

  There were negative movements of heads.

  “You may go,” Fitz clipped.

  When they had gone Fitz said to the cop stationed at the door: “Close it—and if that photographer shows up again kick him in the face.”

  Cardigan buttoned his topcoat. “You know where to find me, Fitz, in case you want me.”

  Fitz chewed on his lip. “What do you think of this?”

  “I’d say, offhand, that there’s a killing widow loose in town.”

  Fitz said: “Mind if we look you over?”

  Cardigan chuckled good-naturedly and held his arms out. Fitz searched his pockets, read the notation Cardigan had made in his office. Cardigan kept smiling down at Fitz’s bony face. Fitz stepped back and eyed him levelly.

  “O.K. I just wanted to make sure. It’s funny as hell, the way this happened, the way you happened to be the first on the scene.”

  Conkey was grinning, showing most of his teeth clamped on a cigar. Cardigan looked from Conkey back to Fitz, chuckled briefly deep in his throat and strode to the door. He opened it and passed into the hall and went down the stairs slowly.

  Halfway down, a fierce breath gushed out of his mouth and he raised a hand to his head, dropped the hand hopelessly. He covered the remainder of the steps with a savage, reckless gait; reached the cement terrace and stood for a moment in the blustering wind, looking up and down the dark street. He lit a cigarette and sloped to the sidewalk, caught a taxi at Vandeventer.

  PAT leaned back against the door and laughed softly, gently—eyes twinkling. Cardigan glowered from the mohair divan in his apartment and said over a glass of rye and White Rock: “Clown around now, clown around.”

  “But you do look a perfect scream, chief.”

  There was a turkish towel rapped around his head. In the hidden folds of the towel was a quantity of chipped ice, to freeze away the pain. He looked quaintly oriental.

  “Run into something?” Pat asked.

  Back of the droll humor in her eyes was a spark of concern. Another woman might have exclaimed, run to him with tender hands. But Pat knew her men, knew, particularly, Cardigan. He was a hard party, hated to be fussed over.

  “Maybe,” he said, took a swallow, added: “Pardon me if I don’t get up and kiss your little hand, madame. I might get the ice down my neck…. Well, some big bruiser—I couldn’t figure him out—he took a swing at me.”

  He gave her the details. She sat on the edge of the divan, looked at empty dinner dishes on a card-table, and listened. Occasionally she said: “M-m-m!” or “My!” or used her lips or eyebrows to register surprise, concern.

  “So that,” Cardigan said, “is why we didn’t dine and dance tonight. I walked into something all right.”

  “But don’t you think you should have told Fitz about those two men?”

  “Sure I should have. I should do a lot of things. But I didn’t. Besides, those two guys didn’t kill Bartles. Besides—” his eyelids lowered—“there’s eighty thousand dollars worth of green ice floating around this man’s town. Stolen, you can bet. Well, they pay rewards for stolen jools, Calamity Jane. And papa needs new shoes and a vacation from this lousy business and maybe he could salvage some of his stocks.”

  “Sure. But the home office might get peeved.”

  Cardigan said: “This is private business.”

  “O.K.,” Pat said, shrugged. “You’d have your own way anyhow. And with that—” she indicated his head—“you’re off to a swell start, I might add cattily.”

  “Maybe I’d give you a bauble or a gadget or something.”

  “Greeks bearing gifts.”

  Cardigan chuckled lazily. “Good little woiking goil.”

  “Another forward pass like that and I’ll smack you!”

  Cardigan finished his drink, spread himself in a rousing grunt of satisfaction, and said: “Mind you, kid, keep what I’ve told you under your hat. There’s a few guys in the office who’d break their necks to tattle-tale to the home office in the hopes of getting my job. The business is getting too big. Too many operatives. Too much—envy.”

  Pat made a little jaw. “I certainly know one—” She stopped short and sat silently.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell papa.”

  “I’ll mention no names.”

  Admiration lay drowsily in his eyes. “You’re a natural, Pat,” he said. “You’re sure a natural.”

  POP-EYED Miss Gilligan was all of atwitter when Cardigan pushed into the office next morning.

  “Oh, Mr. Cardigan, you f-figured in a m-murder again, oh!”

  Cardigan mocked the magisterial. “Please don’t put it that way, Miss Gilligan.”

  “Did the p-poor man suf-suffer?”

  Miss Gilligan was not ordinarily a stammerer, but headlines invariably knocked her askew. She was a good-hearted, unlovely, faithful secretary.

  “Any wires?” Cardigan said.

  “N-no, sir.”

  He entered his private office, taking off his big overcoat, hung it with his battered hat on a costumer in the corner. Morris Katz came and stood in the doorway leading to the operatives’ room. He was tall, dark, with sliding hazel eyes, polished ebony hair, and arresting clothes.

  “Greetings or condolences?” he droned languidly.

  Cardigan said: “Good morning, Katz,” and sat down at his desk.

  “Who was this Bartles?”

  “Bartles—that’s all.”

  “What’s all this crap in the papers about a mysterious widow?”

  Cardigan said: “Just what it says,” and became absorbed in the morning mail. His back was to Katz. His hair, so black, thick and bushy, hid the bump on his head.

  Katz remained leaning in the doorway, a striking figure of a man in his dark, polished hardness. The agency used him a lot at formal dances, dinner parties and big social and political functions.

  “Was there really a widow?”

  “There was a widow,” Cardigan said, “in the building at the time. A woman in mourning.”

  “Talkative, aren’t you, this morning?”

  Cardigan turned down a letter. “Aren’t you on that Willis job, Katz?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then get the hell on it. There’s no special privileges around here.”
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  “I get you. Only concerning the femme, huh?”

  Cardigan rose, turned and crossed the room and regarded Katz with candid malevolence. “Watch that tongue of yours.”

  Katz showed even white teeth in a crooked brazen smile. “You wouldn’t be getting tough, would you?”

  “I happen to be running this shebang. Get on the job.”

  Katz shrugged, dropped his sliding eyes and went back into the big room. He came out wearing a tan polo coat and a secret little smirk. He walked quietly on soft leather soles. From the back he had an athlete’s build. Vanishing, he left an aromatic odor of Turkish tobacco.

  At ten Miss Gilligan announced that Sergeant Conkey was calling, and a moment later Conkey’s round face appeared in the doorway—beaming as usual, with eyebrows halfway up his forehead, eyes bursting with bright wonder, and mouth grinning and pushing up fat cheeks into bloated red balls. He came toward the desk in a bunch like a bear’s, palms pressed to his sides; then he shot one hand outward as if executing a rare trick in magic.

  “Good morning to you, Cardigan!”

  Always a little baffled by this man’s hocus-pocus, Cardigan shook hands casually and said, “To you, sergeant.”

  “Ah!” Conkey exclaimed as if receiving a great favor. His voice was no voice at all but a rushing hoarse whisper which he somehow managed to freight with wonder and mystery.

  Cardigan hooked a heel on an open drawer of his desk and watched Conkey sit down opposite.

  Chapter Three

  Big Man—Little Man

  CONKEY said: “Fitz thought I ought to drop in and see if anything turned up since last night.” Eyes shimmered, mouth grinned in eager anticipation.

  “Not a thing, Conkey.”

  Conkey aimed a finger joyously at Cardigan. “Who do you think Bartles was?” He raised his hand, put thumb against second finger and held the forefinger rigidly straight.

  “Dunno, Conkey.”

  Conkey snapped his fingers. “No sooner was his picture in the papers this morning than a gent named Hardin calls up from Cleverly Hotel and says Bartles looked like one of four guys that held up his jewelry store in Indianapolis two months ago. We get Hardin over at the morgue and he says Bartles not only looks like the guy but is the guy.”

  “There’s a break for you,” Cardigan said.

  Conkey exclaimed: “Ain’t it!”

  “Sure is.”

  Conkey rubbed his hands together slowly and put shining, merry eyes on Cardigan. “And so a guy who lives in a house back of the Western Arms calls up and says about six last night he was putting his car in his garage. He seen two guys come out the basement door o’ the Western Arms. One’s little and one’s big. Big, little—see? And these guys stand for a couple minutes and then go away. So, reading in the paper this morning about the murder, he calls up.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Ain’t it!” His eyes bubbled. “Fitz was wondering, since you got there before six, Fitz was wondering didn’t you maybe scare away two guys.”

  Cardigan leaned back, clasped hands behind his head. “If I did, I didn’t see them.”

  Conkey looked almost ridiculously coy. “Fitz thought maybe you saw them but didn’t link it up with anything.”

  “No.”

  Conkey darted out a finger. “That’s what I said! I told Fitz that if you saw them, you’d sure as hell tell us; you wouldn’t let a thing like that slip your mind. That’s what I told Fitz. I said, ‘Hell, Fitz, Cardigan wouldn’t forget a thing like that.’ That’s what I said.”

  The way he leaned forward, with mouth and eyes eager, gave the impression that he was hard of hearing and trying to read lips.

  “How about that widow?” Cardigan asked.

  “Great possibility! ‘Sure,’ Allison from The Globe-Herald said, ‘Make it a widow. Better headlines, better story. Go ahead, you guys, make it a widow.’ But finding now this Mr. Hardin from Indianapolis and the guy that says he saw—”

  A door banged. The inner connecting door burst open and Pat came in, flushed and out of breath. The presence of another in the office besides Cardigan whipped her up short. She appeared like a flame suddenly blown tall and thin and congealed and her teeth bit into her lip and the red color of her face deepened. Something struggled valiantly in her eyes and her lips started to twitch as she felt she had to say something and didn’t quite know what.

  So she said, breathless: “How—how is your hurt head this morning?”

  The fleeting look on Cardigan’s face gave the impression that he felt like a man with a bridge suddenly giving way beneath him.

  But he said. “Swell…. Now I don’t want to have you busting in here late every day, but if you keep on running to work like that something’ll happen to you.”

  She gasped: “I—I’m sorry.”

  Cardigan became gruffly formal. “That’s O.K. Don’t let it happen again. And don’t try to wash things up by asking about my health. I’m busy. Please….” He nodded toward the big operatives’ room.

  She made a meek little bow and disappeared.

  Cardigan, frowning, moved about some objects on his desk and said: “Women, women, Conkey—especially in this kind of a business.”

  All of Conkey’s face was toned down to a shallow, softly radiating expression of mirth and bafflement. He looked at the door Pat had closed behind her. He looked at the ceiling, at the wall, at various objects in the room. Then his face went blank—like a light snuffed out—and an instant later was beaming again, joyous and cheerful and buoyant.

  “Hope you weren’t hurt too bad, Cardigan.”

  Cardigan said: “When people build doorways high enough for guys like me, I guess I’ll stop cracking the old dome.”

  Conkey bounced to his feet like a heavy rubber ball, put his palms on his sides and then shot his right hand forward. “Well, been a pleasant little call, Cardigan.”

  “Any time, sergeant,” Cardigan said, rising and shaking hands.

  “You know Fitz, always shooting me around to bother folks. Hope I ain’t bothered you. Fitz is all right, but you know Fitz. Come around for pinochle sometimes, Cardigan.”

  He swivelled like a squat turret and went out with a heavy, bounding tread, humming an air of Pagliacci. He left behind him in that room a weird admixture of carnival mirth, side-show cunning, that left Cardigan high and dry as to what it was all about.

  Cardigan clipped a short, exasperated oath between teeth that clicked. He turned and looked at the closed door leading to the big room. He went to the other door and opened it and saw Miss Gilligan in violent combat with the typewriter. He closed the door, crossed the room and sat on the desk.

  “Pat,” he called.

  MUCH of the flush had gone from her face when she reappeared. There was evidence that she had touched up with puff and lipstick. A black hat with a pert little brim was raked becomingly over one ear.

  “So I pulled a boner,” she said.

  “Outside of that, what did you pull?” He flipped open a plain cedarwood box. “Smoke?”

  “Never before breakfast and toothbrush.”

  “Been out all night?”

  She dropped to a chair and wagged her head. “And was it a night, milord—was it a night! Look at my shoes. I walked.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “What a big help you are to come home to. I feel as if I want to put my head on your shoulder and weep—and tell all.”

  “Cut out the clowning.”

  She settled back and looked gravely at him. “When I left you last night I walked out of your apartment house and heard footsteps coming down the front walk back of me. When I turned a chap took me by the arm. I said, ‘Pul-lease!’ and he said, quite to the point: ‘You got a date, sister.’ I said: ‘With you?’ He said: ‘No. With this gat in my pocket—if you try any shenanigans.’ So I went along with him and we were joined by a big fellow and then we all hopped in a car and I was blindfolded and we drove off. Miles. At least it felt lik
e miles.”

  Cardigan didn’t exclaim. He kept regarding her with intense, narrowed eyes.

  She said: “I was hustled into a house, into a room. The blindfold was removed—and there I was! In a beastly room, all smelly and simply frightful. And there were the two chaps, the big one and the little one. I was so mad I forgot to be frightened.

  “It seems they’d tailed you to your apartment when you left the scene of the murder. The little one hid in the linen room obliquely across from your door. The other one waited at the car. The little one had hoped you’d come out again. Instead, I went in—he saw me—and he saw me come out half an hour later and took it into his head that I was your moll and tailed me. What I get for knowing folks like you.”

  “They hurt you?”

  She pulled up a sleeve, showed some black and blue marks. “Only these—some very crude arm-twisting—and I’ll tell you I’ll bet I kicked holes in their shins.”

  “The mutts,” he growled.

  “So they swore high up and low down that you killed Bartles, that I was your moll and that they’d kill you if I didn’t tell all. Whereupon, I said: ‘First you’ll have to find him.’ Well, that brought the house down and brought on the arm-twisting. A little later—it really hurt—I passed out.”

  Cardigan smacked fist into palm.

  “But wait,” Pat said. “When I came to, the room was deserted. The door was locked. I was up three stories, couldn’t jump. I tried the lock with a hairpin. No go. I turned up the mattress, forced one of the little circular springs from the bed-spring, twisted it to a shape I wanted and tried the lock again. It took me ten minutes to open the door and I used the back of my little nail file to take four screws from the snap lock on the hall door. And so out.”

  A glimmer of admiration in Cardigan’s eyes was followed by: “Swell, kid—Swell!”

  “I got the number of the house and when I got to the first corner I got the name of the street. 205 Ellsworth. By this time dawn was breaking. There were no taxis, no street cars. So I began walking and then I got sick and sat down in a doorway and like a fool I began crying. An old Italian woman opened the door and she made me come in and gave me a drink and I was dizzy and sick and went to sleep. So when I woke up I walked again and found a street car and got off when I saw the first taxi and took it and here I am.”