The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  It was closer to twenty minutes before the large open touring car pulled up in front of the World building. Brass clambered into the back seat, joining Deputy Commissioner Mapes, a burly man with a round face and a thick black mustache. “Sorry I’m late,” Mapes said. “McWheeter kept me with last-second instructions and suggestions. The man can fidget and fuss more than two cats in a kettle.” He beamed at Brass and waved the chauffeur onward. “Ready to fight crime?” he asked with a chortle as the car pulled out into traffic.

  “Is that what we’re doing?” Brass passed Mapes the bulky manila envelope the city editor had given him.

  Mapes held the envelope up with his left hand and tapped it with his right forefinger. “In here,” he said, “are the photographs of forty-two members of the city government who might be the mysterious ‘Mr Big.’ We’re going to spread them out before Sammy the Toad and see if he is able to point to one and say, his voice ringing with sincerity, ‘That is the man to whom I’ve been paying three thousand dollars a week!’”

  Brass took his silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and waved it in Mapes’s direction. Mapes shook his head. “I’m a cigar man,” he said.

  Brass selected a cigarette from the case with a care that suggested that one was somehow different from the others. He went through the routine of tapping it and lighting it and putting the case away. “McWheeter’s not going to be able to put away Dutch Schultz, or Luciano, or Rothstein, or any of the other top, ah, liquor importers; you know that, don’t you?”

  “Are you suggesting that this is all an exercise in futility?” Mapes grinned. “Then you don’t understand its true purpose.”

  Brass leaned back in the seat cushion. “Enlighten me,” he said.

  “Roosevelt’s going to be running for president this next election, or the one after,” Mapes said. “And Walker might be thinking of moving up himself. And the people who vote – even the ones who are in favor of booze – aren’t fond of the murder and mayhem that’s accompanying its delivery these days.

  “This investigation is serving the dual purpose of convincing the voters that Roosevelt is a crime-busting governor, and pointing out to the rum runners that we don’t give much of a damn about bathtub gin or Canadian rye, but we don’t approve of the killings that go with it.”

  “At last,” Brass said, “an honest and cynical explanation that I can understand.”

  “Don’t quote me,” said Mapes.

  Brass puffed on his cigarette. “Where have you got the Toad stashed?” he asked.

  “Brooklyn,” Mapes told him. “Out by Prospect Park. A hotel called the Staunton Arms. We have the whole eighth floor.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Not a hint.”

  They chatted about this and that as the touring car crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and headed down Flatbush Avenue. As they turned right along Prospect Park Mapes pointed down the block. “There’s the hotel,” he said, “and – damn! Steve, pull over!”

  “What is it?” Brass asked, looking up at the building looming ahead of them as the chauffeur pulled the car over to the curb. There, about two thirds of the way up the side of the building was a figure leaning out of a window. No – he wasn’t leaning out, he was hanging out. And then, silently and, it seemed to those watching, in slow motion he fell, disappearing from view behind a shorter building in front.

  “Shit!” said Mapes with feeling.

  “Sammy Mittwick?” asked Brass, already knowing the answer.

  “Any odds you want,” Mapes said.

  The two of them were out of the car by now and racing toward the hotel. As they ran, they could see heads appearing in the upstairs windows around the wide open one. “Yup, it’s the eighth floor,” said Mapes. He stopped for a second to stare up at the open window, where the bottoms of the curtains had been pulled outside and were flapping in the wind. “Mittwick could sing,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “but he couldn’t fly.”

  Brass and Mapes ran into the lobby of the hotel to find everything normal: bellmen lounging, room clerks scribbling, elevator men staring mutely out of their cages; even one lone cop strolling unconcernedly across the lobby. Mapes pulled out his badge and waved it in front of him. “I’m Deputy Commissioner Mapes,” he shouted. “You – ” he pointed to a room clerk, “call the local precinct. Tell them somebody was just pushed out of a window here, and to get here in force.”

  “Who? What? Wha – ?” the room clerk stuttered.

  “Never mind, just do it. You – ” he pointed to the cop “ – take the front door and don’t let anybody in or out, especially out. Get someone to cover the back door.”

  “Yes, sir,” the cop said, saluting.

  “Somebody’s head is going to roll for this,” Mapes said, running for the elevator. “I just hope it isn’t mine.”

  Just as Mapes and Brass entered one elevator, another opened and four cops came boiling out. Mapes yelled at them, barking instructions for them to cover all the remaining exits and stay in place until told otherwise. They disbursed and Mapes snapped “Eight!” to the elevator operator.

  “I guessed,” the man said, slamming the door closed and putting the elevator in gear. “What’s going on?”

  “A man was shoved out a window,” Brass told him.

  “No way,” the operator said. “With all them cops up there?”

  “So you would have thought,” said Brass.

  The door opened on the eighth floor to a corridor full of moiling policemen. Mapes brought them to order with a couple of shouted instructions and ran down the hall to where an open door led into one of the hotel rooms. Inside were a few more confused-looking cops and a wide open window, the curtains pushed outside and flapping in the wind. “What the hell happened?” he demanded.

  Sergeant Dickson was the ranking cop there, and he told the tale. “About an hour ago a call came through from McWheeter’s office. Says this broad named Ellen is the Toad’s girlfriend, and she has the okay to come by and bring him some clothes and stuff – maybe stay half an hour. You know.”

  “Of course you checked to make sure the call was authentic,” Mapes asked, smiling tightly.

  “It had to be,” Dickson offered. “Who else knows the guy is here?”

  “Okay. And?”

  “And she shows up and goes into his room. ‘Sweety,’ she says, ‘I’m here.’”

  “And of course you searched her before she went in?”

  “Her and the bag she brought with her,” Dickson said, sounding aggrieved. “Full of clothing. Like an extra suit for him, and a negligee thing lying on top; all pink and stuff.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “And nothing. And that’s it. About ten minutes later we hear this scream and go busting into the room. And it’s empty, and the window is wide open. We look down, and there’s the Toad lying in the alley, all broken up.”

  “So where’s the girl?”

  “That’s what I sez, Commissioner. Where’s the girl? She was nowhere to be found. We looked in the closet and under the bed and everything.”

  “No bathroom?”

  “It’s down the hall. She never left the room.”

  “This the only door?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So she just disappeared?”

  “Not only that, she left all her clothes behind.”

  “How’s that?”

  Dickson pointed to the bed. There was a skirt and a blouse and a pair of shoes and crumpled up white stockings.

  “Shouldn’t leave shoes on the bed,” Brass commented. “That’s bad luck.”

  Mapes glared at him, and then turned back to the sergeant. “There’s people from the local precinct coming,” he said. “I want this room gone over from side to side, top to bottom. I want this hotel gone over with a fine tooth comb. Check the identities of everybody in the hotel, staff and guests. I want to know what the hell happened in here.”

  Sergeant Dickson left the room, and for the first time Mapes
and Brass were alone. “If you saw what I saw,” Mapes told Brass, his voice pitched so that it wouldn’t carry, “I want you to shut up about it.”

  “You mean when the Toad went out the window?” Brass asked.

  “Yeah, that,” Mapes said.

  “You mean the fact that the hand that let go of him from inside the window came out of a blue sleeve?”

  “Yeah,” Mapes said softly. “That.”

  “For now,” Brass said. “You’ve got my word. Here’s something you should think about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you saw him fall, did he scream?”

  Mapes considered. “No,” he said.

  “And the police outside the door busted in a couple of seconds after hearing the scream, and the girl was gone.”

  “So?”

  “So who screamed?”

  Ellen Benchman, the only possible suspect, turned out to have an invincible alibi; at the time of the defenestration she was in rehearsal for a Gershwin song that they were switching into the show. And besides, when the cops that had been on duty took a look at her, they agreed that she wasn’t the “Ellen” they had let into Mittwick’s room.

  And there the story lay for ten years.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Brass asked the Two Step Kid that night at the Hotsy Totsy Klub. “You dressed up like a woman and high-heeled your way into Mittwick’s room.”

  “What makes you think so, Mr Brass?” Finter asked.

  “You’re the loose end,” Brass said. “You were following me, so somebody put you onto it. And it was right after I talked to McWheeter on the phone. You didn’t follow me to the hotel, because you were there first and I didn’t know where it was. But somebody else knew, and sent you.”

  “Put me in a dress and you can take me anywhere,” the Kid said, with a high-pitched laugh. “My only worry was that someone would notice my knobby, and very unfeminine, knees. But I guess those white stockings covered them up pretty well. Let’s assume it was me, Mr Brass, just hypothetically. Then what?”

  “Hypothetically, I’ve always wondered how you got out of that room.”

  The Kid considered. “Well it was, hypothetically, like this. I went into the room with the valise in front of my face so Mittwick couldn’t tell I wasn’t the fair Ellen, and when he got close I sapped him with this equalizer I had up my sleeve. Then, with him lying unconscious on the floor, I changed clothes.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into a cop’s uniform which I had in the valise, turned inside out so the cops couldn’t tell if they searched it. But all the guy did was stick his hand in and poke around. I think he was embarrassed by the nightie.”

  “So that’s it!” Brass exclaimed.

  “That’s it,” the Kid agreed. “I dumped the Toad out the window, then got next to the door and let out a scream. The cops come rushing in, and I’m right behind them; except I was coming from behind the door. Then I went down the stairs, and I was outta there. Oh yeah, and it was me you saw in the lobby.”

  “You were the cop Mapes told to guard the front door?”

  “Hypothetically,” the Two Step Kid agreed.

  The blonde he’d been dancing with had emerged from the powder room and was weaving her way across the room toward our table. The Two Step Kid got up. “I guess I should go now,” he said. “This is all between us, right?”

  “Who’d believe me?” Brass asked. “How did Dutch Schultz find out where Sammy the Toad was being kept?”

  At that the Kid did break out laughing. “He heard it on the radio, Mr Brass, he heard it on the radio.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t the Dutchman I was working for, Mr Brass, it was Mr Big.”

  “So there was a Mr Big.”

  “Yeah. You knew him. His name was McWheeter.”

  “Son of a – ”

  “How true, Mr Brass, how true.” And with that the Two Step Kid held out his arm for his beautiful blonde lady and sashayed out to the dance floor.

  Well, Ellen moved out to Hollywood and changed her name. You’ve probably seen her if you go to the movies. The Dutchman got his with the aid of a machine gun in the Palace Chop House in Newark last year, and by a twist of fate Abbadabba Berman was eating with him that night, and became an unintended victim. And McWheeter disappeared about three years ago. Just plain disappeared. Maybe we should ask the Two Step Kid about that one. Or maybe not.

  Putting Crime Over

  HULBERT FOOTNER

  This is the first of three stories I’ve reprinted in this anthology which are not only set in the 1920s but were also written in the 1920s. I was surprised, when I began delving, how few good whodunnits really reflected the Roaring Twenties. There were, of course, the obvious ones by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but I didn’t want to reprint stories so easily available elsewhere. So many other perfectly good stories were either more Edwardian or even Victorian in flavour (really all Sherlock Holmes or Dr Thorndyke imitations) or were hard-boiled crime stories that had no whodunnit element. Having searched long and hard I’ve settled on three which I think have a unique flavour and which to me are the essence of Roaring 20s whodunnits written by the people who were experiencing it.

  The first is from Hulbert Footner (1879–1944), unjustly forgotten today but in his heyday a popular contributor to the leading magazines. He was born in Canada but lived most of his life in America. He was best known for a long-running series featuring the beautiful Madame Rosika Storey, who was something of a psychologist with an unusual technique in solving crimes. She first appeared in the novel The Under Dogs (1925) and in several story collections including Madame Storey (1926), The Velvet Hound (1928), The Casual Murder (1932) and The Almost Perfect Murder (1933). I’m not aware that the following story was included in a collection. It first appeared in Argosy-All Story for 20 November 1926.

  It was owing to the last-minute illness of Mrs Cornelius Marquardt that I had the good fortune to be included in this little dinner of Mme Storey’s. Her guests do not often disappoint.

  Everybody in the know is aware that the best talk in New York is to be heard around her table. She picks her guests with that end in view, careless of their social position. One may meet a visiting marquis or a tramp poet – the poet more often than the marquis.

  Mme Storey herself is a better talker, in my opinion, than any of them, but one would be slow to learn that at her own table. Her object there is merely to keep the ball rolling briskly. She likes to listen better than to talk.

  On this occasion the men included Ambrose G. Larned, the brilliant advertising man, who had introduced so many new ideas into his profession; John Durward, the famous English novelist; Harry Evans Colter, our own clever and popular short story writer; and Inspector Rumsey, of the New York police.

  Rumsey, the dear little man, is not at all a brilliant person; but he is a perfect compendium of crime, and, since crime seems to be the most interesting of all subjects to persons of every degree nowadays, Mme Storey finds him very useful at the dinner table. When people try to draw her out on the subject of crime, she shifts them on to Rumsey.

  Foreigners regard us Americans as preeminent in crime; they come over here to see crime; and when we have a distinguished visitor like Mr Durward, Rumsey is pretty sure to be included.

  My mistress, as you know, is not enamored of crime, and she managed to divert the talk to other subjects until after we had left the table. When the little company was grouped around the amusing 1850 living room upstairs, it could no longer be staved off, and she let it have its way.

  I must tell you that New York was experiencing a crime wave at the moment – but indeed it always is. It is like an ocean beach, with one crime wave falling right on top of the one before.

  This was the time of the bobbed-hair-bandit sensation, when many of the smaller jewelers were putting in defensive arrangements of siren whistles and tear gas. These things were always going off accidentally and throwing w
hole neighborhoods into a panic. The Englishman was all agog as he listened.

  Everybody is familiar with Mr Durward’s fine head with its silvery hair and delicately chiseled features. He supplied a chorus of “Amazing! Extraordinary! Incredible!” to all the stories that were told.

  “In the middle of the day!” I remember him saying. “With crowds passing in the street, these fellows go boldly into your jewelry shops, and point their guns, and take what they please, and get away scot-free! Such a thing would be impossible in London!”

  “Not impossible,” Inspector Rumsey pointed out good-humoredly. “It has happened even in London. Your police are luckier than we are, that’s all. For London streets are narrow and crooked, and the few main thoroughfares are always crowded. It is exceedingly difficult to make a get-away. Now, our streets are broad and straight, and only one of them is completely full of traffic during business hours. You may have noticed that our holdups never take place in the center, but always in busy neighborhoods off the center, where there is enough traffic to conceal the bandits in their get-away, but not enough to stop them.”

  “Well, what’s to be done? Are you just going to submit to this state of affairs?”

  “There is a remedy,” said Inspector Rumsey quietly, “whenever the public is willing to pay for it.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It is ridiculous and humiliating to the police to be forced to go on foot, when every bandit is provided with an automobile. All patrolmen should be mounted on motorcycles.”

  “Hear! Hear!” said Mme Storey.

  “Even the women are taking to banditry!” murmured Mr Durward. “An incredible country!”

  “There’s a good deal of nonsense about her,” said the inspector. “The newspapers have played up the bobbed-hair bandit so hard that their credulous readers see a bobbed-hair bandit everywhere they look.”

  “And I notice that the police are advertising in the subway cars,” Mr Durward went on. “Cards addressed to the bandits, warning them that they will certainly be caught in the end. Surely that is very naive.”