by Craig Rice
He turned to the pretty brunette who sat at the typewriter. “Any calls?”
“Nothing of importance, Mr. Malone, except this.” She reached for a pad of paper and wrote on it rapidly, “Mrs. Sanders telephoned you a little past noon, asking for an appointment at two o’clock. I didn’t mention this to Mr. Sanders when he came in. It’s now two-thirty and she hasn’t come in or telephoned again.”
The lawyer said, “Nice work, dear,” and gave her shoulder an affectionate pat. “If she should come in, handle it tactfully.” He went on into his office, closed the door, tossed his hat and coat inaccurately at the brown-leather davenport, and said, “Nice to see you. Will you join me in a drink?”
“Thanks,” Sanders said. He looked as though he needed one badly.
Malone rummaged through the office for a bottle of rye, finally found it in a file drawer marked UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE, located two glasses under an old hat in the closet, dusted them, and poured two drinks before he spoke again. “I see you’re still wearing your beard.”
Willis Sanders turned faintly pink. “I can’t get it off. Not until I locate Partridge and find out how.” He finished his drink quickly, spilling a little on his hand, and gratefully accepted a second.
By the time Malone was comfortably settled behind his desk and had lighted a cigar, Sanders had made up his mind to speak.
“That was a damned silly bet Mona made with your friend, wasn’t it?”
Malone smiled. “Yes, it was. I’d practically forgotten it.”
Sanders smiled weakly in return. “Had you?” He mopped his brow.
“Of course.” The lawyer stared fixedly at the end of his cigar. “It was nothing but a joke.”
His visitor laughed hollowly. “That’s what I thought.” He lit a cigarette. “I felt very disturbed, though, by that idiotic remark Daphne made last night. I hope nobody took it seriously.”
“Surely no one did,” Malone said vaguely and comfortingly.
“I’d hoped not,” Sanders said a little too brightly. “Daphne is a strange girl. No telling what she’s going to say.”
“I don’t think anyone paid any attention to her,” the lawyer said.
Willis Sanders coughed, clearing his throat. “Amazing, though, about that little Southern woman—what was her name?”
“Yandry, wasn’t it?”
“That’s it. To think we all sat there making bad jokes about murder, and the very next day she went out and—” He paused, clearing his throat again in an embarrassed manner. “It’s just amazing, when you come to think about it, isn’t it?”
“Very,” Malone said dryly. He knocked the ashes from his cigar. “Very coincidental, as Gus Schenck would say.”
“Gus Schenck?”
Malone nodded. “Client of mine.”
“Oh,” Willis Sanders said. That seemed to be all he had to say.
Malone waited as long as he thought Sanders could stand it before he asked, in his most unconcerned manner, “Did you know in advance that your wife was going to be shot, or did Fleurette tell you about it afterward?”
“Afterwards,” Sanders answered automatically, “but—” He stopped suddenly and said, “What do you mean?” with a very unconvincing air of indignation.
Malone coughed and said, “Nothing. I just like to know where I stand.” He looked thoughtfully at his cigar and said, “One of us has to ask the questions, and it might as well be me. You didn’t shoot Joshua Gumbril yourself, did you?”
“Of course not,” Sanders said. He added stiffly, “This doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Malone agreed. “Where do you want to get? What the hell brought you up here, anyway?”
Willis Sanders said, “Well—” stopped, and looked embarrassed.
Malone rose, refilled Sanders’ glass, and sat down again.
“This is the way it happened,” he said thoughtfully. “You started running around with Fleurette. Before you knew it, she had her hooks in you so you couldn’t get away. Then she told you she intended to marry you, and that she’d make you a free man in a way you couldn’t raise a squawk about.” He paused, mopped his face, and said, “Don’t mind me, I’m only thinking it over. Maybe you didn’t take Fleurette’s threat seriously. But the night your wife was killed, you knew what it was all about—no, don’t misunderstand me, you didn’t know it in advance. But when it happened, you realized right away what was going on. You were just scared enough that when you were questioned, you testified that your wife had screamed and the holdup man lost his head and fired.”
He paused, looked at Sanders, and said, “Don’t feel embarrassed, I’d have done the same thing myself.”
He wondered if Fleurette Sanders had arrived to keep her appointment and how the girl in the anteroom was dealing with the situation if she had.
“You married Fleurette as soon as you decently could,” he continued, “because you knew that if you didn’t, she’d see to it you were accused of arranging the murder of the first Mrs. Sanders. When you got over the shock of what had happened, you settled down to an existence that was bad, but not damned bad. Fleurette was clever, and people accepted her. Then Daphne began getting a lot of notions in her head. There wasn’t a thing you could do. So you hoped for the best and waited to see what would happen next.”
He shook his head and murmured, “How I do run on!” In exactly the same tone of voice he asked, “Did you know Fleurette was Joshua Gumbril’s sister?”
Sanders looked uncomfortable and said, “Yes. But not till later. Not till after we were married.”
Malone shook his head again and said sympathetically, “You must have had a bad hour or so when you learned he’d been murdered.”
Willis Sanders said miserably, “I was afraid Daphne had done it. I knew she’d been trying to find out the truth—and—well, then there was that bet, you know—Mona’s bet with Jake Justus—and of course when I read about the murder that was the first thing I thought, but then Daphne, and—” He rested his forehead on his hand and said, “I don’t know what to do. That’s why I came here to talk to you.”
“Glad you did,” Malone said quietly. “Talk never hurt anybody.” He rose, strode to the window, and stood looking across a dismal vista of downtown roofs. “Well, it’s a good thing it all turned out as it did. I don’t mind admitting I wondered a little about Gumbril’s murder myself. But of course it’s all cleared up now. The Southern woman certainly was justified, and she’s gone beyond the reach of murder trials now.”
Willis Sanders leaned forward. “She really did shoot him?”
Malone turned around and said very reproachfully, “You don’t think the police department would make a mistake, do you?” turned back to the window, and went on, “Of the people involved in your first wife’s murder, Fleurette is in no position to talk. Gumbril is dead, the man who actually fired the shot is gone, God knows where, Gus Schenck is the last man on earth who wants the whole mess stirred up again, and why the hell you want to see a lawyer, I don’t know.” He turned back from the window to the distraught man, with the friendliest and most reassuring of smiles.
Willis Sanders managed to smile back faintly, and said, “I guess I don’t. But when I got to thinking about it, and adding everything up in my mind, it just got me down, and I thought I’d better talk it over with you. Because Mona—” he paused, scowled, and said, “she meant that bet, you know. She said so. And when I read about the Gumbril murder, and it seemed to fit in so perfectly, and then I got to thinking about everything all at once, and—” He stood up suddenly and said, “Oh well, the hell with it. I’m glad I came to see you.”
There was a gentle knock at the door. Malone bawled, “Come in,” the door opened, and Jake Justus walked in, kicking the door shut behind him.
The tall, red-haired man was unusually pale, there was a heavy frown on his face, and he appeared to be out of breath. Sanders’ presence seemed to startle him a little, he greeted him briefly, n
odded to Malone, and stood silently by the desk, folding and unfolding the newspaper he had been carrying under his arm.
“Well?” Malone growled. “What kind of a mess are you in now?”
Jake didn’t answer. He glanced again at Sanders, then at Malone. Suddenly he unfolded the newspaper and tossed it on the lawyer’s desk.
Malone looked at it for a long time without comment, without the faintest flicker of expression on his face.
At last he turned to Willis Sanders and said, “I’d rather you read about it in the papers than tell you myself,” and handed him the newspaper. Screaming headlines told of the fatal shooting of Fleurette Sanders at the corner of State and Madison Streets at one forty-five that afternoon.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fleurette Sanders had been shot and killed at the northwest corner of State and Madison Streets precisely one forty-five by the big clock on the corner of the Boston Store. It appeared that she had been going south on State Street and was turning the corner to go west on Madison Street when the shot was fired.
As in the shooting of Joshua Gumbril on the same corner three days before, there was no trace of the killer. Fleurette Sanders’ small, fragile body had been carried a little distance by the closely packed crowd of holiday shoppers before she fell. No one had heard the sound of the shot.
There were no details given in the newspaper story, which was confined to a screaming headline and a hasty paragraph.
Jake tried hard not to look at Willis Sanders’ face as he read. Malone sat by his desk, apparently completely absorbed in the minute examination of a fingernail.
Though the newspaper account of the slaying was not long, it seemed to take a very long time to read. Jake had a feeling that Sanders was reading it over and over slowly, word by word, trying first to realize the import of what it said, and then to believe that what it told was true. At last the big man folded the paper carefully and meticulously along its original creases, and laid it on Malone’s desk, without comment and almost without a change of expression.
Jake wished that someone would speak. He couldn’t think of anything to say himself.
Malone rose, poured whisky into Willis Sanders’ glass and handed it to him without a word. He held the bottle toward Jake, raising one eyebrow in a question. Jake shook his head, then changed his mind, nodded, and held out his hand.
“Where’s Helene?” the lawyer asked.
“She’s on her way here. She went out looking for her father.”
Very slowly and deliberately Malone screwed the cap back on the bottle after Jake had returned it to him, stood it on the desk, looked at it, looked up at Sanders, looked quickly back at the bottle, and said casually, “Did you shoot her?”
Willis Sanders turned pale, said, “Of course not,” paused, began to turn a purplish red, and said angrily, “Are you accusing me of—”
“Don’t get sore,” Malone said quietly. “Nobody’s accusing anybody.” He added, “It just looked as though I might have you for a client, and I wanted to know whether or not you did shoot her, so I’d be sure where I stand.”
“I didn’t,” Willis Sanders said.
Malone said calmly, “You may have to prove that.”
Sanders started to speak, stopped, stared at the lawyer, and then said slowly, “Yes, that’s right. I suppose I will be accused of killing Fleurette. But I didn’t.”
“A man can have one wife murdered without attracting much attention,” Malone said, “but when it happens twice, it’s liable to arouse suspicion, especially among such imaginative people as policemen. What time did you get here this afternoon?”
“It was—around two o’clock, I guess.”
“Where had you been before that?”
“I’d been to lunch at the Palmer House bar.”
“What time did you leave there?”
“About one fifteen.”
The lawyer swore softly to himself, chewed savagely on his cigar, and, with an I’m-not-gonna-believe-it-anyway note in his voice, said, “Did it take you forty-five minutes to get here from the Palmer House?”
“I guess it must have. I wasn’t in any hurry. I hadn’t quite made up my mind about coming to see you. I walked about a bit, thinking it over.”
“Where did you walk?”
“Let me think. The Palmer House is at Monroe Street. I went out on the Wabash Avenue side and walked west on Monroe Street. When I got to La Salle, I started up here, and then I decided to think it over a little more. So I walked up to Wacker Drive and over to Clark Street, and then I came back here. It was just about two when I arrived.”
“A hell of an alibi,” Malone growled, “but that’s all right.” He lifted his head and bellowed loudly, “Maggie!”
The door opened and the pretty, black-haired secretary came in. “Yes, Mr. Malone?”
“Listen, sweetheart, I want you to make a note of this. It was one thirty when Mr. Sanders came to the office, and he stayed until I got here.”
“Yes, Mr. Malone.”
“What time did Mr. Sanders get here?”
“One thirty, Mr. Malone.”
“Did he leave the anteroom at any time?”
“No, Mr. Malone. He sat right there until you came in.”
“How do you know it was one thirty when he arrived?”
“Because I’d just called Cathedral eight thousand on the phone to get the correct time to set my watch, and I was listening on the phone when Mr. Sanders walked in. It was exactly one thirty-two, to be strictly accurate.”
“Nice work, darling,” Malone said. “That’s all.”
She paused at the door, said, “The buzzer on your desk is working if you need me again,” and went out.
“Well,” Malone said thoughtfully, “that takes care of that.”
“I’m not so sure,” Jake interrupted. “That one thirty alibi depends on sweetheart’s call to Cathedral eight thousand.”
“You seem to have the situation well in hand,” said Malone. “So what?”
“So the police are not so dumb,” said Jake. “They’ll check that call, find it was never made, and that’s the end of a beautiful alibi.”
A happy smile appeared on Malone’s face. “That bright thought occurred to me before you were born,” he said. “Why do you suppose I pay sweetheart out there a salary?”
Jake smirked. “You could sue me for libel if I told you.”
“That’s something else again,” said Malone smugly, “and we don’t call it salary. But one of her jobs is to call Cathedral eight thousand every half-hour. Nine working hours every day. Six working days every week. One hundred and eight potential little alibis.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Jake with awe.
Malone nodded. “A few of my clients would have been if I hadn’t thought of that simple scheme. But so far as Mr. Sanders is concerned, we’re not in the clear yet. If some dope turns up who knows you and who happened to see you wandering around the streets at five minutes to two, we may have to think fast. But I’ve thought fast before.”
“Not fast enough,” Jake said. “Anybody who ran into him on the street at five to two would have thought he was George Brand. You’re forgetting the beard.”
Willis Sanders started, blinked, put one hand up to his chin, and felt uncertainly of the false hair.
“Of course,” Malone said, “of course!” His voice was a nice mixture of awe and wonder. “That beard is almost providential.” He looked searchingly at his new client. “The trick now is to keep you out of harm’s way until you’ve gathered your wits enough to talk.”
Before he could offer any suggestions, Helene arrived. She started to speak, saw Willis Sanders, turned a shade paler than she was already, finally said, “Well!” and sat down.
Sanders looked up at her. “I didn’t do it.”
Helene said soothingly and absent-mindedly, “Of course not,” sat down and lit a cigarette with white, nervous fingers.
“Helene,” Malone asked suddenl
y, “where’s your father?”
“Downstairs in the car.”
“Awake?”
“Reasonably.”
“Run down and bring him up here.”
She rose, smiled at him wanly, and went out.
“Sanders, how well do you know George Brand?” Malone asked gently.
“He’s as good a friend as I have,” Sanders said.
“That’s lucky,” Malone said. He looked at his watch and remarked comfortingly, “There’s plenty of time, don’t worry.”
A moment later Helene arrived with George Brand. Malone handed him the newspaper, he read it silently, dropped it on the desk, stared at Sanders and then at Malone.
“You don’t think he’ll be accused, do you?” he demanded indignantly.
The lawyer’s only answer was to shrug his shoulders.
“That’s utter rot,” George Brand said. “People like Sanders don’t go around murdering their wives.”
“That’s what you think,” Malone said agreeably. “But it might be hard to get the police to accept your opinion as evidence. I want you to look after Sanders for a while.” He turned to the unhappy man. “Did you drive downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your car?”
“In a parking lot on Wacker Drive.”
“You and Brand go up there and get it,” Malone said, “and drive straight home. Let the news be broken to you when you get there. Don’t talk to anybody.” He paused and said very firmly, “Get this straight now. You came downtown this morning, had lunch at the Palmer House, came straight to my office, waited for me about an hour, talked with me about a personal matter which you are not required to divulge to anybody, met Brand here, and went home. Understand?”
Sanders nodded.
“Good,” the lawyer said. “Now tell me exactly where you went and what you did.”
Sanders cleared his throat nervously, looked hesitantly at George Brand, and repeated exactly what Malone had told him.
“Very nice,” Malone said. “You’ll do. As far as what may come up next, I’ll meet it as it comes. That’s what I’m here for. So go home now, and relax. Mr. Brand, keep him from talking to anyone. And for the love of Mike, shift that interchangeable beard back to its original owner.”