The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37

by Frederick Nebel

  “I can’t make it out,” he said, “but thanks.”

  HE bent down, took away Rewell’s gun, looked around the living room and then strode across it and banged open the bedroom door. Sheffield was lying on the bed, bound and gagged. Cardigan took out a pocketknife and cut away the gag and the bonds.

  “Whew,” said Sheffield, “do you look lousy!”

  Cardigan scowled. “I told you to keep those guys—”

  “Jack, I tried to tell you. You know how my hand suddenly goes limp on me. Some nerve bad, I guess. You remember? Well, it went bad and the gun just fell out of my hand and they jumped me an—”

  The phone rang and Cardigan turned and strode back into the living room, snatched up the instrument. “Yes?… Yes, this is Cardigan.” He pressed the receiver closer against his ear. “They are, are they? Well, I’m glad to hear it. All those numbers I gave you, huh?… Swell. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He slapped the receiver back into the hook and turned as Rewell was struggling to his feet. He said to Rewell: “You’re going to have a hard time explaining where you got part of the Wintermeade payroll stick-up, four years ago.”

  Rewell groaned and fell down again.

  Cardigan raised his eyes to the girl.

  “So you’re Laura Harrod. I’ve been looking for you.”

  Still shaking, she came over beside him. “I’ve been looking for you. I went to your hotel and they said—”

  “I know what they said. Then you went out with Rewell—that guy there.”

  She grimaced. “I know. I was a fool. But he said he was looking for you too, he was a friend of yours, and he thought he knew where he could find you. I—I went with him. We walked a couple of blocks and then took a cab and then he took me to that awful house—where you jumped on the running board. He wanted to know why I wanted to see you. I wouldn’t tell him. He slapped me a lot and then tied me up and after a while that fat man came and wanted to know too, but I wouldn’t tell him. They tied me up again and left me there and took my purse. I think one of them went out to my bungalow. My address was in the purse.”

  Cardigan was wiping the blood off his face. “Why did you want to see me?”

  “About Walter Symonds. I—I read in the papers about his—his death—” Tears welled in her eyes. “I read about how they said he had committed suicide, how he was guilty of stealing that money, and about the unfinished note. I—I wanted to see you, to ask your advice. I knew you’d stood up for him before. I—I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to tell you—ask you—”

  He handed her the letter which Sheffield had found in the book and said: “He was going to send that. It’s finished there. It’s pretty incriminating.”

  Sobbing quietly, she read it. Then she shook her head slowly. “It’s not what you think. Walter was in a little trouble about nine years ago, when he was sixteen. He stole a car. It was some kind of an initiation to some boy’s club. They told him he’d have to steal a car and then, of course, return it a day later. But he was caught and the boys were scared, they lied, and he was given a month in jail. That’s what he was afraid of—that before this trial was over someone would find out about that sentence. He wanted to tell the state’s attorney about it. It preyed on his mind. He didn’t—he couldn’t have committed suicide. He never, never took that money—”

  Cardigan grunted, “I catch on, Laura,” and glowered at the men on the floor.

  SHEFFIELD was sitting in his office at noon next day idly fingering a small bronze statuette of Napoleon when Cardigan loomed in the doorway, tossed his hat into one chair and sat down in another. He slapped his knees, said: “Well, we got the money. The whole seventy grand.”

  “Where was it?”

  Cardigan leaned back, his face patched with adhesive tape and one eye a beautiful shade of purple. “Where I guessed last night, when you took me home. In the storage warehouse—in Rewell’s trunk. The money he had on him, the money I took from him, smelled strongly of mothballs. It worried me. Why should money smell of mothballs? Well, because maybe it was stowed away in some clothes. I took a Brody on that storage contract and got a court order this morning to have the trunk opened. Keenan went with me, his puss long as a mule’s. We opened the trunk and there was the money, covered with old clothes. The other money, the stuff Rewell had, was taken out of storage. It was part of the sum traded to Mulvaney for the seventy grand. They gave him fifty grand in old money for it. Mulvaney gave Pomeroy twenty grand of the fifty as a retainer and Pomeroy gave Rewell twenty-five hundred of the same money. Rewell and Pomeroy ran a regular business of buying stolen money and storing it away and paying for it with money that had been stolen years before. Mulvaney told Pomeroy that if he didn’t get him out of this rap he’d spill about the business. So Pomeroy and Rewell put their heads together and figured out a way to make Symonds look like a suicide.

  “We got that from Shannon. It was Shannon who broke down. It was Shannon and Pomeroy who climbed to the roof above Symonds’ window and at an appointed time it was Pomeroy who phoned Symonds from a booth and said, ‘I think somebody’s in your back yard trying to get up.’ Well, Symonds went over and stuck his head out. He was smoking a pipe. Shannon and Rewell were on the roof. Rewell, who used to be a roper in a circus when he was a kid, dropped the loop over Symonds’ head. The line was greased and Rewell gave one yank and Symonds never peeped. They hauled him out of the window and up a bit and then they cut off part of the line, made a loop on their end and hooked it onto another hook which was fastened to another line. Then they lowered Symonds and caught the loop at the end of his line onto the iron hook outside the window. Their hook dropped loose and they hauled up their line and beat it across the rooftops, to a fire-escape on an abandoned building a block away. I knew when I found that pipe down in the yard that something was wrong. Now it fits. It dropped out of Symonds’ mouth when they yanked him.”

  SHEFFIELD leaned forward, toying with the statuette. “Jack, this time yesterday I’d have bet anything I own that you were sunk.”

  “I thought I was myself.”

  Sheffield stood up, said: “Come on. I’ll blow you to lunch.” On the way out he told Miss Olds: “If that nut comes around, Miss Olds, call a cop and have him taken out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cardigan walked down the corridor and Sheffield, joining him, complained: “The old gent is screwloose.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who doesn’t like Napoleon. Why he picked on me, I don’t know. But he wanted me to collect all the statues, statuettes and so forth, of Napoleon. You see, his wife ran away with a guy last month. She fell in love with the guy because he was the dead spit of Napoleon.”

  “It still don’t make sense.”

  “Well, what the old gent wants, he wants to get all the statues of Napoleon he can possibly get and then bust them, one by one. He’s a pest. And besides, he’s been costing me a lot of dough.”

  “How?”

  “Well, every time he comes in, Miss Olds naturally sees him first, being in the reception room, and she hotfoots it to my door, opens it, points at the guy’s beard and yells ‘Beaver’!”

  They took a cab to the Bearcat and as they got out Sheffield made a face and said: “Jack, you’ll have to pay. My hand’s gone limp again.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Cardigan said, and shoved his hand into Sheffield’s pocket, extracted a roll of bills and peeled one off. “I’ll keep the rest till after lunch in case your hand goes bum again.”

  The Dead Die Twice

  Chapter One

  The Powdered Corpse

  THE crash could be heard the length of the block. The heavy glass-and-metal marquee over the side entrance of the Hotel Burley trembled under the impact, and an instant later the pajama-clad body of the woman rolled leisurely over the edge of the canopy and landed on the sidewalk.

  A bellhop pushed open the plate-glass swing door, took one forward step, and stopped in his tracks with a grimace frozen on hi
s face. Across the street a woman, her arms laden with bundles, let out a frenzied scream, dropped her bundles, and fainted into the arms of a total stranger.

  For a minute, in the small area before the hotel’s side entrance, things came to a complete standstill. A dozen persons stood transfixed, rooted to the pavement. Westward was the low hum of auto traffic on Park Avenue; eastward, the blatant racket of traffic on Lexington and the winking of colored neon signs.

  Two cops came on the run through the lush summer night, and a mounted policeman trotted his horse smartly up from Park, his shield and buttons glimmering in the glare of an auto’s headlights. A couple of cars had slowed down and the mounted policeman, taking one look at the body on the sidewalk, wheeled his horse about and with sharp, peremptory gestures yelled for the cars to keep moving. One of the cops turned on the crowd that had streamed after him from Lexington Avenue; he raised his arms and bawled, “Get back. Beat it. Scatter.” The other cop dropped to his knees beside the body, then looked up and said to the bellhop, “Call an ambulance.” He stood up and there was a sickly look on his face as he muttered to the other cop, “Geez, Joe.” The mounted policeman swung down from his saddle, left the reins hanging; the horse remained dutifully at the curb.

  A man in civilian clothes, with a hard straw hat on the back of his head, bored his way through the crowd, broke out of it. He crashed into one of the cops. The cop spun angrily, then relaxed and said, “Hi, Sarge.”

  “What happened?” the plainclothed man asked.

  “She took a header.”

  “And me just after eating.”

  The cars were stopping again. The mounted policeman set his jaw, went out into the street, and cut loose with a tart, impatient tongue. The bellboy who had appeared first at the door now reappeared, and behind him surged other bellboys, other people, men and women. A man pressed through to the street and one of the cops turned and put a hand against his chest.

  The man said, “I’m the house physician.”

  The cop took his hand down and shook his head. “I guess you ain’t gonna be a big help here.” He gestured toward the body, but did not look at it.

  “Good God,” the doctor muttered.

  “You and me both,” said the cop.

  “It’s”—the doctor pointed—“it’s Mrs. McMann.” He looked up at the side of the building, gulped. “She lives on the fourteenth floor.”

  The cop said, “That’s a long dive in any man’s language,” and kept his eyes away from the body.

  The clanging of an ambulance gong rose desperately above the other sounds of the city.

  CARDIGAN shouldered his way through the crowd jammed in the doorway and came down the three steps to the sidewalk. He was hatless and his shaggy hair bunched all over his head. There was a half-smoked cigar in his mouth and his big hands dug in his coat pockets, bagging them.

  The cop said in an angry, jittery voice, “What do you want?”

  Cardigan stood staring somberly at the body on the pavement, tongued his cigar slowly from one side of his mouth to the other. He seemed not to have heard the cop’s outburst.

  The cop shoved him. “Get back! Get inside!”

  “Calm yourself,” Cardigan growled indifferently.

  The plainclothed man in the hard straw hat squinted across the sidewalk. “What you doing here, Cardigan?”

  “House-dicking for one of our men, Abe. Googan—he got a gutful of bad banana.” He took the cigar out of his mouth, dropped his voice. “I see Madge McMann took a run-out powder.”

  “Madge McMann!”

  Cardigan put the cigar back between his teeth, nodded. “Flush McMann is now a widower. Pull your pants up, Abe. Your shirt’s sticking out.”

  The ambulance gonged its way up the street, swung sharply in against the curb. A white-coated figure jumped down from the seat. He was a young man with a dry, tight smile. He sucked at a cigarette twice, tossed it away, said, “Not what you’d call a three-point landing, eh?”

  The mounted policeman looked stonily at him. The two cops didn’t think he was funny, either. The man in the hard straw hat scowled.

  Cardigan said sarcastically, “Where do you find your gags, fella, in the gutter?”

  Madge McMann, in salmon-colored pajamas….

  THE news spread through the hotel like an unleashed electric spark. It sputtered through the dining room, the kitchens, the basement; it clicked round the lobby, up and down the corridors, among the maids and porters and elevator operators; it skyrocketed to the roof garden, leaped from waiter to waiter, ear to ear. It reached Tommy Thoms’s orchestra, and as if to thrust the tragedy farther away, the orchestra picked up speed. In a little while the ambulance sped away with the broken, pajama-clad body. A porter came out and mopped the sidewalk. The spark continued to sputter and flicker and the hotel management tried to catch it and keep it under control.

  The door of Apartment 1404 was done in light gray enamel and the numbers were of chromium, like the knob. The corridor was like any other corridor in the hotel; if anything, it seemed quieter than the others—the management, eager to keep the hotel running smoothly, had seen to that. But it was different on the other side of the door numbered 1404.

  Chadwick, the house physician, said, “She was ill. I’ve been treating her for a month. I stopped in to see her”—he looked at his watch—“four hours ago, at six o’clock. Her nerves were rather shot and she was in the habit of fainting dead away.”

  Abe Green, the plainclothed sergeant, had a searching, narrow stare fixed on the doctor. “Did you tell her to stay in bed?”

  “I advised it,” Chadwick replied, working the knuckles of his right hand back and forth across the palm of his left. He was a dark, heavy-set man, with short bristly black hair and coarse eyebrows that met above his nose. “I advised it principally because of her fainting spells. I didn’t want to have her faint and—well, crack her head against some piece of furniture or—”

  “Fall out a window,” Abe Green cut in.

  Chadwick nodded gravely. “Yes.”

  Abe Green turned and pointed. “She was in the bathroom and she took a bath—a shower. The shower curtain’s still wet and there’s a damp bath towel on the rack. She powdered herself all over, like women do, and then— Now look. Her slippers, or what maybe you’d call mules, are still in the bathroom—and there on the carpet in the bedroom you see the marks of her bare feet that had powder on them. They zigzag across the floor, unsteady, very unsteady, and go to the window. What d’you make of that, Doc?”

  Chadwick frowned. “Possibly she went to the window to get air. She may have felt faint and—”

  “Exactly!” broke in Abe Green, raising a gnarled forefinger and pivoting to impress the others in the apartment. “I just wanted to see if somebody else besides me added that up and got the same total. Okay, then. She took a shower, a hot one, and the steam in there, let’s say, kind of got her—but she managed to dry off and powder herself. But she had to leave sudden—didn’t have time to put her mules on—in order to get air. She got her pajamas on and then—” He threw up his arms, let them drop with simple finality. “It figures. Or does anybody around here think she committed suicide?”

  Chadwick shook his head vigorously. “Not that, certainly. I never saw anyone more eager to live. You see”—he lowered his voice—“she had a weak heart and was likely at any time to pop off—instantly. She knew that, but she wasn’t afraid. She wanted to live intensely in the meantime.”

  The assistant manager of the hotel rubbed his hands together approvingly. He was a prissy-looking fellow with a dandified haircomb and a precious little mustache. “Everything sounds very logical,” he purred delightedly. It was always better to have someone die naturally in a hotel; suicides and murders and things like that were horrible. “Yes”—he actually beamed—“it all sounds most reasonable.” His eyes glimmered on Abe Green, on the half-dozen cops, the couple of newspapermen, the news cameraman. “I should like to send you boys up some ch
ampagne—”

  Cardigan came big-footed in from the bedroom eating an apple and wagging his shaggy head sourly from side to side. “There’s a few things around here that don’t fit as smoothly as the paper on the wall,” he grumbled.

  Green narrowed one eye. The sergeant was a bony-faced man with a good head on his shoulders and a blunt but good-natured way of saying things; his sense of humor was on the rough side, but it was without acid, without malice. His homely face got lopsided with a half-grin. “Okay, Jack,” he said. “Chuck your ideas at me and I’ll bat ’em down and look ’em over.”

  Cardigan looked suspicious. “Listen, Abe—if you’re going to go into a fan dance, I’ll shut up.”

  The assistant manager cleared his throat, looked annoyed. “See here, Cardigan,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t set out on a carnival of theories; put ideas, foolish ideas, in people’s heads. After all, you are working for the hotel—”

  Green interrupted with a wave of his hand. “Let him, let him. There’s none of us masterminds, Mr. Pentmater. If I think Jack’s screwy, I’ll tell him so. Go ahead, Jack.”

  Cardigan, who had planted a dark, disapproving stare on Pentmater, now took a vicious bite at his apple and said to Green, “Come in the bedroom a minute.” He turned and went in himself and the others followed; he pointed to the wide double bed, which stood in the center of the room, its right side toward the bathroom, its left toward the two windows. He said, “Human beings get in the habit of doing things a certain way. Madge McMann was in the habit of sleeping on the right side of the bed—in this case, the side nearest the bathroom. You can tell that—”

  “Both pillows are rumpled,” Abe Green cut in. “Being sick, and being alone in the bed during the day, she could be all over it.”

  “I don’t mean about the pillows—I’m thinking of her slippers. Besides the mules, she had another pair of slippers—they’re here on the floor at the right of the bed. McMann’s, you see, are on the left. Now take a look at the bed covers. If you sleep on the right, and if you have a habit of getting out on the right side of the bed, you generally grab the right side of the covers and throw them back from right to left and toward the foot of the bed. These covers here are thrown back from left to right.”