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

by Frederick Nebel

  “What do you think about it?” Cardigan asked, sitting down.

  “Eh? About what?” Radcliffe said, polishing a pair of nose glasses.

  “Freemont’s death.”

  “Oh, yes,” he muttered, frowning gravely as he set his glasses on his nose. “Freemont’s death. Hmn. Well”—he looked up blandly—“it was very unfortunate. Freemont’s record was so excellent at the bank. But I suppose one never knows what actually goes on inside another’s head.”

  “That’s what makes a detective’s job tough. So you’ve got no doubt about the police verdict, huh?”

  Radcliffe spread his hands and then placed them on his knees. “I’m afraid not, since their verdict seems very logical.”

  “I’m wondering why, Mr. Radcliffe, you went around to Freemont’s apartment to tell him you intended resigning and that you were going to recommend him for your job.”

  “I happened to be passing, walking on my way home. No special motive. I frequently stopped by.”

  “Did you ever say Freemont was a trouble-maker at the bank?”

  “No.”

  “Colby said you did. Told me to ask you.”

  Radcliffe put up his hands and adjusted his glasses. “I’m afraid Mr. Colby is mistaken. Freemont was an able man. He was rather impatient with what he felt was the incompetence of others, but he, himself, was very able. His theft of the money was a complete shock, therefore.”

  “Only circumstances say he swiped that money, Mr. Radcliffe. How did you come to recommend Colby for his job, after Freemont died?”

  “He was next in line for it. His incompetency, which Freemont always alluded to, was a thing I argued about.”

  “Then, why, when you were made cashier four years ago, was Freemont made assistant over Colby’s head?”

  “I had nothing to do with that. That was settled by a vote of the board, the then cashier having died.” He moistened his lips. “I don’t quite know what you’re driving at.”

  Cardigan’s voice was low, heavy as he said: “I’m driving at, or toward, the truth. Was Colby acquainted with District Attorney Cord or Sergeant Snadeker before the death of Freemont?”

  “I—I don’t believe so.”

  “Were you?”

  Radcliffe raised his hands to his glasses again. “Yes, I was. I used to practice on the pistol range at headquarters with Snadeker and—yes, I’ve also known Cord for several years.”

  “Was Cord a depositor in your bank?”

  Radcliffe frowned, shook his head slowly.

  “Snadeker?”

  Again Radcliffe shook his head slowly. He moistened his lips and rubbed his palms against his knees. “Why do you ask?”

  Cardigan grabbed his hat and stood up. “Just an idea. I’ll be seeing you time and time again, Mr. Radcliffe.”

  WHEN he reached the street, Babe Hendrix, who was walking up and down beside the car, said: “Anyhow, you work fast.” Curiosity was doing funny things to her ordinarily laconic expression.

  “This guy, Radcliffe, is either slow on the uptake or sharper than a pawnbroker.”

  “Did he give you any ideas?”

  “No. I gave myself some. Get in the car, if you’re going. How do we get to Kilgore Street from here?”

  “That’s easy. Three blocks ahead and one to the right. That’s the street Freemont—”

  “Sure. Mrs. Freemont and the kids are with her mother, at the beach. Marcus Bancroft lent me the keys to the apartment. Been in it?”

  “At the time the cops investigated.”

  IT was a three-minute drive to 25 Kilgore Street. It was a tan-brick building, ten-storied, with a doorman out front. Cardigan parked a dozen yards beyond the entrance and walked back, with Babe Hendrix stretching her legs trying to keep up with him. A Negro elevator boy drove them to the eighth floor, and Cardigan keyed his way into 812.

  Babe pointed. “That’s where they found him dead,” she said. “Between the divan and the console.”

  “Turn on all the lights.”

  She hopped to it, and Cardigan, pulling a grin, said: “If ever you get tired of the newspaper game, try my game. We could use you.”

  “Thanks, but I like mine better.”

  He drew from his inside pocket the sheaf of notes which Bancroft had given him and spent two minutes reading one of the pages, then shoved the sheaf back into his pocket. His eyes squinted thoughtfully and he said, after a minute: “I’m going giddy for a little while and take it for granted that the shot five people heard was a fluke.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t wake me up,” he clipped and began searching the apartment.

  “The last time I went giddy was on the Fourth of July, when some bright lad at the office said: ‘Here’s a box of candy, kid,’ and, when I opened it, it set off a Roman candle.”

  Cardigan looked at her.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  He began to turn the apartment inside out. He opened all the windows, felt around on the windowsills, then closed them again. He looked in the reservoir in the bathroom, in the dumb-waiter shaft, in all the closets. He searched the icebox, the gas stove. He got up on a chair and looked at the rectangular grillwork of a ventilator and from it took a length of thread about three inches long. He got down on his hands and knees and searched along the baseboards.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” grinned Babe Hendrix.

  He stood up, seeming not to hear her, and pulled at the lobe of his right ear. Then he shrugged and said: “Let’s go.”

  In the lobby, he said: “Go out and wait in the car.”

  “Getting stingy?”

  “Be a pal, will you?”

  “O.K.,” she said, and swung out. She climbed into the car, lit a cigarette, and watched the traffic roll past. She killed two cigarettes before Cardigan appeared and climbed in behind the wheel.

  “Any soap?” she asked.

  “I just questioned the five people that heard that shot the day Freemont died. According to the reports I have here, nineteen people were in the apartment house at the time the shot went off. Did it ever seem funny to you that only five heard it?”

  “No. But now that you speak of it—”

  He started the motor and drove off. “Every one of the five that heard it, Toots, was in kitchens of five apartments.”

  “And Freemont was found in the living-room. All the apartments in the building have the same floor plan, and the living-room would be farthest from the kitchen. Do I get it?”

  “I don’t know, because I don’t get it myself yet. I’m going to bed with it and see what happens.”

  “Drop me off at the Westlake. It’s on your way.”

  Chapter Four

  Flue Clue

  CARDIGAN did not go to bed. He spent half an hour in his room, his heels propped on the windowsill, the mellow night air puffing in his face. The sounds of the city were softened by the darkness. Somewhere near-by, a piano was being played, softly and meditatively, as if someone were playing to himself. It was twenty past ten when Cardigan got up, slapped on his hat and went down to the lobby.

  He drove his car to 25 Kilgore Street, parked it near the service alley, walked down the alley and pushed open the heavy metal door into the basement. The janitor was sitting inside the door at an old roll-top desk. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and was reading a paper in the bright downpour of a green-shaded light. He looked up curiously, suspiciously.

  “I’m Cardigan,” the op said. “Working on the Freemont case.” He flipped his identification card on the desk.

  The janitor read the card thoroughly and then removed his glasses. He was a laconic, gaunt man. “I thought the cops closed that case.”

  “The cops did.”

  The janitor looked up. “Hmn.”

  “That ventilator shaft that runs up past the Freemont kitchen,” Cardigan said. “How many other kitchens ventilate off it?”

  The janitor stood up, looked at a plan of the house whi
ch was tacked on the wall above his desk. He said: “The Freemont apartment is eight-twelve, which means that all the twelve’s from the first floor to the tenth, would ventilate off that shaft. The fourteen’s also back up to the shaft, but there’s a metal partition down the center of the shaft.”

  “Where’s the bottom of the shaft?”

  “Down here in the basement.”

  “Any way of getting at it?”

  “Sure—to clean it out.”

  “Can you get at it now without too much trouble?”

  The janitor picked up a big flashlight and said: “Come on.”

  They walked among great metal sustaining pillars whose long shadows swung and swiveled. Their footfalls re-echoed sharply. The janitor turned a switch which lit up part of the basement ahead of them. They came to a wall, and the janitor pointed to a metal door about three feet square.

  “Clean it out often?” Cardigan asked.

  “Not very. Every two months, about.”

  “Have you cleaned it out since Freemont died?”

  “No.”

  “Open it.”

  The janitor opened the door, saying: “There’s a flue runs into it here at the bottom. Comes from in back in the furnace, warm air, and makes a good draft up.”

  Cardigan took the flashlight and sprayed the beam into the base of the shaft. He could feel warm air passing upward. An accumulation of dirt and soot lay in a soft mound on the base. He asked the janitor for a shovel. The janitor secured one and shoveled the dirt and soot onto the floor, getting the last particles with a brush shaped like a hoe.

  Dropping to his knees, while the janitor held the flash, Cardigan began sifting the dirt through his fingers. The janitor turned his head at the sound of slow, creaking footsteps. His gaunt face became a puzzled mask. A long shadow moved across the floor. A man’s hard-straw hat became visible. There was the faint smell of cigar smoke.

  Cardigan stood up, blew at a small, shapeless object in his hand and caused a stream of soot to shoot away from his face. He looked up and saw Sergeant Snadeker’s fat face ride slowly into the outer fringes of the flashlight’s beam. The sergeant’s white, well-nourished jowls folded over his tight silk collar and his legs looked like a kangaroo’s beneath his balloon-like stomach. The creaking of his shoes stopped as he halted.

  “You ought to change the oil in your shoes every thousand miles,” Cardigan said dryly.

  “Oh,” said the janitor. “I didn’t recognize you, Sergeant.”

  Snadeker made a lazy gesture with his cigar. “What’s he looking for?”

  The janitor shrugged. “I dunno.”

  IN the bare glow of the flashlight, the sergeant’s eyes slowly grew into two pieces of frosted window glass lit from behind. His voice was heavy, preoccupied, as if he were thinking of a lot of things and talking just from habit.

  “Don’t you know that this guy ain’t got no legal right to pester you.”

  The janitor shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

  Cardigan was busy wiping the dirt from his hands. “How’s your busted neck, Sergeant?”

  “What you looking for?”

  Cardigan’s derisive laugh came quietly and sent low echoes roaming through the basement. He thrust his handkerchief into his pocket. Snadeker came closer, his eyes looking greenish-white, his lips limp, red and ugly. He put his left hand firmly on Cardigan’s arm.

  “There’s a law in this town, fella.”

  “You’ve got to show me,” Cardigan said.

  “What’d you put in your pocket?”

  “My handkerchief.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  Cardigan was smiling without in any way seeming pleased. “Take your hand off.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “You got an answer. Take your hand off.”

  “It’s an offense to withhold information from the police.”

  “Where did you read that? Take your hand off, dummy. The more I look at your face, the less I like the way it’s screwed on your shoulders.”

  A blackjack was suddenly in Snadeker’s right hand—it had been up his sleeve. His limp lips fell apart in an ugly, soundless snarl, as he struck. But Cardigan’s toe struck, too—like a snake’s fangs—and clicked against Snadeker’s shins. The blackjack slid off Cardigan’s shoulder. Snadeker doubled. He doubled straight into Cardigan’s driving left fist. Falling, he made a thick, padded sound on the cement floor.

  The janitor let out a short, startled grunt.

  Without a word, Cardigan turned on his heel and strode out. At the end of the alley, beneath a street light, the police flivver was parked. Osterhauser was dozing at the wheel.

  Cardigan roused him and said: “Got a light?”

  “Oh… yeah.”

  Cardigan lit up and said: “Better go in the basement and get Snadeker.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I knocked him out.”

  Osterhauser sighed. Then he began to look very angry—not at Cardigan but at something which Cardigan could not have hoped to divine. Osterhauser banged his fist on the wheel. His jaw set hard, and his lips moved in a silent oath. Then he suddenly relaxed and said: “I’m gonna sit right here and wait till he comes out. T’ hell with always pickin’ that guy up and cartin’ him around.” He got angry again, banged the wheel and talked straight ahead at the windshield: “I’m gettin’ tired—sick and tired and fed up! For two cents—” He sighed and relaxed again, looking moody and discouraged. “I shoulda stayed in the prize ring. If I’d ha’ got by the first round—just once!” He blew out his breath in heavy exasperation.

  Cardigan walked to his own roadster, got in and drove off.

  AT eleven next morning, Radcliffe was sitting in his office in the bank when his secretary looked in and said: “Mr. Cardigan wants to see you.” Then she stood there, waiting expectantly.

  Radcliffe raised his hands to his glasses, adjusted them with deliberation. After a minute, he placed his hands on the desk and nodded. “Send him in.”

  Cardigan came in like an ill wind, his hair thick and disorderly, a cigarette pasted to his lower lip. With him came a small, precise-looking man with a spade face and a head completely bald.

  “Good morning, Mr. Radcliffe. This is Mr. Eddy, a handwriting expert. And this,” Cardigan went on, tossing a paper to the desk, “is a court order giving us permission to look over your file of depositors’ signatures.”

  Radcliffe stared at the court order and said: “For what purpose?”

  “I explained that to the judge.”

  Radcliffe drummed on the desk with his fingers for two minutes. Then he said tonelessly, “Very well,” and rang for his secretary.

  Cardigan crossed the office and stood with his back to the window, arms folded, expression impersonal. The file was brought in. Eddy, taking two pieces of paper from his pocket, sat down and proceeded to go through the file. It was noon when he stood up and said: “Thank you, Mr. Radcliffe.”

  Radcliffe had not stirred during the entire hour. He did not stir now.

  Cardigan joined Eddy and said to Radcliffe, “Thanks a million,” and then went out with the handwriting expert. They climbed into a taxicab, and, as the cab drove off, Mr. Eddy handed Cardigan two pieces of paper and said: “On the reverse side.”

  On one piece of paper Eddy had written down, Paul Everman; on the other, John Brownsmith.

  “Swell,” said Cardigan.

  He dropped Eddy in midtown, drove on to his hotel and made a phone call from a booth in the lobby to Marcus Bancroft. He said: “I think there’s smoke…. Just now. It ought to be ripe for you to make a move. Get a court order to look at the deposits of Paul Everman and John Brownsmith…. Make it fast. I got a lot of other things to do.”

  He pushed out of the booth and ran into Babe Hendrix. She said: “Well, I used my feminine charm and did what you asked.”

  “So how did the charm rate?”

  “The foreman on the job said that, about ten
in the morning of the day Freemont died, a guy came up to him and asked him how long they’d be running the pneumatic drills that afternoon. The foreman said he told the guy they’d run ’em until five.” She teased him with a slow grin.

  “Go ahead. Who was the guy that asked him?”

  “The lad you think is so dumb—Osterhauser. The foreman said he even asked, ‘You mean five sharp?’ And the foreman told him, ‘Yes, five sharp—quitting time’.”

  “Want to do something else for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go around to Twenty-five Kilgore. Got a paper and pencil? O.K., write this down—Apartments Six-twelve, Five-twelve, Four-twelve, Eight-fourteen, Seven-fourteen. Got that?… Swell. Go to those apartments. They’re the ones where the shot was heard. Ask the five people who heard the shot to stand again, each just where he or she heard it, at five this afternoon.”

  “The blow-off, huh?”

  “Either that—or I blow up.”

  “May little sister be there, too?”

  “Meet me in the apartment-house lobby at four-thirty.”

  “Did you find out about the valise yet?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Freemont bought it in a pawnshop in Rice Street, for fifty cents, during his lunch hour. The guy that runs the pawnshop never reads the papers. But I showed him Freemont’s picture, and he recognized it.”

  “That doesn’t sound so well for Freemont.”

  “The rest of it is this. The pawnbroker said Freemont told him he wanted an old suitcase—a cheap one—to pick up some books he’d just bought at one of those noon auctions.”

  “That sounds pretty lame.”

  “Yeah. It’s going to make me do some running around this afternoon.”

  Chapter Five

  Men Against Murder

  AT a few minutes to five Eben Cord got out of his limousine in front of 25 Kilgore Street, looked up and down, and then strode into the lobby. Snadeker and Osterhauser got up from a leather divan, and Cord said tautly: “What’s that guy up to now?”

  “Let him clown—let him clown,” Snadeker slurred through his limp lips.

  They rose in the elevator to the fourth floor, got out, trooped down the corridor. Snadeker didn’t bother to knock. He palmed the doorknob of 812 and opened the door.