by Otto Penzler
WILBUR PENN PROMINENT BABYLON CITIZEN SHOT AND KILLED BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT TONIGHT AT TEN PM STOP HAVE ATTEMPTED TO REACH PENNS BROTHER NAMED MARTIN PENN SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK CITY BUT AM UNABLE TO LOCATE HIM STOP APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD FIND HIM AND GET STATEMENT FROM HIM CONCERNING MURDER OF HIS BROTHER STOP WILL SPLIT NEWS ON CASE WITH YOU IF YOU HELP STOP WIRE CHARGES COLLECT
john harvey
editor babylon gazette
Well, that was a hot one. I was to go out and scour New York looking for some punk named Martin Penn to get a statement out of him about a murder in a hick town in Iowa, and the editor of the town rag, Mr. Harvey, was going to be big about it and split news with me concerning his gigantic murder case. As if the readers of the New York sheets would give two hoots about murder in Babylon (Iowa). The picture of me roaming the wintry streets looking for a statement was not at all appealing.
I would have tossed the telegram in the waste basket, if I hadn’t had a conscience. Wilbur Penn shot tonight. That meant the night before and that meant I was holding a night letter, not a straight telegram and that meant Mr. Harvey was a cheap skate.
So I took the telegram in to the Old Man who was sitting forlornly in his doghouse, his green eyeshade hiding his eyes and accentuating the glistening prairie of hairless dome that covered his skull. I dropped the thing on his desk and I said, “Rural editor asks collaboration. How do you like them berries?”
“Don’t bother me,” said the Old Man. “Can’t you see I’m reading?”
He had a copy of How to Make Friends and Influence People in his lap, and I tsk-tsked and shook my head. “Come on, come on,” I said. “You’re too far gone for that book to do you any good. Take a look at this thing and grab a laugh. They’re few enough nowadays.”
The Old Man picked up the wire and read it, and he didn’t laugh.
When he had finished it, he said, “What’s so funny about it? Just because it’s a hick town? A hick paper? There’s nothing funny in that. We didn’t all begin in New York, Mr. Dill, like yourself. Some of us were small-town scribes for years before we got a break and came on here. Do you know where I came from before I hit New York? Wipe that smile off your face. The name of the town was Punxatawney, Pa … So go ahead and cover for John Harvey.”
“Go ahead—and cover—for him?” I said. “You mean you’re going to waste me on this guy’s Babylon killing?”
“I’ve always made it a policy,” replied the Old Man severely, “to cast my bread upon the waters. When a man wires me for help from out of town, I give. Don’t be a sap, Daffy. The day might come when you would wind up in Babylon, Iowa, needing a stake, an ‘in,’ or just plain help. And having helped this guy once, he’ll help you twice.”
“I have no intention of ever going to Babylon,” I said. “The Bible told me it was a sinful, wicked place. It should have said that there was a moocher in the place too.”
“Never mind the wisecracks,” said the Old Man wearily. “Cover for this guy. And just to make sure you do, let me see Milton Penn’s—”
“Martin Penn,” I said sarcastically.
“You let me see his statement before you wire it. It would not be unlike you to forge a statement from Daffy Dill, Esk., rather than go out and find this other guy. Snap into it.”
When I came out of the doghouse, Dinah met me and shook her head. “Boy, you look low.”
“I am low,” I said. “Out of seven and a half million people in this burg, I’ve got to find one guy to ask him for a statement.”
“Far be it from me to simplify your existence,” Dinah said, patting my cheek. “But did you ever think of looking up the lug in a telephone book and asking for his statement via Alexander Bell’s marvelous invention?”
I said, “Wonderful! At rare intervals you show genius.”
“A mere nothing, my dear Watson.”
I went through a Manhattan telephone directory and found one Martin Penn as easily as falling off a log. Martin Penn, it said, 107 Beeker Place r. CRawford 2-2399.
I buzzed the number, but after a few clicks the operator said, “Sorry, sir, your party does not answer. I will call you again in twenty minutes.”
Well, that was all right. But when five p.m. rolled around and the party still had not answered, I knew that I was going to have to go up there and interview the guy when he got home from work, and that it was all kind of a nuisance. Dinah made a date for dinner, but I agreed only on condition that she went up to Beeker Place with me. She must have been hungry because she accepted the stipulation without a howl.
So off we went to cover the man from Babylon, Iowa, little knowing what we were letting ourselves in for …
Martin Penn was not home. He lived in a small apartment house in Beeker Place and we rang his doorbell for ten minutes before we gave it up as a bad job. I was just as glad but Dinah, the little nimbus cloud, only said, “Hi-ho, it only means you have to come back tomorrow and try, try again. Let’s eat at the Hideaway Club. I haven’t seen Bill Latham since they put Santa Claus’ whiskers back among the moth-balls.”
That was all right with me. We took a cab over to Broadway where the Hideaway Club failed to live up to its name by advertising its location in no uncertain neon lights.
Bill Latham greeted us at the door with a broad grin. “Well, well,” he said, “the Fourth Estate in person. Are you following Poppa Han-ley around or did he tell you to meet him here?”
“Is that galoot here?” Dinah sighed. “Oh great gouts of blood—now he and Daffy will discuss death and detection all night. It’s like going out to dinner with a signal 32 ringing in your ears. I’ll bet you five fish, Bill, that they get a call before dessert.”
“I’ll take it,” Latham grinned. “Things have been pretty quiet, Poppa was telling me, so the chances are you’ll lose. He’s over there in a wall booth, down by the band.”
We wended our way past the jitterbugs on the dance floor and reached the red leather booth where Poppa was sitting, mangling a half a dozen oysters and looking pompously dignified.
When he saw us, he leaped to his feet and looked happier. Poppa is one homely man, when you come right down to it. He was all dressed up, but that didn’t keep his long ears from sticking out like an elephant’s flappers, and his face, always brick red, was holding its own. “Golly,” he said, “this is a pleasure, Dinah. If only you could have left the runt at home. Oh well, a guy can’t have everything. Sit down.”
… Dinah won the five bucks. We had finished the beefsteaks and were waiting for the salad when Bill Latham came over and slipped a fin in Dinah’s bag and said, “Telephone call for you, Lieutenant. Will you take it here?”
Poppa looked grim and nodded. They brought a telephone to the booth and plugged it in.
“Wow,” I said, “so you’ve been to Hollywood, Bill, eh? This is the way they do it in the Brown Derby and Sardi’s out there. Guys go to eat in those joints and tell their butlers to give them a ring, just so they’ll be paged and get the eye from the other customers.”
Poppa said, “Hello? This is Hanley… Oh, hello, Babcock. I’m eating dinner. I told you not to call unless it was something important … eh? … Oh … Hell … All right. What’s the address again? … I’ve got it. I’ll meet you there. You pick up Claghorn and Louie, and tell Dr. Kyne to come running. I think he’s over in Bellevue. I’ll see you there.”
He hung up and took a deep breath and sighed and looked at me.
Dinah groaned, “The march of crime.”
“A guy,” Hanley said to me. “Bumped off. Want to come?”
“Who is it?” I said. “Of course I’ll come. If I didn’t come, the Old Man would beat my pride into the dust, grrr!”
“Guy named Fenwick Hanes,” said Poppa. “Babcock got the call through Telegraph Bureau.
Someone telephoned in and said that this guy had been found in the Hotel Metronome on West 45th. That’s not far from you. Let’s go see. Just up Broadway a couple of blocks. You heard what I said.”
We got out of there and walked north, the three of us, until Dinah got a stitch in her side from the pace. “Take it easy,” she said. “That meal is having its troubles. The fellow is dead. Why the rush?”
“Listen, Angel-Eyes,” I said. “The last time you saw a corpse, you passed out on me. I think you’d better go home.”
“Not me,” Dinah said grimly. “I’ve got a date with you and not even a murder is going to make me a wall-flower.”
We reached the Metronome a few minutes later and found Detective Claghorn waiting for us in the lobby downstairs. We shook hands with him and then we went up.
Claghorn said, “I came right up, Chief, when I heard the news. Did Babcock telephone you? I guess he’s on the way with the stuff and the M.E. I happened to be home when he buzzed me and I don’t live far from here myself. The manager is upstairs and I don’t think we’re gonna get a lead from what he said.”
On the seventh floor, we found the manager, a man named Horace Wilson, who was pasty-faced and nervous. “These things are always bad publicity for the hotel,” he groaned, “but what can we do about them? They always happen.”
“Let’s have a look-see,” Hanley grunted non-committally.
We opened the door and went in. Dinah took one look and opened the door and went out again. “I’ll wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll tell the other boys where to come. But as for me, I just had dinner and I don’t want to waste the money you all spent on it. See you anon.”
Dinah is a sissy, but I like her for it. These women who can look a stiff in the eye without flinching are too hard-boiled for Daffy. It wasn’t that Mr. Fenwick Hanes was a mess, for he wasn’t. He had been murdered very neatly indeed, and there was little blood.
Fenwick Hanes had been shot to death. One shot. He was lying in his bed with his shoes and his coat and vest off.
“Mr. Hanes left a message at the desk that he was to be awakened at eight o’clock,” the manager explained. “Apparently he decided to take a nap. He was in from out of town and had been running around quite a bit and was tired. At eight p.m., the elevator boy heard a shot. He called me and I came in and found him like that.”
“Hmm,” said Hanley. “Looks like a .32 …” He stared at the manager. “You mean that’s all there is? You didn’t see anyone in here?”
“Yes.”
I went over and picked up a small alarm clock which Hanes had set by his bed. It said eight-thirty. I looked at it sharply and I said, “Boy, if this could only talk.”
The elevator boy showed up then along with Dr. Kerr Kyne and Babcock and the police fotog. Hanley went to work on the boy and the gist of it was that the boy had been going by the floor when he heard a shot. He instantly came back to the seventh floor and stepped out. He said he heard a bell ringing. Then he went for the manager. He did not see anybody.
Big help. I could see the disappointment in Hanley’s face.
Well, it was one of those things. I wasn’t particularly interested in the killing and I didn’t see where the Chronicle’s readers would be. Just a hotel knock-off That is, until I asked for some dope on Fenwick Hanes himself.
“We don’t know anything about him,” said the manager. “He checked in three days ago and signed the register Fenwick Hanes, Babylon, Iowa—” The manager stopped short because of the way I gaped at him.
“Babylon, Iowa!” I said.
“That’s right.”
I grabbed the telephone and then set it down again. I was that excited. Then I took up a telephone book and looked up the apartment in Beeker Place and telephoned the superintendent. “This is the police department,” I growled at the super while Hanley watched me as though he thought me half cracked. “I want you to go right up to Mr. Penn’s apartment and open it and have a look at it. We have a tip that there’s been foul play and we’re checking on it. You telephone back and tell me what you find.” And I gave him the number. “Ask for Lieutenant Hanley, room 706.”
“All right,” said the super. “I’ll take a look right away.”
Ten minutes later he telephoned back and I grabbed the handset and listened while he roared shrilly, “Murder! Murder! Mr. Penn is been murdered!”
I hung up instantly and I turned to Poppa Hanley and said, “Three wise men, all of Babylon, all dead. Come on, Poppa. The thing is really beginning to get hot.”
Wilbur Penn had been killed in Babylon. Martin Penn had been killed the day before we found him. Fenwick Hanes had been killed at eight p.m. this very night.
What had started with a routine inquiry from Iowa had suddenly blossomed into three exceedingly dead corpses. Which goes to show that life is still full of little surprises.
Poppa and I sent Dinah home and we left Babcock and Claghorn over at the Metronome and took Dr. Kerr Kyne with us. “I want it clearly understood,” Dr. Kyne said to me with sarcasm as we drove to Beeker Place, “that you never call me Buzzard again. For if anybody ever made me look like an amateur when it comes to hovering over the dead, you are that man, Mr. Dill, and it gives me great pleasure to say that I can practically scent the smell of graveyards all over and around you.”
I let him go on. I couldn’t help smiling because it was about time he got a chance to crow a little. We reached Beeker Place in nothing flat and were greeted at the door by the superintendent who was almost hysterical with fright. He took us right up to the apartment where Dinah and I had previously rung the bell to no avail. He unlocked the door and we trooped in.
Dr. Kerr Kyne went right to work. Martin Penn was dead, all right. You didn’t have to be the chief M. E. of New York County to gather that much. He was a thin, sharp sort of man with a shrewd face, this corpse which sat comfortably in a chair. No bullet in the head this time, as in the case of Fenwick Hanes. This bullet had struck Martin Penn directly over the heart. From the expression on the dead man’s face, it was plain that he had seen his killer, perhaps even talked with him. For there was hate in Martin Penn’s face and no fooling.
We had better luck here, though. Dr. Kyne said that Penn had been dead for at least thirty-six hours and that the slug was a .32, and undoubtedly the same gun which killed Hanes had killed Penn. I reminded myself to check with John Harvey of the Babylon Gazette on the slug which had killed Wilbur Penn. There was an avenging angel on the trail somewhere and it would be a good idea if we stopped him. Murder is a habit when you do too much of it, the killer might easily leave a line of dead behind him, getting scared and more scared on the way. It’s fear that makes murder, in one way or another.
Martin Penn had been a shrewd man, so shrewd that even in death he had pointed out a clue to the identity of his killer.
Sitting in that chair, with a bullet in his body, he had not died at once. This isn’t strange, for I have seen men shot through the heart with a high-power copper-jacket still stumble on and fire several shots, although they were already dead. In man, there is sometimes an unconquerable will which makes him perform even after a mortal wound has been inflicted. In any case, with his own finger, dipped in the blood of his own wound, Martin Penn had traced something upon the maple arm of the chair in which he sat.
It was a flat-sided arm, wide enough to take a pad for sketching, and the blood had dried black upon the wood, leaving his handiwork quite plain there by his right hand.
It was the sketch, crude and macabre, of an ear. Just one ear.
But it was enough to start me thinking and I remembered the alarm clock and suddenly I said, “Poppa, I think I get it.”
“You’re a smarter guy than I am if you do,” Poppa said sourly.
“An ear,” I said. “Well, what about an ear? It would just be guessing if we had this killing alone. But we’ve got the Fenwick Hanes murder too, and to me, the distinctive thing about that one was the
alarm clock. Did you know that the alarm had run down on the thing? And the alarm hand was set for eight o’clock. Now it’s my guess—guess, mind you—that Hanes wanted to make an evening performance at eight-thirty in some theater. He told the desk to wake him at eight. He didn’t trust them, but set the clock for eight himself. Everything happened at eight. There was a killer in there who shot him. The elevator boy heard the bell ringing even when the shot was fired. Which would mean the alarm went off before Hanes was killed. And it was allowed to run down! Now, Poppa—look me in the eye and imagine me a killer. I’m standing here and I’m going to bump you off. Just as I’m getting up nerve, an alarm clock goes off. What do I do?”
“You instinctively turn off the alarm because it’s noisy and you’re afraid of two things: You’re afraid it’ll wake up your victim and you’re afraid it will attract outside attention.”
“Fine,” I said, “and right. I never saw a man yet who didn’t dive for an alarm clock to turn it off when it started to holler. Yet this killer stood there, heard the alarm, shot Hanes, then scrammed, and the alarm kept going to advertise things. What does that mean to you?”
“It means,” said Hanley heavily, “that the killer was deaf.”
“It sure does,” I said. “And Martin Penn didn’t sweat out his last seconds drawing this ear for no other reason but that.”
Hanley grunted. “Well, you don’t have to look so pleased about it. I still don’t see how it gives us a lead. All we have to do is find a guy with a .32 caliber gun which fits these bullets, the guy being deaf. Huh. That’s all we have to do.”
“I think,” I said, “that when you get a line on the Penns and Hanes, it will narrow down your choice considerably. But as for now, I see nothing to keep me from returning to the gay white way. So long, Pater, I’m to pick up Dinah and see the sights. Tomorrow I’ll buzz John Harvey in Babylon and see what he has to offer on the murder of Wilbur Penn.”
At the city room of the New York Chronicle, next morning at ten a.m., I gladdened the Old Man’s heart by pounding out the dope on the stories of the night before, and then I telephoned the Babylon Gazette out in Iowa—at the Chronicle’s expense—and asked to speak with John Harvey. I got a man named Wooley who apparently worked on the sheet and he said, “Gosh, Mr. Dill, it’s funny you should call him. He’s not here. He left for New York yesterday morning and he’ll be arriving on the Golden Arrow sometime this morning in Pennsylvania Station. This murder out here is raising a lot of fuss, and when he didn’t hear from you in answer to his telegram, he decided to go on to New York himself and see Wilbur Penn’s brother. There are some folks here think Martin Penn shot his own brother, and John wants to be first on the spot to make sure. He said he’d go see you and maybe you could help him find Martin Penn. I think the train gets in at eleven.”