Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories

by Bill Pronzini

  "Nothing stolen as far as I could tell," I said. "You'll be able to judge that a lot better yourself after you've talked to Lieutenant Eberhardt."

  "Is he the man in charge?"

  "Yes. He's out in the warehouse."

  Brinkman nodded, started to turn away and then faced me again. "Orin McIntyre," he said, as if he were making some sort of revelation. Maybe he had something to do with this. You heard what he said to me tonight. He's always struck me as the vindictive sort."

  "The police got him on the phone a little while ago," I said. "McIntyre claims he spent the evening barhopping alone, drowning his anger at being fired, and didn't get home until just before midnight."

  Brinkman's cigarette bobbed and weaved in his restless fingers. "Do the police believe that?"

  "They're reserving judgment until they check out his story. Lieutenant Eberhardt sent a patrol car for him; he'll be here pretty soon."

  Brinkman hung his cigarette on his lower lip, said, "I'll go talk to the lieutenant," and headed through the warehouse doorway trailing smoke. Fran Robbins hesitated, glancing at me and biting her lip, and then went after him; the patrolman by the door watched the movement of her hips with the intensity and admiration of a confirmed ladies' man.

  I shut the office door and returned to Brinkman's desk and poured the last of the coffee into my cup. It was quiet in the room—but not at all quiet inside my head. Things had begun to go clickety-click in there, like a sturdy old engine warming up and about to run smoothly.

  I sat on a corner of the desk, sipping coffee and concentrating. Vague ideas sharpened and took on weight and shape; bits and pieces of information slotted themselves neatly into place. And finally —

  "Sure," I said aloud. "Hell, yes."

  I went into the anteroom, through the warehouse door and past the shipping counter. Ahead, near where Judkins' body had lain, Eberhardt and Klein were talking to Brinkman and Fran Robbins. And to Orin McIntyre. It surprised me that McIntyre was there; I hadn't heard him being brought in. But when I looked at my watch I saw that it was one o'clock. A good twenty minutes had passed since the arrival of Brinkman and Robbins; I had been so deep in thought that I had lost track of both the time and my surroundings.

  McIntyre, I saw as I came up, looked rumpled and bleary-eyed and upset. He was talking to Eberhardt but glaring at Brinkman as he spoke. "I didn't have a damned thing to do with what happened to Judkins. I told you, I was out drinking all evening."

  "You haven't told us where," Eberhardt said.

  "I don't remember where." McIntyre's voice was still a little slurred; he rubbed at his slack mouth. "A bunch of bars out in the Noe Valley. Listen —"

  "You never did get along with Judkins," Brinkman interrupted. "You were always arguing with him."

  "That was because he was a half-wit. And you're a bastard, Brinkman—a lousy bastard."

  "I don't have to take that from you," Brinkman said indignantly. "For all I know, you did murder poor Judkins —"

  I said, "No, McIntyre didn't do it."

  All eyes flicked toward me. Eberhardt took the pipe out of his mouth and waved it in my direction. "How do you know that?"

  "Because," I said, "Brinkman did it."

  VII.

  Fran Robbins made a little gasping sound. Surprise opened up Brinkman's face for an instant: guilt flickered there like a film clip on a screen. Then it was gone and his stare was full of shocked indignation.

  "You're crazy," he said. He turned and appealed to Eberhardt. "He's crazy."

  Eb said, "Maybe," and narrowed his eyes at me. "Well?"

  "He did it, all right."

  "You got proof to back that up?"

  "Enough," I said, which was not quite the truth. All I had were solid deductions based on circumstantial evidence and plain logic. But I knew I was right. There was only one person who could have killed Judkins and only one way the whole thing made sense; it was a simple matter of eliminating the impossible, so that whatever you had left had to be the answer. So I was pretty sure I could prove, at least to Eberhardt's satisfaction, that Brinkman had to be the murderer. After that it would be up to Eberhardt to make a homicide charge stick.

  McIntyre said, "I might have known it," in a satisfied voice. His eyes were still on Brinkman, and they were wolfish now.

  Brinkman drew himself up, all bluff and bluster, and ripped at the air with his hands. "This accusation is ridiculous," he said to Eberhardt. "I had nothing to do with what happened here tonight. I spent the entire evening with Fran; I've already told you that."

  "So you have. Is that your story, too, miss?"

  Robbins looked at Brinkman, wet her lips and said, "Yes." But the word came out almost as a question. She sounded anxious and uncertain.

  I said, "You're sure about that, Miss Robbins? Being an accessory to insurance fraud is a minor offense; being an accessory to murder gets you a lot of years in prison."

  That sharpened the anxiety and confusion in her eyes. She put a hand on Brinkman's arm. "Arthur?"

  "It's all right, Fran. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about."

  Eberhardt asked me, "What's this about insurance fraud?"

  "That was the idea from the beginning," I told him. "This outfit isn't as profitable as Brinkman wants people to believe; I think he's been operating in the red and doesn't have enough capital to pay off on the merchandise that just came in from Europe, or enough buyers to take it all off his hands." I looked at McIntyre. "Am I right, Mr. McIntyre?"

  "Damn right," he said. "I warned Brinkman about making the deal; I told him it was liable to put the company under. He told me to mind my own business and went ahead with it anyway. But how did you know?"

  "Some inferences you made yesterday, for one thing. He also let it slip tonight that one of the reasons he fired you was that he couldn't afford your salary. And there are only a small number of purchase orders on the shipping counter, not enough to account for more than a third of the total shipment."

  "So what are you suggesting?" Eberhardt said.

  "That the same bright idea occurred to Brinkman that's occurred to too many small businessmen these days," I said. "Burn the place down and collect the insurance."

  I watched Brinkman as I spoke. Still all bluff and bluster, still plucking away at the air; the shrewd eyes weren't admitting anything.

  "Only he was smart enough to realize arson would be suspected and there'd be a thorough investigation," I went on. "So he decided to setup a neat bit of camouflage. Hire a private detective with a good reputation to act as night watchman, arrange an alibi for himself and then have a fire started right under the detective's nose. I wasn't supposed to get hurt; I was supposed to testify later that I was alone in a completely impenetrable building when the fire broke out. Nobody could have set it except me, and I'd be exonerated because of my record. The cause would go down as spontaneous combustion, which wouldn't be hard to believe with all the straw packing and excelsior lying around in here; he'd already planted the seed by warning me to watch out for fire during my rounds. The insurance company would have no recourse except to pay off on the claim."

  "You're making sense so far," Eberhardt said. "Now where does Judkins come into it? The hired torch?"

  I nodded. "He had to be. It explains the wood alcohol he had in his pocket. That stuff is flammable as hell; you can use it to start a dandy fire."

  "But then why would Brinkman kill Judkins before he could torch the building?"

  "It doesn't figure to be a premeditated homicide; murder was never part of the original plan. Judkins died because of something that happened between him and Brinkman tonight, something that made Brinkman come down here around ten o'clock —"

  "I don't have to listen to any more of this," Brinkman said. His expression still showed defiance, but a muscle had begun to jump under his left eye so that he seemed to be winking spasmodically. He lit another cigarette. "I wasn't anywhere near here at ten o'clock, I tell you. I was with Fran —"
>
  I said, "You went straight to her apartment when you left here at six?"

  "That's right."

  "And had dinner and then went out for a few drinks afterward?"

  "Yes."

  "Then why did you change clothes?"

  "What?"

  "You were wearing a gray sports jacket when you left here; now you're wearing a brown suit. Why the change? And when and where? Unless maybe you got the gray jacket wet and bloody when you shot Judkins, and went home to change before you went back to Miss Robbins' apartment. And why splash yourself with so much cologne? You weren't wearing any earlier tonight, and now you reek of it. Unless it was to cover up the smell of wood alcohol; it was all over Judkins' body, and if it got all over you, too, you wouldn't be able to get rid of the odor just by taking a shower."

  The muscle kept on jumping under Brinkman's eye. He looked over at Fran Robbins; she had long since let go of his arm and backed off a couple of steps. She would not look at him now; there was a dark flush on both cheeks. She was just starting to admit to herself that he really was a murderer, and once she accepted the truth she would turn on him. That would be all Eberhardt needed.

  "Keep talking," Eb said to me. "Something happened between Brinkman and Judkins tonight?"

  "Right. An argument of some kind, probably over how much Judkins was to be paid. Maybe he tried to shake Brinkman down for a bigger payoff before he did the job. In any case, they met here, and one of them brought a gun, and Judkins ended up getting shot dead."

  "Are you saying the shooting took place outside or inside?"

  "Outside. That's why I didn't hear the shot; the wind muffled it."

  "Then why put the body in here?"

  "Because it probably seemed like the best alternative at the time. If Brinkman left it outside for somebody to find, the arson scheme would be spoiled and the police investigation might implicate him. And taking the body away somewhere was too risky. Both he and Judkins had to have come here on foot, because they wouldn't have wanted to alert me by driving into the lot; he couldn't carry the dead man all the way to wherever he'd left his car, and he couldn't bring the car onto the grounds for that same fear of alerting me.

  "But if he took the body inside and started the fire himself, there was a chance the corpse would be burned badly enough to conceal the fact that Judkins had died from a gunshot wound. Which wouldn't have happened, forensic medicine being what it is today; but he had to have been rattled and desperate, and it looked to him like his only way out. And afterward he could claim that Judkins had set the fire on his own, for his own reasons, and been caught in it and died as a result. The insurance company, at least as he saw it, would still have to pay off.

  "Only that plan backfired, too. He's a small guy and Judkins was a big guy; he got the body in here all right, but he lost control of it as he was setting it down. It landed on top of a crate and made that loud thudding noise I heard. Brinkman knew I'd come to investigate, and he was afraid I'd see him and recognize him; he panicked, shut off the flashlight he'd been using and got out."

  Brinkman was standing ramrod stiff, both hands bunched together at his waist, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke. The only change in the way he looked was in the color of his face; it had gone paper-white.

  "Now we come to the sixty-four-dollar question," Eberhardt said. "This place was sealed inside and out, like a damned tomb; it still is. How was Judkins supposed to get inside in the first place, and how did Brinkman get inside with the body?"

  I said, "You told me the answer to that yourself a little while ago, Eb."

  "I told you?"

  "You said something sarcastic about the killer maybe walking through a wall. But you were right; that's just what Brinkman did."

  "Don't give me double-talk, damn it. Say what you mean."

  "He came in through the window," I said.

  "Window? What window?"

  I pointed to the nearest of the two in the left-hand wall, the one closest to where I had found Judkins' body. "That window."

  "Nuts," Eberhardt said. "The gate is padlocked, I can see that from here. And the outside shutter is locked down —"

  "Now it is," I said.

  "What?"

  "Eb, the beauty of Brinkman's little plan is that it's simple and it's obvious—so obvious that everybody overlooked it." I went to the window and demonstrated as I talked. "Like this: I come in here on my rounds and I test the padlock on the gate; it's firmly in place. I glance through the bars, and what do I see in this dim light? The window is closed and the shutter is lowered outside. So I automatically assume, just as anybody would, that both the window catch and the shutter catch are locked, because I expect them to be and because I know the gate is locked. For that same reason I don't bother to reach through and check either one.

  "But the fact is, neither the window nor the shutter was locked at that time; just closed far enough to make me think they were. And the only person who could have rigged them that way is Brinkman. He was the one who locked up tonight. He even asked me to double-check him; he figured his little trick was foolproof, and he wanted my testimony that the building was sealed when the fire broke out.

  "What he did after he shot Judkins was to lift the shutter from outside, then the window sash—slow and quiet so I wouldn't hear anything—and then reach through the bars, open the gate padlock with his key and swing the gate to one side. On his way out after he dropped the body, he closed the gate and relocked the padlock. Then he lowered the window—a little too hard in his haste, which explains the thumping sound I heard. But he couldn't have secured the window latch from the outside. . ."

  I reached through the bars, caught hold of the sash and tugged. It glided upward a few inches in well-oiled slots. "And he didn't. The clicking noise I heard just before putting on the lights was him closing the shutter hard enough to make its latch catch at the bottom —something he could do from the outside."

  "And with all the inside gates and outside shutters in place," Klein said, "who'd think to try one of the windows sandwiched between them? Or attach the right significance to it if they did." He shook his head. "I see what you mean by simple and obvious."

  Brinkman saw, too. He saw the expression on Fran Robbins' face: anger and fear and a congealing hatred. He saw the expression on McIntyre's face, and on the faces of the law. All the bluff went out of him at once, and along with it whatever inner force had been holding him together; the cigarette fell out of his mouth and he sat down hard on one of the crates, like a doll with sand-stuffed legs, and covered up his own face with both hands.

  They never learn, I thought. The clever ones especially—they just never learn.

  VIII.

  "The way it happened with Judkins," Eberhardt said, "was pretty much as you called it. He telephoned Brinkman at Fran Robbins' apartment and told him he'd been thinking things over and didn't want to go ahead with the torch job for the five hundred dollars Brinkman was paying him; he wanted another five hundred, and he wanted it right away. Brinkman tried to tell him he didn't have that much cash available, but Judkins wouldn't listen. Either Brinkman delivered the money immediately or not only wouldn't he set the fire, he'd blow the whistle to the insurance company."

  "I told you Judkins wasn't very smart," I said.

  "Yeah." Eberhardt fired up the tobacco in his pipe. It was the following afternoon and we were sitting in a tavern on Union Street, having a companionable beer—his treat—before he headed down to the Hall of Justice for his evening tour of duty. "Anyhow, Brinkman didn't have any choice; he agreed to meet Judkins and did, just outside the company grounds. All he had on him was fifty bucks, but he promised Judkins the rest as soon as he could get it."

  "Only Judkins wasn't having any of that, right?"

  "Right. He was half-drunk on gin, Brinkman says, and in a belligerent mood; and he'd brought a gun with him. He started waving it around, making threats, and Brinkman got scared and ran into the lot toward the building. He says he was g
oing to call to you for help. But Judkins caught up with him; there was a struggle, and the gun went off. End of Judkins. Brinkman threw the gun—a twenty-five-caliber Browning—away later, into a trash bin a couple of blocks from there. He led us right to it. Cooperating to beat the band, which probably means he'll cop a plea later on."

  "Uh-huh. What did he tell Robbins when he got back to her place?"

  "Fed her a line about some hard cases being the ones who wanted to burn down his company for the insurance; said he had to go along with them or they'd muscle him around—that kind of thing. So would she say he was with her all evening? She went along with it; she's not too bright either. After he called the company and talked to Klein, he told her it must have been the hard cases who'd killed Judkins. She went along with that, too, until you laid everything out in the warehouse. Now she can't wait to testify against him."

  "Good for her."

  "One other thing, in case you're wondering: Brinkman giving McIntyre the sack doesn't fit into it, except as a ploy to throw off the insurance investigators even more. Would a businessman about to burn down his own company fire one employee on the day of the blaze, and promote another? Like that."

  "Cute. And when things got tough, he tried to steer the blame for Judkins' death onto McIntyre—the old vendetta motive."

  "Some smart guy, that Brinkman."

  "Some dumb guy," I said. "Judkins may not have been very bright, and Fran Robbins may not be either. But Brinkman's the dumbest of the three."

  "Yeah. I wish they were all like that—all the damned criminals." Eberhardt picked up his beer. "Here's to crime," he said.

  "I'll drink to that," I said, and we did.

  Late that afternoon I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge for an early dinner in Sausalito. I got a window table in one of the restaurants built out into the Bay; the weather had cleared, and it was near sunset, and from there I had a fine view of the San Francisco skyline across the water.