The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 3: 1934-35

by Frederick Nebel

  The cab was waiting in the street below. Cardigan put his foot on the running board, struck a match and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the wide array of stars.

  “Great night,” he said.

  The driver was shivering at the wheel. “You can have it,” he complained. “I give it to you, mister. Take it away.”

  Chapter Two

  McQueene

  CARDIGAN got up at nine next morning, showered hot, then cold, and collected his clothing from various parts of the room. His apartment was on the second floor of a California Street bay-windowed house. When he left, the sun was bright but without warmth and a harsh wind clubbed him, made his hat-brim drum. He took a trolley downtown and ate breakfast in a Powell Street counter-lunch: a pint of tomato juice, steak, fried potatoes, five pieces of toast and three cups of coffee. He read the morning paper meanwhile, scanned the Caliente entries and made a phone call to place a bet on one of the nags.

  When he swung long-legged into his Market Street office, at nine forty-five, Patricia Seaward, the good-looking end of the agency, was cracking the typewriter keys. She said sweetly, but too sweetly: “Good morning, Mr. Cosmos Agency.”

  He threw his hat at her and it disarranged her haircomb. She threw the hat in the waste paper basket, sighed: “If I come in at a minute past nine, I get bawled—”

  “Your lips are pretty, honey, but button them. I was out on a case last night. Picked up twenty-five bucks for taking a drunk home.”

  “Do you mean you paid someone twenty-five to take you home?”

  He held his head between his hands, groaned and went on into the inner office. He was sitting at his desk, a minute later, when Pat came to the connecting doorway to say: “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Sergeant McGovern called up about ten minutes ago.”

  “Too bad you didn’t forget. What did he want?”

  “Oh, he said never mind—he’d call again.”

  The sound of the outer door opening made Pat turn her head. She smiled brightly. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Hunerkopf!”

  “Good morning, Miss Seaward,” Detective August Hunerkopf said, lifting his hat straight off his head as he came across the outer office. “I just thought I’d kind of drop in and pass the time of day and see if Mr. Card— Oh, there you are, Mr. Cardigan.”

  Cardigan said in a loud, good-natured voice: “Hello, Augie. You wouldn’t be here on business, would you?”

  A pained look crept across Hunerkopf’s broad face. “Mac wants to see you,” he admitted grudgingly.

  “What about?”

  “About a guy that died account of his head was busted in.”

  Pat glanced at Cardigan. He gave her a quick look, then said to Hunerkopf: “What guy?”

  “Name of Trent—”

  Cardigan stood up, strode across the office, took his overcoat from a three-pronged costumer and shoved into it. “Come on,” he said to Hunerkopf.

  Pat looked bewildered. “But, chief—”

  “It’s all right, Pats,” Cardigan said. “The guy I was telling you about I took home last night.”

  “That’s what Miles O’Mara said,” Hunerkopf nodded.

  “Said what?”

  “You took Trent home.”

  On the way out Cardigan bent to pick his hat from the wastepaper basket. Hunerkopf was waiting at the doorway. Cardigan joined him and they walked down the corridor toward the stairway, Cardigan way ahead and Hunerkopf thumping his broad heels behind. There was a battered police flivver parked at the curb downstairs.

  “Is this the one without the brakes?” Cardigan asked.

  “Well, it used to but we got brakes now. We still haven’t got no lights though. Brakes but no lights. Mac and I was arguing about whether it’s better to have lights or brakes. What we do now, being we have the brakes, we don’t take the car out after dark.”

  “It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, Augie, but get in and drive anyhow. What did Miles O’Mara say?”

  They drove on and Hunerkopf said: “Oh, just that you took Trent home account of Trent asked you to.”

  “How did Miles get into it?”

  “We found one o’ then throw-away matchboxes that it had on it O’Mara’s Dynamite Club. Miles is a nice fellow. He says he eats three oranges every morning.”

  THEY reached the Polk Street address; found an ambulance there, a couple of autos, a crowd of curious, milling people, and a squad of uniformed cops. Cardigan got out before Hunerkopf had quite stopped the car. The big Cosmos op and shouldered his way through the crowd, reached the entrance to the foyer and was blocked by a rookie.

  “McGovern sent for me,” Cardigan said.

  “Yeah?” the cop challenged. “I was told to let nobuddy—”

  “But me, officer. I’m Cardigan.”

  “Well, whyncha say so!”

  Cardigan climbed to the third-floor landing, where another uniformed cop was standing doing tricks with a nightstick. The door to Trent’s apartment stood partway open and it had been shattered partially by an axe. When Cardigan entered the living room, his hat crushed beneath his arm, his hands lounging in his overcoat pockets, McGovern barked from the bedroom doorway: “There you are, Cardigan!”

  “In the flesh, Mac. Augie dropped around to pass the time of day. Hello, Miles.”

  “Hi, kid,” O’Mara said. “I hope you don’t think I ratted on you, Jack.”

  Cardigan chuckled with rough good humor. “Ratted how?”

  McGovern chopped in with his foghorn voice: “Miles says—”

  “I know what Miles said, Mac. Miles said I toted Trent home last night and Miles told you the truth. The guy was screwy or drunk or both with a touch of the D.T.’s thrown in. He had an idea someone or something was following him. He never slept with the lights off.”

  McGovern’s dark eyes were hard, beady, and his snowplow jaw was set. He snapped: “It’s damned funny that I can’t run onto a case lately around here without you cropping up on it like a stinkweed.”

  Cardigan was paying no attention to him. “Where’s the body?” he asked.

  It was in the bedroom, lying on the floor near the foot of the bed. One temple was bashed. The man from the coroner’s office was standing in the bathroom doorway drying his hands, his sleeves rolled up over fat white arms.

  “Hello, Doc,” Cardigan said.

  “Hello, Mr. Cardigan.”

  “How long’s he been dead?”

  “I figure he died between one and two this morning.”

  McGovern put in: “Miles says you took him out of the Dynamite at a little past one.”

  “Yeah,” said Cardigan. “Exactly ten past one.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “Took him home—here—in a cab. Lugged him up the stairs, laid him on the bed, took off his overcoat and his collar and tie, put a glass of water alongside his bed and left.”

  “What else did you do?”

  Cardigan pivoted slowly, knotting his shaggy brows together. “Maybe that’s your idea of a joke.”

  “It’s my idea of a police question.”

  “O.K. What else did I do? I took the same cab to my place, got out, went up to my rooms, undressed, brushed my teeth, put on a pair of blue pajamas and went to bed. Then I had a dream. I dreamt that a guy named McGovern was a great detective, but it was only a dream, Mac, it was only a dream.”

  “We’ll skip that,” McGovern growled; and still fixing Cardigan with his hard, blunt eyes, he said: “See that door we had to cave in? Go over and take a look at. O.K., don’t. But there’s a lock on there that locks only from the inside. You can’t open it from the outside. We know because we had to break the door in. What I want to know, Cardigan, is if you accidentally bopped this guy. Maybe he got troublesome, the way drunks will, and you had to bop him. Maybe you didn’t think you hit him as hard as you did. Maybe you—”

  “The guy,” said Cardigan with vast patience, “was very nice. All your guesses are cockeyed, Mac. All he wanted was to be taken ho
me. I took him home. When I left, I noticed the lock you’re yapping about and I slipped the catch and heard it snap shut when I closed the door from the outside.”

  McGovern had not removed his hard stare from Cardigan; and now he said: “Didn’t Trent pull a gun on you?”

  “Pull a gun on me!”

  McGOVERN hauled a long-barreled .38 revolver from his overcoat pocket. “This was in his hand when we found him. No shots fired. He was slammed on the head before he could fire it. The bed-table drawer is open, so we figure he yanked it out of there.”

  “Not at me,” Cardigan said. He turned away from McGovern, his eyes keening and snapping around the floor. “Was this the position the body was found in?”

  “He was laying face down,” McGovern said. “About a foot nearer the bed.”

  “Got a flashlight?”

  One of the cops had one. Cardigan took it and sprayed its beam on the dead man’s face, then on a nearby chair, then along the bed and down the foot of the bed. He knelt, fastening the beam on the near post at the foot of the bed, running the beam down to the heavy, clawlike base. Then he stood up, reversed the flashlight and extended it toward the man from the coroner’s office.

  He said: “Take a look at that down there. Does it look like blood to you?”

  The man took the flashlight, knelt. Then he drew a small magnifying glass from his vest pocket and bent way over. “It does,” he said. “Yes, it does.”

  Cardigan said: “It looks to me as if Trent took a header and smacked his noggin on the bottom of that bedpost. The man could hardly stand up when I brought him in. I had to practically carry him to bed. I’d almost swear that if he tried to get out of bed and stand he would have taken a header sure as hell. And that’s what he did.”

  “You forget the gun,” McGovern cut in. “The gun was in his hand.”

  Cardigan said: “I told you, Mac, the guy was screwy about people following him. He might have got a brainstorm, grabbed the gun out of the drawer, tried to stand up and then—” he jerked his index finger downward—“taken a belly whopper.”

  “That,” said the man from the medical office, rising, “sounds about as logical as anything I’ve heard yet.”

  McGovern said: “This potato could make anything sound logical.”

  “What did you find on him?” Cardigan asked.

  “In his pants, thirty-two bucks and a few cents. In his wallet some cards of his, some other business cards, a lodge card, a letter from his sister in New York—stuff like that. Damn it, Cardigan, nobody got in this apartment after you left. They couldn’t have got in through that lock and there’s no other door and they couldn’t have got in by the windows.”

  “Of course not,” Cardigan nodded. “People die accidentally once in a while, Mac. They die in bathtubs and slip and fall out of windows— Of course nobody got in here. I’m willing to swear that Trent wouldn’t have been able to get to the door to let them in. His legs gave out on him. I had to lug him to bed. Who found him?”

  “A guy works with him at the tourist agency where he worked. Trent ran the agency and this guy was supposed to stop by for him with a car this morning at eight thirty. Well, he did—name of Sylvester—and knocked and rang the bell. No answer, so he thought Trent’d left, but when he got to the office, no Trent. So he phoned the apartment. No Trent either. So he came back and knocked some more and then called a cop.”

  “Did Sylvester say anything about Trent’s brainstorms?”

  McGovern scowled. “Well, he said Trent’d been shell-shocked but it came back at him only now and then.”

  “It sure came back at him last night.”

  Hunerkopf was holding open his report book, pencil poised. He said: “Excuse me, Mac, was the guy’s first name Lincoln?”

  “Yeah. Lincoln Trent.”

  Hunerkopf wrote it down. “I once knew a guy that was named Lincoln and asked him if his folks named him after President Lincoln and he said no, they didn’t. He said they named him Lincoln account of he was born in an automobile.”

  McGovern said peevishly: “It’s just too bad you weren’t born in a covered wagon and never uncovered!”

  Hunerkopf was writing in his book—Death from accidental causes.

  Miles O’Mara was regarding Cardigan covertly.

  THE evening newspapers didn’t give the case an awful lot of space. It got a stick on page three. It was relatively unimportant, and it had been discovered that Trent had had occasional fainting spells before. Blood was found on the bedpost where it was supposed he had struck his temple in falling. An acquaintance had come forth to say that on one occasion, about two years ago, Trent had sat up all night with a gun leveled at his door, certain that someone was going to attempt to kidnap him.

  Cardigan was in his office at about six-thirty, finishing up for the day, when the outer office door opened and a man looked in.

  “Yeah?” called Cardigan.

  “Oh, glad you’re in,” the man said and entered, closing the corridor door and making his way into the inner office. He was short, heavy, with fat arms, rubbery lips and brown jowls. His eyelids were thick, puffy, seeming to crowd his eyes almost shut. He smiled and held out a thick, broad hand, stump-fingered. “My name’s McQueene, Mr. Cardigan. I don’t doubt you’ve heard of me.”

  “Sorry,” Cardigan said, not looking sorry, “I haven’t.” He made an uninterested pass at the man’s hand, then picked up some strips he had clipped from the various evening papers and shoved them into a filing case.

  McQueene smiled at his fingernails. “Of course, I’m not as well known as you are. Besides, I’m a one-man agency.”

  “Oh, McQueene, yeah. I’ve heard of you. I’d forgotten.”

  “I see you’re interested in the Trent death.” McQueene, smiling with his rubbery lips, thumbed in the direction of the newspapers.

  “We always clip out references to cases we stumble into. What can I do for you, Mr. McQueene?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just thought I’d stop by, sit down here, and we’d talk the case over, thresh it out, come to an understanding on just what did happen. I know I’m not in a class with you as private detective. I’m just—”

  “Skip the self-panning, Mr. McQueene,” Cardigan frowned. “The fact is that you think you’re pretty good. Now isn’t that the fact?”

  McQueene looked absently at the palms of his hands. “It’s a queer business you and I are in, Mr. Cardigan. As a matter of fact, I’m here to lay a proposition before you. We can sit down here and talk it over like two sensible men and I say we ought to be able to reach some sort of agreement.”

  “About what?”

  “About the Trent death,” McQueene said.

  “The police reached a pretty good agreement on that,” Cardigan said bluntly, his eyes darkening and searching McQueene’s face.

  McQueene chuckled in a preoccupied manner, his eyes fixed on the surface of the desk. “What I like particularly about it,” he said, “was the fact that it was you who finally convinced the cops that it was a case of accidental death.”

  One of Cardigan’s eyes narrowed down wickedly. “Brother,” he said, “has it occurred to you that you might be talking out of step?”

  McQueene looked up with his half-hidden eyes. “I’ve got both feet on the ground,” he said, his big lips barely moving. “We ought to talk business, not nonsense. I don’t like to get tough and I know you don’t, either.”

  “Who said I don’t?” Cardigan growled.

  “I know, I know; I’ve heard you’re pretty hot to handle, but—”

  “Make it business, Mr. McQueene,” Cardigan interrupted.

  “Sure, I intend to. Let’s forget all about the police hand-out in connection with Trent’s death and get down to cases. You know there’s been no motive established why Trent should have been brained and that alone makes your theory of his accidental death hold the water it does. Now suppose it came to light that there was a motive for Trent’s having been knocked over? What wou
ld you say to that?”

  CARDIGAN sat down on the edge of the desk. “You’re getting interesting, McQueene. Don’t let me down.”

  “That’s why I came here.”

  “Why?”

  “To not let you down.” McQueene leered slowly, lights dancing in the fleshy folds of his eyelids. “You convinced the cops that Trent fell while under the influence of liquor and killed himself. You pooh-poohed the idea that someone might have come in the apartment after you left. The only thing that holds your reconstruction of how he died so well is the fact that there’s been no motive aired. The airing of a motive, Cardigan, might do more than make your face red, don’t you think?”

  “You’re doing an awful lot of talking, McQueene, but still it makes no sense.”

  “Don’t be an Airedale, Cardigan. Trent had something like twenty-two thousand bucks on him when you took him home. I didn’t hear the cops say they’d found it.”

  Cardigan said very slowly: “They didn’t.”

  McQueene leered. “Of course they didn’t. Come, come. I’ll even grant you that Trent fell down the way the papers said he did and conked out. But you know yourself that nobody could have got through that door to lift his roll.”

  “You ought to smile when you say that, McQueene.”

  “I am smiling.”

  “Not according to my dictionary.”

  “You wouldn’t try to get too hot to handle, would you?”

  “Even asbestos gloves wouldn’t help you, mister.”

  McQueene’s face got dull, saturnine, but his voice was still patient. “Trent, I tell you, was packing around twenty-two grand when you took him home. Are you going to be fool enough to stand there with your bare face and think that the cops will laugh it off if they find that out?”

  Cardigan’s voice was low, taut. “You said you had a proposition.”

  McQueene’s face relaxed and his rubbery lips unwound in a jovial leer. “Sure, nobody wants to run to the cops, Cardigan. The case is death by accident with them. Sure, sure. I knew you’d see the light. The proposition’s a white one, Cardigan. Fifty-fifty.”