The shadows changed shape and position—for a while like boys leaping with upstretched arms, or suddenly swooping and stooping, as if tossing a beanbag back and forth, then both of them suddenly sprang together and merged in a kind of jitterbug dance . . . Kerry Ott watched with mild interest for a full two or three minutes, eating crackers, before the thing finally faded down and vanished.
He looked down into the blackness of the alley four stories below, when the shadow show was over. Two dark shapes of men, more to be guessed at than seen, were hurrying down the alley towards the rear of the Royal Arms. There was something in their agitated stride, and perhaps also a certain ponderosity of bulk they had, which reminded him of a pair of Keystone cops, complete with walrus mustaches, brass buttoned frock coats, and grey helmets, diligently pursuing a mocking quick footed shadow all around the barn. He smiled mildly at the suggestion of comedy flatfoot futility.
Light suddenly flashed on behind the little frosted window opposite, as the two dark hurrying figures reached the rear of the Royal Arms, turning back. Through the opening at the top of the window he could see a corner section of midnight blue wall, studded with silver stars, and a portion of chromium shower curtain bar, with a light cord hanging from the ceiling near it. A naked arm had reached up and pulled the light on, in that instant.
Nothing distinct—just a moment's glimpse of a cord grasping hand and a portion of a bare human arm, perhaps a woman's hand and arm, perhaps a meagre man's, undressed for a bath, or in a sleeveless summer garment. As the light went on, the arm had been retracted down. The light remained behind the pane. The smoke of a cigarette came drifting enigmatically up toward the ceiling.
Kerry Ott had finished his box of crackers. He let his window shade drop back into place. He picked up his watch and wound it, setting it at approximately 12:06, and went back to work.
At last he arose ponderously and stiffly, pushing back his chair, wading through the crumpled yellow papers which crushed beneath his shuffling feet with the feel of trodden popcorn. He picked up a cake of soap from the top of his chest of drawers. At the door he took a towel from a wooden horse which stood tilted against the wall, on a pile of three or four paint smeared planks stacked up against the baseboard—gear left by painters at some date indefinite, together with some buckets of dried paints and a few rolls of dusty wallpaper.
He went out, feeling for the small bulb outside the door and turning it on. He went back down the long dim lit railroad hall of the flat, past the doorways of black unfurnished rooms, to the kitchen in the back.
He hadn't bothered to supply bulbs for more than his work room light and the one small hall light. In the kitchen he found the iron sink by feel, across the sagging floor. He washed his face and eyes and the back of his neck beneath the slow running, rusty faucet, in darkness, and dried himself with the rough towel. Picking up his soap again, he went back up the hall to his little room, turning off the hall light in passing.
He draped his damp towel over the tilted sawhorse and tossed his wet soap towards the bureau top. His watch said 12:14 now. He turned off the light above his writing table and felt his way back to his cot in the far corner, where he sat down and pulled off his shoes, then flung himself back, utterly exhausted, with the figures of his play still in his mind.
If beyond his closed and shaded window, across the alleyway, in the fourth floor rear apartment of the Royal Arms, a woman screamed in that moment as swift death struck her, he did not hear it, and he did not know it.
Nor know that in that apartment over there a previous murder had been done, when he had been looking out. And that he had glimpsed the murderer, a man whose face he had not seen, nor would recognize if he should see it.
He knew nothing about it, Kerry Ott. He was never on that murder scene. He was separated from it by a closed window, an alleyway, and a brick wall. He was probably the only man who had a view into that murder apartment while both the front door was chained and the rear window was locked, if that was in any way important. But he had seen nothing.
He was just the man across the alley, not knowing and not hearing, seeing only that vague little, during those twelve minutes of frenzied murder . . .
The third operator from the end on the Harkness 4 exchange board shuttling her wires with rapid hands, murmuring incessantly with her soft cooing voice into her headphone—saw a light flash on at the left side of her board, connection 1203.
'Ridgewood naine, one-naine-thurree-thurree,' she murmured. 'Deposit fifteen cents for five minutes, please . . . We are not allowed to give out the time, madam. Dial Meridian seven one-two-one-two ... I will connect you with Information . . . What number were you calling? Harkness four, four-eight-four-three has been changed to Harkness thurree-one-naine ... I will connect you with Information . . . We are not allowed to give out the time, sir. Dial Meridian . . .'
But the time, as she happened to glance and notice, was just 1203, by the minute turning electric clock above the board.
There was a red light at 12:03. McCue, Dan'l J.'s number, if she had known it, at 219 East Sixty somethingth Street. Miles away from where she sat shuttling her loom of wires, weaving the city fates, old Dan McCue had seized his phone in his great thickveined hand and had dialled the operator.
In case of emergency, dial operator, the book says.
It was just one more light in a busy midnight hour to her. She plugged in.
'Operator,' she said.
'Hel-'
A kind of groaning sound followed by a thump, came over the wire. No word beyond that one meaningless syllable, however.
'Operator,' she repeated. 'What number did you want?'
But Harkness 4-1203 gave her no number. There was only the silence in her earphones, after that groaning bump.
She listened efficiently. The red light flashed out at the end of a moment, as the instrument was quietly replaced. So there was no need for her even to report to the trouble desk that Harkness 4-1203 was temporarily out of order. She shuttled her wires with rapid hands, disconnecting 1203 and connecting a hundred other calls, and bothered no more about it.
So whether old Dan McCue had felt that first crushing, paralysing blow crash down on him, and had tried dazedly, with a dying effort, to summon help, or had died totally unwarned, must remain uncertain, like some other items of that scene. He had seized his phone, and jerked the dial round, and uttered that one croaking syllable—that was all. But he might merely have been trying to call a Hellgate number, or Helsinki, Finland.
The uncompleted call fixed the time of his murder, anyway. The coincidence of the phone number and the time had registered on the operator's mind—1203 calling at 12:03—and she would be able to give Tuxedo Johnny Blythe that much information, when he queried her later if she had heard anything. Which information Tuxedo Johnny would pass on to Big Bat O'Brien of homicide, together with all the details that he could remember of every man he had met from the time he left old Dan's door, around that murder time, up to the time of that second murder back up in the dark apartment a dozen minutes later.
After he had recovered his wits a little, and was trying to think it out.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe had had almost no wits at all, to say the best about it, when he first came cascading down the narrow marble stairs beside the elevator shaft in the Royal Arms from old Dan McCue's door on the fourth floor.
What the exact time was he didn't know. His wrist watch had said around 12:10, he remembered having seen subconsciously, staring at his hand as he sped down. It had been running anywhere from five to nine minutes fast recently, however, as he knew, and so was subject to an indeterminate correction, which he would have no opportunity to make.
It wasn't to consult the time, though, that Tuxedo Johnny was holding up his hand and staring at it with bugging eyes as he rushed down the stairs. There was blood on it—a red slipperiness on his fingers and in the crevices of his palm, which had a still fresh warm, abhorrent feeling.
Blood! his Adam'
s apple seemed to bubble. My God, it's slippery! he thought or bubbled. How in hell did I get all that on me?
With the instinctive revulsion of a neat, fastidious and well manicured man—with the inchoate, inane reaction of almost any kind of man in a like moment—he snatched his handkerchief forth from his breast pocket, and pulled at his fingers to wipe them off as he ran. But it would need soap and water. He balled the linen away in his hip pocket as he rounded the elevator shaft on the second floor and poured his agitated two hundred pounds on down towards the lobby.
'Blood!' his throat bubbled.
In spite of his police background, Tuxedo Johnny had had singularly little contact with blood of any kind before, either in accident or murder. He had never been a soldier or even a rabbit hunter. Even the sight of his own blood always agitated him—a minor cut on the chin while shaving would cause him an anxious and painstaking application of cold towels and styptic collodion, and keep him fingering the place for hours afterwards imagining it still oozing. He had given himself such an invisible nick on the train up from Washington this evening to see old Dan, as it happened, belatedly scraping away his five o'clock shadow outside Baltimore; and he touched the spot now again, with a connection of instinctive thought. But it had dried up as hard as a beetle's shard, of course, hours ago.
There was blood up there on old Dan's doorknob, he thought with horror. Perhaps on the door frame, also, and the sill—he wasn't sure. Maybe not a great amount, though it seemed to him for the moment that it must be like a huge and pouring tide, which was rushing out from beneath Dan's door and flooding down the stairs after him.
Blood! What else? He must think over every detail. He must keep cool, he told himself—he must not be panicked—being panicked completely.
The slow little gilt elevator in its openwork shaft had gone up, answering that ring from the floor above old Dan's. The car had passed him in its ascent when he was halfway down between the third and second floors, with its bald headed, pan faced, operator standing at the control, dressed in a plum coloured jacket with black frogs and a pair of baggy tweed pants, and holding something to his mouth—a sandwich or a bite of cake—which he was meditatively eating.
He might have been down in the basement having supper. Some new man, the thought flashed to Tuxedo Johnny, whom he had never seen before. But he hadn't been in New York for several months and around to see old Dan, and the whole staff of the apartment house quite possibly had changed.
He hadn't waited for the elevator, anyway. The front door was the only way a killer could get away . . .
That there might be anyone still up there in old Dan's apartment did not occur to him. And whether there was, at that precise moment, was something which would later baffle much better cops than he had ever been.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe had been, before going to Washington with the F.A.B., old Dan McCue's political lieutenant and right hand man for fifteen years, and had occupied various minor positions in the city government, having a knack for smoothing things over and getting along with people.
He had got his name of Tuxedo Johnny, not because he invariably wore a black tie after six o'clock, but because he had been, eighteen or so years before, one of the famous tuxedo Cops—one of the half dozen graduates appointed to the force by Commissioner Enfield as lieutenants, after an oral examination and on the basis of their athletic records, without going through the ranks. It had been the intention at the time to appoint six more the same way each year, and so gradually build up a nucleus from which future ranking officers could be drawn. The experiment was not continued the next year however, when Waldron succeeded Enfield. Of the original half dozen, two had soon resigned to go into banking, one to join the army, one to become a Trappist monk, and one, of course, is still a star in Hollywood.
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe, who had remained on the force the longest of any of them, something less than three years, had resigned when he married Dan McCue's daughter at the big wedding at St Christopher's. She had Renoed him two years later, taking the kid, and had married Paul Bean, but the arrangement had been friendly, and it had not interfered with his relations with old Dan.
It would not be an overstatement to say that any tough police sergeant who had got his the hard way had never been able to regard the idea of a Tuxedo Cop with anything but an extreme impassivity of face—Tuxedo Johnny Blythe possibly even more than the rest, with his plump, pink cheeked, surprised and round eyed look, resembling somewhat the look of a plump good natured nine months old baby examining a feather. No doubt in many ways he was something of a fathead. He wasn't quite a walrus mustached, heel clicking comedy Keystone Cop, however, and had never been quite that bad. At least he had had a certain amount of police training and with it he still retained an underlying police awareness, however confused. If there were some things which he didn't think of, and some things which he failed to see—if, as he felt forced to confess to Big Bat O'Brien later with regret, he had played it dumb—it is doubtful if most men would have acted any more intelligently in the circumstances, and perhaps the average not quite so well.
Even in his agitation he was automatically recording everything in the halls and on the stairs, as he went down, but there were no shadows that were tangible. Just empty pockets of darkness. The apartment doors on each floor had been closed—behind one, the murmur of a man's droning voice, perhaps a radio newscaster; behind another, the sound of dance music. Behind all the other doors, what had seemed only a heavy sleeping silence.
The cables of the elevator had ceased vibrating; it had reached the fifth floor, from which that ring had come. The little marble tiled lobby seemed deserted. The front doorway was open, and there was no sound of car or footsteps out on the quiet midnight street.
Tuxedo Johnny had headed downstairs to reach the front door as quickly as possible, with the one thought in his mind of seeing someone on the way, or possibly out on the midnight street beyond. He did not continue his rush straight for the door now, however. On the bottom step of the stairs, he stopped.
In the quiet and apparently deserted lobby, he had seen the movement of a shadow. There was someone standing back of one of the pillars. He had stepped behind it rather quickly, Tuxedo Johnny thought, just as he himself had come in sight.
The first man he had met since leaving old Dan's door, the thought burned itself into Tuxedo Johnny's mind. He must remember every detail—not forget one.
The pillar didn't hide the man behind it completely. He was a big man, dressed in a blue patrolman's uniform. He had fat hands and wrists beyond the ends of his blue sleeves, and white socks beneath the bottoms of his blue pants.
After a moment, as Tuxedo Johnny Blythe remained halted on the bottom step, looking at him, the man behind the pillar came on out. He swung his stick with measured ease. He had a big hooked nose and a broad face, set with small green sliding eyes. One of the buttons of his tunic was unfastened over his belly, and he made a gesture of buttoning it.
'Evening, Lieutenant Blythe,' he said, adjusting the cap.
There were twenty thousand on the force, thought Tuxedo Johnny. He couldn't know them all. The patrolman knew him, anyway.
'Slipsky, sir,' said the big patrolman, sliding his eyes. 'I used to be on the—under you for a while in the old precinct back in 'twenty-nine, Lieutenant. I'm just, uh, investigating.'
'Someone has sent in an alarm already, have they?' said Tuxedo Johnny.
'An alarm?' said Slipsky, his eyes abruptly motionless. 'About what, Lieutenant?'
'Old Dan! Dan McCue—wait a minute!' said Tuxedo Johnny haggardly, as Slipsky half wheeled, glancing over his shoulder, as if to bolt headlong out of the door. 'Where the devil are you going?
'No need of going off half cocked,' he added, catching his breath. 'We'll have to see what it is first. I may have got a little excited. But he didn't answer the doorbell, and there's blood—blood on the doorknob! But maybe it's not murder. We'll have to see.'
'Murder?' said Slipsky, as if he h
ad never heard the word before. 'Mr. McCue? When?'
'Someone must have just come from there—'
'I hadn't heard anything about it, Lieutenant,' said Slipsky. 'I only just came in the lobby a minute ago. I was just asking Sam Boaz, the elevator man, how things was, only he got a call up. I was just waiting for him to come back down.'
'You've been here only a minute?' said Tuxedo Johnny. 'Someone might have gone out then—'
'Only a couple of minutes, anyway, Lieutenant. I came in just at midnight, and it's only eleven-fif— well, I guess the clock here's not running. I thought it was. But not more than seven or eight minutes, anyway, Lieutenant.'
His wrist watch said 12:12, Tuxedo Johnny saw now, looking at it finally. Even though it might be those five or nine minutes fast, Slipsky must have been here in the lobby for an appreciable number of minutes. The fat patrolman was endeavouring to minimize the time, he realized somewhat tardily. He might have been in here since around 11:50, the time the lobby clock said, or he would have noticed when he came in that it had stopped.
It had probably been just a sense of uneasiness at having been caught loitering with the elevator man which had caused him to step back of the pillar, it occurred to Tuxedo Johnny somewhat belatedly, as well. Just for a moment, in the movement of that shadow, he had thought he had seen something sinister . . .
Murder Impossible Page 28