Murder Impossible

by Jack Adrian (ed)

  They had searched the whole apartment, but there was no one there. They took care to disturb nothing. They did not touch old Dan McCue and they did not touch Kitty Kane, lying supine with flung hip in the darkness where she had fallen, in her red silk Chinese dressing gown, with the ideograph embroidered on it which means 'Good Luck'—with the oldfashioned ebony handled straight razor from the bathroom shelf above her head lying beside her black hair in the warm red pool that was still creeping on the tiles.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Face

  Big Bat O'Brien appeared with his cohorts in a few minutes more.

  'Bring in Paul Bean and Father Finley,' he gave his commands as he came highballing in the door. 'Any other visitors that Dan may have had tonight that anybody knows about. Any men that Kitty's been playing around with lately. Maybe letters in her apartment. Get the passkey off that elevator man, Boaz, who was picked up lamming down the street. Or maybe the janitor has one.

  'When I think of it,' Big Bat added, 'Kitty has probably had her two boys living with her recently. A couple of mugfaced brats about fifteen or sixteen, jive happy little hellions. They were up before the judge out in Chicago for petty thieving and sending in false alarms, before Kitty came back East. Were under investigation in connection with their old man's death two or three years ago, too. Pretty young then, but some boys can be damned bloody to their fathers. They've made Kitty's life a hell. Get the little darlings up and see if they know what time she left her apartment, if they aren't out themselves violating the Cinderella law at some jivehole.'

  With his hat pushed on the back of his crisp red curls and shiny pate, carrying his big paunch nimbly on the balls of his small feet like a man eternally tiptoeing, Big Bat paused to slap Tuxedo Johnny Blythe on the shoulder on his way to the living room.

  'Stealing my stuff, Johnny?' he gibed. 'You always wanted to be a homicide sleuth. Now you're it. Headquarters got word that you were busting in with the patrolman on the beat. Precinct reported that the beat patrolman was at his box on Park. Didn't you even notice that Slipsky's uniform wouldn't button around his belly? White socks! A fat cop spreading out of his pants, without a shield! And you had to call on him to help you break in on murder!'

  'Do you mean, Bat—' said Tuxedo Johnny palely. 'But he knew me. And I remembered—'

  'Hell, the guy hasn't been on the force for fourteen years. He's done time up the river. He was with you when Kitty got it, anyway, like he claims—you're sure of it? Yeah, I guess he must have been. Anybody would sure remember it if he had been left alone at a time like that, with one murder already in the apartment. He couldn't have been in on it. He's just a fat punk. In some lousy shakedown racket with this bird Boaz, it sounds like, from the squawk he made. This janitor, Rasmussen, thought that Dan was trying to get gay with his daughter, it seems like. Rasmussen is a nut. Dan may have offered the cock eyed dame a drink and pinched her cheek, as he would with any colleen. But Boaz believed the nut, and thought he saw a chance to ring in his old cellmate Slipsky in his outgrown motheaten uniform for a shakedown. Hell, Dan would have pitched them both out the window. But you had to swallow the clown. Didn't you know he didn't even have a gun? But for the grace of God and there being two of you, you might be lying here in the dark yourself with old Dan and Kitty!'

  Tuxedo Johnny Blythe's face was filled with wax. 'I played it dumb, Bat.'

  'That's all right, Johnny. You got the boys here quick, anyway. You did fine. I always said you'd make a cop some day.'

  Swiftly and nimbly on his small feet, Big Bat proceeded on to the doorway of the living room. His eternal smile was on his shrewd shiny face. His tiny green eyes twinkled like emeralds, bright and hard. The fingerprint men and police photographers had already set to work.

  'What's the print picture so far?' he said.

  'Four highball glasses, inspector. One on the cellaret top with a fresh drink in it, ice not yet all melted, as if Dan had just mixed it. One beside it, empty, with only his own prints, too. One on the little smoking table beside one of the fireplace chairs, half empty, with his fingerprints on it and somebody else's—A's. One on the rug by the chair, on its side and empty, with his fingerprints and another guy's— B's—smeared over.'

  'Smeared over—you mean somebody tried to wipe his prints off?'

  'No. You can still make out enough so that they can be identified. They were just overlaid. It looks more like three people had handled the glass—old Dan and this guy B who had the partial prints, and then some guy with gloves. There's a white ring on the desk like maybe he had picked up the glass from there.'

  'Gloves, eh?' said Big Bat, frowning. 'That's the picture?'

  'It looks that way, inspector. We aren't going to get any prints that matter, it looks like. Just A's and B's, and this guy with gloves.'

  'Get at the pieces of the champagne bottle and the poker handle. At that razor, too.'

  The prints on one glass, A's or B's, must be Paul Bean's, Big Bat thought.

  'Let's see,' he mused. 'Three visitors, and the third one was the killer. He must have been some guy Dan would expect to wear gloves for some reason—even on a warm September night. Or maybe they were bandages—he could explain to Dan that he had hurt his hands. So he picked up some other guy's drink and gulped it down before he killed him, with his gloves or bandages on. And dropped it, and picked up the bottle.'

  He would have used gloves or bandages with that razor, too, thought Big Bat.

  He examined the ashtrays in the room, moving about swiftly, touching nothing. One had four of old Dan's own Havana butts and a little hill of white ashes in it. The other ashtray had a Happy cigarette butt lying on a lump of pipe dottle.

  The cigar butt at the bottom would be Paul Bean's—one that Dan had given him. He had been here first and he smoked cigars. The dottle would be Finley's who had been in next, and smoked foul shag. The cigarette might have been Kitty's, but wasn't. No lipstick on the Happy. It had been smoked by a man. A man who smokes cigarettes doesn't smoke a pipe or cigars. Though a man who smoke a pipe or cigars may occasionally smoke a cigarette, particularly when the time is brief, and he is keyed up or tense. Keyed up to murder.

  'Hey, Cark!' he said. 'Pick up this butt and see what you can get from it, will you?'

  But there would be no fingerprints on the butt.

  Big Bat threw his cigar stump away in the ashes of the fireplace. With his thumbnail he flipped up the lid of the silver humidor on old Dan's desk and selected a corona, fingering it for texture. He didn't like to picture, he didn't try, what had been happening in those intervening minutes, in the black apartment, before Johnny and Slipsky had broken in.

  'Let's see her now, boy,' he said to Tuxedo Johnny.

  'I can give you the exact time of Dan's murder, Bat,' Tuxedo Johnny said apologetically, as they went down the hall. 'It was just three minutes after midnight. Dan tried to put in a phone call for help at that time. The operator heard a kind of groan and bump as he dropped it, but that was all. It was hung up again in a couple of seconds, and she didn't think enough of it to report it. But she did happen to notice the time—One-two-o-three calling at twelve-o-three.'

  Big Bat nodded absently.

  'Good boy,' he said. 'You'll make a homicide man yet, Johnny. You and the operator. Probably doesn't make any difference, the exact minute. But it does no harm to know.'

  He was thinking of something else, however, as he chewed old Dan's corona. Of that prize pair, Slipsky and Boaz. Johnny had played it dumb.

  There were cops in the areaway out back, and cops in the alley, and cops down in the basement and in the lobby and all the halls. There were cops looking over the water tank and chimney pots of the roof, two stories up. For twenty minutes the Royal Arms had been cut off, from within a few seconds of that second murder. The police were completing the work of arousing those denizens who, thanks to deafness or sleeping pills or drink, had been spared the hearing of that appalling scream.

  The blown fuse had
been replaced, and the bedroom was bright with lights now. All bulbs had been removed and substituted. Only the bridge lamp nearest to that murdered girl, which Tuxedo Johnny had groped for desperately and found, had been tampered with, however—with the burnt penny in the socket that had been expected. A scattering of three or four small coins about upon the rug might indicate that the killer had intended to fix more, but that there had not been time. They might, though, merely have been spilled from a hasty, fumbling glove or bandage—that one lamp had been enough to flash the lights out for his getaway. Only, nobody had yet figured how.

  Adjacent to the lamp there was only one of the barred bedroom windows, however, closed and locked. It was near the bathroom door, too, of course, but there had been no one in the bathroom and no egress from it, the precinct men had decided, probing it with their flashlights from beyond the sill.

  Yet he must have been here, within reach of that lamp, with hot murder in him, ready to flash it if necessary—only Tuxedo Johnny had saved him the effort, by finding it and doing it for him.

  A plainclothesman was sitting on an ottoman, reading a comic. He stood up. Tuxedo Johnny Blythe took off his hat, which had saved him in part from the force of that crashing mirror blow, and brushed his thin brown, neatly parted hair on his plump head.

  Big Bat O'Brien squatted on his hams, pushing his own hat farther back on his tonsured red curls. He looked down, with Tuxedo Johnny standing beside him, at the woman who had once been Kitty Kane, little Kitty Kane of Jerome Street, Kitty Kane of the Nestor Club and the Jollities, with the broken glass beside her on the waxed hardwood floor edge, and the spilled white roses. With her gaping throat upon the white tiles just across the threshold and her black eyes staring up yet at some unnamed terror, at the terror in the blackness which had taken her off.

  Staring, staring with her dead eyes up at Big Bat O'Brien and Tuxedo Johnny Blythe. But she did not speak.

  'She used to play with my kid sisters,' said the murder man heavily. 'Right down the next block on Jerome Street. Her mother was black eyed Kitty Shawn of Shannon, that was a friend of Dan McCue's. She died when Kitty was born. Bill Kane, her old man, worked for Dan. He took to the drink. Was she an eyeful as a kid! God, were all the boys nuts about her in the old days! But you had all the play, Johnny. You were the only one she ever really loved. You were honeymooning, and you never knew, but she went on the tear for a month after you married Sue McCue. The Tenderloin boys used to pick her up in the gutter. She didn't care what she did; she was crazy. But that's the way things go.

  'Kitty Kane!' he repeated heavily. 'She was wild, she was wild all through. The wildest kid on Jerome Street. But she was always a squareshooter with her friends. She never let a pal down, or did him dirt. Whatever she was or did, she never deserved this. It was as damned hellish a piece of business as I've ever run up against, and I've seen plenty. It was a black way for Kitty Kane to die . . . God, but the way she keeps looking up at you!'

  'If she hadn't screamed!' said Tuxedo Johnny. 'It was the way she screamed!'

  'I know. I know, Johnny. You might sort of hope she hadn't known what she was up against here in the dark, if it hadn't been for that. I'm glad I wasn't where I could hear her. I'll always be glad. But I'll be gladder yet when I meet the black son of hell who made her scream like that. It must have been an awful moment for you when you found her, Johnny.'

  'The worst I've ever known, Bat.' Tuxedo Johnny said with a constricted throat.

  With hard bright eyes Big Bat O'Brien had taken in the shattered amber vase glass, the water pooled on the hardwood floor, and the wet stems of the roses. The hollow ground straight razor lying near her head, across the threshold, with its red blade open. The pool of blood on the white tiles.

  'Looks like she knocked the vase off from somewhere when he got her,' he said. 'White roses were always Dan's favourite flower. I remember the blanket of them he had for Kitty Shawn of Shannon. That was all of thirty-six years ago, and I was only a boy of eight then, but I still remember them. They were the talk of Jerome Street, Dan's roses, and Mrs. Kane did look beautiful. He couldn't have had much money then, Dan couldn't, and what he had he got the hard way, with his hands. But he went all out for those white roses for her who had been Kitty Shawn of Shannon.'

  One of the fingerprint men had come in to take the razor. Big Bat arose and inched on past that red clad form into the bathroom, pulling on the light cord with a big red haired hand. Tuxedo Johnny followed him.

  'Where do you suppose the razor came from, Bat?' Tuxedo Johnny said with a dry throat.

  'Danny always used a straight razor—didn't you ever notice, Johnny? You must have seen him a hundred times. He had a case of them that his father had brought from the old country. He would generally keep one out and use it till it had lost its edge, then put it away and use another one, before sending four or five of them to the barber to be honed. Probably it was lying here on the glass shelf right beside the brush and soap. Maybe he picked it up as she came out of the door, and he grabbed her wrist and forced it across her throat. Or . . .

  'No, they couldn't have been struggling very long,' he amended it. 'She didn't have it in her hand at all. She had that bowl of flowers in her hand, Johnny. There isn't any table or anything else around where it could have been knocked from. It just comes back to me, too, that tomorrow would have been old Dan's birthday—the 17th of September, he'd have been sixty-one or sixty-two. That's it! Dan's birthday. Maybe Kitty brought those roses over to give him after Finley left, before the murderer came in and chained the door.

  'Maybe old Dan gave her the vase to put them in, or maybe she had come into the bedroom first and picked one up, one she knew about, and gone on into the bathroom here to put them in water, before giving them to him. She must have been in here, anyway, almost up to the moment of her death. A woman can spend a lot of time in a bathroom, if maybe she happens to look at herself in the mirror and decides to put another curl in her hair. She didn't know the killer had come in, and he didn't know that she was here.

  'She was in the way of the killer's escape, it looks like. He had probably come in off the fire escape, the same way you and Slipsky did, Johnny. It was easy and natural, so long as there was no one out there to see him. He had probably expected to get out the same way, too. He doused the lights after killing Dan, and started to. He was that devil Rasmussen saw starting out on the fire escape. When he saw the light of the basement door down below and the glow of Rasmussen's pipe in the blackness near it, he bolted back in, though, and closed and locked the window if Rasmussen should come up to investigate.

  'He had another way figured out to get away, of course, just in case there might be somebody down below like that. Even a goon would have another way figured out, a little harder one, maybe, but still a sure way. And he was smart as hell. He shows it by the way he did get out. Having the lamp fixed to douse the lights if necessary, right here by the bathroom door. Maybe he was just fixing it when Kitty came out. No way of saying just when he did it. But right there he met her, at the door. She was in his way, and he killed her.

  'You're right, Johnny. You're right as hell, and you've been right all along. How did he get away? That's really the one question.'

  Big Bat looked up at the little frosted bathroom window, measuring it dubiously with his eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Moaning Ghost

  Tuxedo Johnny Blythe had been following all the murder man's reflections with strained attention. These horrors were his first experience with red bloody murder, and he hoped sickly that they would be his last. Old Dan had been terrible enough, but Kitty . . .

  He had had enough of it, and he was afraid Big Bat would see how sick his nerves were. He had lost his head. He had played it dumb. Perhaps it made no difference what symptoms of calm or panic he showed, of brilliance or dumbness. Big Bat would continue in any case just to think him a tuxedo clown. Still he couldn't just walk out, or collapse like a woman.

  He had
followed, with a sense of amazement and even awe, the work of the fingerprint men, whose thoroughness and skill were even more intensive than he had believed possible. He had been baffled by some of the obvious things Big Bat had seen, which he himself had missed, and the uncannily accurate pictures which Bat had drawn from them—Big Bat might have almost been there himself, the way he had now figured out that Kitty must have been carrying that vase of flowers, and hadn't just knocked it off some table. And that the flowers had been a birthday gift for Dan—he had forgotten himself that Dan's birthday would have been tomorrow.

  The problem still remained of how the killer could have got away. Dumb as he had played it, Tuxedo Johnny had seen that from the beginning. Now Bat himself had come to it, as sooner or later he must.

  With his baffled gaze, Tuxedo Johnny Blythe followed the murder man's hard emerald eyes up to the little frosted bathroom window. It was too small, it was high up, with its lower sill more than six feet above the floor, and open only those six inches at the top, for ventilation.

  Nevertheless, Tuxedo Johnny stepped up on the rim of the lavatory basin beneath the window, pushing up both panes to the top. With a dry throat, he started forth.

  It was a straight drop down to the alley, and must be dismissed as a possibility. There were no similar windows of other apartments below, he remembered—this apartment of Dan's, the owner's suite, was built on different dimensions from the rest. And the squad car men had been hurrying down the alley within a fraction of a minute after Kitty's murder. They would have seen any man who might have cat climbed down the bricks, or slid down a rope.

  Opposite, a dirty window pane showed blank and bare. No shade, no curtains, back of the glass. The opacity of years of dust seemed on it. An emptiness lying behind it. An unbreathing silence.