He hadn't known where he had been during the last hour, or all evening, when they asked him. Perhaps he hadn't known where he had been for the past several years.
He had left Dan's apartment at one or two o'clock, he thought. But it wasn't quite one o'clock yet. He had thought, then, that he might have left at nine or ten. But actually it had been a quarter of twelve, just eighteen minutes before Dan's murder and thirty minutes before Kitty's, when he had taken the elevator down, according to Boaz, the elevator man, who was sweating to tell the truth.
He didn't know where he had been in the meantime. He had been looking for a cat—a half grown cat, or rather a kitten, grey, with three white feet. And here he was, smoking his pipe, with the grey kitten with the white feet, that he had found at last, in his arm.
Isn't she lovely, Bat?
Behind a door, near where they had found him, there had been the inaudible silky rustling of his innumerable cats, throatily, inaudibly thrunming, walking around in slow cat patterns on padded feet. This was where he lived now, therefore. Here on the fourth floor of the old tenement across the alley from Dan McCue's. This was where he had probably been living for the past month, since he had unobtrusively left Hell's Kitchen. Laying what plans, making what cunning catlike stalks preliminary to murder, God knew.
Dan's dead, Michael.
Oh, dear, I do hope he remembered to leave me his money for my cat foundation. Paul Bean promised to see to it that I should have some of it. But I really could use it all. One doesn't realize how many hungry cats the world is filled with . . .
Dan was murdered, Michael. In his apartment. He was beaten to death with a bottle and a poker, by some friend of his, who came to visit him.
Oh, dear, oh goodness me! How bloody, how cruel, some men can be . . .
Kitty Weisenkranz, her that was little Kitty Kane of Jerome Street, that was the daughter of Bill Kane the bricklayer and Kitty Shawn of Shannon, was murdered, too, Michael. Wild and beautiful little black eyed Kitty. Remember how when you were younger and were clerking in the bookstore, living with your wife and kid, before they were burned up in the fire and you went kind of off, you used to tirade against her, Michael! Saying she was sinful, full of sin, and would be better off dead. You were younger and hotter then, of course, Michael, against the sins of the flesh. But she had her throat cut with a razor, Michael.
Dan's razor was a little dull tonight. He never strops them. I like a razor with a good clean stroke. My skin is very tender. But he always has plenty of hot water . . .
Yes, the water is hot, Michael. Wouldn't you like to go along down with one of the boys? Perhaps you had better go along, and collect your thoughts a little, Michael. Perhaps there will be something you can remember.
I remember I heard the crying beyond the door. I put on my gloves, and went in. I think she was afraid of me and trying to hide from me. But I knew she was there. Then I found her.
He's got a glove, just one, in his pocket, boys. May have dropped the other in the vacant room, or in the alley. If we find it, that will clinch it. Take him along, Fulheimer. Just tell the boys to go easy with him. Nothing rough. He wouldn't know what they were doing to him, anyway . . .
So they had found Father Finley, by a lucky break, wandering in the hall here on the top floor of the old tenement across the alleyway from Dan's. And Big Bat had paused, after the little grey man had been taken unprotestingly away, to look for a moment into that front flat of his, filled with pad footed, silkily weaving, lambent eyed cats, to see if the ladder or the board he had used was there, while Tuxedo Johnny Blythe and Jorgensen and Cark had gone on to look for the glove, or anything else, into the old empty flat without a lock in the rear, which faced Dan's, and which must have been the way he came through.
'It's murder, brother!' said Tuxedo Johnny good humouredly, though baffled. 'The boys think they've probably got the man, but there's just a chance it might have been the other one. He got away through your window here, anyway, whichever one he was. All we wanted to know was just whether you happened to see him . . . My God!' he said, with a helpless quiver of his belly muscles. 'Clear out of this world! I wonder how they do it?'
The two detectives laughed with him as the big unconscious man laid a page aside and wrote on.
Big Bat O'Brien came down the hall.
'Boards!' he said, with his quick eyes darting to the baseboard just inside the door. 'A pile of painter's planks! And he needed only one! That's what I wanted! Have you found his other glove here? . . . Who's that bird?' he shot, advancing. 'Does he live in this dump? Was he in here? Did he see him? Why, for the holy love of the whispering son of Brian of Carney!' he said in a whisper, on tiptoe. 'It's Mr. Ott!'
'Do you know him, Bat?' Tuxedo Johnny said with a bewildered chuckle. 'Does he think? Does he breathe? Is he human? I thought maybe he was the original mechanical man. So help me, I've told him five times that it was murder, and five times that the guy escaped right through his room here, and five times I've asked him pointblank if he saw him. And he just sits here writing. He's out of this world. He's nowhere. Anybody could have come in and walked right over him.'
'He's Kerry Ott, the playwright,' said Big Bat in a whisper, tiptoeing. 'He doesn't know anything you're saying unless he's looking at you, Johnny. He's deaf as the grave. There's only one thing that makes him mad, and that's to be disturbed while he's writing, too. He may have been out or asleep when the killer came through, of course, and not seen him at all, or be able to tell us anything about him. But if he saw him well enough to identity him, and it wasn't poor Michael Finley, I'd like to know it, and quick. We've got poor Michael where he can't do any more harm, and for as long as we want him. But Paul Bean's a lawyer, and we can't hold him three hours unless we've got some proof. And if we let the wrong man loose, he's just too smart, and he's liable to kill again on us. I don't know what to do.'
'I was just thinking of giving him the hotfoot, to see if he could feel it without his shoes,' said Tuxedo Johnny Blythe good humouredly. 'I'd have liked to see his face. But if he's a friend of yours, Bat, we'll do it the soft way.'
'Johnny, you'd better not—'
But Tuxedo Johnny Blythe had already put his smooth plump good natured, chuckling hands on the sides of the big concentrated man's face from behind, with a slight, soothing barber's stroke.
'Wake up out of your dreamland, brother! It's murder!'
Kerry Ott turned his bland mild face around, pushing up his knees, in bland glaring rage. He stood up, knocking his chair backwards, filled with glaring thoughts of murder. He snapped his pencil in two and squeezed the pieces in his fists.
'Who did that?' he said. 'Damn him, who did that? That broke it! Who are you with your slick polished hands and the dumb fat grin like a bewildered nine-months-old baby examining a feather?
'What do you mean by coming in here and rubbing me?' he went on in his high outraged voice. 'Haven't you got brains enough to leave me alone while I'm working on a play? If you think that writing one is simple work, trying to make something impossible seem possible, and something seem real that never happened; just try and do it some time! Damn it, that broke it! That broke it all apart!'
He exhaled an outraged breath.
'What are you doing in here, Arthur?' he said to Big Bat O'Brien, glaring. 'Who is this dumb friend of yours with the baffled look? Who is responsible for this insufferable intrusion?'
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Cobweb
Oh, it was terrible!
Wrenched out of that timeless and spaceless imaginary world, where he had been ranging, back into this small limited world of obviousness and reality, by a stroke of offensive familiarity. Light and smooth as the touch of a beetle's wing, perhaps, but he was sensitive to touch, and had an antipathy to being handled. He would almost sooner have been hit with a hammer. Damn the fool!
Emerald eyed, red haired, bald pated Big Bat O'Brien of homicide—whom nobody else in God's world had ever called or even thought of as A
rthur, even his mother having called him Bat—from whom Kerry had got at times an idea for a play or two, and to whom perhaps he had given an idea, was in here, with a couple of his prize bloodhounds, it looked like, and this fourth bird, who had given him that startling brush of hands. Just as his play was finishing. They broke it.
He took another breath, calming down. The man who had done it looked completely baffled, startled, hurt, and anguished to the death.
'All right!' Kerry said, leaning back against the table. 'I didn't mean to hurt you. I don't like to hurt men. Let's leave it there . . . What is it, Arthur? Spill it, and get it over.'
He leaned back against his table, with his bland mild face, watching the movement of Big Bat O'Brien's lips, a little sick. Oh, it was terrible! Terrible . . .
Big Bat O'Brien had clenched his teeth in his cigar.
'Mr. Ott,' he said, 'the light was out and the shade was up in this room a little while ago, when we looked across. It had the appearance of being an empty room. But it's your room, I take it. Could you just tell me whether you have been here since fourteen and a half minutes after midnight, and if you saw a man, who was either a little unobtrusive grey cat man, or a thin, tall beanpole man, coming in through your window from the small bathroom window in the building across the alley, on one of those painters' boards which are stacked up along that baseboard and making his escape out through your door?'
'What is it, Arthur—the It-pays-to-be-an-idiot program? If so, I bite.'
Make a joke out of it, he might. But it was terrible, really.
Big Bat O'Brien had clenched his teeth more firmly into his cigar. Standing wide planted on his light and nimble feet, rocking his stomach quietly. Looking at Kerry Ott, the playwright, who knew a scene when he saw one, or a play when it had been described to him, with his hard emerald eyes.
'Mr. Ott,' he said, 'a man and a woman—Mr. Dan McCue, the eminent philanthropist and political leader, and Mrs. Kitty Weisenkranz, a friend of his, who lived across the hall from him— were murdered in his apartment in the Royal Arms, directly facing you across the alley, during the quarter hour after midnight. The front door was chained and the rear window was locked when the place was broken into, and there were bars on all the other windows. There was only one way the killer could have escaped, and that was out the little bathroom window and through this room, by crossing the intervening space on a ladder or board. Shake hands with Johnny Blythe of the Federal Aid Bureau, who's just up from Washington, who used to be Dan's right hand man for fifteen years, and who is one of the most popular and best liked guys you ever met. Johnny used to be a cop himself. If he had stayed, he might have made a good one. The boys just inside the door are Detective sergeants Cark and Jorgensen of homicide, two of the smartest men in the department, who are agreed with Johnny and me that the killer could have escaped in no other way than this.
'Dan was killed in his library at three minutes after midnight with a champagne bottle that Paul Bean had brought to him, and a poker that was there. Kitty was killed at fourteen and a half minutes after midnight with a razor that Michael Finley had used to shave himself with a half hour before—he had dropped in before, off and on, to do it, using Dan's hot water, and had done it tonight, as he mentioned to the elevator man. So both Bean and Finley had prints on one of the murder weapons, but whichever killed him later wore gloves.
'We just picked up Michael Finley, and he had no explanation or alibi at all for his whereabouts during the murder time. We found one bloodstained glove on him. He lost the other somewhere. If he had lost it in your room here, we would know we had him. However, since apparently he didn't, there is an element of doubt about him, which leaves Paul Bean still in it.
'Paul Bean was picked up about half an hour ago, fifteen minutes after the murders were completed, on the street about a block away from the Royal Arms, dressed in a pair of dark slacks and an old dark golf pullover, and with his fingers wrapped in bandages, looking for a purse he had lost when some boys tripped him up, after he left Dan, earlier in the evening. Or that's his story. But if we had found his purse lying on the floor in this room, it would have been the clinching thing against him, like the glove against Michael Finley. Or if you saw one of them close enough to identify him, that would close it. You get the picture, Mr. Ott?'
Oh, it was terrible, really. It would have been a terrible play.
'Motive, Arthur?' said Kerry tiredly. 'There must be some motive.'
'Both men had a motive, a money motive,' said Big Bat O'Brien, 'for killing Dan. Kitty Kane, it looks like, was just in his way as he escaped. But Finley thought—and still thinks, it seems—that Dan was going to leave him a big chunk of money in his will, if not all of it. He's laying plans to feed ten million cats. Dan hadn't made a will though, as Bean knew. And without a will Bean's thirteen-year-old-stepdaughter, Dan's granddaughter, will inherit everything—little Jennie Blythe. She was Johnny's daughter here, but Sue McCue Renoed him a dozen years ago, and married Bean. Which means Bean would have control of the money for eight years till she comes of age. And that is all the time a lawyer needs to have his hands on money.'
A terrible play, still.
'Time, Arthur?' said Kerry tiredly. 'How do you know the time so precisely of the murders?'
'Fifty people heard Kitty scream,' said Big Bat O'Brien. 'Some police were already downstairs in the building—Johnny here had them called. The time was fourteen minutes after midnight, or fifteen. The phone operator clocked the time of Dan's murder. He had tried to call for help as he was being killed— at twelve-o-three.'
'My God,' said Kerry Ott. It was even more terrible than he had thought.
'Scene?' he said, staring incredulously at Big Bat O'Brien's hard bright emerald eyes. 'Chained door and locked windows? Who discovered the murders, Arthur?'
Big Bat told him about that, too. About how Johnny had come rushing down the stairs, with the front door of the Royal Arms the only way he could think of for a murderer to get away, but watching for anybody he might see on the way, too. Without realizing, till he met that phoney cop, Slipsky, and the elevator man had come down to join them and had offered to get into Dan's apartment with the passkey that he had, that with a chain on the door no murderer could have got away out in front, and that if there hadn't been a chain he could have got into Dan's himself with his own key.
Big Bat wore a brief grin, while Cark and Jorgensen joined in a laugh again at poor Tuxedo Johnny. Big Bat told about how Johnny had then gone around to break in the back, taking Slipsky with him, and had met Rasmussen, the janitor, and heard about the devil himself. And how Johnny and Slipsky had gone on up and broken in the locked window and found Dan's body; and how Johnny had told Slipsky to phone homicide while he went on to see if the chain was still on the front door, which he didn't expect to find, it having now occurred to him that it was probably off and should be off, as that was the way the killer had probably got away. And how Slipsky hadn't phoned, but had followed him out. And how Slipsky and he had both seen that the chain was still on the door, which meant that somebody was still in the apartment. And how then they had heard Kitty scream, and Johnny had gone rushing in.
'Johnny thinks it may have been only a few seconds before he went in,' said Big Bat O'Brien gibingly. 'But he may have just stopped to de his shoelace, or figure up his insurance policies. I know I would, myself, without a gun. There she was, anyway. She must have died within a second. However long it was, it gave him time, with the fuse that blew, to make his getaway someway. By the bathroom window, as we found out, and across here. It was the only way.'
Great God, it was incredible! Kerry Ott turned his bland mild face on the pink cheeked man with the round blue eyes, with the look of a fat nine-months-old infant examining a feather.
'My God!' he said.
'It may have been more time than I thought before I found her,' the dumb faced man's lips moved to him, with a swallowing of his Adam's apple. 'A man gets mixed up at a time like that. Maybe it wa
s as long as forty or fifty seconds. I was just trying to gauge the probabilities. She was dead, anyway. He got out that bathroom window, that's all. He came through your room, that's all. He got away.'
His fat dumb eyes were on that drawn window shade, before that dingy window, straining. 'Oh, impossible!' said Kerry tiredly. 'Impossible?' said Big Bat O'Brien.
'The hell it was impossible!' said Tuxedo Johnny Blythe. 'What does this bird know about it, Bat? Anyone could have come in here and walked right over him.'
He strode to the window shade and ripped it off. He said something with his back turned, but Kerry didn't see.
'The spider web,' said Kerry wearily. 'Not any slipshod haphazard web thrown up helterskelter in fifteen minutes by a theridiid, but the patient work of an argiopid—octagonal, geometric, flawless, with four rays of laddered silk. A work of time. A work of highest art. Moored from the window ledge across the pane, to every corner. That web wasn't spun since twelve-fourteen. She has been spinning that web all night.'
Tuxedo Johnny Blythe tore the geometric net of thin and sticky threads to tatters with one sweep of his arm. He smashed the black and yellow spider as it ran, with one blow of his fist. He gave the window a violent tug. But it didn't budge. His shoulders heaved. There was sweat on his smooth shaved neck. Big Bat O'Brien went over and helped him. They both heaved.
Big Bat O'Brien turned his puzzled face around.
'Nailed,' he said. 'In solid, and there's paint and dust on the heads. They've been in years. What's the answer, Mr. Ott?'
Kerry Ott's mild face looked tired. The obviousness of reality. The walls which no one could have gone through. The one actor on the scene. But he was not one to smash even a spider, which had not harmed him. He was not God, or even a policeman.
'Perhaps you had better go back to your fingerprints, Arthur,' was all he said.
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