Eye Witness

by George Harmon Coxe

  ‘I could have’, Murdock admitted. ‘If I was John Doe and the murdered man was Kent Murdock. Assuming, of course, that I stole the wallet.’

  O’Brien continued his inspection of the cards and papers and Murdock felt himself responding to the other’s quiet and direct manner. Realizing that he was dealing with an intelligent and experienced officer he felt the chip come off his shoulder. He had an idea that it would be smart to co-operate with O’Brien, a mistake to take him for granted; for when he considered the man’s keen grey eyes he knew that nothing fooled them for very long.

  ‘You could compare my signature with the one on the hotel card’, he said, ‘but it would be simpler to get Murray Leonard over here.’

  ‘He’s on his way.’

  Murdock said he was glad to hear it and then, thinking of something else, he asked if O’Brien knew Lee Farnsley.

  ‘I’ve heard of him but I don’t know him personally.’

  ‘I guess none of your men who were on the case with you in 617 knew him either. Otherwise they would have recognized him.’

  ‘Not unless they knew him well’, O’Brien said. ‘The first blow with that candlestick caught him across the face. It was pretty puffed up by the time we found him.’

  ‘What about the help in the hotel?’

  ‘We had the manager up. He’d never seen Murdock. The clerk was not the one on duty when you registered yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘His wallet was missing?… What else?’

  ‘How do we know? We can’t tell what he had on him. He was still wearing a wrist-watch.’

  ‘Did you find a platinum brooch?’

  O’Brien eyed him aslant. ‘How do you happen to know about that?’

  Murdock explained what Helen Farnsley had said about her husband’s visit to her apartment. O’Brien thought it over.

  ‘Where do you come in?’ he said. ‘What was Farnsley doing in your room?’

  ‘He took it over. He was drunk and objectionable. Also I think he was scared.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I think he owed some money and couldn’t pay up. I think that’s why he took the brooch and I think Joe Apollo was the one he was ducking.’ He explained his argument with Farnsley and its consequences. He said he finally had to go to the State Hotel to get a room.

  ‘What time was that?’ O’Brien asked, pencil poised over the little notebook.

  Murdock said he wasn’t sure; he thought it was about ten-thirty. He said he had a drink at the bar and then went to bed.

  ‘Get back to Joe Apollo’, O’Brien said. ‘You think he’s mixed up in this?’

  Murdock said he did not know, but that there was a man waiting in the lobby of the Greene Hotel when he left the night before that answered the description of Joe Apollo.

  ‘Where’d you get your description?’

  ‘From a girl who works for Apollo. Claire Emerson’, he said, and mentioned her address.

  ‘When did you see her?’

  Murdock was saved from answering this one because just then the door opened and a voice announced that Murray Leonard was outside. O’Brien said to send him in and then Leonard was in the room, big and easy-moving as he nodded to the lieutenant and walked over to Murdock.

  ‘You know him?’ O’Brien said.

  ‘Certainly I know him’, Leonard said. ‘His name is Kent Murdock. He’s picture-chief on the Boston Courier-Herald; he’s been on the paper for years. He came down here yesterday at the request of Walter Dorrance, a Boston attorney, to see if Dorrance’s niece intended to divorce her husband—who was Lee Farnsley.’

  ‘That’s all I want to know’, O’Brien said.

  ‘That’s not all I want to know’, Leonard eyed the lieutenant steadily and his voice was quietly challenging. ‘An hour ago you told the Ledger the murder victim was Kent Murdock. We might have gone to press on that basis. You know, this could make quite a story.’

  If O’Brien was worried he gave no sign of it. His voice was steadily matter-of-fact. ‘When you write that story’, he said, ‘be sure you mention that a reporter from the Ledger named Flynn, who works out of the press room here, had a look at the body. Be sure and state that Flynn didn’t recognize the victim either.’

  Murdock found his respect for the lieutenant mounting. He was aware that Leonard made some reply but he did not hear it. No longer the centre of attention, he was able at last to apply his mind objectively to the murder of Lee Farnsley and he began to speculate on its significance in the light of what he now knew.

  If the police were right, Farnsley had been killed without premeditation. His mood had been ugly and abusive when Murdock left and someone had walked in to become the object of that abuse, not with any idea of murder in mind, but for some other reason. The argument that followed had ended fatally, either because the killer had become enraged beyond endurance and had momentarily lost his head, or because he had struck first in self-defence, then struck again once self-control had been shattered.

  Yet even as he considered this theory, Murdock realized that its validity presupposed two facts: first, that some motive already existed in the mind of the guilty person even though under normal conditions it would not have been exercised; second, that this person knew that Farnsley occupied room 617.

  Helen Farnsley qualified on both counts. Her husband had given her two years of unhappiness and now threatened her future; she knew where he could be found, thanks to Murdock’s call, and she had sufficient physical strength for the occasion. His brain told Murdock all this. He admitted that it was the sort of murder that could have happened to almost anyone given the proper provocation, even to Helen. But, because he did not want to believe this, his emotions coloured the facts and he rejected her as a suspect.

  Murray Leonard? He glanced covertly at the big man now. Leonard knew where Farnsley was. He was in love with Farnsley’s wife and must have hated him for the things that had happened. Believing that a divorce could be had without difficulty he had learned the night before that Farnsley intended to fight unless he got his price. Weighing these points now, remembering his own first impression of Leonard—big and easy-going, but possibly a tough man when aroused—Murdock saw that the pattern of murder was one into which Leonard would fit, if it could be proved that he went to Room 617.

  As for Simon Rigby, he had been at the Greene Hotel at the right time, though on the face of it he had no apparent reason to seek out Farnsley, nor was there any way he could have known that Farnsley occupied that room. Unless he had tried the house telephone a second time in his effort to reach Murdock and in that way learned of Farnsley’s presence.

  Joe Apollo knew where Farnsley was, and though he had no motive for killing the man, he might have been forced to do so in self-defence, Farnsley’s mood being what it was. That left Claire Emerson, who not only knew where Farnsley was but had recently attacked him at the Club Ebony, according to Rigby, with a lamp.…

  He saw that O’Brien was standing and brought his attention back to the moment. ‘Let’s go up to my office’, the lieutenant said. ‘I want to get this story straight.’

  They left the room and went along the hall, Murray Leonard tagging behind. They climbed the stairs to the floor above, walked down a hall, entered a good-sized room which had three windows and several small desks, around one of which five or six men had gathered, all of them looking as if they worked there. They stopped their conversation and turned to watch O’Brien lead the way to a small private office in one corner of the room, then went on talking when the lieutenant opened the door and motioned Murdock inside. To Leonard, O’Brien said: ‘This is as far as you go for now, Mr. Leonard.’ To Murdock he added: ‘Sit down. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.’

  Chapter Eight

  THE office which was the base of Lieutenant O’Brien’s operations was, at first glance, somewhat discouraging. About eight feet by ten in size, it had one window, a small radiator, an ancient flat-topped desk, placed diagonally across one corner of the
room with a chair behind it, two other chairs, two telephones, and an electric fan bracketed to one wall and currently covered with a hood of rubberized cloth.

  Murdock took one of the chairs and lit a cigarette. He felt a little better since talking to O’Brien, and after his session with the three plain-clothes men in that downstairs room it was a relief to have his identity straight and be considered simply in the role of murder suspect. This was something that he felt he could handle, particularly if Simon Rigby put the call through to the Courier-Herald, and although he knew that it might be some time before his release could be arranged, he no longer had any doubt as to the end result in spite of the mistakes he had made. He moved over to the window as his mind got busy and he was looking out into the courtyard below when O’Brien came back with a police stenographer and closed the door.

  ‘Do you object to this?’ the lieutenant asked, indicating the man with the notebook.

  Murdock said no. He said that didn’t mean that he would answer all questions until he had a lawyer, but he was ready to get started. O’Brien sat down behind his desk and the stenographer spread his notebook. O’Brien said to start from the time Lee Farnsley entered Room 617; he said to keep it brief. He said he would have questions to ask as they went along and his first one came when Murdock told of registering the night before at the State Hotel.

  ‘We’ve been in touch with the clerk who assigned your room’, he said. ‘The clerk says you didn’t go up to your room after he gave you the key. You mentioned something about going up later.’

  ‘I told you I went back into the bar to finish my drink and pay the tab’, Murdock said. ‘I doubt if I could have been in there more than five minutes. You don’t think I’d go back to the Greene after that, do you?’

  ‘Why not?’ O’Brien spoke as if this was the most natural thing in the world. ‘It would all depend on how sore you were’. He motioned to the stenographer to stop taking notes. ‘We had a case two weeks ago. Two guys had an argument in a bar. It wasn’t much. One punch from each before they broke it up. So what happens?’ He leaned back in his chair, reached for his straight-stemmed and well-caked pipe.

  ‘One of these characters’, he said, filling the pipe from an oilskin pouch which he had unrolled, ‘walks a half a mile to his house, goes upstairs and takes a war-souvenir Luger from a chest of drawers. He walks a half a mile back to this tavern.’ He re-rolled the pouch and put it neatly on the desk. ‘Now you’d think a man who’d walked a mile would get pretty well cooled off, wouldn’t you, even after a punch in the snoot. But not this lad. This one apparently got madder with each step and when he comes into the tavern he walks up to the other fellow, who is now having a quiet glass of beer, and shoots him three times.’

  He took time to light his pipe, glancing at it as he did so to make sure it was burning evenly, and said: ‘It happens frequently. You should know. A psychiatrist can explain it for you very neatly after a thing like that happens, but there’s no way of telling how an individual is going to react. There is no such thing as normal behaviour under such circumstances, or if there is I never heard of it.… You say you had a drink and went to bed. I say you could just as well have left by the side door of that bar, walked back to the Greene, and gone up to have it out with Farnsley. It all depends on how you react to such an incident, how mad you got, how much you brooded, how good your self-control is.’

  Murdock had to admit the logic of the lieutenant’s reasoning. He had, as O’Brien had intimated, known of cases that had a pattern almost exactly like the one just outlined, but he did not admit this now. What he said was:

  ‘In other words, I haven’t got an alibi.’

  ‘Not for me, you haven’t. Not on a case like this that has all the earmarks of a killing as the result of a brawl and none of the signs of premeditated murder. For instance there was a man in 619 that heard the quarrel and yelled for quiet.’

  ‘I know’, Murdock said.

  ‘This was around ten o’clock. That was you in there, then.’

  ‘That was me.’

  ‘All right.…’ He broke off to glance up as the door opened and a plain-clothes man said: ‘Officer Hansen is out here.’

  O’Brien said to send him in, and when the burly, uniformed man entered, Murdock recognized him with some dismay, knowing what came next.

  ‘You were on duty in the hall outside Room 617 this morning’, O’Brien said.

  ‘I was, sir.’

  ‘Take a look at this gentleman and tell me if you ever saw him before.’

  Hansen fixed Murdock with a stony gaze. ‘Sure I saw him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the sixth floor hall, sir. About a quarter to ten, it was. I asked him if he was a guest and he showed me a key, though I didn’t see the number. He went to the end of the corridor and turned there.’

  O’Brien said: ‘That’s all, Hansen. Thanks for coming in.’ Hansen withdrew. O’Brien took off his glasses and began to polish them. He said, not looking at Murdock: ‘Hansen got worried about you after you’d gone. He got thinking you had no coat and needed a shave. He mentioned it, so I thought it might be well to check.’

  He held the spectacles up to the window to pass upon their condition, decided they needed more polishing. He breathed on them and spoke quietly as he continued his labours.

  ‘You came back but you went on by. That’s hardly the act of an innocent man.’

  ‘It was an act of a very stupid man’, Murdock said wearily. ‘Me.’ Then a new thought came to him and he snared it. ‘If I had killed Farnsley I wouldn’t have come back, would I?’

  ‘You had to come back’, O’Brien said flatly, ‘or get picked up eventually, which was worse, and which you did. Your things were there—I’ll admit we pulled a rock on the identification but we would have soon found out who the dead man really was—and it was just a question of time before we started looking for you.’

  He put his glasses back on and said: ‘You could have killed him and come back this morning with the same story you’ve told me. You could have come back with the idea of giving yourself up and then lost your nerve and went out to bolster it up some more. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what you did.’

  ‘With this difference’, Murdock said. ‘I didn’t kill him. I made a mistake, granted. I wasn’t ready for anything like that and it sort of knocked me over. I wasn’t ready for it and I wanted time to think before you started working on me.’

  ‘You took time, I’ll say that. You were gone at least an hour, and if we hadn’t picked you up in that bus station we might still be looking for you.’

  Murdock admitted all this silently. He had no reply to make, and by some odd and devious mental process he felt an honest admiration for O’Brien’s ability to use his facts so skilfully. He had seen others in this line of work in action and this man rated well up on the list. It occurred to him that had he not been the object of the other’s attention it would have been a pleasure to watch him work.

  ‘You’re good’, he said. ‘I’m glad I’m not guilty.’

  To show that he had a sense of humour a smile appeared in the corners of O’Brien’s grey eyes. ‘Flattery’, he said, his expression otherwise deadpan, ‘will get you nowhere.’ He sat up and signalled the stenographer. ‘Why did you wait to be picked up?’

  ‘I was on my way back to the hotel then’, Murdock said, ‘but like a dope I stopped to get a shave. I waited that long because I knew that once I gave myself up I’d be held and questioned, and there were some things I wanted to find out while I could.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like who beside myself knew that Farnsley was in Room 617 last night.’

  ‘Where did you go first?’

  ‘To see Mrs. Farnsley.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’d ’phoned her the night before and told her about her husband being in my room. I wondered if she had told anyone else.’

  ‘Did she?’

  Murdock hesitated,
but not for long. Until he could consider himself in the clear he had no intention of protecting anyone and so he said: ‘After I ’phoned her, she called Murray Leonard.’

  O’Brien’s steady gaze showed new interest. ‘Why would she do that?’

  Murdock explained the situation, the girl’s decision to get a divorce, and Farnsley’s reaction. He quoted the conversation with Helen Farnsley, including her own telephone talk with Leonard. ‘She just wanted to make sure that Leonard would not go to see Farnsley.’

  ‘Then where did you go?’ O’Brien asked when he had digested this bit of information.

  ‘To see Claire Emerson.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’d been Farnsley’s girl-friend until a few days ago. They had a fight down at the Club Ebony and she tried to crown him with a table lamp.’

  O’Brien remained thoughtful. He held his pipe in the centre of his mouth and smoked in small puffs, expelling the smoke without holding it long between his lips.

  ‘Did she talk?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘You must have a knack of getting people to open up for you.’

  ‘She didn’t know about Farnsley—at least she gave a good performance of pretending she didn’t—and I crowded her a little before she had too much time to think. She said Farnsley ’phoned her a few minutes after I left the room and wanted her to come right over.’

  O’Brien nodded. ‘That makes three who knew where he was. Did she go over?’

  ‘She says she did’, Murdock replied, and then went on to repeat the things Claire Emerson had told him. ‘Farnsley told her about the new trouble with his wife and ended up by wanting Claire to stay, but she says she wasn’t having any. When she came downstairs she saw Joe Apollo. He asked her where she’d been and he told her he’d been waiting for Farnsley. She doesn’t know whether he was there when she came in or not.’

  O’Brien’s grey gaze was narrow, but Murdock was no longer the centre of its focus. O’Brien was looking at the wall beyond Murdock, though it is doubtful that he was aware of this.