by Craig Rice
“It isn’t second sight,” Helene said. “It’s first sight. One look at Cora Belle. Did she tell you who murdered the Senator, or didn’t she know?”
“It’s like this,” Jake said. “It was Jerry Luckstone’s idea.” He went on to resurrect the past evening as best he could, including the story of Cora Belle’s return to Jackson. His account ended at the point where he’d begun worrying about how to get Cora Belle from his car to her house.
“Then everything gets very confused,” he told her. Helene frowned. “I hope you didn’t just leave Cora Belle on the sidewalk.”
“I don’t think I did. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t.” He paused. There was a badly mixed-up memory of hauling her up the front steps, fishing through her pocketbook for the key, dropping a curious miscellany of pocketbook contents on the porch and crawling around to pick them up, of shoving Cora through the door and dumping her on a sofa. “No, I know I got her in the house. Then I guess I left.”
“Darling, don’t you know?”
“I must have left,” Jake said. “Or why am I here? And how did I get here?”
“You came roaring up to the door at six o’clock,” Helene said. “I let you in, you apologized for breaking into the wrong room, and collapsed. I put you to bed.”
“Six o’clock?” Jake said. “But it wasn’t more than one or two when I delivered Cora Belle. It couldn’t have taken all that time to get here.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “All I know is that the sun was up.”
Jake blinked. “Helene, the car.”
“It’s all right, darling,” she said soothingly. “I can get another one if I have to.”
“No, that isn’t what I mean. I mean—hell, I was very careful of the car. But—wait a minute. I sort of remember getting in the car and curling up for a nice nap. Then I woke up and got terribly lonesome for you, and started out to find my way here. It was very hard, because the streets kept getting all mixed up. Anyway, I got here.”
“That’s the one thing I’m sure of,” Helene said. “You did get here.”
“Only the car.” He wrinkled his brow. “I know I came back here. So I must have left it there. Parked right by Cora Belle’s house. It must be there now.”
Helene said, “And the good people of Jackson can just assume that you were there too.”
He scowled at her. “You mean you don’t care?”
“Why should I care?” Helene asked pleasantly. “It’s your reputation, not mine.”
Jake moaned, and lay back on the pillow again. It was very comfortable to be there, to lie quietly on a bed and not have to move, not have to fight his way through twisting streets to a place that was secure.
“Helene, what do you think about what she told me?”
“You mean about her life? I think it’s very beautiful and very, very sad. Go to sleep.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep. I mean, do you think she knows who murdered Senator Peveley and blew up the bank, and all that?”
“If she does,” Helene said firmly, “let a better man try to find out.”
Jake was silent for a moment. “What do you think about what she said about Miss McGowan?”
“I think she has a nasty mind.”
“Helene, please be serious. What do you really think about what she said?”
“I think,” Helene told hm, “that Miss McGowan probably murdered her father, for reasons I would prefer not to discuss, and faked the story of his being in California to hide her crime. Furthermore, I think that Senator Peveley found out about it and so she killed him. Then she blew up the bank because she’d never really liked the place. Now shut up, and go to sleep.”
Jake obediently closed his eyes.
Later he claimed that he had not slept a wink. Helene declared that he’d slept like a baby for three hours. But to Jake, the period was one of confused thoughts and confusing dreams, of half waking and half sleeping, trying to reach either one state or the other.
He’d curled up the pillow under his head and tried to settle down. Bits of Cora Belle’s story came up to haunt him. At sixteen or seventeen she must have been an attractive young thing in a helpless sort of way. She’d stolen her old man’s dough and gone off to Milwaukee. Jake dozed a bit there. Florence Peveley came up and invited him to go to a Junior Prom. She was dressed as an Indian, and explained to him that it was going to be a costume party. He was wide-awake, turned over, punched the pillow again, and resolved firmly to go to sleep. He would never drink Dollar Gin again, in fact he would probably never drink anything again.
Who had murdered Senator Peveley? Did Cora Belle really know? The bartender at The Owl’s Nest was setting a glass down in front of him, and someone said, “Look out, it’s a bomb.” The bomb exploded, and someone with a pickax began working on the wreckage, pounding and cracking and pounding and cracking, with a sound that grew steadily louder and louder.
With a groan he sat up, wide-awake now. The pickax had turned into someone knocking on the door.
Helene called, “Who’s there?” cautiously, one hand on the doorknob.
“It’s me,” Malone roared, out in the hall. She let him in.
Jake lay down again and pretended to be asleep. But the little lawyer paid no attention to him. Instead, he addressed himself to Helene.
“You would have to say a thing like that,” he told her crossly, shutting and locking the door behind him.
Helene raised her eyebrows. “What did I say?”
“Down here in the bar last night, where everybody in the world could hear you, you said that if Jake went out with another woman you’d wring her neck.” He mopped his steaming brow. “Even if you didn’t know Jake was out with another woman right at that minute, it was damned tactless of you.”
“She didn’t know it,” Jake murmured from the bed.
“You shut up,” the lawyer told him. “I’m talking to her.”
Jake felt he shouldn’t let anyone bully an angel, but was unable to cope with it. He kept still.
“Well?” Malone demanded.
Helene shrugged her shoulders. “What does public opinion expect me to do about it, go out and murder Cora Belle?”
“Public opinion seems to be that you already have,” Malone said. “Early this morning the milkman found Cora Belle murdered. Somebody, it seems, had wrung her neck.”
Chapter Twenty
“As a matter of cold, hard fact,” Malone said, peeling a cigar, “Jake is the one who gets some of the credit for this.”
The little lawyer looked at Jake thoughtfully for a minute. “What were you drinking last night?”
“Dollar Gin,” Jake said, “and so help me, if I ever touch another eyedropperful—” But Malone was out the door and halfway down the stairs.
He returned five minutes later with a bottle and a glass. “This will fix you up.”
Jake shuddered. “Go away,” he said faintly.
“Never look a Greek in the mouth when he comes bearing a gift horse,” Malone said cheerfully. He paused in the act of opening the bottle. “I mean beware of the Greek when he comes bearing a horse in his mouth.”
“Never mind,” Jake said in a feeble voice. “Let’s get this over with.”
Dollar Gin proved to be every bit as bad as he had remembered it.
“Now,” Malone said. “What time did you leave Cora Belle?”
“I wish to heaven I knew,” Jake said miserably. He looked up at the lawyer’s face, it was white and drawn. It made him feel a little happier to realize that someone else was suffering. “How did you know I was out with her?”
Malone lit his cigar, tossing the match toward the wash-stand. “Everybody in town knows you were out with her, and knows where you went. The convertible is still parked by her house, and three bartenders report seeing you with her.”
“I think they missed a couple of bartenders,” Jake said, thinking back. He gave Malone a brief sketch of the evening. “The hell of it is, I didn’t learn anything from her,
and I’d counted on it.”
“You should have had a practice session with Dollar Gin first,” Malone said, chewing savagely on the cigar. “What time did you roll in?”
“Helene says it was sunup, and roll is not the word.”
“Then where in God’s name were you in the meantime?”
“Probably crawling up the sidewalk on my hands and knees,” Jake said bitterly. He lit a cigarette, puffed at it experimentally, and put it out fast. “All right, let’s have the gory details.”
Cora Belle Fromm, Malone told them, or rather, Cora Belle’s body, had been found about six-thirty that morning by the milkman, a personable young fellow named Harold Krause. Harold, questioned by the sheriff and fourteen reporters, had declared that Cora Belle was one of his best customers for Jersey cream, and so when he’d seen her front door open, he’d taken the liberty to go up and close it, thinking that maybe she’d come home a bit high, and knowing what the flies were like this time of year. He was just reaching for the doorknob when he saw Cora Belle’s body, sprawled half on the davenport and half on the rug.
It hadn’t been so great a shock to the young milkman. “I just thought she was plastered,” he told the reporters. But when he came a little closer, with an idea of moving her into a more comfortable position, he’d gotten a good look at her and immediately rushed to the telephone to call Doc Spain.
Why Doc Spain instead of the sheriff? He hadn’t known she was dead, and besides, people always sent for Doc Spain when there was unidentifiable trouble.
Dr. Spain had discovered that Cora Belle had been strangled to death with a bath towel, probably not more than a few minutes before the milkman had found her. Her body had still been warm. Her clothes had been ripped to pieces and her face and body badly bruised.
The milkman’s wife was reputed to have entered a suit for divorce, within two hours of the discovery of the body.
Everybody in town was talking about the fact that the robin’s-egg-blue convertible had been parked by the house.
“And there you are,” the little lawyer finished angrily. “You’ve got yourself into a fine mess, and the Lord only knows if I can get you out of it.” He relit his cigar. “All right, you’ve made your pipe, so put that in your bed and smoke it.”
Jake said indignantly, “I didn’t murder her and nobody can pin it on me, especially a small-town sheriff in a purple suit.”
“Shut up,” Malone said. “I want to think.” For a full five minutes he stood staring out the window, puffing furiously at his cigar. Then he turned around to glare at the man on the bed. “All I need to do is take a night off to get some sleep, and you go right out and race into trouble. Now I don’t know when I’ll get back to Chicago.”
“Who asked you to stay?” Jake said stiffly. “You can go right back to Chicago on the next bus.”
“All right, I will,” the lawyer roared. He dived out the door, slamming it behind him. Thirty seconds later he was back in the room.
“Up to this morning,” he said, ignoring the previous conversation, “my interest in who had murdered ex-Senator Peveley was purely academic. Now I’ve got to find out who it was, and why, because the same person undoubtedly strangled this blonde wench. If I don’t do it, nobody else will. All that sheriff has done for the past two days is sit on his hands and scratch his head.”
“Neatest trick of the week,” Jake murmured.
Malone ignored him. “The bomb expert from Milwaukee states that the bomb at the Farmers’ Bank—a homemade affair—could not have been planted in advance. It had to be set off a few seconds before it did its work. No one but myself in Jackson seems to be paying any attention to that bit of information, which is considerably more important than the strangling of Cora Belle Fromm.”
“Why?” Helene wanted to know.
He looked at her disgustedly. “Because it proves that the planter of the bomb was one of the group in the bank when it went off. Assuming the same person murdered Senator Peveley, it narrows the field considerably.”
He found a scrap of paper in his pocket and began writing. “Not counting ourselves and the man who was killed, the following people were in the bank at the time. Jerry Luck-stone, a farmer named Krausemeyer, Ed Skindingsrude, and inside the cage, Miss McGowan, Phil Smith, Mr. Goudge, and the girl at the adding machine.” He scowled at the list. “What members of that group were on hand when the Senator was shot?”
“Miss McGowan,” Jake said, “Jerry Luckstone, Ed Skindingsrude, and Phil Smith. Four promising names.” He looked up, first at Helene, then at Malone. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Jerry Luckstone could have asked me to take out Cora Belle last night, so that suspicion would fall on me when she was found strangled. But I hope it wasn’t that way.”
“So do I,” Malone said, “and that reminds me of a bit of local gossip. The Goudge girl—Arlene—slipped out for a date last night, and her old man found out about it and wouldn’t let her in when she came back. She spent the night with Jerry Luckstone’s mother. It’s as interesting to the townspeople as Cora Belle’s murder.” He relit his cigar. “I don’t know where that fits in to the murder of Senator Peveley and the bank teller and Cora Belle, but you never can tell.”
Helene lit a cigarette and sat cross-legged on the end of the bed. “How about motives, Malone? Jerry Luckstone was engaged to the Senator’s daughter and was running around with another girl, and possibly seeing Cora Belle on the side. The Senator didn’t like him.”
“Wrong set of murders,” Malone said. “If he was marrying the Senator’s daughter for her old man’s political pull, he’d hardly murder the old man, and blow up the bank that held the money.”
“That’s for you to figure out,” Helene said. “Or how about Philomen Ma. Smith? Nobody seems to pay much attention to him.”
“He got his collarbone broken in the explosion,” Jake objected. “He’d hardly break his own collarbone.”
“He might,” Helene said, “if he couldn’t duck as fast as he’d expected. After all, whoever blew up the bank took some risk himself.”
“But why would Phil Smith blow up the bank?” Jake demanded.
“Why would anybody?” Malone asked crossly. “That’s a question that hasn’t occurred to anybody yet. Magnus Linkermann appears to have been the mildest, most inoffensive guy who ever sang in a choir. He’d never had any trouble with any of the people involved in this, nor any particularly close friendships with them—or with anybody else.”
“It’s still possible nobody intended to murder him,” Helene pointed out. “He just happened to be there.”
Malone nodded slowly. “In which case the only possible conclusion is that the bomb wasn’t intended to destroy any person in the bank, but to destroy a thing. What thing?” He paused again. “You wouldn’t ordinarily expect a man to throw a bomb into a building full of people, no matter how desperate he was, if the same effect could be accomplished without mayhem.” He was fast assuming his best courtroom manner. “Therefore, the object to be destroyed must have been one which was not in the bank previous to its opening in the morning. Then why not wait until after the bank was closed? I believe it was in order to prevent that object from being seen by persons in the bank.”
Jake yawned. “Why not say it was that package of records Ellen McGowan brought over from the courthouse, and be done with it,” he said crossly. “I figured that out all by myself, simply because the bomb was planted as close to the package as possible.”
“I might as well go back to Chicago,” Malone said stiffly.
Jake sighed heavily. “That’s where you came back in again. We’re not progressing.”
“Don’t worry,” Malone said reassuringly. “Even a Jackson County jury wouldn’t convict you with me for your lawyer.”
Helene stood up. “All this talk is very fine,” she declared, “but I’m beginning to crave action. Malone, what do you propose to do first, or are you just going to wait for a premonition?”
“I’m goi
ng to talk with Jerry Luckstone,” Malone said. “I’m going to suggest to him that everything points to some kind of monkey business at the bank and that an investigation might be in order. Then—” He paused. “I don’t know yet. I’ll just make it up as I go along.”
Helene began pulling stockings out of the open suitcase on the table. “Wait for me down in the lobby. I’m going with you.”
Malone turned to Jake. “As for you—you stay here and keep quiet. Understand?”
Jake nodded. “There’s nothing in the world I want more to do than just keep quiet. For a long time.”
“Then do it. Go to sleep. Don’t answer any questions. And if before we get back that fathead sheriff comes around to arrest you”—he paused—“send for me and I’ll come and knock his block off.”
He had waited less than five minutes in the lobby when Helene came down the stairs, looking as though it had taken her five hours to dress.
“Breakfast?” Malone asked.
“I’ve had some,” she told him. He saw that her face was very pale. “Malone, suppose they should arrest Jake.” “They’d never convict him,” he said. “And if they should, don’t worry, he’s been in jail before, and worse ones than this.”
At any other time in his life, he would have enjoyed the walk up Main Street with Helene, conscious of the admiring glances she attracted. Today he was worried. He knew the glances were not solely admiration. There was considerable curiosity about the wife of the man who had probably committed a hideous crime the night before.
Malone mopped his brow with a crumpled handkerchief. It was not a pleasant situation. The three crimes seemed to be unrelated in their methods. An ex-Senator had been shot in the back. A rabbity little bank clerk had been pulverized by a bomb. A hard-drinking town woman had been strangled. Yet he sensed that they were all part of one deadly pattern. He knew, too, that the desperate hand behind them had too big a stake to stop now, whatever stood in its way. There was still a sense of impending doom in the air.
“If you see Buttonholes,” he muttered to Helene as they went up the courthouse steps, “ask him how he feels.”