Stepping out of the car, I said, “Hello, Stella. Remember me?”
At first she looked at me without remembrance. Then recognition dawned in her eyes.
“Mr. Moon,” she said. “You were here the day after Bart died.”
Her manner was no longer listless and her thoughts seemed to have stopped turning inward at least enough for her to be aware of her surroundings. Bart Meyer’s funeral had been Monday, I remembered, and this was Thursday. In the interval she seemed to have sufficiently pulled herself together to go on living, but she still didn’t seem to have much interest in it. There was a hopeless sort of quietness about her unnatural in a girl so young even after a shock.
I said, “You aren’t wearing the auxiliary uniform today.”
“I dropped out,” she said quietly. “I guess I could have stayed, but you’re supposed to have … to have a boy friend.”
It probably wasn’t the most tactful way I could have started the conversation.
I started over. “I won’t keep you long, Stella. But I’m starting back over the ground I covered the other day. Mind talking to me for a minute or two?”
“Of course not. I heard about those men being arrested. Have the police found out they killed Bart instead of Joe doing it?”
“They haven’t been able to prove it. Which is why I’m still working on the case. Did you know about the Purple Pelicans’ burglary activities, Stella?”
Before answering, she weighed the question, balancing her old loyalty against her new indifference to everything.
Presently she said, “I knew they stole stuff. They never told the auxiliary any details.”
“Did you know what part Bart played in the burglaries?”
“None,” she said emphatically. “At least not lately. He stopped all that kind of stuff and was trying to get the club to stop it too.”
“He ever mention Buzz Thurmond objecting to this?”
She shook her head. “He mentioned Mr. Thurmond sometimes, but he never said anything about not liking him, or having trouble with him.” Her forehead creased in a small frown. “You know, a couple of days before he was killed, Bart said something about winding up his last racket. He said that even if he had to go to jail for it, he was going to get himself clean so he could start out straight and stay that way.”
I felt my interest quicken. “What’d he mean by that, Stella?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Bart only told me what he wanted me to know. He didn’t like me asking questions.”
She couldn’t even guess at what the boy may have meant. His reference to possibly going to jail sounded to me as though he might have been planning to confess his past activities to the police with the idea of clearing his conscience, which opened up a whole series of interesting possibilities. Since this could have involved every member of the Purple Pelicans, among other things it opened the possibility that one of the club members could have taken desperate measures to shut Bart up.
However, Stella could add nothing to what she had already told me. When I asked if she had ever heard any rumors about who the girl who had phoned the police might be, she said she had heard some speculation about it, but nobody seemed to know. Apparently either Stub Carlson or Ruth Zimmerman had let drop the fact that a girl had phoned the police, because I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else except Stella, and Stella said she hadn’t passed it on.
Deciding the girl had told me everything she could, I thanked her and left.
I found Ruth Zimmerman sitting on the front steps of her tenement building with a good-looking boy of about her own age. The boy wore the regalia of the Purple Pelicans and I vaguely recalled seeing his face in the group the evening before. Ruth wore the usual purple hair ribbon and purple jacket.
When I approached, the boy rose and said in a voice so respectful, it surprised me, “Hello, Mr. Moon.”
Ruth gave me an intimate smile and said, “Hi, Manny. I was beginning to think you’d given me the go-by.”
I said hello to both of them and Ruth introduced the boy as Ben Turner.
When we had shaken hands, I said to the girl, “Like to talk to you a minute, Ruth.”
“Sure,” she said. She jumped to her feet. “Shall we go for a ride?” She threw a coquettish smile at the boy and asked, “You don’t mind, do you, Ben?”
“Of course not,” the boy said self-consciously.
I had no intention of letting a teen-age girl use me as a foil to make her admirers jealous. I said, “We can talk here. What I want won’t take a minute. Stick around, Ben.”
Ruth looked a little put out, but she passed it off gracefully enough. Reseating herself in the center of the steps, she looked an invitation to both of us to sit either side of her. After a moment Ben Turner sat down on her right. I remained standing.
I said, “All I wanted to know was whether you’ve ever found out who the girl was who phoned the police the night Bart was killed.”
“Who?” Apparently she had thrust out of her mind everything connected with the murder just as she had thrust Joe Brighton out of it, for she had to concentrate a moment before she figured out what I was talking about. Then her face cleared. “Oh, you mean the girl who said she was Joe’s girl friend. She had some nerve.”
“Ever find out who she was?” I asked patiently.
“Did you just make that up to make me jealous?” she demanded.
“What makes you think that?”
“I asked everybody in the auxiliary,” she said. “Not a one of the girls even knew what I was talking about. I bet there never was such a girl.”
That seemed to put the damper on my bright idea of tracing the girl down.
27
BEFORE I left, the girl got out of me a vague promise to take her riding again sometime, preferably in the evening. What her new boy friend thought of this, I have no idea, but he couldn’t have missed the intimacy of her manner. I tried to make it clear to him that I didn’t constitute a rival by deliberately placing them both in a category years below mine when I said good-by.
“Nice to have met you, Ben,” I said. “I haven’t time now, but next time I stop by, I’ll take both you youngsters for a ride. Maybe we’ll take a trip to the zoo.”
Ruth said good-by to me a little petulantly.
I had an idea that Bart Meyers’s mother was probably at work, but I tried her flat anyway. I timed it just right, because I caught her just coming in. She was in the lower hall collecting her mail.
“Hi, Mrs. Meyers,” I said. “I thought probably you’d be at work, but I took a chance on catching you.”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Moon. I just got off work at three-thirty. I go into the restaurant at seven a.m. Come on up.”
She led me up the worn stairs to her kitchen and motioned me to a chair. Like Stella Quint’s, her grief had now settled into a quiet hopelessness, but she seemed to have adjusted to the necessity of going on with her everyday life. I waited without saying anything while she checked over what the mailman had brought that morning.
A card which looked like a gas bill and an envelope I recognized as the kind the electric company uses, she placed in a tray on top of the ice box. An envelope addressed in a flourishing feminine hand she put aside on the kitchen table without opening. A slim brown envelope with a typed address she tore open, drawing from it a small printed form of some kind. She examined the form puzzledly.
Reading half aloud and half to herself, she muttered, “Due to your new employment, you are no longer eligible … If you are not satisfied with the decision of this office, procedure for request for review of your case is …”
She looked up at me and omitted a humorless chuckle. “This is good. The welfare finally got around to letting me know I’m off relief, when I been off two years.”
Crumpling the form into a ball, she dropped it into a waste basket under the sink and took a chair across from me. “Now what can I do for you, Mr. Moon?”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “I�
�m still convinced Joe Brighton is innocent of your son’s death, but I’ve come to a dead end, so I’m starting the investigation over. There’s one point I didn’t touch on when I was here before. Just about the time the police figure Bart was killed, a girl, or possibly a woman, phoned police headquarters to report that a marijuana party was in progress at the Purple Pelicans’ club room. There wasn’t, of course, but the report brought the police just in time to catch Joe Brighton coming out of the place. Would you have any idea who made that call?”
Wonderingly she shook her head. “How would I know, Mr. Moon?”
“I didn’t think you would,” I said, rising. “But none of the Purple Pelican’s auxiliary seems to know either, and I thought it was worth the chance to ask you.”
After I had thanked the woman and left, I sat in my car out in front of her place and brooded for a time. There didn’t seem to be any next logical move to make except to tackle the Gravediggers, and I was so unenthusiastic about that possibility, it hardly seemed worthwhile checking. The motive of inter-gang rivalry hardly seemed sufficient to bring a bunch of teen-agers to the point of committing cold-blooded murder and planning an elaborate frame on top of it. Also, since Stub Carlson had told me an end to strife between the two gangs had been ordered by their adult advisors, there was hardly even the motive of inter-gang rivalry.
Nevertheless this seemed to be the only remaining field of research, so I unenthusiastically decided to tackle it. But to put it off, I decided to drop by and see Ed Brighton first.
Ed would be working, I knew, but I also knew which dock he worked on. I drove down to the riverfront.
As it was now four in the afternoon, I had an idea Ed would only be standing around. I know the local dockworker’s union had a contract based on piece work which required the loading or unloading of only so much tonnage per eight-hour day, the amount of tonnage being adjusted according to the type of cargo. Consequently the dock crews broke their backs to finish as soon as possible, so that they could loaf the last hour or two. Hardly ever did you see anyone working after four o’clock.
I found Ed sitting on a piece of crated machinery which apparently had been unloaded that day from the big cargo boat in the slip. A number of other workers were lounging in a circle around him.
Some of them I knew casually through Ed, and they gave me lazy greetings. When Ed saw me, he jumped up, took my arm and led me to one side.
“I’d rather not talk about this thing in front of the guys,” he said. “They know Joe’s in jail, of course, but you know how it is working with guys. They’re embarrassed about it and so am I, so we just skip it. Anything new?”
“Only bad news,” I told him. “Homicide’s pretty definitely decided the Bremmer gang had nothing to do with the killing, and the D.A.’s going ahead with asking for an indictment on Joe.”
Ed looked as though I had kicked him in the stomach. “Jeepers, Manny! I’d been counting on this gang’s arrest cleaning up the whole thing.”
“So had I,” I said glumly. “But it hasn’t. I’m sure the kid’s innocent though, Ed. There’s bound to be proof of it somewhere.”
“Where?”
“That’s the question,” I said.
I told him of my unsuccessful attempt to run down the girl who had phoned the police, and also of Joe’s theory that the Gravediggers had killed Bart and framed him. From my tone he sensed my lack of enthusiasm about the theory.
“You don’t think much of that last idea, do you?” he asked.
“It’s about all there is left. I just can’t see the motive. In the first place the two gangs weren’t supposed to be fighting any more. And even if the Gravediggers had wanted to raise hell with the Purple Pelicans, it seems more likely they’d just have stormed over in a bunch. Planning a slick frameup like this seems to me beyond what you’d expect of a kid gang. Then too, whoever swiped that knife must have been familiar with where Joe lived, which would seem to narrow it to a resident of this section.”
When Ed merely silently brooded over what I had told him, I said, “Can’t you remember where you kept that blamed knife? Joe insists he never in his life saw it before he found it sticking in Bart Meyers.”
He shook his head. “I hadn’t used the thing in years, Manny.”
“What in the devil did you ever buy the thing for?” I growled at him. “You never did any hunting, did you?”
“I used it to clean fish.”
We both lapsed into moody silence. For some reason Ed’s last remark lingered in my mind and wouldn’t go away. After unsuccessfully trying to push it aside for a time, I gave up and deliberately examined it.
“You used it to clean fish,” I repeated. “That why it didn’t have a sheath?”
“Yeah. I just used to pitch it in my bait box.”
I felt a peculiar tingle race along my spine. “Say that again,” I demanded.
“What?” he asked, surprised. “I just said I used to pitch the knife in my bait box. When I was getting ready to go fishing, I mean.”
It was as simple as that. For more than a full week I’d been pounding my legs off, talking myself hoarse and ducking knives and guns without making an inch of progress. Then Ed Brighton made a casual remark which he could as easily have made the first day he came to see me, and I knew who had killed Bart Meyers.
I wasn’t sure of the motive, but I even had an inkling about that. And now I knew where to look, it wasn’t going to be much trouble to check.
Glancing at my watch, I saw it was nearly a quarter of five.
“I have to get somewhere before five,” I told Ed. “See you later.”
And I walked away so abruptly, I left him with his mouth open.
I didn’t make it by five, however. You can’t take your car clear down to the docks, and I’d parked on First Street. By the time I’d walked back to it, it was ten of five. Then I had to fight traffic across the most congested part of town, so it was nearly ten after when I pulled up in front of the building where Public Welfare was officed.
There were no relief clients in the big lobby when I went inside, and only one woman worker was behind the Intake counter. She was pulling on a pair of gloves.
“You happen to notice if Miss Chesterton went out yet?” I asked her.
“No, I didn’t. But I imagine she has. We close at five, you know.”
“I’ll check,” I said, and started toward the elevator.
The woman called something after me about visitors not being allowed upstairs without a phone check first, but I merely said over my shoulder, “I’m a friend,” and kept going.
The ancient self-service elevator was on the first floor with its door open. I punched “Two” and waited while the door laboriously closed and the cab creaked decrepitly upward.
When I stepped out into the big room where the caseworkers’ desks were, my first reaction was disappointment, for there wasn’t a person in sight. Then the door of a private office across the room opened and Sara’s plump supervisor, Mrs. Forshay, came out dressed for the street and carrying a purse.
I went forward to meet her halfway between her office and the elevator. We both stopped and she looked me over puzzledly.
“Yes?” she asked. “May I do something for you?”
“We met last week, Mrs. Forshay,” I said. “Manville Moon. I was talking to Sara Chesterton at her desk when you came over.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “If you’re looking for Miss Chesterton, I’m afraid she’s gone for the evening. The girls don’t tarry after five o’clock strikes.”
“I was looking for her,” I admitted. “But I think you’ll do even better. Could you spare a minute?”
“Well …” she said hesitantly.
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” I said. “Do you remember the ten closings Sara got in under the wire at the last minute the other day?”
“Of course.”
“I wonder if you’d let me look at those cases?”
She stared
at me in astonishment. “Welfare cases are confidential, Mr. Moon. I’m afraid I’d need a pretty good explanation before I could accede to a request like that.”
So I gave her a pretty good explanation. When I finished, she stopped looking astonished and started looking upset. Without any more argument she led me into the Record room and pulled all ten cases.
I didn’t spend much time with them, only enough to note they were all old cases and had been on and off relief for a period of years. Then I copied off the names and addresses of each. One of the names was Meyers, I noted, and another was Tipp.
Mrs. Forshay studied the face sheet and the last part of each record carefully, however, and jotted down the amount of the monthly relief check which had gone out to each.
When she had finished her study, she said slowly, “I believe you’re right, Mr. Moon. The last reopenings all occurred in the same month.”
“I’d suggest you don’t do a thing about this until tomorrow,” I said. “Particularly don’t call Sara. I’ll check these people, and if I find what I think I’ll find, I’ll turn the complete data over to you in the morning. Meantime, just sit on it, because if we’re guessing wrong, you’d create a terrific hullabaloo over nothing.”
She agreed not to take any action until she heard from me, but she wasn’t ready to let me go. First she wanted to know how the swindle had been worked.
I wasn’t sure, but I had some ideas. With my ideas and her knowledge of agency procedure, we worked out most of the answers between us.
28
THEN I left the welfare office, I worked straight on through until eight o’clock in the evening without even stopping for dinner. I made five calls, and the answers I got in each case were the same.
Each of the women I called on was either a widow, divorced or separated. Each worked, so was not at home in the daytime when the mail was delivered. Each had at least one son who belonged to the Purple Pelicans.
And while all of them had been on relief at some time or other, none had been on the rolls for over two years or more.
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