by Unknown
“Where was he to go? Take a look, will you, and see if he jotted it down on his pad.”
She came back with it in her hand. “The pad’s blank. He must have torn off the top leaf and stuffed it in his pocket, to make sure of not forgetting the address.”
The uneasy feeling was deepening in Butler minute by minute. “Let me have that pad a minute just as it is. Can you get me a pinch of coal dust or soot of some kind from your kitchen, any dark substance?”
She came hurrying back with a little held in the hollow of a torn scrap of paper. He took it from her, sifted it over the top of the pad, then breathed on that very lightly, barely enough to clear it off again. It remained seamed in the identations left by the doctor’s pencil point pressing down on the leaf above. A gray tracery, faint but not too indistinguishable to be read, was the result.
“Karpus,” he said, squinting closely at it, “270 Hanson Road. That’s a little far out, isn’t it, for an emergency call to an unknown doctor? Does he use a car when he goes out on calls?”
“Yes. It’s not much of one, but it gets him there.”
“Then all the more reason why he should have been back by now. Let me have its license number.” He got to his feet and started for the door. “I’m going out there myself and see what’s what. If I miss him and he comes back while I’m gone, have him wait here for me. But—” He felt like saying, “But something tells me he won’t come back,” but he didn’t; she was badly enough frightened already without that.
He flagged a cab, said: “Get me out to 270 Hanson Road, and get me there fast; this is police business!”
They drew a motorcycle cop presently, by the rate at which they were bulleting along, but Butler changed him into an escort by a flash of his badge and a shout of explanation from the cab window.
It was way out, in a half-built-up, weed-grown sector. “Somebody’s handed you a bum steer, guv’nor,” said the driver, tapering off uncertainly and pointing.
Butler had already seen the vacancy sign tacked up on the door-frame, himself, and noted the decrepit condition of the place. “Yeah, it was a bum steer, all right,” he said, “but it wasn’t me it was handed to.”
The cop had circled and come back. “That place is vacant,” he called out unnecessarily, from the opposite side of the dirt-surfaced street.
Butler got out and started through the ankle-high weeds toward the door. “I only wish it was,” he hollered back. “Put in a call for me from the nearest box. Then scout around until you dig up a second-hand car; here’s the license number. It ought to be around here somewhere not very far away.”
He climbed the two creaky wooden steps of the frame place, tried the door. The knob promptly came off in his hand, and he was able to get the rest of it out of the way with one good, swift kick.
There was a man’s huddled body lying just a couple of yards away from where he was standing, just far in enough to let the door swing past.
Butler just nodded his head as he crouched down by him, turned him over on his back. The blood hadn’t altogether coagulated yet from the three bullet wounds he counted, it had been so recently done. His instrument case was a little further on, where it had fallen from his hand.
He noticed an ordinary watchman’s oil lamp, that had probably been appropriated from some street excavation, hanging from a nail on the wall. He tested the chimney with his knuckles, and the glass was still faintly warm, as though that, too, had only recently been in use. He went outside and inspected the vacancy sign. It wasn’t nailed down fast, just punched on over a nail in the door-frame.
“So that’s how it was worked,” he murmured. “Took the sign down temporarily and let him see a glimmer of light coming from inside. Probably the woman who put in the call met him outside on the street somewhere and steered him in, to distract his attention. He needed patients too bad, poor devil, to turn down anything that came his way. Someone must have been waiting for him right behind the door, didn’t even let him get down two steps inside the house. Took his car and ditched it somewhere afterwards.”
He went inside again, stood looking down the beam of his light at what had been Dr. Bradley Meredith. “Somebody hasn’t been so clever about this,” he said aloud. “Planting conviction where there wasn’t even suspicion before.”
He was shown into Swanson’s cell at the unholy hour of three that same night, or the following morning rather. Swanson was a huddled cylinder, asleep under a gray blanket on the iron cot that was let down broadside from the wall like a slab on chains. “I’ll call you back when I’m ready to go,” he said, to get rid of the guard.
The reclosing of the cell gate partly roused the sleeper. He stirred; then as he made out the detective’s outline against the dim corridor-light outside the bars, he shot upright on his shelf. “Who is it?” he gasped frightenedly.
“Me,” said the dick. “I want to talk to you. Keep your voice down. Here’s something to smoke. Now, are you awake?”
Swanson swung his legs down to the floor, crouched low over his own knees. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“If you’re not, here’s something that ought to do it. Your friend, Doc Meredith, was murdered early last evening.”
Swanson jolted ruler-straight, then buckled over again, held his head. “Oh, now I am hooked!” he groaned. “First my wife, now the doctor. They were the only two who could have proved— Now there’s no one who’ll believe me! I’ll never get out of it now; I’m finished!”
“All right, quit wailing through your adenoids,” Butler told him impatiently. “You’re a lot better off than you were while Meredith was still alive.”
Swanson blinked at him stupidly in the cell twilight. “How do you mean, how could I be?”
“What his murder has managed to do is start me to thinking there may be something to your story after all. It looks too much as though someone didn’t want anyone to be able to clear you, now that you’re conveniently under indictment and the wheels have something to feed on. What happened to Meredith may just be a coincidence. The fact remains that he was lured out on a fake call, that robbery wasn’t the motive, and that he had no personal enemies of his own; the way he never pressed his patients to pay their bills is the best guarantee of that.
“Add to this the fact that his name was never spoken by you until this afternoon, to my knowledge; that it was mentioned to only one person—Ranger’s widow—and that his murder followed within a few hours, and the coincidence becomes a little too wobbly for my liking.
“You stuck your neck out,” the dick went on, “and you’re not going to be allowed to pull it in again, even if a second or third murder has to be piled on top of the original one. That’s one line of reasoning we could take—just to see where it gets us.” He stopped, thought it over. “Yeah, that’s our play: A second or third murder. Given the same circumstances, if it comes through again, it’s our pay-off.”
He took a quick turn around the cell. “That’s what I looked you up at this ungodly hour for. Isn’t there someone else who could go to bat for you like Meredith could have if he had stayed alive enough?”
“No, no one,” said Swanson mournfully. “Only the doc was up there that Wednesday night with us, and he’s dead now.”
Butler didn’t seem to be listening. “How about a guy named—” He stroked his chin thoughtfully as he went along. “Lindquist, let’s say.”
“But I don’t know anyone named Lindquist; I never did!” exclaimed Swanson in surprise.
“Oh, yes, you do!” he purred with slow emphasis. “Now get this and see that you hang onto it tight; it’s your only chance to keep from being railroaded into the hot seat or a bughouse.
“Your last possible remaining alibi is a guy named Lindquist, a doctor like the other one was. Dr. Carl Lindquist, we’ll call him. He also happens to be an old friend of yours as well; Swedish ancestry like you, and all that.
“Now Meredith called him in that Wednesday night of the murder in consultation, at you and your wif
e’s urgent request, because you wanted a second opinion on your boy. You’re sure he’ll remember the date, be able to vouch for you. He hasn’t come forward until now because, you understand, he moved his practice out to St. Paul soon afterwards, probably hasn’t heard about the case. Does all his reading in Swedish-language papers. You’re sure a wire from you will bring him back again, though.
“Now you tell all this to one of the other men in the department; any of ’em, it don’t matter which. I’ll arrange it so that you’re given a chance to do your pleading in that same office in the next building where you were the last time.
“Plead to be allowed to send this wire for help. Here’s what this Dr. Lindquist looks like: He’s an elderly guy, sort of a country fogey, doesn’t know his way around so good. Got a big corporation and dresses sloppy in clothes that fit him like a tent. Wears thick-lensed glasses and a little white goatee on the end of his chin. Be sure to tell whichever dick you’re talking to all that, whether he asks you or not.
“Now, have you got all that? I hope you have for your own sake, because you won’t be seeing me around much from now on.”
“Would you mind waiting in here a few moments?” the detective who had ushered her in asked Mrs. Ranger politely. “They’ll be ready for you in the D.A.’s office in just a minute or two.” He drew out a chair for her.
She sat down in it with a poor grace. “You know, this is really becoming a nuisance. I don’t mind cooperating all I can, but this is the third time I’ve been sent for by you people.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ranger,” the detective said deferentially. “I’m sure this is the last time you’ll be troubled, before the case goes to court.” He moved toward the door. “You don’t mind if I ask you not to touch that little lever there on the table in front of you while you’re in here—it’s a dictaphone leading into the next room, where suspects are sometimes interviewed. I’m not supposed to bring anyone in here, but seeing it’s you, Mrs. Ranger …”
She smiled faintly, mollified. He closed the door discreetly after him and she could hear his heavy tread recede down the corridor outside.
She reached out and snapped the lever defiantly, as if to say: “Just for that, I will!” A faint buzzing, like a fly trapped in a bottle, sounded. She picked up the head-set and gingerly brought it around to the back of her head, careful not to disturb her modish hat.
A gruff voice said in her ears: “What do you want now, Swanson? You have been beefin’ all week long to be let in here to talk to me. All right, out with it.”
Mrs. Ranger changed her original intention of immediately discarding the head-set; brought it in closer around the base of her skull.
“There is still one person who can tell you I was in my own flat that Wednesday night Ranger was killed. Please let me get in touch with him, that’s all I ask you!”
“Yeah? Who is he?”
“He’s an old friend of my wife and mine, an old Swedish doctor named Carl Lindquist. He was up there that night; we asked Dr. Meredith to call him in in consultation, just to make sure there was no mistake about the kid’s condition. We’ve known Lindquist so long, we knew if he told us, it must be true.”
“Yeah? Well, then, why didn’t he show up before now and speak up for you, if he’s such a good friend of yours?”
“He went to St. Paul right after that; he probably hasn’t heard about it out there. He only reads Swedish newspapers, anyway. He’s slow and kind of old-fashioned, you know; dresses sloppy in baggy clothes; can’t see so good any more, wears thick glasses; and he’s got a little white billy-goat beard stuck on the point of his chin. But I know that if he hears I’m in trouble he’ll take the first train east and do all he can to square me. He’ll tell you; he’ll be able to tell you that I was home minding my business that night. He even stayed on with us, after Doc Meredith left, talking over ways in which I might be able to raise the money to help my youngster.”
“All right, all right, can the sob stuff. So what do you want us to do?”
“Just let me send him a wire; that’s all I ask.”
The heavy tread was returning along the corridor once more. Mrs. Ranger deftly replaced the head-set on the table before her, pushed the lever down.
The door opened and the detective who had originally shown her in said, “They’re ready for you at the D.A.’s office now, Mrs. Ranger. Sorry you had to wait like this.”
“That’s all right,” she said vaguely, as though she were thinking of something else entirely.
“Hundred and Twanny-fif’ Strit!” the conductor whined dolefully down the aisle of the lounge car from the vestibule entrance. The nearsighted old doctor with the white goatee and thick-lensed spectacles glanced up indifferently as the Twentieth Century began to slow up, flush with the upper stories of the below-track-level Park Avenue tenements that marked its next-to-last stop—125th Street. Then he resumed peering at the St. Paul Swedish newspaper he had been occupied with ever since he had got aboard—one stop before, at Harmon-on-the-Hudson, where inbound trains halt to change from coal-burning to electricity-driven locomotives.
The train came to a full halt. It seemed to linger a little longer than usual at this penultimate stop. Then a darky porter from one of the Pullmans appeared in the vestibule, pointed to the old doctor reading the Swedish newspaper. A well-dressed heavy-set man in his late thirties pushed past him with a muttered “Thanks a lot,” came on down the aisle, stopped opposite the reader’s seat. He had to tap him on the shoulder to attract his attention.
“Are you Dr. Carl Lindquist, of St. Paul, Minnesota?”
The old fossil peered at him over the tops of his glasses. “Yuss. Vhy, who are you?”
The intruder tactfully lowered his voice so that it would not reach the others in the car. “I’m from Police Headquarters. I was sent to meet you at the train, ask you to get off here with me, instead of riding on down to Grand Central.”
The old Swedish doctor looked innocently apprehensive. “I am not under arrest, no?”
The detective laughed outright at this. “No, no, nothing like that. The D.A. would like to question you privately, that’s all. I’m just delegated as sort of an escort to take you to him. By leaving the train here, there won’t be any unwelcome publicity to your arrival, no nosy newspapermen to buck. I have an official car waiting for us downstairs. Better get your things, if you don’t mind; they’re holding up the train for us.”
“All right, I yust as soon,” Lindquist said willingly. “I ache all over from riding on this train so long, anyway.” He struggled to his feet, pulled down a ponderous, battered-looking case from the rack overhead. The detective obligingly took it from him, started down the aisle with it, swaying from its weight. Lindquist waddled flat-footedly after him.
As he passed the Pullman porter who had pointed him out to the official envoy, he slipped something into his hand, as though this service had been prearranged between them. He alighted on the station platform beside his escort.
“Now, no offense,” the Headquarters man said, “but have you got some proof of your identity on you; can you show me some credentials, before we go any further? Your name and description tally, but still I don’t want to show up with the wrong man; it might cost me my job.”
The doctor fumbled about his balloon-like clothes. “I ain’t got much,” he said, pursing his lips. “Just a couple of unpaid bills, maybe. Vait, here’s the telegram from my friend, vhat brought me back here.” He stripped it out of the envelope, passed it to him.
The detective unfolded it, read:
“DR. CARL LINDQUIST
______________
ST. PAUL, MINN.
“PLEASE COME QUICKLY AM IN JAIL ACCUSED OF MURDER AND YOUR EVIDENCE CAN CLEAR ME.
JEROME SWANSON.”
He nodded approvingly. “That’s fine; that’s all that’s necessary.” He led the way down the station stairs to street-level, still carrying the doctor’s bag for him. The official car he had mentioned was stand
ing several blocks away, inconspicuously parked under one of the granite arches of the elevated structure that carried the railroad.
There was no official sticker or designation on its windshield, but this too might have been a precautionary measure to avoid attracting the newspaper publicity that the D.A. seemed to detest so. In any case, the shaggy old doctor was hardly the type who could be expected to notice a thing like that, unfamiliar as he was with the metropolitan police system.
There was no one else waiting in it; the detective evidently intended to do his own driving. He shoved his protégé’s bag in the back and got in under the wheel. “Sit in front with me, Doc,” he suggested friendly. “Keep me company getting there; we’ve got quite a ride ahead of us.”
They started off. The detective made little attempt at conversation, in spite of what he had said about wanting to be kept company; the doctor made even less.
“Have a hard trip?” he asked his charge after a while.
“It cost so much,” lamented the doctor. “And I ain’t doing so well out there, neider. If it wasn’t that Swanson is an old friend of mine …” He wagged his head. “Nothing but trouble that poor fellow’s had. How did he get mixed oop in such a t’ing?”
“Sorry,” said the detective pleasantly but firmly. “I’m under orders not to discuss the case with you beforehand, until you’ve been questioned.” He switched back to their former topic, which seemed to interest him more. “So you’re not so well off, eh, Doc?” he suggested understandingly.
“Who iss?” sighed Lindquist, folding his hands mournfully across his vibrating middle.
“Ever think of going back to the old country, to try your hand at building up a practice there?” the detective went on, apparently at random.
The pupils behind the doctor’s bulgy lenses flicked sidewise toward him, then back to center again. Then he showed postponed enthusiasm. Like Mrs. Ranger’s anger at the time of her interview with Swanson, the timing was a little slow. But then, maybe his mental processes weren’t so quick on the trigger.