by Otto Penzler
So I just nodded, let a couple of seconds pass and then asked him, “Everyone else gone, Mr. Brinkman?”
“Yes.” He shot the cuff of his gray sports jacket and looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to be gone, too, or I’ll be late for my appointment. I’ll call you later, as usual. Around midnight.”
“Whatever you say.”
I followed him to the door and we exchanged good nights. When he’d gone out I closed and locked the door, using the latchkey he had given me. I made it a double seal by swinging the barred gate shut across the door and padlocking it. And there I was, sealed in all nice and cozy until seven a.m. tomorrow.
The next order of business was to shut off the ceiling lights, which I did and which left the anteroom dark except for the desk lamp glowing beyond the half-open door to Brinkman’s office. I went in there and put my paper sack down on the desk, came out again and crossed to the door that led back into the warehouse.
A dull, yellowish bulb burned above the shipping counter, casting just enough light to bleach the shadows past the partitions. None of the overheads was on in the warehouse proper; it was like a wall of black velvet back there with all the windows shuttered against the fading daylight. I located the bank of electrical switches and flipped each in turn. The rafter bulbs were not much brighter than the one over the counter, but there were enough of them to herd most of the shadows into corners or behind the stacks of shelving and crates.
I made my way through the clutter on the right side of the aisleway, to the nearest of the windows. The barred gate was as firmly padlocked as it had been last night. There was a second window several feet beyond, to the rear; I had a look at that one next. Secure. Then I moved over to the shelving, down one of the cross aisles past several hundred unpacked crystal candleholders that caught and reflected the light like so many prisms. The single window on that side, too, was both shuttered and barred up tight.
That left the rear doors. I went down there and rattled the gate and padlock, as I’d done at the windows, and peered through the bars at the double locks on the doors themselves. Secure. A team of commandos, I thought, would be hard-pressed to breach this place.
To pass some time, I prowled around for fifteen minutes or so, shining my flashlight into dark corners, examining glass vases and tiny pieces of dollhouse furniture, poking through what few purchase orders there were on the shipping counter. Lethargy was already starting to set in; I caught myself yawning twice. But it was as much a lack of sleep as it was boredom. I had never been able to sleep very well in the daytime, and I hadn’t had enough rest during the past two days; by the end of the week I would probably be ready for about fifteen hours of uninterrupted sack time. I could have curled up in a nest of straw right here and taken a nap, of course, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it. I had never cheated a client in any fashion and I was not about to start now by sleeping on the job.
So I shut off the overheads and went back to Brinkman’s office, leaving the warehouse door open. It was almost as cold in there as it was in the warehouse, which was probably just as well; the chill would help keep me awake. I got my thermos bottle out of the paper sack and poured myself a cup of hot coffee. Sat back with it and one of the pulps I’d brought, bundled up in my coat, feet propped on a low metal file cabinet to one side of the desk.
And I was ready to begin another long night in my brief career as a nightwatchman.
IV.
The minute hand dragged itself around the clock on the office wall. In the pulp—the December 1936 issue of Detective Tales—I read “Satan Covers the Waterfront” by Tom Roan and “The Case of the Whispering Terror” by George Bruce. Outside, the velocity of the wind increased; I could hear it rattling a loose drain gutter on the roof as I read “Malachi Gunn and the Vanishing Heiress” by Franklin H. Martin.
Eight-forty.
I poured another cup of coffee. None of the other stories in the issue of Detective Tales looked interesting; I put it down and picked up the May 1935 Dime Mystery. And read “House of the Restless Dead” by Hugh B. Cave and “Mistress of Terror” by Wyatt Blassingame. The wind slackened again, and the only background noises I had to listen to then were creaking joints and the distant moan of foghorns on the bay.
Ten-oh-five.
I read “The Man Who Was Dead” by John Dixon Carr, which was a nice little ghost story set in England. The “Dixon” was no doubt a misspelling and the author was John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked-room mystery; I’d read somewhere that Carr had published a few stories in mid-1930s pulps, one other of which I’d read in the third or fourth issue of Detective Tales.
My eyes were beginning to feel heavy-lidded and sore from all the reading; I rubbed at them with my knuckles, closed the magazine, yawned noisily, and looked at the thermos and the three salami-and-cheese sandwiches and two apples inside the sack. But I wasn’t hungry just yet, and the coffee had to last me the rest of the night. I got to my feet, stretching; glanced at the clock again in spite of myself.
Ten thirty-three.
And something made a noise out in the warehouse—a dull thud like a heavy weight falling against another object.
The hair poked up on my neck; I stood frozen, listening, for three or four seconds. The silence seemed suddenly eerie. Sounds in the night seldom bother me, but this was different. This was a building in which I was alone and sealed up, and yet I was sure the thudding noise had come from inside the warehouse.
I grabbed my flashlight off the desk, switched it on and ran into the anteroom. Just as I reached the open warehouse door, I had an almost subliminal glimpse of a streak of light winking out beyond the night-lit shipping counter. Somebody else with a flash? I threw my own beam down the corridor, went through the doorway after it.
In the clotted darkness ahead, there was a faint thumping sound.
Without slowing I veered past the shipping counter and over to the bank of light switches. The flash beam illuminated the near third of the main aisleway, but its diffused glare showed me nothing except inanimate objects.
Another thump. And then a kind of clicking or popping. Both noises seemed to come from somewhere diagonally to my left.
I threw all the switches at once, slapping upward with the palm of my free hand. When I hurried ahead into the aisle, the pale rafter lights let me see the same tableau as earlier—nothing altered, nothing subtracted, nothing added. Except for one thing.
There was a dead man lying a few feet to the left of the aisle, half-draped across one of the wooden crates.
I saw him when I was no more than twenty feet into the warehouse, and I knew right away he was dead. He was facing toward me, twisted onto his side, features half-hidden behind an upflung arm; there was blood all over the leather jacket and blue turtleneck sweater he wore, and the one eye I could see was wide open. Hesitantly, gawping a little, I moved to where he was and bent over him.
Sam Judkins, the warehouseman.
He’d been shot once in the left side, under the breastbone, at point-blank range with a small-caliber gun: scorch and powder marks were visible around the hole, and there was no exit wound.
His jacket and trousers were wet in front. And they smelled of … wood alcohol?
Ripples of cold flowed over my back. The eerie silence, the dead man, the bullet wound, the wood-alcohol smell all combined to give me a feeling of surreality, as though I were asleep and dreaming all of this. I backed away from the body, shaking my head. He couldn’t have got in here, but here he was. He couldn’t have been murdered in here, but here he was. It was murder, all right; there was no gun near him, which had to mean that whoever had shot him still had it. And what had happened to him? Where did he go?
Still in here somewhere, hiding?
I stopped moving and made myself stand still for thirty seconds. No movement anywhere. No sounds anywhere. Over to my left, lying on a metal-wheeled cart, was one of those curved iron bars used for prying lids off wooden crates; I caught it up and held it cocked
against my shoulder, wishing that I hadn’t decided I would not need a handgun for this job.
But nothing happened as I paced back into the aisle, along it through the shipping area. Nor was there anything more to see or hear.
In Brinkman’s office, I dialed the number of the Hall of Justice. Eberhardt, my sober-sided cop friend, was on night duty this week, and I got through to him with no problem. He grumbled and did some swearing, told me to stay where I was and not to do anything stupid, and hung up while I was reminding him I used to be a police officer myself.
I went back into the anteroom and took another look through the door leading to the warehouse. But if whoever had killed Judkins was still here, why hadn’t he come after me by now? It didn’t make sense that he would let me call the cops and then hang around to wait for them.
The front door seemed to be as secure as before; that was the first thing I checked. Nobody could possibly have come in through there when I was in Brinkman’s office earlier, or gone out through there after I heard those noises. I walked back into the warehouse again, taking the pry bar with me just in case. Not touching anything, I checked the gates and padlocks on all the windows and the rear doors. And each of them was also as secure as before.
So how had Judkins and whoever killed him got in?
And how had the killer got out?
V.
When the banging started at the front entrance I was back in Brinkman’s office, just hanging up the telephone for the third time. I hurried out and unlocked the gate and swung it aside; unlocked the door and opened it.
“What the hell are you guarding in there?” Eberhardt asked sourly. “Gold bullion?”
There were a half-dozen other cops with him: an inspector I knew named Klein, two guys from the police lab outfitted with field kits, a photographer and a brace of patrolmen. I moved aside without saying anything and let all of them crowd past me into the anteroom. Then I shut the door again to cut off the icy blasts of wind.
Eberhardt made a gnawing sound on the stem of his pipe and glowered at me. The glower didn’t mean anything; like the pipe—one of twenty or thirty battered old briars he owned—it was a permanent fixture, part of his professional persona. The only times he smiled or relaxed were when he was off duty.
He asked me, “Where’s the victim?”
“Warehouse area, in back.”
I led him and the others out there. The two lab guys and the photographer headed straight for the body; Eberhardt told Klein and one of the patrolmen—the other had stayed in the anteroom—to have a look around, and then made it a foursome around the dead man. The alcohol smell coming off Judkins’s clothes was strong on the cold air; I retreated from it, across the center aisle, and stood waiting against one of the platform shelves.
Nine or ten minutes passed. I watched Klein and the patrolman poking around, peering at the windows and doors, checking for possible hiding places. The patrolman climbed up into the loft and shone his flashlight among the boxes and things. More light flashed over near the body as the photographer began taking his Polaroid shots.
Klein came back from the rear doors just as an assistant coroner bustled in from the anteroom; the two of them joined Eberhardt for a brief consultation, after which Klein disappeared up front, the coroner’s man moved to the corpse and Eb came over to where I was.
“You got anything to add to what you told me on the phone?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said. “There’s nothing missing from among the merchandise in here, at least as far as I can tell, and the place is still sealed up tight. I tried calling Brinkman after I talked to you, but there was no answer.
“Any idea where he might be?”
“He said he had an engagement at seven-thirty. I figured it might be with the receptionist, Fran Robbins, because it looks like they’ve got a thing going. But there’s nobody home at her place either; I found her number in Brinkman’s address book and tried it.”
“Dead man worked here, too, that right?”
I nodded. “He was the warehouseman.”
“Was he around when you got here tonight?”
“No.”
“How many other employees?”
“Just one. Bookkeeper named Orin McIntyre. But he’s an ex-employee as of today.”
“Oh? Quit or fired?”
“Fired,” I said. “Brinkman told me his work wasn’t up to par and that he couldn’t afford McIntyre’s salary. McIntyre left just after I got here; he didn’t look any too happy.”
“You think there might be a connection between that and the murder?”
“I don’t know. I tried McIntyre’s number, too, just before you came. Third straight no-answer.”
“All right. Let’s go over your story again, in detail this time. Don’t leave anything out.”
I gave him a complete rundown of the night’s events as I knew them. And the more I talked, the more he glowered. What we had here was a mystery, and mysteries annoyed the hell out of him.
Klein returned just as I finished. He said to Eberhardt, “I looked around outside. Nothing in the parking lot or anywhere else in the vicinity.”
“You check the doors and windows?”
“Yep. All secured with inside-locking shutters.”
“You’re certain they’re locked?”
“Positive.”
“Same thing in here, too, huh? With the gates?”
“Afraid so, Eb.”
Eberhardt muttered something under his breath—and up front, in the anteroom, the telephone began to ring. I glanced at my watch. Almost midnight.
“That’ll be Brinkman,” I said. “He said he’d call about this time to check in.”
“You get it,” Eberhardt said to Klein. “Wherever he is, tell him to come here right away.”
“Right.”
When Klein had gone again Eb said to me, “What is it with you? Every time I turn around you’re mixed up in some kind of screwball case.”
I said wryly, “Where have you gone, Sam Spade?”
“How’s that?”
“Just something I was thinking earlier today.”
“Yeah, well, from now on try to keep it simple, will you? No more homicides. Do skip-traces or find somebody’s missing cousin like other private eyes.”
“At least I don’t go around getting hit on the head.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you much if you did,” he said.
The assistant coroner called to him before I could say anything else, and he went over for another short conference. Just after they broke it up, Klein reappeared from the anteroom. He and Eberhardt converged on me again.
Eb said, “Was that Brinkman?”
“Uh-huh. He’ll be right down.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“The apartment of one of his employees,” Klein said, “a woman named Fran Robbins. He says he’s just given her a promotion and they’ve been celebrating all evening—at her place for dinner, then out for a couple of drinks around ten. They just got back. He sounded pretty upset when I told him what’d happened here.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Eberhardt got a leather pouch out of his coat pocket and began thumbing shag-cut tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, scowling all the while.
Klein asked him, “Coroner’s man have anything to say yet?”
“Confirmed the obvious, that’s all. Shot once at close range, death instantaneous or close to it. Small-caliber weapon, looks like; we’ll know what size and make when the coroner digs out the bullet and Ballistics gets hold of it.”
I said speculatively, “Maybe a twenty-two with a silencer.”
“Why a silencer?”
“Because I didn’t hear the shot.”
“The gun could have been muffled with something else. Heavy cloth, cushion of some kind—anything along those lines.”
“Sure. But it was pitch-dark in here except for the killer’s flashlight; it’d be kind of awkward to hold a flash on somebody and muffle and fire a gun
all at the same time.”
“Well, a silencer seems just as doubtful,” Eberhardt said. “They don’t leave powder and scorch marks like the ones on Judkins.”
“Then why didn’t I hear the shot?”
None of us had a ready answer for that. Klein said, “What about the alcohol smell?”
“Wood alcohol, evidently,” Eberhardt told him. “Judkins had a bottle of it zipped inside his jacket pocket; the bullet shattered the bottle on its way into him.”
“Was he drinking it, you suppose?”
“He was crazy if he was; that stuff will destroy your insides. No way to be sure yet, though. There’s a strong alcohol odor around the mouth, but it could be gin.”
I said, “Was there anything else on the body?”
“Usual stuff people carry in their pockets.”
“How much money in his wallet?”
“Fifty-eight dollars. You thinking robbery?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Yeah, but not of Judkins so much as by him and somebody else. Of what’s in this warehouse, I mean. That would explain what he and whoever killed him were doing here tonight.”
“It would,” I said, “except that it doesn’t add up. Nothing seems to be missing; so if two guys come to a place to rob it, why would one of them shoot the other before the robbery?”
“And how did they get in and out in the first place?” Klein added.
Eberhardt jabbed his pipe in my direction. “Listen, are you sure you were alone when you locked up after Brinkman left?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I came out here first thing and checked the windows and doors. Then I wandered around for a while, looking things over. I didn’t see or hear anything.”
“But somebody—Judkins, say—could have been hiding in here just the same.”
“It’s possible, I guess. Up in the loft, maybe; I didn’t go up there. But Brinkman told me Judkins had gone for the day, and it just isn’t reasonable that he could’ve slipped back in without somebody seeing him. And I still think I’d have felt something. You know when you’re alone and when you’re not alone, at least most of the time. You get what the kids nowadays call vibes.”