by Otto Penzler
An indulgent smile curled Hamilton’s lips.
“The process of extracting gold from mud is one of the simplest in chemistry and mechanics. And the joke is,” he went on, screwing up the corners of his mouth, “that when that crafty mud rat has manufactured it into bullion again he will probably have the supreme gall of bringing it here and asking us to buy it. The devil of it is that we shall have to buy it too!”
At this remote date the Assay Office officials are still in doubt whether they have repurchased their stolen treasure. It is worthwhile to say in passing that the surety companies responsible for the men responsible for the treasure of the Government Assay Office are still engaged in suing each other and the various contractors responsible for fitting and inspecting the interior of the new building.
The robbery undoubtedly had been planned and the properties arranged months ahead of time; but, aside from the fact that an expert electrician named Dahlog, who had been employed on the premises at odd times—a man with a pronounced Danish accent—turned up hopelessly missing, the case has not progressed. It promises in time to become as celebrated in court annals as the antique litigation of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce.
Whitaker seldom confessed his failures; but several months later, over cigars in the library of his friend Godahl the exquisite, he related the story—unabridged—of the most remarkable bit of thievery in his experience. It was his secret hope that the acute mind of this celebrated dilettante, who had many times pointed his researches with astounding analyses, might help to the solution. Godahl laughed.
“Let us go below the surface,” said Godahl. “Abolish the lure of gold and the world will be born good again. Your mud rat is the apotheosis of the pickpocket. How much better they managed the whole thing ten thousand years ago! To the remote races of the Andes gold was not a vulgar medium of trade and exchange. It was a symbol of kingship—a thing to be possessed only by kings.
“In my small way,” said Godahl deprecatingly, with a wave of his fine hands, “I have erected a monument to the Incas in this room. My frieze—have you noticed it? A poor thing! Where I have used grains of gold, they used pounds. But to me it symbolizes the same poetic idea. Will you join me in a fresh cigar? Ah! I beg your pardon! One’s physician is a tyrant!”
THE STRANGE CASE OF STEINKELWINTZ
MACKINLAY KANTOR (1904–1977) is best known for his mainstream novels, such as the sentimental dog story The Voice of Bugle Ann (1935), filmed the following year; the long narrative poem Glory for Me (1945), filmed as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; and the outstanding Civil War novel about the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, Andersonville (1955), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Already a journalist at seventeen, he began selling hard-boiled mystery stories to various pulp magazines at almost the same time, quickly followed by several novels in the genre, such as Diversey (1928), about Chicago gangsters, and Signal Thirty-Two (1950), an excellent police procedural, given verisimilitude by virtue of Kantor’s having received permission from the acting police commissioner of New York to accompany the police on their activities to gather background information. His most famous crime novel is Midnight Lace (1948), the suspenseful tale of a young woman terrorized by an anonymous telephone caller; a film was released twelve years later, starring Doris Day and Rex Harrison.
His most famous crime short story is “Gun Crazy,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940, which served as the basis for the noir cult film of the same title, for which Kantor wrote the screenplay. Released in 1950, it was directed by Joseph H. Lewis. The film, an excellent though more violent expansion of the story, features a clean-cut gun nut, played by John Dall, who meets a good-looking sharpshooter, played by Peggy Cummins, and their subsequent spree of bank robberies and shootings.
“The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz” was first published in the Chicago Daily News Midweek in 1929; it was first collected in It’s About Crime (New York, Signet, 1960).
MACKINLAY KANTOR
THE PHONE BELL blatted in the darkness, insistent, exasperated, like the second cousin of a two-dollar alarm clock.
Maxwell Grame pushed the wrong electric light switch so that only a parchment-shaded corner lamp was illuminated, and he skinned his ankle against the leg of a chair as he staggered through the half glow of the living room to the telephone stand.
“Yes, yes!” with that unamiable severity which young men exude when roused from their honest slumbers at three o’clock in the morning.
“Max! Hello, Max!” The voice was strained like a taut rubber band. “Max, for God’s sake come down here right away——”
Grame growled to himself before he addressed the transmitter. “You might tell me who you are, calling at this hour.”
“Larry Greening, Max! This is Larry——”
“Yes.”
“Can you come down here to our apartment right away, old man? There’s hell to pay——”
“That’s all right if you’ve got the money.” Slumber was sliding away from Grame’s brain and he began to feel more natural.
“Max, don’t kid like that. This is serious. I mean it. Maud will lose her mind unless something is done!”
Grame sighed. For the ten years of their acquaintance, Larry’s unstrung impetuosity had dogged him. “What’s the trouble? Have you discovered a banshee in the flat?”
“Come down, come down!” chanted Larry with frenzy. “I won’t call the police or do a thing until you get here——”
“All right. I’ll dress and get a cab.” Grame hung up the receiver. He chuckled to himself, but grew more serious as he pondered on the possibilities of Larry’s wild call. What on earth had happened, anyway? Maud and Larry didn’t possess any valuable jewels or securities insofar as he knew. Nothing important could have been stolen.… Was it a mysterious threat which they had received?
In his role as amateur detective, Grame was often called upon by his friends to search out a stray dog or discover the writer of an anonymous note. Now came the Greenings, at three o’clock of a cold morning, to swell his list of nonpaying clients. And he had to be at the office—his workaday bread-and-butter law office—at nine o’clock.
“Why did I ever get this detective notion?” he muttered, and drew on his trousers.
Half an hour later he entered the lobby of a gaudy, none-too-exclusive apartment hotel on Sheridan Road in the 40s, and was slowly lifted to the second floor by an automatic elevator. He rang the bell at Larry’s door, and the door flew open immediately to disclose Larry, pale-faced and disheveled in an old bathrobe and the trousers of his tuxedo, with his wife hovering behind him. Maud was even paler than Larry, and her fingers twitched as they held her dressing gown together.
“It’s gone!” howled Larry.
Max shook his head and scowled. “Will you please get hold of yourself and talk sanely? What’s gone?”
“Look, look!” Larry dragged him into the living room of the small apartment and motioned dramatically toward the farther end of the room.
Nothing seemed very wrong. It was a neat room with Coxwell chairs and bridge lamps, taupe rug, and a Windsor desk. “Looks all right to me,” said Grame. “I don’t see anything missing.”
“The pee-an-oh!” his friend shrieked. “Gone!”
Grame sat down, removing his topcoat and nodding agreeably at the gibbering Larry and anguished Maud. “That’s so. You did have a piano.”
“Did have a piano?” Maud was wailing now. “Listen to him, Larry. I said to call the police.…”
Larry’s faith was shaken but he remained loyal. “Wait a minute, Maud.… Maybe I am too excited, Max, but I tell you, it gave us a shock to walk in here from Consalti’s party and find that seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar baby grand gone!”
With dogged patience Grame managed to pry the story out of them. The piano—a Christmas gift from her beloved Larry, at which Maud sat and warbled heroically to the neglect of the dish
es—was sitting in its usual corner, scarf-draped and serene, when they went out to a party given by Consalti, the opera singer, at nine p.m. Five hours later they arrived home to find the embroidered scarf and stacks of music neatly piled on a divan, and the piano missing.
Maud was in hysterics. Larry had dashed madly through the building, summoning janitor, clerk, and manager. All swore that no one had gone near the Greening apartment that evening; the lock was of the most improved, complicated type, and Larry’s key reposed safely at the desk where he had left it. The porter who operated the freight elevator was above reproach; he had been employed for many years by the management, in this and in other buildings owned by the same firm, and when he declared that no one had operated the freight elevator during the evening, nobody could doubt his honesty.
Reluctantly the baffled manager acceded to Larry’s demands, and glanced into every apartment in the building, a task occupying an hour and resulting in the threat of broken leases. The piano was not in the building. Larry himself had accompanied the searching party.
“What I want to know is, what’ll we do without that baby grand?” wailed Larry. “Maud adores it—she worships it like a child. We can’t afford to buy another this year. What will Maud do for accompaniment when she sings? Max, you’ve heard Maud sing, haven’t you?”
Yes, Max had heard Maud sing. He would not be apt to forget the experience for a long time.
He got up and scanned the room carefully, noting that the woodwork near the door bore no scars or telltale scratches such as might have resulted had the instrument been drawn through the front doorway in haste. The windows.…
“Larry, were your windows open when you went to the party?”
Greening looked at the windows. “Sure. Of course they were. We always keep the apartment aired well, the radiators are red-hot most of the time.”
“Your piano went out of the window,” said Max.
Maud began to laugh inelegantly. “Banana oil! You couldn’t get that piano through any of those windows. Anyway, it’s a two-story drop to the ground, and there isn’t a fire escape on this side of the building. Larry, as a detective Max Grame is a good equity lawyer. Call the police!”
Grame shook his head at her. “That would be silly. If you told a policeman the story you’ve told me, he would try to arrest you for a fraudulent operation against your insurance company. Of course the piano was insured?”
“Insured nothing,” Larry lamented. “Maud said that in her home they had a piano for twenty-one years and nothing ever happened to it. Why should we bother with insurance? She spent the amount of the premium on new music instead.”
Max came back from a tour of exploration into the dinette. “Let us look at this thing coldly,” he argued. “The piano has gone. That is established. We are reasonably certain that it is not in the building. We are well satisfied, through the testimony of employees as reported by you, that it is not in the building. We are well satisfied, through the testimony of employees as reported by you, that it wasn’t taken out of the front door and down the stairways or elevators. Now, is there a back door?”
“No such thing,” Greening replied. “There’s a little hole that the janitor takes the garbage through. No ice; there’s an electric machine. Absolutely no back door and no need for one.”
“Well, it went through the window, then. It didn’t slide down the drainpipe in the bathroom.”
“Foolishness!” Maud choked again tearfully, and flung herself on the chaise longue in despair.
Grame rolled up his sleeves. “I,” he said, “shall look for clues.”
“Go to it, old man,” urged Larry without much faith.
The apartment occupied by the Greenings was at a corner of the building; living room and dinette windows faced an alley on the west, and bedroom windows faced an airshaft on the north. Max went into the bedroom and poked his head out into the dimness.
He found that the airshaft was in reality a narrow court, open toward the alley on the west, with the blank wall of a building next door forming the north side. There were no fire escapes, pipelines or other means by which access could be gained to the Greening apartment, although that floor was not a full two stories above the alley level.… Leaning farther from the window, Max struck a match and examined the bricks directly beneath him. Scanning the surface closely, he saw what appeared to be two small scratches or bruises, rubbed on the bricks a few inches below the concrete sill and about eighteen inches apart. But of other signs there were none.
Something in his subconscious brain was tantalizing him as he joined Larry and Maud in the living room.… Something elusive and intriguing—some clue that seemed to be all about him, and yet which he could not identify. Nothing which he had seen, nothing which he had heard.…
The Greenings sat, sullen and weary. Larry lit a cigarette.
“Larry!” cried Grame. “Put out that cigarette!”
Larry stared at him. “Huh?”
For reply Grame jumped to his side, grasped the cigarette, and pounded its sparks against the bottom of an ashtray.
“It’s an odor!” he exclaimed with exultation. “An odor! I don’t want you smelling up this apartment with cigarettes.… Now tell me, can’t you discern some sort of an unusual odor in this room?”
Larry sniffed ambitiously. “Incense?” he asked.
“No, fool. It’s more like—like the hotel at South Raub, Indiana.” Maud’s theory was indefinite, but she clung to it stubbornly.
“There is an odor,” she repeated. “I noticed it when we came home, though I was so upset about the dear piano.… But, Max Grame, you can’t arrest an odor! I suppose you think that an odor stole my piano?”
“Nonsense!” said Max. “If I can identify that haunting, elusive odor that’s in here.… I’ve smelled it often, but not for a long time. It … makes me think of my grandmother.”
Maud arose with a jerk. “Grandmother, bah! Larry, I’m going to bed. And in the morning, we’ll have a real detective come.”
Greening also got up. “I’ll open the daybed for you here, old man. No, we won’t hear of your chasing out north again tonight. And maybe, sleeping here … it’ll bring some clues to your mind or something.”
Fifteen minutes later the Greenings had retired, Max Grame was stretched on the daybed, and the apartment was in darkness. Being very weary, the “great detective” went to sleep immediately. But his subconscious mind and his conscious nostrils were working overtime. Shortly before daylight he sat up with a jolt.
“Fried onions!” he repeated to himself, over and over. “No, that’s not it.… Cheese! Cheese! By God, I’ve got it now.…”
He sprang from the couch, turned on a light, and began examining the floor on his hands and knees. Near the vacant corner where the baby grand had stood, he found a small smudge of grease. He sniffed at this tiny, soiled patch of rug and chuckled with satisfaction.
While Maud was preparing breakfast and Larry was shaving, Grame went into the alley for a tour of inspection.
The early sun was steaming the frost on roofs and sheds, but the alley was still deep in shadow. Secure amid the backyard bustle of milkmen and incoming servant girls, Max wandered close to the fences which abutted properties on the west side of the alley. He gazed carefully into each successive yard as he passed it, perusing the homely porches and rear areaways with a peculiar intensity.
Directly opposite the hotel where the Greenings lived was an unusual backyard. All the others were barren nooks sacred to tin cans and matted papers, but this lawn, serene between well-kept fences, bespoke an oasis of the sort not often found in the city’s spare ugliness. There were a couple of plum trees, two birdhouses, and a frost-bitten hedge of autumn flowers. As Max Grame looked into this yard he saw something else that gave him a glow of victory.
Walking to the end of the alley, he turned down Thole Street and back along Kenmore. Several sets of the ordinary three- or four-story flats. Then … the building with the backyard.
You could tell by looking at it that it would have a backyard. The old porch was scrubbed and painted, there were bridal wreath bushes near the walk, and even a bird bath. Obviously the place was one of those narrow, high-stepped, three-story-single apartment houses put up late in the nineteenth century. Boldly enough, Grame marched up to the front door and entered the small vestibule where he examined three mailboxes with their cards.
3. B. F. EDDY
2. GRACE COOK
1. C. STEINKELWINTZ
“Maud,” said Grame, when he entered the apartment four minutes later, “you’ll have your piano back tonight or tomorrow. I will let you know immediately after dinner, and will then make out my bill.… No, no, good people, do not question me! Genius requires a cloak of mystery.”
At seven o’clock that evening, Max Grame walked into the three-story-single apartment house on Kenmore Avenue and pressed a bell button opposite the name steinkelwintz.
After a moment’s delay the inside door, and then the vestibule door, were opened by a little gray-haired woman with a black shawl about her bent shoulders.
“Could I see Mr. Steinkelwintz?” asked Max.
“Yah,” said the little old lady, and she called back into the dark hall behind her, “Carl!” She watched Grame with beady, black eyes as her husband came shuffling out.
He was also short and bent, but his shoulders were broad and his muscular arms sturdy, although his mustache was well-mixed with white. He peered up at Grame through thick, gold-rimmed glasses.
“Mr. Steinkelwintz,” said the great detective, “I’m Mr. Johnson from around the corner on Thole Street. My little girl’s kitten climbed up into that high tree in front of our place and can’t get down. One of the neighbors said that you had a long ladder. May I borrow it?”
For an instant there was a flash of suspicion in the glance that the old German gave him, but the face of Max Grame was guileless. Then the old man grinned kindly.