The Man with the Lumpy Nose

by Lawrence Lariar

  McElmore clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back. They were beginning to sweat. “This man who was shot, then, he couldn’t have been anybody who lives on this street?”

  “He didn’t live on this block, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That will help us a lot, ma’am. Now then, can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “He was big. He was very big, a big man with a small head. He wore a hat pulled down over his eyes—I couldn’t see much of his face.” She meditated for a moment. “He had on a black coat. And—oh, yes, he walked with a bit of a limp. Not much, mind you, but I had the feeling there was something wrong with one leg, if you get what I mean.”

  Bull eyed the old lady incredulously. “You have a keen eye, Mrs. McGinness. Are you quite sure that you saw all that?”

  For a moment her face clouded. Then a sudden thought came to her, she tittered in her palm and reached under her sewing basket for the field glasses. “Gracious, I almost forgot to mention these. Danny gave them to me last year for Christmas. Of course, I always use these things when I sit here at the window. It makes the day go by so quickly—makes me feel as if I’m right up close to people, don’t you know.”

  Homer lifted the glasses and peered down the street. They were of standard size, of the type used at race tracks. “These are excellent, ma’am. Surely you saw more of this man’s face as he approached from the corner?”

  “It’s just as I said, I couldn’t see much of his face because his hat was pulled down over his eyes.” She fingered her chin and thought deeply. “On the other hand, I do remember something. It was really silly of me to forget. The man had a big nose—a rummy nose, if you know what I mean.”

  “Are you sure of that?” asked McElmore.

  She nodded briskly. “Indeed I am! I’m just as sure of that nose as I am of his limp, even though it wasn’t much of a limp.”

  “Excellent. And after the car began to backfire, did you see a flash from a gun?”

  “I don’t remember seeing flashes,” she said. “But I remember the shot, all right.”

  “Then this man on the sidewalk staggered and fell?”

  “He didn’t quite fall. They grabbed him just before he fell and pulled him into the car.”

  “This must have happened very quickly. You couldn’t remember what these men looked like?”

  Mrs. McGinness leaned back in her chair and laughed. “In heaven’s name, man, how could anybody remember? What do you take me for—a human camera?”

  Homer rose. The interview was over. “You’ve done almost as well, Mrs. McGinness. The Police Department appreciates your excellent reporting.” He bent down to take her hand.

  She watched them file into the black sedan on the street and when Bull waved goodbye she allowed him a pert nod and a smile.

  Mrs. McGinness leaned lightly on the window sill. It was time to begin her game again.

  In his office downtown, Inspector McElmore paced the length of the room and bit into his pipe with nervous fury. The men around his desk eyed each other warily. The Chief’s pipe was out. This was a bad sign.

  Cassidy walked in and waited for his boss to make the turn at the end of the room. The inspector stopped when he saw him.

  “Did you get him?” he roared. “Did you get Hinnick?”

  “Sure I got him, boss. What I mean is, I got the office over in Queens. Hinnick was out on account of they got a riot call over there. But I told the office—”

  McElmore slammed a big fist on the desk. “Never mind the double talk, Cassidy! Did they check what I told them?”

  “Yeah. Sure they checked. The desk sergeant told me they got nobody in their files answers that description you sent out.”

  The inspector sat down heavily. “That’s the last straw, boys,” he said grimly. “Now the job is right in our laps.” He leaned back in his chair, a tired man. “Sit down. Let’s go over this again. We’ve got to think this thing out. We’ve got to get somewhere with it.”

  The men took their seats quietly. They were used to an angry McElmore, but this time it was different. He stared at his blotter and put down his pipe.

  “I’ll tell you what this is,” he said. He assembled a few sheets of paper and waved them gently. “Here’s what we’ve got on a bunch of murders that happened right under our noses. Don’t laugh, Petersen, because if these things don’t get cleared up you’ll be pounding that beat out in Flatlands I pulled you away from. And I’ll be there walking with you, too.” He paused and let his eyes rest for a moment on each man in the room. “These murders tonight, this Earl Chance guy, and the one with a knife in his chest. I’ve got a hunch that our killer’s been busy before tonight.”

  He thumbed through the papers and drew one out. “The first time we hear of a bad knifing case it was over in Queens. You remember that one, boys? That was the one where we found the little lady stretched out on the bed with a knife stuck where no knife should be. That little lady was stabbed through the chest, remember? Well, we didn’t do so good on that one. We couldn’t find any trace of the killer, and we still can’t, can we, Mosher?”

  Mosher was the detective assigned to the Queens killing. A red-faced giant, he shifted uneasily in his chair. “No, Chief. I got nothing on that one. But I haven’t given up yet.”

  “No. Of course not,” McElmore’s eyes scanned the papers again. “The second one with a knife happened in Brooklyn. Fellow by name of Bartlett, he was. We located Mr. Bartlett behind a hedge, when a dog began to lick the blood off his shirt. Nobody saw Mr. Bartlett when the killer nailed him with that knife; we only had the kid and the dog, and they didn’t know who the guy was, even. Well, who was he? Why was this Bartlett guy bumped off?” He asked the ceiling his question, his eyes half closed. “Bartlett was just an ordinary guy, just a local business man, he was. Why was he killed? Everybody liked him. So the police come in on the case. The police begin to investigate. This is some time ago, don’t forget.” He leaned forward over his desk and scowled at the men before him. “What have we got? We’ve got absolutely nothing on that one either!”

  McElmore was staring at the man nearest his desk. This was Gargan, the detective assigned to the Bartlett case.

  Gargan returned the stare coolly. “Just a minute, Chief,” he said. “Don’t forget we got a good lead on that Bartlett thing. We at least know the guy was divorced and his first wife is missing.”

  The inspector assumed a tolerant air and lowered his voice. “I beg your pardon, Detective Gargan.” He turned to the others. “Detective Gargan thinks Bartlett’s wife came back and stabbed him in the street. Is that right, Detective Gargan?”

  Gargan shrugged. “We can’t tell until we find her.”

  “Nuts!” roared McElmore. “No woman on earth would kill a man that way, you ape! You think a woman would stab her ex-husband once, then stab him a couple of times extra to see him squirm?”

  “Why not?”

  The inspector gurgled his impatience and then swallowed it. He held up a hand. “Never mind, Gargan, we’ll forget about the Bartlett case for a while, see? Let’s keep talking about knives.” He dropped the papers and clasped his hands. “So after the Bartlett case we get no more knifings until last night. Then this business happens uptown and we find two more murdered that way, only this time we have a couple of clues. We hear from the Prentiss girl that the man who came at her in the office was big and had a terrific nose. Remember that, boys—he had a big nose. Next we find out that two women in Earl Chance’s penthouse have been knocked cold. Well, I spoke to one of them at the hospital. Miss Bates gives me the same story about one of the men who came up to the penthouse.” He smiled at the memory of Miss Bates’ testimony. “I couldn’t get much out of her about the man she saw, but she did tell me he was a big one. Maybe later on she’ll remember his nose, too.”

  He lit his pipe and continued. “All right, wh
at have we got so far? Early this morning I went up to visit an old lady on Ninety-Fourth Street. This old lady has another piece of news about our man with the nose. Good news? No—this news knocks all our ideas right behind the eight ball. The old lady tells me that she saw a man last night, you understand? This man is big, too. He is the same big boy, fat nose and all. But the old lady also tells me that she saw this guy murdered!”

  He waited for the news to take effect.

  Gargan said, “I don’t get it. Maybe this guy who is murdered is somebody else.”

  “Smart thinking,” said McElmore. “Except that you forget one thing, Gargan. We have a couple of women who tell us that this ape’s nose is terrific and also that he is a big guy. Well, what do we know about noses?” He stared around the room with a fish eye. “We know just this—that one of our boys downtown, an Officer Cramer, also gets the business from a gent with a big snout. It’s a funny thing that all kinds of witnesses lately have been reporting a nose to us. It’s a funny thing that every time we get a report on this rat it’s always tied up with murder.”

  Gargan opened his mouth to talk, but McElmore silenced him with his hand. He was getting angry. “Skip it, Gargan! I made up my mind what I want you men to do and I’m giving my orders now. Every man has a job. Every man is looking for only one thing. We’re looking for a man with a fat nose, dead or alive, you understand? We’re going to find that ape, too. We can’t get anywhere until we locate this big gorilla, bring him in, and tear him to pieces!”

  “Maybe he wasn’t murdered,” said Gargan. “Did the old lady feel his pulse, too?”

  McElmore sighed. “All right, Gargan, for once you’re thinking like an expert. We’ll say he wasn’t murdered, then. That makes your job easier. I want you boys to send men out. People would remember a puss like our man has. If he’s wounded, he should be easy to reach. If he’s dead—well, that’s another story. But dead or alive, I want some news on that man before tomorrow morning!”

  They filed out slowly, talking in hushed whispers.

  At the door, Mosher said, “He must be up around Ninety-Fourth Street. Bet you anything he lives up there.”

  “I’ll give you odds we find him floating around somewhere in a sack,” said Petersen, “nose and all.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Dumbo Waddell sighed and lay back on Homer Bull’s broad studio couch, pulling unceasingly at his ear lobes. This was a symbol of deep and concentrated thought, a habit he had acquired in the first year of grade school when primers were heavy reading for him.

  “A hell of a note,” said Dumbo. “Here it is almost eleven in the morning and I haven’t wet my whistle yet. Do you expect me to read on an empty stomach, Homer?”

  Bull moved toward the kitchen, reading as he went. His flat was littered with the papers taken from Chance’s basement. They had been reading steadily for over two hours. “Keep right on reading,” he said. “We’ll have some coffee in a minute or so.”

  Dumbo flipped a sheet to the floor with a deep groan and began another. Then his eyes lit with a sudden spark.

  “Here’s a queer paragraph, Homer.”

  “More political rotgut?”

  “This is better than rotgut. The great editor’s heart was full to overflowing with sympathy for the German people.”

  “Read me some of it, without gestures.”

  “Chance says: ‘… The great masses of the German people are simple folk—as normal as the normal American. They are well known for their love of home and children and the thousand and one gracious habits of kindly, civilized citizens!’”

  Bull frowned at his cigar, leaned forward in his chair. “That stuff is loaded with purposeful adjectives. He was building up to something.”

  “Wait,” said Dumbo. “He goes on: ‘… These essentially peaceful people have always admired the great men in their country’s cultural heritage. Talk to the average German and you will find him a person deeply interested in Goethe, Wagner, Beethoven and Schiller. He is proud, and rightly so, of the great German kultur and the noble German spirits who made so great a name for the Father land in the arts and sciences.’”

  “Fritz was so proud of them that he burned their works out of existence in the dear Fatherland,” said Bull. “This stuff is breaking my heart.”

  Dumbo held up a hand. “Get a load of this. He goes on to say: ‘… Such simple people cannot be blamed for the dislocation in their lives after the last war. It was the last war and its after affects that brought Hitler to power, against the wishes of the great mass of honest, kindly, normal Germans who wanted no part of the Fuehrer, but who were forced to accept the new leader. We should sympathize, rather than condemn. We owe it to our consciences to listen to this great voice of the soul of Germany. If we but listen, we will understand—and if we understand, we cannot refuse to grant them the peace that these poor souls so fervently desire.’” Dumbo made a face and dropped the sheet. “I don’t get it. You think the guy was serious? Who’d print tripe like this?”

  Bull smiled. “A good question, Dumbo, but the answer is obvious to anyone who has followed the German system of propaganda in this country. There are many people in this country who are still at work with the German underground. These people are powerful and are well heeled. Seems to me that Chance’s stuff might have been written as part of the new German routine—an easy peace. If the Germans can accomplish this peace there’ll be a good chance for the Prussian war lords to remain in power. Left in power, these scoundrels can begin to lay the ground work for the next war. The FBI has already stopped several moves toward a peace offensive here.”

  “A new formula,” said Dumbo.

  “It’s as old as the hills. They’re appealing to the sympathies of Americans. They know we’re charitable people at heart. They want us to forget that the masses of Germans were in accord when they made Hitler their national hero. They tell us that war and bloodshed are abhorrent to the German mind, and yet Germans have waged war for the fifth time in the last eighty years!”

  “And Chance contributed these articles to a Nazi journal?”

  “That should be the answer. Those stinking propaganda journals rarely pay off for gibberish of this sort unless it’s done by a staff man.” Homer eyed the manuscript with a baleful eye. “This sort of small talk is getting us nowhere, however. The fact that Chance manufactured this type of swill is unimportant to us unless we can discover through which Fascist slop sheet his writings were released to the public. If we had access to a few of the Fascist journals we could probably locate all of Chance’s work. He writes with a style easily recognized. Have you any contacts among the American Nazi tribes, Dumbo?”

  “Some of my worst friends are Fascists. But these domestic boys don’t talk much.”

  “Aren’t there other sources? Files?”

  Dumbo snapped a finger. “You’ve hit it, Homer! I probably can get all the dope we want on our Nazi friends down at the paper. A couple of our liberal writers will steer me to their personal research, I’m sure. I’ll make a note to speak to Irwin Pause, in our feature section. The guy is a rabid hunter of pro-Nazi influences in our pure American culture.”

  “Make another note to do the job immediately,” said Homer.

  “Check,” said Dumbo.

  The doorbell rang. It was Hank MacAndrews. He sank wearily into a chair. “Eleven o’clock in the morning and I’m ready for a Swedish massage. My body itches for the laying on of strong hands. Why is it that every time you pick an errand for Little Hank it turns out to be a walking tour of Greater New York?”

  “A chronic complainer,” said Dumbo.

  “Nuts!” spat Hank. “My legs feel like a reporter’s brain—pulpy and numb.”

  “You found something?” Homer asked.

  Hank sniffed the air lustily. “Is that coffee? I don’t talk until I’ve quaffed the nut-brown stuff!”

 
Dumbo disappeared into the kitchen, returned with coffee, some ham and a round brown bread.

  Hank began to talk between mouthfuls. He had started his search for Alex Smith at the office building.

  “Everything was all right down there,” he began. “By that I mean that everything was all wrong. Nobody around the place knew anything about our mysterious Alex. I questioned all the elevator boys, the super and the two porters. All they told me was that our Alex was a quiet boy who high-hatted the staff. Aside from that, he never bothered a soul among them, paid them off every Saturday morning and disappeared every evening into some mysterious hole of his own.”

  “They didn’t know where he lived then? I mean, not even the neighborhood?”

  Hank shook his head sadly. “They knew strictly from nothing. I should have been satisfied with that. I should have buttoned my coat, fixed my tie and come back home. But, no, not MacAndrews. MacAndrews has to be a detective. I had to go out in the street and annoy storekeepers.”

  “Good!” said Bull. “You learn fast. And you met a storekeeper who knew something?”

  “I did not. I tried all the stores on both sides of the street. Most of the storekeepers never met our Alex. However, in two of the restaurants they knew him—by sight, that is. Alex had eaten lunch in these two places. I plugged away at these gents for quite a while, even questioned the bus boys and the bartenders, but no dice. I was about to return here when I saw a crowd of cleaning women leaving the building. I played my hunch and stopped the group.”

  “Wonderful!” said Dumbo. “How is it possible for a cartoonist to be so clever?”

  “I’d have been a lot cleverer if I had passed those dames up,” said MacAndrews. “Five of the six didn’t even know the janitor, and three of them spoke very little in our native tongue. The sixth, however, was talkative. And willing. Yes, she knew little Alex—not directly, mind you, but through a friend. It seems that this friend had spoken to Alex for her so that she might work at the building. It was through this friend that she got the job, you see, even though this old wren didn’t know Alex at all.”