The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  "Did you look in the parlor then?" McCracken asked.

  "No. I think the door was closed. But I didn't have any reason to look in, so I didn't."

  "You're not sure about the time. Couldn't it have been two o'clock, maybe, if you'd lost track of time while you were reading?"

  "No. I went to bed at twelve-thirty, see? I did look at my clock then, and my watch too, to set it. I could be wrong by it being earlier, but not later."

  "And the other fellow who heard it?"

  "Name's Bill Johnson. Yes, he's sure, too, that it was somewhere around midnight."

  McCracken sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. He tried another tack.

  "Birds outside, maybe?" he asked.

  "No, too loud," Carson said. "And I never heard birds sing that much or that loud around here before. Anyway, it'd have to be a flock of different kinds of them. And--let's see--robins don't sing at night, do they? Robin's about the only bird call I'm sure of, and I heard that."

  "How good was Slimjim Lee? Perley was teaching him, he says."

  Carson shook his head firmly. "No, but definitely. I've heard him, and he could carry a tune, but that's about all. And he wasn't sure where he'd carry it. No, pal, this stuff was good. If it wasn't Perley, then he's got a rival."

  "How about the radio?"

  "I thought of that, afterwards," Carson said. "But it couldn't have been. The place was as quiet as a morgue, around then, and I'd have heard the announcer shooting his mouth off between imitations. Anyway, no bird imitator could stay on the air that long. It was at least half an hour, off and on, like I said."

  McCracken sighed again. "Was it you said something about a dog imitation?"

  "Not me. That was Bill Johnson. I might have heard a dog, but if I did, I don't remember. I'd have figured that came from outside. Like the cats. I did hear some cats yowling, but that wouldn't have been Perley either. He doesn't imitate animals, just birds."

  McCracken got up and went to the door.

  "Well, thanks," he said. He declined another drink, and went down the hall. He opened the door of Perley Essington's room and went in.

  Jerry Bell came out of the room across the hall and stood in the doorway.

  "Find out anything new?" he asked.

  "Carson's telling the truth, I think," McCracken said. "If he was lying, he'd be more definite about time and things. He rings true."

  "Then how can you figure an out for Perley? Or can you?

  "I don't know," McCracken said. "But I got an idea. It's almost as screwy as Perley is."

  He got down on his hands and knees in the middle of the carpet, and started working around the floor in circles, examining the carpet carefully. A white spot he found on the floor behind a chair interested him considerably.

  He was starting to crawl behind the bed, when Jerry Bell said:

  "You got it wrong, Mack. No corpses in here. That was the other room, remember?"

  McCracken got up slowly and dusted off the knees of his trousers with his left hand. A tiny object he'd found behind the bed was gripped carefully between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He held it so Bell could see that it was a light blue feather.

  Jerry Bell grunted. "Is that what you were looking for, Mack? Jeepers, I'll open the pillow and get you a handful of "em."

  McCracken shook his head slowly.

  "I doubt it," he said. "Very few pillows are stuffed with mocking bird feathers. Jerry."

  "What makes you think that's off a mocking bird? You sure?"

  "No," McCracken answered frankly. "But it's the right color. An ornithologist can tell. Anyway, mocking bird or not, there was a bird in this room. There's proof of that back of the chair. And a mocking bird fits the picture."

  "Look," he explained. "The killer brought the bird here, probably in a box. He came in the window there and hid in the parlor until Jim Lee came in, and he killed him. Then--to pin the thing on Perley Essington--he came in here and let the bird out in this room for awhile. The bird would be Perley's best imitator, wouldn't it? And it'd sing, being free--comparatively--after being shut up."

  "But--a mocking bird!" Bell protested. "Where'd anyone get one?"

  "Pet shops have 'em occasionally. They're not common, but they can be got. Probably the killer stole it, though. He wouldn't want the trail traceable if there'd be a slip-up. It was that dog-and-cat business made me think of one. My aunt used to have a mocking bird, and it'd imitate dogs and cats when it heard them.

  And it'd have picked that up around the pet shop."

  "Then maybe Perley wasn't lying about that call that sent him on a wild-goose chase."

  McCracken nodded. "Of course. This was carefully planned. The guy who did it made sure Jim Lee would be here and that Perley wouldn't, and that he'd be a place where he couldn't prove he'd been."

  "If an expert backs you up on your guess what that feather is," Bell said, "looks like you did figure Perley an out, Mack. Got any idea who did kill Lee?"

  McCracken took a deep breath, then said flatly: "You did, Jerry. I was sure as soon as I found this feather. It's just like the one you pretended to pull off Perley Essington's head when you were clowning back at Headquarters. You had the bird in your pocket when you left. Maybe you'd killed it after you used it. And when you pulled that feather gag in Zehnder's office you'd just had your hand in your pocket. You were so confident you had Perley framed, you didn't hesitate to use it for making fun of Perley."

  The expression on Jerry Bell's face didn't change. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, an unlighted cigar was tilted in a corner of his mouth.

  "Not bad, Mack," he said. "How about motive?"

  "It wasn't the ring," McCracken went on, "although in your kind of work you ought to know the outlets and where to cash in on it easy. But you wouldn't have done it for that. I figure you must have gambled over your head and gone in debt to Lee. Which did he have in his billfold, I.O.U.'s or checks of yours?"

  Jerry Bell sighed deeply, took a gun out of his pocket.

  "You're covered, Mack," he said. "I think you could make that stick. I'm in plenty deep, including some company funds, and that'd come out if the police nosed around. And -well, I did buy that bird instead of stealing it." He paused, then:

  "But listen, Mack, Slimjim was blackmailing me on those debts. You can't blame a man for killing a blackmailer. You aren't --"

  "How about Perley?" McCracken interrupted. "You tried to frame it on him, just so you wouldn't be suspected, just to give the cops an easy victim."

  "He was in with Slimjim on the whole--"

  "Nuts! If he had been, he'd have known who killed Jim, and why. That don't hold water, Jerry."

  "Then let's try it this way, Mack. I can get two thousand for that ring. I know you're broke. How about half of that?"

  McCracken's eyes were cold. "Jerry," he asked, "know what that spot on the floor back of the chair is?"

  "I can guess. Why?"

  "Then you can guess my answer to that proposition. I'm going to call your bluff, Jerry. You won't shoot me. You'd have done it already, if you figured you could get away with it. As readily as you killed Lee."

  He turned and walked slowly toward the door, his hands relaxed at his sides.

  "Regan out there knows we're in here alone, Jerry," he said. "If there's a bullet hole in my back, there's no story you could tell that would stand up under investigation. I'm not even armed, so you couldn't use self-defense. There'd be no out for you at all, Jerry."

  He took a step toward the door, another.

  "Stop, Mack!" ordered Bell. "I'll--"

  McCracken kept on walking. It didn't seem to him that he was breathing at all. He made the hallway, and was half way to the front door before he heard the shot. It had not been aimed at him.

  * * *

  The contents of the desk and the filing cabinet had been taken from the drawers and were stacked in a cardboard carton with a rope around it.

  The carpet was rolled up at
one side of the room, and the phone had been disconnected, although it still stood on the desk.

  McCracken sat on the desk beside the phone, with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands.

  He was whistling softly and mournfully.

  He didn't hear the door open, but he almost fell off the desk when a voice said:

  "Excellent whistling, Mr. McCracken. Excellent!"

  The shiny pate of the little bird imitator was bobbing across the office toward him.

  "Hello, Perley," McCracken said. He couldn't muster a smile to go with it.

  "I'm leaving vaudeville, Mr. McCracken," Perley explained. "Or maybe one could say that vaudeville is leaving me, because the Bijou is closing. Anyway, I'm opening a school for whistling and bird imitating. You whistle well. I could make you my star pupil."

  "Thanks," said McCracken listlessly. "Maybe sometime. But what with moving and all--"

  "To better quarters, I hope. And that reminds me. You never sent me a bill. I came to settle up for what you did for me."

  He beamed at McCracken, and for a moment the private detective felt a ray of hope. Then it faded. A few dollars can seem like a lot sometimes, but it doesn't make much difference when you owe a few hundred and are about to be put on the street. "In fact, Mr. McCracken," Perley went on, "I have a check already written, which I hope you'll think adequate. It's for three thousand dollars. You may have heard that Jim Lee's will said that I was his only real friend and that he left me all his money, and that it turned out to be more than anybody thought he had. Some bonds, you know, that he thought weren't worth much."

  Mechanically, McCracken took the little slip of yellow paper that was being held out toward him. His eyes focused on the figures, then blurred, then came into focus again.

  "There was thirty thousand net, Mr. McCracken," Perley Essington was saying, "and if it hadn't been for you--well, I'd never have been free to spend any of it. So I think a tenth is fair, isn't it?"

  McCracken found his own voice at last.

  "More than fair, Perley. I--well you can put me down as your star pupil, all right. And give me that nightingale business first. It's just how I feel. But not on an empty stomach." He took the little man's arm firmly. "First, we're going down to the Crillon and order a plate apiece of their very best birdseed."

  A DATE TO DIE

  It was five minutes before five a.m. and the lights in my office at the fourth precinct station were beginning to grow gray with the dawn. To me, that's always the spookiest, least pleasant time of all. Darkness is better, or daylight. And those last five minutes before my relief are always the slowest.

  In five minutes Captain Burke would arrive---on the dot, as always---and I could leave. Meanwhile, the hands of the electric clock just crawled.

  The ache in my jaw crawled with them. That tooth had started aching three hours ago, and it had kept getting worse ever since. And I wouldn't be able to find a dentist in his office until nine, which was four long hours away. But, come five o'clock, I'd go off duty, and I had a pretty good idea how to deaden the pain a bit while I waited.

  Four minutes of five, the phone rang.

  “Fourth Precinct,” I said, “Sergeant Murray.”

  “Oh, it's you, Sergeant!” The voice sounded familiar, although I couldn't place it; it was a voice that sounded like an eel feels. “Nice morning, isn't it, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah,” I growled.

  “Of course,” said the voice. “Haven't you looked out the window at the pale gray glory that precedes the rising of---”

  “Can it,” I said. “Who is this?”

  “Your friend Sibi Barranya, Sergeant.”

  I recognized the voice then. It didn't make me any happier to recognize it, because he'd been lying like a rug when he called himself my friend. He definitely wasn't. On the blotter, this mug Barranya is listed as a fortune-teller. He doesn't call himself that; when they play for big dough, the hocus-pocus boys call themselves mystics. That's what Barranya called himself, a mystic. We hadn't been able to pin anything on him, yet.

  I said, “So what?”

  “I wish to report a murder, Sergeant.” His voice sounded slightly bored: you'd have thought I was a waiter and he was ordering lunch. “Your department deals in such matters, I believe.”

  I knew it was a gag, but I pressed the button that turned on the little yellow light down at the telephone company's switchboard.

  I'll explain about that light. A police station gets lots of calls that they have to trace. An excited dame will pick up the phone and say “Help, Police” and bat the receiver back on the hook without bothering to mention who she is or where she lives. Stuff like that. So all calls to any police station in our city go through a special switchboard at the phone station, and the girl who's on that board has special instructions. She never breaks a connection until the receiver has been hung up at the police end of the call, whether the person calling the station hangs up or not. And there's that light that flashes on over her switchboard when we press the button. It's her signal to start tracing a call as quickly as possible.

  While I pressed that button, I said, “Nice of you to think of me, Barranya. Who's been murdered?”

  “No one, yet, Sergeant. It's murder yet to come. Thought I'd let you in on it.”

  I grunted. “Picked out who you're going to murder yet, or are you going to shoot at random?”

  “Randall,” he said, “not random. Charlie Randall, Sergeant. Neighbor of mine; I believe you know him.”

  Well---on the chance that he was telling the truth and was going to commit a murder---I'd as soon have had him pick Randall as anyone. Randall, like Barranya, was a guy we should have put behind bars, except that we had nothing to go on. Randall ran pinball games, which isn't illegal, but we knew (and couldn't prove) some of his methods of squelching opposition. They weren't nice.

  Barranya and Randall lived in the same swank apartment building, and it was rumored that the pinball operator was Barranya's chief customer.

  All that went through my head, and a lot of other things. Telling it this way, it may sound like I'd been talking over the phone a long time, but actually it had been maybe thirty seconds since I picked up the receiver.

  Meanwhile, I had the receiver off the hook of the other phone on my desk---the interoffice one---and was punching the button on its base that would give me the squad car dispatcher at the main station.

  I asked Barranya, “Where are you?”

  “At Charlie Randall's,” he said, “well, here it goes, Sergeant!”

  There was the sound of a shot, and then the click of the phone being hung up.

  I kept the receiver of that phone to my ear waiting for Central to finish tracing the call, which she'd do right away now that the call had been terminated at that end. Into the other phone I said, “Are you there, Hank?” and the squad car dispatcher said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Better put on the radio to--- Wait a second.”

  The other receiver was talking into my other ear now. The gal at Central was saying, “That call came from Woodburn 3480. It's listed as Charles B. Randall, Apart---”

  I didn't listen to the rest of it. I knew the apartment number and address. And if it was really Charlie Randall's phone that the call had come over, maybe then Barranya was really telling the truth.

  “Hank,” I said, “send the nearest car to Randall's apartment, number four at the Deauville Arms. It might be murder.”

  I clicked the connection to the homicide department, also down at main, and got Captain Holding.

  “There might be a murder at number four at the Deauville,” I reported. “Charlie Randall. It might be a gag, too. There's a call going out to the nearest squad car; you can wait till they report or start over sooner.”

  “We'll start over right away,” he said. “Nothing to do here anyway.”

  So that let me out of the game. I stood up and yawned, and by the electric clock on the wall, it was two minutes before five. In two minutes
I could leave, and I was going to have three stiff drinks to see if it did my toothache any good. Then I intended going to the Deauville Arms myself. If there was a murder, the homicide boys would want my story about the call. And having something to do would help make the time go faster until nine o'clock when there'd be a dentist available.

  If there wasn't a murder, then I wanted a little talk with Sibi Barranya. He might still be there, or up in his own apartment two floors higher. Maybe “talk” isn't the right word. I was going to convince him, with gestures, that I didn't appreciate the gag.

  I put on my hat at one minute of five. I looked out the window and saw Captain Burke, who relieves me, getting out of his car across the street.

  I opened the door to the waiting room that's between the hall and my office, and took one step into it. Then I stopped---suddenly.

  There was a tall, dark, smooth-looking guy sitting there, looking at one of the picture magazines from the table. He had sharp features and sharp eyes under heavy eyebrows, each of which was fully as large as the small moustache over his thin lips.

  There was only one thing wrong with the picture, and that was who the guy happened to be. Sibi Barranya---who'd just been talking to me over the telephone a minute before . . . from a point two miles away!

  I stood there looking at him, with my mouth open as I figured back. It could have been two minutes ago, but no longer. Two minutes, two miles. There's nothing wrong with traveling two miles in two minutes, except that you can't do it when the starting point is the fourth floor of one building and the destination the second floor of another. Besides, the time had been nearer one minute than two.

  No, either someone had done a marvelous job of imitating Barranya's voice, or this wasn't him. But this was Barranya, voice and all.

  He said, “Sergeant, are you---psychic?”