The 31st Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Sam Merwin Jr

  “But I don’t know anything!” wailed Wilfred.

  Venner took considerable convincing of this, but he finally had to give in. He contented himself with making Wilfred for a second time reenact everything that had happened in Mr. Gorman’s office the afternoon before.

  Wilfred went through it twice, just as he had after the murder, while Venner, a cigar dead in his mouth, looked on. But at the second performance’s conclusion neither he nor Wilfred nor anyone else present knew a bit more than they had before. Finally Venner gave it up.

  “I’m going to put a man on you,” he said. “For your own safe keeping. Be careful. Even if you don’t know from nothing, this guy thinks you have something on him. If he gets a chance, he may try again. We don’t want him to succeed. So take it easy.”

  “Any progress?” Leonie inquired. Venner shook his head.

  “Found any clue as to which way your boss had decided on the will business?” Venner asked in his turn.

  Leonie shook her bright red head, pointed to the big pile of documents on her desk.

  “I’ve been through everything,” she said. “In deals as confidential as the Weaver-Hollingsworth one, Mr. Gorman didn’t allow me to make copies until the decision was made. Whoever killed him must have made away with whatever he had. All I know is that he had a statement ready.”

  Venner nodded and shook his head. “A mutt of a case!” muttered the detective. “Three guys with equal opportunity.” He saw his listeners’ look of surprise. “Yes, Weaver could have done it. He could have unlocked the door while he was alone with Mr. Gorman and then stuck his head through from the hall and shot him.”

  “But the door to the closet would have cut off his view,” protested Leonie. Venner looked at her and sighed.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said somberly.

  Wilfred and Leonie went to lunch together. Wilfred’s office had given him time off until the case was settled and he enjoyed Leonie even more by the light of day than in the lamplight of the evening before. She had a redhead’s wonderful milky skin and needed and used little make-up.

  “What are you going to do, Will?” she asked him over coffee and sherbet. Wilfred made a gesture of helplessness.

  “What can I do?” he countered. “I don’t know who did it. The police will have to trace the gray car if they can. It’s their business to get the killer.”

  “If he doesn’t get you first,” she said slowly. “I think he’ll try again. Will, don’t you know something you haven’t told yet—some little thing maybe that might be unimportant to us, but which might scare the killer to death.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what it could be,” Wilfred replied. He didn’t feel shy with Leonie any more. He didn’t even mind that she was beautiful. He felt comfortable and pleasantly excited. He had too many other fears to be afraid of her good looks.

  “But Venner is bound to learn who has a gray car,” he said, like a boy, whistling in the dark.

  “I don’t think he’ll trace it easily,” she said. “It was probably rented—or borrowed—or stolen. A man with nerve enough to—why, hello, Mr. Leffords.”

  On Wilfred’s hesitant invitation, the attorney sat down and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee gratefully.

  “Had the dickens of a time locating you two,” he said. “Dear me, this is a mess, isn’t it?” He paused.

  “Yes?” said Leonie, regarding him watchfully. The lawyer seemed to be unsure of himself.

  “If you hadn’t picked the restaurant nearest poor Gorman’s office, I never should have succeeded,” he went on. Then, “May I speak in strictest confidence, Mr. Hull?”

  “I guess so, if it isn’t too strict,” said Wilfred. He winced then, at the feebleness of his own joke. Mr. Leffords ignored it.

  “In behalf of my client,” he said, “I am naturally interested in discovering whether you saw or heard anything yesterday morning which might be prejudicial to his interests. If you—er—should happen to remember such an incident, I—we might be willing to make it worth your while if you would inform us before you told Lieutenant Venner. My client’s life may well hang in the balance. This is off the record, of course.”

  “And you can be thankful for that!” snapped Leonie, her face a sudden angry red. She glared up at Mr. Leffords so hard that he upset his coffee, spilling some of it upon his beautifully creased trousers.

  “Sorry,” he said, rising and backing away and trying to mop off the stain all at the same time. “I guess perhaps I should have known better.”

  “I guess you should have,” said Leonie angrily, but to his retreating back. “I hate lawyers. Will, what would your ancestor, Captain Hull, have done to a man like that?”

  “Challenged him to a duel maybe,” said Wilfred, feeling a pleasant if vicarious glow of self righteousness. So Lawyer Leffords had the wind up. Wilfred felt a wonderful sense of power and then recalled the quick blaze of those headlights outside his apartment the night before. He didn’t feel so powerful then.

  “Did Mr. Gorman really decide Captain Isaac Hull was my ancestor?” he asked to change the subject.

  “He went on to higher rank, though,” said the girl. “Oh, dear, I wish I could remember exactly. Hasn’t it come in the mail? It was one of a whole batch of letters.”

  Wilfred made a gesture of apology. “I forgot to look this morning,” he said. “With Lieutenant Venner and all.” He wondered if he could make plain to this marvelous creature how important, to his utterly undistinguished existence, it was to prove that he stemmed from something famous and heroic.

  “Let’s go and see,” she offered, then blushed again, but not from anger, added, “if you don’t think I’m being too forward in wanting to see the letter.”

  “Of course not,” he said softly. “I’m glad you’re interested. But I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”

  “That,” she said, “can be remedied,” f and he walked out of the office on a cushion of ozone.

  It was not far from the restaurant to his apartment below Washington Square, and they decided to walk it. They were halfway there when Wilfred saw the follower who kept himself a discreet distance behind them. He was a tall man who wore rather shabby looking clothes.

  “I don’t like it,” said Leonie when he pointed out to her the fact that they were being trailed. “He doesn’t look like a policeman to me.”

  “When policemen don’t wear uniforms, they look no different from anybody else,” said Wilfred.

  “That is what you think,” said Leonie. “Oh, dear, I wish you could figure out what it is that you know.”

  “You and me both,” said Wilfred. He glanced again at the man on their trail. By contrast, perhaps, or perhaps because, of some faint resemblance, he thought of the dapper Weaver. Unconsciously his fingers went to his upper lip.

  “Good gosh!” he cried, stopping abruptly and staring at the girl, who regarded him with mild astonishment. “I just thought of something! Do you remember how Weaver went this way—” he ran his thumb and forefinger once more across his upper lip “—when he came out of Mr. Gorman’s office and spoke to Mr. Hollingsworth.”

  “Yes,” said the girl. “I remember. But what about?”

  “Don’t you see?” Then Wilfred’s excitement faded. “It’s so trivial that it can’t be very important. But it just occurred to me that a man would do this—” he repeated the gesture “—only if he were used to wearing a mustache. One of those little British type ones that he could flatten against his upper lip. And if Weaver wore a mustache—”

  “Perhaps the police would recognize him,” Leonie cried excitedly. “And if he’s the kind of a man the police would recognize, your gesture must have frightened him out of his wits—particularly if he had just killed somebody.” She paused and scowled. “But that closet door!”

  “It woul
dn’t have been in his way if he’d killed Mr. Gorman before he came out of the office,” said Wilfred, his mind working overtime. “That would explain the towel. I thought that gunshot made an awful lot of noise for a shot that was fired through a towel.”

  “Then you mean—” Leonie’s voice was breathless.

  “Sure. If Weaver did it, he must have shot Mr. Gorman before he came out. Perhaps he asked for a drink when he got the bad news and Mr. Gorman took him to the cooler in the closet. He could have grabbed a towel and shot him in there with none of us the wiser.”

  “And then he could have unlocked the corridor door and come out into the outer office. Remember, it was he who told Mr. Hollingsworth to go on inside. He was jumping at a chance to frame somebody else. He had probably planned to escape by the hall door, unlocked it and all, and then heard Hollingsworth’s voice in the outer office.”

  “Will!” said Leonie. “You’ve got it. Then he could have opened the corridor door and fired a second shot through the open window and tossed the gun inside. Old Captain Hull or whatever he was would be mighty proud of you now.”

  “You really think so?” said Wilfred.

  “I’m sure of it,” said a voice directly in back of them. “Nice going, Hull. I was afraid you’d work it out eventually—you or that dumb Venner. And I couldn’t have it. Not after destroying the only piece of evidence that could keep me from cashing in on the Weaver estate.”

  UNDER the shabby clothes and turned down hat the handsome face and perfect figure of Morgan Weaver were all too evident—as was the muzzle of the pistol that made an ugly bulge in his topcoat pocket.

  “I told you he didn’t look like a policeman,” said Leonie femininely and with utter irrelevance. “Oh, dear.”

  “Wh-what are you going to do?” Wilfred asked. His knees were shaking.

  “What would you do in my place?” was the answer. “Keep on walking, Hull—you too, Miss Carroll. If you were going to Hull’s apartment, that ought to do very nicely.”

  “If you think I’m going to—” began Leonie angrily. A prod of the gun into the small of her back and a “For heaven’s sake!” from Wilfred caused her to obey, if sullenly.

  Wilfred gave her a sidelong glance. Her head was high, her walk defiant. She was brave, she was lovely—and all at once he realized that she was going to die—all on account of what he had just told her.

  She was the first attractive girl who had ever been kind to him, bumbling, nondescript Wilfred Hull. And for that kindness she was going to be pushed out of existence. So angry was Wilfred that he almost forgot he was certainly due to cash in his chips himself.

  What would Captain Isaac Hull, pacing the quarter-deck of the wonderful old Constitution have done. Without closing his eyes, he tried to visualize the doughty old sea dog.

  Hull—Captain Hull—had believed in letting the enemy get close aboard before delivering his opening broadside. Deadly initial impact had been the secret of his maritime success in battle. Well, the enemy was close enough.

  Furthermore, Captain Hull had believed in sudden, shocking surprise—and certainly the murderer was expecting no resistance from Wilfred. After all, he had the gun.

  Something happened to Wilfred then, something which might or might not have been atavistic. He had been involved in a murder not of his own free will. So had Leonie. He had been nearly assassinated the night before. Now he was really up against it—and so was Leonie, through no fault of her own. It was simply too much of a bad thing.

  It was as if a control light in his brain had turned suddenly green. Wilfred spun fast and, with all the force of his pivot behind it, swung a right fist directly to the point of Weaver’s well cut chin.

  Leonie screamed then as Weaver, caught off balance, crashed to the sidewalk. Wilfred, unaccustomed to fisticuffs, hesitated for a fatal second before following up his attack—and the killer was back on his feet. His eyes were narrow as he swung the gun in his pocket toward Wilfred.

  A pistol cracked hard and sharp, and Wilfred wondered why he didn’t fall down. He had heard of men so numbed by the shock of a bullet that they felt nothing.

  Then he looked at Leonie in sudden panic. But she too was upright.

  It was Weaver who collapsed, slowly, to lie on the concrete with blood spurting from his shoulder. And a plainclothes man, carrying a police positive in his right hand, came up on the run, putting a whistle between his lips…

  “No, Weaver wasn’t Weaver at all,” said Lieutenant Venner, later. He was studying a photograph of the killer to which a Centre Street artist had appended a thin mustache, matching it with a poorly screened snapshot of the same man.

  “This picture,” he said, indicating the snapshot, “is the only one on record of Kansas Jolley. He’s wanted in seven states for everything from fraud to bluebeardism. Young man, you’ve cut yourself in for a slice of a whole lot of rewards.”

  “I wonder what happened to the real Morgan Weaver?” Leonie asked then.

  “Jolley knocked him off,” said the detective. “Somewhere in Ohio. He was on the lam from a holdup that backfired and Weaver picked him up. He got Weaver talking, saw that they were the same general type physically and killed him. Then he came on with Weaver’s papers and stuff.”

  “If he hadn’t tried to run me down last night, he’d have got away with it,” said Wilfred thoughtfully.

  The detective shook his head.

  “Not likely,” Venner stated. “He slipped when he made that gesture toward a vanished mustache, and when you imitated it, he got scared. He hadn’t intended to murder Gorman by his own account—but when he saw that half million slipping away he lost his head.

  “He knew I’d keep making you reenact the scene over and over again and that it was an odds-on chance someone would dope out his gesture and put a mustache on his face just in case. And he knew he was sunk then. So he had to do what he did. He was just unlucky, that’s all.”

  “Praise Allah!” said Leonie, hugging Wilfred’s arm tightly. Venner looked at them and stopped frowning.

  “That was a mighty brave thing you did today, Hull,” he said. “Even if it was mighty foolish. Our man was right behind Kansas Jolley.”

  “But we didn’t know that,” said Wilfred, blushing. He winced as he accepted the big calloused mitt the lieutenant had extended toward him.

  They left Headquarters a few minutes later to face a battery of cameramen. Then someone found them a cab and they returned to Wilfred’s apartment house. There, in the mailbox, was the letter from the late Orrin S. Gorman whose delayed delivery had made Wilfred a witness to murder.

  Leonie stood close beside him in the entryway as he ripped open the envelope and scanned its contents. Wilfred read it, then read it again.

  It went, in part:

  So there is no question but that, through your paternal grandfather, you are in direct line from the Hull family which played such a part in early American history. However, you are a descendant of Major General, not Captain (later Commodore) Isaac Hull of Constitution fame. The latter was a nephew of the former, who served with distinction in the Revolutionary Army.

  However, while General Hull attained eminence as a soldier of Washington, he is better known for his activities during the War of 1812 when, as a Major General, he was put in command of the Northwest Territory. There he surrendered Fort Dearborn, the site of modern Detroit, and all other garrisons in the Territory to the British without firing a shot.

  His surrender constituted one of the worst fiascos in the history of American arms. Had Perry not won the battle of Lake Erie some months later, the results would have been disastrous. While bribery and treason were never actually proved, there is every reason to suspect that…

  Wilfred looked at Leonie, who returned his stare. Then suddenly, both of them burst out laughing.

  “Poor Will,” she said tenderly. “So your Isaac Hu
ll wasn’t even the right Isaac Hull.”

  “Maybe he had a reason for giving up Detroit,” said Wilfred. “Maybe his gout was acting up or something.” He looked down, discovered that Leonie was in his arms and that he was enjoying her presence there. He felt like a man who had just walked out of a self-imposed prison that had surrounded him all his life.

  “That,” he said when he had kissed her to their mutual satisfaction, “is the end of ancestors for both of us. We’re going to be too busy becoming ancestors ourselves.”