Long Live the Dead

by Hugh B. Cave

  “They think I’m a crook down at Headquarters, see? First they called me crazy for not believin’ DiConti was guilty. Then they found out I was acceptin’ bribes. Well, I had to. It was the only way to get you. I’m new at this game and I had to plug along slow and easy, the hard way, with no mistakes.

  “That money goes back now, Bartell. Back to the guys who gave it to me. But DiConti goes free and you and Minkler go up for murder, so it was all worth it.”

  It was all over when Carney and the lads from Headquarters arrived on the scene. Bartell was still out cold on the floor and Dougherty was sitting near him, kind of groggy and dazed but making gestures and elaborately explaining the business of the dictaphone—as if Bartell cared!

  “Thought you were smart, huh, when you looked the place over? Well, I didn’t think you’d be smart enough to look in a wastebasket. I wasn’t takin’ no chances with you.”

  Carney and the others took Bartell to Headquarters, and it wasn’t long before Solly Minkler was brought in to keep him company. They poured a lot of hot coffee into Steve Dougherty, and after a while the kid stopped talking to himself.

  “Well,” Carney said admiringly, “I guess the booby prize goes to me.”

  Dougherty shrugged. “It had to be Solly Minkler,” he said, still a bit dazed. “You see, it couldn’t have been Gilson because policemen are honest. And it couldn’t have been Mr. DiConti because he wouldn’t have thrown all that stuff around and broken Mrs. Haggerty’s watch—not after he’d just finished repairing it. So it had to be Minkler or someone working for Minkler, and he had to know Tiny Tim, because if Tim hadn’t recognized him …

  “Don’t you see?” the kid rambled on. “When I told you what Tim said about being followed, you just laughed at me. And now, you see, he was followed.”

  “Kid,” Carney declared humbly, “you’re all right. You’re gonna be a first-class cop.”

  Curtain Call

  This one appeared in Black Mask in November 1938, a month in which i had other stories in Pulp Magazines ace g-man stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, thrilling Mystery, and something called Ten Story Gang. but I was aiming some of my stories at this slicks, and by this time I had been published in a non-pulp called Household magazine, and 15 times in three Canadian slick-paper magazines, The Canadian, Chatelaine, and National Home Monthly. The Saturday Evening Post and other big slicks were just over the horizon.

  HBC

  Suicide or Murder? This cop plays out his strange hunch mercilessly

  The trouble with you,” I said, glaring at Jojo Evans, “you think everything connected with the detecting business is funny. You’re like a lot of guys that write these dumb detective stories. Murder is just something to crack wise about.” I felt that way. It could have been the rain, and most likely part of it was but, whatever the reason or the excuse I was in a mood that morning to bite the head off a rattlesnake. And it didn’t help to have Percy Joseph Evans sitting there with his feet on my desk, kidding me about my attentions to a corpse.

  I’m dumb. I admit it. Any other dick on the force would have taken one look at that corpse and scribbled “suicide” down in his hip-pocket notebook; but yours truly Thompson the Trouble Seeker, had to stand right up in public and call it murder.

  Why? Because it should have been murder. This guy Vanetti had been begging for it.

  Only it wasn’t. Or was it?

  I walked into the private sanctum of W. J. Reynolds, my boss, and said morbidly: “You sent for me, Chief?” He scowled at me.

  “Close the door, Thompson.”

  “Sure.” I closed it.

  “Sit down.”

  “Sure.” I sat. Two other men were sitting, too, and both gave me a good looking-at. One was Detective Inspector Bill Donahue; the other was Mr. Nick Lomac. Putting those two together in the same room was like parking St. Peter alongside the devil’s number one furnace stoker. Bill Donahue was big, gray at the temples, middle-aged and honest. Nick Lomac was small, slick, black-haired and vicious. A politician.

  The Chief narrowed his gray eyes at me and pulled a scowl across his mouth. He was a good man, Reynolds. He’d been around a long time and without him Kolb City would have been a heap crookeder than it was.

  He said, “The papers have printed statement by you, Thompson, about the death of Leon Vanetti. An unauthorized statement and a most embarrassing one. Perhaps you can explain.”

  “You know these newspaper reporters as well as I do,” I muttered.

  “Meaning?”

  “I spoke out of turn and some squirt scribbled it down.”

  “Then you don’t actually believe Vanetti was murdered?”

  “Listen,” I said, hauling in a breath because it was going to take a bit of time. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I was around here last night with Joe Evans, waiting for curfew, when this call came in from the joint where Vanetti had a room. I took the call myself. It was Vanetti’s landlady.

  “She was in a lather about something but she talks with a spaghetti accent and it took me at least five minutes to unravel the spaghetti. What she was trying to tell me was this: Some woman telephoned and wanted to speak with Vanetti. So Mrs. Fretas the landlady hoffed upstairs to Vanetti’s room and knocked and got no answer. She figured he must be asleep because she herself d been sitting out on the front steps when he came in an hour ago and he hadn’t gone out again since. So she knocked again.”

  I was deliberately dragging it out, not to hear myself talk but to see what the story would do to Nick Lomac.Apparently it did nothing. Lomac sat there with indifference warped all over his swarthy face and listened to me. The way you’d listen to a Sunday morning sermon after being out on a binge the night before.

  “So Mrs. Fretas,” I said, “put an eye to the keyhole, to see if Vanetti was in, and she saw him hanging there.”

  “You and Evans went over there?” the Chief said.

  He knew we’d gone over there. He was just pulling it out of me for the benefit of Nick Lomac. It didn’t take a swami to size this thing up. Nick Lomac was sore because of my murder talk, and he wanted a complete, detailed explanation, and he was influential enough to get it.

  “When we got there,” I said, “we had to bust in the door. Mrs. Fretas didn’t have an extra key because, so she says, she gave her spare to Vanetti, a couple of days ago. He lost his and asked for another. So we broke in and found him hanging there.”

  Nick Lomac opened his mouth for the first time. “What was he hung with Thompson?”

  “Fishline.”

  “Fishline?”

  “Yeh. The kind you catch cod on. Heavy stuff, tarred. It seems Vanetti did a lot of fishing in his spare time and had a couple of tackle boxes under his bed.”

  Nick Lomac had an imagination. He put his fingers up to his throat and rubbed them around the edge of his starched collar, and winced. I didn’t blame him. That line had almost sawed Vanetti’s head off.

  “So you and Evans walked in,” the Chief said, “and found him hanging there. The door was locked. The windows were locked. On the floor you found the chair on which Vanetti stood while adjusting the noose. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “You cut him down?”

  “We cut him down.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just police routine.”

  “But when the reporters arrived, you told them it was murder.”

  “That’s not so,” I insisted. “I just warned them to leave things alone because it might be murder.”

  “But damn it, Thompson they quoted you as saying it was murder!”

  “That was their mistake.”

  The Chief glared at me then let me have it. He possessed a nice vocabulary most of which he picked up while handling mules in the War. Ordinarily I’d have grinned at him but with Nick Lomac there I didn’t. Because the lacing I was getting was solely for Lomac’s benefit and I knew it.

  When it was over I mutter
ed under my breath and got up and walked out pretending to be sore.

  Jojo Evans still had his dogs on my desk. He grinned at me. “Way out here,” he said “I heard the biggest part of it.

  There’s one word he uses that really gets me. That ‘scurrilousness.’ Some day I’m gonna look that up. What’s it mean?”

  Pippo’s lunch cart has the best coffee you ever tasted, and he deals it to you by way of his black-eyed daughter Anna who stands five-three and has a smile that wide.

  I slupped the coffee and thought things over. This wasn’t an ordinary case of detecting. There are standard jobs and there are crazy quilts. In the former you smell along a given trail knowing more or less what ought to be at the end of it. You just keep on smelling until you uncover the source of the stench. But in this particular job there were too many possible angles. Smells emanated from it the way tentacles curl out from an octopus.

  First-off the world was never going to miss Vanetti. The air would be cleaner with him underground. And I could name at least ten persons to whom his demise would bring a great big belly laugh. So without any deep thinking at all you could practically fill a phone book with the names of suspects.

  And then again maybe Vanetti’d really hung himself.

  I drank a second mug of coffee just to see Anna Pippo smile at me. Jojo Evans slid onto the stool beside me. “There’s going to be hell to pay,” he said. I glared. “Why?” “Nick Lomac didn’t ask to have you fired. I eavesdropped.” “Why should he ask to have me fired?” “He’s sore.” I said, “That guy is always sore. He just hops from one

  sore spell to another. Last week he burned up because a right guy got elected to fill that vacancy on the school committee. The week before that he had pups because Mitchell Brothers got the contract for that high school.”

  “Only this time,” Evans said, “he didn’t blow up. He didn’t shoot off his mouth.” He gave me a fishy stare. “I’m only the police photog man but I know this time, Thompson, that it goes a lot deeper. The Lomac guy actually told the Chief to lay off you. Said you only did what you thought was your duty.”

  “Real nice of him,” I snapped.

  Evans reached across me for the sugar. “You keep out of dark alleys, cop. You watch your step.”

  I didn’t think much about it. There was too much else on my mind. “You get those pictures finished yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head. I dropped my check into his coffee and walked out and drove up to Ancell Street, to the rooming house where Mr. Leon Vanetti had committed suicide—perhaps.

  It was a crummy dive, as you’d expect in a neighborhood like that. The name of Ancell Street got to be so bad at one time that respectable residents at the cleaner end of it petitioned the city fathers to change its label. Mrs. Fretas’ rooming house offered its high class tenants a nice respectable view of a dump on one side and an abandoned brewery on the other.

  The downstairs door was open and I walked in. The door of the landlady’s apartment was open, too. Mr. Fretas was parked in a rocking chair in his shirtsleeves, reading a paper, and the missus was jammed into another chair, the whole two hundred and fifty pounds of her, peeling spuds.

  I told her I was going upstairs to have another look around.

  “Sure,” she said. Her old man didn’t even look up.

  Vanetti’s room was second floor front, and when I got into it I just stood there looking around, wondering why I’d come. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on, but that room fascinated me, just the way certain scenes in a movie do things to you. As a room it was worth just about what Vanetti’d paid for it—four bucks a week. The bed was up against one wall, a seedy green carpet covered the floor, and the furniture was heavy old-fashioned stuff salvaged from a junk store somewhere.

  I felt dumb, gaping there. Something in that room was getting me down. I walked around it slowly, poking at the bed, the bureau. I hefted the chair which Jojo and I’d found overturned on the floor. I decided what the hell, maybe I was crazy. But still I couldn’t shake that feeling.

  I hiked downstairs again, and Mrs. Fretas was still peeling potatoes. I sat down, envying her old man because he looked so all-fired comfortable. A spud dropped with a noisy plop into Mrs. Fretas’ bucket of water and I asked:

  “Did Vanetti have many phone calls?”

  She blinked her eyes at me. She had a face like an inflated basketball and her eyes were like imperfections in the leather. “Phone calls?” she echoed. “Why, no, I don’t think so, officer.”

  “Who was the girl called him last night? Know?”

  She shook her head, very solemn. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did she ever call before?”

  “No. No girl ever call him before, which I know of.”

  “And she didn’t give her name, hey?”

  “She just say, ‘Please, I wish to speak with Mr. Vanetti. You call him to the phone, please.’”

  I was wasting time. Still, that phone call could have been important. I wondered if by any streak of long-shot luck I’d be able to trace it.

  There was another angle, though, which might prove to be more valuable at the moment. I lit a cigarette, watched the skin curl off a potato for a moment, then said: “You have keys to most of your rooms, don’t you, Mrs. Fretas?”

  She said, “Yes,” and labored around to point to a row of hooks on the wall. Each hook held a couple of keys and the keys were tagged.

  “Did Vanetti lose his keys very often?”

  “Oh, no. Just once.”

  “You remember exactly when that was?”

  I didn’t think she would, but after scowling at a potato for a couple of minutes, she surprised me. “Today,” she said, “is Thursday. Now let me see. Mr. Vanetti, he kill himself yesterday, which is Wednesday. The day before that I go to the movies with Mrs. Molinoff. That is Tuesday. So it is Monday Mr. Vanetti lose his key.”

  “Monday, hey?”

  “Monday. I am sitting here reading the noosepaper. My husband, he is go out for some beer. It is maybe ten o’clock when Mr. Vanetti comes in. He goes straight up the stairs. Then he comes down again and he says, ‘Mrs. Fretas, I lose my key I am afraid. You give me another, please, and tomorrow I get a new one made for myself and give your key back to you.’ So I give him my key and he goes upstairs again.”

  “Ten o’clock Monday night, eh?” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he went that night.”

  She shook her head. “No-o. He go to the doctor that afternoon, I remember, because his leg trouble him. But where he go at night …” She shrugged her shoulders.

  I almost had it then. The reason for my queer ideas about that upstairs room, I mean. The doctor. Vanetti’d been to a doctor because his leg troubled him. A couple of years ago Vanetti’d been banged up in an automobile accident which had left him with a limp.

  I almost had it. It came up to me like a wave on a beach whispering closer, closer, and then suddenly receding without having washed out the cobwebs in my brain. Like a name you almost but can’t quite remember. Like a strain of music or a voice on the telephone. Close but not quite.

  I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental picture of Vanetti as I remembered him: Small, thin, ratty in face and figure, dipping along like a two-wheeled cart with one wheel off center. I made fists of my hands and tried to force my brain to think through that last thin layer of mist. But it was no go.

  I sat there, struggling, then gave it up. You can put yourself in a chuckle college that way. I stood up and said good night to Mrs. Fretas and her old man and walked out of there, my face so full of scowl that it ached.

  It was all over town of course that Vanetti’d committed suicide and that didn’t help me a bit. When I asked my questions I got a flock of negative head-shakes for replies and I put those questions to citizens who couldn’t possibly have been so void of information. I asked bartenders in joints where Vanetti had hung out. I asked men who had palled around with him. They just didn’t w
ant to remember. Had any of those mugs seen Vanetti Monday night? Hell no!

  I made a nuisance of myself for two days. I covered the town like an epidemic, visiting every possible place the guy could have been to. But he hadn’t been anywhere. So far as Monday night was concerned Vanetti could have hung himself Monday morning.

  I had a talk with Bill Donahue who’d sat in on my little conference with Nick Lomac and my Chief. Bill didn’t get around much lately. A siege of the flu had taken plenty out of him, and the doctors had warned him to ease up. But he still had the best brain in the department. Put that guy flat on his back, lop off his arms and legs, and with his brain alone he could solve more cases than most of the healthy lads who do their thinking on the hoof. Including me.

  He heard me out and then spent a long time looking at me, with a solemn frown on his rugged face. Finally said, “Why don’t you drop this business, Thompson? After all, Vanetti was just a heel. No one misses him.”

  “And besides,” I said, “I have no proof he was murdered. I can’t even convince myself.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, “what Joe Evans told me. Keep out of dark alleys. Pull in my horns before someone breaks them off and rams them down my throat. Okay, Bill. You want me to go on living, and I like you for it. On the other hand I’m single—no wife, no kids—and I’m an insatiable glutton for punishment. And this thing has me goofy.”

  He did his best to dissuade me, and he failed. I’m a sap. I’m a dope. I’m always going into barrooms and gulping down some screwy concoction the barkeep claims will knock your hat off.

  So Bill said, “Well, if you must find out where Vanetti was Monday night, try number 10 Casavant Street. And be careful.”

  I thanked him. On my way I bumped into Jojo Evans. “Listen, you,” I snorted. “When do we get a look at those pictures of the room and body?”

  “I’m gonna do them up tonight,” he informed me.

  I told him he’d better.Then I drove out to Casavant Street.