Fuller shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “It could have been almost any hotel and the right room number or I could have had the whole thing wrong or he could have given it to me wrong. He probably had him a couple of drinks.”
“Probably,” Gibby said dryly. “Give it to us step by step. He called you and you came down here. You didn’t call him from the lobby or anything like that. You went right up to the room.”
“He said I should. He said he would be expecting me.”
“So you just stepped into the elevator and went up to the fifth floor.” Gibby waited for a response to that. He had none. Fuller was also waiting. There was a painfully long silence. Brady broke it.
“Mr. Gibson asked you a question,” Brady growled.
“I didn’t know it was a question. How else would I go up there? I took the elevator and went up to five.”
“When?” Gibby asked.
“Just now. Maybe a couple of minutes before you picked me up. How long does it take to ride up to five, go to Room 509, see I’m in the wrong place and start down again?”
“It hardly matters, since you didn’t do that,” Gibby said.
“I don’t know what I can do to convince you.” Fuller was still trying. Gibby put an end to it or tried to. “Let’s quit kidding around,” he said. “For the past hour or more the elevator operators have been very careful about taking people to the fifth floor. Other floors, yes, but for five they have to know you have business here. That means either that you used the stairs or you were up there for more than an hour. Either way it isn’t good, Art, but we’ll have to know which it is.”
“The stairs,” he finally said. “I used the stairs.”
“Why?”
He looked Gibby straight in the eye. “Mr. Gibson,” he said, “all I can tell you is I’m not out of line. I haven’t been for a minute. I’m not answering any questions.”
“That’s pretty silly, Art,” Gibby said gently.
“That’s the way I am—silly.”
Gibby went wearily toward the elevators. “All right, Brady,” he said. “We’ll take him back upstairs.”
We rode up in silence. None of us was disposed to kick it around for the elevator boy’s benefit. As we went along that fifth-floor corridor again, however, Art Fuller did ask a question.
“Do I get to know what I’m supposed to have done?” he asked.
Gibby shot back a question of his own. “Do we get to know what you’ve been doing?”
“No,” Fuller said. “That’s out.”
He had his hat brim pulled down and his coat collar was still turned up, but now there was no question that he was trying to lose himself between the two. It was obvious.
Gibby remarked on it. “You’re hiding from somebody,” he said. “Who?”
“Hiding?”
It was by no means convincing. He made it sound innocent enough, but he wasn’t coming out from between his hat and his coat collar.
“That’s right,” Gibby growled. “You aren’t answering any questions.”
We came to Room 524 and went in. The boys were about through in there, but they had not yet removed the body. Ellerman was there and reported that the Gleason pants had produced nothing and had been restored to Albert Gleason. I was watching young Fuller. He had taken a careful look around the room and then he had taken off his hat. He wasn’t hiding any more. Now he was curious. He was frightened. He was sunk but also he was curious. He looked to me like a bewildered kid in a bad spot.
The body was covered, but Gibby uncovered it. He called the kid over to look at it. Art Fuller looked.
He moaned. “No,” he whispered. “Oh, no, no.” He shut his eyes and shook his head. His face had gone bloodless. I noticed his lips. They had turned gray. He opened his eyes and looked again. Sinking his teeth into his lip, he turned away.
“You know this man?” Gibby asked.
The boy managed a whisper of voice. “No,” he said. “No. I don’t know him.”
“Taking it hard,” Gibby remarked, as he covered the body again.
Fuller had taken a grip on himself. “The man’s dead,” he said. “Do you want me to laugh?”
“I’d rather you talked,” Gibby said.
“I can’t. Even if it’s murder, I can’t.”
Gibby dropped him. He went off and talked to Brady. I drifted after them, but I was watching the Fuller kid as I went. He stood over the covered body and his head was bent. He could have been looking at the sheet that was drawn over the late Homer G. Coleman; but a man can look without moving his lips. Art Fuller’s lips were moving. I had a hunch he was praying.
“We can turn him loose,” Gibby was saying. “If he’s loused up his parole, we might as well get something out of it before we throw the book at him. I’d say let’s see where he leads us.”
Brady shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Give me a little time. I’ll fix him up with a tail.”
Gibby nodded. We left Art Fuller to stew over it a little while, and we looked around at the rest of the suite. There were two bedrooms and two baths, on either side of the sitting room. One of these was empty and it didn’t look like much. There seemed to be spillings of face powder everywhere and everywhere towels smeared with lipstick.
We went back through the sitting room to have a look at the other bedroom and bath. Art Fuller had found a place to sit down. He was sitting with his head in his hands. He looked as though he might be thinking hard.
Gibby tapped him on the shoulder. “Ready to be sensible?” he asked
Fuller raised his head and looked at him. I have never seen anyone look more miserable.
“I don’t know the man,” he said dully.
“And what brought you here?”
“I can’t answer that. I wish I could.”
We left him to think some more; and we went to look at the other bedroom and bath. These were much the same as the others, the same indications of overpopulation. Here, however, the bedroom was in use. Lansing was in there and he still had Cary Willard with him. They were hovering solicitously over a third man. The third man was lying on one of the beds, and he had a wet hand towel folded across his eyes and forehead. There was also a cop in the room, but he was just there. He didn’t seem to be participating. He just seemed to be rather bored.
The man on the bed was wearing the uniform. He had his coat off, but it was neatly hung over a chair and it was another of those dignified gray coats. He had on the white shirt and the hard collar, but his collar was wilted. His tie had been pulled loose and his shirt had been opened at the throat. He was a beefy man of medium height, and I should have said that normally he would be a slightly pudgy, pink-faced chap.
Just then he was slightly pudgy but he wasn’t pink faced. His face was grayish and it glistened with sweat.
Gibby spoke to the cop. “Who’s he?” he asked.
“Name’s Sully,” the cop said. “James Sully.”
“What happened to him?”
“Been putting his lunch.”
“Drunk?”
The cop shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sick. He found the body. He’s been taking it hard.”
Lansing was paying no attention to us or to Gibby’s exchange with the cop. He sat by the bed and patted James Sully’s shoulder. Cary Willard was less concerned with the recumbent Mr. Sully. He did hear and he made it evident that he didn’t like it. Cary Willard bristled.
“Mr. Sully was very fond of Mr. Coleman,” he said. “Mr. Sully has had a terrible shock.”
Gibby nodded. “Has a doctor seen him?” he asked.
“Naturally,” Cary Willard answered.
“Then he’s all right?” Gibby asked.
“He has had a terrible shock, Mr. Gibson,” Willard said again. “Surely you can understand that.”
Gibby went over to the bed. “I would like to ask him a few questions,” he said.
Lansing looked up. “We have talked to him,” he said. “I can answer your questions. The man
is terribly upset.”
Brady came in. He spoke to Gibby. “Lined up,” he said. “Anytime you want to turn him loose.”
Gibby nodded. “All right,” he said. “Have another try at getting him to talk. If he won’t give, let him go.”
Brady went out to the sitting room, and Willard spoke up.
“He saw nobody and he saw nothing,” Willard volunteered. “He’s told us his whole story.”
“I won’t disturb him much,” Gibby said.
He turned back to the bed. Lansing now took the arm of the man who was resting. He shook it gently.
“Jim,” he said softly. “Can you pull yourself together a bit? We have some gentlemen from the District Attorney’s office, and they would like to ask you a few questions.”
Gibby then addressed himself to Sully. The effect was disquieting. That wet towel over the man’s eyes made it curiously hard to talk to him. It set up a strange sort of blankness for Gibby to talk at. “I’m Assistant District Attorney Gibson,” he said, and I noticed that in speaking to Sully he raised his voice. I’ve noticed people doing that when they speak to the blind.
“Yes, Mr. Gibson,” Sully murmured. His voice was husky and it had a marked tremor in it.
“You found Mr. Coleman’s body?”
“Yes, I did.”
He barely got the words out and he had to pause in the middle of them and run his tongue over his lips.
“Out here in the sitting room?”
“Yes.”
“You are one of the bank officers?”
“No, sir. I’m not an officer.”
Lansing helped him out. “Mr. Sully is one of our chiefs,” he said. “Mr. Sully is chief of Branch Banking. We think very highly of Mr. Sully. He has more seniority than any other chief in the bank and Mr. Sully would be one of our officers if it weren’t for his reluctance to leave the department he grew up with. Mr. Coleman got us to offer Mr. Sully a vice-presidency. He has been trying to persuade Mr. Sully to take it. There has long been a very close bond between them.”
Gibby by-passed the close bond. He was trying to penetrate through the emotional factors to the facts.
“Branch Banking,” he said, speaking to Sully. “Then this suite—it belongs to your department?”
Lansing answered that one, too. “We’ve checked that for you, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “These rooms were taken by Branch Banking.”
“Branch Banking takes the same rooms every year,” Sully volunteered. “The department has a lot of girls. We need a bigger suite.”
“Mr. Coleman was invited up here?” Gibby asked.
“Mr. Coleman always came up and had a drink with the boys and girls, I understand. He knew they’d feel badly if he didn’t. All of us in Branch Banking, we were crazy about Mr. Coleman.”
The tremor in his voice was more marked, and as he spoke the name of the dead v. p. his voice broke in something like a small, dry sob.
“Then you would say he had a standing invitation?” Gibby asked.
“Yes,” Sully answered. “They asked him every year.”
“Just whom do you mean by they?”
“All of my kids. Like today. He dropped by the department this afternoon and he said he’d see us tonight. The kids said of course he’d come up and have a drink with them in the room and he said of course he wouldn’t miss it. It was like that all over the department, everybody asking him, him telling everybody of course he would. It was always like that, with Mr. Coleman.”
Gibby broke in on him. “The kids did all the asking,” he said. “What about you? Didn’t you want him up here?”
It was all too evident that the question shocked James Sully deeply. That anyone should so much as suggest that he wouldn’t have wanted Homer G. Coleman to come up and take a drink with him left him speechless with outrage. He pulled himself together to explain.
“This is the first time I have attended any of these parties,” he said. “I am on a diet and I don’t go to dinners and I don’t know how to dance. I was here tonight only because Mr. Coleman urged me to come. He said it would be good for morale in Branch Banking for me to be here. He said I would enjoy myself.”
He broke down again. This time it was clearly a sob.
“So he came up to have a drink with you,” Gibby said, riding past the sob. “Where were you when he came up?”
“I was downstairs in the ballroom. I thought I’d ask him to come up but I didn’t see him anywhere down there, so I came up here. I dropped in here at the suite to see how the kids were doing. None of them were here. Nobody was here—nobody but Mr. Coleman. He was—he was…” At that point he broke down completely. He turned his head, burying his face in the pillow.
“Take it easy a while,” Gibby advised.
“I wanted a smoke,” Sully said. “In my coat.”
We all glanced toward his coat where it hung on the back of the chair. A couple of fat, black cigars protruded from the breast pocket. Lansing smiled at him.
“You’re in no shape now for one of those cigars of yours,” he said. “Better try a cigarette.”
Lansing whipped out a handsomely tooled gold cigarette case. Willard whipped out a cigarette lighter. Between them they supplied Sully with his smoke. He took a deep drag on the cigarette and then remembered to murmur his thanks. Resolutely he went on with his story. It wasn’t easy for him. He told it haltingly and several times he had to fight down emotion before he could resume speaking; but he forced himself through it, and when he finally had the whole of it out, it added up to very little.
He had come into the sitting room and had found the body. Coleman’s body had been face down on the floor, and Sully hadn’t had even the first thought of death. He had been upset and now he was wryly aware of the irony of it.
“I thought it was one of our men,” he said. “I thought he was drunk. I was terribly upset. You know these rooms up here can get to be a very bad thing if we aren’t very careful. Everybody must co-operate on keeping things decent, and getting drunk and falling down unconscious just wouldn’t do. I hurried to get him up, but then I saw the strap around his neck and then I knew he wasn’t drunk. I didn’t even look to see if he was dead. I didn’t look to see who it was. I tried… I tried…”
At that point it was a breakdown that was complete. He had come to a hurdle he couldn’t get over.
Gibby helped him over it. “You tried to take the strap off,” he said, “but you couldn’t loosen it without first tightening it.”
“I didn’t,” Sully said quickly. “I was ready to and then I remembered that I’d have to jerk it tighter to get the buckle loosened. I couldn’t do that. I turned him over and I saw he was dead. I saw it was Mr. Coleman.”
“You saw he was dead?” Gibby asked. “Just what do you mean by that? How did you see?”
That was another one it was hard for Sully to answer. “I listened for his heart,” he said, choking on the words. “It wasn’t beating and he wasn’t breathing.”
Gibby nodded. “What did you do then?” he asked.
“I picked up the telephone and I had Mr. Willard called.”
“Why Mr. Willard?”
“Mr. Willard knows what to do about things like this,” Sully said, and he sounded as though he might be thinking he was explaining the obvious.
Cary Willard evidently recognized that it might be something less than obvious. He hastened to correct any impression we might form that murder was a common, everyday thing in his life.
“I handle all public relations for the bank,” he explained. “That means that generally the extraordinary and the distressing situations come to me. It had never been murder before this.”
That was the whole of it. Cary Willard had called the police. Cary Willard had called Nicholas Cooper Lansing upstairs. Cary Willard had taken charge.
Gibby went through the other necessary questions, but all the rest of what he had from Jim Sully was negative. Sully had seen no one enter or leave the suite of rooms. He had mad
e no attempt to look for anyone, however, since he had felt he must stay with the body. He had not looked in the bedrooms or the bathrooms. He had simply waited with the body until Cary Willard had arrived.
“I would think people might be popping in and out of here all the time,” Gibby remarked.
Sully shook his head. “I locked the door,” he said. “I kept it locked until Mr. Willard came and then he locked it after himself. We opened only for Mr. Lansing and then for the police.”
“Anybody try to get in while you were waiting?”
“A couple of times people tried the doorknob, but when they saw the door was locked they went away,” Sully said.
“Nobody wanted to know why the door was locked?”
Sully flushed. “They would guess there was a couple in here,” he said. “They would guess it was a couple wanted things private, didn’t want anybody busting in on them.” He turned to Lansing and explained further. “It’s been like that in some of these rooms tonight,” he said primly. “It’s the kids, but they are getting out of hand.”
Lansing shook his head dolefully. It was clear that Homer Coleman was an irreparable tragedy. This was something else. This was a situation with which the president of Fiveborough National was going to have to cope.
Cary Willard put his tongue through a small series of deprecatory clicks. Then, having done his duty by the proprieties, he volunteered to Gibby a small morsel of information.
“I locked the door after me, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “As soon as I had satisfied myself that Homer was really dead and that there was nothing we could do for him, I called down and had them ask Mr. Lansing to come up. I also called the desk and had a doctor sent up and I called the police. The calls did not take me any time, and after I’d finished with them I went through into both bedrooms and locked the bedroom doors. I thought it better not to have people coming in on us until the police would be here and could take control of the situation. Both bathroom doors were standing ajar. There was no one in either bedroom or either bathroom then.”
“Thank you,” said Gibby.
We pulled out of there. Some time later, when we were ready to leave the hotel, I noticed that the party was about over. We went out the Park Avenue entrance.
The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends Page 4