She couldn’t say any more than that because at that point she began to weep again. O’Malley looked very uncomfortable.
“Yes, ma’am,” he evaded her.
I was glad when we got out of there.
“That’s the trouble with it,” I complained. “Back of the criminal are innocent people—”
“Sure,” O’Malley interrupted. “Do you think you can do something about that? Well, I got his friends’ names that I came out here for, so what I’d ought to do now is go back to Manhattan and question those people; but it ain’t likely he can get away, and that old lady has given me an interest in this case I didn’t have before. Let’s go and look at the scene of this homicide.”
“Where was she killed?” I asked.
“Right there in the house that she thought they were going to buy to live in, with the piece of pipe you seen there in the station house. Some plumber had left it lying handy for him, or else he’d put it there himself to serve his purpose. Let’s go.”
* * * *
We drove to the house, which was in a new real estate development. There were rows of these small houses, all alike, for sale mostly to young married couples. Some were already occupied; others finished but vacant, with “For Sale” signs on them; others were only partly completed, with men still working. Around them were the truck gardens that once had filled the neighborhood and close by were greenhouses.
We had no trouble picking the right house; there were parked cars and people staring at it, and a uniformed officer on the doorstep. There were more cops inside, in plain clothes and uniform; and it was easy to tell the room where it had happened—the freshly laid floor and hardly-dry plaster were stained with dreadful evidence.
“The real estate guy found her,” O’Malley stated. “Auston and her had looked at the place several times before and said they’d buy; so this time nobody came with ’em but they just gave ’em the key. When they didn’t come back to complete the purchase and the key wasn’t returned, the real estate guy came to find out about it. The door was locked but he had another key, and the shades in this room were drawn.”
We went all over the house and O’Malley looked in all the rooms, but we learned nothing more than we already knew.
“What are you doing here, fellow?” one of the plainclothesmen demanded of O’Malley.
“I’m on this case. I’m supposed to be looking for the guy.”
“Well, you don’t expect to find him here, do you? He got through his business here. Why don’t you work on your own island?”
“I guess you’re right, at that,” O’Malley admitted. “I got no business here.”
* * * *
We went out of the house, but we did not return to Manhattan. Instead, we walked all around the neighborhood and O’Malley examined the surroundings closely. Next to the house was a vacant lot with tall weeds growing in it, and O’Malley picked up among the weeds a small, round piece of glass—a mirror. We went back to the house.
“Did you guys find the girl’s vanity?” he asked one of the officers.
“She didn’t have none.”
“Yeah?” O’Malley said. “You’re smart, ain’t you? She was out with her beau that she was going to marry, on an all-day excursion, and she didn’t have no rouge or even powder with her?”
“We didn’t find one, anyway.” the officer said, with less assurance.
We went back and looked thoroughly all about in the weeds but we could not find the rest of the vanity. Finally our search brought us to the door of the greenhouse. Inside, a big man with a watering-pot was sprinkling sweet peas. We stood and watched him. Suddenly O’Malley turned around and went back toward the spot where we had found the mirror, and after going a little way he picked up the vanity.
“You’ve got it now!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, I guess this was hers, all right; it’s got her right initial on it. We couldn’t find it before because we didn’t know where to look. Gee, this is a funny case!”
“Why is it funny?” I inquired.
“It ain’t the way it looks.”
He put the vanity in his pocket and we went back to the greenhouse. The gardener, who was a muscular man with a stolid, foreign look, turned and stared at us.
“This place for sale?” O’Malley asked him.
“Don’t know. The boss ain’t here.”
“When’ll he be back?”
“Maybe two, three days. Don’t know. He been away a week now.”
“You tell him a guy was here might buy the place and find out what he says. Meantime, I want to look at it.”
The greenhouse had a square room with a brick floor, off of which opened a long, dirt-floored gallery, and from this there opened other galleries. We went into the gallery.
“You got nice flowers here,” O’Malley commented to the gardener. But I could see he was not looking at the flowers.
“See if it looks like something was buried here,” he told me sotto voce.
We went through all the galleries, one by one, inspecting them carefully.
“How about it?” he inquired.
“I didn’t see anything suspicious,” I replied; but I didn’t know what we were looking for. We had come back to the room with the brick floor.
“How about here?” he asked.
“You can’t tell here,” I said, “because the floor is brick.”
“Yeah? Well, there’s a way to find it out.”
He picked up the watering-pot which the gardener had been using, filled it at the hydrant and began to pour water on the bricks.
“Hey! what you do there?” the gardener shouted at him, but O’Malley paid him no attention. He filled the watering-pot at the hydrant several times till he had wet all the bricks. Then be stood looking at them. In one place small air bubbles were rising through the water between the bricks, but they stopped as the spot got dry. O’Malley picked up a spade, but now the gardener interfered violently.
“You get out of here!” he shouted. “You got no business here. I put you out!” He grabbed O’Malley and tried to push him out of the greenhouse.
“Go and get some of them cops,” O’Malley directed me.
I did not know what this was all about, but I went to the house and got the cops; I ran. When we returned O’Malley had the gardener backed against the wall and was dislodging some of the bricks. Two of the cops grabbed the gardener and another one helped with the bricks. When they had taken out quite a lot of bricks O’Malley began to dig, while the rest of us peered excitedly down into the hole. They had dug about four feet when O’Malley straightened.
“Well,” he said, “we found the guy they said I was to look for. This guy buried here is Auston. They can tear up their flier calling him a murderer. Put the cuffs on that gardener. We’d ought to find her four thousand dollars somewheres around here—it might be buried in a flowerpot.”
* * * *
“Explain this O’Malley,” I demanded, when we were again in the car.
“You hadn’t ought to need any explaining,” he replied. “You seen it all. Everybody had this case wrong because it looked so simple. This gardener, whose name, they say, is Mellin, looks dumb, but he’s a smart guy. He had the run of the place because his boss is away. Auston and Miss Wells had come out here a lot of times to look at the house, and probably they’d bought flowers here and the gardener talked with ’em. I guess Auston was in love with her all right. He give her a false name at first because answering the ad was just a joke to him, but I hear from these cops that after he got to know her he give her his right name.
“The day they brought the money out, they may have told the gardener they had it or else he saw it in her handbag. He went up to the house with ’em and he knocked ’em both off. He was a smart guy: he knew that if they found Miss Wells and didn’t find Auston. Auston’d be the one
suspected and we’d be trying to find him and look for no one else. Maybe he carried Auston’s body to the greenhouse covered up with canvas; people were used to seeing him working around the place and wouldn’t suspect anything.”
“That’s all plain enough,” I insisted, “but how did you find it out?”
“Why, I was as wrong on this case as anybody when I come out here. Then I found the mirror out of her vanity. Of course it might not be hers; but she wouldn’t be out with her beau without one and they hadn’t found one with her things. I figured the vanity had been thrown away by Auston and the mirror had fell out of it; but I couldn’t find the rest of it because I thought it had been thrown from near the house and was looking in the wrong place. Then we looked into the greenhouse and the gardener was watering sweet peas. I thought, ‘Here’s where she got her flowers; so maybe the vanity got thrown away from this place.’
“I walked from there toward where we’d found the mirror, and there the rest of the vanity was. But if it had been thrown from the greenhouse maybe it hadn’t been thrown by Auston but by someone else. Then what had become of him? Had somebody knocked him off with her? I looked all through the greenhouse to see if there was any sign of ground being disturbed as if Auston had been buried there, but there wasn’t. Then I wet down the bricks. When bubbles came up between some of the bricks and that part of the floor got dry much quicker than any other, because the water ran down through the dirt in the cracks, I knew the bricks had been taken up recently and the dirt between ’em was soft.
“It proved to be like I’d said—the gardener grabbed the vanity out of her handbag with the money. When he took the money out of his pocket to hide it in the furnace-room where we found it, he found the vanity with it. He couldn’t have that around, so he went to the greenhouse door and threw it away. Even if it was found, he figured, they couldn’t connect him with it.”
“That was good reasoning,” I congratulated him, “and this ought to get you promotion.”
“You think so? When them Long Island cops get through telling the newspapers how they caught the guy, you won’t know there ever was a cop from Manhattan on their island.”
THE WRONG HAT
Originally published in Collier’s, July 16, 1932.
“If any guy but me had this case.” said O’Malley, “he’d make himself a name out of it. I won’t because when I get a case like this something unlucky always happens. This is a case of a dead guy riding in a taxicab. Him and some other people took the cab and later the other folks got out and when the taxi-driver got to where he had been told to go he found his passenger had been shot. A lot of other cops are working on the case.”
“Haven’t they any clue at all?” I asked.
“Yeah, they got one thing. The dead guy’s hat don’t fit him. They give me the job to find out why it don’t; so I got to go and look at this guy, but I don’t expect to find out nothing.”
We went and looked at him. He was a coarse-looking man of middle age but he appeared well cared for. His hair had just been trimmed and he was freshly shaven and his nails were manicured. All his clothing was brand-new. His linen was new and never had been laundered.
“I’d say,” O’Malley remarked, “that this guy was dressed up in a way he wasn’t used to.”
The hat, however, was not new. We tried it on the dead man and it proved much too large. O’Malley picked a woman’s long golden hair off the hat and put it in an envelope.
“They are holding the taxi-driver at headquarters as a witness,” he stated. “I guess we got to see him next.”
We went and talked with the taxi-driver.
“You tell us, fellow.” O’Malley invited, “how all this was.”
“Well, mister,” said the taxi-driver, “I was cruising along Madison Avenue about two A. M. and I seen three guys standing on the curb with their arms around each other, singing close harmony, and a lady was watching ’em. So I slows up and the lady stops the cab.
“Two of the guys was in evening clothes and had high hats, and the third one was this guy that is now dead. The lady was in evening clothes too. The three guys got into the cab, still singing, with their arms around one another and staggering so that I seen that they were pretty drunk, and the lady got in afterward. The guys sat on the back seat and kept singing, and the lady sat on one of the little front ones.
“I drove to Park Avenue, like they told me, and the lady and one guy got out there. Then I drove to East Seventieth Street and another guy got out. ‘Take Mr. Sullivan,’ he says, ‘to Riverside Drive and One Hundred and Twentieth Street. That’s where he lives. He’s feeling low now but the drive’ll do him good.’ So I done that. When I tried to wake him up to find which house it was, I seen that he was dead. So then I took him to the police station. That’s all I know about it, mister.”
“Didn’t you hear the shot?” I asked. “There wasn’t no shot fired in my cab. Would I be drivin’ a cab and not know what happened in it?”
“Was these folks old or young?” O’Malley asked him.
“They was all young except the dead guy, but I can’t describe ’em because where they got in, it wasn’t near a street lamp and I couldn’t see ’em very good.”
“Well. O’Malley,” I said, when we had left the driver, “you’ve got a lead anyway. The man’s name was Sullivan and you know the neighborhood where he lived. There was a drunken party and Sullivan got shot. I think it was in the cab. They were all happy when they got into the cab and then there was a drunken quarrel. It is quite possible the driver did not hear the shot; or the last man to leave the cab may have bribed him. Find the last man who left the cab and you’ll have Sullivan’s murderer.”
“Yeah, Sullivan!” O’Malley said. “That’s a good name. Or would you think the name might be Heidenbacher and he lived in Brooklyn? They wouldn’t give the guy’s right name. You ain’t ever very smart! Where did the hat come from? If one of the guys in the cab made a mistake and took the wrong hat, this’d be a high hat, wouldn’t it? And the medical examiner says the dead guy hadn’t had a drink, but he was a drinkin’ man, and I don’t think none of the others had either.”
I was amazed.
“How do you figure it, then?” I asked incredulously.
“I ain’t figuring. I got nothing but a hunch. I think the guy was dead before they ever got into the cab. There was some reason they couldn’t leave him there in Madison Avenue. They were holding him up as if he was alive and then they seen the cab; so they began to sing and act like they were drunk. . . . All that ain’t my present business. I got to take this hat around to all the stores that sell this make of hat and find if anyone remembers selling it.”
* * * *
I went around with him to several stores, but we learned nothing and I presently got tired of it. I left him and met him the next day.
“Made any progress?” I inquired.
“I ain’t made a step. I been to all the stores and nobody remembers this hat because it was sold too long ago. Now I been going to the restaurants around Madison Avenue and showing it to the hat-check people. Would you believe it, I ain’t seen a hat-check girl yet that has gold hair!”
He had the hat in a paper bag. I went along with him. The hat-check girl in the fourth restaurant we visited said quickly:
“Oh, you’ve got Mr. T. O. Annan’s hat. That’s good. His butler telephoned yesterday about it and said I’d given him the wrong hat—though I can’t see how I did it, because I know his hat.”
We went to give Mr. Annan back his hat. It was a fine big house around the corner from Madison Avenue. The butler came to the door and we gave him the hat and he gave us the other one. It was a brand-new hat and the maker’s label was stamped in the leather of the sweatband.
I was amused.
“You’ve traveled a long way, O’Malley,” I said, “without getting anywhere. The hats were exchanged in the
restaurant. I don’t suppose you’ll accuse T. O. Annan, who is over seventy years old and one of the richest and most philanthropic men in New York of knowing anything about this murder.”
“No—I might be dumb, but I ain’t so dumb as that. I’m out of luck, the way I always am.”
* * * *
I didn’t see him for two days.
“Got anything yet?” I asked him when I met him.
“I have got plenty. This dead guy’s name was Klein. The department had his fingerprints but they’d mislaid ’em. He used to be a valet, but now he was a bum and hung out on the Bowery. I thought all along he was a bum in spite of how he was dressed up. I been to the Bowery hotel where he hung out and talked with his friends and now I got to go back to T. O. Annan’s, but first I want to call them up.”
I waited while he telephoned.
“T. O. ain’t home,” he said. “I wanted to be sure of that. Annan’s got a grandson who’s in college, and a granddaughter that lives with him. That’s all his family. The young folks’ name is Cairn.”
“I know that.” I told him.
“Yeah, and I guess all the rest of N. Y. knows it too.”
We told who we were and asked to see Miss Cairn. She was very pale and frightened and about twenty years old, and she had gold hair.
“You’re—the police?” she said.
“That’s right,” O’Malley told her.
He took three worn and greasy letters from his pocket.
“You look at these,” he said, “but you ain’t supposed to tear ’em up.”
She hardly glanced at them and then began to weep. “You’ve read them?” she inquired.
“Sure. I had to read ’em because I am a cop. Now don’t you think you’d better tell us all about it?”
“I’ll have to, now that you’ve seen these. He shot himself. I know you won’t believe it. I don’t expect anybody ever to believe it. Of course he didn’t mean to. It is all too terrible! Grandfather always thought that Mother was perfect; she was his only daughter and he thinks that she was wonderful and it would almost kill him if he thought that she was not.
The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK Page 4