“I went out to her place three different times of day, wondering whereabouts the stones could be, and every time the soup was cooking on the stove. That didn’t seem natural.”
“You’re a clever cop, O’Malley.”
“You tell ’em that at headquarters, will you?” he replied. “I’ve been trying a long time now to get somebody to think that, and I ain’t found nobody that will believe me yet.”
THE LOCKED DOOR
Originally published in Collier’s, October 12, 1932.
“You like a case where there ain’t nothing to go on,” O’Malley said, “and now I got one. This is a case where a guy without no clothes on was found dead in an apartment that ain’t occupied by anybody. There don’t nobody know who he was and nobody seen him go into the building, so it looks as though we won’t find out much about it. Here’s the place.”
It was a cheap but fairly respectable building on the West Side, renting furnished apartments. Although it was five stories high there was no elevator. We walked up two floors to an apartment in the rear. A uniformed officer was on duty there.
“What about this case?” O’Malley asked him.
“You know as much as me. This guy had no business in the building. He came in here and either somebody came in with him or somebody was waiting for him and bunged him on the head. Then they took the clothes off him and walked out with ’em.”
“That seems a strange thing to do,” I said. “I suppose it was done to prevent identification.”
“You got as good a right to guess as anybody.”
There were old bloodstains, but no other evidence that anyone had been there. The windows looked out on a deserted court, and the undisturbed dust on the furniture showed that we would find no fingerprints. Evidently it was a long time since the apartment had been occupied. We had seen nobody in the halls as we entered the building, and many of the apartments were plainly empty.
“All the people in this building been questioned,” the cop informed us, “and none of ’em, or the janitor, ever seen this dead guy before.”
“We’ll see the janitor ourselves,” O’Malley decided.
* * * *
We had some trouble finding him. We knocked on several doors, at most of which we got no response, and finally located him in his living quarters in the basement. He was a huge, rather brutal-looking man, who plainly resented being questioned.
“How long since anybody lived in that place?” O’Malley asked him.
“T’ree mont’.”
“Was it locked when the dead guy got in there?”
“Yah. Always lock’.”
“Who had the keys?”
“I had him.”
“Were the keys you had the only ones to the place?”
The janitor scowled at us. “I get back two key. That’s right. Maybe somebody gets key made and I don’t know. It’s the same lock because nobody live there.”
“What does he mean, O’Malley?” I inquired.
“I guess he means that when they rent an apartment they change the lock and give the tenant two keys. Sometimes tenants get extra keys made and he don’t know about it. This is the same lock that was on the place when the last tenant occupied it, because it has been vacant. . . . How’d you come to go in there today when you found the dead guy?” he asked the janitor.
The janitor peered at us a long time silently. “I just go in,” he answered finally.
“What was the name of the people who last lived there?”
“I think Andris.”
As we were leaving, the janitor’s wife came in. She was a coarsely pretty kid and she sparkled with costume jewelry. We went back upstairs to the entrance of the building.
“That janitor isn’t telling all he knows, O’Malley,” I declared. “He seems to be the only one who had access to that apartment and, according to his story, he just ‘happened’ to go in there and find the dead man. It doesn’t sound right to me. He’s married to a flirtatious woman about half his age, and that always causes trouble. The janitor’s a lot smarter than he acts.”
“Yeah; he’s smart, all right. The guy had been dead three days. I don’t think the dame had nothing to do with it, and I guess we won’t get nothing out of the janitor. We’ll call up headquarters and get them started looking for those Andris people.”
“You think they may have kept a key?”
* * * *
We went to a drug store on the corner and O’Malley called up headquarters and came out of the booth smiling.
“They got the guy identified,” he stated. “Every once in a while headquarters ain’t so dumb. The chief thought, because his clothes was gone, he might be a rent collector; so they called up the building management companies and they learned a guy named Millen, that worked for a company called Lincoln & Wells, had been gone three days. So somebody from their office went down and recognized him.”
“Explain why they thought that because of the clothes.”
“Rent collectors is cagey guys, always looking to be held up; so they put money in their shoes and in their hats and sometimes they wear a money belt.”
“Yes,” I said, “and rent collectors go around in buildings and in that way meet a lot of women. I stick to the idea of the janitor’s wife. You’re wasting time, O’Malley, if you don’t arrest the janitor.”
“You got a lot of ideas. I wish some of ’em was good ones. We’ll go see Lincoln & Wells.”
We went to the office of the building management company and saw Mr. Wells.
“What did Millen go to that building for, Mr. Wells?” O’Malley asked him.
“That’s inexplicable. That building is not under our management and he cannot have gone there on business. He was undoubtedly carrying several hundred dollars, and he was a careful man, and I cannot imagine his going into a building he knew nothing about.”
“You tell us what his job was.”
“Most of the tenants in buildings which we manage pay their rent by check or come here to the office and pay it. Every month there are a number who, for various reasons, are delinquent. Millen called on those people and collected the rent when possible and, if they could not pay, received their explanations.”
“You know where he would have gone that day?”
“Approximately.”
* * * *
Wells sent for a list and showed it to us. It gave the street numbers of something over half a dozen buildings and the names of several times that number of tenants. There were some folders on Wells’ desk with a map of that part of New York, and O’Malley took one and marked the location of the buildings on it with a lead pencil.
We came out of the place.
“What’s the idea?” I asked.
“A guy that’s got a job like Millen had don’t do any more traveling than is necessary. He might start at the building nearest the office and work away from it, or he might start farthest away and work back. Anyway, I figure he’d take ’em in some regular order. I’m going around to ’em and see if we can find out where he went that day.”
We went to the building nearest to the office. It was on West End Avenue. Millen, it proved, had been there between nine and ten o’clock on the morning of the murder. All the tenants who were behind in their rent had seen him. At the second building, which was on Eightieth Street, and the third on Eighty-sixth, it was the same way. At the fourth building none of the tenants had seen Millen in several weeks.
“I begin to see through this,” I commented. “After Millen left the building on Eighty-sixth Street he would naturally have come here. He never got here, so whatever happened to him began somewhere between.”
“You try to make it easy. We’re only guessing he’d have come here. We don’t know where he went when he left that building.”
“What were you expecting to find?” I asked.
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“I thought maybe we’d find some building where some of them had seen Millen and some of ’em hadn’t; then we’d know that what happened to him started in that building. Well, I’m going to quit and start again tomorrow.”
I met him the next day.
“Headquarters dug up something that might interest you,” he told me. “This Andris family that lived in that apartment went to South America when they left there.”
“Then it doesn’t matter whether they kept a key or not.”
“It looks that way.”
“So,” I said triumphantly, “we come back to the janitor who was the only one who did have a key.”
“I don’t guess he had anything to do with it.”
We took up where we had left off the night before and visited another building. The tenants had not seen Millen.
“We’ve got only one building left,” O’Malley said. “It’s on Amsterdam Avenue and there’s only one guy there ain’t paid his rent, and I can’t fit it in how Millen would have went there.”
“The Eighty-sixth Street building,” I said, “is nearest the one where the body was found. You can take it from me that he went directly from Eighty-sixth Street, where we lost track of him, to where they found him.”
“We’ll finish the job, though, by going to this Amsterdam Avenue place.”
We went out there. The one tenant who had not paid his rent was named Jaklin. A large-framed blond woman opened the door and her husband, who was a heavy-featured, unintelligent-looking man, sat by a window reading a newspaper. O’Malley made his usual inquiry.
“If you’re from Lincoln & Wells,” the man said, “I went to their office and paid my rent yesterday. Show ’em the receipt, Hilda.”
The woman brought the receipt.
“That’s all right,” O’Malley told them. “I guess you promised Millen that you’d do that.”
“We ain’t seen Millen. He ain’t been here for a month.”
“Well, you won’t see him again.”
O’Malley sat down.
“No,” the man agreed. “I saw that in yesterday’s newspaper. Who knocked him off?”
“Nobody knows. But whoever done it picked up a nice piece of money.”
“He had money on him, did he?”
“He’d collected several hundred dollars’ rent, but that wasn’t anything. This guy Millen didn’t believe in banks.”
The man and woman looked at each other. O’Malley got up to go.
“What do you mean, he didn’t believe in banks?” the man inquired with interest.
“He’d lost some money in a bank once, so he didn’t trust ’em. He kept his savings on him. He had about three thousand dollars in bills sewed up inside his clothes, and whoever done the murder must have knew that and took the clothes along.”
We went out.
“Where did you get that information about money in Millen’s clothes, O’Malley?” I asked curiously.
He looked at me with a queer expression. “I heard it this morning. Well, now we’ve been to all these places and got nothing. I’m going over to the precinct station and sit around.”
“If that’s all you’re going to do,” I said, “I’ll leave you.”
“I’d advise you to come along.”
* * * *
We went to the precinct station and O’Malley went into the captain’s room and talked with somebody while I waited outside. He came out again and sat down and we didn’t do anything. At one o’clock I went and got some lunch, but O’Malley wouldn’t go with me, and I brought him back a sandwich. Still we didn’t do anything except talk with the desk officer when he wasn’t answering the phone or talking with somebody else. About three o’clock the phone rang and the officer answered it.
“This is for you,” he told O’Malley.
“Where from?”
“Queensboro Bridge.”
We went out and got into a police car and drove over Queensboro Bridge. When we got near Flushing a plain-clothes cop who was sitting on the curbstone stopped us and got in with us and jerked his thumb toward a side street and we turned that way.
We were near Flushing Bay. There were coal yards and other business places. The tide was out and the wet mud was gleaming, and there were marshes and rank vegetation which hid small shacks. Then we came to a second plain-clothes cop sitting in some bushes. He got up and we followed him and came to a shack, and went around to the door and looked in, and there sat Jaklin pulling apart some muddy clothes. He started up and tried to get away from us but the cops grabbed him.
“All right, fellow,” O’Malley told him. “You’re the guy we want.”
* * * *
“Clear this up for me, O’Malley,” I said, somewhat later. “I saw what you did but I don’t understand it.”
“Why, when we found this Millen was a rent collector, I figured this wasn’t nothing but a case of murder for robbery. Millen was a cautious guy and took no chances, so whatever happened to him happened while he was carrying on his business. But there hadn’t nothing happened in the buildings we went to because the tenants all corroborated each other. They all said he was there and went away, or else that he hadn’t come there. The one place something could have happened to him was at Jaklin’s, because Jaklin didn’t have no corroboration. Jaklin hadn’t paid his rent and after Millen was dead he paid it, but we didn’t have no evidence against him.
“I figured, when Millen came there to collect the rent, Jaklin might have made some excuse to get him to go to the other building with him, and then knocked him off. He took his clothes off to see if he had money hidden, and afterward he carried the clothes away with him to make it harder to identify him. He’d searched the clothes, of course; but when I told him and his wife Millen had money sewed into his clothes, they thought Jaklin must have overlooked it. I guess him and his wife had quite a pretty argument before Jaklin made up his mind to come out here and fish up the clothes again. They tell me he had business pretty often in Flushing and, after he’d killed Millen, he seems to have brought the clothes out and sunk ’em in Flushing Bay. Of course I’d had him watched.”
“But,” I said, still thinking of the janitor, “how did Jaklin get into the apartment? How about the key?”
“I don’t know about the key.”
When we got to the police station they had Mrs. Jaklin there and they took both their pedigrees. When they asked Mrs. Jaklin who her relatives were, she said she had none except a brother in South America.
“Your brother named Andris?” O’Malley asked her.
She saw she’d made a slip and wouldn’t answer; finally she nodded.
“There’s your key!” O’Malley whispered to me. “I guess when Millen come for the rent, Jaklin told him his brother-in-law had the money, and Millen went with him to get it. They probably knocked on the door and got no answer, and it didn’t excite Millen’s suspicions that Jaklin had a key to his brother-in-law’s apartment.”
“Good for you, O’Malley!” I commended. “This was nice work!”
“Yeah? There ain’t nobody but you going to think that. They’re going to think Jaklin was so dumb that anybody could have caught him.”
THE HIGH BRIDGE
Originally published in Collier’s, November 12, 1932.
“This is that case,” said O’Malley, “that ain’t never been solved yet, of the society guy that got killed in his apartment. It might be that you remember it. Renand his name was, and they thought his wife killed him but they could never get enough proof even to arrest her. These were pretty gay folks and they had an apartment in New York, and a house in Westchester and knew a lot of other gay guys and went to parties. Him and her had went to a party that night and gone home and he got shot.”
“Certainly I remember it,” I said. “There was stir enough about it. She said burglars did it. S
ome jewels were missing and were never found, but there was no other sign of burglars and nobody believed her. What’s reopened that case?”
“Mrs. Renand herself got killed last night. She wouldn’t go near the apartment after her husband got shot, and she lived in Westchester, but she come in town a lot. Last night she was driving herself homo from a party she had went to in Manhattan and her car went off the high bridge above the Speedway.
“What’s that got to do with whether she killed her husband?”
“Not a thing; but us cops have to act wise. They want to know did she maybe leave something that would show she killed him. I won’t find nothing because she was too smart a dame to leave evidence around.”
* * * *
On the way out to Westchester we stopped to look at the spot where it had happened.
A section of the heavy iron railing of Washington Bridge was being repaired and had been replaced by planks, and the car had gone through the planks. Far below us we could see the treetops and the Harlem River and the Speedway, and we could see marks on the driveway where the car had landed, but the car had been taken away.
“It must be a terrible sensation,” I said in a hushed voice, “to be in a car and feel it plunging from a height like this! O’Malley, do you think she did it on purpose?”
“How come?”
“She killed her husband and it has weighed on her ever since until it became too much for her. Last night, driving home alone, she saw the gap in the rail and drove her car through it.”
“Yeah? If this lady felt bad because her husband got killed she never showed it, and if you think she was the kind that would knock herself off you ought to be locked up. Outside of them two things you might be right.”
We went to the garage where they had taken the car. It had been a jewel-like piece of work but now all you could tell was that it once had been an automobile. I was interested in seeing what had happened to a car which had fallen from such a height. The motor had been shattered into fragments, but the gasoline tank was intact though battered, the horn would sound and the gear-shift still worked, as I ascertained by shifting it.
The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK Page 6