“Very interesting,” I commented—“if it had anything to do with anything else.”
“That’s right. It would be. Anything been done to this bus since when it fell?” O’Malley asked the garage attendant.
“No, buddy; that’s what I call a wreck. We picked her up with a crane and set her on a truck, and picked her off of the truck and set her there.”
We got back into our car and drove to Westchester. The Renand house was not large, but was handsome and stood in carefully kept grounds. There was a middle-aged housekeeper and other servants. A car was parked in the driveway in the yard and a young man was talking with the housekeeper.
“This is a dreadful happening, gentlemen!” the young man said.
“It is that,” O’Malley answered. “What’s it got to do with you?”
“I was engaged to marry her.”
“This is Mr. Innes,” the housekeeper said.
“How long you been engaged to Mrs. Renand?” O’Malley asked.
“About a month.”
“How long had you known her before that?”
“I’ve known her about six months.”
“You didn’t know her before Mr. Renand got shot?”
“No; I didn’t meet her until some months afterward. I didn’t know about this terrible accident until I saw it in the morning paper. Then I went where they had her and afterward I came out here.”
“O. K., Mr. Innes,” O’Malley told him.
We went into the house and the housekeeper went with us.
“What do you think of that guy?” O’Malley asked me. “He’s a good-looking young guy but it don’t make no difference to him if Mrs. Renand shot Renand or not—he wanted to marry her anyway. This Mrs. Renand was the kind of dame that sets ’em crazy, and I bet there’s half a dozen other guys that felt the same about her. You’d think guys took pleasure being shot at.”
“When a person once gets into trouble you police never let them alone,” the housekeeper remarked.
“We got to do our business, lady.”
The housekeeper made no objection when O’Malley told her he intended to search the house, but she went along to watch us doing it. In a pleasant room on the second floor, connecting with Mrs. Renand’s bedroom, we found a desk whose pigeonholes were filled with letters.
“We might learn something now,” O’Malley stated.
He seated himself at the desk and examined the letters. Occasionally he handed me one to look at. They wore nearly all letters from admiring men.
“This dame was a gay lady,” O’Malley said, “and it looks like she got gayer after her husband died. Here’s letters from this young Innes that we seen downstairs and it was like he said—he only met her a few months ago; and letters from a lot of other guys. Some of ’em sign their names but some sign only their initials. Here’s, one guy wrote to her a lot but not lately, and he signs himself ‘E.’ Who would that be?” he asked the housekeeper.
She took the letter and examined it. “It might be Mr. Ewerson,” she answered. “He used to be here quite a great deal.”
“Yeah? Who’s he?”
“You can see his house from the drive in front of this one.”
Presently O’Malley bundled the letters back into their pigeonholes. “Nothing in those,” he said.
There was nothing else of importance in the desk, If Mrs. Renand had left a confession she had left it somewhere else.
We searched the whole house thoroughly. In a disused bureau under discarded clothes we found a small package wrapped in chamois skin and, as O’Malley unwrapped it, I saw diamonds glistening. There were several rings set with large stones and a brooch set with many smaller ones.
“I don’t remember the description of the jewels which Mrs. Renand said were stolon when her husband was killed,” I remarked, “but I shall be much surprised if these are not the ones.”
“These are the ones, all right.”
“Then Mrs. Renand lied and the case is solved. She killed her husband. She hid the jewels, pretending that a burglar had taken them, and the police failed to find them. Since then, she could not bring herself to destroy them and there was no other way she could dispose of them for fear of their being traced to her.”
“I guess you got the answer,” O’Malley assented.
“So they weren’t so crazy when they sent you out here!” I observed sarcastically.
“No; they was wise guys.”
* * * *
The next morning I read in my newspaper that the Renand case finally had been solved, and I saw with pleasure that O’Malley’s name was mentioned.
I didn’t see O’Malley for a couple of days.
“What are you working on now?” I asked him when I met him.
“Same case.”
I was astonished.
“I got interested,” he explained, “in them guys that wrote her all those letters. I guess I’m a dumb cop to be going around asking questions after the case is solved. I seen most of the guys that wrote her, and I talked with all the people that was at the party that night when she started home alone.”
“Learn anything?” I asked.
“Not a thing. I ain’t seen that Ewerson yet, who signed his letters ‘E’.”
“Was Ewerson at the party?”
“No.”
We went out to Ewerson’s. He was a handsome man of forty with a tired face and weary eyes, and he received us politely but indifferently.
“I got some letters here I want to read you, Mr. Ewerson,” O’Malley told him.
He took from his pocket a packet of letters which I recognized as those which had been in Mrs. Renand’s desk, and read one and then another of them aloud. They seemed to me the sort of letters any man might write to a woman for whom he has an ardent admiration.
“You write those?”
Ewerson took the letters and examined them. “Yes; those are my letters.”
“You wasn’t home the night Mrs. Renand got killed, was you?”
“No. I was in New York and spent the night at a hotel. You’ll find my name on the hotel register.”
“Yeah, I found it. Did you see Mrs. Renand that night?”
Ewerson did not answer.
“You was at the hotel, all right,” said O’Malley, “but I got evidence of a doorman, an elevator operator and a newsdealer that you left the hotel about half past one A. M. and didn’t come back until about two hours later. That was the time when Mrs. Renand had her accident. Now I got something else I want to read to you.”
O’Malley drew from among the letters a gray monogrammed envelope, opened it, and took out a sheet of note paper. I recognized envelope and paper as being like some I had seen in Mrs. Renand’s desk marked with her initials.
“ ‘If I should meet sudden death,’ ” he read, “ ‘you may be certain that the one to be accused is Albert Ewerson. I will not explain why he should desire my death, but my protection is to have this in writing. I shall tell him I have written it!”
I have never seen a man look more utterly weary than Ewerson. He seemed to consider something and come to a decision.
“She never told me she had written that,” he said. “It was—rather like her. It is true, of course. I killed her.”
He looked like a man putting down a burden which he had carried until it had become intolerable.
“You kill Renand, too?”
“Yes—by accident. Mrs. Renand and I had been—rather more than friends, and on the night of his death at the party which we all attended, Renand became suspicious of us. He demanded that I come to his apartment after the party. He was a jealous, violent man and before going to his apartment I obtained a revolver, but I had no idea of attacking him—it was purely for self-defense. I dreaded scandal and on reaching the apartment I avoided the elevator and walked up. R
enand accused us and we admitted it. I was anxious to marry Mrs. Renand if she would leave him, but he grew wild with rage when I suggested that. He threatened me and I drew the revolver to protect myself, and in the struggle for it he was shot. Mrs. Renand fully realized that it had been an accident but we knew that no one else would believe that. No one knew that I had come there. She told me to go away before she gave the alarm and she would try to make it look as though it had been done by a burglar.
“We continued to see each other after that, but we did not dare to marry for fear it would bring up again the question of how Renand had died. Then some months ago Mrs. Renand met young Innes and became infatuated with him. I was losing her. Nothing in the world mattered to me except her, and I could not endure the thought of her belonging to someone else. I begged her for one more interview and, on the night of her death, she agreed that, after leaving the party, she would pick me up and drive me out here.”
* * * *
O’Malley went to the telephone to call headquarters. As he did so, I took from his hand the paper containing Mrs. Renand’s statement, opened it and looked at it. As I expected, there was no writing whatever on the sheet of notepaper.
“I see through most of this, O’Malley,” I said, an hour later, “but not all of it. It’s plain, of course, that you found reason to suspect Ewerson and used the old trick on him of reading an accusation against him which you pretended Mrs. Renand had left. I am surprised, however, that he fell for it.”
“I ain’t sure he did fall for it, but it wasn’t necessary. He seen that we suspected him and would get him sooner or later, and besides, the guy loved this Mrs. Renand and he’d killed her and he doesn’t care what happens to him.”
“Was it his letters that made you suspect him?”
“There wasn’t nothing in the letters. Hut the guy lived close to Mrs. Renand and still he was always writing to her, and when she got engaged to this Innes his letters stopped. I asked about where he had been that night, and he couldn’t be accounted for at the time she got killed.”
“But how did he do it?”
“I figure he done it this way: He’d noticed where the bridge rail was being fixed and that gave him the idea. He knew she was going to the party that night and he got her to pick him up afterward because that late there wouldn’t be much traffic on the bridge. She didn’t have no idea he meant to harm her. He begged her to break her engagement to this Innes and she wouldn’t. When they got near the bridge he made an excuse to get her to stop the car, and knocked her unconscious and run the car off the bridge so it would look like an accident.”
“Yes; and he almost got away with it. By everybody except you it was accepted as an accident. That’s the part of it that I don’t understand.”
“You seen Mrs. Renand’s car.”
“I did,” I said indignantly, “and there was nothing about that piece of wreckage which could tell you anything.”
“You’re always making me think you ain’t very bright. The car was in low gear. You tried the gears yourself and they couldn’t have been jarred from high speed into low. Would any lady run her car off of a bridge in low by accident? It had to be murder or suicide, and this wasn’t no lady that would kill herself. I figured somebody had started the car and then stepped out of it and watched it go off the bridge.”
“That was police work, O’Malley!” I said approvingly, “and you’ll get credit for it because the newspapers have already mentioned you in the case.”
“Sure they mentioned me,” he said, “when we had it solved wrong, but you’ll see they won’t say nothing about me now that we got it solved right.”
TOO MANY ENEMIES
Originally published in Collier’s, February 11, 1933.
“This is one of them vengeance murders,” said O’Malley, “and in this kind of case plenty people know who done it but they all go blind and dumb. I’ll have no luck with it. This dead guy was named Vanelli, and he was only twenty-three years old but already he had so many enemies it was only a question who would get him first. They got plenty cops working on this case.”
“How was he killed?” I asked.
“He got beat up and then stabbed.”
“Where?”
“Right in his own home. This Vanelli got himself suspected of passing info to the cops about some guys he knew that done a little counterfeiting; and, besides that, a guy that he had went with for a long time but had had trouble with got knocked off and the guy’s family thought Vanelli had a hand in it; and when he already had two outfits trying to shove him over, Vanelli goes to Boston and runs off with a girl that was going to marry somebody else.”
“He sounds like a desperate character,” I said.
“The guy got himself so he couldn’t be nothing but desperate. We’ll go and look at him.”
We went. Vanelli seemed to have been an ordinary-looking young man, but it was not easy to tell much about that now. As O’Malley had said, he had been badly beaten up. His nose was broken and his face battered and he had been stabbed five times and the letter Z had been cut on both his cheeks.
“What was the name of the man whose girl he ran away with?” I inquired.
“Zeglio.”
“Well!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “What more do you want?”
“You’re smart.”
They had Vanelli’s clothes there and we examined them carefully. He had been stabbed twice in the back and three times in front, but his clothes were stabbed twice in front and three times in back.
“I suppose,” I hazarded, “that after the first stabbing there was a struggle and his clothes got twisted around his body so that the holes don’t correspond.”
“You can account for everything, can’t you!” O’Malley commented. “We’ll see what Zeglio says about it.”
They had already arrested Zeglio and had him at the station house, so we went there. The station house looked as though they were holding a convention. Vanelli’s parents were there and had identified the body and now wanted to claim it. Besides Zeglio, they had the girl there, and several members of the family who believed that Vanelli had put their relative on the spot, and a number of the men who were suspected of counterfeiting. They all talked at once and I had never seen such excitable people, and most of them seemed to be congratulating one another that Vanelli was dead.
They had Zeglio and the girl kept separate and we talked with her first. She was a beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, with hair black as night and dark limpid eyes, and she couldn’t make the simplest statement without putting emotion into it. Her name was Josephina.
“For why am I kept here?” she demanded passionately before we had a chance to question her.
“They got to have you for a witness, lady.”
“But I know nothing. I have told all. For how long will I be kept?”
“It might be quite a while, girlie. You tell us over again what it was you told them.”
“I told nothing because I know nothing. I was making dinner and wondering when Peter would come home.” Peter was Vanelli. “Then I heard something—like quarreling. Two people. I look out but see no one. Then I heard something like fighting, but I can see nobody. Again a third time I look out, wondering when Peter will come, and Peter is in front of the door.”
“Was he dead?” O’Malley asked.
“Certainly he was dead.”
“Was one of the voices you heard Peter’s?”
“If I had thought that I would have gone to look.”
“Was one of them Zeglio’s?”
“I don’t know. Now I have told everything, so why do you keep me here?”
I was sorry for her.
“That’s a wonderful girl, O’Malley,” I said, after we had left her, “and I don’t wonder there was trouble over her; it’s a shame to keep her locked up.”
“Yeah,
I saw you thought she was a knock-out. You keep on thinking that and you might get a knife pushed into you yourself.”
We questioned Zeglio. He was a small man, dark, quick and muscular.
“You knock Vanelli off?” O’Malley asked him.
“Not me.” Zeglio grinned at us delightedly.
“How long ago did you come from Boston?”
“This time, ten days.”
“You’d been here before, then. When was that?”
“Two months.”
“I see. That was when Vanelli run off with your girl. You came here and looked for them, intending to kill him, but you couldn’t find them. So you went back and ten days ago you came again.”
“Thata right, I keela heem if I geta the chance.”
“And last night you got the chance and stuck a knife in him and left him outside of Josephina’s door.”
“Not me. Some other guy. I looka ten days but I don’t find heem.”
“And this other guy cut your initials in his cheeks?”
Zeglio shrugged. “What a kind guy,” he answered. “He beata me to it.”
We talked with the other people there and they all made the same answer as Zeglio. They admitted that they had intended to kill Vanelli and had been looking for him, but he and the girl had hidden themselves and they had been unable to find him. Now someone else, they said, had killed him, but they didn’t know who. We went to look at the place where it had happened.
It was a rather nice apartment building on the West Side. Vanelli and the girl had had an apartment in the rear. A long hall led through the building and a shorter hall branched off to the door of Vanelli’s apartment. There was blood on the floor of the long hall and more blood in front of Vanelli’s door, and a uniformed cop was on post in the hall and another one in the apartment.
We looked everything over carefully. There were two rooms with a bathroom between them, and someone had spilled a bottle of ink on the floor in front of the bathroom door. Otherwise the place was spotlessly clean. Vanelli’s clothes and the girl’s clothes were hanging in closets, and there was a table set with two places, and the dinner Josephina had been cooking was still on the stove. Some of Josephina’s things had been put into a suitcase. I thought she had been getting them ready to take with her to the police station, and I was indignant that they had hurried her away without them.
The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK Page 7