The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK

by Walter MacHarg

  “What do you make of it, O’Malley?” I asked.

  “I don’t make nothing of it. This case is like I said; everybody we talked to has been lying, and you can’t solve a case where nobody tells the truth.”

  “At least one of them is lying,” I agreed, “because one of them killed Vanelli. But the others, in that case, would be telling the truth, and I am quite sure that Josephina told it.”

  “Yeah? How do you figure that?”

  “The quarreling she heard was in the long hall where she couldn’t see the speakers. Vanelli was killed there. Afterward the murderer carried or dragged him into the short hall and put him in front of the door, and when Josephina looked out she found him.”

  “You make it sound pretty good.”

  I was pleased at his commendation, so I went on: “I have come to the conclusion, O’Malley, that it was done by Zeglio.”

  “All right; let’s hear it.”

  “At first I thought the Z’s on Vanelli’s cheeks meant that someone was trying to throw suspicion on Zeglio and meant he really hadn’t done it; but this was a murder of revenge. A man seeking revenge is willing to take a risk if there is someone whom he wants to have know he did it. Zeglio wanted Josephina to know. What, do you think of that?”

  “I guess it deserves consideration. . . . Who spilled the ink on the floor?” O’Malley asked the officer.

  “Search me,” the officer replied. “It was that way when we come here.”

  O’Malley scraped up some of the ink and put it in an envelope.

  “Anything been taken away from here?” he asked the officer.

  “Not a thing except the dead guy. We was told to keep it like it was.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked O’Malley.

  “People like this Vanelli and Josephina always have pictures of their folks around, and the first thing a guy like him does if he runs away with a girl is get his picture taken with her. Well, where’s the pictures?”

  I myself was surprised a little, now that he spoke of it. There was not a picture in the apartment. There were several photographers in the neighborhood, and after we came out of the apartment we went around to them and O’Malley asked them if any of them had taken a picture of Vanelli and Josephina. None of them had. As we were leaving the last place he noticed several different-sized small pictures of a darkhaired girl and asked the photographer about them.

  “You sell any of these?” he questioned.

  The photographer said he could not sell them, until O’Malley showed him his badge; then he agreed, and O’Malley picked out two of different sizes and we took them back to the apartment and gave them to the cop in the hall, but I couldn’t hear what O’Malley said to him.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “There wasn’t no pictures in the place, so I told the cop to put some there.”

  “That sounds like a silly performance to me.”

  “That’s right; it might turn out to be silly.”

  “What I like least in this case,” I said, “is your keeping Josephina locked up.”

  “You’ll get that knife in you yet if you keep on thinking about her.”

  “She hasn’t done anything,” I said, “and it is clear now that she told the truth. I admit that she eloped with Vanelli and was living with him without being married to him, but that was to get away from Zeglio. She and Vanelli undoubtedly meant to get married, and I don’t blame her for what she did under the circumstances. But now you have her locked up, and the way you are going about it there seems no chance of Vanelli’s murder being solved, so there is no telling how long she’ll have to stay there, or what people are going to think about her. You’re putting a stigma on the girl which she doesn’t deserve.”

  “I was thinking maybe we’d ought to let her go.”

  “If you’re afraid of losing track of her you can have her watched.”

  We went back to the police station and O’Malley went into the captain’s office but I stayed outside. I knew he was arranging to have Josephina released, and I would have been glad to have her know that I had had a hand in it, but I didn’t get the chance to tell her.

  When he came out we went back to the apartment, hut we didn’t go in. Instead we went into a shoe-repair place across the street. The proprietor asked what we wanted done to our shoes, but O’Malley told him “nothing,” and we just sat and waited.

  “Are you having her watched?” I asked.

  “I guess we know where she’ll go.”

  Presently I saw Josephina come along the street and go into the building opposite, and a plainclothesman who had been following her came in and sat down with us.

  “Will the cops in there interfere with her?” I asked.

  “There ain’t no cops in there. I had ’em taken off.”

  * * * *

  In about an hour Josephina came out of the building very hurriedly. She had her suitcase with her and she seemed much excited. She got into a cab, and after she had driven away we got into another cab and followed her. She went to the Bronx. The cab stopped in front of a rooming-house and the cabman carried in her bag for her, and after he had gone away we went in after her.

  We could hear Josephina in one of the rooms talking loudly, and we listened for a moment. Then O’Malley and the other plainclothesman kicked down the door, and a handsome, reckless-looking young man to whom Josephina had been speaking violently jumped up at sight of us. Pieces of the photographs which O’Malley had bought were scattered on the floor.

  “Okay, Vanelli,” O’Malley said to the young man. “We want you for murder.”

  “This is all a mystery to me, O’Malley,” I said about an hour later. “I can’t see through it.”

  “What can’t you see?” he asked. “This Vanelli was on the spot and he knew it. Him and the girl hid out, but he had too many people after him, and he knew wherever he went one of ’em would find him, and they were getting closer to him all the time. He figured if they thought he was dead they’d quit looking. We don’t know yet who the dead guy was and we might never find out. There’s plenty guys right now around the streets that got no jobs and their folks don’t know where they are, and there’s nobody to ask questions if one of ’em disappears. I guess Vanelli picked out one of ’em that looked something like himself and made some excuse to get him to go home with him—it might be he offered him a meal. When they got to the apartment Vanelli knocked him off. Then him and Josephina dressed the guy in Vanelli’s clothes and Vanelli lit out, taking the guy’s clothes with him, and Josephina give the alarm.”

  “So Josephina was in it with him?” I asked, depressed.

  “I wouldn’t wonder if Vanelli planned it all himself and she didn’t know nothing about it till it had been done; but then she backed him up the same as his parents did. Vanelli’s parents seen it wasn’t their son, but they identified him anyway so that Vanelli could get away, and whatever other people saw him didn’t know him very well and didn’t question it being him because his parents said so. I told you this was a case where you had to figure that everybody was lying. I figure the murder happened inside the apartment in front of the bathroom door. Vanelli stabbed the guy and pushed him into the bathroom where it was all tile and the blood could be washed up. I guess they undressed and dressed him in the bathtub. Some blood got on the floor outside the bathroom door where he was stabbed, and it couldn’t be washed up clean and so they poured ink on it. I got some of the ink off the floor being analyzed now to see if they find blood in it and I’m sure they will.”

  “But,” I said, “you seem to have realized from the first that the dead man wasn’t Vanelli. How was that?”

  “Why, the guy was wearing his own clothes when he got stabbed, and then they dressed him in Vanelli’s clothes and they had to poke holes in them; but it was a hard job to get the holes exactly where the wound
s was, and they didn’t get it right. If he wasn’t wearing Vanelli’s clothes when he got killed, he wasn’t Vanelli. They put blood off the guy’s clothes in two places in the hall to make it look as if the murder happened outside the apartment, and Vanelli cut the Z’s in the guy’s cheeks so we’d think it was done by Zeglio.

  “I guess Vanelli and the girl had it planned to meet later in some other city and start over where they wasn’t known. She was altogether too anxious to get released by the police so she could join him; but we couldn’t let her go for fear she’d disappear. Then I and you went to the apartment. They had to leave Vanelli’s clothes there so as not to excite suspicions, and her things were there too. If she was released, she’d have to go there to get her things and when she did that she’d go through Vanelli’s clothes to be sure there wasn’t nothing being left in ’em.

  “I didn’t know whether she knew where Vanelli was or not; but I figured she was the kind of girl that, if she found some other girl’s picture in Vanelli’s clothes, would forget about everything else until she had found out about it. So I got a couple of pictures of another girl and had one of the cops put ’em in Vanelli’s pockets. She found ’em, all right; and she went straight to Vanelli to get an explanation about ’em.”

  “It was a remarkable case,” I said, “and I’m surprised that you got the answer to it so quickly.”

  “Sure. It’s a swell case, but too many other cops was working on it. You watch and see who they say figured this all out. It won’t be me.”

  NO FINGERPRINTS

  Originally published in Collier’s, March 18, 1933.

  “The case I got now,” O’Malley said, “a girl got murdered. This was in Greenwich Village. She went and took a couple of rooms and told the landlady she was going to get married and her husband would come and live with her. The next time the landlady seen her she’d been knocked off.”

  “Is that all they know about it?” I inquired.

  “She give her name as Miss Neal and told where she worked. That’s all they know. We’ll go and look at her.”

  We did. She was pretty and about twenty-two years old and had a small, determined face. She’d been hit in the head.

  “They got anything about this lady yet?” O’Malley asked the attendant.

  “I guess they have. Two cops was here with a young guy. He looked at her and then he said, ‘It’s her,’ and then they all went over to the station-house.”

  “Well,” said O’Malley, “I guess we got to find out what we can about it.”

  We went to the precinct station. The young man was twenty-four or -five years old and he looked pale and horrified and shaken. It appeared his name was Robert Elwood.

  “This young fellow,” one of the officers told us, “come here a couple of days ago and said the girl he was engaged to, named Miss Neal, had disappeared, and he wanted us to look for her. He had a note from her saying she was going to marry someone else, so the captain told him to go on home, it wasn’t police business. When we got this homicide, we went and told him. It’s his girl, all right.”

  “You tell us about this,” O’Malley directed Elwood.

  “Mary never told me that she didn’t mean to marry me,” Elwood said unsteadily. “Then I got that note from her. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I went to where she worked, and they said she hadn’t quit her job but just hadn’t come back to it. Then I went to where she’d lived, but she’d moved and hadn’t left any address. So then I came to the police but they wouldn’t do anything. Mary was alone in New York and you police were supposed to protect her. Well, you didn’t do it! Why don’t you get busy and get the man who did this, instead of standing around here asking questions?”

  “I don’t guess you kept that note?” O’Malley asked him.

  “Of course I did.”

  Elwood held out the note. O’Malley looked at it and then put it in his pocket.

  “You ever see this guy she writes about?”

  “I think once I did. I didn’t know he meant anything to her. It was just I saw a man talking with her and then he walked away. I didn’t see him very well. He was tall and had a small mustache.”

  “It might be you could identify him, then. How’d it come this note is typewritten?”

  “She typewrote all her letters. She was a stenographer.”

  “You got any of them letters?”

  “Plenty.”

  “You might bring ’em in and leave ’em with the desk officer.”

  “Let’s see that note, O’Malley,” I said after we had left the station.

  It didn’t help any. It said, “I hate to hurt you but I can’t help it because I love someone else. I’m going to marry him. Please don’t ever look for me.”

  “Not much in that,” I commented.

  “Not anything. We’ll see the landlady.”

  We went. It was a five-story “walk-up” building of furnished apartments. First we looked at it from outside; then we went in. The landlady lived in the basement.

  “This girl,” she told us, “came here and wanted an apartment. She gave the firm she worked for as a reference. I had two vacant, one on the fourth floor, one on the fifth. She looked at both of them and took the fifth and paid me a deposit. That same night she moved in, with a trunk and couple of suitcases, but after that I didn’t see her. After a couple of days I got curious and looked in with a pass-key. Well, she was there—the same way the police found her later!”

  “She say anything about this guy she intended to marry?”

  “Only mentioned him. She said she was a lot in love with him and it might cause trouble.”

  “Anybody come here to see her?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Who else you show those apartments to these last few days?”

  “Not anyone.”

  “Let’s see ’em.”

  We followed her upstairs and looked at the fourth-floor apartment and then went to the fifth, which was directly over it. A uniformed cop was asleep there in an easy-chair. We woke him up and he told us not to touch anything because the fingerprint men hadn’t been there yet. There were two rooms, exactly like the two rooms on the floor below, arranged the same and with the same kind of fireplace, and there were a shovel and a pair of tongs there, but there was no poker.

  “The homicide guys took the poker away with ’em,” the cop remarked to us. “She was killed with that—I guess you know. They didn’t find no prints on it, they tell me.”

  “They find any pictures of men among her things?”

  “Not any.”

  “You’d think she’d have a picture of the guy she was going to marry.”

  “He’d be a dumb guy if he didn’t carry that away with him.”

  We looked the place over carefully without touching things where it would leave a print, but we didn’t find anything. Then we went back downstairs.

  “She must have liked to walk upstairs,” I commented. “The fourth-floor apartment is exactly like the one on the fifth, but she took the top one.”

  “No,” O’Malley said, “they’re different. The top one has got a vacant apartment underneath it.”

  “Are you suggesting,” I inquired with sarcasm, “that this young woman carefully selected a place with a vacant apartment underneath, so that she could be safely murdered without anyone’s hearing?”

  “I think somebody did. She had been dead two days, according to the medical guys.”

  We went to the place where she had worked and afterward to the boarding-house where she had lived and we talked with everybody at both places. Elwood had seen all of them when he was trying to find her, but none of them had ever met the man with the small mustache. Some of them thought they’d seen him.

  “The way of a maid, O’Malley!” I observed. “All these people know about the man she didn’t intend to marry, b
ut the one she meant to marry she never introduced to any of them.”

  “That’s right. How do you figure it?”

  “He may be a married man,” I said importantly.

  “You’re pretty smart. Well, we done a lot of work and got nothing by it, and I’m ready to call it a day and start again tomorrow morning—and I guess we won’t get nothing then, either.”

  I met him the next morning.

  “Elwood’s taking them letters to the precinct station-house,” he stated. “I said we’d meet him there.”

  We went to the station-house and found Elwood there. He had a half-dozen letters and O’Malley looked them over carefully, but there was nothing in them of importance.

  “Nothing in these,” O’Malley said. “This is one case where we ain’t got a single lead, unless it might be we missed something at that apartment. I’m going there again. Will you come with us?” he invited Elwood.

  “If I can be of help. You don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Why don’t you get that man?”

  We went to the apartment.

  “This place been fingerprinted yet?” O’Malley asked the cop on duty there.

  “Not yet.”

  “What’s the matter with them guys? You two got gloves. Better put ’em on.”

  Elwood and I put on our gloves.

  “I been tryin’ to think out how this job was done,” O’Malley said gloomily. “I figure the guy come here the same night the girl moved in. She hadn’t got unpacked yet. He took care no one seen him come in. Then what? When her hack was turned he hit her with the poker. Well, where was he before that? I figure while he was planning how he’d do it, he stepped in the kitchen. When she was busy and her back was turned, he stepped out again. That brought him to the poker. He picked that up and had to make one more step.”