We went around and looked at everything.
“What do you make of it, O’Malley?” I inquired.
“I wouldn’t wonder if it was like that cop just said. Somebody came here and Carlton let ’em in, so I guess he knew ’em. Then they knocked him off.”
There were some tiny shreds of crumpled newspaper on the carpet. O’Malley picked the biggest one up and smoothed it out. It was about as big as his thumb nail, so the words on it had no meaning.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I guess somebody tore up some newspaper,” one of the officers answered.
O’Malley put the scrap of paper in his pocket.
“There ain’t much to be got here,” he said. “All these people that might have to do with this have been asked over to the station-house to talk with the inspector. We’ll see what’s doing there.”
We went to the station-house and found it full of people.
“Nothing but limousines rolling up to this police station today,” the desk officer remarked to us.
They had Bassin there and Mrs. Lessing and a man who proved to be Mr. Lessing and several chauffeurs and half a dozen servants. We didn’t go into the room where the inspector was questioning them separately but talked with them while they waited outside. Bassin and Mrs. Lessing and Mr. Lessing all looked like people who lived much outdoors but stayed up too many nights.
“I’ve told all I know about this matter,” Bassin told us irritably. “I dined at a club and went directly home. I didn’t go out again. This morning the police came and told me Carlton was shot and asked if I had a small-caliber revolver. I replied that I belonged to a pistol club and had several pistols. They looked them over and took one away with them and asked me to come here.”
“Did you know Carlton was going to be in town last night?”
“I did.”
We went and talked with Mrs. Lessing. She was about twenty-four years old and pretty, but insipid-looking.
“Did you see Carlton yesterday?” O’Malley asked her.
“Yes; in the afternoon.”
“Make any engagement to see him later? He went home but he just sat around like he might have been expecting somebody.”
“No; I had no engagement with him.”
“Mrs. Lessing knows nothing about this matter,” Lessing said angrily. “She is entirely innocent and it is very unfortunate that she has been drawn into this.”
“What’s Lessing got to do with it?” I asked O’Malley.
“Not anything. Him and her are divorced but they’re still friendly. When he heard she was asked here for questioning he came over to see if he could help her. There’s always plenty guys want to help them baby-faced women.”
Then a cop came out of the inspector’s room and took Bassin back in for further questioning, and O’Malley followed them in but I stayed outside. O’Malley came out presently.
“Bassin tell anything more?” I asked.
“He didn’t have to.”
He had a photograph in his hand. The three bullets that killed Carlton had been photographed with three that the police had fired from Bassin’s revolver; then the photograph had been cut and fitted together. The experts said that the markings made by the pistol barrel on all six bullets were exactly the same. There was no doubt that the bullets which killed Carlton had been fired from Bassin’s revolver.
“That settles that!” I commented.
“Bassin don’t say so. Says he hadn’t touched or even seen the gun for a couple of weeks and he kept it locked up. Says if it was used it was done without his knowledge.”
“That’s ridiculous! He wants you to believe that someone entered his apartment, took the gun which was locked up, used it to kill Carlton, cleaned it, took it back to his apartment and locked it up again, all without his knowledge? Bassin might as well admit he did it.”
“That’s what these cops all think.”
“Bassin had a motive, he knew Carlton would be in town, he is a marksman, and it was his gun.”
“Sure. How about this?”
O’Malley took the scrap of newspaper from his pocket and smoothed it out. On one side it said “by Nassa,” “ommunity actio,” “for purpos,” and the other side was part of an advertisement.
“These were all crumpled and torn up and scattered on the rug. They may mean something.”
We left the station-house and parted. Bassin was arrested, and I didn’t see O’Malley for a couple of days.
“I found what paper them pieces come from,” he announced when I met him. “It said ‘Nassa,’ so I thought that might mean Nassau County and it might be some paper published on Long Island. Well, it was.”
He had a copy of the issue from which the fragment had been torn. It came out of a paragraph about community work in Nassau County.
“I don’t see,” I said, “what that article could have to do with the murder.”
“It ain’t got nothing. I wanted to find out who subscribed to that paper. Well, Carlton didn’t, and Bassin and Mrs. Lessing don’t. Some guys that belong to the shooting club do.”
We drove out on Long Island to the shooting club. A Negro attendant showed us around.
“Mr. Bassin a good pistol shot?” O’Malley asked him.
“Yassah. Very fine shot.”
“How about Mr. Carlton?”
“He was good. Mrs. Lessing, too.”
“How about Lessing?”
“Mr. Lessing don’t shoot no revolvah. He shoot clay pigeons. Mr. Lessing say he can’t hit a barn doah with a revolvah, can’t hit a bale of hay. He hit it, though.”
“Hit what?”
“Bale of hay.”
“Let’s get this: Mr. Bassin and Mr. Lessing were talking about pistol shooting and Mr. Lessing took Mr. Bassin’s revolver and fired it at a bale of hay?”
“Yassah. And plenty times he hit it.”
“When was this?”
“Two, three weeks ago.”
We got back in the car and went to look for Lessing. Since his divorce he had maintained quarters in several clubs. One was a golf club. He wasn’t there but they said he was expected, so we waited. His servant let us wait in his rooms. They were luxurious. There were riding and golfing things about and there were several shotguns.
“Did Lessing subscribe to that newspaper?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
Then Lessing came in.
“The inspector wants to see you,” O’Malley said.
We drove back to New York.
“Where were you, Mr. Lessing, the night Carlton got killed?” O’Malley asked him, as we started.
“I was on Long Island.”
“You’re lucky. If you’d happened to drive into town that night, and maybe took a bag of golf clubs with you, you might have been suspected.”
“Possibly. No imbecility on the part of the police would surprise me.”
“Yeah?” O’Malley answered. “Well, I’m going to be dumb enough to arrest you for this murder.”
We took him to headquarters.
“See here, O’Malley,” I said, after we had left him, “Lessing apparently committed this murder, but I don’t get it.”
“You better clean your eyeglasses. This Lessing is a guy that couldn’t get along with his wife and can’t get along without her, and he wasn’t willing nobody else should have her. She was going with Carlton and Bassin and would probably marry one of ’em, and Lessing figured if one of ’em got killed and she thought the other one did it, she wouldn’t marry either of ’em.
“He wanted some bullets that had been fired from Bassin’s revolver. These guys all belonged to the shooting club, so that was easy. Lessing fired the revolver at a bale of hay, and afterward he got the bullets.”
“Then what?”
“
Then he took the shot out of a shotgun shell and put three bullets in place of it, packing ’em in tight with newspaper. When he shot Carlton, it blew the newspaper into little pieces all over the place.”
“Very neat!” I appreciated. “But Lessing took a long chance of someone’s seeing him with that gun.”
“You won’t ever get smart. Didn’t you hear what I said to him? He carried the shotgun in a golf bag.”
“A nice piece of work!” I gloated.
“You think I done a good job? Well, I guess some of these other cops will get a lot of credit out of it,” he answered.
THE MIND READER
Originally published in Collier’s, July 22, 1933m.
“Several guys,” said O’Malley, “got knocked off, all in the same neighborhood. They was strangers that come to town with money. Now another guy got pushed over, so they put me on the case. Cosimo his name was, and he come from Rochester. It happened in a rooming-house. We won’t solve this because everybody that knows anything is afraid to tell it. It’s just bad luck my getting this case.”
“Have you got any lead at all?” I asked.
“The guy that runs the rooming-house knows more than he is telling. He says if someone came in with Cosimo he didn’t see him. You can’t blame him; he’s an honest guy himself but liable to be shoved across if he says different.”
“It sounds like a tough case.”
“You said it.”
The rooming-house was four stories with a high basement. People were gossiping on doorsteps all around but not on this one. A uniformed cop sat in the doorway reading a newspaper.
“Anyone around this place?” O’Malley asked him.
“I’m the only tenant. The birds that live here,” the cop explained, “got no more baggage than a second shirt. When this happened each of ’em took his extra shirt and moved out before the police could get here. They got the proprietor at the station-house.”
“You got his keys?”
“Yeah, I got those.”
“I guess we ought to look around a little.”
We followed the cop upstairs. The murder room was on the second floor. It held a bed, a dresser and one chair. There was nothing else in the room except an empty red-wine bottle and two glasses on the window sill.
“They took everything this bird had,” the cop informed us. “His clothes and baggage. Domenico says the bird come in here alone. Would a bird that was alone drink out of two glasses, stab himself in the back and carry out his baggage afterward? There ain’t no fingerprints on them glasses. They left the knife here.”
“Is Domenico the man that runs the place?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“What do you make of it, O’Malley?”
“It’s like I said it was. The robbed guy got killed so there would be no witness. It’s some kind of murder ring. They seen this Cosimo had money and got acquainted with him and one or more of ’em come here with him to his room. Nobody will talk, so we got no way to tell who done the killing. It might be someone from outside or some of those that lived here.”
We went all through the building looking at everything. Some of the rooms were locked but the cop unlocked them with his bunch of keys. There were things scattered about such as men would leave who were departing hurriedly. On the top floor one room was different. It was rather luxuriously furnished and the bureau drawers were filled with a man’s things and his clothes were hanging in the closet. The owner’s name on the tailor’s label in the clothes said: “Jos. DiPalda.”
“Whoever DiPalda is,” I remarked, “he is apparently expecting to come back here.”
We found nothing else. When we came out of the building one of the prettiest girls I ever saw, about seventeen years old, was standing on the sidewalk waiting for us.
“What’s on your mind, girlie?” O’Malley asked her.
“I would wish to know what you are doing with Domenico.”
* * * *
People on doorsteps near and on the sidewalk were listening. One of them was a big man with two pin-points of mustache.
“She has interest in Domenico,” he informed us suavely, “because he is our friend, but there is no use asking policemen anything, Philomena.”
“You got that much right, fellow, anyway,” O’Malley told him. “Any of you people know anything about this homicide?”
They didn’t. We went around and questioned people in all the neighboring buildings. Sometimes we didn’t question them, because when they saw us coming they disappeared before we got to them. Nobody knew anything. They couldn’t even tell us the name of anyone who lived in Domenico’s rooming-house.
“Well, there you got it!” O’Malley declared finally. “This murder might as well happened in some statue hall in the Metropolitan Museum. What’s the use questioning people whose eyes and ears and tongues are made of marble? You get no answers. I knew we wouldn’t get nothing. Let’s quit and go to a show and I’ll report I couldn’t get no clue.”
I didn’t feel like going to a show.
“See you tomorrow at the station-house,” I told him.
I met him the next day.
“How was the show?” I asked.
“Swell. They had a dame there that read guys’ minds. I came away for fear she might read mine. This is the knife that Cosimo guy got killed with.”
The knife had been made out of a file. It had been wrapped in paper so that it could not be seen to be a knife and had been used without taking the paper off.
“Not much chance of tracing that,” I decided.
“Not any. They got Domenico here still, but now they got to let him go.”
We went in where they had Domenico. He was a small man about sixty years old, with white hair, and he had a pleasant, determined face.
“How is it you get nothing out of this guy?” O’Malley asked the officers.
Domenico answered for them: “They get notting out of dees guy because he don’t know notting.”
When they let him go we went out of the station-house with him. It was plain he didn’t want to be seen with us but there was nothing he could do about it. He was going home. When we had gone a few blocks we came to a small theater which had motion pictures and vaudeville. A sign outside said, “Madame Fortuna appears here afternoon and evening. She reads the trouble in your mind and answers it. Consult her between performances.”
“We’ll go in here,” O’Malley stated.
Domenico didn’t want to go in but he couldn’t help himself. Some people were waiting to consult Madame Fortuna but they let us in ahead of them. She was a stout middle-aged woman, very blond, in a black dress, who sat in a room hung everywhere with red.
“I got a guy here to get his mind read,” O’Malley told her.
Domenico was startled. Then he was frightened.
“Nossir, nossir!” he cried, and he started for the door.
We dragged him back.
“I’ll see what I can get,” Madame Fortuna agreed. She shut her eyes and covered them with her hands. “I get something tragic in this guy’s mind,” she declared after a moment. “Is it—murder? Yes, it’s murder he is thinking about.”
“Keep on, lady, you’re doing fine,” O’Malley urged her.
“It was somewhere in a room.” She described the room. It was a good description of the murder room. “Two men are there. I can’t be sure—there may be more of ’em. There may be three or four. A big man is in his shirt sleeves. He and another one drink wine. Now the other one stands behind the big man. He makes a signal and then stabs him.”
“That’s swell!” O’Malley commended. “Does this guy’s mind give you any picture of the one that done the killing?”
“Sure it does. It gives a real good picture. He is about twenty years old and tall—six feet, I guess; black hair, dark eyes and say, boy
! that guy is handsome. He’s got a curved scar about half an inch long under his lower lip but it don’t disfigure him any.”
“Who would that be, Domenico?” O’Malley asked.
Domenico was very white. “Not nobody!” he cried excitedly. “No, no, no, no! I don’t know nobody like that.”
We went outside. Domenico was anxious and uneasy. When we let him go he scurried down the street.
“You aren’t serious about this, O’Malley,” I objected. “You don’t believe that woman described the killer to you?”
“She described the room and she had never seen it, and we got nothing else but this to go on.”
“You’re nuts!”
“Yeah? That’s been thought before. And I don’t have to go searching for the guy she told about; I know where he is.”
* * * *
On the way we picked up a plain-clothes cop and then went to a hotel. O’Malley knew the room. We knocked at it and a remarkably good-looking young man, who had been poring over a heavy book, opened the door. He was black-haired and had a half-inch scar under his lower lip.
“Come on, DiPalda,” O’Malley told him. “They want to see you at the station-house.”
We let the plain-clothes cop take DiPalda to the station-house while we hurried to Domenico’s.
“What now?” the officer on post there asked us.
“We got a lead.”
Domenico was peeking at us through the crack of his kitchen door. He followed us when we went upstairs. We hadn’t searched the top-floor room before but now we searched it thoroughly. In a dresser drawer, hidden under some shirts, we found a file exactly like the one the knife had been made from, wrapped in the same kind of paper. Among the clothes hanging in the closet was a brown suit which had a button missing; some of the cloth had been torn out with the button.
“Fine!” said O’Malley. “Here’s the button the dead guy pulled off the killer’s coat and had clutched in his fingers.”
He took a brown button from his pocket and held it against the coat. It matched the other buttons and the torn cloth fitted.
“No, no!” Domenico yelled. “You are a beeg liar! Dees dead guy don’t have no button in his fingers. You don’t arres’ dees Joseph!”
The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK Page 10