See You at the Morgue

by Lawrence G. Blochman

  “Right away.”

  The superintendent stepped over to press the elevator button. Kilkenny went back to buttonhole Dr. Rosenkohl.

  “Look, Rosie,” he said. “I thought you were going to get me all kinds of scientific evidence from the bloodstains on that handkerchief.”

  “I’m sorry you brought that up,” the doctor said. “I was hoping you’d forget I mentioned it. Because they didn’t get anything but negative results in the serology lab.”

  “For instance?” Kilkenny said.

  “Well, as I think I told you, the blood on the handkerchief was A type blood—and Laurence belonged to A grouping. But there was a B factor present in the unstained portion of the handkerchief—caused, undoubtedly, by perspiration from the hands of the person who wadded the handkerchief into a ball. Therefore, I can say definitely that while the handkerchief belonged to Mrs. Penelope Dunne, Mrs. Dunne herself did not wad it and dip it into the blood of the murdered man—because Mrs. Dunne also has A type blood.”

  “What about the rest of my suspects?”

  “That’s just the point,” said Dr. Rosenkohl, taking a paper from his pocket. “Not one of the persons whose sample we tested has blood of the B group. That’s not surprising, because only ten percent of people generally have B type blood. Forty percent have A type and forty-five percent have O type. All the people on your list belong to either A or O groupings. If only one were a B—”

  “Let’s see that paper,” said Kilkenny, reaching. He squinted at the list for a moment, then made a peculiar explosive sound with his lips. “They’re not all here,” he declared. “There’s one missing.”

  “I noticed that,” Dr. Rosenkohl admitted, “but I assumed you had a report on him from some hospital, so that you hadn’t bothered to send him around.”

  “But I did send him around,” Kilkenny insisted. “He just didn’t go, that’s all. Why, the stupid so-and-so! Did he think I wouldn’t notice he hadn’t gone? He might just as well admit he has B type blood. Matter of fact, now, I’m sure he has.”

  “I think that young fellow Weaver is going to check on that for you,” Dr. Rosenkohl said.

  “Weaver? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He’s been hovering around the test tubes most of the afternoon, over at the lab. The boy knows his isoagglutinins. He volunteered to locate the missing sample.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to need it,” Kilkenny said.

  “I think my answer is coming right in the door now with the super.”

  The elevator boy was a light tan mulatto from the Windward Islands. He had a polite manner and an accent like a Calypso singer.

  “Look, boy,” Kilkenny began. “You don’t remember all those names and times you told me yesterday, do you? All those people who came to call on Mrs. Dunne during the afternoon?”

  “I remember perfectly, sar,” the elevator boy said. “I should remember perfectly. I recited the list often enough.”

  “Do you know Mr. Henry Frye?”

  “By sight, yes, sar.”

  “Did you see him at all yesterday?”

  “No, sar.”

  “Did he give you money to say you hadn’t seen him?”

  “Oh, no, sar. I have not seen Mr. Frye in some time.”

  Kilkenny took a pack of dog-eared envelopes from his pocket, shuffled them slowly as he studied his notes on the backs.

  “Yesterday you gave me a timetable of the people who got on and off the elevator at Mrs. Dunne’s floor after she went out,” he said. “Can you remember the people who came up before she left?”

  “Well, sar, I thought I remembered Mr. Laurence came up before she left, but you seem to think I must be mistaken, sar.”

  “I’ve changed my mind, boy. I think you remember right. I think Laurence came up before Mrs. Dunne left, all right. Now, who else came up—before Laurence?”

  “I can’t recall anyone, sar—except Mr. Dunne. But you already know about him.”

  “Yes, we checked on him last night. Mrs. Dunne says he came up about half an hour before she left the house. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sar. That’s right. Half an hour.”

  “And how long did he stay?”

  “Pardon me?” The boy looked blank.

  “How long did Mr. Dunne stay? At what time did you take him downstairs again?”

  “I—I don’t remember taking him down, sar.”

  “Don’t remember?”

  “No, sar. That is, now that I think back, sar, I’m positive I did not take Mr. Dunne down.”

  “Then when Mrs. Dunne left, Mr. Dunne, as far as you know, was still on this floor?”

  “He must have been, sar.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this last night, boy?”

  “I didn’t recall it last night, sar. It was difficult enough remembering the people I did see, and getting them in the proper order. Naturally it is more difficult remembering those I did not see.”

  “You remembered about Miss Sanderson, all right,” Kilkenny said. “You remembered you hadn’t taken her down.”

  “But you questioned me specifically about Miss Sanderson, sar,” the West Indian said. “You racked my brains about Miss Sanderson. But you did not delve deeply on the subject of Mr. Dunne, sar.”

  “But you’re positive about Mr. Dunne—that you took him up half an hour before Mrs. Dunne left, and did not bring him down again?”

  “Yes, sar. Positive.”

  “You’d swear to it in court?”

  “Positively, sar.”

  “There’s the answer, Lieutenant,” Kilkenny said. “Better have Roger Dunne picked up immediately, and charged with murder. I’ll sign the complaint. And have the boys hold a green-eyed blonde they might find either in Dunne’s office, or at that red brick house in West Twenty-Fourth Street. You have the address. Her name is Annabelle Morse, and she’s theoretically Dunne’s secretary. I just remembered something she told me this morning that will make her a material witness. Come along, Rosie?”

  “Maybe I’d better,” said Dr. Rosenkohl. “Maybe you’ll have another customer for the medical examiner’s office.”

  XXVII

  BARNEY WEAVER HADN’T REALLY EXPECTED to find anyone at the Roger Dunne Studios so late. He had come to Twenty-Eighth Street on an off-chance and was rewarded by finding the door open and a light burning in the office back of the row of owls and the row of baby dolls. The shapely blonde with green eyes and very red lips was in the office.

  “Open late for a Saturday afternoon,” Barney said. “This usual?”

  “We’re usually closed Saturday afternoons,” Miss Morse replied, “but Mr. Dunne had some special work to get out.”

  “Mr. Dunne here?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Will he be back?”

  “I’m not sure. I thought I’d wait awhile and see. He left in an awful hurry about ten minutes ago, and didn’t say where he was going.”

  Barney leaned against the edge of the desk. He said, “I wonder—You don’t know if Mr. Dunne had a sample of his blood sent to the medical examiner’s laboratory today for grouping?”

  “I know he was supposed to,” said Miss Morse. “He must have. He said he was going to.”

  “They have no record of it at the laboratory,” Barney said. “You don’t suppose—” He stopped abruptly. A three-column photograph of Vivian Sanderson was staring up at him from the wastepaper basket near his feet. He stooped, picked up the late edition of the Journal-American. The caption read: Reporter Locates Mystery Redhead. Barney’s worried glance raced down lines of type. He learned that Vivian Sanderson, mysterious central figure in the Riverside Drive murder case, had been found through the astuteness of the Journal-American’s ace heartthrob writer, Cora Essex, in the Mid-Manhattan Hospital where she had been hidden by the police in Room 314 under the name of Mathilda Green.

  “You don’t know, do you, if Mr. Dunne saw this paper before he left?” Barney asked anxio
usly.

  “I guess he did,” Miss Morse replied. “He’s been reading ’em all as fast as they come out. He’s pretty upset by that Riverside Drive case. Mrs. Dunne’s mixed up in it, you know.”

  “I know,” Barney said. “Could I use your phone?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Frantically Barney dialed the hospital.

  “She hasn’t come back yet, Mr. Weaver,” said the third-floor head nurse in response to his query.

  “Yet?” Barney echoed. “What does that mean? When did she go? Where?”

  “But—Didn’t you call just a little while ago, Mr. Weaver?”

  “I did not. Tell me what happened?”

  “Well, some gentleman called,” the nurse said. “I asked if it was Mr. Weaver, and he said yes, so I gave him the message.”

  “What message?”

  “The message Miss Sanderson left for you. She said to tell you she’d gone to her office at the Overlook Arms. She said she was in a hurry because she had to look up something. She—”

  “Good God Almighty!” There was stark dread written on Barney’s face as he banged down the receiver. He bolted from the office, ran for the outer door at a reckless gallop which barely missed the row of stuffed owls.

  Miss Morse watched him in open-mouthed astonishment. Then she shrugged and took her hat from a hook behind the door. As she did so a slip of paper fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and read:

  Annabelle—Please wait for me. If I am not here by eight o’clock, play back the record that is now on the Dictaphone. Don’t transcribe it. Just listen. And then destroy the cylinder.—Roger.

  Miss Morse sat down weakly, the look of a condemned person on her face. Suddenly she arose, her green eyes wide. She leaped to Roger Dunne’s desk, yanked out the top drawer.

  The revolver that had always been there was gone.

  XXVIII

  AT THE OVERLOOK ARMS EXCHANGE of the Gotham Telephone-Answering Service, Vivian was kneeling in front of the cabinet where the pink message slips were filed. She was looking for the calls that had come over Penelope Dunne’s number last night, because there were several names she was not sure of, and she did not remember the time sequence. There they were.

  Her fingers flipped through the papers. She put aside the slips that contained the calls for Roger Dunne. Mr. Artie Whisk at 5:45 and 5:50—to call at once. At 8:30 a man—with a foreign accent—with instructions to call the Rux girl. At 11 o’clock a man—the same man, it had seemed to Vivian—who said Roger Dunne was to call Vanizol before midnight or the deal was off.

  Vanizol!

  “A crazy customer of mine who wants me to turn the world upside down for a few hundred pink glass eyes for toy white mice,” Roger Dunne had said.

  And yet if you picked up your telephone and dialed V-A-N-I-Z-O-L, dialing letters instead of numbers, you would be connected with Vanderbilt 6-4065, the phone number of the Henry Frye Co.—where Boris Pilozor was murdered at about midnight!

  Rux girl!

  Dial the letters R-U-X-G-I-R-L and you get Rubicon 9-4475. Rubicon 9-4475 was the phone number of the house where Boris Pilozor lived!

  Artie Whisk!

  There was something wrong here. The formula didn’t fit. Too many letters. A-R-T-I-E—No, something wrong. Still, let’s try Whisk. That looks like something. W-H-I-S-K would dial 94-4-7-5. Of course! The afternoon operator had made a natural mistake in taking the message. The man with the accent had said “R. T. Whisk.” The girl had written Artie Whisk. R. T. Whisk on the dial would also ring Rubicon 9-4475.

  So Boris Pilozor had been trying desperately all evening to have Roger Dunne call him. Boris Pilozor had even delivered an ultimatum to Roger Dunne; get in touch with him by midnight or the deal would be off. The last call had been made, apparently, from the Henry Frye Co. as that was the number—in code—which had been left for Roger Dunne. And at midnight Boris Pilozor had been strangled to death in the alley behind the Henry Frye Co.

  A wave of cold nausea crept over Vivian. The room blurred before her eyes. It was incredible. Roger Dunne seemed to be such a decent fellow. She had really liked him, felt sorry for him for the treatment he had received from Penelope. And yet there seemed no other explanation. It must be Roger!

  She had told Roger that the calls evidently came from the same man—that he spoke with an accent. She had even insisted on the accent. So Roger had been afraid that she would remember this, that she might even decipher the simple code. If the police had ever asked her about the calls and then had tried to check on Roger’s customer named Vanizol, they would be pretty sure to have dug up the truth in the end. So Roger Dunne had decided that she should not live to tell the police about the calls from the man with an accent.

  Vivian closed her eyes. Again she saw the dizzy lights of the subway train rushing toward her, heard the shriek of brakes, the screams of the crowd on the platform.

  Quickly she opened her eyes. She replaced the rubber bands around the stacks of pink slips, put them back in the cabinet.

  She hurried to the elevator. She would go right to Kilkenny with her story. She would go to the police station, and if Kilkenny was not there, she would wait for him.

  She left the elevator, crossed the lobby. As she stepped to the sidewalk, a taxi swung over from across the street and stopped at the curb. She opened the door before the doorman could help her, and jumped in.

  She had already shut the door again and had sat down before she noticed that there was a man sitting beside her.

  “Good evening, Vivian,” said Roger Dunne.

  She saw the gleam of gun metal in his hand. She opened her mouth but her vocal cords refused to scream.

  The taxi lurched forward.

  XXIX

  KILKENNY, THE LIEUTENANT, and Dr. Rosenkohl got into the same car.

  “Traffic on the express highway is poison this time of night,” Kilkenny said. “We better go downtown through the Park.”

  “Go across on One Hundred and Tenth Street,” the lieutenant told the chauffeur.

  “You know, Lieutenant,” Kilkenny said, “I had the answer to this case right in my hand this morning, and I didn’t know it because I was too damned skeptical. Dunne had a first-rate alibi for the Boris Pilozor murder and the business of pushing the Sanderson gal in front of the subway train. He was supposed to be in his love nest with the Morse dame. He knew he was being tailed, I guess, and went in—but went right out again the back way without even waking up the girl. When he’d finished his evening’s business, he came back through that house in West Twenty-Fourth Street and out the front door again—to pick up our tail. The girl told me this morning she hadn’t seen him last night—and I like a boob thought she was lying.”

  “Guess we’re all a little skeptical,” the lieutenant said. “Force of habit.”

  “And I was a boob, too, to swallow Dunne’s story about moving back with his wife just to force her to get a divorce,” Kilkenny said. “After we’d found the platinum fox in the woodpile, I should have thought of Dunne’s connection with all the furriers he sells glass eyes to. With his widespread out-of-town clientele, he’d be the ideal fence to market hot foxes. We can assume he’s mixed up with the fur robbery, because he had access to the vacant apartment where the foxes were stored. He was the vice-president in charge of distribution, evidently. Pierre Laurence was the dashing founder of the firm, tired of retailing stolen furs to ladies in search of smuggled bargains, ready for large-scale wholesale operations. Boris Pilozor was the production manager—producing from inside the Frye Company. I don’t know what went wrong to break up the firm; maybe we’ll never know. I have an idea, though, it was those furs that Tony stole, turning up in the local market, that gave Dunne the idea that Laurence was double-crossing him. That would explain his moving back to his wife’s apartment—to keep an eye on the furs across the hall, and keep Laurence in line.

  “I can see him running into Laurence the first hour of his sentry duty. He accuses him. They
quarrel. Dunne shoots him—”

  Two dull explosions beat upon the night air. The lieutenant sat up very straight. Dr. Rosenkohl looked at Kilkenny. The reports seemed to come from the right.

  “Weren’t those pistol shots?” Dr. Rosenkohl asked.

  “Those were pistol shots,” Kilkenny replied.

  “Sharp right at the next corner,” the lieutenant ordered the chauffeur. “Cut through that service station. Step on it.”

  The car roared ahead.

  The speedometer on the dash of the taxi read 60, but to Barney Weaver, the cab seemed to be crawling along Central Park West at an incredibly slow pace. Every click of the taximeter had been an hour of torture, every red light an eternity.

  The taxi driver leaned back and turned his head a little without taking his eyes from the road. He shouted, “I can’t turn into One Hundred and Eighth; it’s a oneway street.”

  “Turn in anyhow,” Barney yelled back.

  “I’d better turn at One Hundred and Seventh, go around the block, and come into One Hundred and Eighth from Columbus.”

  “Don’t you dare! You turn at One Hundred and Eighth.”

  “Can’t, buddy. It’s one way. Ain’t my fault if it’s one way.”

  “If you go around the block you’ll run into two more red lights. That means minutes. I can’t spare the time, pal. You go in from this side. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. And I’ll double the bonus I promised you.”

  “Okay, buddy. It’s your neck.”

  The tires squealed as the taxi rounded the corner. Barney cranked the window down and poked his head out so he could look toward the Overlook Arms. He saw Vivian Sanderson getting into a cab. The cab immediately pulled out from the curb.

  Barney knocked on the glass. “Turn around!” he shouted to the driver. “Turn—”

  “What the hell, buddy?” the driver complained. “One minute you want—”

  “Turn around! Pull alongside that cab!”

  The other taxi lurched toward them. A shrill scream arose above the roar of its motor. Barney flung a ten-dollar bill at his driver, opened the door, leaped to the running-board of the other cab as it flashed by.