Crimson Clue

by George Harmon Coxe

  Murdock stood still, his knees beginning to shake in his rage and frustration.

  ‘You want to sock him?’ the voice said.

  ‘Naw’, Klime said. ‘I guess he’s entitled to one punch.… Keep walking, pal’, he said. ‘Don’t try anything. Just take that broad of yours and start up the steps.’

  Murdock hesitated, his rage battling stubbornly with reason. He tried to think of something he could do and now the gun jabbed harder and he had to take a step and then another. A moment later he was walking by himself. He heard the car doors slam and turned to watch the sedan pull from the kerb and accelerate down the street, its lights still off.

  Audrey Wayne ran to meet him. ‘What was it?’ she said. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘They got the envelope’, Murdock said bitterly.

  ‘One of them had a gun, didn’t he?’

  ‘Did you get a good look at them?’

  ‘I—saw them.’

  ‘I mean, would you know them again?’ Murdock snapped, trying not to shout. ‘Could you identify them?’

  The girl seemed to shrink back from the fury of his tone. He could see her wide-open eyes, the parted lips. She shook her head, mute and frightened.

  He started up the steps, stopped abruptly when he realized she wasn’t with him. He turned and saw her standing on the first step, one hand on the iron rail and her face pale in the darkness. He retreated slowly and took her arm.

  ‘Come on’, he said, quiet now. ‘I didn’t mean to yell at you. I know who one of them is, but it’s not going to do any good without some corroboration.’ He opened the vestibule, cursing silently as they went through the inner door and started up the stairs.

  ‘Some idea of mine’, he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let old Murdock take the envelope’, he muttered with heavy irony. ‘It’ll be safe with Murdock. He’ll know what to do.’ He was at his door now, still muttering imprecations at himself as he unlocked.

  ‘You couldn’t help it’, Audrey said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ She went into the living-room as he snapped on a light. ‘You did all you could … They must have followed us from the hotel’, she added as he helped her with her coat.

  He turned her toward him, his hands on her arms and standing close so she had to look up at him. ‘Tell me the truth now’, he said. ‘Do you know what was in that envelope or not?’

  ‘No’, she said. ‘Honestly.’

  He looked deep into the green eyes and knew somehow that in this, at least, she had told the truth. She was still frightened and he saw no point in trying to question her further so he stepped back and said he would show her around. He turned lights on in the dinette and kitchen, led her to the bedroom and bath, the small linen closet.

  ‘Throw some sheets and a pillow out on the davenport when you go to bed. There’s a chain lock on the door. Fasten it and don’t open it until you’re sure it’s me.’

  ‘All right’, she said, and then, understanding what his words implied, spoke quickly. ‘You mean, you’re going out? Do you have to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to look for Garvin.’

  ‘But where?’

  It was on the tip of Murdock’s tongue to tell her the morgue but he didn’t. He said he wasn’t sure but he had some ideas.

  Chapter 7

  THE clerk at the desk in the vestibule of the Century Club told Murdock that Mr. MacGrath was in, a fact which Murdock already knew since he had first telephoned the operator at the Courier to see if the managing editor was there.

  ‘I’ll try to locate him for you, Mr. Murdock’, he said.

  ‘Would you care to wait in the lounge?’

  Murdock nodded and climbed one flight of stairs to the second floor. Here on his left was a long, carpeted room filled with comfortable chairs and divans, and two refectory tables on which were neatly placed the latest magazines and newspapers. The illumination came from strategically placed floor lamps and table lamps, and at the far side a long row of windows overlooked the street. An attendant was silently emptying ash trays, and aside from him there were only three other men in the room, two of them asleep in their chairs.

  Murdock did not sit down but stood in the main entrance and waited until, a minute or so later, the elevator door opened and T. A. MacGrath stepped out, a stocky man with a thick, muscular neck and a broad, ruddy face that was solid rather than fat. He held a half-smoked cigar between the stubby fingers of one hand, and because he knew that Murdock would not have come here except on a matter of some importance, he wasted no time on preliminaries.

  ‘Let’s go in here’, he said, and led the way to a small room which opened from the bar at the end of the hall. ‘Trouble?’ he asked when they were seated.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Then let’s have it.’

  Murdock told him, right from the beginning, and MacGrath did not interrupt. He fired up his cigar, let it go out again, worked it round in his mouth, and nodded from time to time.

  ‘Then the police don’t know a thing yet’, he said finally. ‘Do you think you should tell them?’

  Murdock said he doubted it. He said he had thought of telling Lieutenant Bacon but he wasn’t sure Bacon would believe him and, even if he did, what could Bacon do about it?’

  ‘There’s not a damn thing we can print either’, MacGrath said with some resentment. ‘Not until we have a corpse and probably not then.’ He glanced up. ‘You’ve checked the morgues?’

  ‘Both of them.’

  ‘What’re you going to do now?’

  ‘Keep checking.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want to know if you’ll print a paragraph, in case I turn up this Garvin before we go to press.’

  ‘You mean a paragraph like this, “A man tentatively identified as so and so was found strangled to death on such and such a street, apparently the victim of whatever it might be?” Certainly we’ll print it—if you’re damn well sure of your facts.’ He paused, looking at Murdock with one eye and then both.

  ‘Bacon over at Homicide is a friend of yours, isn’t he? And if you find this corpse and we print the piece, Bacon’s going to know who did the identifying before he gets through. What about that?’

  ‘Bacon won’t like it.’

  ‘Hah!’ said MacGrath. ‘He’ll blow a gasket and you know it.’

  Murdock stretched out his legs and eyed his shoe tips morosely, well aware that what MacGrath had said was true. He should have notified Bacon at the time of his discovery, and having waited until it was too late, he saw no great harm in waiting a little longer.

  ‘I’ll have to take my chances with Bacon’, he said flatly. ‘But if I can break the identification in the final those characters out at the Canning Place will know by morning that they’re not yet in the clear.’

  MacGrath was a keen judge of men and he had known and admired Murdock for a long time; he also knew a little bit about photographers, though he had confessed many times that he did not pretend to understand them. To MacGrath they were a breed apart and now, glancing at Murdock’s darkly scowling face, he thought he knew what motivated the photographer’s actions.

  Murdock had been mixed up in murder before and there had been times when he was instrumental in bringing about a solution. He was mixed up again, but MacGrath did not believe it was any particular desire to solve the case that was driving Murdock now. He had been played for a sucker out at the Canning place and he resented it; he had been slugged by some unknown who had been waiting in Neil Garvin’s room, and later he had lost a package of some importance that had been entrusted to him. There was, apparently, some connection between all these things, and together they had most certainly influenced him.

  But there was still another factor which Murdock had not mentioned and which, to MacGrath’s way of thinking, was perhaps the most important of all. For, like all pre
ss photographers, there was one thing Murdock could not forgive, and that was any tampering with his cameras or equipment. MacGrath remembered having seen one photographer with the build of a featherweight and the muscles of an adolescent tear into a man twice his size simply because, in a drunken moment, the fellow began to pry into the equipment case of the smaller man.

  It was that way with Murdock now. It was not the actual loss of equipment that bothered him so much as the circumstances and motives behind its disappearance, and MacGrath understood there would be no point in arguing for caution at the present time. Murdock had the bit in his teeth and MacGrath knew from experience that it was highly probable, not only that Murdock would make plenty of trouble for those who had been pushing him around, but also that the Courier might possibly wind up with some exclusive pictures if not an exclusive story.

  Now he grunted and gave Murdock’s shoulder a friendly punch. ‘Okay’, he said. ‘Play it any way you like. I’ll back you up; I always have, haven’t I? If Bacon gets too tough for you——’

  ‘He’s going to give me hell anyway and I’d rather take it tomorrow than tonight.’

  ‘Then how about giving the morgue another ring while you’re here?’

  He led the way to the telephone booths in the hall and stood by the open door while Murdock made his call, his broad face creasing in a grin as he listened to the one-sided conversation.

  ‘How about it, Carl?’ Murdock said when he had identified himself. ‘Yeah? When?’ There was a pause. ‘What’s he look like?… Yes.… You know the cause of death? Guess … Thanks, Carl, I’ll be down.’

  ‘You think that’s your man?’ MacGrath asked.

  ‘Sounds like it. Strangled. No identification yet.’

  ‘On your way, then’, MacGrath said. ‘I’ll phone the city room and tell them they’ll hear from you.’…

  The morgue was a four-story brick building adjacent to the hospital, very neat, unprepossessing, and reasonably modern. The receiving room was in the basement, there were some small offices on the first floor, the medical examiner’s rooms on the second; laboratories, including that of the city chemist, occupied the third, and the autopsy and storage rooms were on the fourth.

  Now, at ten minutes after twelve, Murdock went up the half dozen steps to the main lobby. A similar number of steps led down directly ahead of him to swinging doors and the white-tiled room below, but he swung right into the information room. Carl, a tow-headed oldster with steel-rimmed spectacles, lowered his newspaper and swung his feet down from the desk.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said wearily, ‘you’ll want to see this guy.’ He rose without waiting for an answer and started out of the room, plodding slowly across the lobby and down the stairs. ‘Number six’, he said, and pulled out a sliding drawer like a clerk with a filing cabinet.

  A sheet-covered form lay inside and Carl flipped the covering part way back to reveal the head and torso of a skinny, black-haired man whose pale, hollow-cheeked face was instantly familiar to Murdock. The marks on the throat were still visible.

  ‘Is this the one you were looking for?’ Carl asked.

  Murdock started to reply, caught himself in time. ‘Who said I was looking for anyone in particular?’

  Carl eyed him curiously. ‘It was just an idea I had.’

  ‘It’s been a slow day’, Murdock said. ‘I was only hoping something would turn up. Where’d they find him?’

  ‘In Allston.’

  ‘You have his clothes?’

  ‘They’re going over them out back.’

  Murdock thanked him and walked down the narrow room and through the doors at the rear. At a table on which the dead man’s effects were piled, a uniformed policeman and two plain-clothes men were giving the clothing a careful inspection. One of the men recognized Murdock and said hello.

  ‘Who is he?’ Murdock asked.

  ‘We don’t know yet’, they said.

  ‘Carl said you picked him up in Allston.’

  ‘In an alley.’

  ‘A mugging?’

  ‘We thought so at first. Now we don’t.’ The detective who knew Murdock lit a cigarette and picked up a jacket. ‘Pockets were clean’, he said. ‘No identification. But look at this.’ He pointed to the inside of the collar and then to the inside pocket. In both places the labels had been removed.

  ‘Somebody took a little trouble to make sure we couldn’t identify the guy’, the man said. ‘But he forgot one thing; they usually do.’

  He picked up the dark-blue necktie and flipped it over. Down near the bottom of the small end there was a label that read: Christies—Los Angeles.

  Murdock nodded. ‘It’ll stick a piece in the final’, he said. ‘Maybe that’ll start something. If you should see Lieutenant Bacon tell him I’ll call him in the morning.’

  He got out before they could think of any questions to ask him, and twenty minutes later he was pressing the buzzer at his apartment. Seconds later the door opened and Audrey Wayne peered out at him.

  ‘I told you not to open the door until you were sure it was me’, he said.

  ‘But it’s on the chain’, she said. ‘See?’

  She slipped the catch and stood back, looking smaller and younger with her shoes off, his flannel bathrobe belted tightly about her slim waist, the sleeves rolled back.

  Murdock came in and locked the door. Then he sniffed. ‘Is that coffee I smell?’

  She said it was and started for the kitchen while he slipped out of his coat. ‘It’s not too fresh’, she said as she filled a cup for him. ‘I wasn’t sure just when you’d get back.’

  Murdock sat down and poured thin cream from a paper container she had found in the refrigerator. He gave her a cigarette and said the coffee was a wonderful idea.

  The way he said it brought a smile to her eyes and she said: ‘Did you find Neil?’

  ‘I found him.’

  ‘Did you tell him about losing the envelope?’

  ‘Well—no.’ Murdock sipped coffee, decided his news could wait. ‘It’s a long story’, he said. ‘Could it wait until morning. I’m sort of tired——’

  She said she understood and presently he grinned at her and she asked him what was funny.

  ‘I was thinking about how you got into the Canning place this afternoon. It was quite a party.’

  ‘I’ll bet it was.’

  ‘Plenty of liquor and champagne, a few drunks. Did you see any while you were sitting outside on the bench?’

  ‘Maybe one’, she said. ‘Or maybe it was three. Anyway I saw three men come out the back door and one of them could hardly walk, and they sort of staggered over to a car that pulled up outside the back gate.’

  Murdock kept his face controlled but his mind was a long way off as it visualized with quiet excitement the scene she had described. He felt sure, though he still could not prove it, that Neil Garvin was the man she had seen being taken from the house; he understood, too, that tomorrow was going to be a tough day, both for Audrey Wayne and for him.

  He stood up to rinse the cups and she said she would do that. He said all right; to give him three minutes in the bathroom and then the bedroom was hers. He was back in the living-room within the allotted time and he thanked her for fixing the divan, which was neatly made up, the sheets folded back, the pillow in place, his pyjamas at the foot.

  When he started round the room turning off the lights she said good night and closed the bedroom door. Without meaning to he listened to see if she would lock it; when there was no further click he grinned absently and began to undress.

  Chapter 8

  MURDOCK had gone to sleep with the smell of coffee in his nostrils and when he waked with the smell still there he thought first that he had not been long asleep; then he saw it was daylight and as he turned over he heard the noises in the kitchen.

  He called a good morning and when Audrey replied and came to the doorway he thought she looked very nice indeed. Her two-toned hair was neat and softly shining, her tawny skin fr
esh-looking, with just a touch of lipstick at the mouth. Her simple dark dress moulded neatly the slender roundness of her body and her green eyes were bright.

  ‘If you want to shave,’ she said, ‘the coffee won’t be ready for four or five minutes.’ She started to turn away; then glanced back. ‘You don’t have much food, do you?’

  ‘Only emergency rations’, he said, and grinned.

  The bedroom had already been straightened and the bed made when he went in with his arms full of clothes. He shaved and showered quickly, hung up his suit after emptying the pockets, and put on a grey tweed, blue shirt with button-down collar, a maroon tie.

  ‘The coffee’s ready’, she said when he went into the kitchen. ‘And I found some frozen orange juice, and there’s some bread, sort of stale, but all right for toast.’

  Murdock said that was wonderful. He said he rarely had breakfast here and he was sorry he couldn’t offer more. She said she was only a juice-and-coffee girl anyway and then, when they had their cigarettes going, she said:

  ‘Now tell me about Neil.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘and thanks for not pressing me last night.… Neil Garvin is dead’, he said, and told where he had found him and why he had come to Garvin’s hotel room later.

  In the first moment of her shock and disbelief she tried to interrupt him but he kept on doggedly, and presently she quieted down to sit there, inert and unprotesting. It took her a while after he had finished before she could say anything at all and then her husky voice was awed and incredulous.

  ‘But—you’re saying someone at the Canning home killed him.’

  ‘It has to be that way.’

  He stood up, knowing he would have to do a lot of talking before the morning was out, and not wanting to do it here. The last thing he had done before getting into bed the night before was to pull out the telephone plug; now he stepped into the living-room and replaced it.

  ‘But why?’ she asked when he came back to the kitchen.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why should anyone there want to kill him?’

  ‘As a guess,’ Murdock said, ‘because he went out there to blackmail someone, or had some idea he could stop the wedding. Did you know he was once married to Pat Canning?’ He watched her nod with growing amazement. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’