Crimson Clue

by George Harmon Coxe

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Not yet. My secretary phoned her hotel this morning. She wasn’t in but I left word for her to call me at the studio.’ He paused, his concern again colouring his words.

  ‘To get back to Garvin—he said the letters were from Patricia Canning and that he was going up to the house the next day and collect before the wedding.’

  Murdock said: ‘Ahh.’ When French hesitated, he said: ‘Did you tell Pat, or anyone at the house?’

  ‘No. Because I didn’t think he’d go through with it. I told him he was crazy. I had an idea he might have violated some parole by coming East in the first place but I didn’t say so. I figured when he sobered up in the morning he’d have too much sense to try blackmail. So I talked to him about his piano; I said I might be able to find a spot for him and we made a lunch date for one o’clock.’ He shrugged. ‘He never turned up. I waited until after two.’

  ‘Then Monday night was the last time you saw him?’ Murdock watched the other nod and all at once he felt better. Here, finally, was some corroboration for his theory. He laughed abruptly. ‘How does that put you in a jam? You don’t need my advice, Syd. Go down and tell Lieutenant Bacon what you know and——’

  ‘It’s not quite so simple.’ French sat down beside Murdock, his round face twisted and his gaze remote. ‘I’m worried about Vivian Keith. You know we’re engaged.’

  Murdock had a little trouble figuring out the connection but he knew Vivian Keith who, for some time, had ambitions as an actress that had never quite been fulfilled. She had been brought up in Longmeadow and had gone to a proper finishing school—on a scholarship—and since then she had studied dramatics and worked in summer stock when she could. At one time or another she had appeared in most of New England’s summer theatres, usually in minor roles.

  She was pretty in a blondish, energetic way and her small body was nicely proportioned. She managed somehow to be modishly dressed, she knew the mechanics of artful make-up, and she had a quick, accomplished smile that men seemed to take as a personal compliment. Through friends in the right places, mostly male, she had done some work in radio and television, and two years previously she had reached the fringe-section of local society by marrying a handsome but indolent son of a moderately wealthy family: one Nicky Keith.

  The marriage was reputed to have been a tempestuous one because of Keith’s alcoholic appetite and Vivian’s temper, but this was solved very neatly nine months ago when Keith ran his convertible head-on into a stone wall, leaving his young widow very comfortably fixed financially and only slightly bothered by remorse. She still looked for work in the studios now and then, and it was through such ambitions that she had met Sydney French. All this Murdock understood, and now he said he had heard they were to be married some time after Thanksgiving.

  ‘We were’, French said.

  Murdock shook his head. ‘You’re not getting through to me, Syd. What’s the connection?’

  ‘I’m afraid if I go to Bacon and tell how and where I knew Garvin that maybe Bacon will check on me.’

  ‘What about it? Are you afraid of that other marriage you mentioned?’

  ‘No. I told Vivian I had been married and divorced.’

  ‘Well?’

  French had his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling, head slightly bent. His face was still twisted and his distress was obvious and genuine.

  ‘What nobody knows in this part of the country,’ he said woodenly, ‘is that I also have a record. I did ninety days for possession of marihuana. That was nearly four years ago and I’m clean now but——’

  He lifted one hand, then let it flop back, and now Murdock began to understand why French was worried.

  ‘Garvin knew’, he said slowly. ‘If he didn’t know about your engagement he’d soon find out. He could blackmail you.’ He paused, remembering how Garvin had assured Audrey Wayne that he could get her a job.

  ‘And when Bacon checks on me and finds out how it was,’ French said disconsolately, ‘maybe the thing about my record will come out.’

  Murdock studied the other, thinking hard. ‘Who’re you worried about?’ he asked finally. ‘Bacon or Vivian?’

  ‘Both.’ French sighed and stood up. ‘I’d better tell you all of it.’ He walked away and came back. ‘We were playing together, Garvin and me. We weren’t on the weed, you understand, none of the band was, but you know, we’d give it a whirl once in a while just for the hell of it. I didn’t know it then but Garvin was bringing it in from Mexico once in a while.’

  He sat down on a chair arm and said: ‘What I also didn’t know was that he was making a play for my wife, and I guess she liked the idea. He always did have a way with dames. He was a dresser, a good-looking guy when he was sober, a wonderful dancer. I don’t know yet whether the cops walked in on me that night because they’d had a tip or because I was just unlucky. Anyway they had me cold and there’d been a lot of publicity about the stuff—some movie kids were picked up just the week before—and they gave me that ninety days in a hurry.’

  He glanced up and continued in the same even monotone.

  ‘Well, I’m only in the can a week when the wife comes on visiting day to tell me she’s going to Reno. According to her she’s been wanting to do it for a long time and now that she’s got the grounds she’s going through with it. We had a joint account and she had the money and off she went. I can’t even argue with her. I ask her if it’s another man and she says not, but there is: Garvin. They get married three weeks before I get out. A little later he gets nailed at the border with a load of heroin.’ He cleared his throat and now his voice was flat and unpleasant. ‘So maybe there’s some justice after all’, he said as an afterthought.

  ‘What about your ex-wife?’

  ‘She wanted to come back to me. I don’t know what happened but I heard she divorced Garvin. I came East while he was on trial. I never saw her again.’

  Murdock stood up and took a cigarette from a silver box. He inspected it a moment before he lit it; then he regarded French with sleepy eyes.

  ‘What do you want from me, Syd?’ he said.

  ‘Advice. You know the homicide boys and how they think. If it hadn’t been for Vivian I think I would have gone down this morning. As it is, well, how much of this will have to come out?’

  ‘In my opinion?’

  ‘In your opinion.’

  ‘Practically none of it.’ Murdock pointed the cigarette as though to emphasize his words. ‘Most of the information a cop gets stays with him. Most of that which becomes a matter of record stays right in the department. Even the records of a convicted man—once he has re-established himself—are confidential.’ He lit the cigarette and said: ‘If I were you I’d tell Lieutenant Bacon just what you’ve told me. He’s an honest cop and he’ll never use anything against you that’s not pertinent to Garvin’s murder. What happened here since Garvin came is pertinent and he may want a statement. The rest of it——’

  A musical chord cut him off and he looked round in astonishment. French’s chuckle sounded almost genuine. ‘That’s my idea of a buzzer’, he said and started for the door.

  Vivian Keith’s quick, effusive greeting rippled through the apartment before Murdock saw her. She said: ‘Hello, darling’, and came up on tiptoe to kiss French. ‘You’re taking me to lunch, you know.’

  French backed off to close the door. He said something Murdock did not get and then Vivian looked up and hurried across the foyer, looking very smart in her black dress and short mink jacket and close-fitting hat.

  ‘Hello, Mr. Murdock’, she said, and came forward, her hand outstretched. ‘Do you have our picture yet?’

  Murdock had forgotten about the pictures. It was a subject he did not wish to dwell on and the mere thought of it served to blacken a mood which had become increasingly gloomy.

  ‘Not yet’, he said. ‘I haven’t had a chance.’

  ‘I’m dying to see it.’ She swept past him and began to straighten the music
sheets on the piano, her small hands quick-moving and restless. ‘I do hope it comes out.’

  French laughed. He said when Murdock took a picture it always came out. Then, with some hesitation, he said he might have to give her a rain check on the lunch.

  She turned quickly, her pencilled brows lifting and her small red mouth beginning to pout. ‘But you said——’

  ‘I know, but Kent and I have got a little business to take care of first. Unless’—he glanced at his watch—‘you want to make it a late lunch.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, her pout quickly forgotten. ‘One-thirty?’ she said. ‘At the Ritz bar.’

  French got his hat and they went out together. Down on the sidewalk he opened the door of Vivian’s convertible while she slipped behind the wheel. She asked if she could drop them anywhere but Murdock said he had his car.

  When she drove off he walked back to his coupé and French got in beside him. They rode in silence to Police Headquarters and when French opened the door he turned back to thank Murdock for listening to his troubles, a glum, unhappy man who moved with reluctance to the sidewalk and stood there surveying the building.

  ‘I ask for Lieutenant Bacon, hunh?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Co-operate with Bacon and he’ll co-operate with you’, Murdock said. ‘Just don’t try to outsmart him.’

  He shifted and drove off without glancing back, and when he reached his desk in the Courier ten minutes later he found a special delivery letter. The name and address had been printed in pencil and when he turned it over he saw there was no return address. He tore open the envelope, at once aware that some small, unyielding object lay inside, and then he pulled forth a sheet of paper which had been wrapped round a longish, funny-looking key.

  The key had a number on it, imprinted in a coloured handle: 8946. The cheap white sheet bore five words, printed crudely and in pencil, like the envelope: South Station. Atlantic Avenue Side.

  Chapter 11

  IT took Kent Murdock a little while to find the parcel locker with the proper number on the lock, even though he knew roughly where it might be. When, finally, he swung the door open and saw his equipment bags inside he was not particularly surprised.

  Coming down from the office he could find no other explanation for the key, and his discovery merely confirmed what he already suspected. Until now there had always been the possibility that his equipment had been stolen for profit: had this been the case it would never have been returned. That it was returned, with everything as he remembered it except the film, indicated that it had been taken for quite a different reason.

  He did not stop to make a careful inventory then but he did take time to kneel on the station floor and check the film. Every bit that had been in the film holders was gone, even though he knew none of this had been exposed. There were no longer any film packs. What he did have was a thick sheaf of developed negatives, held together with a rubber band.

  He understood the reason for this too, but when he returned to the Studio he took these negatives to the printing room and methodically put each one in the enlarger, not bothering to make prints but projecting the oversized image on a white sheet so that he could see more clearly the subject of the picture.

  In this, too, his suspicions were confirmed, and when, a half hour later, he walked back to the anteroom he knew that two negatives were missing: the two he had taken of Neil Garvin.

  The others he put in a desk drawer, and then leaned back in his chair, staring sightlessly at the opposite wall, his lean angular face grim and immobile as his mind began to work. He sat there quite a while, the same thoughts going round and round inside his head as he sought some new lead that would support his theory.

  Sometime later he realized he had had no lunch so he called upstairs for a boy and sent him out for a sandwich and coffee. He ate hungrily, looked over some prints one of his men offered for approval, then sent him out on another assignment, all the time thinking but never finding anything surprising or new. In the end the focus of his attention came down to one factor:

  Who, he asked himself, had developed the negatives?

  He looked again at the envelope he had saved. The postmark had been stamped at the South Station branch and the time was 11 p.m. How long before that the envelope and key had been posted it was impossible to know; he could narrow the time by checking with the branch post office but it did not necessarily follow that the envelope had been posted immediately after the bags had been put in the locker.

  It was a reasonable assumption however and now, working back, he realized that the developing had been done sometime between the time he had missed his equipment—he was not sure about this either but he thought it might be around six o’clock—and eleven.

  But by whom?

  Luther or Todd Canning? The Elliott twins?

  He shook his head unconsciously. Then who else was there left to do the work but Damin or Klime? No one in his right mind would take negatives such as were missing to a professional photographer. Too much was involved to take such a risk and yet those negatives had to be developed, all of them. For only in that way could one be sure that he had found the important ones.

  ‘Okay’, he said aloud and swivelled in his chair to reach for the telephone directory. When he found his number he gave it to the office operator and presently a female voice said:

  ‘Damin and Klime.’

  ‘You’re the private investigators?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, this is Mr. Lathrop of Lathrop and Marks. I may have a little work for you and I was wondering if you are equipped to take pictures.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Do you do your developing and printing right there in the office?’

  ‘No, but we arrange for such work confidentially.’

  Murdock thanked her and hung up, his smile fixed and mirthless as he opened a drawer and took out the ring of keys he had collected over the years. Then, pawing over the odds and ends in the drawer, he found a gadget a detective friend had given him a long time ago, a flat, thin strip of polished steel, round at one end and measuring perhaps five-eighths of an inch by five. A proper strip of celluloid would work just as efficiently on a spring lock but steel, his friend said, was more durable and more generally satisfactory.

  Consulting the directory once more, he jotted down an address and then gave the corresponding number to the operator. He heard the connection made, listened to the distant ringing of the other telephone. When he was satisfied there was to be no answer he stood up and reached for his hat and coat.

  Saul Damin lived in a brownstone not unlike the one Murdock occupied. In the same general neighbourhood, it stood in a block of other brownstones, some of which had been converted into small apartments and some serving as rooming houses. The street was quiet at this hour with the kids not yet home from school, and the sidewalks were empty except for two young women who nearly blocked it off by marching abreast with their baby carriages.

  Murdock parked somewhat beyond Damin’s address and then walked back, not knowing just what to expect until he had climbed to the vestibule and saw from the mailboxes on the wall that this house had been cut up into apartments, with Damin occupying 2-A.

  The small foyer was gloomy but clean, the stairs mounting directly ahead were carpeted but creaky, the banister shiny and black with age. There was a buzzer button next to Damin’s door and Murdock pressed it twice before he took out the thin steel strip and inserted it next to the moulding. The latch slid back silently and he pushed into a small hallway, easing the door shut behind him.

  The living-room opened up ahead of him but there was a door on his immediate right and he glanced into the sizable coat closet before he continued. He could see then that the living-room was long and rather narrow and overlooked the street. As he crossed this he was aware that the furnishings were quite good, heavy and masculine, but comfortable looking and in good taste. There was a pastel nude over the davenport, two sporting prints on
another wall, three small oriental rugs.

  At the far end there was an alcove, which may have been designed as a dinette since the kitchen adjoined; now it was furnished with a flat-topped deck, a green-steel filing cabinet, and a chair.

  The kitchen did not look as if it was much used and the ice box yielded nothing but soda, lemons, and beer. There was no sign of any photographic equipment either here or in the bedroom down the hall. When the bathroom turned out to be just another bathroom, Murdock knew that if Damin had done the developing last night he had not done it here. He went even further in his speculation because, being a photographer himself, he understood that most men interested in such things usually had some sort of a darkroom at home, even if they had to use the kitchen sink.

  Coming back through the little office he hesitated, his glance stopping on the desk. Then, on impulse, he reached down and tried a drawer. He did not know why. He had come here for one reason; to see if Damin might have developed the films. Damin apparently had not done so. Still——

  He had his keys in hand before he knew it and three minutes later he opened the centre drawer which, in turn, released the locking bars on the others. He found no films as he went through one drawer after the other. What he did discover in the double-depth drawer on the right was a desk safe of grey steel that was fastened solidly at the sides and bottom. He was fooling with the combination when he heard the car stop outside.

  It was the squeal of tyre against kerb that caught his attention and it was curiosity rather than any feeling of uneasiness that made him glance out the window. It was just as well he did.

  For the car, he realized at once, looked somewhat out of place in that neighbourhood. It was long and black and sleekly shining, and even as he watched, the right-hand door opened and a slim dark man in a blue coat stepped out on the sidewalk. Murdock could not see his face but even from that angle he saw enough to realize that Saul Damin had come home.