The Nine Mile Walk

by Harry Kemelman

  I played another half dozen games with Zelsky, losing when I gave him an advantage but invariably winning when we played even. He invited me to dinner at his house and it was quite late by the time I finally got home.

  Dressing the next morning I turned on the news broadcast and heard that Lesser had been killed by a fall from a ladder while working on Professor Robert Dykes’ house.

  I had only met Lesser once, two days before, and had not found him particularly prepossessing; nevertheless it was something of a shock to realize he was now dead. What made it even worse was that apparently I had last seen him only minutes before his death.

  I arrived at my office and to my surprise found Nicky waiting. He tapped an inside page of the morning newspaper and tossed it on my desk. “Have you seen this?”

  A glance at the headline told me it was the story on Lesser. “I got it over the radio this morning,” I said.

  “I thought you might have more information.”

  I riffled through the papers on my desk. “Nothing here. But we can step around the corner to Police Headquarters and see what they’ve got.” I was somewhat surprised he was interested, but knowing how I felt I assumed he felt the same way.

  Captain Scalise was busy checking through the contents of a metal file on his desk when we came in. “This is luck,” he said. “I was just planning to drop around to see you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes sir. A man, name of Lesser—”

  “That’s why we’re here,” I said.

  “Then you heard about it?”

  “On the morning newscast. It didn’t say much. Was there some reason you thought his death might interest me?”

  “Well, there is and there isn’t,” said Scalise. “Seems this Lesser had a little shop where he repaired radios and TVs. He also did some film developing and printing. And he traded in cameras and sold supplies for ham operators. The story as I get it was that he was putting up some special kind of antenna for Professor Dykes. I guess you two must know him.”

  Nicky and I nodded.

  “Well, along about half past one another professor from the college, name of Jan Ladlo, comes calling on Dykes. He rings the bell and there’s no answer. So he goes around the back. According to him, Dykes frequently works around the back of the house and doesn’t always hear the bell. At least that’s what he says.” He looked at us questioningly.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, his story is that just as he rounded the corner of the house he heard a cry, and looking up, he saw the ladder falling. A moment later Lesser hit the ground. He rushed over, but immediately saw there was nothing to do. He ran out into the street and caught hold of Jeb Grogan, who is the patrolman on the beat. According to Grogan, Lesser was already dead, but of course he called in for an ambulance.”

  Scalise opened a desk drawer and took out a large manila envelope. He slid the contents onto the top of the desk. “This is what was found on him.”

  It was about what you would expect: a well-worn wallet with eight dollars in bills, a pocket handkerchief, seventy-three cents in coin, and a leather key case. He poked in the still open drawer and this time drew out a camera with a leather case and strap. “And he was wearing this at the time. Kind of funny—I mean a man wearing a camera while working on a ladder.”

  “He was testing it. I gather he carried one pretty much all the time.”

  “Testing it to decide whether to buy it or not?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then that checks. This fellow Dykes called up and asked if he could have it—claimed it was his and that you knew about it.”

  “Is that why you wanted to see me?”

  “That was one of the reasons.”

  “What time did this happen—I mean Lesser falling?” asked Nicky.

  Scalise flipped the pages of a notebook. “It was one fifty-two when Grogan saw the body. Figure that Lesser fell a couple of minutes earlier, maybe as much as five minutes because this Ladlo didn’t spot Grogan right away.”

  I looked at Nicky. “That must have been within minutes after we saw him from High Street.”

  Nicky nodded grimly.

  Scalise picked up the key case. “This kind of roused my curiosity,” he said.

  I opened it and found it contained three keys, one of which was obviously the key to his car. “What makes these so interesting?”

  “Well, I know Lesser’s shop,” said Scalise. “It’s a little two-by-four place and he lives in the back. I wouldn’t give you a hundred dollars for everything in it. Now this key is the key to the shop, but this one is to a safe deposit box down at the bank. I know because I’ve got one. So I decided to take a look at the contents of that box. I also had the boys in the squad car look over his place. They brought this file in. It has some papers, but they’re mostly bills and invoices and business correspondence. Nothing that helps us. There are also a bunch of pictures—”

  “Pictures that Lesser snapped?” asked Nicky. “May I?”

  “Sure.” Scalise pushed the file over to him.

  “Did the bank manager let you open Lesser’s box?” I asked.

  “Oh, I went to see Judge Quigley first of course. As a matter of fact, I know the manager and he would have let me look—unofficially, of course. He knows I’d play fair; if I found something, I’d leave it until I came back with a court order.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  “These pictures are extremely interesting,” said Nicky, who had been studying them all the while.

  “Interesting how?” asked Scalise, fearful he had overlooked something.

  “They’re all the same kind of thing—what the art critics call coup d’oeil, the blink-of-an-eye type of picture, a flash of visual impression that is almost deceptive. There are action pictures here, for example, of a basketball game in which the players are like figures in a ballet; there’s a picture of a full moon transfixed on the spire of a steeple like a ball on a Christmas tree; there is a picture of two people on a park bench that looks like a single body with two heads.”

  Scalise laughed. “Well, he took one other picture that isn’t in that collection. It’s like the blink of an eye all right. In fact, it will make you blink. That’s what I found in the safe deposit box. That’s all that was there.” He reached into his desk drawer and tossed over to me a small square print. It was of Professor Ladlo and his young wife. They were naked.

  “A Peeping Tom,” I exclaimed.

  “Worse than that,” said Scalise. “Turn it over.”

  On the back, in pencil, was a list of dates and beside each a sum of money.

  “You’ll notice that starting in May and going through to December, there is a hundred dollars a month that I’m guessing Ladlo paid to Lesser.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “I would say so, sir.”

  “They’ve only been married a few weeks—”

  “Oh, that’s his wife, is it?”

  “But the dates and figures would suggest that this happened sometime ago, months ago.” I chuckled. “Sonofagun, I didn’t think he had it in him.”

  Nicky cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “The initiative could have come from the lady, you know. She has a forceful personality.”

  “Nicky!”

  “Obviously he was on a ladder when he took the shot,” he continued, ignoring my outburst.

  “How do you know?” asked Scalise.

  “Because that took place in Ladlo’s apartment. I’ve been there and I recognize the lamp on the table. Now Ladlo is on the third floor of that new apartment house on Dalton Street. Since there are only one- and two-story houses across the street he wouldn’t have to draw the blinds. You can’t see into his apartment from any of the houses across the way. But a man on a ladder putting up an antenna on the roof of one of those houses would be on the third-story level and could see straight in.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Scalise. “That must have been the way it was done. In any case, yo
u can see that I was justified in calling in Ladlo to make a statement.”

  “You showed him the snapshot?” I asked.

  “No, I thought I ought to speak to you about it first, him being a professor at the college and all that. But knowing about the print, I thought it gave me the right to ask a lot of questions and get a full statement.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “The sort of questions you’d ask if you were investigating a crime,” he answered sharply, “rather than what you’d need to just fill out an accident report. I asked him why he was calling on Dykes in the first place. You see, if he said he just happened to be in the neighborhood, he could have just happened to see Lesser on top of that ladder. A man on a ladder, Professor,” he added with a smile, “can not only see a great distance, but he can also be seen.”

  “Your idea is that Ladlo might have spotted Lesser on the ladder, approached unnoticed, and upset the ladder?” Nicky asked.

  “Why not?”

  “It was a magnesium ladder and they’re pretty easy to upset,” Nicky admitted.

  “That’s right,” Scalise said.

  “And what reason did Ladlo give for being there?” I asked.

  “He said he went to see Dykes about some manuscript he was working on. You remember this Professor Bowman who took a tumble a couple of weeks ago up at the excavation on High Street? He was writing a book with this Dykes, or Dykes was helping him. Now Bowman’s son”—he glanced at his notes—“that’d be Charles Bowman, he’s in the publishing business, and he’s interested in getting that book for his own company. And as the old man’s heir, I guess he’s got a right to it, at least to that part of it that his father did. But according to Ladlo, he was afraid that if he came right out and asked for it, Dykes might balk—try to palm him off with a couple of chapters, claim that the rest was his, or that it was all that had been done. So he asked Ladlo to see Dykes so he could evaluate the manuscript.”

  “But why Ladlo? Did he know him?”

  “He met him at Prex’s party, of course,” Nicky observed. “It would be the natural thing to do—to approach the senior man in the department.”

  “I gather too, the young feller hinted that he’d let him finish it, either with Dykes or alone,” said Scalise.

  “And did Bowman come to see him? He was here in town?” I asked.

  “That’s what Ladlo said.”

  “Did you check?”

  “I called the hotel and he had been there all right but had already left by the time I called. Anyway, that was Ladlo’s reason for going to see Dykes. And by the way, that’s why he didn’t phone first to make an appointment. I got the impression that Ladlo thought Dykes might not be too willing to surrender the manuscript. His idea was just to drop in on Dykes accidentally—as though he just happened to be in the neighborhood and then lead the talk around to the manuscript.”

  I glanced at Nicky. “What do you think?”

  “I think the manuscript might be valuable enough to murder for,” said Nicky quietly. “And I think there might be proof in that camera, Captain. I suggest you have the film in it processed right away.”

  “You think Lesser might have had a chance to snap a picture of Ladlo just before he fell, maybe even caught him in the act of tipping the ladder?” He looked at Nicky in frank admiration. He flipped the intercom switch on his desk and called in the uniformed officer who acted as his clerk. “Tom, take this down to Ned at the photo lab and tell him I want the roll in it developed and printed right away.”

  “But it wasn’t Ladlo who wanted the manuscript,” I protested, “at least not for himself. It was young Bowman—”

  “We’ve got only Ladlo’s word for that,” said Scalise. “Besides, Ladlo had reason for killing Lesser because he was blackmailing him.”

  “He had been,” Nicky corrected. “But that was over and done with. The figures show that. There’s a line under the December payment and the amount is totaled. Back in May or earlier, when the picture was taken, it could have done a lot of damage. The lady was suing for divorce at the time. But now that they’re married, Ladlo had nothing to fear from him.”

  Scalise was nettled. “Yeah, but Ladlo lost eight hundred dollars in this little game of Lesser’s, and as far as I’m concerned that’s good enough reason for Ladlo to give him the old heave-ho when he saw his chance.”

  Nicky looked at him in surprise. “Do you really think so, Captain? Eight hundred dollars is a nice tidy little sum, but to a man in Ladlo’s position, hardly ruinous. Jan Ladlo is a mild, gentle, scholarly type, not what I would call vengeful. It’s hard for me to imagine him killing someone in cold blood because he had been mulcted of eight hundred dollars. And would he have gone looking for a policeman? When he could have walked quietly away?” He shook his head. “I doubt if he even knew who his blackmailer was. I doubt if Lesser would have approached him directly. My guess is that the arrangements were made by telephone and the money was sent to a box number at the post office. When Lesser saw the announcement of the marriage a few weeks ago, he knew that the game was up. It wouldn’t surprise me if he sent him the negative as a wedding gift. That would explain why it wasn’t in the safe deposit box with the print.” Suddenly he began to laugh. “Yes, I’m sure of it. It’s in keeping with Lesser’s rather peculiar sense of humor.”

  “What do you know about Lesser and his sense of humor?” I asked scornfully. “You saw him for a minute yesterday, a hundred yards away. And the day before, you saw him for about ten minutes, and he spoke maybe thirty words.”

  “The conversation was short,” he admitted, “nevertheless it was quite remarkable.”

  “What was remarkable about it?”

  “Do you remember how it went?”

  I flatter myself that as a result of years of courtroom experience in the examination of witnesses, I have developed a pretty good memory. “Not word for word,” I said, “but I remember the gist of it. Dykes asked Lesser how he liked the camera and he answered that he didn’t know yet because he was still testing it. Then Lesser asked Dykes if he wanted to buy some special antenna that he had. Dykes asked him when he got it and Lesser said it was one that he had bought for himself but had decided not to use because his place was too low; that he had put one up on the house across the street and that it worked fine. All right so far?”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  “Okay. Then Dykes asked him when he had put it up and Lesser said he had installed it in time for Christmas. And Dykes said he would have helped him if he had seen him working. And Lesser answered that he had seen him. So Dykes said he couldn’t have because he had been away all day.”

  “And what did Lesser say to that?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “That was what was remarkable about the conversation.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Nicky was scornful. “It’s your courtroom training. In the courtroom, dialogue is carried on according to a rigid set of rules: a question is asked and the question is answered—finis. If you should repeat the question, the attorney on the other side or the judge would object that you had already asked your question and received an answer. Then there would be a discussion and finally the judge would rule that the witness did have to answer or did not. Then the witness would ask to have the question repeated—and on and on. But normal conversation doesn’t work that way. It has a certain rhythm. When Dykes said that Lesser couldn’t have seen him on the day in question because he was out of town, Lesser should have said something like, ‘Well, I thought it was you,’ or ‘I could have sworn it was you,’ or even, ‘I guess I must have been mistaken.’ But Lesser said nothing, and I lost all interest in the chess game because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “But still I don’t see—”

  “—what connection it has with the present case? You’ve forgotten the day they were talking about. Lesser put up the antenna on the day before Christmas, the tw
enty-fourth. That was the day that Johnny Bowman fell to his death and that Dykes claimed to have been out of town all day.”

  I stared at him. “Are you suggesting that Bobby Dykes had something to do with Bowman’s death?”

  “He said he wasn’t home when Bowman called because he was out of town. If he lied about seeing Bowman, it could be only because he had some knowledge of his death. And if he claimed he was in Norton all day, it can mean only that he wanted to furnish himself an alibi.”

  “But you don’t know that he was home. Lesser said he saw him and Dykes denied it. And Lesser did not contradict him. And now Lesser is dead and we can’t ask him.”

  “Ah, but he did contradict him. He dropped the other shoe all right, but I didn’t know it at the time. Only when I saw this snapshot of Ladlo and his wife did I understand. He answered Dykes by snapping a picture of him and then explained that he couldn’t resist the shot, what with the sun slanting through the venetian blinds like prison stripes. In effect, he was saying that he had proof of having seen him—that he had a picture of him. Dykes understood all right because it was then that he asked how much he wanted for the antenna. And if he had any doubt, it was dispelled when Lesser quoted him a price of five hundred dollars.”

  “You mean that five hundred was a blackmail payment? How do you know? What do you know about the price of an antenna?”

  “I’ll admit I don’t know much about antennae? antennas?” He cocked his head to one side to listen to the sounds. Then he nodded. “Antennas—I think I prefer the English plural; the Latin can be reserved for the apparatus of insects.”

  “Nicky!”

  “Oh yes, well I don’t know much about antennas, but I do know something about five hundred dollars. I saw the antenna that Lesser installed. It was a simple affair. Unless it is made of some precious metal instead of the steel it appears to be made of, I would say that five hundred was at least three or four hundred too much.”