There was a Crooked Man

by George Worthing Yates

  “No.”

  “It’s getting damn cold out here. I’m just about wet through.”

  “How uncomfortable. Dare say you’re quite trustworthy?”

  Holcomb was amazed; then he laughed a little and said, “I won’t sell out cheap, anyhow.”

  “Good. Holcomb. I must remember the name. I shall depend on you, I think. No need for me to tell you how devilish precarious this affair seems, both for Christien and your Company. Two possible courses. To let the police go about their business, and consequently to trust Christien’s eventual vindication to the awful processes of law—if it must come to that. Or to undertake a private investigation at once, in a spirit of prejudice against the theory of Christien’s guilt. That is, to discover the real murderer. I prefer the second course. Do you agree? I shall engage a private detective tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Holcomb. “You can count on me.”

  “In what way?”

  “I know Mr. Boxworth will start a little investigation of his own, and that’ll be my job. Anything I find out, I’ll tell you about, if Boxworth hasn’t any objections.”

  “You must investigate those theatre passes.”

  “I have to get a list of owners,” said Holcomb, “first thing in the morning. Tussard wants it.”

  “This list, will it be extensive?”

  “Just prominent people, the Governor, the Mayor, movie stars, theatrical people, big executives, artists, people like that.”

  “Ah. Compare the names of the owners of those passes with the names to which those Whittacker advertisements were sent. Compare to the result, the names of the men who received notices of this meeting of the Committee tonight. That should suggest the identity of the murdered man.”

  “Not if he borrowed the pass, and happened to pick up the ad somewhere, and sneaked the notice of the meeting out of somebody’s office.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “I can tell you now, I don’t know where Boxworth’s notice went to, and neither does he. Levison can’t remember what he did with his, if he didn’t throw it away. And Suttro threw his away. I heard him say so. Tussard asked them to find them.”

  “I expect to meet difficulties, Holcomb.”

  “You will,” said Holcomb. Two policemen in uniform were working close to them along the terrace, flashing torches and weaving back and forth in a vain and dogged search for the absent watchman. “Well, I’ve got to do a lot before I go home—before I go to a hotel, I should say. I won’t get home any more tonight, I guess.”

  “Tomorrow morning? For a bit of a talk?”

  “Any time you say.”

  “Shortly before lunch. Here, in your office. Can you suggest a capable inquiry agent?”

  “That’s out of my line. I never went in for getting a divorce or anything. You might be able to find somebody in the telephone book.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where can I reach you, just in case?”

  “The Ritz. Do you know my name? Geoffrey Bennett. Assurance of perfect discretion, of course.”

  “Yes, sure,” said Holcomb. He seemed to be having a bit of trouble getting something out of his mind. He smoothed his wet hair with great vehemence, as if he had some hope of squeezing the thought into words by sheer physical pressure on his skull. He brought himself to the sticking-place at last, and blurted, “You know, I wouldn’t say too much to anybody. That is, I wouldn’t trust anybody too much. That is, you can’t tell how some people will take it if...”

  “What, pray, does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not my business to talk, anyhow. Look here, I have to go now.” Abruptly, Holcomb waved a hand and trotted briskly back across the tiles to the offices. He had to see Tussard. He had to see Mr. Boxworth. He had to telephone his wife. He had to lock something up in the office files. And he had to get some sleep, God knew how. And there had to be a watchman on duty...

  The discouraged policemen brought their search close at the end of the terrace, then struggled past Bennett and went away. Bennett stood alone in the darkness and mist. Death had become a matter of casual fact, accepted and unsurprising. Tomorrow there was this and that to be done. Most oppressing, at this late hour of the night, were the cold, hollow, empty structures rising about him, fantastic white monuments in the sky, dead as tombs, great human schemes with the living humans gone out of them, Chelsea Project asleep, sharply calm and dead. An uneasy sensation along the spine.

  Bennett, aware that his pipe had gone out and that he was tired and that his feet were damp, turned unhappily back, in the way Holcomb had gone. He saw Vergil’s horrid bird, the monster Scandal, wheeling on strange wings across the heavens. He brushed the fancy impatiently out of his mind. He said to himself, “Wretched, blundering fools, and the devil take us all for our incompetence.”

  He found Tussard to be in much the same unsatisfactory state.

  4.

  It was so late, and people had become so vague, ill-tempered and distracted for lack of sleep, that Tussard could do little with them but let them go. He had not found the watchman. He was sure the watchman had not got away. The watchman was therefore in the upper part of the building, but invisible. Tussard wanted a little time to think out this intricate matter, and all its implications.

  “You can all beat it now,” he said to the gathering in Christien’s office. “I’m not keeping you any longer. Leave the addresses where I can get you when you go past the man at the door. Don’t take it into your heads to go out of town without telling me first, because that would put me in a position where I’d have to be hard on you. I won’t get tough, if you won’t. Now go on, go home and get some sleep.”

  There was some pushing and talking in a confused way. They were awkwardly bearing out the dead man on a stretcher, which gave some trouble at the door. The police, most of them, were abandoning the scene, now exhaustively photographed, examined, measured and tested for finger-prints. There was weary obstinacy in the congestion about the secretary’s office. In the midst of it, Christien’s doctor came pushing his way through to Bennett.

  “I thought I’d better find you. Christien’s been taken to my hospital in a private ambulance, and Mrs Christien will stay in town tonight.”

  “Quite.”

  “She looked at the body. Nasty shock. But she couldn’t recognize it, of course. Odd, isn’t it, that nobody’s seen that fellow before?”

  “Where is she?”

  “This way.”

  Bennett had no trouble getting to the passage. The few policemen who remained were waiting for Tussard now, and gathering up the bits and pieces, the things on the secretary’s desk, the coats and hats...Paula Christien looked suddenly grateful at the sight of Bennett, stumbled against him and held fast with her hands to his coat. She said, “Geoffrey, they’ve taken him. They wouldn’t let me go in the ambulance—because a policeman—”

  “Not under arrest,” the doctor explained. “You can tell her not to worry about it. Just a formality, the cop going along.”

  “Damned precious formality!”

  “I arranged for her to have a room next to his at the hospital,” said the doctor.

  “Exactly. Come, Paula. Which way, doctor?”

  They were last, excepting Tussard’s men and Holcomb, to leave. They stood waiting for the elevator to come for them, when Tussard charged down the passage. At his heels came another policeman, in uniform.

  Tussard stopped, stared at them with a kind of white anger.

  “Look ‘em over, McGrath.”

  McGrath went carefully through the doctor’s clothes, pockets, linings, collar, socks, trouser ends and more intimate places; methodically, without unnecessary roughness, but leaving a ludicrous disorder behind him. The doctor tightened his lips and put up with it. He scowled a little when McGrath tickled him. He let Bennett protest.

  “Aren’t you being silly, Tussard?”

  “Let’s see your bag, Mrs Christien,” said Tussard. He went
through it, putting keys, purse, compact, card-case into his pockets after looking at them carefully.

  The elevator came, opened, showed a tired youth in plum-colored uniform. Tussard made a brisk motion with his hand, and the elevator went away again.

  “If you explained to me,” said Bennett, “I might help you. You aren’t looking for the watchman, by chance?”

  Tussard was stung. “I’m not looking for the watchman, Mr. Bennett. What are you doing here, anyway? Looking for a street car?”

  “You aren’t quite civil.”

  “You want to know what I’m looking for? Somebody got a little careless and took away the slip of paper we found in the dead man’s pocket. That Executive Committee notice.”

  McGrath finished with the doctor, shook his head, and turned to Bennett. Bennett gave him his hat, umbrella, gloves and overcoat.

  “It must embarrass you,” said Bennett. “Had it been photographed?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I know it’s too bad. Don’t tell me.”

  “Those others who were in Christien’s office? And Holcomb? Dare say you’ll search them, too?’

  “They got away on me. Holcomb’s being searched right now.”

  “Unfortunate. Holcomb won’t have it. I saw him go past the desk myself, and I’m quite sure he couldn’t reach it. Of course, we haven’t it. I fancy it’s destroyed by now.”

  “We’ll see.”

  When Bennett, too, had been searched, and McGrath had assured Tussard that Mrs Christien could scarcely have hid it during the moments she and Bennett and the doctor were together after coming away from the office, Tussard’s anger wilted into anti-climax and self-reproach.

  “After this, I’ll know enough to treat decent people like cheap crooks,” he said. “Where’s Dillon, wasn’t he watching that room?”

  “Ah, may we go?”

  “Get the—go on, go anywhere you want to.”

  He turned his back on them, and charged back the way he had come, with an eye out for the culpable Dillon.

  This was close to four o’clock on Wednesday morning. Mrs Christien went to the hospital, and Bennett went to his hotel to bed. The Christien chauffeur, luckless man, had to go back to Southampton that night for Mrs Christien’s things, and Bennett’s. Hope managed to avoid this somehow.

  By four o’clock the mechanical process of scandal was almost complete. Within a few hours, the morning papers would be propped against a million or so different sugar bowls on as many breakfast tables. There would be the customary hoarse shouts of murder and foul suspicion rising on a thousand street corners. Nothing could be done to prevent this. Therefore Bennett, eminently sound in his attitude towards Fate and similar inconveniences, quietly wound his watch and brushed his hair and washed his teeth and drank the night-cap Hope had put ready for him, and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A VERY LONG TIME ago and during the reckless days of his youth, Bennett’s personal servant had gone by the proud name of Cedric Hoppflack. The Hoppflacks as a family, even in these queasy times, are a proud lot of sturdy and self-respecting East Anglian yeomen; no mean people. Cedric, however, in the process of becoming a gentleman’s man, suffered Hoppflack to be reduced first to Hopp, then when dignity required, to the mere undistinguished Hope, and as Hope he was still catching up on his sleep in his cubicle on the top floor of Bennett’s hotel when the telephone rang in Bennett’s rooms. Bennett himself, therefore, woke cursing loudly (this was at quarter to nine on Wednesday morning) and climbed out of bed blinking to answer the thing himself.

  When he said Hello into the receiver, it sounded more like a sentence after court martial than a polite greeting.

  “Good morning. This is Louis Holcomb talking,” said an undaunted voice, as efficient and as weary as during the night before.

  “Really? Well?”

  “I just saw Tussard. You know a paper was picked up last night? He’s out for blood. And there’s no trace of the watchman.”

  “Surely, Holcomb, you aren’t fool or rascal enough to wake me to tell me these cold comforts?”

  “Sorry I woke you. I’d better call you later—”

  “Carry on. Wait. Ruddy gale raging here. Ah, back in bed now. Sorry. Are you there? Carry on.”

  “Well, sir, I want to apologize in a way.”

  “Do you? Apologize, then.”

  “I didn’t understand you were who you are when we were talking last night, and I don’t want you to think I—”

  “Ah! I feared it. Forget it. You Americans, Holcomb, are the most damnable snobs. Frightfully inconvenient. I think, Holcomb, it would be wise for us to be precise upon the point at the very beginning; our shortcomings, that is, my noble birth or what d’you call it, and your bloated emphasis upon the matter, must never rise to come between us again. Now, what the devil did Tussard say to you?”

  “He dropped a hint that somebody has been pulling strings. Working the influential friends. Getting Tussard worried. He’s afraid, I have an idea, that he may step on important toes if he isn’t careful. Afraid he’ll make a bad mistake and find himself pounding the pavements out in the wilds of Flatlands. I guess you understand what I mean.”

  “Whose toes, pray?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t either. He tried to pump me about you.”

  “Ah! Why?”

  “Because he found out you’re Lord Broghville.”

  “Ah! This is thick, Holcomb. May I ask, in an idle way, who first came to you with this priceless discovery?”

  “Everybody knows about it here. I think Mr. Levison figured it out first. He might have told Tussard this morning, I don’t know.”

  “Levison. Of course. Damn. What else did Tussard say?”

  “Something you might be interested in, sir. You re

  member I spoke of Hobey Raymonds, the boy who was drunk last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “They haven’t very much against him. Anyhow, Tussard wants to question him this morning. He’s going to bring him over at eleven o’clock. We’re checking up on what he says, so we can bring charges for illegal entry or something like that, if it’s necessary. I thought you might like to be in on it. I fixed it for you to be here, if you want to.”

  “I do. At eleven. Right you are.”

  “And I asked Mr. Boxworth about a private detective. He told me you could ring Murray Hill 2-0224. It’s the Meaghen Agency—M-e-a-g-h-e-n. All he knows is that they keep in with the police pretty well, which might help. That’s all I could find for you, sir.”

  “Good. Thank you. One word more. Has this Raymonds and his coming up for questioning implied a change in the official attitude?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll look in on you at eleven, then...”

  Bennett put aside the telephone. Very soon, Hope brought the morning cup of tea to Bennett’s bedside, and pulled open the curtains to let in an exuberant burst of robust spring sunshine. The old man drank the tea, blinked like a bear at the sun, and relaxed in complete tranquility beneath the covers for his habitual period of reflection. Hope was running water for the bath. An orderly and reassuring sound.

  As for this matter of the dead man’s identity; something could be made of that without stirring a muscle. Far from being the corpse of almost anybody at all, as Tussard seemed to think, merely because it had no name and telephone number attached to it, it was in Bennett’s opinion a most distinguished and unusual corpse, quite out of the ordinary run of such things.

  The money: a wealthy man. The ring, the watch, the note-case: a man of sober taste, with respect for the acquisitions of his parents, and with no liking for cheap and shoddy things. The three keys on a thong: a man who seldom went abroad in the world, a man who lived simply. This was inferred, since Bennett regarded the accumulation of dozens, even hundreds of keys as one of the necessary attendant evils of an active and varied career. The more one does in the world, the
more keys he must carry. The make-shift mask for the ruined face: a sensitive concealment of a personal horror that would have ceased to be a bother, in the case of an insensible or superficial person, many years ago. (Bennett never considered seriously the opinion, earnestly proposed in several newspapers, that the bandage had been intended as a kind of disguise.)

  Even more revealing and insistent than any of these details remained the vision of that singular forehead, so clear, grave, intellectual, impressive, beautiful. Bennett raked in his memory for some elusive association, and •recalled at last the poet Tennyson as he had seen him once on the Isle of Wight. Although the generalization ranged clear outside the farthest rules of logic, Bennett nevertheless believed that the faces of great men took on a perceptible nobility and refinement as they grew old. The forehead of the dead man, considered this way, would not let itself be reasoned quite into irrelevance.

  Surely the murderer must have known very well whom he had killed. Knowing it, he had found it very necessary to suppress it; and he had made away with the pass and, later, the notice of the committee meeting, in spite of the greatest danger of discovery. It followed, too, that the murder had been a hasty deed, not carefully planned and prepared. Otherwise the clumsy and uncertain method, choking, would have been improved upon. With more time, and free from the pressure of circumstances that had risen last night, the murderer might have succeeded in concealing his crime and his victim entirely, if the victim was as thorough a recluse as it seemed now. Who would set up a cry for a missing man without friends or family?

  A man probably of distinction, wealth, culture, and certainly of secluded habits, had been throttled in some terrible emergency there on the terrace. But why had he gone there? And why had he been killed? Bennett speculated. The notice taken from under Tussard’s nose, connected the dead man even more closely to one of the group of five—Ann Crofts and her aunt, Suttro, Levison and Boxworth. Less and less, the sphere of interest was proving unlimited. Progress, even in bed, was possible.

  On this note of cheer and confidence, Bennett stretched and got up for his bath.

  2.

  Bennett had Hope call the Meaghen Agency. The operative (Francis X. Mapes, his card read) arrived in a remarkably short time, like a doctor come to deliver a baby. Bennett was still soaking his gaunt pink ancient body in a tub of warm water.