There was a Crooked Man

by George Worthing Yates

  “Yes,” said Tussard, “that’s a theory that fits what we know.”

  “Pure conjecture, I assure you.”

  “I know that, sir. How about some conjecture on what happened tonight?”

  “With pleasure. Murderer suffers dreadfully. What might happen to him, if you found the watchman’s body, thus eliminating watchman as second suspect, and thus eliminating Mr. Christien as first suspect? Horrid thought. He can’t sit idle, waiting. He must, he supposes, remove the corpse of the watchman.”

  “The watchman on top of the elevator doesn’t clear Christien,” said Tussard.

  “Not according to your evidence.”

  “What other evidence is there?”

  “The murderer’s own. He may well have seen Mr. Christien through the window. He may suppose you allow Christien three or four minutes for his crime. In truth, you allow him more than ten minutes, possibly fifteen.”

  “All right. I’ll let it go for now.”

  “Generous, my dear Tussard. Let’s get on. The murderer, in a fever of apprehension, realizes that the watchman may be discovered soon, and also that tonight is an excellent time for preventing such a discovery. The lift stands, as last night at the second. The corpse on its roof, of course, can be reached from the third. The murderer, we may be sure, has taken the watchman’s keys. With them, he can get about very conveniently. I assume, not unreasonably, that he enters the building in some way I shan’t be precise about, and prepares the scene by putting out the lights on the second floor, and the third, where he intends to use the landing. The lights are arranged. In the dark, he opens the door of the shaft at the third floor, and removes the body to the floor of the landing. Quickly as he can, he runs below to the lift itself on the second, and raises it up to the third, where he next puts the corpse in the lift. He returns to the third floor again for some obscure reason—”

  “I think I can tell you.”

  “Pray do.”

  “If he was going to get rid of the body, he took the clothes off it so it wouldn’t be identified. He went back to the third to get the clothes.”

  “Bauer? Raymonds? What do you say?”

  “He was there too long just to be picking up some clothes,” said Bauer.

  “Too long for that,” said Raymonds.

  “Unless,” said Bennett, “he stood in the dark in dithering terror, waiting for courage to return.”

  “He was probably putting on the watchman’s clothes,” said Tussard, “so he wouldn’t have to carry them in a bundle. He could wear them under an overcoat.”

  “Oh, excellent!” said Bennett. “He was dressing when we trapped him. Dressing, I suggest, by the light of a ten shilling petrol lighter. He forced our trap, sprang into his lift, and vanished.”

  “Vanished where?”

  “To the street. With the corpse? Yes. No doubt he had a motor car waiting. The motor car, Tussard, is for you to find.”

  “I won’t know whether I have to look for it or not,” said Tussard, “till I find out if the watchman was really dead and stuck on the top of the elevator, and if you can play around with these elevators like that, and if anybody used the stage door downstairs on Eighteenth Street. I got a man stationed at the corner of Ninth, keeping an eye on anything that happens along the street.”

  When Markey came back, Tussard’s doubts perished. The top of the elevator cage, a flat and ample space, had definite marks in the dust on it. These had more than probably been caused by a human body. The elevator doors, not at all usual, had locks that permitted them to be opened by the watchman’s key from the hall, whether the cage itself was at that floor or not. As for the policeman at the corner of Sixth:

  “That’s perfectly right, sir,” said Markey gravely. “And it’s just that he reported, at exactly seventeen minutes to eleven when the crosstown traffic was going through. A man with a very large object coming from the theatre, sir. He had a little car waiting, and away he went in it before the lights could change against him.”

  “That took guts,” said Bauer in the depths of his chair.

  “He had no choice then,” said Bennett. “Absolute ruin raging at his back, a cold corpse in his arms, and a city street before him.”

  “It was McLellan saw it,” said Markey. “Want him up?”

  “Later,” said Tussard. “Not now.”

  “How about the car?”

  “McLellan see the numbers?”

  “No lights on the car, he says.”

  “Description?”

  “Chevrolet coup’, 1934.”

  “Get on to it, Markey.”

  Markey nodded. He went out to use the telephone in the secretary’s office.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BENNETT MADE A motion with his pipe-stem towards Hobey Raymonds, who was staring up at the ceiling. Tussard agreed, and called out, “Markey! Hey, Markey!”

  Markey opened the door.

  “Hey, Raymonds! Outside.” Raymonds took up his hat and coat, and departed. Tussard continued to Markey, “All right. Let him go. And no visitors here for a while. That’s all.”

  Bennett then composed himself comfortably in the chair Raymonds had left. He blew out a fat cloud of tobacco smoke, and watched it roll in the light on Tussard’s desk. He said, “Really, Tussard, do we agree?”

  “Just about.”

  “Um.”

  “You can take one line, Mr. Bennett, and build on it and follow it up. You can say, this thing is more probable than that thing, so I’ll believe this. But I got to take every damn line I get hold of, and follow it up as if I believed it was the only one, and I got to believe everything till my case breaks; this thing and that thing, probable, improbable, and just plain no damn good at all.”

  “Therefore clinging to the theory that Christien is the murderer; that the watchman is alive, and the murderer; and, for all I know, that I am the murderer myself.”

  “I can agree with you on your theory,” said Tussard, “and keep all the other theories, too, can’t I?”

  “If you’re clever.”

  “You see, Mr. Bennett, I know something about Mr. Christien that you don’t know yet, and when you know it, you may change your mind a little.”

  “The devil. Really?”

  “But I’m not telling you about it, Mr. Bennett, because I don’t know you won’t go right to Christien’s lawyers with it, and I don’t think that would be fair to me. So we won’t argue about it. I’ll say frankly, Mr. Bennett, that my mind is open like a porch right now, and just about as empty, and what you found out tonight has changed everything around a whole lot, and I’m not disagreeing with you at all.”

  “Good. Privately, you think Mr. Christien has an accomplice?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who?”

  “He has a wife, hasn’t he?”

  2.

  Bennett said, “We may walk a long way, Tussard, and stumble on each insufficient fact a hundred times over, and grow old, and not get to the bottom of this crime. It seems to me that all our little facts are no more use to us than this, cumbrances to stumble over. Facts are rot. The psychology of murder is rot. Indeed, all psychology is pretentious rot, a cold puffing out of some ancient commonplace. Let us both have the grace to stop pretending we are logical and deductive. You think Frederick Christien is the murderer; and you will find your facts to satisfy the thought, and to hang Christien, if the facts exist. No! And justly, too! I shan’t complain—if you discover facts. However, you and your opinion, not facts from which you dispassionately deduce his guilt, will hang the man. I, of course, have another man to hang.”

  Tussard said, “Who?”

  “My mind, Tussard, is more doddering, and less impulsive, than yours. I must wait. Perhaps the issue of justice to a horrid murderer scarcely excites me, at my age. But prejudice? My dear man, as you are prejudiced in the opinion that Christien is guilty, I am equally prejudiced for equally superficial and illogical reasons in the opinion that Christien is innocent. Christien,
you know, is my friend.”

  “I hope you get him off.”

  “Generous hope. You likewise hope to get him on. How it may turn as the murderer writhes and kicks the dust about, I’m sure I don’t know. Dare say, Tussard, if I had an opinion, I could find the facts tonight in what we both know. And dare say too, that if your opinion were right enough, you, too, could find the facts to put Christien in the dock.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Who is the murdered man, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He came on his crippled legs last night, to the terrace outside. He was murdered. The watchman saw the murder, and the murderer. The watchman flashed his torch—Oh, Bauer! you know you sat on my torch, don’t you, at the proper moment? I had it in my hand—”

  “Probably got shot if you’d lit it, sir.”

  “However. The watchman last night flashed his torch. Perhaps he was astonished, amazed. But he was killed on the spot, before he could speak. Curiously, it was the watchman whom the murderer concealed first. Do you think the other man seemed less dangerous, less easily identified? Do you think, perhaps, that the murderer had brooded in his mind on killing the cripple one day, so that the sight of his dead body frightened him less than the sight of the dead watchman, whose death was not premeditated?”

  “That’s pulling it fine, sir,” said Tussard.

  “It is, indeed.”

  “You say it’s all a guess, who did it. I’d like to hear your guess.”

  “Oh no! unjust!”

  “Well, if justice is only a guess, the way you said...?

  “Good God, I’m done!”

  “You know mine, sir. I’d like to hear yours.”

  “You’ll hear it all, then. I made a frightful blunder. I let the murderer know I would come here tonight.”

  “How?”

  “He came to dine with me. I told him, not explicitly, but by inferences, that I would come. He knew, I’m sure, that I meant to find what you, Tussard, had overlooked. He may have thought me more astute than you. At least, he got here before me. No coincidence, you know, that I interrupted his arrangements to depart. It was a kind of race. He won it.”

  “Who was this you told?”

  “Three people—Ann Crofts, Miss Whittacker, and Anthony Suttro.”

  “Which is the one?”

  “My guess? Suttro.”

  3.

  “Suttro telephoned over here about ten o’clock or a little earlier, and told Mr. Levison you’d be coming tonight to have a look for something.”

  “The devil.”

  “Mr. Levison was in his office, and he went across to Holcomb, who was sitting here in this office of Christien’s and he told Holcomb you were coming.”

  “The devil.”

  “Holcomb was alone in his office from that time, till Raymonds called for help. Levison was alone in his office.”

  “Goon.”

  “I’m just showing you what I have to do, Mr. Bennett. I check up on everybody. Ann Crofts was in her little shop, alone. Emma Whittacker was down in the theatre seeing the show, right here in this building. You might have guessed her, and been nearer right.”

  “Go on.”

  “Mr. Christien was in the hospital, and dead to the world. But Mrs Christien went out about nine o’clock. The first time she left the hospital since last night. She hasn’t got back yet, because they got to ring me when she shows up.”

  “Go on.”

  “John Boxworth was up in Mr. Suttro’s office when I rang him, and Boxworth says he was with Mr. Suttro from ten o’clock on.”

  “Tussard, my humiliation is abject, and profound. May yours be so, too, when you find out the truth about Christien. I withdraw my guess, if I may. I told you, I think, I hadn’t decided properly? Tonight’s prowling might be the work of the murderer’s third cousin, who heard him confessing the crime at family prayers, and who chose to confuse the plot merely for a rag. Suttro! I’ll be dashed.”

  “Going, sir?”

  “Of course. Dare I stay? Get your coat, Bauer.” Tussard said, “When will you be back?”

  “Friday.”

  “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Forgive me.”

  “I mean, anything you want done?”

  “Quite seriously, I shall start from abstractions and work towards the prejudice this time. Could you give me dossiers on Levison, Holcomb, Boxworth—and Suttro?”

  “Stuff I’ve looked up about their pasts, eh?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Yes, I can. That’s routine work. When do you want it?”

  “Tonight, before I go to Washington. Give it to Hope.”

  “I’ll have it sent in a hurry. While you’re in Washington, you can boot my man along. I sent him down by ‘plane this afternoon to look up the records on cripples without faces. Disabled Veterans.”

  “Good. Friday, then.”

  “That’s right, sir. I’ll have the watchman for you by then, dead or alive.”

  “Dead. And Tussard!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Keep the dead watchman under your hat, as they say.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Tussard.

  4.

  Bennett and Bauer came out on Eighteenth in a thin flush of late theatre-goers.

  “Supper with Suttro,” murmured Bennett.

  “What, sir?”

  “Nothing.”

  The theatre-goers vanished as the two men strolled towards Eighth. Bennett scowled at the empty street, now glazed and cold in the light of the lamps. A few parked cars made black shadows where they stood.

  “What do you think of it, Bauer?”

  Discreet and unobtrusive, Bauer said, “I don’t know as I think anything, sir. I haven’t followed the trouble very closely.”

  Bennett swung his stick at a crumpled cigarette package and murmured, “Nor, as it seems, have I.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE DISTINGUISHED old gentleman in the silk hat encountered the pretty girl with flowers in her hair, almost directly beneath the great canvas representing the Civil War draft riots, and he said, “I own twelve hundred slaves in West Africa. Liberate them? Maudlin hysterical nonsense. Where is your aunt?”

  “Late, it seems. Looking in the wrong places for me.”

  “And Mr. Suttro?”

  “Upstairs by now. Who is that man?”

  “Bauer. He has me in charge.”

  “Shall we walk round the Moore House Lobby, Mr. Bennett? I’ve been standing here so long, my knees are beginning to be afraid I’m an elephant.”

  “Of course.”

  “This is the Livingston School display, and these are the New York History murals.”

  “Art?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You know, I think the Bovril posters are very cheerful, and I seldom go higher.”

  “Let’s not wait any longer. She’s not here.”

  The Chelsea Roof has its own elevator in the evening. They ascended, and found Aunt Emma waiting with Anthony Suttro at one of the little tables in the Lounge.

  “My dear child, I thought you said—”

  “Not here,” said Ann. “Come argue with me while I leave my coat.”

  Suttro said, “Nothing very serious seems to have happened to you, Mr. Bennett. From the way Tussard spoke to me on the telephone, I was afraid at first you’d been really injured.”

  “Silly misadventure.”

  “How about the newspapers?”

  “I don’t think so, really.”

  “Tussard may let them have the news.”

  “I don’t think so. Indeed, there was no news.”

  “Good. Latest thing is, the dead man came from Boston. He was identified, possibly you heard—?”

  “No.”

  “By a train porter and a conductor. They’d seen him a year ago. The hunt is on in Boston now. It’s a reasonable theory. If he’d lived in New York, he’d have been reported missing by somebody, his fam
ily or friends or his landlord by this time.”

  “Very probably. Ah, there’s Miss Crofts coming—“

  They advanced into the Chelsea Roof, which is not a roof at all. Suttro had managed to arrange a table on the square raised terrace which surrounds the oval dance floor, like the curb of a giant well. At the table sat a beautiful and ineffectual blonde angel, who had the very best manners and vaguely distressed eyes, as if she were wondering what people thought of her. She came from California. Her name was Cushman. Her father made motion pictures. With her sat John Boxworth, whose bright, polished red cheeks and fine white hair looked especially grandfatherly. He had been asked, it was eventually explained to Bennett, to take the strange girl from California on a mild tour of the city out of the kindness of his heart, and because nobody else would do it, and because it was one of those things that had to be done. Boxworth brightened with relief at the sight of Suttro and his guests.

  (The beautiful Miss Cushman danced beautifully with Suttro once or twice, but confined her conversation to intense, empty stares, and nods and shakes of her head, and was soon given up. She drank buttermilk.)

  Boxworth, like Bennett, did not dance. They had much time to themselves. Ann seemed to know several formidably upright young men who dressed a great deal like Hobey Raymonds, and several very fresh and bright young ladies. Aunt Emma worked diligently to catch the eye of an august and icy female novelist (taking her husband out for the evening) and thereafter drank two cups of tea at the novelist’s table while she let it be known she was in the company of Lord Broghville. Bennett himself marveled at the fluid gentle light in the silver ceiling, and at the luminous dance floor itself, and at the great windows which made the room seem a fragile shell floating unsupported in a void of night.