by Joe Barry
“Yes.” Rush’s seriousness was a model of overacting. “Yes, by all means. The police must be told. I’d go to them right away.”
In the edge of his field of vision Rush saw Merwin come through the front door. He made a veiled sign to him to stay away.
“I’ll do it. I’ll go to them right away. You’ve made me see that it is my duty.” The tall, dark man rose to go. “Thank you very much for your time, Mr. —?”
“Henry, Rush Henry, and it’s been a pleasure, Mr. —?”
Rush caught him off balance and he obviously fished. “Ah, Miller, Otto Miller.”
“Yes, it’s been a pleasure, Mr. Miller. I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
Rush followed him as far as the bar and said a final farewell. He stood there waiting till the door closed behind Mr. Miller, then he swung on Merwin.
“Tail him. Run him to ground and let me know where he sits. If you need any help phone Hogan and take tricks with him. Now, beat it and don’t lose him.”
Merwin was sometimes slow but he knew an order when he heard one and this was his meat. He knew the city of Chicago from the South Shore to Evanston and it was a rare quarry that could lose him.
Rush turned to the bar. “A rye, Barney, to take the taste of that sanctimonious hypocrite out of my mouth.”
The rye came and Rush drank it. He suddenly realized that the rye was falling into an empty stomach. Unless he called a halt he would drink his dinner. He was, he discovered, very hungry.
“No more, Barney,” he said, as the barkeep hovered near with the rye bottle. “I have to eat. If anyone phones, I’m across the street eating.”
He stopped at the telephone on his way out and called a number. “This is Rush Henry. I can be reached through Barney’s for the next hour.” This was in the nature of a small chisel. Long ago, Rush had learned that radio actors had access to a telephone service which would answer for them when not at their own phone. He immediately subscribed. It saved him the salary of a night girl at his office telephone.
Rush walked across the street to the restaurant and ordered dinner. His order in, he walked back to the cashier’s counter and picked a Tribune from the stack of papers on one side. Back at his table he propped it against the sugar bowl and began a careful reading. He got as far as column one, page one. It read—
SON OF WEALTHY FAMILY FOUND DEAD
Scion of Pioneer Chicago Family
Found Stabbed In Alleyway
July 19. (Tribune Service)—A body found in the alley at —— State Street at 4:05 p.m. was identified by papers as Paul Joseph St. John Germaine, Jr., son of P. J. St. J. Germaine, Sr., head of the brokerage firm bearing his name.
Rush’s eyes went no further. He searched his mind for any clue of identity in the conversation of the afternoon. There was none. Paul Germaine, Jr., had been scrupulously careful not to give any hint as to his background. A wave of unreasoning anger swept over Rush. Anger, not at himself, but at the pale young man who had reached Journey’s End in an alley. Why had he felt it necessary to play games with Rush? Why the vague evasiveness, the over-mysterious hints at valuable articles and shadowy threats? Rush shook his head angrily and thrust the paper aside. It wasn’t his problem. Carnahan would take over from here on out.
A man touched Rush’s shoulder.
“Phone, Mr. Henry.”
“Thanks,” Rush said and walked to the cashier’s desk. He picked up the receiver and said “Hello.”
“Mr. Henry?” A great weariness came over Rush as he recognized the voice of the elder Germaine. “Yes.”
“How soon can you be at my home? This is Paul Germaine.”
“An hour. I’m just eating.”
“Don’t. I’ll have a sandwich ready for you here. I want to see you immediately.”
“Okay,” Rush said. “I’ll be there right away.”
He dropped a bill on the counter to pay for the dinner he wasn’t going to eat. Picking up his hat, he walked swiftly across the street and left word with Barney to tell Merwin where he was if he reported in, then caught a cab and gave the North Shore address of the Germaine estate.
“Don’t pick up any share-a-riders, chum. This i$ police business.” He showed the deputy badge he had won years before in a crap game.
“Sure, boss. You in a hurry?”
“Keep it right at thirty-five. I don’t want to be stopped.”
“Right.”
The drive took half an hour during which Rush tried to marshal his thoughts. He found no pattern in which to fit what he knew, so he gave it up and relaxed. His watch said eight o’clock as the cab turned into the driveway of the Germaine estate. He paid the driver and walked up to the door. It opened immediately at his ring and an ancient butler conducted him directly to the study.
The elder Germaine had aged measurably in the few hours since Rush had seen him last. He sat behind his desk with only his hands, nervously drumming the desk top, in the pool of light thrown by the shaded lamp. In the shadows Rush could see the discouraged slope of his shoulders. Germaine straightened as Rush came in.
“The sandwiches for Mr. Henry, Horace,” he said over Rush’s shoulder. “Please sit down, Mr. Henry.” Rush sat down.
“You have read the papers?”
Rush nodded.
“Then you know about my son.”
“I saw his body. It happened in the alley beside my office building.”
Germaine sat up straighter. “Then—?”
Rush held up his hand. “You tell me why you have called me here and then I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“It should be obvious why I have called you here. I have confidence in the Chicago police, but I know that there are things a private investigator can do that the regular authorities cannot. I want to leave no stone unturned. I want the murderer of my son brought to justice. I will pay any price you may set on your services if you will do that.”
“You’re already paying me enough to take care of everything, Mr. Germaine.”
“Good enough, but listen to this. I’ll double my bonus suggestion of this afternoon. For every day, under ten that it takes to complete the job I’ll pay you two thousand dollars.”
“That’s very generous.”
“Generous, hell.” Germaine’s voice trembled. “I don’t think you know what it means to me to have the last of my name done to death in a dirty alley. He was my son—my only son.” Germaine visibly struggled for self-possession. When he was himself— “Now, what do you know?”
“I can best tell you by asking questions.”
“I’ll answer anything I can.”
“Right. First, what was your son afraid of?” Germaine looked at him curiously, then seemed to decide to play it Rush’s way. “He had gotten himself into something of a financial mess. I blame myself for that. I felt that the way to teach him the value of the money he would some day control was to keep him in comparatively low funds. It was a mistake. He became embroiled with some girl,” disgust was heavy in his voice, “and to keep the knowledge from me he manipulated funds at the office. With the money he got that way he paid off the girl. I knew of the falsification almost at once but I decided to give him more rope to see if he could pull himself out of it. That, I am ,sure, was what he was afraid of. But, I don’t see—”
“Just a minute, Mr. Germaine. One more question. Had he ever said anything to you about a windfall, any large sum of money he expected to acquire in the near future?”
Germaine was plainly surprised. “No, no, of course not.”
“And did he seem more upset than usual lately?”
Germaine thought a moment. “He returned two weeks ago from a trip to San Francisco. He had visited some soldier friend of his who was wounded in India and sent there for hospitalization. There was some kind of accident at the hospital, an explosion or something, and his friend was killed. He has been extremely nervous since his return, but I attributed it to a combination of shock and worry about his shortage at the office.
”
“I see.” Rush scratched his nose with the back of his thumb, a characteristic gesture. He tried to fit the facts into a pattern. They didn’t match up very well.
“Those are very strange questions, Mr. Henry. Isn’t it about time you explained?”
Rush reached a decision. “Yes, Mr. Germaine, it is.” He paused. “Your son came to me to ask for protection this afternoon and I refused him. He was killed fifteen minutes later in the alley outside my building.”
“What!” Germaine gripped the arms of his chair, starting forward. Rush held up his hand to calm him. “There’s a little more than that, Mr. Germaine.
He gave me no hint as to his identity. He told me a weird story of being threatened. He said his life was in danger because of some valuable item he had recently acquired. He refused to tell me more and refused to give me his name. He promised an extremely large fee and didn’t even have expense money in his pocket. I had already accepted a commission from you and in sheer fairness to you I couldn’t accept him as a client.”
The irony of the thing struck Germaine. He sat back in his chair, white and shaken. “Then, in a way, I am responsible for the death of my son. That is a horrible thought to have to live with.”
There was nothing Rush could say to that, so he kept silent.
The door behind him burst open and a girl ran into the room. Rush recognized her as Leslie Germaine. She went to her father and put her arms around him.
“I just heard, Daddy. It’s too horrible. Who did it? And why?”
“We don’t know, Leslie.” He patted her shoulder. His voice became grim. “But we’ll find out.”
“But, Daddy—”
He pushed her away from him. “Leslie, I want you to meet Mr. Henry. He is a detective who will work on the case for us.”
“A detective?” Leslie’s eyes became big and round and she walked slowly around the desk to look at Rush. She looked at him for a long minute, her eyes measuring him up and down. Rush noticed that she was more mature than she appeared in the pictures in his pocket. Across the short distance between them came a breath of the same perfume that pervaded her room. Here, with that slim young body swaying before him, the effect was more pronounced and he noted absently that it was still glandular. “A detective. I must have a long talk with you sometime. There are so many questions I’d love to ask you.” She appeared to have forgotten entirely the reason for Rush’s presence.
“Run along, dear,” Germaine said. “I have a word or two I wish to say to Mr. Henry. I’ll come up to your room after he leaves.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said meekly, but there was nothing meek in the glance she threw over her shoulder at Rush.
When she was gone Germaine turned back to Rush. “I want you to spare no expense. Unlimited funds are at your disposal and I’ll ask no questions as to how you spend them. Just bring in the murderer of my son.”
“I’ll do everything I can, Mr. Germaine.” He stood up to leave but Germaine stopped him.
“One more thing, Mr. Henry. I have not reached my present age without becoming a confirmed realist. While your present task is of utmost importance, let us not, in doing our duty to the dead, forget the first duty is to the living.”
Rush’s eyes swung to the door through which Leslie Germaine had left a moment,before.
“I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Germaine.”
4
Rush took a cab to Barney’s. He wanted a cool, quiet place to think and he also wanted a drink. He got neither. Barney met him at the bar.
“Sam Carnahan called in, a few minutes ago. He says you are to come to your office right away when you come in. He’ll wait for you.”
Rush cursed silently but swung around and walked out into the street. In the two blocks to his office building he tried to frame an alibi for denying knowledge of Paul Germaine’s identity. Obviously Carnahan had been nosing around and learned that the younger Germaine had been in Rush’s office that afternoon. He wished he hadn’t been so abrupt in his statement that he had never seen the body before. But that couldn’t be helped now. He turned into the door of the office building.
Carnahan met him at the door of his office. Rush decided to attack.
“How in hell did you get in here?”
Carnahan grinned an irritating smirk. “Why Rush,
I guess you must have left the door unlocked.”
“Fat chance,” Rush grumbled. “I ought to have you up for breaking and entering.”
“Oh, I coulda got a warrant, Rush. I thought you’d rather have it this way.”
There was no answer to that. “Okay, Ellery Queen,, how did you dig it?”
“It was pretty easy, Rush. I sniffed around and found out the guy had been in the building, the elevator girl said he got off on this floor, and since the only tenants on this floor are a beauty college, a firm for importing scotch tweeds which doesn’t import any more, and a detective agency, it was no chore to figure he was aiming at the detective agency. Corpses don’t need no beauty culture or scotch tweeds.” He grinned again. Carnahan obviously enjoyed this.
“Go on, flatfoot.”
“Sticks and stones, Rush. Why, I gave you the benefit of the doubt even then. I figured maybe he didn’t find you in. So I had the boys bring in that chunk of woman you’ve got as a secretary, for routine identification and she placed him right off. ‘Why that’s the man who waited an hour to see Mr. Henry this afternoon,’ she says. ‘And did he see him?’ we ask. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘he was in Mr. Henry’s office for some time’.”
“Fine,” said Rush.
“Don’t blame the girl, Rush. She didn’t know what kind of a damn fool she was working for. She didn’t know her boss would be dumb enough to hold out on the cops.”
“No, you can’t blame her for that, can you?”
“And while we’re on the subject, Mr. Henry, why did you do just that?”
“I shouldn’t have, Sam. That’s a fact. But—oh hell, maybe I’d better tell you the whole thing. It’s the damnedest mess you ever heard of.”
“Yes, maybe you’d better tell me.”
“Okay. The guy comes in. He wants protection. He won’t say what from or why. He won’t tell me his name. He’s got no dough to pay off,-so I fluff him. I’ve got a big job on hand, and this is the weird part. The guy for whom I’m working is the kid’s dad, old man Germaine. I was out there just now and this has just about laid him out.”
“Damn, that is a load to take, isn’t it? But Rush, why did you hold out on me?”
“Well, hell, I was upset because I had turned the guy down. I had this other job on hand and I didn’t want to get tied up in any police stuff. So I guessed wrong on a bad hunch.”
“Yeah, that was a bad hunch. But I guess I can’t have you thrown in the clink since you’ve come across now. Say, what is this job you’re doing for the old man?”
“That I can’t tell you, Sam. But take my word for it, it has absolutely nothing to do with this other. As a matter of fact, the old man just called me out there to put me on the murder.” Rush didn’t think a very small lie would hurt here so he threw it in. “Actually he called me off the other deal till this is cleared up. It’s another matter entirely.”
Carnahan took it because there was nothing else he could do. “Okay, Rush. But isn’t there anything else you can give me for a lead?” ‘
“No, I can’t think of a thing. Say—wait a minute. Has a tall, thin, hungry looking guy in black clothes and a black string tie been in to tell a story?” Carnahan thought. “No, nobody like that’s come in.”
“You’d remember him if he had. He’s got a voice that sounds like a kettle drum.”
“No, he hasn’t been in. Why?”
“He followed me away from the alley this afternoon and pumped hell out of me about how would the cops identify the guy, and how would he know if they did. He ended up by asking me if I thought he should go to the police with something he saw.”
“The hell,
what did he see?”
“He claims to have seen a swarthy character come out of the alley five minutes before the body was discovered. He was standing against the building for fifteen minutes before it happened.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him to tell the police by all means.”
“You mean you let him get away. Damn it, Rush, you know better than that. The guy might have something, and if he gets scared and doesn’t come in we’ve lost him.”
“No, you haven’t. I put Merwin on his tail. He’ll follow him to ground and report in. He should have something any time now.”
“He ain’t, though, Rush.” It was Merwin standing behind them in the door to the office.
“What do you mean, he ain’t?” Rush asked.
“I lost the guy.” Merwin was miserable and also a little mystified. “I don’t know how he did it, Rush, but the guy gives me a slip somewhere in Marshall Field’s. He musta ducked in the crowd. I never lost a guy so easy to see before.”
“He probably found out he was being followed and shook you.”
“Damn, maybe the guy is a crank and maybe he isn’t. I sure hate to lose any lead on this case. It looks like a tough one. No motive, no fingerprints, no nothing to go on.” Carnahan shook his head. “I got to blow. I’ve got the boys out now rounding up the stoolies to see if anything is going the rounds. I’ll let you know if we pick up anything. And Rush, don’t hold out on me any more.”
Rush mentally crossed his fingers. “I won’t, Sam. I’ll give you everything I get.”
“See that you do,” said Carnahan as he closed the door behind him.
“Well, Merwin,” Rush said.
“I’m sorry, Rush. I didn’t figure the guy would try anything. I’m following him nice and peaceful giving him a light tail so’s he won’t tumble to anything and the first thing I know he’s gone.”