“An unknown man phoned my office, Crole. He said he saw you enter and leave the building yesterday afternoon where James Gillespie has, or rather had his office. An elevator operator remembered seeing you and another man enter the office where you remained for perhaps half an hour. I showed the operator your picture. He said there couldn’t be a mistake.”
“I’ve got a face that people don’t easily forget,” said Crole.
“Gillespie’s safe was open,” continued Minifie, “and from a casual examination made by Captain Jorgens’ men and my own, it would seem that its interior had been thoroughly looted.”
“You really think that I opened and robbed that safe, Minifie?”
“You had another man with you.”
“So I did. Well, go on with the indictment. Pd like to hear the rest. One of your men told me that you had me on ice. But it looks like the ice is melting.”
“You admit, then, that you were in Gillespie’s office. .
“Listen, Minifie. I was in that office with another man. The safe was open. Nobody was around—or so I thought. I was interested in the place. So I did a little looking around. James Gillespie was a man I especially desired to see right then. You can imagine what a shock I received when I learned of his accident on the Iron Mountain grade.”
“Don’t try to be funny, Crole. Your humor is rather out of place under the circumstances, and I thoroughly disapprove your treating murder as something of no special significance.”
“I stand corrected, Mr. District Attorney. But I still insist that I was shocked when I learned of the accidental death of James Gillespie. And that’s no joke.”
The District Attorney leaned forward in his chair. Color spotted his cheeks. Personal animosity got the better of him. Suppressed rage caused his eyes to flame redly.
“Now listen here, Crole. I’ve stood for all I’m going to from you. You’ve flouted the law, suppressed information, and been underhanded in your business ethics. But I’ve reached the limit of my endurance. I’m going’ to crush you, Crole. And I’m going to begin by seeing to it that your license as a private detective is taken away from you.”
Crole said mildly: “I didn’t know you were so vindictive, Mr. District Attorney.”
“I’m not. I’m just downright angry.”
“That’s unfortunate. Very. And I’m sorry you feel that way, Minifie, for I know from experience how easy it is to fall into error.”
“Then you understand a damn sight more than I do,” raged the District Attorney. “For a single thin dime, I’d slap you in a cell where nobody could get to you. And I’d hold you there as long as the law allows me. And believe me, you’d come out a chastened man, ready to talk—not hinder public investigations.”
Crole tossed a dime to Minifie’s desk. “I’m calling you.”
“Damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“If you’d get a grip on yourself, Minifie, I’ll explain you a few things for your own good.”
“All right. Sorry for the outburst of bad temper. But I’m being harassed from all sides.”
“Do you know who put Captain Jorgens on the murder angle of what looked like an ordinary accident?”
“Sergeant Keeble, along with the fingerprint and picture experts, Williams and McCarthy.”
“Wrong.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“I said you were wrong. If Jorgens forgot to tell you, that’s no fault of mine. I went out and investigated the wreck myself. Afterwards I called the captain on the phone and told him that it was murder. He came to my apartment breathing fire. I almost had to draw a diagram to convince him as to why I thought it was murder. Figure it out, Minifie. Would I do all this if I was involved in a killing?”
“I don’t think you would, Crole. But you’re a peculiar individual, with deeper recesses in your mind than most men.”
“I’ll tell you something else, Minifie. You said an unknown man called your office and told you he had seen me enter the building. It might be just possible that this unknown was the same mug who was hiding in a storeroom in Gillespie’s office while I was there. He cracked me over the head when I opened the door. Did the same thing to the gentleman who was with me. Neither of us got a look at his face.”
The district attorney’s eyes registered unbelief.
Crole pointed to the welt on the side of his head now bluish in color. “You still don’t believe me. All right. Listen some more. The man who was with me in Gillespie’s office was also struck with the same weapon. His name is Ned Anderson. He’s registered at the Commodore.”
“Mind telling me why you were there?”
Simon Crole shrugged. “Why not?” Deftly he rolled a cigarette. “Anderson has been abroad for over two years. Before he left, he placed his funds in Gillespie’s hands for investment, giving him power of attorney.
When Anderson returned he found out through the bank that his account of over two hundred thousand dollars had shriveled to nothing. He came to me seeking help. Together we went to Gillespie’s office. He wasn’t there. The place was open. He wasn’t at his apartment. Couldn’t be found anywhere until. .
Minifie raised a deprecatory hand. “I don’t like this business, Crole. You’re altogether too glib.” He rubbed tired eyes with his fingers. “You can go, Crole—but not out of town.”
“Why should I leave town. My business is here. There’s nothing for me to worry about, and you ought to know it by this time.”
“Oh, get out of here. The sight of your face makes me sick.”
Crole got to his feet. “I feel sick, too, Minifie—same reason.”
A block from the building housing the District Attorney’s office, Crole entered a telephone booth and called Anderson.
“Crole talking,” he said quietly. “Listen. I just came from the District Attorney’s office. He would have given anything to have linked me with Gillespie’s killing. He’ll be looking you up sometime this morning. You can tell him all you want to except one angle. Forget about Virginia Laird and her visit to you leading up to the attempted kidnapping. Clear? Remember, not a word. I have my own reasons. Swell, and try to keep sober. Bye.”
Etta smiled brightly as he entered the office. “I see you got rid of them apes.”
“Yeah,” sighed Crole. “They’re gone. For good, too, I hope. Now, maybe, I can get around to getting some food inside me.”
“What did Minifie want of the gun?”
“Gun?” Crole’s eyebrows moved up. “Did you say gun, precious?”
“That’s what I said. The man who came for it told me...”
“You foolish kid,” interrupted Crole, grimly aware of a warning tinkle of a bell somewhere in the center of his brain. “You shouldn’t have given it to him—or anybody else.”
Etta’s face blanched. Sudden realization of what she had done caused her lips to quiver. “Boss,” she said, her voice no longer bland, but on the actual point of breaking. “You mean that I...?”
Crole didn’t blame the girl. The trick was an old one. He had used it himself, in various ways. But it made him wince to have someone use it on him.
“Somebody pulled a fast one on you, girl. I never sent anyone for my gun. There was no reason why I should.”
“But he told me that the District Attorney...”
“Whatever he told you was a lie. I never sent anyone...” He broke off suddenly. His eyes swerved. They came to rest on the hall door. It was opening slowly, almost imperceptibly.
And revealed in the opening stood a man—a man whose face was deathly gray. The lips of this man were moving, but no sound was coming from them.
Etta suddenly clutched Crole by the arm. “Boss,” she half sobbed. “It’s him. He’s the man—the same man who came in while you were away and got your gun.”
Simon Crole took two steps forward and froze. His eyes lighted with recognition. The man in the doorway was Coughlin, the private detective.
He was swaying on his feet now like a r
eed in a gale. And his throat was making a rasping sound as if his wind pipes were coated with sand.
His fingers clutched the front of his coat, the knuckles of his hand showing white like tiny islands on a background of tan.
Crole kicked the door shut and placed a supporting arm in the small of Coughlin’s back. Something told him that Coughlin was going to die—here in his office.
A thin trickle of dark liquid struck the office floor and splattered flatly. Crole looked again at the clenched hand holding the coat tight against the man’s body. The fingers were beginning to relax, and with the lessening of those fingers the flood, no longer held back, streamed from the underside of Coughlin’s coat, and smeared the floor in a reddish, drumming patter.
“Get a doctor, precious!” snapped Crole. “Doctor Cane. No, don’t bother with the phone. Run down to the third floor and bring him back with you. Scram, little one!”
He stood for a moment, after the girl had fled, looking moody and depressed. Again that faint tinkle of a bell was sounding in his brain. A warning signal. Disaster was close. How was he to avoid it?
Groaning, Coughlin slid from Crole’s supporting arm into a bloody heap on the floor.
VIII. ASTUTE OFFICIALS
With surprising gentleness, Simon Crole gathered the dying man into his cradled arms and fixed him as comfortably as possible on the leather couch in his own office. Then he poured a small amount of whiskey in a glass and held it to the doomed man’s lips.
“Get this into you, Coughlin,” he urged. “It’ll help.”
Coughlin’s dry lips scraped against the rim of the glass. Crole held him in a partially upright position. Convulsively he swallowed. Then his head sagged loosely and his eyes closed.
Kneeling beside the unfortunate man Crole said: “Who did it, Coughlin? Who shot you?”
The eyes of Coughlin opened. Already a thin film was beginning to glaze them. His lips moved in a husky whisper. Crole missed the first half dozen words. All he heard was “...from Lima, Ohio. Edward Smith...double for Gillespie...girl suspects...snatch...checked...warn against...you...gun...frame...the rat! Turns gun on me...get him...” The husky whisper trailed into a harsh swirl of an indrawn breath.
“Who?” insisted Crole, bending close. “Who shot you, Coughlin? Tell me. I’ll see that he gets what’s coming to him.”
The convulsion started deep, racking the wounded man with paralyzing twinges of pain. His lips moved—soundlessly. No word issued from the dry lips, nothing but a slow exhale of the last breath Coughlin would ever breathe.
Simon Crole, still kneeling, saw the last flicker of life in the eyelids, then before his eyes, the dead man seemed to turn into wax—so still was he.
For several long moments Crole did nothing but stare into the face of the murdered man as if hypnotized. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that the death of this man on the leather couch was linked somehow with the murder of James Gillespie.
But how? What part had Coughlin played? Was he the man who had tried to kidnap Virginia Laird? Was he the man who had hidden in the storeroom? And why had he come here and talked Etta out of the gun, only to return a few minutes later mortally wounded?
Simon Crole straightened. His eyes were sink holes of despair. He looked carefully around the office. Listened for the sound of footsteps in the hall. Licked his lips during a split second of indecision, then bent over the dead man.
Expertly he went through Coughlin’s pockets, keeping his fingers away from everything metallic. In the breast coat pocket he found a folded square of paper. He spread it open, read: “Secret File, Ask Leahy.” Scurrying footsteps in the hall warned him that Etta was returning.
He slid the paper to his own pocket and stepped back from the body, not looking towards the front office.
Through the door came Etta, her dress rustling. Behind her followed Dr. Cane. As the doctor came through the door his foot kicked something on the floor, and sent it against the partition in back of Etta’s desk.
Simon Crole left the body of the dead man. Etta and the doctor, both, were looking at that lump of metal on the floor. Crole looked. His lips twisted, and the look of perpetual surprise was on his face. Only this time it was real—the lump of metal was his gun—a Luger equipped with a silencer that had been clamped on by somebody other than himself.
Doctor Cane’s eyes swung from the gun on the floor to the man on the leather couch. In them was a double question.
“I think you’re too late, Doc,” said Crole, shaking his bald head. “The man’s dead.”
As Doctor Cane bent to examine the body on the couch, Etta started to retrieve the Luger and was brought to sudden immobility by Crole’s: “Leave it!” Her eyes held worried glints as they looked in his. Reassuringly, he laid a big hand on her shoulders. And his voice deep and purring sought to ease the tension in her young body. “Don’t let it get you down, precious. Not for a minute. The frame was timed beautifully, but it isn’t going to work. Not this time. Your lips, kid. Turn ‘em up at the corners. That’s better. Everything’s gonna be all right.”
“I hardly think,” said Doctor Cane, dryly, “that you’ll find it quite as simple as you seem to think, Crole. This man has been shot through the vital organs—apparently in your office. There’s blood all over the floor—and what looks like the murder weapon.”
“I noticed the gun,” said Crole, mildly amused, “and I’ve been trying to figure how it got there on the floor. Things sure look bad. Very bad. Especially for me, since that’s my gun on the floor.” He turned to the girl.
“Turn in the alarm, precious. Call Police Captain Jorgens. Oh!” He placed a protecting arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her to the nearest window which he jerked upward.
“Sorry, kid. I didn’t realize you were getting sick. Here, sit down. Stick your head out the window and get some fresh air. You’ll be all right in a second. Now get control of yourself while I get the police mob on our premises. Your boss is gonna be grilled, and grilled plenty.”
He sighed morosely as he reached for the phone. “Damn it. I hope the time is coming soon when I can sit down in peace and eat. I don’t mind working for my fees, but I never figured on starving myself to death. One meal is all I ask. Geez, it seems like so little, but I don’t seem to have a Chinaman’s chance of getting it. Police Headquarters,” he finished, sadly. “Captain Jorgens.”
George Baron, ensconced in a beautiful mahogany chair in his impressive office, heard the muted tingling of the inter-office phone, ran exploring fingers over his perfectly-groomed hair, lifted the receiver from its cradle, and said: “Well?” The receiver crackled as the secretary in the waiting room explained certain matters.
Baron was breathing rather rapidly as if he had just passed through some great emotional stress. He didn’t want to be bothered at this time. He needed isolation where he could think. There were many and varied things that had called and were still to call for intense concentration—none of them directly connected with his court work.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“They won’t give their names. They just grin and look wise. I think, Mr. Baron, you had better see them.”
George Baron knew, then, who his callers were. Being a smart lawyer, instinctively cunning, and an opportunist of the first rank, he had no physical fear of these two men who, he had supposed, had left the coastal city for points east.
He would have to have help with his many and varied things. These men had proved capable. Perhaps he could make further use of them. Yes, it would be wise on his part to cultivate these men, to use them. The time was surely coming when...
“Show them in,” he told his secretary. “Then you can take the rest of the day off. I won’t need you.” He hung up, adjusted his smile, then allowed pleased surprise to cross his face as Ghost Mokund and Gene Selingo shuffled into the room. He motioned them to chairs, saw his secretary leave the office, then quietly closed the door and locked it.
Ghost Mokund’s
hands were deep in his coat pockets when Baron came back into the room. Selingo was fidgeting uneasily, a vacant look staring out of his face.
“Don’t be alarmed, boys,” said George Baron, suavely. “I sent the girl home, and locked the door to keep out unwelcome callers. Glad to see you again, of course, but I thought—I thought you would be fairly well on your way east by this time.”
Mokund grunted.
Selingo wiped the vacant look from his face. “Well, we didn’t go. Decided to hang around this town for a couple days. Last night we was taken for our roll in a gyp gambling joint. They cleaned us pretty and I still can’t figure it out. Other guys were hitting the house for plenty. But us—we got nothing but a headache.” George Baron nodded. “That’s the way things go.” He reached for his checkbook. “Broke?”
“Yeah,” said Selingo.
“A thousand see you through?”
Mokund lighted a cigarette. His boy face was expressionless. He dragged deeply on the burning tobacco. “Yeeeah!” he yawned.
Selingo said: “I don’t like checks.”
“I’ll go with you to the bank and get the cash. Will you be leaving, or do you boys want to work for me?”
“Doing what?” asked Selingo.
“Various things,” said Baron. He took a lean cigar from a box on his desk, clipped it with sharp front teeth, held a match to it and watched Selingo’s face register in turn pleasure and greed.
“Sure, we’ll work for you. Why not? What’ll it be, straight pay by the day, or commission?”
“Either way.”
“Jobs like the last one aren’t as easy as they look. You know that, Baron.”
“I know that.”
“Five thousand is little enough. We need more for handling that kind of work. Understand, we ain’t trying to chisel in on your racket, whatever it is. It’s just that the cops are gonna be all hot and bothered. You read the papers?”
George Baron nodded. “Naturally.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“This town has got smarter dicks than I thought. Somebody told me they were only a bunch of hicks. Somebody lied. Ghost and me will have to give this town the air if things begin to get hot.”
The Man who was Murdered Twice Page 8