Lieutenant MacDonald’s hand stayed near his shoulder holster. “It was a good enough scheme. Certain prearranged books were your vehicles. Any accidental patron finding the messages, or even the average librarian, would pay little attention. Anything winds up as a marker in a library book. A few would be lost, but the safety made up for that. You prepared the messages here at home, returned them in the books so that you weren’t seen inserting them in public…”
“You reconstruct admirably, Lieutenant.”
“And who collected them?”
“Frankly, I do not know. The plan was largely arranged so that no man could inform on another.”
“But Miss Benson discovered it, and Miss Benson had to be removed.”
Mr. Utter shook his head. “I do not expect you to believe me, Lieutenant. But I have no more knowledge of Miss Benson’s death than you have.”
“Come now, Utter. Surely your admitted activities are a catamount to a confession of—”
“Is catamount quite the word you want, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know. My tongue’s fuzzy. So’s my mind. I don’t know what’s wrong…”
Mr. Utter smiled, slowly and with great pleasure. “Of course, Lieutenant. Did you really think I had underrated you? Naturally I drugged both glasses. Then whatever gambit you chose, I had merely to refill my own.”
Lieutenant MacDonald ordered his hand to move toward the holster. His hand was not interested.
“Is there anything else,” Mr. Utter asked gently, “which you should care to hear—while you can still hear anything?”
The room began a persistent circular joggling.
Nick Noble wiped his pale lips, thrust the flask of sherry back into his pocket, and walked into the Main library. At the information desk in the rotunda he handed a slip of paper to the girl in charge. On it was penciled
QL 696. C9
The girl looked up puzzled. “I’m sorry, but—”
“Elsie,” said Nick Noble hesitantly.
The girl’s face cleared. “Oh. Of course. Well, you see, in this library we…”
The crash of the door helped to clear Lieutenant MacDonald’s brain. The shot set up thundering waves that ripped through the drugwebs in his skull. The cold water on his head and later the hot coffee inside finished the job.
At last he lit a cigaret and felt approximately human. The big man with the moon face, he gathered, was Lafferty, F.B.I. The girl, he had known in the first instant, was Stella Swift.
“… just winged him when he tried to get out of the window,” Lafferty was saying. “The doc’ll probably want us to lay off the grilling till tomorrow. Then you’ll have your murderer, Mac, grilled and on toast.”
MacDonald put up a hand to keep the top of his head on. “There’s two things puzzle me. A, how you got here?”
Lafferty nodded at the girl.
“I began remembering things,” she said, “after you went off with Mr. Utter. Especially I remembered Miss Benson saying just yesterday how she had some more evidence for the F.B.I. and how amazed she was that some people could show such an utter lack of patriotism. Then she laughed and I wondered why and only just now I realized it was because she’d made an accidental pun. There were other things too, and so I—”
“We had a note from Miss Benson today,” Lafferty added. “It hadn’t reached me yet when I phoned you. It was vaguely promising, no names, but it tied in well enough with what Miss Swift told us to make us check. When we found the door locked and knew you were here.…”
“Swell. And God knows I’m grateful to you both. But my other puzzle: Just now, when Utter confessed the details of the message scheme thinking I’d never live to tell them, he still denied any knowledge of the murder. I can’t help wondering.…”
When MacDonald got back to his office, he found a memo:
The Public Library says do you want a book from the Main sent out to the Serafin Pelayo branch tomorrow morning? A man named Noble made the request, gave you as authority. Please confirm.
MacDonald’s head was dizzier than ever as he confirmed, wondering what the hell he was confirming.
The Serafin Pelayo branch was not open to the public the next morning, but it was well occupied. Outside in the reading room there waited the bandaged Mr. Utter, with Moon Lafferty on guard; the tousle-haired James Stickney, with a sergeant from Homicide; Hank Jarvis, eyes bleared from a sleepless night at his wife’s bedside; and Miss Trumpeter, head of the Branches Department, impatiently awaiting the end of this interruption of her well-oiled branch routine.
Here in the office were Lieutenant MacDonald, Stella Swift, and Nick Noble. Today the girl wore a bright red dress, with a zipper which tantalizingly emphasized the fullness of her bosom. Lieutenant MacDonald held the book which had been sent out from the Main. Nick Noble held a flask.
“Easy,” he was saying. “Elsie. Not a name. Letters L. C. Miss Swift mentioned systems of classification. Library of Congress.”
“Of course,” Stella agreed. “We don’t use it in the Los Angeles Library; it’s too detailed for a public system. But you have to study it in library school; so naturally I didn’t know it, being a junior, but Mrs. Jarvis spotted it and Miss Benson, poor dear, must have known it almost by heart.
MacDonald read the lettering on the spine of the book. “U.S. Library of Congress Classification. Q: Science.”
Stella Swift sighed. “Thank Heavens. I was afraid it might be English literature.”
MacDonald smiled. “I wonder if your parents knew nothing of literary history or a great deal, to name you Stella Swift.”
Nick Noble drank and grunted. “Go on.”
MacDonald opened the book and thumbed through pages. “QL, Zoölogy. QL 600, Vertebrates. QL 696, Birds, systematic list (subdivisions, A-Z).”
“Birds?” Stella wondered. “It was her hobby of course, but…”
MacDonald’s eyes went on down the page:
e.g., .A2, Accipitriformes (Eagles, hawks, etc.)
.A3, Alciformes (Auks, puffins)
Alectorides, see Gruiformes
“Wonderful names,” he said. “If only we had a suspect named Gruiformes… Point C seven,” he went on, “Coraciiformes, see also.… Here we are: Point C nine, Cypseli…”
The book slipped from his hands. Stella Swift jerked down her zipper and produced the tiny pistol which had contributed to the fullness of her bosom. Nick Noble’s fleshless white hand lashed out, knocking over the flask, and seized her wrist. The pistol stopped halfway to her mouth, twisted down, and discharged at the floor. The bullet went through the volume of L. C. classification, just over the line reading
.C9, Cypseli (Swifts)
A sober and embittered Lieutenant MacDonald unfolded the paper napkin taken from the prisoner’s handbag and read, in sprawling letters:
STELLA SWIFT
“Her confession’s clear enough,” he said. “A German mother, family in the Fatherland, pressure brought to bear.… She was the inventor of this library-message system and running it unknown even to those using it, like Utter. After her false guess with Stickney, Miss Benson hit the truth with St … the Swift woman. She had to be disposed of. Then that meant more, attacking Mrs. Jarvis when she guessed too much, and sacrificing Utter, an insignificant subordinate, as a scapegoat to account for Miss Benson’s further hints to the F.B.I. But how the hell did you spot it, and right at the beginning of the case?”
“Pattern,” said Nick Noble. “Had to fit.” His sharp nose twitched, and he brushed the nonexistent fly off it. “Miss Benson was cataloguer. QL business had to be book number. Not system used here or recognized at once, but some system. Look at names: Cora Jarvis, James Stickney, Norbert Utter, Stella Swift. Swift only name could possibly have classifying number.”
“But weren’t you taking a terrible risk giving her that napkin? What happened to Mrs. Jarvis?”
Noble shook his head. “She was only one knew you’d consulted me. Attack me, show her hand. Too smart for
that. Besides, used to taking risks, when I…” He left unfinished the reference to the days when he had been the best damned detective lieutenant in Los Angeles.
“We’ve caught a murderer,” said Lieutenant MacDonald, “and we’ve broken up a spy ring.” He looked at the spot where Stella Swift had been standing when she jerked her zipper. The sun from the window had glinted through her hair. “But I’m damned if I thank you.”
“Understand,” said Nick Noble flatly. He picked up the spilled flask and silently thanked God that there was one good slug of sherry left.
(1943)
Black Murder
In peacetime the whole Shaw case would never have happened. As Officer Mulroon said later: the first attack would have been passed off as natural illness, and besides there never would have been a first attack.
But police work in the spring of 1943 was full of cases that could never have happened in peacetime. Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald (Homicide, L.A.P.D.) was slowly becoming reconciled to the recruiting officer who had dissuaded him from joining the Navy. He was necessary here on his job, even though he sometimes wished that he were back in a patrolman’s uniform. His plain clothes did draw occasional sardonic stares.
Even the stripe and a half of Lieutenant (j.g.) Warren Humphreys made him uniform-conscious and reminded him of his frustrated enlistment. But the slight bitterness was effaced by the knowledge that in this case the Navy had had to turn to him because he was a trained specialist who knew about murderers.
“We don’t believe in coincidence in the Navy,” Lieutenant Humphreys had barked over the phone. “When I’m sent out here to pick up specifications on a sub detector, and find the inventor’s suddenly come down with an attack having all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, I want police action. And quick.”
Lieutenant MacDonald remembered when Warren Humphreys had been his favorite political commentator, and hoped that he diagnosed poisonings more accurately than he had the strength of the Red Army.
Apparently he did. At least the police doctor made the same snap diagnosis after an examination of the comatose inventor, and commended the naval officer for his prompt administration of a mustard emetic followed by milk of magnesia.
“Best I could do with what’s in an ordinary house,” Lieutenant Humphreys said with gruff modesty. “Got to know a thing or two about poison treatment in Naval Intelligence. You never know …”
“You’ve made a good start; he ought to pull through. Keep him quiet and give him lots of milk. I’ll send out a male nurse. You can call the lab about six, MacDonald. I’ll try to have a full report on these specimens by then.”
It was now one forty-five. Humphreys had arrived at one and phoned the police almost immediately. The attack, which the household had taken for ordinary digestive trouble, had struck Harrison Shaw at twelve-thirty, after his usual lunch: a tartar sandwich and a bottle of beer.
“The dietetics boys’d say he had it coming to him,” MacDonald observed.
“But it was what he always ate, Lieutenant,” the blind man said. “And it seemed to sustain his energy admirably—enough at least to interest the Navy, if not to bring in any marked practical rewards.”
The slight note of bitterness toward the—professional habit made him think “deceased”—toward the victim caused MacDonald to look at the blind man more closely. He saw a tall, lean man of fifty, with a marked resemblance to the poisoned inventor save for the sightless stare and the one-sided smile that never left his face. He wore a gray suit of unusually fine tailoring and unusually great age.
The suit was like the house. One of those old family mansions in the West Adams district near U.S.C. You saw it from the outside and expected sumptuous furnishings and a flock of servants. You came in and found a barn, and not a servant in sight.
“Let me get the picture straight,” MacDonald said. “The medical report was the first essential. Now that that’s given us something to sink our teeth into, pending the lab analysis, there’s plenty more to cover. I gather you’re Mr. Shaw’s cousin?”
The blind man went on smiling. “Second cousin, yes. Ira Beaumont, at your service, Lieutenant.”
“You’ve been living with Mr. Shaw for how long?”
“Mr. Shaw has been living with me for some three years. Ever since I inherited this house from a distant relative of ours. He felt, and with some justice, that he had as great a right to the inheritance as I, and I was glad to give him some of the space I could not possibly use up in this white elephant.”
“And the rest of the household?”
“First my cousin’s mother came to look after him. Then his laboratory assistant joined our happy household. I began to feel a trifle like the old woman who is so horribly moved in on in the play Kind Lady.”
“That’s all in the house?”
“There was a couple who cooked and kept house, but we could not compete with Lockheed and Vega in wage scales. Mrs. Shaw now takes their place.” He rose and crossed the room to a humidor. “Do you gentlemen care for cigars?”
“No thanks, not now.” MacDonald noted admiringly the ease with which the blind man moved unaided about his own house. There’s something splendid about the overcoming of handicaps. … a splendor, he reflected, that we’ll have many chances to watch in the years to come. … “Then Mrs. Shaw prepared your cousin’s lunch today?”
“As usual. I believe you’ll find her in the kitchen now; I know she’ll be thinking that the family must eat tonight, whatever has happened.”
Lieutenant Humphreys tagged along. The prospect of a Watson from Naval Intelligence somewhat awed the police detective.
“There can be only one motive,” the Naval Watson muttered. “Somebody had to keep him from delivering those specifications to me. And if you can find them, officer, I’d almost be willing to write off the murder as unsolved.”
“We don’t even know yet that they’re lost,” MacDonald pointed out. “When Shaw’s himself again, he may hand them straight over.”
But Humphreys shook his head. “They’re good,” he said cryptically. “They wouldn’t slip up on that.”
There was a sudden slam of a door as they entered the kitchen. Mrs. Shaw, MacDonald thought, was almost too good to be true. Aged housedress, apron, white hair and all, she was the casting director’s dream of Somebody’s Mother. But at the moment she was nervous, flustered—almost guilty-looking.
Wordlessly the Lieutenant crossed the kitchen and opened a pantry door. He saw, at a rough count, a good hundred cans of rationed goods. He laughed. “You needn’t worry, Mrs. Shaw. This isn’t my brand of snooping; I shan’t report you for hoarding.”
Mrs. Shaw straightened her apron, poked at her escapist hair, and looked relieved. “It’s really all for the good of the war,” she explained. “My boy’s doing important work that’ll save thousands of lives, and he’s going to get what he wants to eat whether somebody in Washington says so or not. Why, if he was a Russian inventor they’d be making him take it.”
“We didn’t see a thing, did we, Lieutenant?”
Humphreys made a gruff noise. It was obviously hard for him to resist a brief official lecture.
“Now about this attack of your son’s, Mrs. Shaw …”
“I just can’t understand that, Lieutenant. I simply can’t. Harry never was a one to complain about his food. He liked lots of it, but it always set right fine.”
“Mr. Beaumont said he always ate this same lunch?”
“Yes, sir. A white bread sandwich with raw ground round, with a little salt and Worcestershire sauce, and some slices of raw onion. And he drank beer with it. I can’t say I’d cotton to it myself, but it’s what Harry liked.”
“Where was the beer kept?”
“In a little icebox in his laboratory. He always opened it himself. All I did was fix the sandwich.”
“And bring a glass for the beer?”
“No. He liked it out of the bottle, just like his father before him.”
&nb
sp; “And where did you keep the meat, Mrs. Shaw?”
“I didn’t. I mean not today. It didn’t get kept anyplace. I didn’t get out to shop till late and I bought it down at the little market on the corner and brought it right back here and made the sandwich.”
“And the onion?”
“I peeled a fresh one, of course.”
“And the salt and the sauce?”
MacDonald impounded the shaker and bottle indicated. “We’ll analyze these, of course. Although no one would take the chance of leaving them here in the kitchen where anybody might. … And what did you do with the sandwich after you made it?”
“What should I do, officer? I took it right up to Harry and now he’s … Oh, officer, he is going to be all right, isn’t he?”
“He will be. And you can thank Lieutenant Humphreys here that he will.”
“Oh, I do thank you, Lieutenant. I didn’t know what to think at first with Harry so sick and you running around here and wanting mustard and things, but now I see the good Lord sent you to save my Harry.”
Humphreys looked relieved when MacDonald cut through her embarrassing gratitude. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Shaw. Now do you know where we’d find your son’s assistant?”
As they walked down the long empty hall to a crudely improvised laboratory, MacDonald said, “Did you ever see such deliberate suicide before?”
“Suicide? But great Scott, man, you don’t mean that Shaw—”
“Lord no! I mean Mrs. Shaw. She’s told a specific, detailed story that doesn’t leave a single loophole. Unless analysis turns up something in those seasonings, there’s only one person who could conceivably have poisoned Shaw. And that, by her own admission, is his mother.”
The assistant, so far nameless, introduced himself as John Fire-brook. He was a little man with a thick neck and a round, worried face. “I don’t believe it, Lieutenant,” he began flatly. “Nobody could want to kill a fine man like Mr. Shaw. It must have been something he ate.”
“Sure. It was with Mrs. Crippen too.”
“And there are too many people at large in this world,” the naval officer added, “who think killing fine men is just what the doctor ordered. Especially fine men who invent sub detectors. And how much do you know about that detector, Firebrook?”
Exeunt Murderers Page 4