“I know the principles, of course, sir. I helped to work them out, though Mr. Shaw didn’t trust even me with the final details. You remember the man recently who made a seventy-nine cent bomb-sight out of junk? Well, ours is not perhaps quite in that class, but comparable. It consists of
(censored)
Humphreys nodded happily. “Brilliant, Firebrook. Brilliant. What we need is men like Shaw who can make something out of apparently nothing. If this lives up to expectations, I think the Navy can promise him plenty more jobs.”
“If the Navy will promise us a decent laboratory and materials, we will be happy. It’s fine to make something out of nothing, Lieutenant, but it is nice to work with something too. We have kept hoping that Mr. Shaw would receive a large sum of money from a great-uncle; but the old gentleman has defied all the statistics of life-expectancy. If this detector is a failure… I do not know what will become of us,” he added simply.
“Do you know where these specifications are?” MacDonald asked.
“I do not. We could not afford a safe that would be any real protection. Mr. Shaw had his own plans which even I did not know.”
“It’ll be simple,” said Humphreys. “Call your men, Lieutenant, and we’ll search the whole place, starting with this lab.”
“No!” said Firebrook sharply.
“And why not?”
“You see this laboratory? It is cheap, it is insufficient. But it is in perfect working order. I keep it so. I will not have hordes of police trampling through it and destroying that order.”
“Even with warrants?” MacDonald murmured.
“Even with warrants.” Firebrook’s little eyes flashed. “Gentlemen, you will not search this laboratory.”
The officers stared at him for a moment, but his defiant gaze was steady. “My, my!” Lieutenant Humphreys said at last. “The racial passion for order … Very well. You’ll be seeing me again—Herr Feuerbach.”
And that was the end of the first phase of the Shaw case.
There was nothing more that Lieutenant MacDonald could accomplish at the rundown mansion of Ira Beaumont until he had the report from the laboratory and could talk to the inventor himself. He stationed Mulroon to watch the sickroom pending the arrival of the police nurse, and Shurman and Avila to guard the outside of the house. Lieutenant Humphreys appointed himself part of the guard too.
“I’m not leaving this house till I hear from Shaw’s own lips where the specifications are. And I’m keeping an eye on that German.”
MacDonald drove slowly back to headquarters. He didn’t like this Shaw business. It was too wrongly simple. There was only one possible suspect, and that one was impossible.
Greed can do strange things to people (was there a lead in that legacy expected from the great-uncle?), and perverted political fanaticism can do even stranger; but could a mother kill her son even from such motives? Worse yet, psychologically, could she kill him by means of her own food, while she calmly broke all rationing regulations to provide him with that food?
He didn’t like it. And he found, as he mused, that he had overshot headquarters. He was driving out North Main Street. He was, in fact, just about opposite the Chula Negra Café.
Lieutenant MacDonald grinned at himself. It was that kind of a case, wasn’t it?
The Noble scandal had been long before MacDonald’s time on the force. He’d gathered it piecemeal from the older men: a crooked captain who had connections, and a brilliantly promising detective lieutenant who’d taken the rap for him when things broke, losing his job just when his wife needed money for an operation …
Nick Noble had been devoted to his wife and his profession. When both were gone, there was nothing left. Nothing but cheap sherry that dulled the sharpness of reality enough to make it bearable. Nothing but that and the curious infallible machine that was Nick Noble’s mind.
That couldn’t stop working, even when Noble’s profession no longer needed it. Present it with a problem, and the gears meshed into action behind those pale blue eyes. A few of the oldtimers on the force were wise enough to know how invariably right the answers were. Twice MacDonald himself had seen the Noble mind trace pattern in chaos. And this was just what Noble would like: only one possibility, and that impossible. The screwier the better.
Screwball Division, L.A.P.D., they called him.
He was in the third booth on the left, as usual. So far as MacDonald had ever learned, he lived, ate, and slept there… if indeed he did ever eat or sleep. There was a water glass of sherry in front of him. His hair and his skin were white as things that live in caves. A white hand swatted at the sharp thin nose. Then the pale blue eyes slowly focused on the detective and he smiled a little.
“MacDonald,” he said softly. “Sit down. Trouble?”
“Right up your alley, Mr. Noble. A screwball set-up from way back.”
“They happen to you.” He swallowed some sherry and took another swipe at his nose. “Fly,” he said apologetically.
MacDonald remembered that fly. It wasn’t there. It never had been. He slipped into the seat across the booth and began his story. Once the Mexican waitress came up and was waved away. Once the invisible fly returned to interrupt. The rest of the time Nick Noble listened and drank and listened. When MacDonald had finished, he leaned back and let his eyes glaze over.
“Questions?” MacDonald asked.
“Why?” Nick Noble said.
“The motive, you mean? Humphreys thinks spy work. He must be right, but a mother …”
“Uh uh.” Noble shook his head. “Why questions? All clear. Let Humphreys hocus you. Awed by the gold braid you wanted, MacDonald.”
The detective shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe. But what do you mean? What’s clear?”
Nick Noble turned sideways and slid his pipestem legs from under the table. “Come on,” he said. “Take me out there.”
He didn’t say a word on the drive out Figueroa. His eyes were shut: not glazed over, as they were when he worked on a problem, but simply shut, as though he were done with it. He opened them as they turned off the boulevard. In a moment he said, “Almost there?”
“Yes. We turn again at the next, then we’re there.”
“Stop here,” Nick Noble said.
MacDonald was beginning to wonder what he’d let himself in for. Conferences at the Chula Negra were one thing, but… He pulled up in front of the small market and said, “What goes?”
“Need some meat,” Noble said. “Supper. Come on in.”
MacDonald followed, frowning. At least this was a clue as to how Noble lived outside the Chula Negra … The butcher’s counter was sparsely filled. Not so bad as before rationing, but still not overflowing.
Nick Noble said, “I wanted about a pound of ground round.”
The butcher had red hair and a redder face. “Don’t know’s I’ve got any left to grind, but I’ll see. Got your red stamps?”
Noble’s face fell as he groped in his pocket. He muttered something about his other suit.
The butcher said, “Sorry, brother.”
Nick Noble said, “It’s what the doctor said the baby ought to have …” He took out a wallet and held it open. It was far from empty.
The butcher said, “Hold on, brother. With a baby …” He went into the refrigerating room.
MacDonald stared at the greenbacks in the wallet. It wasn’t possible that Nick Noble should flash such a roll.
The butcher came back with a package in heavy paper. He didn’t weigh it. He said, “One pound. That’ll be ninety cents.”
Noble’s pale eyes rested on the posted list of ceiling prices. “Kind of high,” he said.
“Take it or leave it, brother.”
Nick Noble took it. As he turned to go, a woman came in with a heavy shopping bag. She said, “Frank, I’d like to ask you about that meat I got in here yesterday. My husband’s been …”
Frank began talking loudly about the meat quota problem. Nick Noble went on out. On his way
he stopped at the grocery department and picked up a quart of sherry.
Back in the car he handed the meat to MacDonald. “Lab,” he said. Then he went to work on the seal of the bottle, and broke off to swat at the fly.
MacDonald grinned. “The Noble touch! So you’ve done it again. Black market, huh?”
Noble nodded. “Food poisoning symptoms pretty much like arsenic.” The bottle glurked and its contents diminished. “Mother hoards for son. She’d buy on black market for him too. But she poisoned him. Same like woman’s husband.”
“‘All clear,’” MacDonald quoted. “I guess it is. Humphreys’ profession gives him a naturally melodramatic outlook, and it sucked in the doctor and me. We expected poisoning, so we saw it. The lab tests’ll be the final check. All clear but one thing: how come you have all that folding money?”
“Oh,” said Nick Noble. “Sorry.” He handed over the wallet.
MacDonald felt in his own empty pocket and swore goodhu-moredly. “In a good cause,” he said.
He was still grinning when they drove up to Ira Beaumont’s mansion. Shurman wasn’t in front of the house as he should have been. Instead he answered the door. His broad face lit up. “Jeez, Loot, we been tryna get you everywheres.”
“It’s all O.K., Shurman. All cleared up. There never was an attempt at murder.”
“Maybe there wasn’t no attempt. But somebody sure’s hell did murder Mr. Shaw about fifteen minutes ago.”
It was the first time MacDonald had ever seen Nick Noble surprised.
This was the most daring murder that MacDonald had ever encountered or heard of. The murderer had slipped up behind Mulroon, on guard before the sickroom, and slugged him with a heavy vase. Then he had entered the sickroom and slit the throat of the sleeping invalid, leaving the heavy butcher knife (printless, MacDonald knew even before dusting it) beside the bed.
It was a crime as risky as it was simple, but it had succeeded. Harrison Shaw would contrive no more somethings out of nothing for the Navy.
“The method doesn’t even eliminate anybody,” MacDonald complained. “The knife was sharp enough and the vase heavy enough for even a woman to have succeeded. And that damned wheeze Mulroon has from his cold could’ve guided the blind man. Method means nothing.”
“Motive,” said Nick Noble.
The motive seemed indicated by the scrawl on the plaster near the bed. At first glance it looked like blood. A closer examination showed it was red ink. The bottle and a pastry brush (taken from the same drawer as the butcher knife) lay under the bed. The scrawl read:
So sterben alle Feinde des Reiches!
Firebrook had translated this as, Thus may all enemies of the Reich perish! The mere fact of his knowing the language had caused Lieutenant Humphreys to glower on him with fresh suspicion.
“And so what?” MacDonald complained when he and Noble were alone again with the body of Harrison Shaw. “So he is a German and his name used to be Feuerbach. That doesn’t convict him.”
Nick Noble said nothing. His pale blue eyes studied the room.
“What have we got?” MacDonald recapitulated. “Nobody in this house alibies anybody else. And it must be one of them. Avila and Shurman swear nobody came in. One of three people is a Nazi agent who took advantage of Shaw’s illness and the confusion to steal his plans and now to kill him so he can’t reproduce them. Mrs. Shaw, the assistant Firebrook, the blind cousin Beaumont: one of these three …”
“Four,” said Nick Noble. He stood teetering on his thin legs. One hand swiped at the fly. Then his eyes fixed on the wall inscription and slowly glazed over.
He rocked back and forth while his last word echoed in MacDonald’s mind. Four … That was true. There was a fourth suspect. And who had planted the notion of murder in the first place? Who had forcibly established himself in this house? Who had created the very confusion by which—
“Lieutenant!” It was Firebrook in the doorway, and his round face was aglow. “Lieutenant … !” And he thrust a set of papers into MacDonald’s hands. “I did not wish your men to search, but myself I can search and respect the order of things. I have searched … and found!”
MacDonald’s eyes lit up. “Then at least the killing was in vain. We’ve got the detector! Humphreys will have to see these,” he decided, his momentary suspicions rejected as absurd. “Come on, Noble.”
Nick Noble took a swig from his bottle before he followed. His eyes had come unglazed now.
“In this room,” Lieutenant MacDonald announced, “is a traitor.”
He looked around the shabby room. The naval officer was happily absorbed in contemplating the recovered plans. Firebrook looked as though his pleasure in the discovery was fading at the realization of the death of the man he had worked with. Mrs. Shaw was crying quietly and paying no heed to anything. It was impossible to read the sightless eyes and permanent half-smile of Ira Beaumont.
But it was Beaumont who spoke. “Isn’t it obvious who the traitor must be, Lieutenant? Mrs. Shaw is a dear sweet woman who knows nothing of the world beyond her kitchen and her family. Lieutenant Humphreys is an officer of Naval Intelligence. I lost my sight in the Argonne; that does not predispose me toward our country’s enemies.”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Beaumont, we need some proof beyond what you think obvious. We have a traitor here, and he is a traitor who failed. He killed Shaw, and to that potential extent harmed our war effort. But the plans of Shaw’s detector he has failed to find.”
“Did he?” Beaumont insisted. “Is Lieutenant Humphreys certain that those plans which he holds—?”
“Well, Lieutenant?” MacDonald asked.
Humphreys grunted. “Can’t be positive till they’ve been checked by experts. Seem damned plausible, just the same.”
“Beaumont’s right,” said Nick abruptly.
No one had been paying any attention to him, beyond the first obvious glance of wonder as to why the detective lieutenant should drag along such a companion. Now all the faces turned to him. The blind man’s smile widened with gratification. He said, “Thank you.”
“Beaumont’s right,” Noble went on. “Obvious who’s traitor: Nobody.”
The room gasped. Lieutenant Humphreys snorted.
“Private murder. Clear pattern: Humphreys started spy scare; murderer took advantage.”
“But the scrawl on the plaster …?” It was Firebrook’s question.
“Proves it. Clumsy trick to mislead. Swastika wrong.”
“Ach so …!” Firebrook made a click of belated realization.
“Wrong?” MacDonald asked.
“Pencil,” Nick Noble said.
The officer handed him pencil and notebook. He drew for a minute, then showed the results as he spoke. “Old Indian swastika was straight. So’s swastika on wall. Like so:
alle Feinde
Nazi swastika slants. Always slants. See any pictures. If Nazi made wall scribble, it’d have to be:
alle Feinde
So fake.”
“You’re right,” Humphreys said grudgingly. “Should’ve seen it myself. They always slant like that.”
Beaumont, unable to see the illustrations, looked puzzled.
“So who’d go wrong?” Nick Noble went on. “Who but man who’s never seen Nazi swastika. Heard about swastika, naturally thought it same as old Indian. Man who hasn’t seen anything since long before there were Nazis … since Argonne.”
Even the half-smile was gone from Ira Beaumont’s face. He said, “Nonsense! My cousin was, I confess, a burden to me, but I was willing to tolerate him for the work he was doing. Why should I kill him?”
“Check,” said Nick Noble to MacDonald. “Great-uncle Shaw was expecting fortune from. See if Beaumont’s next of kin.”
MacDonald knew he wouldn’t have to check. The momentary twist of Beaumont’s lips, the little choking cry of realization from Mrs. Shaw were enough.
“If not spy, who else but Beaumont?” Noble went on. “Only possible pattern. Hump
hreys total stranger. Mrs. Shaw devoted to son. Firebrook too likely to know right swastika; besides wouldn’t pull German fake pointing straight at him. Who else?”
Ira Beaumont regained his smile. “Lieutenant, your drunken friend is amusing enough, but you surely must realize what pure tosh he is babbling.”
“Must I?” said MacDonald.
“Of course. I defy you to arrest me.”
As MacDonald hesitated, Nick Noble spoke. “O.K. Don’t. Withdraw police. Leave him here.”
MacDonald’s eyes opened in amazement at the advice. Then he looked at the faces in the tense room.
They were all fixed on Beaumont. Humphreys was thinking, He killed a man who could help the Navy. Firebrook was thinking, He killed my friend and tried to frame me for it. Mrs. Shaw was thinking, He killed my son.
Ira Beaumont could not see the faces, but he could feel them. He could think of a blind man left helpless and alone with those faces when the police guard was withdrawn.
He rose slowly to his feet. “Shall we go, Lieutenant?”
As the wagon took away Beaumont, with the aching-head Mulroon and the rest, MacDonald and Noble climbed into the Lieutenant’s car.
On the seat lay a package wrapped in heavy butcher’s paper. Nick Noble pointed at it. “Another murderer for you.”
MacDonald nodded. “That butcher, plus Humphrey’s suspicions, set the stage for this murder all right. And God knows what else the black market and the racketeers behind it are responsible for. Black market? Black murder …”
He held the butcher’s parcel in his hand and stared at it as though it were a prize exhibit in the Black Museum. “I may not have had the heart to report Mrs. Shaw’s hoarding, but it’ll be a pleasure to turn in that market. And to see that the first part of this case gets enough publicity to cut some ice with the meat-buying public.”
Nick Noble uptilted his bottle. “I’ll stick to this,” he said. “Safer.”
His pale blue eyes closed as MacDonald drove off.
Exeunt Murderers Page 5