“Murder wasn’t going to keep those Santa Juana policemen from hearing the Big Game.
“‘Give him a parole or something for just three hours,’ Leary pleaded. ‘Just let him play this game. I’ll bring him back to you myself.’
“‘Let me go,’ Jim urged, ‘and I’ll sign anything you want. What is this, a new kind of third degree?’
“I put in a word too, offering my own standing and my word of honor as pledge for Jim’s return. But Sergeant Hanlon was adamant. It seemed as though nothing could prevent him from taking Jim to the station then and there.
“It took Bob here to save the situation. You see, there was nothing the sergeant could do but release Jim after Bob had confessed to the murder.”
Father Pearson paused. “I think the rest of this is Bob’s story. But is it clear so far? Any questions, Sister?”
Sister Ursula took her astonished eyes from Coffin Corner Cassidy, who had confessed a murder. “Yes. About that cribbage arrangement. You said that the gambler’s own hand was bad, only two. Is that usual? How do scores run in cribbage?”
The priest suppressed any curiosity as to the question. “Anywhere from zero to twenty-nine. An average passably good hand would be from eight to sixteen.”
“And all that was on the desk was the cards arranged for cribbage?”
“Yes.”
Sister Ursula’s face was not happy. “Tell me,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “this Michaelis—was he well-versed in football, or simply interested in scores and odds as a gambler?”
Father Pearson looked to Cassidy. “Bob?”
“Very well-versed, I’d say. He wasn’t only a gambler; he was a Santa Juana rooter. He could tell you the score of every Big Game in the past twenty years and who stood out on what plays.”
Sister Ursula nodded, frowning. “Thank you.”
“Then if that’s all, Sister, perhaps Bob should take up the—”
“Just a minute, Father. Reverend Mother was saying yesterday that she wanted to see you about something. Perhaps you could talk to her while Mr. Cassidy tells me the story that you must know by heart.”
“Fine, Sister. Do a good job on it, Bob.”
Cassidy cleared his throat several times. At last he said, “There isn’t much to the rest of it, Sister. Have you got any ideas yet? You’ve got to help us clear Jim.”
“I believe he’s well worth it, Mr. Cassidy, and I shall certainly try. I do have an idea … but I’d like to hear the rest of your story first.”
“Well, as Father said, there wasn’t anything the sergeant could do then but book me, while Father and Coach took Jim off to the stadium. I think they all guessed right away why I confessed.
“The sergeant wanted a full statement, but I persuaded him to let me hear the game first. It wasn’t hard; he was on tenterhooks to hear it himself. So we sat there in the station and heard one of the greatest of all Big Games.
“Maybe you remember it, Sister. Jim went in there full of fire, and in the first quarter he dropped one in coffin corner that resulted in a touchdown when a blocked kick sailed into Cyrovich’s arms. But after that, something happened to him. He told me later it reminded him of me in that game you were talking about and he got to thinking about me in jail and he sort of went to pieces. A little later one of his punts made only five yards net from scrimmage, and Santa Juana took over on the twenty and marched straight for a touchdown.
“After that Coach Leary pulled him out for a while. You remember the end of the game, though: 13—7 in their favor, and Cyrovich finally gets away to the races for forty yards and a touchdown. Thirteen-thirteen, and Jim sent in to boot the extra point. The strain on him by then was something terrific. And the kick was blocked.
“But Jim got hold of himself at the last minute, grabbed the ball, and ran it over to make it 14-13.
“It was a great game. And just as the announcer was saying it had been one, Sergeant Hanlon switched off the radio and said, ‘Now, you son—’ I beg your pardon, Sister—‘now tell me how you killed him.’
“‘Killed who?’ I said. And that was that.
“Not that I got off easy. I’d insulted the police of Santa Juana, and they were out to teach me a lesson. I won’t go into all that. I could show you scars …
“They found a motive for me. Jim had told me his dilemma and I’d saved him from it. The Beak switched his story so it seemed I must’ve done it. It was bad enough so that my lawyer advised to reserve my defense and stand trial.
“When I did, it was a cinch. We produced witnesses that established I couldn’t possibly have seen or heard from Jim between his visit to Michaelis and mine. We got in The Beak’s first story—stricken out as hearsay but still having its effect on the jury. And I took the stand myself and told just why I’d confessed so that a fine boy could play a great game.
“That jury darned near gave me a medal.
“The police were all for going back to their first suspect. But the D. A.’s office weren’t going to be made fools of again; they wouldn’t ask for an indictment without a perfect case. By then the trail was cold, and the police finally gave up. I think that’s all the story, Sister. But now—”
“Now,” said Sister Ursula, “Jim Echeverri wants a commission. Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Cassidy. That’s no wonderful deduction. In times like this, that’s the most likely reason why it should suddenly be imperative to clear him of this lingering suspicion. And you want me to tell you who is guilty?”
“I want you to tell us how to prove it. It’s pretty obvious who did it. Michaelis was alive when I saw him, so it couldn’t be Coach. I’m acquitted, and we all believe Jim’s story. It must have been The Beak. But to prove that …”
Sister Ursula did not look at Cassidy. “Must it?” She chose her words carefully. “You’ve fallen into a common snare on your reasoning there, all of you. You assume that there are only four possible answers, and eliminate three of those. But isn’t there a fifth?”
“Father explained it couldn’t have been suicide. If only it could…”
“What evidence gives you that limitation of four suspects? What evidence almost sent Jim to trial? Who had the best opportunity of all and yet was so little noticed that Father did not even mention his name?”
Cassidy looked suddenly stricken. “Good Lord! I never thought of him. The elevator boy!”
Sister Ursula nodded.
“But no, he couldn’t be.” His words came fast and urgent. “It isn’t possible. He had no motive. There’s no reason why he—”
The nun smiled ruefully. “The Beak is dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Got into the sugar-hijacking racket and was shot a few weeks ago. But how did you know that?”
Sister Ursula’s voice was low and earnest. “It was a lucky guess. … Am I equally lucky in guessing that you haven’t been to Communion since the Big Game?”
There was a long silence in the sunny patio. At last Cassidy said tonelessly, “How did you know?”
“I didn’t think you would receive the sacrament under that burden of guilt any more than you would try to shift the murder onto a living man.”
“I’ve been acquitted, you know,” he said quietly.
“I know. That makes Jim’s problem more difficult.”
“But how—what—”
“Let’s start with the cribbage game. There was one thing glaringly wrong. On the desk was nothing but the piles of cards. I don’t play cribbage myself, but I do know that it is always scored on a cribbage board. In an emergency, paper and pencil might do; but they were also absent.
“Therefore it was not a cribbage game. Then what was it? Because there was no mention of fingerprints on the cards, which could so easily have established which of the four was present, I knew they must have borne only Michaelis’s prints. The cards, as Father described them, were bloodstained on both sides. Then they were laid out after the shooting, or they would have been stained on only one side.
“
Michaelis was shot through the chest. He could have lived a short while after such a wound. There was nothing on his desk with which to leave a message, and when he tried to get up he would find the exertion too much for him. He had only his habitual solitaire deck. So he laid out an imaginary cribbage game, and for his adversary’s hand he arranged the cards that positively identified him.
“Father said that that hand was the highest possible in cribbage. He also said that cribbage scores ran from zero to twenty-nine. That was the rarest of hands, as striking and distinctive as thirteen spades: the twenty-nine hand.”
“And I never noticed that,” Cassidy groaned. “Never thought of it.”
“Twenty-nine is the number of your immortal jersey. If a man had just been visited by Red Grange and then announced, ‘Seventy-seven has done thus and so to me,’ his meaning would be clear enough. And Michaelis was well-versed in football history.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Cassidy said. He kept his face turned away. “When I went to lay my bet he warned me the game was fixed; he thought he was doing me a favor because of my friend the politician. I got mad and called him out for it. He was feeling so damned proud of himself for how he’d sewed up Jim. Finally I took a sock at the cocky little rat and he pulled his gun. I got it away from him and then all of a sudden I saw how to solve Jim’s problem …
“I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. I just remember wiping the gun and leaving it there and getting the hell out. Thank God that damned elevator boy didn’t spot anything wrong with me.”
Sister Ursula showed no reaction to the profanity. “Do you?” she asked gently.
“Do I what?”
“Do you thank God that you went unspotted?”
“No,” Cassidy said after a long silence. “Because I didn’t go unspotted. I mean, I’m spotted inside me. I’m not clean. But if I’d stood trial honestly on the truth instead of the farce that cleared me …”
He broke off and lit a cigarette. After a long draw, he said, “It’s up to you, Sister. I urged Father to reopen this closed case because I hoped we might clear Jim by shifting the blame onto that dead racketeer. But you saw through that. All right, Sister; you’ve solved it. Now solve your solution. What can I do? I can’t clear Jim by confessing; they’d laugh at me because they couldn’t try me.”
“You can confess,” she said, “to God. You can ask Him for grace and guidance. And you can confess to the officers examining Jim’s record.”
“They won’t believe me.”
“I think they will if your statement is supported by the priest who gave you absolution. One doesn’t joke about murder in the confessional.”
Cassidy tossed away his cigarette and straightened up. He looked ten years younger and ready for another fifty-yard punt. “Sister,” he said, “if my prayers are worth anything at all, you’ll never stay long in purgatory.”
Sister Ursula laughed softly. “I might resent the implication that I’d be there indefinitely without you.”
When Father Pearson came back, she said simply, “Father, I think Mr. Cassidy wants to talk to you alone.”
The nun walked out of the patio, leaving the murderer with the priest.
(1943)
The Stripper
He was called Jack the Stripper because the only witness who had seen him and lived (J. F. Flugelbach, 1463 N. Edgemont) had described the glint of moonlight on bare skin. The nickname was inevitable.
Mr. Flugelbach had stumbled upon the fourth of the murders, the one in the grounds of City College. He had not seen enough to be of any help to the police; but at least he had furnished a name for the killer heretofore known by such routine cognomens as “butcher,” “werewolf,” and “vampire.”
The murders in themselves were enough to make a newspaper’s fortune. They were frequent, bloody, and pointless, since neither theft nor rape was attempted. The murderer was no specialist, like the original Jack, but rather an eclectic, like Kürten the Düsseldorf Monster, who struck when the mood was on him and disregarded age and sex. This indiscriminate taste made better copy; the menace threatened not merely a certain class of unfortunates but every reader.
It was the nudity, however, and the nickname evolved from it, that made the cause truly celebrated. Feature writers dug up all the legends of naked murderers—Courvoisier of London, Durrant of San Francisco, Wallace of Liverpool, Borden of Fall River—and printed them as sober fact, explaining at length the advantages of avoiding the evidence of bloodstains.
When he read this explanation, he always smiled. It was plausible, but irrelevant. The real reason for nakedness was simply that it felt better that way. When the color of things began to change, his first impulse was to get rid of his clothing. He supposed that psychoanalysts could find some atavistic reason for that.
He felt the cold air on his naked body. He had never noticed that before. Noiselessly he pushed the door open and tiptoed into the study. His hand did not waver as he raised the knife.
The Stripper case was Lieutenant Marshall’s baby, and he was going nuts. His condition was not helped by the constant allusions of his colleagues to the fact that his wife had once been a stripper of a more pleasurable variety. Six murders in three months, without a single profitable lead, had reduced him to a state where a lesser man might have gibbered, and sometimes he thought it would be simpler to be a lesser man.
He barked into phones nowadays. He hardly apologized when he realized that his caller was Sister Ursula, that surprising nun who had once planned to be a policewoman and who had extricated him from several extraordinary cases. But that was just it; those had been extraordinary, freak locked-room problems, while this was the horrible epitome of ordinary, clueless, plotless murder. There was no room in the Stripper case for the talents of Sister Ursula.
He was in a hurry and her sentences hardly penetrated his mind until he caught the word “Stripper.” Then he said sharply, “So? Backtrack please, Sister. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”
“He says,” her quiet voice repeated, “that he thinks he knows who the Stripper is, but he hasn’t enough proof. He’d like to talk to the police about it; and since he knows I know you, he asked me to arrange it, so that you wouldn’t think him just a crank.”
“Which,” said Marshall, “he probably is. But to please you, Sister … What did you say his name is?”
“Flecker. Harvey Flecker. Professor of Latin at the University.”
Marshall caught his breath. “Coincidence,” he said flatly. “I’m on my way to see him now.”
“Oh. Then he did get in touch with you himself?”
“Not with me,” said Marshall. “With the Stripper.”
“God rest his soul …” Sister Ursula murmured.
“So. I’m on my way now. If you could meet me there and bring his letter—”
“Lieutenant, I know our order is a singularly liberal one, but still I doubt if Reverend Mother—”
“You’re a material witness,” Marshall said authoritatively. “I’ll send a car for you. And don’t forget the letter.”
Sister Ursula hung up and sighed. She had liked Professor Flecker, both for his scholarly wit and for his quiet kindliness. He was the only man who could hold his agnostic own with Father Pearson in disputatious sophistry, and he was also the man who had helped keep the Order’s soup-kitchen open at the depth of the depression.
She took up her breviary and began to read the office for the dead while she waited for the car.
“It is obvious,” Professor Lowe enunciated, “that the Stripper is one of the three of us.”
Hugo Ellis said, “Speak for yourself.” His voice cracked a little, and he seemed even younger than he looked.
Professor de’ Cassis said nothing. His huge hunchbacked body crouched in the corner and he mourned his friend.
“So?” said Lieutenant Marshall. “Go on, Professor.”
“It was by pure chance,” Professor Lowe continued, his lean face alight with logical satis
faction, “that the back door was latched last night. We have been leaving it unfastened for Mrs. Carey since she lost her key; but Flecker must have forgotten that fact and inadvertently reverted to habit. Ingress by the front door was impossible, since it was not only secured by a spring lock but also bolted from within. None of the windows shows any sign of external tampering. The murderer presumably counted upon the back door to make plausible the entrance of an intruder; but Flecker had accidentally secured it, and that accident,” he concluded impressively, “will strap the Tripper.”
Hugo Ellis laughed, and then looked ashamed of himself.
Marshall laughed too. “Setting aside the Spoonerism, Professor, your statement of the conditions is flawless. This house was locked tight as a drum. Yes, the Stripper is one of the three of you.” It wasn’t amusing when Marshall said it.
Professor de’ Cassis raised his despondent head. “But why?” His voice was guttural. “Why?”
Hugo Ellis said, “Why? With a madman?”
Professor Lowe lifted one finger as though emphasizing a point in a lecture. “Ah, but is this a madman’s crime? There is the point. When the Stripper kills a stranger, yes, he is mad. When he kills a man with whom he lives … may he not be applying the technique of his madness to the purpose of his sanity?”
“It’s an idea,” Marshall admitted. “I can see where there’s going to be some advantage in having a psychologist among the witnesses. But there’s another witness I’m even more anxious to—” His face lit up as Sergeant Raglan came in. “She’s here, Rags?”
“Yeah,” said Raglan. “It’s the sister. Holy smoke, Loot, does this mean this is gonna be another screwy one?”
Marshall had said she and Raglan had said the sister. These facts may serve as sufficient characterization of Sister Felicitas, who had accompanied her. They were always a pair, yet always spoken of in the singular. Now Sister Felicitas dozed in the corner where the hunchback had crouched, and Marshall read and reread the letter which seemed like the posthumous utterance of the Stripper’s latest victim:
Exeunt Murderers Page 18