Exeunt Murderers

by Anthony Boucher

  This is where I came in. You always come in late when you’re on Homicide, so sometimes when you tell the story it’s better to start in earlier and give out with a lot of stuff we didn’t learn for a long time. That way, when you’re reading it you can get a picture a lot quicker than I did when I walked into that store.

  There isn’t anything uncommon about people living in stores in Berkeley. You walk down Telegraph and that’s what you see every place. Little one-man stores closed up because the President sends greetings, and meanwhile all the defense workers pile into town and there’s no place to sleep. Sure, it was tough, a man and his wife and his brother all living in a one-room store, but at least they didn’t have kids.

  I’ve been in some of the stores—professionally and otherwise—and they’ve looked real nice. Trim and neat and damned near like homes. I walked into this one, and the first thing I thought was how glad I was I wasn’t married to this woman. Squalor’s the word, I guess. Everybody’s junk every place.

  The people’s name was Flaxner and she was the corpse’s wife and this was her brother-in-law. She was average in height and pretty in a thin, sharp way. The brother-in-law looked like Humphrey Bogart or was going to die trying. He worked in a plant out at Richmond. The dead husband was unemployed, which was a word I haven’t written down on a form in years. Well, he was unemployed now, all right.

  I went over the story with each of them alone and both of them together, and it still made just as much or as little sense. They didn’t either of them seem afraid of the police. They answered questions clearly and readily, but not too clearly and readily. I don’t know what made me think they were covering something.

  Rose Flaxner timed the shot about seven-forty because the radio chiller they’d been listening to was over at seven-thirty. I asked Joe Flaxner where he was then.

  “I was at a movie—Halloween horror bill up at the Campus Theatre. Don’t go.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Times?”

  “Let’s see—I get in from Richmond in the car pool about four-thirty. The show probably runs about four hours, but I couldn’t stick it all. I walked out around seven-thirty. That’s a quarter of an hour from here by foot.”

  The doctor said seven-forty was as likely as anything. All the time I was getting the story he was busy, and so was the fingerprint man (feeling kind of annoyed because there really wasn’t anything to print but the corpse), and the boys were covering the block hunting for a gun or anything else.

  They didn’t find the gun, but they found something else. Down at the corner, stuffed into a trash can, Rourke found a sheet and a mask. I showed them to Rose.

  She shuddered. She wouldn’t ever think masks were funny again. She said, “I wouldn’t know. They all look alike. But it could be the same. I don’t know.”

  I asked the usual one about has your husband got any enemies?

  To hear them talk, there wasn’t ever anybody alive that had so few enemies as the late Ben Flaxner. I looked at his ugly puss and I looked at Rose and I didn’t believe it. But all I said was, “All right. Everybody loved him and I don’t doubt they’re taking up funds for a Flaxner memorial right now. But somebody killed him. All right. Who’d you know five feet or under?”

  They looked at me and I got patient like George Burns trying to explain something. I said, “This is maybe the smartest killer I’ve ever run up against. He picks the one night in the year when he can go around completely disguised without bothering anybody. Then he ditches the sheet and the mask and there’s not a thing to tie him to the crime. But to bring it off, he’d have to be little. You saw the trick-or-treater; so did your husband. Both of you would’ve thought there was something screwy if it hadn’t looked like a kid. So who’s under five feet? The killer has to be.”

  I was watching Rose, and something scared her and scared her bad. But I could see from the way she compressed her lips that I wasn’t going to be able to find out what, just by asking. So I let it slide for the moment.

  Then, suddenly, Joe exclaimed, “The hunchback!”

  Rose looked suddenly relieved and she said, “The hunchback!” too.

  “Of course,” Joe went on, “I don’t know who he is, but I’ve seen him around this neighborhood a lot. And one day when I came home he was having some kind of a row with Ben. I don’t know what. Ben wouldn’t talk. But he’s—oh, hell, he isn’t over four eight, I’d say.”

  I wrote it down and waited. Finally Rose said, “Helen?”

  Joe said, “Hell, no. Why?”

  I asked, “Who?”

  “Helen Kirk,” Rose said. “She’s a friend of ours, works out where Joe does. She didn’t hardly know Ben, but she is little—not over five feet. You know—the cute type.”

  I wrote down the name and the address she gave me and drew a cat in the margin, which was nice for Halloween.

  “We’re not on the same shift,” Joe said. “She’s on swing—she’ll be getting home about twelve-thirty or one. So of course she was working when—”

  I said, “Of course.”

  There wasn’t much more to say right then. I finally said to Joe, “Richmond’s in the next county. That’s out of my territory. If it won’t hold up national armament too much, I’d just as soon you stuck around here tomorrow. I’ll want to see you again.”

  Joe said, “Can do, I guess.”

  The next hour or two was a lot of routine. There were forms to fill out and then waiting while they dug out the bullets. There were three of them, all from the same 32. I put the ballistics description and the corpse’s prints on the wires to Washington, where the big file is, and to Cheyenne, where Rose Flaxner said they’d come from, and to Chicago, because she’d said Ch—Cheyenne and that was the likeliest name for her to’ve almost let slip.

  When I got through it was about time for Helen Kirk to be getting off work. She was a rare lucky woman in Berkeley. She had an apartment—on Alcatraz, not too far from the Flaxners’ shop. I got into the apartment house without troubling anybody and camped in front of her door.

  She showed up at two-thirty and there was a Marine with her. They’d been bowling. The Marine looked as if he’d like to use me to knock down a few pins, but my badge calmed him down a little. He went away and Helen let me into the apartment.

  She was little—four eleven, I’d guess—and just plump enough. She wasn’t too cute, either. Just sort of lively. She liked an adventure like a policeman at two in the morning, but she didn’t like it when I told her about Ben Flaxner. She took it harder than the people that knew him better, and maybe that proved something about Ben.

  “It was Joe you mostly knew in the Flaxner family?” I asked.

  “Yes. I used to see a lot of him.” She stopped and then added, “Before Rose came out here.” She didn’t say anything more, just let it sink in unornamented.

  I said, “That’s a break for the Marines.”

  She asked, “But why did you come to see me, Lieutenant? I told you I scarcely knew Ben. He was grumpy and nervous and afraid; you couldn’t know him.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Like a little child sometimes, that thinks Something’s going to get him. He was—oh, I don’t know—funny.”

  I turned that around in my mind. I asked, “You clock in on time tonight?”

  She said, “I guess so. I’ve never been docked yet.”

  I thought of a lot of swell possibilities on the way home. Maybe there was some way of faking a time clock at the Richmond plant. Sure it was possible, but it took a lot of believing. Those plants aren’t run for fun.

  Or maybe there never was a trick or treat. Joe and Rose made up the whole story between them, and there wasn’t anybody under five feet. But would they make up such a wild story and carry it out so far as to plant a mask and a sheet?

  Well, there was still the hunchback. If there was a hunchback. And in the meantime I could use some sleep.

  The phone woke me up. It was Rose Flaxner. I guess they gave her my number at Headqua
rters. She sounded half crazy. She kept saying he was gone and she was all alone and it would come back and she was scared of what sounded like an angel; I didn’t know for sure. I boiled it down to where Joe hadn’t been able to get off at Richmond and had gone on out there.

  I said, “I’ll talk to the plant manager and send a man out there to bring him back. Keep quiet about it, because it isn’t strictly legal, but I think it’ll work.” I didn’t tell her she was safe enough, anyway, because there was a man watching the storefront.

  “Thank God!” she said in a kind of gasp. “Because it might come back.”

  “Lady, Halloween’s over. This is November 1st.”

  “Yes—but you said it had to be little, and the—” She stopped short, then added, “I want to get out of this place. I’m afraid.” Then suddenly she hung up.

  You can’t get anywhere on a phone, anyway. I brushed my teeth, shaved and fixed breakfast and wondered what it was like to be a private eye like you read about, and have whisky instead of coffee. I didn’t think it’d work, but you never know till you try.

  They had reading matter for me at Headquarters. There wasn’t anything yet from Cheyenne, not that I expected it, but there was plenty from Washington and Chicago. It started out like routine and it ended with cold fingers on my spine.

  They knew Ben Flaxner’s prints both places. That was his real name, and maybe it’s smart to use your real name sometimes. Back before Repeal, they knew him very well in Chicago. Nothing big—just a young punk getting his start. He didn’t do so good for a while after that; the depression hit all kinds of business. He got really going again with the war, and in the meantime he’d grown up.

  He was 4-F and there was some suspicion of fraud, but his draft board had never been able to get hold of him for a re-physical. He got into the black market in Chicago—mostly liquor, which was a racket he knew backwards. He was doing swell until Johnny Angelino got his. The Chicago cops never pinned anything on him, but Johnny’s friends had their own ideas. I began to see why he was out here and why he was jumpy and scared the way Helen Kirk said. It looked clear enough until you read the ballistics report.

  It said that the type and make of the gun that had killed Flaxner was not too common and that the same sort of gun had been used on Johnny Angelino. They’d like to take a look at the slug in a comparison.

  I didn’t like the implications in that. But what really started the ice-fingers playing with my vertebrae was this:

  Johnny Angelino—the Angel, they called him, not just from his name but from that round sweet face with the curls—was a dwarf.

  Four feet one, it said. Just the right size for a trick-or-treat.

  Ghosts don’t come back and kill their murderers with the same gun. I know better than that. So do you. So did Ben Flaxner.

  I didn’t pay any attention to it. I didn’t give it another thought. But if Berkeley had bars, which it doesn’t, I might have tried the methods of a private eye before I started out hunting for the hunchback.

  Joe Flaxner said he’d seen the hunchback around the neighborhood a lot, so I tried the neighborhood stores—the ones that were still really being stores. The drugstore never saw him, neither did the service station man. The barber saw him a couple of times—he remembered because he thought it brought him luck with the gee-gees—but he didn’t know anything.

  Then I tried the butcher. He was all alone with some brains and tripe and his memories. He said, “Hunchback? Well, he has been in here.”

  “Lately?” I asked.

  “Not for a week or so.”

  He looked like he wanted to talk and still he didn’t. I tried showing my badge and it worked. He said, “So you got him, huh?”

  I deadpanned it with a grunt.

  He said, “You see how it is, Officer. I want to see him get it, but I don’t want to start anything, see? I don’t want any trouble.”

  “I understand.”

  “That foreigner up the street, now; I bet he took some of them hens. Made a nice profit on ’em, too, I’ll bet you. But I don’t want to go breaking ceilings. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Sure,” I said. “There’s a war on.”

  “That’s it, Officer. That’s exactly it. So I told him to take his black market chickens and—well, I sure told him. But I didn’t want to go to the OPA about it and report it because—”

  “—you don’t want any trouble.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Supposing you changed your mind?”

  “Huh?”

  “Supposing you wanted some hens, after all. He leave any instructions?”

  It took five minutes after that. I timed it by the wall clock. He kept going back and forth between “there was a war on” and he “didn’t want any trouble.” Finally he dug out the card from under the cash register and I thanked him and told him I’d be in as a customer next time I wanted some tripe, and I hope I live that long.

  The address was over in West Berkeley, across the railroad tracks. It was in the basement of an old house made into flats. I knocked on the door the way it said on the card and he opened up, and sure enough he was a hunchback and only about four nine.

  He had a long face with a Roman beak and his voice was Italian. He asked, “What you want?” and I said, “In, first of all.”

  He backed away and let me in. His room made the Flaxner store look elegant, but it was cleaner. He sat down by the grappa bottle, but I kept standing near the door.

  He said “What you want?” again.

  I said, “Talk. We can do it here if you like. If you don’t, they’ve got rooms as nice as this down on McKinley Avenue.”

  He snarled a word in Italian that may’ve meant copper, only I think it went a little deeper than that. He made a move with his right hand, and I had my .45 in mine.

  I said, “You’re handling black-market poultry. That’s none of my business. My business is corpses. And you had a row with a corpse of mine, and it just so happens he used to play black-market games, too. It takes some clearing up.”

  He wasn’t talking. He hunched himself over a little more than nature had done and sat there. I smelled second-hand garlic and olive oil. He leaned forward a little and spat at my feet. I didn’t care. It was his carpet.

  I said, “All right. You won’t talk to me, you’ll talk to the boys.”

  He said, “Will I?” and just then I felt the rod in my spine.

  I hadn’t heard the newcomer make his entrance; he was good. I didn’t argue when he said, “Drop.” I let the .45 go; I slipped the safety catch back on first.

  He let me turn around then. He was tall and moon-faced. He asked, “What’ve we got here, Gino?”

  Gino grunted. Moon-face ran a hand over my clothes and felt my badge. Then he laughed. It was a full, clear laugh and the little room rang with it. He took a wallet from his pocket and handed it to me.

  I read it and laughed, too. I reached down for the .45 and nobody minded.

  Lafferty (that’s what it said on his identification) said, “Isn’t there trouble enough about local and Federal government without city police and the FBI playing cops and robbers with each other?”

  I said, “That’s all right. But what’s a G-man doing stooging for a black-market operator?”

  He grinned. “Put it the other way round. Gino’s our stooge, and a hell of a good one. I thought you were from the gang he’s working with. Some day, God help him, they’re going to get wise.”

  Gino showed three and a half teeth. “Your country free mine from Nazis. I help.”

  Lafferty asked, “And what did you want with him?”

  I told him. When I was through I said to Gino, “And what were you doing with Flaxner?”

  “One of the black-market boys see him, tell me he use to work with Johnny Angelino, maybe he work with us. I feel him out; he tell me he think about it.”

  I can’t help it; routine’s routine. I asked, “And where were you last night at seven-forty?”
/>   Lafferty said, “With me, making out a report.”

  “That leaves me with a ghost.”

  Lafferty shook his head. “I’m not trying to run your business, Lieutenant; but doesn’t it look as if there never was a trick-or-treater? It’s a put-up job.”

  I said, “I’ve heard terror in a woman’s voice before. Rose Flaxner’s mortally afraid of what she saw. And I’m beginning to be myself.”

  Back at the office I read the report from Richmond. Helen Kirk arrived at work on time last night—eight o’clock. From South Berkeley to there in twenty minutes isn’t possible. And the clocks, they swore, can’t be faked.

  I was left with the ghost, all right.

  I hunted out the mask and the sheet. They didn’t tell anything. A sheet is shapeless and sizeless. So’s a mask. There was no laundry mark on the sheet and no makeup inside the mask. The lab hoped it could do something with identification from sweat-groups; but the courts aren’t sold on that one yet, and, anyway, first I’d have to make a pinch.

  I tucked the mask under my arm.

  I went to every house in a five-block radius of the Flaxners’ store. I asked every mother did her kid go trick-or-treating last night. And if the answer was yes, I said what time did he get home and was he all right or did anything funny happen to him.

  They mostly got home at nine if they were due at eight, and ten if they were due at nine. And nothing happened.

  Until at last on Ellsworth Street a Mrs. Mary Murdock, housewife, said Terry got home before eight. It worried her; he was so early. And he had terrible nightmares last night and was so upset this morning he didn’t go to school. It wasn’t like Terry; he wasn’t one of these sensitive children.

  I said, “Lady, it wouldn’t take a sensitive kid to have nightmares, if what I think happened. Could I use your phone?”

  When I was through phoning I went in to see Terry. I showed him my badge and we talked shop. He was a Junior G-man and he knew some things I didn’t. When everything was going smooth, I let him see the mask.

  It took me ten minutes to quiet him down, and then I got the story, after I promised he could wear my badge all day, because nothing could get him then.