He held out a green jade Buddha with a flaming red ruby in the forehead.
The big man in the underwear cursed and tried to turn and run.
Sellers clipped him on the back of the neck.
The guy went down so hard I could feel the house shake.
“Come on,” Sellers said, “move in. We’re taking the joint to pieces.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
My wristwatch said it was a little after four. The idea of going to my apartment was a physical torture. I thought of the mattress that had to be lifted down and put in place; the bed that had to be made; the knowledge that Bertha would be certain to be calling on the telephone at least by eight o’clock in the morning. It was all too much of a chore just to get a few hours’ sleep.
I thought of Phyllis waiting. She’d have to wait.
I called a taxi and went to a Turkish bath, managed to get my clothes off, wrap up in a sheet and then limped down to the hot room.
It was a heavenly sensation to relax in the warm air and feel my muscles slowly soaking up the warmth and giving up the pain.
The attendant, who had been putting cold wet towels around the top of my head, came in with a glass of water and said, “There’s a cop outside wants to see you; says his name is Sellers.”
“Tell him to come in.”
“He can’t come in. He’s dressed. He’d be sweating buckets inside of five minutes.”
“Tell him I can’t go out. I’d catch cold.”
The attendant went away.
Within about five minutes, Frank Sellers came in, mad all the way through.
“Listen, Pint Size,” he said, “who the hell do you think you’re standing up?”
He took off his coat and necktie and threw them on a chair.
“I’m not standing up anyone,” I said. “I just want to get some of the pain out of my muscles, and I’m not going out in the cold to talk with you. Now, what is it you want to know?”
“Now, look. Pint Size,” Sellers said, “you’ve pulled a couple of mighty fast ones. I don’t know how the hell you did it, and I’m not going to try to find out because we’re sitting pretty. We got that safe open and we’ve got confessions out of Ferguson and Jimmy Lenox. Mortimer Jasper has been one of the biggest fences in the country, operating with a choice clientele, picking up only the stuff for which he had a customer in advance, and operating right under our noses without our even suspecting what was going on.
“I’ll forgive you a lot for that. But I have an idea you may be a paragraph ahead of us on the murder.
“Now, that’s in my department. I can’t afford to come a cropper on that. I want to know what you know, and then I’m going away and leave you alone.”
I said, “You’re too opinionated to have an open mind on that murder.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. The only place from which that dart could have been fired was Phyllis Crockett’s studio. The only time it could have been fired was while Phyllis Crockett and Sylvia Hadley were in there together —and Sylvia Hadley saw the tip of that blowgun as Phyllis Crockett was aiming it from the bathroom.…You can get a first-degree murder conviction on that kind of evidence.”
“Can you?” I asked.
Sellers started to sweat. He pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his forehead. “Damn it,” he said, “don’t argue with me. Tell me what you know, and let me get the hell out of here.”
“Your premises are cockeyed,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You say that the only place the dart could have been fired from was Phyllis Crockett’s studio.”
“Well? What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything. The dart couldn’t have been fired from the studio.”
“You’re nuts, Donald,” Sellers said angrily. “We took that damn blowgun and stood it up there in that closet, and there isn’t a single damn place where you can stand—even leaning out of the window so far as you can lean—and shoot a dart from that blowgun that would have landed in Crockett’s chest—the one that was stuck in the wood up on top, I’ll agree with you, might have been fired by someone standing by the window in the closet. But even so, a person would have had difficulty manipulating that blowgun—that’s a five-foot, four-inch blowgun and—”
“What kind of rifling marks does it have?” I asked.
“What do you mean, rifling marks?” Sellers asked.
“So you can call in your ballistics department,” I said. “You know, the way you do with a bullet. You identify the bullet that came from the gun by comparing the rifling marks and the grooves and the lands and the pitch and the marks of striation, and—”
“You’re nuts,” Sellers interrupted. “There aren’t any grooves in a blowgun.”
“You look here, Frank Sellers,” I said, “do you mean to stand there and tell me that you can’t tell from the marks on a dart that it was fired from a particular blowgun?”
“Of course not.”
“Then,” I said, “how in hell do you know the darts were fired from Crockett’s blowgun?”
Sellers looked at me, started to say something, changed his mind, grabbed his handkerchief, mopped his forehead, ran the handkerchief around the collar of his shirt, looked at me again and said, “Sonofabitch!”
“How do you know they came from that blowgun?” I repeated.
“We don’t,” Sellers said after a minute.
“Well,” I said, “ that opens up an interesting possibility.”
“Now, wait a minute, Donald. It stands to reason they had to come through that blowgun.”
“Why does it stand to reason?”
“Well, blowguns aren’t manufactured in mass production. Each one is an individual job in itself. Darts are made to fit a particular blowgun. Those are the darts that came with the blowgun. They’re the ones that Crockett brought from Borneo. They’ve been seen in his collection. There’s not much opportunity of confusing those darts with any others.”
“Therefore you feel they had to be fired from that blowgun?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Because they were made to fit the blowgun.”
“Then,” I said, “if darts were made to fit a blowgun, it should be possible to make a blowgun to fit the darts.”
Sellers wiped his hands with a handkerchief, ran it over his forehead and around his neck, and said, “Damn it. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“What’s holding you back?” I asked.
“You are.”
“How come?”
“You’re not telling me what you know.”
“I’m simply asking you questions about blowguns.”
“All right,” he said, “go ahead and ask me questions. But those darts were fired from that blowgun. They had to be. I don’t care what you say.”
“You’re certain?”
“Of course, I’m certain.”
“That dart,” I said, “that was embedded in the wood in that closet went in pretty deep.”
“That’s right. It went in pretty deep.”
“You think Mrs. Crockett blew it from across the air well in that apartment house?”
“She had to. It was the only place it could have come from. You take the angle of that and it points right back to the bathroom window. There was no other place it could possibly have come from.”
“Well,” I said, “before you rule out the impossibilities, you should consider the possibilities. Now, have you taken one of those darts and tried blowing it through that blowgun and see how deep you can penetrate the wood with the dart?”
“Why should I?”
“It might be a good test.”
“The wood is there, the dart is there. The dart was in the wood. You can’t argue that away, Pint Size.”
“I’m not trying to argue it away,” I said. “All I’m telling you is that I don’t think Phyllis Crockett could possibly have blown that dart that distance
and had it stick in that wood that deep. I don’t think you can take that dart and that blowgun and blow it into a piece of wood from a distance of even three or four feet and have it penetrate that deep.”
“ Now what are you getting at?” he asked, his manner showing his irritation.
“Now,” I said, “I’m getting at the fact that simply because you saw a blowgun that was made to shoot darts, and saw a dart that was made to be shot from a blowgun, you jump to the obvious conclusion that the dart had to come from that blowgun. I don’t think it came from any blowgun.”
“Then where do you think it came from, if you’re so damn smart,” Sellers asked, wiping the perspiration from his face and neck. “And quit running me around in circles because I’m going to get the hell out of here.”
“Get the hell out any time you want to,” I said, “but my own idea is that somebody manufactured a short-barreled weapon that worked with a charge of compressed air; that that person stood in the closet right next to Dean Crockett and fired the dart into his chest. Then after Dean Crockett fell, this person fitted the second dart into the mechanism and released it with a charge of compressed air so that it went into that piece of wood at an angle to make it appear that it had been fired from the bathroom window across the air well.
“And I think that person made a fatal mistake in a perfectly planned crime by not taking into consideration the fact that the compressed air in his gun generated more power than could possibly be generated with a pair of human lungs.
“As soon as I saw the setup, I felt absolutely certain that that dart in the wood had been the second dart that was fired instead of the first.
“You can reason it out,” I said. “Put yourself in the position of Dean Crockett. If he had been standing there in the window and someone had fired a dart at him and had missed, and the dart had thudded into the wood, he would hardly have turned to face the window, put his hands on the window sill and exhibited a perfect target for the second shot. Remember, the guy had been around the jungles and he wasn’t born yesterday.
“And when I saw that dart buried clean to the hilt in that hard wood, I knew damn well you couldn’t have fired it in there with a blowgun.”
I settled back and closed my eyes.
Sellers went to the door and bellowed at the attendant, “Hey, for God’s sake, bring me a towel.”
He came back and stood looking down at me with his feet spread wide apart, mopping away at his perspiring face, neck and hands with the towel. Then suddenly he wadded the towel up in a ball, slammed it down to the floor hard, picked up his coat, turned and walked toward the door without a word.
He got as far as the door, then turned on his heel. “All right, who did it?” he asked.
“Try the person who last saw him alive,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I think they teach rookies that as the first procedure, don’t they?”
Sellers stood there for a moment, then I heard the swinging doors as he went out, then he came back and said, “If it wasn’t so hot in here that I don’t dare to exert myself, I’d kick you right in that sassy fanny of yours. As it is, thanks for the information.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I got into the office about ten-thirty. I looked a little better, but I had a good shiner on the right side, I couldn’t take a deep breath without it hurting, and I favored one side when I walked.
Elsie Brand came running out to meet me. “Bertha has to see you just as soon as you come in,” she said. “She’s been having kittens trying to locate you.”
“Tell her I’m in,” I said.
I eased myself down into the swivel chair and Bertha came barging in before I had settled back in a comfortable position.
“Frank Sellers is in my office,” she said. “Can you come in?”
“Tell him to come in here.”
“He won’t like it.”
“Tell him to come in here.”
Bertha said, “You can’t order cops around this way. We have to keep on the good side—”
I eased my aching frame in the swivel chair and closed my eyes. “It’s okay,” I said. “If he wants to see me, he can see me. If he doesn’t, it isn’t important. Tell him I’ve told him all I know.”
Bertha strode out of the office.
In about ten seconds she was back with Frank Sellers. “How you feeling, Pint Size?” Sellers asked. His voice was friendly, almost respectful.
“Like hell.”
“You sure took a beating.”
“You aren’t telling me anything.”
Sellers seemed a little uneasy. “Donald,” he said, “I wrapped that murder case up this morning.”
“Crockett?”
“Crockett.”
“Who did it?”
“Olney,” Sellers said. “He was pretty damn slick about it. He made arrangements so that he could get the blowgun out of there without anyone knowing it. He carefully hollowed out the handle of the club flag, then he stole the darts and everything was set to plant the gun in Mrs. Crockett’s studio. Of course, you butted in and saved him the trouble.”
I changed my position slightly, trying to ease the pain in my side. “Made himself a little blowgun?” I asked.
“Nothing to it,” Sellers said. “The tube wasn’t over ten inches long, but he screwed one of those containers that holds compressed carbon dioxide on the end of it and worked out a trigger arrangement that sent the darts so fast and so hard that they were traveling like a bullet.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’d been managing Crockett’s business and his tax matters, and what with one thing and another, he’d got into Crockett to the tune of about eighty thousand bucks. Crockett was beginning to think something was wrong. Next he would have been having an audit made—or Olney thought that would be the next step.”
I said, “That’s nice. I was a little afraid he might have had his eye on Phyllis and wanted Crockett out of the way for that reason.”
“Well, that’s all there was to it,” Sellers said. “Once we got on the right track it was easy. We searched his room. The damn fool hadn’t even disposed of the air gun he’d manufactured.”
I yawned. “Why did you come over here, Frank?”
“I wanted to talk with you before the case broke in the newspapers,” Sellers said uncomfortably.
“Why?”
“Well,” he said, “they’ll probably interview you and I wondered what you were going to tell them.”
“Me!” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Why, hell. I’m not going to tell them anything except that it was my privilege to work with Sergeant Sellers of Homicide last night while he was solving the theft of the jade Buddhas from the Crockett penthouse, that after he had solved that theft, Sellers went ahead on his own with cleaning up the Crockett murder case.”
“What about our conference in the Turkish bath?” Sellers asked.
“What Turkish bath?” I asked.
All of a sudden Sellers reached down, grabbed my hand and started shaking it. “You’re a game little bastard,” he said, “and a damn good friend. There are times when I feel like I could kiss you—despite the fact that I know damn well you pulled some kind of a slick razzle-dazzle on us over those two idols, and, by God, Donald, I’m not sharp enough to find out what it was.”
“Then why try?” I asked.
Sellers shook hands with me again, then suddenly grabbed Bertha and kissed her.
“You’re the kind of private detectives we need in the city,” he said, and walked out.
Bertha Cool stood there blinking her greedy little eyes at me.
“Well?” I asked.
I thought she wanted to ask about the fee in the Crockett case and what arrangements I’d made with Phyllis. But, instead of that, Bertha reached up and patted her lips.
“The sonofabitch kissed me,” she said, tenderly.
You never can tell about women.
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