Crime Stories Page 16

  Registering at the hotel they had selected, he scanned the page of the book given over to the previous day’s business. “Mrs. H. H. Moore,” the name she was to have used, did not appear thereon. Discreet inquiries revealed that she had not arrived.

  Sending his baggage up to his room, Carter went out and called at the two other hotels in the town. She was at neither. At a newsstand he bought an armful of New York papers. Nothing about her arrest was in them. She had not been picked up before leaving the city, or the newspapers would have made much news of her.

  For three days he clung obstinately to the belief that she had not run away from him. He spent the three days in his New York rooms, his ears alert for the ringing of the telephone bell, examining his mail frantically, constantly expecting the messenger, who didn’t come. Occasionally he sent telegrams to the hotel in the upstate town—futile telegrams.

  Then he accepted the inescapable truth: she had decided—perhaps had so intended all along—not to run the risk incidental to a meeting with him, but had picked out a hiding place of her own; she did not mean to fulfil her obligations to him, but had taken his assistance and gone.

  Another day passed in idleness while he accustomed himself to the bitterness of this knowledge. Then he set to work to salvage what he could. Fortunately, it seemed to be much. The bare story that the girl had told him over the remains of her meal could with little effort be woven into a novelette that should be easily marketed. Crook stories were always in demand, especially one with an authentic girl−burglar drawn from life.

  As he bent over his typewriter, concentrating on his craft, his disappointment began to fade. The girl was gone. She had treated him shabbily, but perhaps it was better that way. The money she had cost him would come back with interest from the sale of the serial rights of this story. As for the personal equation: she had been beautiful, fascinating enough—and friendly—but still she was a crook . . .

  For days he hardly left his desk except to eat and sleep, neither of which did he do excessively.

  Finally the manuscript was completed and sent out in the mail. For the next two days he rested as fully as he had toiled, lying abed to all hours, idling through his waking hours, replacing the nervous energy his work always cost him.

  On the third day a note came from the editor of the magazine to which he had sent the story, asking if it would be convenient for him to call at two−thirty the next afternoon.

  Four men were with the editor when Carter was ushered into his office. Two of them he knew: Gerald Gulton and Harry Mack, writers like himself. He was introduced to the others: John Deitch and Walton Dohlman. He was familiar with their work, though he had not met them before; they contributed to some of the same magazines that bought his stories.

  When the group had been comfortably seated and cigars and cigarettes were burning, the editor smiled into the frankly curious faces turned toward him.

  “Now we’ll get down to business,” he said. “You’ll think it a queer business at first, but I’ll try to mystify you no longer than necessary.”

  He turned to Carter. “You wouldn’t mind telling us, Mr. Brigham, just how you got hold of the idea for your story ‘The Second−Story Angel,’ would you?”

  “Of course not,” Carter said. “It was rather peculiar. I was roused one night by the sound of a burglar in my rooms and got up to investigate. I tackled him and we fought in the dark for a while. Then I turned on the lights and—”

  “And it was a woman—a girl!” Gerald Fulton prompted hoarsely.

  Carter jumped.

  “How did you know?” he demanded.

  Then he saw that Fulton, Mack, Deitch, and Dohlman were all sitting stiffly in their chairs and that their dissimilar faces held for the time identical expressions of bewilderment.

  “And after a while a detective came in?”

  It was Mack’s voice, but husky and muffled.

  “His name was Cassidy!”

  “And for a price things could be fixed,” Deitch took up the thread.

  After that there was a long silence, while the editor pretended to be intrigued by the contours of a hemispherical glass paperweight on his desk, and the four professional writers, their faces beet−red and sheepish, all stared intently at nothing.

  The editor opened a drawer and took out a stack of manuscripts.

  “Here they are,” he said. “I knew there was something wrong when within ten days I got five stories that were, in spite of the differences in treatment, unmistakably all about the same girl!”

  “Chuck mine in the wastebasket,” Mack instructed softly, and the others nodded their endorsement of that disposition. All but Dohlman, who seemed to be struggling with an idea. Finally he addressed the editor.

  “It’s a pretty good story, at that, isn’t it, all five versions?”

  The editor nodded.

  “Yes, I’d have bought one, but five—”

  “Why not buy one? We’ll match coins—”

  “Sure, that’s fair enough,” said the editor.

  It was done. Mack won.

  Gerald Fulton’s round blue eyes were wider than ever with a look of astonishment. At last he found words.

  “My God! I wonder how many other men are writing that same story right now!”

  But in Garter’s mind an entirely different problem was buzzing around.

  Lord! I wonder if she kissed this whole bunch, too!

  THE HOUSE DICK

  The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.

  The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it—until the third and last day. Then things changed.

  I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager, hunting for me.

  “One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.

  We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.

  I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms—pitched out backward—and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.

  That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him—facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face—I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.

  And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.

  From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly—almost deliberately—in a ghastly game of ‘follow your leader.’

  Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.

  I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.

  “Get the woman out! Get doctors—police!”

  I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.

  A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room ex
cept what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.

  The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.

  The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.

  That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.

  Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.

  The doctor’s work was soon done.

  “This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one”—pointing to another—“was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours—since noon or a little after.”

  The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed—the first to fall out of the clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D.C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.

  The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.

  The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next door to Develyn’s office.

  Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money-belt around his waist we found $2,200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches-Develyn’s was a valuable one—in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham’s room key was in his pocket.

  Beyond this money—whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn’t been the motive behind the three killings—we found nothing on any of the persons to throw the slightest light on the crime. Nor did the most thorough examination of both Ingraham’s and Develyn’s rooms teach us anything.

  In Ingraham’s room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on race-horses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Crutcher Street in Dallas; as well as a list of names and addresses that we carried off to investigate later. But nothing in either room pointed, even indirectly, at murder.

  Phels, the Police Department Bertillon man, found a number of fingerprints in Devetyn’s room, but we couldn’t tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Develyn and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Phels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars.

  The maid who had discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Develyn’s room between ten and eleven that morning, but had not put fresh towels in the bathroom. It was for this purpose that she had gone to the room in the afternoon. She had gone there earlier—between 10:20 and 10:45—for that purpose, but Ingraham had not then left it.

  The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Develyn up from the lobby at a few minutes after twelve remembered that they had been laughingly discussing their golf scores of the previous day during the ride. No one had seen anything suspicious in the hotel around the time at which the doctor had placed the murders. But that was to be expected.

  The murderer could have left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked away secure in the knowledge that at noon a man in the corridors of the Montgomery would attract little attention. If he was staying at the hotel he would simply have gone to his room; if not, he would have either walked all the way down to the street, or down a floor or two and then caught an elevator.

  None of the hotel employees had ever seen Ingraham and Develyn together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingraham habitually stayed in his room until noon, and did not return to it until late at night. Nothing was known of his affairs.

  At the Miles Building we—that is, Marty O’Hara and George Dean of the Police Department Homicide Detail, and I—questioned Ansley’s partner and Develyn’s employees. Both Develyn and Ansley, it seemed, were ordinary men who led ordinary lives: lives that held neither dark spots nor queer kinks. Ansley was married and had two children; he lived on Lake Street. Both men had a sprinkling of relatives and friends scattered here and there through the country; and, so far as we could learn, their affairs were in perfect order.

  They had left their offices this day to go to luncheon together, intending to visit Develyn’s room first for a drink apiece from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled in to him.

  “Well,” O’Hara said, when we were on the street again, “this much is clear. If they went up to Develyn’s room for a drink, it’s a cinch that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whisky glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham.”

  “I’m wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress was just large enough for them to be packed in it—too small for them to slip down while the door was closed.

  “Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothespress. Ingraham, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn’t have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he’d have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward.

  “Now, why should he have been standing in such a position? Do you dope it out that he and another killed the two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off?”

  “Maybe,” Dean said.

  And that “maybe” was still as far as we had gone three days later.

  We had sent and received bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco—thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.

  Ingraham, we had learned, was a bookmaker and all around crooked gambler. His wife and he had separated, but were on good terms. Some fifteen years before, he had been convicted of “assault with intent to kill” in Newark, N.J., and had served two years in the state prison. But the man he had assaulted had died of pneumonia in Omaha in 1914.

  Ingraham had come to San Francisco for the purpose of opening a gambling club, and all our investigations had tended to show that his activities while in the city had been toward that end alone.

  The fingerprints Phels had secured had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing!

  So much for our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders.

  We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail-studying,
patience-taxing grind of picking up the murderer’s trail. From any crime to its author there is a trail. It may be—as in this case—obscure; but, since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is—there must be—a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do.

  In the case of a murder it is possible sometimes to take a short-cut to the end of the trail, by first finding the motive. A knowledge of the motive often reduces the field of possibilities; sometimes points directly to the guilty one.

  So far, all we knew about the motive in the particular case we were dealing with was that it hadn’t been robbery; unless something we didn’t know about had been stolen—something of sufficient value to make the murderer scorn the money in his victims’ pockets.

  We hadn’t altogether neglected the search for the murderer’s trail, of course, but—being human—we had devoted most of our attention to trying to find a short-cut. Now we set out to find our man, or men, regardless of what had urged him or them to commit the crimes.

  Of the people who had been registered at the hotel on the day of the killing there were nine men of whose innocence we hadn’t found a reasonable amount of proof. Four of these were still at the hotel, and only one of that four interested us very strongly. That one—a big raw-boned man of forty-five or fifty, who had registered as J. J. Cooper of Anaconda, Montana—wasn’t, we had definitely established, really a mining man, as he pretended to be. And our telegraphic communications with Anaconda failed to show that he was known there. Therefore we were having him shadowed—with few results.

  Five men of the nine had departed since the murders; three of them leaving forwarding addresses with the mail clerk. Gilbert Jacquemart had occupied room 946 and had ordered his mail forwarded to him at a Los Angeles hotel. W. F. Salway, who had occupied room 1022, had given instructions that his mail be readdressed to a number on Clark Street in Chicago. Ross Orrett, room 609, had asked to have his mail sent to him care of General Delivery at the local post office.