Nightmare Town Page 33

  There was plenty of illumination, he said, and he could see both fire escapes all the way to the roof, and he had seen nobody on them.

  Martinez had given the police a rap on the phone and had then watched the front door and the foot of the front stairs. He had seen nothing.

  I had just finished questioning the Filipinos when the street door opened and two men came in. I knew one of them: Bill Garren, a police detective on the Pawnshop Detail. The other was a small blond youth all flossy in pleated pants, short, square-shouldered coat, and patent-leather shoes with fawn spats to match his hat and gloves. His face wore a sullen pout. He didn’t seem to like being with Garren.

  “What are you up to around here?” the detective hailed me.

  “The Toplin doings for the insurance company,” I explained.

  “Getting anywhere?” he wanted to know.

  “About ready to make a pinch,” I said, not altogether in earnest and not altogether joking.

  “The more the merrier,” he grinned. “I’ve already made mine,” nodding at the dressy youth. “Come on upstairs with us.”

  The three of us got into the elevator and Ambrose carried us to the fifth floor. Before pressing the Toplin bell, Garren gave me what he had.

  “This lad tried to soak a ring in a Third Street shop a little while ago—an emerald and diamond ring that looks like one of the Toplin lot. He’s doing the clam now; he hasn’t said a word—yet. I’m going to show him to these people; then I’m going to take him down to the Hall of Justice and get words out of him—words that fit together in nice sentences and everything!”

  The prisoner looked sullenly at the floor and paid no attention to this threat. Garren rang the bell and the maid Hilda opened the door. Her eyes widened when she saw the dressy boy, but she didn’t say anything as she led us into the sitting-room, where Mrs. Toplin and her daughter were. They looked up at us.

  “Hello, Jack!” Phyllis greeted the prisoner.

  “ ’Lo, Phyl,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

  “Among friends, huh? Well, what’s the answer?” Garren demanded of the girl.

  She put her chin in the air and although her face turned red, she looked haughtily at the police detective.

  “Would you mind removing your hat?” she asked.

  Bill isn’t a bad bimbo, but he hasn’t any meekness. He answered her by tilting his hat over one eye and turning to her mother.

  “Ever see this lad before?”

  “Why, certainly!” Mrs. Toplin exclaimed. “That’s Mr. Wagener who lives upstairs.”

  “Well,” said Bill, “Mr. Wagener was picked up in a hock shop trying to get rid of this ring.” He fished a gaudy green and white ring from his pocket. “Know it?”

  “Certainly!” Mrs. Toplin said, looking at the ring. “It belongs to Phyllis, and the robber—” Her mouth dropped open as she began to understand. “How could Mr. Wagener—?”

  “Yes, how?” Bill repeated.

  The girl stepped between Garren and me, turning her back on him to face me. “I can explain everything,” she announced.

  That sounded too much like a movie subtitle to be very promising, but—

  “Go ahead,” I encouraged her.

  “I found that ring in the passageway near the front door after the excitement was over. The robber must have dropped it. I didn’t say anything to Papa and Mamma about it, because I thought nobody would ever know the difference, and it was insured, so I thought I might as well sell it and be in that much money. I asked Jack last night if he could sell it for me and he said he knew just how to go about it. He didn’t have anything to do with it outside of that, but I did think he’d have sense enough not to try to pawn it right away!”

  She looked scornfully at her accomplice.

  “See what you’ve done!” she accused him.

  He fidgeted and pouted at his feet.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bill Garren said sourly. “That’s a nifty! Did you ever hear the one about the two Irishmen that got in the Y.W.C.A. by mistake?”

  She didn’t say whether she had heard it or not.

  “Mrs. Toplin,” I asked, “making allowances for the different clothes and the unshaven face, could this lad have been the robber?”

  She shook her head with emphasis. “No! He could not!”

  “Set your prize down, Bill,” I suggested, “and let’s go over in a corner and whisper things at each other.”

  “Right.”

  He dragged a heavy chair to the center of the floor, sat Wagener on it, anchored him there with handcuffs—not exactly necessary, but Bill was grouchy at not getting his prisoner identified as the robber—and then he and I stepped out into the passageway. We could keep an eye on the sitting-room from there without having our low-voiced conversation overheard.

  “This is simple,” I whispered into his big red ear. “There are only five ways to figure the lay. First: Wagener stole the stuff for the Toplins. Second: the Toplins framed the robbery themselves and got Wagener to peddle it. Third: Wagener and the girl engineered the deal without the old folks being in on it. Fourth: Wagener pulled it on his own hook and the girl is covering him up. Fifth: she told us the truth. None of them explains why your little playmate should have been dumb enough to flash the ring downtown this morning, but that can’t be explained by any system. Which of the five do you favor?”

  “I like ’em all,” he grumbled. “But what I like most is that I’ve got this baby right—got him trying to pass a hot ring. That suits me fine. You do the guessing. I don’t ask for any more than I’ve got.”

  “It doesn’t irritate me any either,” I agreed. “The way it stands the insurance company can welsh on the policies—but I’d like to smoke it out a little further, far enough to put away anybody who has been trying to run a hooligan on the North American. We’ll clean up all we can on this kid, stow him in the can, and then see what further damage we can do.”

  “All right,” Garren said. “Suppose you get hold of the janitor and that Eveleth woman while I’m showing the boy to old man Toplin and getting the maid’s opinion.”

  I nodded and went out into the corridor, leaving the door unlocked behind me. I took the elevator to the seventh floor and told Ambrose to get hold of McBirney and send him to the Toplins’ apartment. Then I rang Blanche Eveleth’s bell.

  “Can you come downstairs for a minute or two?” I asked her. “We’ve a prize who might be your friend of last night.”

  “Will I?” She started toward the stairs with me. “And if he’s the right one, can I pay him back for my battered beauty?”

  “You can,” I promised. “Go as far as you like, so you don’t maul him too badly to stand trial.”

  I took her into the Toplins’ apartment without ringing the bell, and found everybody in Frank Toplin’s bedroom. A look at Garren’s glum face told me that neither the old man nor the maid had given him a nod on the prisoner.

  I put the finger on Jack Wagener. Disappointment came into Blanche Eveleth’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said. “That’s not he.”

  Garren scowled at her. It was a pipe that if the Toplins were tied up with young Wagener, they wouldn’t identify him as the robber. Bill had been counting on that identification coming from the two outsiders—Blanche Eveleth and the janitor—and now one of them had flopped.

  The other one rang the bell just then and the maid brought him in.

  I pointed at Jack Wagener, who stood beside Garren staring sullenly at the floor.

  “Know him, McBirney?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Wagener’s son, Jack.”

  “Is he the man who shooed you away with a gun last night?”

  McBirney’s watery eyes popped in surprise.

  “No,” he said with decision, and began to look doubtful.

  “In an old suit, cap pulled down, needing a shave—could it have been him?”

  “No-o-o-o,” the janitor drawled, “I don’t think so, though it—You know, now that I come to think about it, ther
e was something familiar about that fella, an’ maybe—By cracky, I think maybe you’re right—though I couldn’t exactly say for sure.”

  “That’ll do!” Garren grunted in disgust.

  An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods. A lot of people who don’t know any better—and some who do, or should—have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony. Take any man you like—unless he is the one in a hundred thousand with a mind trained to keep things straight, and not always even then—get him excited, show him something, give him a few hours to think it over and talk it over, and then ask him about it. It’s dollars to doughnuts that you’ll have a hard time finding any connection between what he saw and what he says he saw. Like this McBirney—another hour and he’d be ready to gamble his life on Jack Wagener’s being the robber.

  Garren wrapped his fingers around the boy’s arm and started for the door.

  “Where to, Bill?” I asked.

  “Up to talk to his people. Coming along?”

  “Stick around a while,” I invited. “I’m going to put on a party. But first, tell me, did the coppers who came here when the alarm was turned in do a good job?”

  “I didn’t see it,” the police detective said. “I didn’t get here until the fireworks were pretty well over, but I understand the boys did all that could be expected of them.”

  I turned to Frank Toplin. I did my talking to him chiefly because we—his wife and daughter, the maid, the janitor, Blanche Eveleth, Garren and his prisoner, and I—were grouped around the old man’s bed and by looking at him I could get a one-eyed view of everybody else.

  “Somebody has been kidding me somewhere,” I began my speech. “If all the things I’ve been told about this job are right, then so is Prohibition. Your stories don’t fit together, not even almost. Take the bird who stuck you up. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with your affairs. It might be luck that he hit your apartment at a time when all of your jewelry was on hand, instead of another apartment, or your apartment at another time. But I don’t like luck. I’d rather figure that he knew what he was doing. He nicked you for your pretties, and then he galloped up to Miss Eveleth’s apartment. He may have been about to go downstairs when he ran into McBirney, or he may not. Anyway, he went upstairs, into Miss Eveleth’s apartment, looking for a fire escape. Funny, huh? He knew enough about the place to make a push-over out of the stick-up, but he didn’t know there were no fire escapes on Miss Eveleth’s side of the building.

  “He didn’t speak to you or to McBirney, but he talked to Miss Eveleth, in a bass voice. A very, very deep voice. Funny, huh? From Miss Eveleth’s apartment he vanished with every exit watched. The police must have been here before he left her apartment and they would have blocked the outlets first thing, whether McBirney and Ambrose had already done that or not. But he got away. Funny, huh? He wore a wrinkled suit, which might have been taken from a bundle just before he went to work, and he was a small man. Miss Eveleth isn’t a small woman, but she would be a small man. A guy with a suspicious disposition would almost think Blanche Eveleth was the robber.”

  Frank Toplin, his wife, young Wagener, the janitor, and the maid were gaping at me. Garren was sizing up the Eveleth girl with narrowed eyes, while she glared white-hot at me. Phyllis Toplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeble-mindedness.

  Bill Garren finished his inspection of the girl and nodded slowly.

  “She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion, “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Exactly, my eye!” Phyllis Toplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence-school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face—real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know, it’s not in a play!”

  The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.

  “Phyllis is right.” Frank Toplin backed up his offspring. “He was a man—no woman dressed like one.”

  His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.

  But I’m a bull-headed sort of bird when it comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.

  “Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.

  She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.

  “All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”

  Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.

  Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.

  “Here! Here!” Bill Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.

  “Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Tom, Dick, or Harry.”

  I hauled her (or him, whichever you like) to his or her feet and asked it: “Feel like telling us about it?”

  For answer I got a snarl.

  “All right,” I said to the others, “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for a man, why couldn’t the robber have been Blanche Eveleth before and after the robbery by using a—what do you call it?—strong depilatory on his face, and a wig? It’s hard for a woman to masquerade as a man, but there are lots of men who can get away with the feminine role. Couldn’t this bird, after renting his apartment as Blanche Eveleth and getting everything lined up, have stayed in his apartment for a couple of days letting his beard grow? Come down and knock the job over? Beat it upstairs, get the hair off his face, and get into his female rig in, say, fifteen minutes? My guess is that he could. And he had fifteen minutes. I don’t know about the smashed nose. Maybe he stumbled going up the stairs and had to twist his plans to account for it—or maybe he smacked himself intentionally.”

  My guesses weren’t far off, though his name was Fred—Frederick Agnew Rudd. He was known in Toronto, having done a stretch in the Ontario Reformatory as a boy of nineteen, caught shoplifting in his she-make-up. He wouldn’t come through, and we never turned up his gun or the blue suit, cap, and black gloves, although we found a cavity in his mattress where he had stuffed them out of the police’s sight until later that night, when he could get rid of them. But the Toplin sparklers came to light piece by piece when we had plumbers take apart the drains and radiators in apartment 702.

  ONE HOUR

  I

  This is Mr. Chrostwaite,” Vance Richmond said.

  Chrostwaite, wedged between the arms of one of the attorney’s large chairs, grunted what was perhaps meant for an acknowledgment of the introduction. I grunted back at him, and found myself a chair.

  He was a big balloon of a man—this Chrostwaite—in a green plaid suit that didn’t make him look any smaller than he was. His tie was a gaudy thing, mostly of yellow, with a big diamond set in the center of it, and there were more stones on his pudgy hands. Spongy fat blurred his features, making it impossible for his round purplish face to even hold any
other expression than the discontented hoggishness that was habitual to it. He reeked of gin.

  “Mr. Chrostwaite is the Pacific Coast agent for the Mutual Fire Extinguisher Manufacturing Company,” Vance Richmond began, as soon as I had got myself seated. “His office is on Kearny Street, near California. Yesterday, at about two forty-five in the afternoon, he went to his office, leaving his machine—a Hudson touring car—standing in front, with the engine running. Then minutes later, he came out. The car was gone.”

  I looked at Chrostwaite. He was looking at his fat knees, showing not the least interest in what his attorney was saying. I looked quickly back at Vance Richmond; his clean gray face and lean figure were downright beautiful beside his bloated client.

  “A man named Newhouse,” the lawyer was saying, “who was the proprietor of a printing establishment on California Street, just around the corner from Mr. Chrostwaite’s office, was run down and killed by Mr. Chrostwaite’s car at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets, five minutes after Mr. Chrostwaite had left the car to go into his office. The police found the car shortly afterward, only a block away from the scene of the accident—on Montgomery near Clay.

  “The thing is fairly obvious. Someone stole the car immediately after Mr. Chrostwaite left it; and in driving rapidly away, ran down Newhouse; and then, in fright, abandoned the car. But here is Mr. Chrostwaite’s position; three nights ago, while driving perhaps a little recklessly out—”

  “Drunk,” Chrostwaite said, not looking up from his plaid knees; and though his voice was hoarse, husky—it was the hoarseness of a whisky-burned throat—there was no emotion in his voice.

  “While driving perhaps a little recklessly out Van Ness Avenue,” Vance Richmond went on, ignoring the interruption, “Mr. Chrostwaite knocked a pedestrian down. The man wasn’t badly hurt, and he is being compensated very generously for his injuries. But we are to appear in court next Monday to face a charge of reckless driving, and I am afraid that this accident of yesterday, in which the printer was killed, may hurt us.