by Q. Patrick
He watched Cordelia Ash. No, she was too cool, too goddesslike. Not really the type he admired.
“Imitating your dead aunt’s voice, cheating insurance companies, framing a man for murder! Nice if you can get away with it, Miss Ash, but—” He leaned toward her and gently removed the cigarette from her lips—”I’m afraid you’re the classic example of the girl who smokes too much.”
Death Before Breakfast
Lieutenant Timothy Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau followed the sedate waddle of Minnie, his sister’s dachshund, through the midwinter bleakness of Central Park. It was 7:30 on a Sunday morning, an unhallowed hour. But Minnie, who was temporarily boarding with Trant, believed in Rising and Shining.
As an Arctic wind slashed around Trant, Minnie paused imperturbably to inspect a sheet of newspaper which had floated to rest at their side. She put her front paws on it and examined an advertisement for the Ice Follies at the Center Theater. Hopefully, Trant kept the leash slack. Minnie, however, merely sniffed at the Obituaries and padded ahead.
The park was almost deserted, but, coming up the path toward them, Trant noticed the now-familiar figure of the blind man with the Seeing-Eye dog. Every morning since Minnie had inflicted these sadistic pre-breakfast hikes on him, he had met this pathetic pair. Minnie had on previous mornings carried on a hopeless flirtation with the German Shepherd. However, between Trant’s firm grip on her leash and the Seeing-Eye dog’s apparent indifference, Minnie’s progress had been halted.
Sometimes the blind man and his dog were accompanied by a pretty Gallic-looking girl and sometimes they were alone. Today they were alone, and as the dog steered his master between a bench and a large clumsily boarded excavation in the path, Trant glanced sympathetically at the blind man. His youngish face with its dark glasses looked harsh and hostile. But suddenly he bent to pat his dog’s head and his tenderness touched Trant’s heart.
“I wonder,” he reflected dubiously, “ whether I could ever get that fond of Minnie.”
It seemed unlikely, unless Minnie made a drastic change in her pattern of life. She dawdled to peer down into the perilous depths of the excavation hole; she inspected a bench nearby and yawned. Then, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, she tugged Trant into a skittish gallop.
When Minnie’s business was finally completed more people were about and, as Trant hurried homeward toward the life-preserving prospect of hot coffee, he noticed that an excited group was gathering around the excavation hole.
Congenitally curious, he picked up Minnie and walked to the brink of the excavation. In the bottom of the deep pit, sprawled across pipes and jagged fragments of rock, lay the body of the blind man, and the Seeing-Eye dog, moaning despairingly, crouched at his side.
One of the onlookers, a blond young Army sergeant, was trying to lower himself into the pit, but each time he tried the dog leaped upward, snarling with bared fangs.
Trant called: “I’ll go down, Sergeant.”
The sergeant, jostled toward him, his open overcoat revealing an Eisenhower jacket impressively hung with foreign and domestic decorations. ‘’Are you a policeman? Listen, I saw it all. I was coming up the path. This guy was sitting on that seat.” He pointed to the bench. Minnie had inspected earlier. “’The dog was off having its run. The guy got up to call his dog. I saw him headed for the pit. I yelled and ran toward him but he didn’t hear and went over the edge. The dog rushed up, snarled at me, and jumped down.”
“Get a cop,” cut in Trant.
As the sergeant hurried off, Trant squatted at the edge of the pit with Minnie in his arms. It was improbable that the German Shepherd would cooperate with Minnie but the improbable happened. Lowering demure lashes, she gazed down at the police dog and yelped coyly. The police dog cocked its head attentively. Trant called to it and it did not growl. With Minnie under one arm, he swung recklessly down into the pit. The police dog did growl then, but Minnie pranced toward it with great coquetry. While she charmed it, Trant examined the blind man. He was dead. The skull was crushed and a jagged lump of rock near by was thickly spattered with blood.
Feeling a kind of cosmic sadness, Trant slipped the wallet from the dead man’s pocket and examined its contents—$12 in cash, two ticket stubs for the Center Theater, an identification card giving the name of Andrew Stiles, and a battered photo. Trant peered at the photo. It showed Stiles in sergeant’s uniform with the same pretty girl whom Trant had noticed in the park. They were standing in front of an ancient broken bridge, with a little chapel at its center. Suddenly, as Trant fingered these objects, he experienced a thrill of astonished excitement. The idea was fantastic and proof was at the moment practically non-existent, but instinct screamed that he was right. If he could bluff it out …
* * *
Above, two policemen and the blond sergeant were standing at the pit’s edge, lowering ropes. Trant supervised the lifting of the corpse. He coaxed the police dog into letting itself be pulled up, too. Finally, with a smug Minnie under one arm and the blood-stained rock under the other, he was hauled up himself. A policeman, recognizing Trant, hovered respectfully. “Okay, Lieutenant, we take over now. Guess there’s nothing special you want us to do?”
“I’m afraid there is.” Trant turned to the Army sergeant, intimidated by his own daring. “Arrest this man for murder.”
The sergeant sagged.
“Murder!” gasped a policeman. “But he saw the blind guy fall …”
“He didn’t.” Inexorably committing himself, Trant held up the rock and indicated the evergreen bushes behind the bench. “He was hiding behind those bushes. He waited until the dog was off on its run, sprang out, hit Andrew Stiles on the head with this rock, and dumped the body and the rock into the excavation.”
The sergeant’s face was grayish green. “Lieutenant, you’re crazy.”
“That’s what all murderers tell me. But we’ll dig up your motive.” He pointed to one of the sergeant’s decorations. “That’s the Croix de Guerre, isn’t it? So you fought in France. Stiles did too.”
In spite of the cold, beads of sweat were forming on the sergeant’s forehead. Trant produced the photograph from the dead man’s wallet. “Look at this snapshot. There’s only one broken bridge like that with a chapel in the middle. That’s at Avignon. The Pont d’Avignon. And the girl—she’s a cute mademoiselle, isn’t she? I’ve seen her right here in this park with Stiles. He stole her from you, didn’t he? The two of you never got on overseas. Then, on top of it all, he snatched your girl and married her. Was that the way it happened?”
The sergeant stood as though stunned. Then, with a look of sheer panic, he spun around and started to run like a madman. As the policeman dashed after him, Trant’s exultation welled up. He’s cracked, he thought. I’ve done it.
In a few moments the policemen had dragged the sergeant back. Trant surveyed the young man’s guilt-scarred face. “Yes, I can see the whole picture. One of these mornings here in the park, quite by chance, you ran into Stiles and his wife and the Seeing-Eye dog. Suddenly, there he was—the guy you’d sworn to get, the guy who’d stolen your girl. And he was blind. What a temptation! All you had to do was to wait in ambush some morning when he came along with the dog. With the excavation hole, it was a cinch. Blind man, left a few minutes without Seeing-Eye dog, stumbles into pit. A cut-and-dried accident case. And, in due course, what was to stop you showing up out of the blue and courting his widow?”
He shook his head. “Fine, but you shouldn’t have stuck around. I see the advantage, of course. With you as a phony eye-witness, there’d be no embarrassing investigations. But, unfortunately, you overlooked one rather important point. Blind men trip and fall into excavations in broad daylight—yes. But only blind men. Not men who can see.” He paused. “And Andrew Stiles could see. Oh, he’d been blind.
Probably one of those shock blindnesses. But he’d regained his sight. We can easily check with his doctors and his wife. But there’s no real need. We’ve got proof enough.”
From the wallet Trant produced the theater stubs. “Two tickets to the Center Theater, Radio City. Thanks to my dog’s interest in reading the newspapers, I happen to know that the Center’s current show is an Ice Follies. A man who can’t see might go to the movies, to a concert, to a theater. But never in a million years would a blind man, however much he loved his wife, take her to the Ice Follies. It isn’t worth anything to someone who can’t see it. “
The sergeant, completely broken, gasped: “But the dog …!”
“Oh, the dog.” Trant shrugged. “Stiles undoubtedly thought that Seeing-Eye dogs pine away when they feel they’re no longer useful to their masters. Stiles loved his dog. For the dog’s sake, it wasn’t much of a hardship, when he took it walking, to pretend for a while at least that he was still blind.”
Minnie was gazing at the Seeing-Eye dog now with entranced adoration.
Her tail was thumping while she squeaked her delight. Slowly the German Shepherd lowered its head and made a dab at her nose with its tongue.
Trant patted his head. “Okay, boy,” he said resignedly, “if Mrs. Stiles doesn’t want you now, I guess Minnie and I have house room for another boarder.”
Death at the Fair
Lieutenant Trant of the New York Homicide Bureau sighed and glanced through the country fair crowds the man at whom his small nephew was pointing.
The man was obviously very drunk indeed. He was leaning against the paddock rail behind which the horses were parading toward the start of the afternoon’s second race. His pork-pie hat, with a racing ticket stuck in its band, was at a rakish tilt; his unbuttoned check top-coat flapped in the gusty wind. He was beaming foolishly up at a yellow pig-shaped balloon which bobbed from his wrist.
“See, Uncle? Why can’t I have a balloon like that, Uncle? Is he drunk, Uncle?”
“Your balloon’s exactly the same as his, Colvin.”
“Isn’t. Mine’s red. His is yellow. Why can’t I have a yellow pig?”
The melancholy little balloon vendor was standing nearby struggling to control his tossing cluster of inflated balloons.
Trant had five dollars on the Daily Double, and one of his selections, the long-shot Arquebus, had already won the first race. No nephew on earth was keeping him from watching the second.
As he yanked the protesting Colvin toward the finishing line, the drunk lurched against a fat man in blue jeans with a face as red and bulbous as Colvin’s balloon. Both men laughed uproariously. The drunk made a playful tap at the fat man’s arm with his racing card, missed and toppled grotesquely sideways.
“Uncle, he’s a lovely man. Why can’t we—?”
“He eats little boys,” growled Trant. “And unless you’re very careful, you’ll be next on his menu.”
Trant watched his horse run an ignominious sixth. “First—Blue Boy,” blared the public address system.
Another long shot at 10-1! Why hadn’t he picked Blue Boy, wondered Trant gloomily. Whoever won the Daily Double was really going to hit the jackpot.
He destroyed his blue Daily Double ticket and let himself and Colvin be carried away by the crowds surging down from the grandstands.
Suddenly Colvin cried. “There he is again, Uncle. The lovely man who eats little boys.”
In front of them, the drunk with the balloon was swaying aimlessly through the entrance to a canvas marquee which housed the Poultry Exhibit.
“Why can’t we see the chickens, too, Uncle?”
Once more an obedient slave, Trant let Colvin conduct him into the marquee’s large, almost empty interior, which smelt of barnyards and rang to the squawks of indignant prize roosters. The drunk had almost reached the rear exit, but Colvin, suddenly developing a passion for a plump white rabbit in a cage, deflected the pursuit for a couple of minutes.
When finally they stepped out of the rear exit into the deserted meadow beyond, a familiar yellow pig-balloon floated past them and soared upward over the fair.
“The lovely man’s balloon’s escaped. Oh, catch it, Uncle!” But Trant was no longer looking at the balloon. Some yards to their right, slumped on the muddy turf against the flapping side of the canvas marquee, lay the man “who ate little boys.” The pork-pie hat and racing card were scattered at his side. Blood was streaming from the man’s smashed right temple and, close by, Trant saw one of the sharp iron tent pins which supported the guy-ropes of the marquee. It was stained with blood.
The man was dead.
Trant discovered a second marked contusion on the back of the man’s head. There was only one explanation for that. The drunk couldn’t have tripped accidentally. Someone must have hit him on the head from behind and knocked him down. Although it had been contact with the ten-pin which had actually killed him, this was clearly a case of assault followed by death.
To all intents and purposes, it was murder.
Expertly Trant searched the body. There was a gold ring on the pudgy finger. The wallet contained twelve dollars. That precluded petty theft. Then … Trant picked up the dead man’s racing card. A shaky cross had been pencilled against both Arquebus in the first and Blue Boy in the second.
Trant’s vague suspicions suddenly solidified into a pattern. The drunk had picked the two winners of the Daily Double. He had obviously been on a talking jag. What if he had babbled about his selections to someone who had trailed him to this lonely spot and slugged him in order to steal his Pari-mutuel ticket and cash it in quickly for its quite considerable value while his victim was still unconscious?
Two women came out of the Poultry Exhibit. Trant shouted to them to bring a policeman. As they hurried away he grabbed up the pork-pie hat. The ticket was no longer sticking out of the band.
He felt around inside the band and brought out a small triangular scrap of blue paper on which was printed the lower half of the numeral 2. Unmistakably it was the bottom left-hand corner of a five-dollar Daily Double ticket, which must have been ripped off when the thief-murderer tugged the ticket out of the band.
Trant’s guess had been right.
Two State troopers ran up, followed by a crowd of curiosity-seekers. This, thought Trant rather disappointedly, should prove the simplest case of his career. If the thief did not realise that his victim was dead, he would certainly try to cash in the ticket. All that had to be done was to watch for a ticket with a missing left-hand corner.
A quick interrogation of the five-dollar Daily Double cashier told Trant that as yet no claimants had appeared. Concealing the trooper behind the window with the cashier, he lit a cigarette and stood on the outside, the scrap of ticket in his hand.
Soon several people arrived and presented tickets which Trant saw were intact. After they had been paid off, another winner appeared. Trant recognised him immediately as the fat man with the red balloon face who had been talking with the drunk. He waddled cheerfully to the cashier’s window. “What d’you know? Twenty years I’ve been after that Daily Double. And now, at last—just because some crazy
character loaded to the gills gives me a tip.”
“Let’s see your ticket,” demanded Trant.
The fat man swung around. Quailing before Trant’s steady gaze, he felt in one pocket and then another with growing uneasiness. “Gosh, where’d I put it now? A hell of a note if I lost it …”
Trant called the trooper from behind the window. “Help him.”
As the trooper moved toward the flustered fat man, Trant felt a tug at his sleeve. Colvin was there. His small finger pointed stubbornly at the balloon vendor who was hovering just outside the shed, struggling to control his wind-battered balloons with one hand while he blew up a new blue pig to add to the cluster.
“Uncle, I wanna yellow pig. Why can’t I …?”
“We’ve found the ticket, sir,” called the trooper. “He’s okay. The ticket’s okay.”
Trant glanced at the now indignant fat man who was being paid at the window, and the solution came to him in a sudden revelation. Of course! This wasn’t such a dull c
ase, after all. He turned sharply back to Colvin. As he did so, the end of his cigarette brushed against the child’s red balloon which exploded with a frivolous pop.
Colvin gave an anguished yell. “Uncle, you’ve busted …”
“Never mind. I’ll buy you another one,” Trant dragged his wailing nephew toward the vendor who had just added the freshly inflated blue balloon to the bobbing throng.
“Give me that blue one.”
He made a sudden grab at the blue balloon’s string. As he did so, the vendor seemed to stumble. There was a scuffle and then the whole great cluster of balloons escaped from the vendor’s grasp and swirled upward into the sky. But Trant still held the blue balloon safely by its string.
“Here, Colvin.”
“Don’t wannit. Wanna yellow …”
“Then bust it, Colvin.”
Ferociously the little boy slammed the balloon between his hands. As the inflated rubber collapsed, a small piece of blue paper fluttered from it to the ground. In a flash, the vendor was dashing away into the crowd.
“Get him,” called Trant to the trooper who ran in pursuit.
Contentedly Trant picked up from the foot-scuffed turf a blue Daily Double ticket with its lower left-hand corner missing. He smiled almost with affection at his nephew.
“Of course, Colvin. Your drunken friend told the balloon man what horses he’d picked when he bought his balloon. At a fair a balloon man’s as inconspicuous a part of the landscape as a hotdog stand. It was a cinch for him to sneak around the back of the Poultry Exhibit, slug him and grab the ticket. It would have meant a small fortune to him.”
Colvin was still squalling and purple with fury.
“Yes,” continued Trant serenely. “When you so cleverly pointed to him just now I should have wondered why he was hanging around the Pari-mutuel instead of selling his balloons. But I didn’t jump to it until I saw him blowing up the blue balloon. I wondered in my slow avuncular way, should he be blowing up another balloon when he had more than enough already to handle in that high wind? Then when I realised the balloon was blue—the colour of the ticket …”
