by Hank Janson
My mouth was dry. I licked my lips and moved over to him cautiously.
I found I was tiptoeing. I bent over carefully and touched him. There was a kinda unpleasant coldness about him. I knew right away he was dead.
I turned around, went back into the lobby. Stella was waiting there, plucking nervously at her frilly underclothing and looking at me like she thought I was gonna solve all the troubles in the world after a few moments’ weighty consideration.
‘Did you phone the cops?’
She shook her head. ‘I wanted to see you first.’
‘Why?’ I asked bluntly
She put her hand to her mouth like she was on the point of crying.
‘Dane,’ she said. ‘I thought …’
I knew what she thought. That thought was stirring around at the back of my mind, too. Except that Dane had been talking about a gun. I said tersely: ‘What happened?’
Her lower lip was trembling. ‘You’ve seen what happened.’
‘What d’ya know about it?’ I asked wearily. ‘How much of this did you see? When did it happen?’
‘I don’t know when it happened. I found him like it. I telephoned you immediately.’
‘What were you doing before that?’
She shook her head, bit back a sob. Then she looked at me, trying to keep her lips from quivering. ‘I don’t know.’
She was upset, all ragged nerves. I steered her along gently. ‘What time did Hugh Burden come up to bed last night?’
‘Just after you left. But he went out again.’
‘How long afterwards?’
‘Almost at once.’
‘D’you know what he went out for?’
She nodded. ‘He said he was going to clear everybody off the premises. There were one or two drunks lying around. He said he’d leave them in the courtyard to cool off.’
‘And then he came back?’
She shook her head tearfully. ‘He didn’t come back,’ she sobbed.
I took her by the arm, guided her firmly into the next room and sat her down. I took her hands, looked into her eyes and said sternly: ‘You’ve got to tell me what happened, Stella. I can’t help unless I know what happened.’
I dragged it out of her bit by bit. She’d had a bad night, she’d had a bad shock and she was scared and badly hurt inside.
Burden had come up to the bedroom, made a coupla passes and then left her so he could clear out the one or two drunks that were still in the house.
She waited for him. I guess she’d been steamed up all evening and probably he seemed gone longer than he actually was. She decided to go look for him.
She found him. She found him in the little room next to the kitchen. Hugh Burden had done what he had set about doing. He’d cleared everybody right out. Everybody, that is, with the exception of the coloured maid. She was in the little room with Burden. What they were doing I didn’t need to ask. At that point in her story, Stella sobbed on my shoulder uncontrollably.
Shocked, hurt and humiliated, she had run back to her room – or, rather, his room – locked the door and thrown herself on the bed. At some time later, Hugh Burden had come up, demanded to be let in the room, and threatened to break down the door. But she’d just lain there, crying loud enough for him to hear, and finally he’d gone away.
She’d lain there all night, sobbing bitterly, drinking down the bitter dregs of humiliation. And then she’d decided to get away from there as quickly as she could. It was early, but there would be taxis running. Her dress was in ribbons and unwearable. She’d crept down to the living-room to see if there was something she could wear lying around, perhaps even the coloured girl’s dress. Instead, she found Burden.
‘Is nobody else in the house now?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘If there had been, I guess they would have heard me when I first found Burden. I looked in all the rooms while I was waiting for you. It scared me. I was the only one in the house.’
‘And you’re worried about Dane?’
She looked at me with serious, thoughtful eyes. ‘I was such a fool,’ she said. ‘How could I ever –’
‘Write to Aunt Jane,’ I interrupted rudely. ‘She’ll solve all your heart problems. Why did you telephone me? Why didn’t you get smart and run out?’
‘Don’t you think I would?’ she asked. She looked down at herself. ‘How far d’you think I’d have got dressed this way without attracting attention?’
‘Yeah,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘That’s right.’ I got up.
‘What are you going to do, Hank?’
‘There’s only one thing to do, Stella. You can’t play games with a thing like this. It’s serious. It’s murder.’
‘Murder!’ She echoed the word, and her mouth was a wide ‘O’.
‘I’m gonna call the cops,’ I said ‘But don’t worry. You’ll be all right. Dane will be all right.’
I went through to the living-room, skirted Hugh Burden’s body and dialled for the police. A quiet, efficient voice took down the name and the address. ‘We’ll be along in five minutes,’ he said.
I went back to Stella. ‘Remember this,’ I warned her. ‘You were scared when you found Burden. You didn’t know what to do. So you rang me at once to get my advice. Understand?’
She nodded.
‘A coupla other points,’ I said. ‘The last time you saw Burden was during the party last night. You were tired, you went up to his bedroom, locked the door and slept there. Sometime during the night you heard him trying to get in but you kept the door locked. Understand?’
She sat and looked at me with wide eyes. ‘Don’t I say anything about him being downstairs with the coloured maid?’
‘The last you saw of him,’ I repeated heavily, ‘was before you went upstairs and locked yourself in the bedroom. Understand?’
‘Anything you say, Hank,’ she said quietly.
‘Well, don’t forget,’ I growled.
After a few moments she said doubtfully: ‘Don’t you think I should tell the truth, Hank? You know what the police are like. They like to know everything.’
I took her by the shoulders, looked into her eyes and said: ‘Now listen to me carefully, Stella. You didn’t kill this guy, did you? I know it and you know it. You just couldn’t have done a thing like that, could you?’
She shook her head.
‘You don’t know what cops are like,’ I went on. ‘You tell them that tale about Burden and the coloured maid and they’ll get ideas.’
Her eyes widened slightly.
‘They’ll begin to figure that a knife is a dame’s weapon. They’ll begin to figure that you’re the only person in this house. They’ll even begin to figure that you could have sidled up beside him, pressed your fingers against his ribs and then eased the blade through your fingers between his ribs.
There was horror in her eyes. ‘They surely wouldn’t think that!’
‘When did you last see Hugh Burden?’ I asked her.
She swallowed. ‘Just before I went up to my bedroom,’ she said.
‘Stick to that, Stella,’ I said. ‘You didn’t see him again until you found him stretched out there in the living-room.’
‘I’ll do what you say, Hank,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ll just snoop around again while I’m waiting for the cops,’ I said. ‘You wait here.’
I went back into the living-room, walked in very carefully and looked around. If there had been any kind of a struggle between Burden and the person who had murdered him, you wouldn’t have been able to tell, because the room was a shambles anyway. I allowed my eyes to roam around the room, looking at everything and hoping that perhaps I might see some little thing that would give me some kinda clue.
In the far distance I heard the approach of wailing cop sirens. I hadn’t much time. I looked around again, very slowly, very carefully, scrutinising everything. It was all more or less just as I remembered seeing it last.
I looked around just once more. My eyes alighted for a third time on the mantelpiece, passed on and then swept back again. There was something about the mantelpiece that I had to remember. Something that was important.
The sirens wailed to a stop outside the house. I heard rough boots scraping the asphalt. Heavy fists pounded on the door and the door buzzer began to work overtime.
‘I’ll get it,’ I called to Stella, and went through into the lobby. I was opening the door when the realisation hit me. It slid right off the edge of my brain into my thoughts with such a bang that, as I opened the door to a uniformed cop who said loudly ‘What goes on?’; I replied automatically and excitedly, ‘Fountain pen!’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was just thinking,’ I said quickly. ‘Straight through there. Room on your left. It’s a clear case of murder.’
He flashed me a cunning glance, shouldered his way past and went into the living-room. Four other cops trampled through after him.
I went back to Stella. ‘There’ll just be a little questioning now,’ I said gently. ‘Then we’ll be able to get some breakfast and you can rest for a time.’
But I wasn’t reckoning on resting myself. I was remembering how Charles Skinner had gone home the previous night leaving his gold fountain pen on the mantelpiece. I was remembering how he’d said that if he had a gun he might kill Burden himself. I was remembering, too, all the reasons he had for killing Burden.
And what made everything click together into a nice, neat picture was the fact that although the fountain pen had been on the mantelpiece when Charles Skinner had left the night before, now there was no fountain pen there at all.
6
Detective-Inspector Sharp and his partner Conrad arrived a few minutes later.
I knew both of them and they knew me. They loved me like a millionaire loves an income-tax collector, and I trusted them as far as I could kick an elephant.
Sharp brought up dead when he saw me, and he seemed to probe me with his steely eyes as his face set hard.
‘So it’s you,’ he said grimly.
‘Yeah,’ I said apprehensively. ‘It’s me.’
Conrad put his hands in his pockets, stretched his long legs and gently rocked from his toes to his heels. He looked at me with the same kinda hard look.
It was just my bad luck that Sharp happened to be on this case. He was the one guy down at Police Headquarters I didn’t get along with. The last time I’d tangled with him, he’d tried to pin a murder rap on me.1
‘We’ll play it different this time,’ said Sharp. ‘A guy that gets himself mixed up in trouble the way you do deserves to be handled carefully.’
‘Listen, Sharp,’ I said grimly. ‘Lay off me, will ya? Don’t make me get tough.’
Stella was listening to all this, her eyes wide open with surprise. She just hadn’t had as much experience as me with cops.
‘Gets worried quick, don’t he?’ commented Conrad.
Sharp grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant grin. ‘We’ll talk later, Janson,’ he said. He said it like it was a threat. ‘Meanwhile, just keep out of the way.’
The fingerprint men came, the photographers and the doctor. I guess they went through the usual routine of checking up thoroughly, putting a chalk-line around the body and checking the cigar-butts in the ash-tray.
But I didn’t know anything about that. Me and Stella were pushed into the little room next to the kitchen, where we just sat looking at each other moodily. Stella was too scared to say anything and my head was aching intolerably. There was a uniformed cop just outside the door who grinned when I wanted to take a walk and chested me back into the room.
‘Sorry, fella,’ he said. ‘You’ve gotta stay put for questioning, even if you bust.’
It was more than an hour later when Sharp and Conrad came in. By that time Burden had been taken to the morgue and the cops had all the information they could get.
Conrad draped his lanky form along the mantelpiece. Sharp stood in the middle of the room slowly stripping the cellophane from a cigar. Neither of them said anything. But they both stared at Stella. I knew their tactics. They were getting her worried.
They succeeded, too. Stella looked from one to the other, moved uncomfortably, looked away guiltily and finally asked: ‘Do I start talking now?’
They still stared at her steadily. They didn’t answer. In about three minutes she was as jumpy as though she’d committed the murder herself.
‘Don’t keep staring at me like that!’ she yelled suddenly, a quarter of the way towards being hysterical.
‘Why didn’t you get dressed before we came?’ suddenly snapped Sharp. And his steely eyes were suddenly busy, probing into the secrets of her body, which were scantily concealed by her underclothing. Stella wasn’t a self-conscious dame. But the way those two stared at her steadily, stripping her with their eyes, got her worried. She crossed her legs, put her hands across her breasts. ‘My dress got torn,’ she faltered.
‘During the party, huh?’
She nodded. Her eyes flicked to me. I wouldn’t look at her. Sharp turned his steely gaze towards me. ‘That kinda party, huh?’
‘Burden’s kinda party,’ I replied.
‘Just the kinda party a swine like you would like,’ sneered Sharp. ‘Undressed women, dolled up, golden-haired boys with high-pitched voices. Just your line, Janson. Have you got any coke on you?’
He was deliberately trying to get under my skin and he very nearly succeeded. I got up slowly, ominously, my fists clenched at my sides.
Conrad said causally, just too casually: ‘Funny how some of these newspaper guys always wanna use their fists. A guy can go down to Sing Sing a long while for socking a cop.’
Sharp moved in close, his steely eyes glittering but mocking. ‘Take a poke, Janson,’ he said. ‘Try it out, fella. Take a poke.’
There were half a dozen cops trampling around that house. I’d get maybe just one good poke at Sharp. After that they’d half kill me. And on top of it I’d get a stretch in jail for assaulting the police.
I sat down, seething. But I kept my mouth shut and unclenched my hands.
‘You don’t provoke?’ said Conrad.
‘We’ll get around to him later,’ said Sharp. He turned back to Stella, probed her underclothing with his eyes and asked: ‘You found him dead?’
She nodded.
‘Why d’ya do it?’ he stabbed at her.
‘But I didn’t,’ she protested, suddenly scared. ‘I didn’t do it, I tell you. I was upstairs all the time.’
Sharp held up his hand, commanding her to silence. He nodded briefly to Conrad, who pulled out a notebook and pencil, and then said: ‘Tell it just the way it happened, lady. Use your own words. Exactly the way it happened.’
She wasn’t a good witness. She rambled all over the place. But with Sharp stabbing questions at her, keeping her to the point, she told the simple story just the way I wanted her to tell it.
‘It still isn’t very clear to me,’ said Sharp ominously, ‘why you telephoned this monkey before you phoned the police.’ He indicated me with a jerk of his thumb.
‘I was scared,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought of Hank. He knows about these kinda things. That’s why I telephoned him.’
‘And how did your dress get torn?’
I could see Dane being implicated. I said quickly, ‘You’ve got to tell him everything, Stella. Tell him the truth. Tell him I tore it.’
Sharp rounded on me quickly, furiously. ‘Keep your trap shut!’ he said.
But Stella was smart enough to follow up. She flushed, wouldn’t look at me. ‘Hank got a little tight last night,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘We had a bit of a struggle before I went upstairs. I guess that’s how my dress got torn.’
Conrad said: ‘D’ya want to charge him with assault, lady? Could get him five years for that.’
>
‘No, no,’ she said quickly. She turned to Conrad appealingly. ‘Please don’t do anything like that.’
‘You liked having your dress torn?’ Sharp stabbed at her.
She looked back at him, her hands fluttered nervously. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It was a nice dress.’
‘You didn’t like having the dress torn, because it was a nice dress, but you didn’t object to the act of it being torn off you?’
She looked at him, she looked at me, and then she looked at him again.
‘No,’ she said in a whisper. ‘It was nice. I was only pretending to get away.’
Sharp let a long breath hiss out through his teeth and I felt my belly sink as he turned his attention towards me.
‘Now!’ he said.
Conrad’s sharp eyes had detected something. He went down on his knees, fumbled beneath the settee and came up with something white. It was a triangular piece of cloth with tapes attached.
‘What the hell is this?’ asked Conrad, looking at it seriously.
Stella burst into tears when she saw it. The last time I’d seen it, the coloured maid had been wearing it around her loins.
‘It’s a G-string,’ snapped Sharp, sourly. Then his eyes switched to me. ‘This the only dame you tried to strip last night?’
I bit my lip, kept quiet.
He glided in quickly, smashed his knuckles against my lips. ‘Answer up, dope,’ he growled.
I looked at him venomously, wiped the back of my hand across my lips, and it came away smeared with blood.
‘Stella’s the only dame,’ I grunted.
‘Too bad,’ he drawled. ‘Too bad. But don’t worry, Janson. We’ll get something on you sometime. What do you know about this business?’
I told him simply that I had gone home from the party, Stella had awakened me and I’d come along straight away. As soon as I had seen what had happened, I telephoned the police.
‘You’d never seen Burden before last night?’
