by Jerry eBooks
“You won’t be going to work,” Reynolds said coldly. “If you want to come through now, save me a lot of time, just tell the truth. Maybe, it was done in hot blood. A fight, huh? O.K. If you killed him before you thought, if you didn’t mean it, you got a good chance. The judge won’t even throw the book at you. But if you want to be tough, Adams—well, you’ll be plenty tender for that electric skillet up the river. Where you claim you got that suit you’re wearing now?”
Amazement, incredulity, fear—all were now blending in the mild eyes of Adams.
“Why, I bought this suit last night. I’d been a little seedy-looking, I’m afraid; wanted to surprise the wife. Bought it at Old Sam’s, over on Seventh Avenue. It’s a . . . a secondhand suit,” Adams added, flushing slightly, and I paid eight dollars for it.”
Reynolds swung back to the Cuban and the man next to him. “And you fellows saw Valdez walking out of here in a suit just like this last night?”
They had,-they reassured the captain. They were not certain, about the time—it might have-been closer to ten o’clock—but they were absolutely sure about the suit.
“You have the landlady take you to Valdez’s room., Carroll,” Reynolds ordered. “See if he has a pencil-stripe blue suit there.” Carroll was guided to the ground-floor rear room, which Mrs. Handy unlocked for him. In a little clothes-press, Carroll saw a topcoat and an overcoat on a form; also a sweater and three suits, but none of the suits was anything like a pencil-stripe. He returned along the hallway, saw through the front door that the reporters and news photogs were arriving.
“No suit like a pencil-stripe, was there, Carroll?” Reynolds yelled.
Red shook his head. “No, captain. He was a hot dresser—had a loud overcoat and a topcoat, and three suits. But no pencil-stripe.”
Reynolds nodded affably. “O.K., I guess this tears it, Carroll.” He peered out through the window. “Here comes the fingerprint boys and the M.E. and those news hounds. You slip out while the slipping’s good. Roberts’ll take over here. Take this Adams over to Old Sam’s; Garrity’ll run you over in the car. Adams won’t be able to make his story stick. Then bring him in, and we’ll book him on a murder charge.”
Red Carroll wasn’t nearly so hopeful himself. But as soon as you hinted at an alibi for not breaking a case, or even let on that you thought a job was doubtful or tough, Reynolds tabbed you as a phony. Under Reynolds you just had to swallow disappointment, plug along, take every bad break, make no defense, no argument. Reynolds was hard, had come up the hard way, wanted cases cleared up at once; he was headed for a deputy inspectorship and didn’t intend to have any ragged record slow up the expected advancement.
“G.K., captain,” Red said.
Snappy suits—“as good as new”—were suspended outside of the open door of Old Sam’s, and there was an array of overcoats and topcoats in the rather dusty windows.
Carroll and Garrity, their prisoner between them, walked into the narrow shop. On either side were open cabinets in which suits of various sizes and patterns were suspended on hangers. A couple of long tables occupied the center of the room, and in the rear there was a curtained doorway.
Red Carroll noticed an atrocity of a suit on one of the hangers—a suit that was a warm terra-cotta tone broken up by small squares of faint yellow. “I’d like that one for off duty. A little conservative, though, eh, Dan?”
Garrity stared. “Consoyvative? That? Why, I’d say it was—”
“Skip it,” Red said. “Hi, Sam!”
There was no answer. Red was about to growl out another peremptory summons when he reached the back of the store, caught a profile glance at the cash register. The drawer was open—and completely empty!
Red’s eyes hardened. “Say, take a gander at that damper, will you? Not a penny, and—”
With his Police Positive in his right fist he plowed toward the curtained door at the rear and yanked the drapery aside—and froze on the threshold of the hidden room. He stood there, the muscles of his strong jaws tightening, his left fist clinched. Still warm—Slugged and stabbed—
Garrity and Adams, looking over Red’s shoulder, gasped. Adams went very pale.
“Good night!” Garrity said. “Another kill dumped right into our laps! The skipper’ll like this!”
“Yeah,” Red Carroll said. He picked up the phone, dialed headquarters, addressed Garrity over his shoulder. “Dan, take this Adams over to the precinct station and hold him till I get in touch.”
“What’ll I book him for?” Garrity wanted to know.
“Oh, piracy,” Red growled. “Or barratry, or the Cleveland torso murders, or—” He jiggled the hook furiously. “What the matter with this—”
“Book him on . . . what?” Garrity asked.
“Skip it, Dan. Make it anything. And tell the skipper, incidentally, that when I go back pounding a beat, I’d like to get on some nice goat range in Canarsie, and—Hello! Hello! Headquarters? . . . Carroll speaking . . . No! Carroll! Carroll! That’s three Carrolls!”
He put in the alarm. He knew the skipper would blow, his top on this one—and Valdez’s murder not solved.
After the cop on the beat took over until the men came from headquarters, Red Carroll slipped out into Seventh Avenue. He had some things to do. Somehow he didn’t want to meet Captain Reynolds right now.
He made calls at the stores on either side of Old Sam’s. One had just that minute opened up for the day, and the clerk going on duty had seen, no one at all enter Old Sam’s. The man in the store at the other side of Sam’s—also an old-clothes store—had been open since seven thirty, but had seen nothing irregular in the neighborhood. Neither had the hardware man directly across the street, nor had the counter man or any of the breakfast customers in the nearby drugstore. But a shoe-shine boy a few feet to the north of Old Sam’s had seen something that made Red Carroll do some keen thinking.
The shoe-shine boy had taken up his stand there about twenty minutes to eight. Men on the way to offices often stopped and got shoe shines as early as this.
He had seen a man trying the door of Old Sam’s about a quarter of eight. No, it wasn’t Old Sam; he knew Old Sam. This was a younger guy, and when the guy found the door locked, he went away and came back again in about five minutes and found Old Sam’s still not open.
The shoe-shine boy didn’t know whether the guy went away this time or not—he caught a customer just then—but he remembered that just as he was finishing the shine he saw the same guy going into the store with Old Sam.
“What kind of a looking guy?” Red asked.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. “I wasn’t lookin’ at him much. I was lookin’ fer cust’mers, an—”
“As big as I am, say?”
“Naw. Not near.”
“Light or dark?”
The boy thought for a pair of seconds. “Kind o’ d-dark, I guess. Y’see, I wasn’t lookin’ at him much, I was lookin’—”
“For customers,” Red cut in. “You might be a cop some day, kid, but you’ll never get out of harness.”
He turned back toward the store. He was looking for a man “not near” so big as himself, of a complexion that—the boy guessed—was “kind o’ dark.” There were thousands of men answering that description in New York City.
Back at the store, Red looked over the cash register with the open drawer again; also looked over the body of Old Sam again. Three or four pockets of Old Sam were turned inside out.
“Robbery, huh?” the cop on the beat said.
Red nodded, half-heartedly. “Yeah . . . maybe.”
And a big maybe, he was thinking. The shoe-shine boy had seen the man try Old Sam’s door about a quarter of eight; had seen him go away and try again in five minutes or so. A stick-up? Red Carroll couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Why Old Sam’s store, particularly? Why try three times to get into Old Sam’s store when there was another store a few feet away, a store that was already open? Anyhow, no stick-up guy would pull a job on a secondhand clothes st
ore just at opening time. Furthermore, the robbery set-up inside was somehow too obvious, too stagy—the cash-register drawer left open, every last penny taken, Old Sam’s pockets turned inside out. A plant. A phony, to cover up something bigger.
Adams? That guy was in a spot. He claimed he had bought his pencil-stripe blue suit at Old Sam’s. And now Old Sam, the only man who could back up his claim—was dead—murdered. Yet Adams was not “kind o’ dark.” And would Adams, if he had even been an accomplice in the bumping of Old Sam, be sap enough to claim Old Sam as an alibi and thus lead the police right to his victim? Yet Red Carroll couldn’t clear his mind of the thought that Old Sam’s death might be tied up in some way with the Valdez kill.
Why hadn’t the killer—if he had really been on a mere stick-up job—held Old Sam in the windowless back room, away from the phone, grabbed the contents of the cash register, and scrammed? No necessity for a killing here. Only one logical reason. Old Sam knew the killer, Old Sam’s mouth had to be shut for keeps. Why?
Red went into the back room, started to rummage through the battered old desk. Certainly anyone as keen and businesslike as Old Sam would have kept some records of purchases and sales.
He found the book in the right-side lower drawer—a big, heavy ledger with a mottled cover. His sharp glance raked over the final entry, made the previous day:
No. 657. Oct. 16. Blue penc. stripe, 3-piece; Mfr., H. & M.; buying price, $5;. asking price, $10; selling price, $3.
Here was something, anyhow—an entry in Sam’s own writing that substantiated every word of Adams’ claim; his claim that he had bought the blue pencil-stripe suit at Sam’s the day before and paid eight dollars for it.
Red continued to leaf through the book, looking over the entries for a period of months. Sort of screwy, he admitted. No names, of course; no addresses. Old-clothes men didn’t make such entries, as pawnbrokers and buyers of old gold did; and anyhow, if there had been names and addresses, they’d be phonies in case of any crooked deals.
The entries—suit numbers, dates of purchase, descriptions, manufacturers’ names, buying prices, asking prices, and selling prices—were made in a fairly legible hand, with a very hard lead pencil; the writing was difficult to decipher in spots, it was so pale.
The detective emitted a gasp of surprise as he flipped over a page and saw that one of the leaves of the book had been ripped out. The missing entries evidently covered part of the purchases for the month of July, that year. Sam would never have ripped out that page; Sam had taken pains to have all the records at hand. The killer! Fifty to one, he had ripped out that page! That page told something—something the killer didn’t want known! The killer had ripped out that telltale leaf rather than carry along a big, heavy, conspicuous ledger.
Red tucked the ledger under his arm. “I’ll be scramming for a while,” he told the cop on duty. “I’m not too keen on meeting the skipper right now. Seein’ yuh.”
He went out, grabbed a cab, rode a few blocks down Seventh Avenue and over to Sixth. He got out, paid the driver, and went into an optical-goods store.
“Hi ya, Irving,” he greeted the proprietor. “Just want to borrow one of your strongest magnifying glasses. I’ll use it here.”
Irving shrugged his shoulders and grinned good-naturedly. “I should make a big profit on guys like you, Red,” he said. “Going Sherlock Holmes on me, eh?”
Red grinned back sheepishly. “Yeah. I forgot my drop-stem pipe and the fore-and-aft cap.”
He was still grinning as he took the magnifying glass and retired to a bench in the repair room where mechanics did precision work under strong lights. Often he had snickered at screen sleuths who performed wonders with magnifying glasses; all that was specialized police lab work these days. But this instance was an exception.
One glance through the powerful glass told him that his hunch had been correct—that the entries made on the ripped-out leaf of the ledger with a sharp, very hard lead had cut faint impressions in the paper of the next leaf.
It was painstaking, irritating work. But with the aid of the glass.
Red finally reproduced the missing record. And three entries, grouped together, stuck out like a wart on the tip of a prominent nose;
No. 419. July 28. Chk. 3-piece; Mfr., Klasskraft; buying price, $7; asking price, $12; selling price, $10.
No. 420. July 28. Chk. 2-piece; Mfr., Klasskraft; buying price, $5; asking price, $11; selling price $8.
No. 421. July 28. Chk. 3-piece; Mfr., Klasskraft; buying price, $4; asking price, $11; selling price—
There was no selling-price figure after the third entry.
Obviously, the three suits sold to Sam on the same date had been brought in by the same person—someone who went in for Klasskraft checks in a big way. And No. 421 was not sold as yet; it must still be among Old Sam’s stock.
Red Carroll was jubilant. Maybe a good break of some kind at last, after more than his share of bad ones. The entry of three checked suits on the same date, made by the same clothing manufacturer, was the only clue from the ripped-out leaf that might be expected to add up to something. And possibly that unsold checked Klasskraft suit would have a dry cleaner’s stencil or tag on the lining, and most certainly it would bear the label of the store where it had been purchased.
With his pulses beating lustily, Red taxied back to Old Sam’s. Captain Reynolds, Red was glad to learn, had come and gone; but after Red heard from the fingerprint men what Reynolds had said, he wondered why the air in the store didn’t still have a bluish tinge to it. Ordinarily a clean-spoken man, Reynolds could swear picturesquely and expressively when he was good and sore.
“The skipper wanted to know,” one of the fingerprint men told Red, “where . . . well, where the hell you were, is the way he expressed it. And he’ll blow his top when we make the report; no prints worth a damn, except those of Old Sam himself. Tough baby, this case.”
“Tough is right,” Red agreed.
He went to work, pawing over dozens of suits, finally located the gaudy checked suit marked No. 421. Though the original “asking price” had been $11.00, Old Sam had later marked it down to $6.00, and finally to $4.00—the price he had actually paid for it. And Red Carroll, who knew clothes, realized why Sam had been stuck with it: the suit was of a type in style two, perhaps as much three, years before; a vogue that had been “hot” with certain snappy dressers for a brief period and had then gone out abruptly. It had what was known as a bellow back—it had a strip of cloth running diagonally from each shoulder to the edge of the pinchback belt. It also had side vents, which had not been worn for well over a year, and other tricky gewgaws such as would be out of place on anything but the loudest sport coats. And the vest and trousers were shirred and pleated.
And Old Sam, ironically enough, had stymied the very man who might solve his murder. For a new strip of lining—obviously replacing an old strip with a dry cleaner’s stencil mark on it—had been sewed into the back of the coat; and although Old Sam’s entry had shown that the manufacturer was Klasskraft, the canny clothes dealer had replaced this label—and the name of the store where the suit had actually been bought—with the label of a high-class tailor.
“Dead end!” the detective rasped. Klasskraft Clothes were for sale at numberless clothing and haberdashery shops throughout the country.
It was a bitter, disappointed Red Carroll who took the suit over to the better lighted space near the window. But then his heart started to trip-hammer wildly.
For this loud checked suit that was at least two years old—which had been that age, in fact, before the seller stuck Old Sam with it, according to the purchase date entered in the ledger—was practically brand-new! That is, it could not have been worn within a couple of years! The special parts where suits began to show wear the earliest—the seams, the buttonholes, the pockets, and particularly the handkerchief pocket—were in perfect condition. The lining, except for the deftly sewed-in strip, was new and clean. The sleeve edges and trousers
cuffs showed no wear at all. Why?
The answer fairly hurtled through Red Carroll’s brain. “Why, the little rat always went in for loud checks!” he muttered. “But he couldn’t wear this one while he was in stir; and when he came out of stir, he was broke and had to sell ’em and get some dough. And he lived near here—Old Sam’s ‘u’d be the logical place to sell ’em. But, damn it, I thought he was still in stir.”
He tossed the suit back, ran out the doorway, crossed to the drugstore across the street and dialed a number in a telephone booth.
“Hello? Probation officer’s? . . . This is Detective Carroll, headquarters. Let me talk to Mr. Kelly . . . Put him on the wire . . . Hello? Larry? . . . Larry, this is Red Carroll. You recall that little heel—Punk Harter—that I sent up for a cigar-store heist two years ago? He got a minimum of two years, didn’t he? And—”
“Was in to report to me about a week ago,” the answer came back. “Must have a drag somewhere. Paroled last July.”
“Where’s he living?” Red asked. He could hear his own heart thumping above the pulsing of the telephone wire.
He jotted down the address—rooming house on Bank Street—but when he went there, wasn’t a bit surprised to learn that Punk Harder had given up his room there days before.
Red Carroll walked over to McQuade’s Place on Eighth Avenue. McQuade himself had taken the early trick that morning, and was behind the bar, polishing glasses.
“A touch o’ the Burke’s, Mac,” Red said.
He kindled up a fag while McQuade poured out the Irish whiskey. McQuade took a little trickle for himself. It wasn’t very often that his old friend Red Carroll dropped in these days.
“On a job?” McQuade asked.
“Oh, sort of,” Red answered. “Say, Mac,” he said casually, “seen anything lately of Tom Devery’s kid—Katie, wasn’t it?—that Punk Harter used to bang around with?”
McQuade grimaced. “I’ve seen as much as I want to see av the likes av her,” he answered. He had hit the bottle again, and his slight brogue broadened. “I tooled her an’ Harter out av here not more than this day week. It’s a good thing her father, ol’ Tim, ain’t livin’, to be havin’ the heart av him broke.”
