by Jerry eBooks
“Thanks,” I said. “Keep the money, it’ll help.”
“Pennies make dollars,” she said as I walked away.
THE DOOR marked private wasn’t locked, so I walked right in. The brave act was wasted because nobody was there at the moment, so I sat down. Then I got nosy. A filing cabinet in the corner looked unlocked so I stepped over to it, pulled out the E-to-H drawer. No soap. No Farnam. With a sinking feeling in my tummy I yanked open the next drawer. There was a folder marked personal. Something told me to hurry while I still had my breath inside of me.
I clutched maybe six sheets inside the folder, doubled them, and stuffed the works into my inside breast pocket. The folder was too big. That I jammed back into the drawer and eased it closed again. I never worked so close to eternity in all my life. I had just—and I mean just—left the cabinet and slipped across the room to a chair opposite the black walnut desk when that door opened again and in he walked. There was sweat on my face but innocence in my eyes as he stared fascinated.
“Who let you in here, sonny?” he was a solid job of a man. Looked like he’d been raised on stacks of wheat-cakes, and they all lumped up till they made a heavy-looking creature that breathed. He was the type of character you instinctively grab at in a high wind when you want to keep your feet under you; massive, solid and tough.
“You Minego?” I asked without any more trembling in my voice than a canary with the palsy.
He laughed like Edward Arnold. Even his eyes twinkled. If I’d been calmer, I’d have probably thought he looked like Arnold, too. “Boy, are we tough!” he boomed.
“Thanks,” I said faintly. His laugh had turned into a nice pleasant smile such as you use for the minister when he sees you out of church on Sundays. It just sat on his face, waiting, as though it were sure what you had to say would _ please the ears that belonged to the face.
“You don’t look like a guy who’d knife me,” I said.
“Not if the knife was dull. But I don’t have to, you see.” He spread his hands expansively. “I have money, plenty of it. I enjoy making money. And now I’ve a new hobby. I enjoy helping other people.”
“It was you who said that, not me,” I warned. “Try making me happy.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Whoever you are is beside the point. What you want counts with me.”
“Okay. How come Gerald Walker got mixed up with Linda Raleigh?”
I expected the temperature of the room to drop suddenly. But in this I was wrong. Minego’s face turned into a picture Van Gogh might have painted in one of his heavy moments, titled: ‘man in brown study’.
Finally he spoke, rubbing the desk top with a fat palm. “I wouldn’t know about that. He was hardly the type to marry Linda. Not that she was a bad kid—no, no. Just that, well, you know.”
“Maybe I do,” I admitted. “And now she’s a widow.”
A flush spread around his fat cheeks. “What business is it of yours?”
“Only professional,” I said quickly. “More or less. Lieutenant Scott of Homicide knows I’m questioning you.”
He seemed puzzled over that but let it ride. “I think,” he said quietly, “Gerald is lucky to be out of it.”
“Why would anybody want to kill him?”
“I don’t know. A kid like that hasn’t any enemies, you know. He couldn’t have; he was too good.”
“You talk like you knew him well,” I said.
His hand still stroked the desk top and although he was looking at me, his eyes weren’t trying to bore holes through my coat. “Gerald’s Uncle William has been my attorney for years,” he said. “I know the family very well.”
“Somebody,” I mused, “had something against him, but I don’t know who. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Well, I guess I’ve wasted enough of your time. I’ll be going now.”
“Okay, friend,” he said. “Drop in anytime. What did you say your name was?”
“Kelly,” I told him. “James J. Kelly.”
“Okay, Kelly, glad to know you.” He walked toward me and I thought he was going to be polite with the door but instead he stopped about a foot from my face. “Would you mind,” he asked quietly, a smile fading slowly from his lips, “giving me back the papers you took from my file?”
With a watery feeling in my stomach I reached the papers over to him. He took them, backed away from me. “Thank you,” he said simply. It was then I noticed he had done me the compliment of my younger physique. A .38 that cared not the slightest for me lay in his fat palm, pointed in my direction.
I HAD ONE of those horrible premonitions that I wouldn’t make it to the door. Then when I went through it the premonition transferred to a feeling that I’d never get out to my car again. I had to pass by the hat check girl on my way to the outside again. She was looking at me, wondering, I suppose, how come I still walked under my own power. I gave her a grin but I could feel my cheek muscles wobbling with it. You ever have this happen to you? It’s a hell of a feeling.
I went back to my apartment and decided to call it a day. I took off my coat, threw it on the bed, and a little square of white fluttered in the breeze from it and landed on my pillow. Idly I picked it up and then froze in my tracks when I read what was on it.
Just a typewritten sheet, half-folded, bearing a few simple words. Rather like a note preceding entry in a ledger of some sort. It read thus:
Farnam—$300.00 Final.”
It didn’t require much mental effort to guess where this came from. When I handed Minego his papers, this one must have stayed behind in my pocket. Oboy, if he missed it. Yeah, I told myself, oboy for you, Kelly! How dead can you be?
Late as it was, I bounced out to the Plymouth again and headed for the Walker house. When I got there I cased it from the opposite side of the street. Two of the boys from Scott’s office were holding up the verandah so I figured Walker was still under guard. There were a couple of lights on inside the house. One in the den. It wasn’t too late, I guessed, so I left the car. The boys didn’t know me at first.
“Who are you, pally?” asked the taller of the two.
“James J. Kelly. Lieutenant Scott tell you it was okay for me to go in?”
“Oh, yeah. Walker want to see you?”
“I don’t know, fellas. I hope so. Let’s try him, huh?”
INSIDE the house, another of Scott’s men studied the wallpaper in the living room. He looked comfortable enough to be bedded down for the night.
“Where’s Walker?” I asked him.
He looked at the two with me. They nodded. “In his den. Went in there about ten minutes ago.”
“Let’s try,” I suggested.
A couple of raps on the den door brought Walker to answer it. He looked awfully tired, almost haggard, I noticed. Nor did he seem to click mentally. “What is it now?” he asked wearily.
“Mr. Walker . . .” I began and then he recognized me and stiffened.
“What do you want, Kelly?”
“Just like to speak with you again for a minute. Okay?”
“What’s there to speak about? This has been a trying day for an old man.”
“Yeah, I know,” I sympathized. “But I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions for the record. Only take up a minute more of your time.”
He stepped aside. “Oh, all right, come in.”
The boys from Scott’s department looked questioningly at him but he shook his head. “It’s all okay,” he told them.
I closed the door quietly behind me, and walked over to the fireplace in the far corner of the room. Walker followed me.
“Where did they take Gerald?” I asked.
“Morgue,” he said lifelessly. “Tomorrow they’ll move him to Graham’s Funeral Home.”
“Uh huh. No more threats made against your life today?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why, of course not?”
“Well,” he explained, “the police have been here all day. Rather silly to expect threats with all th
at protection isn’t it?”
“I guess. Now, Mr. Walker, I’m going to be very damned nosy. As you know, Miss Farnam hired me to solve your murder. So far you’re still alive. But I feel, regardless, that I owe it to her to keep my eyes open as long as I’ve got her money—and I still have. In fooling around, wasting time, you might say, I’ve picked up several ideas about things that two days ago weren’t any of my business. They still aren’t, but since I’ve gotten them, I believe that you can help me protect your life if you’ll play along with me.”
“Well?”
“The first idea I’ve gotten is that Gerald Walker wasn’t your nephew; he was your son—and Miss Farnam was his mother.”
I was tired myself. I felt like I was standing in Paries’ Art Store downtown studying a surrealist painting that contracted and expanded, that lived and breathed. And Walker emerged from the painting and hung on to the frame like he was hanging on to his suspenders. And strangely, he swayed to and fro from the sides of the frame and I saw he was standing in a swing suspended from the limb of a tree. It was slowly cutting an arc like a pendulum on a grandfather clock. I blinked my eyes and the whole thing disappeared. Walker was there, all right but he was only swaying on his heels and the blank look on his face was me looking at the painting—or could have been. His lips were parted and I could hear his breath whistling in and out.
I DON’T KNOW why, but I waited, knowing he’d answer in a while. And presently he did. “Gerald was not my son,” he finally said.
I heaved a sigh. “Oh, well, it was too good to be true. But for a minute I thought I had the tiger by the tail. Well, I’ll try another. Why did you kill Gerald?”
This time I could hear the jackpot cracking open. He still swayed on his heels, didn’t even break the rythm. “I had to,” he said simply.
“Okay,” I said, shocked in spite of myself. “Care to tell me why?”
“I had to. Last night Gerald came here just as I was retiring. He wanted money, practically a fortune.”
“What for? He had a practice of his own, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but he also had an expensive wife. I think she put him up to it. He asked me for twenty-five thousand. Then when I wouldn’t give it to him, he—he threatened me. He had that paper knife and told me he’d kill me if I didn’t give him the money.”
“So,” I finished for him, “you took the knife away from him and in the scuffle it got stuck in his chest. That it?”
Walker nodded. I felt kind of sorry for him. “Yes,” he admitted. “That’s the way it happened.”
“Well, I suppose Lieutenant Scott ought to be told about this, don’t you?”
He looked down at the floor and nodded. “Yes, I suppose he had. Yes, it would be best that way.”
He was in another mood. The reflective mood, I labeled it. Too bad it couldn’t last. On him it fitted pretty well. “Yeah,” I agreed. “It would be the best way if it were true. Unfortunately—or fortunately, whichever way you put it—you didn’t kill Gerald.”
He glared up at me. Reflective mood gone. Now the indignant mood. “I said I did, didn’t I?”
“You said it, Mr. Walker, but it wouldn’t even convince me. In the first place, isn’t it silly to think of Gerald threatening your life over money? He was too pious for that. And if he had, isn’t it just as silly to believe that an old man past his physical prime could so easily kill a much younger man—especially with a knife—with no signs in the room of a struggle?”
“That’s the way it happened, nevertheless,” he persisted.
“Okay, have it your way. I’m going now, but before I do, would you care to tell me why Gerald didn’t have more to do with Miss Farnam? He was her son, wasn’t he?”
Walker didn’t answer. Slowly his hand went to his coat pocket. Funny I didn’t catch on to it at first. Maybe because I wasn’t mentally prepared for it from him. I even kept on talking—I was that dumb. “I think Gerald was an illegitimate child, Walker. That’s what I think. Further, I think you were the father of that child. That’s why you raised him as your nephew—”
I didn’t get any farther. From out of his pocket emerged with sickening reality a deadly little gun. A .25 caliber, it looked like. Those things give me the shivers. They’re as common as cigaret lighters and as final as a last act.
Walker was talking as he pointed the gun at me. “Not from you, Kelly; not from you. I don’t have to take it from you.”
I could feel the reaper putting on his grim act for my benefit. Walker was standing with his back to the den door, facing me. There wasn’t a chance that I could get to that gun before it got to me. And Walker didn’t look like I could talk him out of it. This was his determined look. His new mood. “Look, Mr. Walker . . .” I began, and I could see his head move a little from side to side like a man arguing with himself. He took one step toward me. This was it, I figured. And then, like lightning, the act was ended. Walker clutched at his side with his left hand, sort of half-doubling up. His old head with that self same determined look on his face, bent slowly and looked at the floor. I think he was dead then, but his old muscles refused to collapse any faster in death than they would have in life. He just crumpled, like a tire with a leak, going down. But even in death his latest mood played itself out. Before he hit the floor, that little .25 in his hand spit five times and all five slugs chased one another into the wall behind me at about knee level.
IN THAT instant I recalled the last threat note he had received that morning. It finished with: Don’t jail me tomorrow. Well, he hadn’t. Walker had died February 25th—as requested.
I didn’t get a chance to examine him. Scott’s men were in that room like flies in half a second. And I was in handcuffs. And almost before I got used to the feel of them, Scott himself was there and had taken me into another room to question me.
“I didn’t do it, of course,” I told him.
“No,” he replied calmly. “I don’t think you did, Kelly; but it looks as though you may know who did.”
“Not even that,” I said.
“Okay, Kelly. We’ll start from there. How did it come about, shall we say?
“Well, Walker and I were gassing. I was just going to scram. I had told him that I believed he was Gerald’s father—for the second time, as I rerecall. Suddenly he seemed to resent it. Pulled that little gun on me. And before he could use it, he just folded up.”
“He shot five times,” Scott reminded me.
“Yeah, but while he was going down. He knew he was doing it.”
Scott thought for a moment. Then: “Kelly, I know pretty positively you didn’t do it. You’re not heeled. Moreover, until the M.E. gets here, we won’t know what really killed Walker. I’m asking you like a friend to tell me if there was anything more to it than you’ve already said?”
“Thanks, Scott,” I replied. “That’s how it was—the way I told you. I don’t know what hit him and I doubt if he knew himself. He just collapsed, and that was that.”
“All right. I’ll have to hold you, though, until the M.E. gets here at least. There’s something awfully funny about the death.”
“You know what I’d do if I were you, Scott? I’d find out where old man Farnam spent the last hour and a half. Also his daughter, Miss Farnam. Remember, Walker stated he thought Farnam sent those threat notes. I think he did, too.”
“You think he meant to kill Walker, really?”
“I don’t know about that, but look; I think Farnam believed that Gerald was Walker’s illegitimate son, and that his daughter was the mother. He probably wanted Walker to marry Phyllis.”
“You would have thought he’d try something like that years ago. After all, Gerald was twenty-four years old. Pretty late to be rectifying matters, wasn’t it?”
Yes,” I agreed, “but not if he had just recently found out about it. Something or somebody must have stuck an idea into his head—within the last year—and he acted on it with the notes. He was a religious old bird, remember; that could ha
ve become an obsession.”
“It could have,” Scott admitted. Okay. How about you acting on it? And as for me, how about letting me loose for tonight? You know damned well I didn’t do it and if you want me for questioning, I can be had at any time.”
“What’s your hurry?” Scott asked suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, “it just occured to me that from this moment on, I’m now working for Miss Farnam. Walker’s dead, and I’m supposed to find out who murdered him. Also, I haven’t had lunch or supper yet today. I can eat, now, you know. I’m getting paid.”
Scott laughed in my face and looked his apologies at once. “Damned if you’re not right,” he said. “Okay, I’ll chance it. Scram. But I want to see you in the morning: about a formal statement on this mess. And remember, I mean in the morning!”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering.
I DID A double time over to the Farnam cottage on Yacuta Road. There was still a light on in the kitchen so I rapped on the back door. Miss Farnam answered.
“Why Mr. Kelly,” she said, surprised.
“You bet,” I told her.
I came into the kitchen. She was drinking coffee and having a sandwich. Late snack.
“Can I have some?” I asked. “I’ll take it off the expense account.”
“Certainly!” she said. “You poor boy, I’ll bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”
She gave me some coffee and pushed over a ham sandwich. “What . . . I mean, did you come to find something?”
“I don’t know, really, Miss Farnam. I see you’re feeling better.”
“Oh, yes. Father told me you had been here. I was resting. I had a headache.”
“Uh huh. Well, I’m afraid I’m going to give you another. Mr. Walker died tonight and I was powerless to stop it.”
She gaped. “He—he—did?” she almost squeaked.
“In front of me; I don’t know what killed him.”
