She also asked if there was a doctor in the house, and when it developed there were three, I sent them all out to hold a consultation over the corpse, first requesting them not to disturb the body beyond what was necessary to verify that Lancaster was actually dead.
They decided he was.
Instead of phoning headquarters I phoned Inspector Warren Day at his bachelor apartment, getting the reaction I anticipated.
“Listen, Moon,” he growled. “Headquarters is full of cops. Why bother me when I’m off duty?”
“This one is too hot for anybody less than the chief of Homicide,” I told him. “I’ve got the lieutenant governor of Illinois laid out for you.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said impatiently. “Last time it was the Aga Khan. Cut the clowning and say what you want.”
“I already said it. No clowning, Inspector.”
He was silent a minute. Then he asked querulously, “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“No.”
He took a deep breath and blistered my ear with profanity. “A political assassination! Plain murder’s not fancy enough. You got to give me a political assassination!”
“I didn’t shoot him,” I said reasonably.
“Wouldn’t put it past you,” he snarled. “Don’t let anybody go. Be there in fifteen minutes.”
When I hung up Fausta said in a small voice, “Tom says you shot that man, Manny.”
“Tom?”
“The doorman. He said he saw it.”
“He saw an optical illusion,” I told her. “I never commit my murders in front of witnesses.”
Her brow puckered in concentration. “I could tell him not to say anything in front of the police, but he told it in front of all those customers on the steps.” Then she brightened. “I was outside when the shooting happened. I had just left the side door from the ballroom and was walking around to the front entrance for a breath of air. I will say I stepped out to meet you and we were making love in the bushes when the shot sounded. Then the police will think it must have been another person he saw.”
“I didn’t shoot the guy,” I said irritably. “Someone fired from behind a bush right next to me. Incidentally, I came out here for dinner, but once the cops get here it may be hours before I get a chance to eat. How about rustling up a fast sandwich?”
“Food!” Fausta said. “You shoot a man and it makes you hungry! I should think instead you would want to kiss me good-bye before they take you off to jail.”
She looked at me expectantly and I said, “Roast beef if you’ve got it. And a cup of coffee.”
“You are a corpse yourself,” she said without heat, and lifted her desk phone to order.
I was munching on the sandwich when the police arrived. Minutes before they got there we heard the sirens in the distance, and they grew to a scream as they reached the drive entrance, then faded away to a final snarl. When I figured they were entering the front door, I took my sandwich in one hand and my coffee in the other and followed Fausta out to the dining room.
We arrived just as Inspector Warren Day, trailed by his silent satellite, Lieutenant Hannegan, and two uniformed cops, entered the dining room through the arch from the cocktail lounge. Day’s spare figure, attired in a shapeless seersucker suit, halted just inside the archway. Ducking his skinny head to peer over thick-lensed glasses, he slowly swept his eyes over the assembled hundred or so diners until all conversation stopped. Then he suddenly jerked off his flat straw sailor to disclose a totally bald scalp.
In a booming voice he announced, “I’m Inspector Warren Day of Homicide!”
He should have made his announcement in the ballroom first, where they had an orchestra, for it would have been much more effective followed by a flurry of trumpets.
A half-dozen male customers immediately left their tables to cluster around the inspector and yammer about appointments they had to keep. Day listened for about thirty seconds, then suddenly roared, “Shut up!”
They all stood looking at him with their mouths open. Ignoring them, the inspector glowered out over the others in the room.
“Anybody here know anything at all about this?” he inquired.
When a half minute had passed without any volunteers stepping forward, he said, “You’ll find a cop at the door with a half-dozen note pads so several of you can write at once. Sign your names, addresses and telephone numbers and go on home.”
Then, belatedly realizing there were probably innumerable influential people in the crowd, he turned on a fierce smile which apparently he meant to be ingratiating. “Sorry if anyone was inconvenienced,” he said grudgingly. “We got here as fast as we could.”
As the crowd began to leave tables and file past the inspector and his party, Day turned to snap something at Hannegan. The inscrutable lieutenant merely nodded, never being one to waste words where a gesture would serve, and left the room. I guessed Day had instructed him to repeat the performance in the other two rooms.
Then the inspector began to work his way through the crowd toward us. But halfway he stopped and grasped a dinner-jacketed man by the sleeve. The accosted man, a handsome fellow of about thirty, shrugged off the inspector’s hand impatiently.
“Not so fast!” Day roared, then said something to one of the uniformed cops with him.
Scowling at the man belligerently, the cop dropped a meaty hand on his shoulder and pushed him over toward the far wall, where he fixed him with a watchful eye and simply waited. Apparently Day had instructed that the man be held until he could question him at leisure.
“Who’s that?” I asked Fausta as the inspector again began his approach. “Barney Seldon.”
“The gangster from across the river?”
“I believe Mr. Seldon is a businessman,” she said with odd primness.
Before I could pursue the subject any further Warren Day stopped before us and eyed me moodily.
I said, “Evening, Inspector,” put the last bite of sandwich in my mouth and chewed it with enjoyment.
Day turned his gaze at Fausta. “Miss Moreni, isn’t it?”
There was none of the usual strain in his manner which appears when he is faced by a beautiful woman. Ordinarily he exhibits traces of psychotic terror when he has to speak to any woman at all, and the degree of terror increases in direct proportion to her beauty. Fausta’s should have reduced him to a dithering wreck, but she is the exception which proves the rule. Possibly because he had met her on a number of previous occasions, but more probably because he refused to be in awe of any woman who would associate with me, she was the one woman I knew with whom he was able to be almost entirely natural.
When Fausta admitted she was Miss Moreni, Day said, “May we use your office for questioning?”
“Certainly,” Fausta said, turning to lead the way.
Back in the office I sipped a quarter of my coffee, then set the cup in the saucer I had left on Fausta’s desk. The inspector watched me with irritation.
“May I interrupt your meal long enough to ask what happened, Moon?” he inquired acidly.
“Sure, Inspector. I’ll even skip my dessert. Somebody hiding in the bushes right across from the club entrance shot Lancaster just as he started to climb into a taxi.”
I explained in detail just what I knew, including my argument with the taxi driver and his apparent assumption I had been shooting at him and missed.
“The doorman thinks I shot him too,” I said.
“Did you?” he asked.
I gave him a pained look. “You think I’d miss and get the wrong man at a distance of four feet?”
“Maybe it was Lancaster you meant to get.” He turned to the cop who still remained with him. “Bring in that cabbie and the doorman. And tell Lieutenant Hannegan I want him.”
While awaiting these arrivals, I went back to sipping my coffee. Fausta sat on the edge of her desk and crossed her legs, which parted a knee-high slit in the side of her green evening gown to expose a beautiful silk-clad calf. Inst
inctively the inspector gawked at it, then turned his head to study the far corner of the room.
The moment the little cabbie was ushered into the office by the cop Day had sent after him, he pointed a finger at me and said in a shrill voice, “There he is! He done it!”
“What’s your name?” the inspector asked in a bored tone.
“Caxton. Robert Caxton. This guy tried to kill me, but he hit that other character instead. You take away his gun?”
“Just tell your story, Caxton,” Warren Day suggested.
Except for implying he had left plenty of room for any normal driver to pass when he parked his cab, and stating I had no business to move his cab, the little man’s story corroborated mine up to the point of the shot. From there on we were miles apart.
“As soon as he seen what he’d done, he put away his rod, jumped in his car and tried to escape by backing out the drive,” he said. “But another car was coming in, and when he saw he couldn’t make it, he come back to brazen it out.”
“You saw him put away the gun?” Day asked.
“Sure I seen him. He wasn’t five feet away from me.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“Geeze, I don’t know. Everything happened too fast. I heard the shot, turned around, and there he was with this gun in his hand — ”
“Turned around,” I interrupted. “Catch that, Inspector? He was opening the door for his customer and had his back to both of us. When the shot went off, he took one look at me and dived in front of his cab. Ask him how he saw me put away a gun when he had his face in the gravel under his radiator.”
“Shut up, Moon,” the inspector said without anger. He looked up as the doorman Tom was ushered into the room by Hannegan. “What’s your name?”
“Thomas Henning, sir.”
“What’s your story?”
The doorman, though less definite about it, generally verified Robert Caxton’s accusation. He refused to say right out I had done the shooting, but said that was his impression. His eyes had been on Lancaster when the shot came, and a lance of flame seemed to come from where I was standing. He cheerfully admitted it could have come from the bushes, however, and his assumption I had done the shooting could have been based on the fact no one else was in evidence.
“Hmph,” the inspector said. He stared at me with relish. “Guess we’ll have to book you overnight at least, Moon.”
I glared at him. “You know damn well this little twerp is talking through his hat, Inspector.”
“He sounds like a reliable witness to me, Moon. I hate to drag in an old friend, but I can’t let friendship interfere with duty.”
He beamed at me piously as I tried to decide whether to kill him right then, or wait till I had a chance to plan out the crime so that I might get away with it. Warren Day is probably one of the best homicide cops in the country, but he is also, to put it mildly, eccentric. And one of the symptoms of his eccentricity is that he firmly believes he has a sense of humor.
He hated to drag in an old friend like I hate fresh apple pie. He had known me so long, I was sure he held no belief whatever in the possibility of my being the killer, merely seeing an excellent opportunity to exercise what he regarded as his sense of humor. Day’s sense of humor is the kind which battens on fat men slipping on banana peels, or women getting their noses caught in wash wringers. It would split his sides to have me spend the night in the pokey.
Fausta said suddenly, “Nobody asked me who the killer was.”
Everybody in the room turned to look at her.
Finally Day asked, “Do you know?”
“I know it was not Manny,” she said positively. “I was just coming around the corner of the building from the side door to the ballroom when the gun went off. It was a man behind a bush right next to Manny. I could see his face in the light from the neon sign.”
“Wait a minute, Fausta,” I said. “You don’t have to — ”
“I cannot describe him,” she said firmly, “because I could only see his head. I do not know whether he was thin or fat, or how tall he was, because I think he was crouched a little. But I would recognize his face if I saw it again.”
After a moment during which no one said anything, Day growled, “You’re making that up to save your boy friend’s skin. You didn’t say anything about it when Moon was telling his story.”
“You did not ask me, Inspector.” She looked at him calmly. “Many customers who saw me can testify I stepped from the ballroom door a few minutes before the shot came. I wish to make a formal statement, and I would like a copy to show the judge when he asks you why you arrested Manny.”
The inspector gave up. Had he held the slightest belief in my guilt, probably he would have thrown Fausta in the cooler as an accessory along with me. But since he had only been exercising his perverted sense of humor in the first place, he decided to let it drop.
“Take her statement, Hannegan,” he growled. “Okay, Moon. You can shove off. But stay in town. Understand?”
“I was thinking of a Canadian fishing trip,” I growled back at him.
Just then a medical examiner stuck his head in the door and informed Day that Lancaster was dead. He had been for nearly an hour by then, of course, and this was the fourth doctor to say so, but this made it official.
3
By the time I got home the news of Walter Lancaster’s death was on the radio and special bulletins were coming over every few minutes. Having stopped for a late supper to top off my lone sandwich at El Patio, it was after midnight by then and sufficient time had passed for the radio news bureaus to hold telephone interviews with most everyone important enough to quote.
One after the other I tuned in all the local stations, then listened to what the nearest stations in Illinois had to say. The contrast was edifying.
Our local stations quoted all the carefully correct statements made by our city and state officials, such as how shocked and grieved they were that a visiting dignitary should have been murdered this side of the river, and the people of Illinois could rest assured no stone would be left unturned in the effort to bring the assassin to speedy justice. At the same time the local announcers managed to imply the shooting must have been the work of gangsters from across the river. A European visitor listening to the broadcasts might have gotten the impression Walter Lancaster’s was the first murder ever occurring in our state.
On the other hand the stations in Illinois delicately suggested Lancaster might still be alive had he stayed in the civilized state which elected him, where police were on duty to prevent the shooting of important citizens. Without being in the least discourteous, and in fact while professing the utmost confidence in the efficiency of our local police, they managed to get across the impression that anyone who entered our barbaric territory unarmed was virtually committing suicide.
California and Florida are not the only two states where interstate competition flourishes.
Shortly after one I grew tired of listening and was reaching for the radio switch just as another bulletin began. At the moment I was tuned to a local station, and my hand was already on the switch when the announcer’s words froze it there.
“We have just received the first official statement from Inspector Warren Day of the Homicide Department,” the disk jockey who ran the Dawn Patrol said. “Inspector Day has personally assumed charge of investigating the murder of Walter Lancaster, which occurred earlier this past evening. According to the inspector, a witness has been located who saw the assassin’s face just as the shot was fired. The name of the witness is being withheld. Earlier reports indicated three persons saw the shooting: the doorman at El Patio Club, a taxi driver who was holding the door of his cab for Mr. Lancaster to enter when the shot was fired, and a customer who was just entering the club. The inspector states that none of these is the key witness, however, and that a fourth person who was standing in darkness at the corner of the building is the one who saw the killer’s face. An arrest is expected within
twenty-four hours.”
Switching off the radio, I phoned Fausta at her apartment on the second floor of El Patio Club. The club closes at one, and she was already in bed, but not yet asleep.
“After I left, you actually wrote out and signed that statement about seeing the killer, didn’t you?” I said.
“Of course,” she told me cheerfully. “I could not see you go to jail, Manny.”
“For cripes’ sake, Fausta. You know Warren Day didn’t believe you, don’t you?”
I could almost see her shrug. “But he let you go free.”
“You hear the radio bulletin just now?”
“No.”
“Day released your statement. Withholding your name, of course. But if they ever catch the killer and call you to testify in court, you’ll be in a sweet spot. They put you in jail for perjury.”
Over the phone I could hear a kittenlike yawn. “I will lie so nobody catches me, Manny. Do not worry so.”
“It isn’t the lie that worries me so much,” I told her. “It’s Day making so much of it when he knows as well as I do it’s a lie. Knowing how the inspector’s mind works, I smell the beginning of a killer trap with you as the bait.”
She was silent for a minute. “You mean the killer might try to silence me because he thinks I could recognize his face?” Obviously this possibility had not previously occurred to her.
“What would you do if you had just committed a murder and then heard over the radio a witness could identify you?”
“Pooh!” she said. “You’re just trying to scare me. If the inspector withheld my name, how would the killer know who to look for?”
“He wouldn’t, unless Day deliberately lets it leak out who his witness is. Does Mouldy still sleep downstairs off the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to keep his gun handy. I’ll be around to see you sometime tomorrow.”
After I hung up and climbed into bed, it was another hour before I was able to get to sleep.
The next noon I had just sat up in bed and was contemplatively scratching the small of my back with the toe of my right foot when the door buzzer rang. Aside from contortionists, there are few people who can do this, but it is relatively simple when your right leg is detachable just below the knee.
Tweak the Devil's Nose Page 2
