“Hell, only Fitz.”
“That’s enough.”
Outside, he said to Gahagan, “Now go to Fitz’s place where he lives.”
Going up in the elevator, the skipper seemed to sag a bit. There was a look around his mouth as though a bitter taste were in it. His face appeared to grow more haggard as the elevator climbed and he rubbed his hands against his thighs because his palms were sweaty. He looked leaner, thinner, as he walked down the corridor, and his head was forward, his jaw hanging, and his shoulders appeared lifeless. There was not about him that usual snap and self-certainty when he reached the door to the apartment. He hesitated. Indecision, hardly ever a part of him, crinkled across his face and down his body. He licked his lips. He put his finger on the bell-button, hesitated, then poked it hard. His hand went toward his gun but he shook his head and took his hand away again. He straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat. He ground every hint of emotion out of his face.
A houseman opened the door.
MacBride thrust him aside, walked down the entrance hall and out into the center of the living-room, where he stopped, for no one was in the room. The houseman came in timidly.
“Where’s Mr. Mularkey?” the skipper asked.
“I think—” The houseman looked aloft towards the gallery.
MacBride went up.
Mularkey was in his den at the end of the gallery. He sat in the big desk chair, his hat, bashed in, on his head and his gloved hands resting palms down on the desk. He gave MacBride a brief, uninterested, absent-minded glance, and then returned his stare to the surface of the desk.
The skipper said, “I’ve come to get you, Fitz.”
“Yeah,” Mularkey muttered.
His fancy books, which he never read, circled him and added a strange dignity to the utter silence. He took a fresh cigar from his pocket, put it between his lips but did not light it. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk, rubbing his gloved hands slowly together.
“Why’d you do it, Fitz?” the skipper asked.
Mularkey kept rubbing his hands slowly together, staring at the cased books which he never read. “He killed Tiny.”
“You promised me—”
“H’m. He threatened to kill Marcia. He told me he’d kill Marcia.”
Into the minute’s silence that followed MacBride said, “Why didn’t you phone me and let me take him?”
“I d’ know,” Mularkey murmured. “I d’ know.”
MacBride dropped into a chair as though someone had smacked him across the back of the knees. His face was heavy, bitter, disgusted.
“That’s all right, Steve,” Mularkey said slowly.
MacBride said, “It’s tough, Fitz, that you won’t be able to plead self-defense.”
Mularkey looked at him.
“I know,” MacBride said, “that Steamboat’s gun was taken away from him last night and put in your safe. You took it out.” He added, “You took it over to his hotel and left it there.”
Mularkey leaned back. “You’re right. You can’t blame me for trying.”
MacBride said, “What did you take out of that envelope?”
“What envelope?”
“There was an envelope that Steamboat got out of the hotel safe before you got there. The clerk said it felt pretty thick. The envelope was empty when the precinct men got there.”
Mularkey looked confused, his eyes flicking many times at the skipper. Then he shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that.”
MacBride went on: “Another thing. You took a lot of care about wiping away fingerprints, which seems funny when you had no intention, as far as I can make out, of trying to scram.”
Mularkey looked morose. “Hell, when I got back here I thought, what’s the use?”
“Did you ever hear of Dolly Ireland crowning a guy with a bottle once?”
“Dolly?…No. Why?”
“I don’t know. Except that Steamboat was crowned with a bottle.”
Mularkey put a chill look on him, then smiled. “It was the only thing handy I could crown him with. I know you’re trying hard as hell to give me a break, Steve, and thanks. I could’ve forgiven Steamboat about Tiny, maybe. It was when he said he’d kill Marcia that I saw red.”
MacBride was looking hard at him, thinking hard. The skipper said, “It means the chair, Fitz. You went there deliberately to kill Steamboat. It means weeks and months of trial and then more weeks in the death house. It means…”
Mularkey frowned and rubbed his jaw with his thumbnail. Then he stood up and tossed away his unlit cigar. He casually opened his desk drawer and pulled out a gun and said:
“I just pulled a gun on you.”
“Yeah, I see.”
“Okey, Steve. I pulled a gun on a cop. Pull your own and let me have it. I can take the chair but I can’t be pestered by a long-drawn-out trial.”
“Put the gun away.”
“Do what I tell you.”
“Put it away.”
“If you don’t, I’m going to slam out of here and in an hour you’ll have every cop in town after me—so do as I tell you.”
MacBride pulled his gun and it banged in his hand. Mularkey’s gun fell to the floor and he looked down stupidly at his bloody right hand. He said almost sorrowfully:
“You only got me in the hand.”
“Yeah. Where did you think I’d get you?”
Mularkey grimaced. MacBride crossed the room looking for the slug that had glanced off Mularkey’s hand. He saw a tear along the backs of three books, high up.
“Get one of those books, Steve.”
MacBride had to get up on his toes, and as he was toppling one of the books out, Mularkey scooped up his gun in his left hand and jammed it against MacBride’s back.
“Drop your gun, Steve.”
“You go on being funny, huh?”
“Drop it. I’d hate like hell to drill you, pal, but I’m a desperate man.”
MacBride dropped his gun. Mularkey shoved him roughly forward and was able to pick up the discarded gun with his bloody right hand.
He said, “I’ll leave it with the elevator boy.”
MacBride said in a thick, emotional voice, “The next time I see you, Fitz, it’ll probably be on a slab in the morgue.”
“I just can’t stand a long trial,” Mularkey said.
He backed out of the den, disappeared at a run. The skipper did not start after him. He took out his battered briar and his worn tobacco pouch and loaded the bowl to a little less than flush. He lit up slowly, then blew out the latch and walked down to the living-room. In the elevator, he said to the boy:
“Did Mr. Mularkey leave me something?”
“He left a gun for Captain MacBride.”
“Thanks.”
CHAPTER VIII
When MacBride entered the small lobby of the apartment house where Dolly Ireland lived, the janitor was polishing the brass top of the newel post. The skipper had forgotten the number of her apartment. He said to the janitor:
“What’s Miss Ireland’s apartment?”
“Thirty-two.”
MacBride drummed up the staircase, heard the janitor say: “But she ain’t in.”
The skipper came down again.
“When’d she leave?”
The janitor made a gesture of taking his hat off but didn’t. “Oh, half an hour ago. I carried her bag out and got her a cab.”
“Bag, huh?” the skipper muttered to himself.
“Yop. Went to Union Station.”
“What’d her bag look like?”
“Black. I guess patent leather. D.I. on it, so it was hers.”
MacBride strode out to the Buick and said, “Burn it to
Union Station, Gahagan. Siren and all.”
That was right up Gahagan’s alley. He opened the car wide and broadcast with the siren. People, cars swept out of his way. He waved to cops he knew.
“Never mind waving!” MacBride shouted. “When you do seventy, keep both hands on the wheel!”
Gahagan arrived in front of Union Station with the siren screaming and instantly cops came running from all directions. MacBride hopped off and pounded his heels into the waiting room. The clock above the information booth said 4:52. MacBride went on to the train gates. Two boards were up showing trains scheduled to leave at 5:30 and 5:55. He went back into the waiting room. Nowhere did he see Dolly Ireland. Of the man in the information booth he asked:
“What was the last train to leave here and where was it bound?”
“The last was the Twilight Flyer, for Boston. It pulled out at four-forty.”
“What was the one before that?”
“A local for New York. She pulled out at three-fifty.”
The skipper checked up with the porters. One said he had carried a black patent leather suitcase for a woman boarding the Twilight Flyer. MacBride banged into a phone booth, called Headquarters. He consulted a time table, held it to the light while he said into the transmitter:
“Call the state police barracks at Bencroft and tell ’em to board the Twilight Flyer, due there in twenty minutes. Tell ’em to take off a Dolly Ireland. She’s traveling with a black patent leather suitcase with the letters D.I. on it. She’s a tall, good-looking blonde about twenty-eight. Ask ’em to run her back here in a car to Headquarters—quick.”
He hung up and sailed out of the station; said to the dozen cops gathered round the Buick, “Okey, boys; it’s nothing,” and climbed in. “Headquarters, Gahagan.”
“Siren and all?”
“No. You’ve had your fun.”
The skipper strode into Headquarters with his shoulders squared, his arms swinging, the cuffs of his trousers slapping his ankles.
Bettdecken said, “I hear Mularkey was the bad boy o’ the Steamboat killing. You sent out an alarm for him yet?”
“No.”
“Gonna?”
“No.”
MacBride went to his office and crammed his pipe and pulled hard on it. He had held off the general alarm for Mularkey because he had an idea Mularkey was determined to be taken only after a gunfight. The skipper was sure of this. But he wasn’t so sure that Mularkey had told the truth. He went back mentally to the scene of the crime, the words of the precinct man on the case. He made notes, put down a lot of numbers, scratched his head and shook it and sucked on his pipe and when it was empty loaded it again.
At 5:25 the Bencroft barracks called. Dolly Ireland had been taken off the train and was being rushed back to Richmond City by automobile. The skipper hung up, rose and took a satisfied punch at the air. The door opened and Kennedy drifted in, saying:
“So Steamboat got it, eh?”
“Plenty.”
“I told you you were wasting your time rounding up all those heels.”
MacBride grinned ferociously. “Oh, yeah? Well, don’t kid yourself, baby. I rounded ’em up and Pickney Sax got sore and came here and we had an argument and out of that argument I learned things. I learned that not only was Steamboat around Union Station when Torgensen was killed, but Dolly Ireland was there too. I pull boners sometimes. Okey, I do. But sometimes a boner turns over and you learn things.” He flexed his shoulders, smacked his hands together and said, “You just sit here, Kennedy.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a bottle. “Nuzzle this bottle and hang around and see what Daddy MacBride will have to show you.”
Kennedy took a drink, looked at it. “So now you think Dolly Ireland is mixed up in it.”
“I wouldn’t tell you a thing, boy. You just sit and wait.”
Kennedy smiled. “Okey, big fella. Your liquor’s good, the chair is comfortable and I don’t mind your company too much.”
The skipper sat down to a mass of desk work. “And shut up. I got to get caught up here.”
At half-past six Kennedy was in a mellow alcoholic fog and MacBride was putting aside his last paper. The phone rang and the skipper scooped it up, said, “Yup….You bet. Right away.”
Two minutes later the door opened and a state police sergeant carrying a black patent leather suitcase, came in with Dolly Ireland.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” MacBride said.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Wait downstairs, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
Kennedy, looking a little befuddled, put his sixth drink aside and passed his fingers across his face. Dolly Ireland stood where the sergeant had left her, just inside the door. Her face was flushed, her eyes were alive with uncertainty, but her lips were set.
MacBride was dour. “Sit down,” he said.
She sat down, inhaled and then let her breath out slowly.
“Why’d you beat it?” asked MacBride, watching her narrowly.
“I didn’t beat it,” she said.
“Just went away, huh?”
She nodded. “Just went away. Took a little trip—or started to.”
“When did you decide to take the trip?”
She shrugged. “On the spur of the moment.”
“After Steamboat was killed?”
Her eyes snapped upward. They widened. They stared first at Kennedy, then at MacBride. Confusion left its red trail down across her cheeks and round her neck. Her lips stumbled and her hands trembled.
MacBride said, “Were you afraid that Steamboat, going around drunk the way he was, would pop off about you and him getting together to kill Tiny Torgensen?”
Her confusion kept her speechless.
“Did you,” MacBride asked, “put Steamboat up to kill Torgensen?”
She flared, “No!”
“You killed Steamboat with a bottle, didn’t you?”
She grimaced.
MacBride pointed. “You killed Steamboat with a bottle and Fitz took the blame for it!”
“What is this, what is this?” she said brokenly.
MacBride was stern. “Things don’t hang together. Fitz confessed to killing Steamboat. But listen to this. At the scene of the crime, Steamboat’s room in the Hotel Shane, a lot of care was taken to wipe away all fingerprints. It takes time to do that, to go over everything carefully. I judge it would take at least ten minutes and very likely more. A guy in a room under Steamboat’s heard sounds of a fight and called the desk to send up somebody to stop it. Five minutes later the desk sent up a guy. The guy found Steamboat dead.”
MacBride paused. His eyes got hard.
“Now Fitz had to finish his fight and wipe out all those prints in five minutes. And if he did that—just suppose, for the sake of argument, he did—why should he leave the hotel with his hat bashed in and wiping his hands dry on his handkerchief? Fitz didn’t kill Steamboat. You did and Fitz covered you. Now listen to me, lady. Something was stolen when Steamboat was killed. Something out of an envelope. Fitz didn’t know that. He looked surprised when I told him.”
The skipper stood up and said, “Open your bag.”
“No.”
“Okey, I’ll open it.”
She cried, “You leave it alone!”
Kennedy stood up and crossed to her. “Come on, Dolly. Give me the key.”
She stared up at him with a stricken look.
His eyes were lazy, without expression. He held his hand out and after a minute she gave him a key. He knelt and opened the suitcase and MacBride leaned over the spittoon to knock out his pipe. Kennedy slipped a small photograph swiftly up his sleeve and MacBride came over from the spittoon and got down on his knees. The skipper ransacked the suitcase while Kennedy knelt, w
atching him absently. MacBride found nothing of interest.
He stood up and looked down slyly at Dolly Ireland. She was crying. He grunted, said, “That won’t get you anything here.”
Kennedy tapped a yawn. “What time did you say Steamboat was murdered?”
“About a quarter to three,” MacBride growled.
“Well,” said Kennedy, “that’s funny. I was with Dolly from half-past one till three o’clock.”
MacBride spun, stabbed him with a dark stare.
“At the English Chop House, eating,” Kennedy added, “in case you want to check up.”
The door opened and Haims, the ballistics expert, stood in the doorway holding Steamboat’s bone-handled revolver. He said, “This ain’t the gun that killed Torgensen.”
MacBride muttered, “Did you check up carefully?”
“I didn’t have to. This is a forty-five. Torgensen was killed with a thirty-eight.”
MacBride’s eyes glittered, his lips snapped shut. He turned on the annunciator, rapped into it, “Pick up Pickney Sax!”
Kennedy was saying, “Haims, try this one,” as he withdrew from his inside pocket a .38 short-barreled revolver.
MacBride clipped, “Where’d you get that?”
“Never mind until we get Haims’s report. What you ought to do now, Skipper, is find Fitz. Have you tried Marcia Friel’s place?”
“Do you mean to tell me Fitz knocked off Tiny?” MacBride demanded.
“I’m not telling you anything. But it might be a good idea to get hold of him.” He turned to Haims, saying, “When you check up on that gun, if I’m not here, phone Western four-one.”
CHAPTER IX
Marcia Friel’s living-room was long, narrow, with casement windows overlooking Western Drive and the park. She made no attempt to hide a troubled curiosity when MacBride and Kennedy walked in on her. Kennedy dawdled but the skipper moved with vigor and his eyes snapped darkly around the living-room. Lewis Friel shut off a radio to which he had been listening and reached down to squirt charged water into a half-consumed highball.
MacBride said outright, “I’m looking for Fitz.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 208
