Gallows in My Garden

by Deming, Richard

  The three occasions were sore spots for both of us. Day shifted the conversation to a new channel.

  He fished in his pocket, produced half a chewed-up cigar, and clamped it in his teeth. “If we could nail those two mugs, we’d be a long way toward clearing this whole thing up. I can’t understand where they’ve holed up, because every man on the force has their photographs and has memorized their descriptions.” He peered at me over his glasses. “You got any more bright ideas?”

  “One,” I said, “but it may make you mad.”

  He spat out a shred of tobacco. “Spill it anyway. This thing has got me so confused I’m even willing to listen to you.”

  “How about giving me authority to retrace everything you did in such a hurry Saturday night and Sunday morning? Talk to whoever performed the autopsy on Don, for example, and to the handwriting expert who examined the so-called suicide note.”

  “Don’t you think we know how to compile evidence?” Day growled. “Think we need an ex-stevedore to check on us?”

  I shrugged. “Told you it would make you mad.”

  Glumly he examined my face. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “I been thinking of assigning someone to go back over that ground, anyway. It will save a man if you do it instead. But I want your guarantee you’ll report everything you find out.”

  “Why should I hold out on you?” I asked irritably. “I’m as eager to catch this killer as you are.”

  “You’ve held out before. Just try it this time and I’ll get your license lifted so fast you’ll be selling pencils before your head stops spinning.”

  “All right. All right. I won’t hold out.”

  “Don’t,” he warned. He studied my face for a moment. “Be at headquarters at nine in the morning. After we get your statement about tonight on paper, I’ll give you a note to Doc Halleran and Professor Quisby, so you can check back on the autopsy and suicide note.”

  “Fine. Need me for anything else now?”

  “Not till nine in the morning. Be there on time.”

  My taxi was still waiting and the bill had mounted accordingly.

  “If you do this often, you could afford to buy a car,” the driver told me.

  “I have one,” I said. “It’s in the garage having a fireplug pried loose from its radiator.”

  He shook his head sympathetically. “These new cars can’t take the same knocking around they did ten years ago. Every little thing you bump puts them in the garage.”

  I told him to take me home.

  XVIII

  AT EIGHT THE NEXT MORNING I found Mouldy sitting on his cot in his undershirt and trousers, in which apparently he had slept. He told me someone was up in the apartment because he had heard movements, but neither Grace nor Fausta had yet appeared.

  Leaning across the cot, I knocked on the door and almost immediately it was opened by Fausta. She wore a dirndl and a white silk peasant blouse which exposed shoulders the color of coffee with cream and just as appetizing to a man who had not yet had breakfast. Her tangy perfume mixed with the aroma of frying eggs in the background.

  “Gee, that smells good!” I remarked, climbing over Mouldy’s bed.

  “It is called Nocturnal Menace,” Fausta said, tipping an ear for me to sniff.

  “I meant the eggs,” I said absently, walking on by her toward the kitchen.

  I had taken two steps when her spike heel caught me in the seat of the pants. I spun around to find her standing with hands balled against her hips and a dangerous glint in her eyes.

  “The perfume is nice, too,” I said, backing into the kitchen.

  Grace Lawson, minus her Mickey Finn hang-over and looking like a twelve-year-old kid in a blue playsuit that exhibited six inches of tanned stomach and all of her slim legs, was setting the table.

  “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Moon,” she said. “Is Mr. Greene up yet?”

  “Just barely,” I said, staring at the brief shorts and briefer jacket. “Look, I’m not letting you out of my sight today, but I’ve got a lot of running around to do and I’ll have to take you along. You’re not planning to wear that outfit on the street, are you?”

  “Certainly,” she said in an offended tone. “All the girls dress like this in this weather.”

  “Not when they’re with me,” I said definitely, “unless I’m going to the beach. You get on a dress.”

  “Hah!” Fausta put in. “If her stepmother dressed like that, you would goggle with the eyes and say nothing. Let the child alone.”

  Mouldy came in to join us for breakfast, having donned a shirt and his shoes. He had not yet shaved, but with his face it made little difference.

  I decided to let Grace’s costume ride until after breakfast, which was a mistake, for when I brought it up again, Fausta turned obstinate and declared she was going along with us in a like costume. Flouncing into the bedroom, she returned wearing a yellow bandana in place of the peasant blouse and yellow silk shorts in place of the dirndl. “Ye Gods!” I said. “You look like you’re in your underwear!”

  “I think she looks good,” Mouldy contributed in an admiring tone.

  I glanced at my watch, saw it was twenty of nine, and gave up the argument.

  “You get stuck with the dishes, chum,” I told Mouldy.

  Since El Patio did not open till noon, the bar was deserted. I used the bar phone to call the nearest cab stand, which was five blocks away, and ten minutes later we were on our way to police headquarters. It was exactly nine when I told Danny Blake, the desk sergeant, to inform Warren Day I was there.

  Flashing his gold front tooth in a smile, Danny buzzed the inspector’s office without taking his eyes from Fausta’s bare stomach.

  “You stay here,” I instructed the two girls. “The sergeant hasn’t completed his inspection yet.”

  A uniformed stenographer with an open notebook on his knee sat in one corner of Warren Day’s office. The inspector had his heavy, old-fashioned gold watch in his hand when I entered.

  “I said nine!” he snapped at me.

  My wrist watch said nine-o-two. The electric wall clock behind him said one minute after. Leaning over his desk to get a view of the watch, I saw it pointed to nine-fifteen.

  Without saying anything, I pointed to the wall clock. Day swiveled in his chair, stared over his glasses at the clock, then clicked shut the lid of his watch and dropped it in his pocket.

  “All right, Moon,” he said sourly. “Give your story over again for the record.”

  Slowly, so as not to get ahead of the stenographer’s racing pencil, I went over the events leading to my discovery of Vance Logan’s body. I started with my conversation with Ann Lawson, at which I first learned of the chauffeur’s existence, explained that the possibility of Donald Lawson Senior’s death having been murder instead of an accident had occurred to me, and this was the reason I had wanted to interview Logan.

  When I finished, the inspector nodded without asking further questions, and the stenographer left the room. This I considered a tribute to the thoroughness of my report, for I have seen Day fire questions at a witness for a half hour after the poor guy thought he had unloaded everything he knew.

  I broke the ensuing silence by asking, “Don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting my gun back for a while, is there?”

  The inspector shook his head. “Not till it’s been presented as evidence at a trial.”

  “That means about a year after the guys are caught,” I said glumly. “Get a report on that doped Coke yet?”

  “Yeah. Chloral hydrate. Exactly 1.5 grams to the bottle, which the lab says is a pretty heavy dose, but safely under a fatal one.”

  I said, “How about your check on the finances of our suspects?”

  “Judas Priest!” he said. “I just put a guy on it this morning.”

  “Think you’ll have it by tomorrow?”

  “I’d better,” he said grimly, “or a certain young college cop is going to get bounced right back in the commissioner
’s lap for assignment to another department.”

  “While you’re at it,” I suggested, “why don’t you add Vance Logan to the list?”

  “What for?”

  “Didn’t it strike you a little strange that an ex-chauffeur lived at the Grand Towers?”

  Day stared at me thoughtfully as he scratched the fuzz over one ear. “I guess that is a pretty fancy place.”

  “Three hundred a month for an apartment like Logan’s. I looked at one once.”

  Fishing a blank scrap of paper from the litter on his desk, the inspector made a penciled note.

  I asked, “How about that note of introduction you were going to give me?”

  Pawing through the litter again, he found a piece of memo paper and tossed it to me. It was addressed both to Dr. Thomas Halleran of City Hospital and Professor Laurence Quisby of the State Teachers’ College. It stated that I was investigating the death of Donald Lawson Jr. in a semiofficial capacity, and asked that I be given co-operation.

  “The first is the guy who performed the autopsy,” Day said. “He’s a second-year intern at City Hospital.”

  “I know him,” I said.

  “The second is the guy we use as our handwriting expert. Teaches educational psychology, whatever that is. Handwriting is his hobby.”

  “Any chance of taking along Don’s suicide note?” I asked.

  The inspector frowned at me. “And get it lost?”

  “I won’t lose it. But there isn’t much point in talking to Professor Quisby unless I have the note for him to examine again.”

  “Humph,” he said. Leaning over, he jerked open a desk drawer and removed a cardboard file folder. He opened it, removed a sheet of paper, and tossed it to me. “Lose that and I’ll slap a warrant on you for destroying evidence.”

  I grinned at him and folded the note into my breast pocket. Another twenty minutes passed before the police stenographer returned with my statement typed up in triplicate. By the time I had read it over and signed it, it was after ten o’clock.

  The city morgue is in the basement of the City Hospital, and that is where I found young Dr. Halleran. I left Fausta and Grace in the anteroom, which had posted about its walls a series of particularly revolting pictures of bodies in various stages of decomposition, and followed a lank, dour-faced morgue attendant back to the laboratory.

  Dr. Tom Halleran was a thin, youngish man with slightly stooped shoulders, an eager expression, and ears that flared outward like twin air scoops. His stoop came from a habit of thrusting his head forward inquisitively, and this, combined with his eager expression and cocked ears, created the unnerving impression that he was constantly waiting with bated breath for you to say something.

  I had had dealings with him before, and though we were not particularly good friends, we were on a first-name basis. It was not the young doctor’s fault we weren’t better friends, for he practically folded me to his bosom whenever we met. But invariably our conversation turned to the morbid subject of overripe cadavers, which seemed to fascinate him, and about fifteen minutes at a stretch was all I could take.

  “Manny Moon!” he said heartily, looking up from a microscope under which he undoubtedly had something gruesome, and advancing across the small room with outstretched hand.

  I shook the hand without enthusiasm and showed him the note from Warren Day.

  “Donald Lawson,” he said. “I ought to remember him. Homicide dragged me down here at one a.m. to perform the autopsy. A real stinker he was. Been in the sun nearly a week, and all mashed up on top of it. Seven feet of entrails I had laid out on the drainboard before I was through.”

  “Makes me hungry. to think about it,” I said. “But what I wanted was your findings. In nontechnical terms, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I can tell you from memory, without even going to the card index. Have a cigar?”

  He opened a cabinet drawer and produced one of those black and crooked things imported from Italy that look like gnarled twigs.

  “No, thanks.” I declined politely. “Little strong for me.”

  “Nothing like them for this business,” he said, lighting up and inhaling with relish. “I’ve tried incense and bathroom antiseptic, but no luck. These are the only way I know to drown out the stink of a rotting cadaver. Anesthetizes the taste buds, I think, so you can’t smell so well. Even helps when we have a floater, though it’s still pretty bad with them. Know what a floater is, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said unwisely.

  “One we get from the river. They don’t float till they’ve been in a few days, you know. First they sink, but when decomposition starts, up they come. Know why?”

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  “Gas. When tissue rots, it forms gas, and the cadaver swells up just like a balloon. Pops it right to the surface. I’ve had them three times their normal size. Have to be careful with them, too. When you use the scalpel, they go down like a punctured tire and squirt fluid all over the place. If you’re not nimble, you’re likely as not to get it right in the eye.”

  “About Donald Lawson—” I suggested.

  “Oh, yeah. We were talking about him. Plain case of gravity. Hardly an unbroken bone in his body.”

  I said, “We’re pretty sure it wasn’t an accident, but there’s still some question if it was suicide or murder. How complete an autopsy did you make?”

  “The works. That’s what Homicide asked for, and that’s what they got. Of course I can’t tell you how he came to fall, but nothing but the fall killed him.”

  “I wondered if possibly he might have been unconscious when he fell.”

  Halleran shrugged. “No way to tell that. He might even have been dead. I mean, if someone bashed his head in with a hammer, then tossed him off of whatever it was he fell from, we’d have no way of sorting the hammer blow out from all the other concussions.”

  I said, “I meant was he drunk or doped or anything like that? We’ve had another instance of chloral hydrate being used in this same case.”

  The young doctor shook his head. “Not a chance. We tested for everything. Found a slight accumulation of alcohol in the brain, but not enough to make him unconscious. More like he’d had a few beers.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” I told him. “Thanks for the information.”

  “Glad to help,” he said. “But don’t hurry off. Just before you came I got a call that a floater’s coming in. Ought to be here any minute.”

  I mumbled that I was certainly sorry to miss it, but I had another appointment.

  “Well, take a look at this before you leave, anyway. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

  Opening the same drawer from which he had obtained his cigar, he drew out a small, dark-colored object resembling a dried fig. He laid it on my palm.

  “What is it?” I inquired.

  “A hobo’s ear. Guy was in a knife fight, and this came in two days after he was buried in Potter’s Field. A street sweeper found it.”

  He stooped to pick the object from the floor, where it had fallen from my palm.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “Clumsy of me.”

  Before he could find more curiosities to interest me, I made my way back to where Fausta and Grace were waiting. The two women were staring fascinatedly at a photograph of a marble slab on which lay a torso without arms, legs, or head. The lanky morgue attendant was staring just as fascinatedly at the legs of his beautiful visitors.

  “If you can tear yourselves away from that art, I’ll buy you both a drink,” I said. “I’m having a double myself.”

  “I feel a little hungry,” Fausta said. “May I have a sandwich?”

  “Not in front of me,” I said violently.

  XIX

  FOR SOME OBSCURE REASON a city ordinance forbids the establishment of a tavern within two hundred yards of a hospital, which meant a two-block walk before we could get a drink. We barely made it, and while Fausta sipped a rum Coke and
Grace a plain Coke, I anchored my breakfast down with a double rye.

  Professor Laurence Quisby was teaching a class when we arrived at the state teachers’ college, a group of three buildings in the center of the business district. There was little college atmosphere about the school. There was no campus. The buildings came right to the edge of the sidewalk, just as did the other office buildings in the area.

  A clerk in the administration building told us Professor Quisby would be free at noon, and since it was already past eleven-thirty, I told him we would wait. He showed us to a small office which had Professor Quisby’s name inscribed on the door and offered us the comfort of three straight-backed chairs.

  The professor turned out to be a round, gray-haired man with a sad face and a Van Dyke beard. He glanced at Fausta and Grace without surprise and without the faintest flicker of admiration in his eyes, which led me to believe he was not long for this world. Dejectedly he lowered himself into the chair behind his desk, turned sad eyes on me, and waited without saying anything.

  Not to be outdone, I pushed Warren Day’s note under his nose without speaking, either. He read it, pushed it back, and elevated one eyebrow inquiringly. That licked me, for I didn’t know the signs for the questions I wanted to ask, so I had to use my voice.

  “This is Miss Grace Lawson, Professor,” I said, indicating the girl. “She’s the sister of the lad who wrote that note. And this is Miss Fausta Moreni, who has no connection with the case, but just came along for the ride.”

  He offered a nearly indiscernible nod to each.

  “We’ve come pretty close to a dead end on this thing,” I told him. “So we’re rechecking all the original evidence.” Removing the suicide note from my inner pocket, I pushed it across to him. “I understand you positively identified the handwriting here as the deceased’s by comparing it with other handwriting of his.”

  With his eyes fixed on the note, his head went up once and down once in a depressed affirmative.

  “I also understand you said the writing indicated emotional strain.”

  He gave the same signal. Rapidly I was becoming frustrated, but I made a final try.