“I heard about them. I’ll see them in the morning.” He laughed in a deliberately ghoulish manner. “Thanks for the business.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but I think he meant it. I said, “Do me a favor and phone your report to my flat as soon as you get it, will you?”
“Sure, Manny. Looking for anything in particular?” “Yes. The short one has a previous wound and is still bandaged up. I’d like to know if it was made by one bullet or two.”
His voice sounded puzzled. “All right. Can do.” Then he brightened. “I’ll start about seven-thirty. Why don’t you come down and watch?”
I told him I hated to miss the chance, but I always had breakfast at seven-thirty. Then I hung up before he could make any joking remarks about the lovely fare he could provide for breakfast at the morgue.
“What was that double talk about two bullets?” Day wanted to know.
I grinned at him. “That was for your benefit, Inspector. It isn’t actually what I wanted to know at all.”
“Are you holding out again?” he demanded.
“Sure,” I admitted brazenly, then as his nose began to whiten, I added, “But only overnight. I’ll let you in on my wild idea after I hear from Halleran in the morning. Let’s go home and go to bed.”
XXV
I KEEP MY PHONE in my bedroom because most of the people I know stay up all night and think nothing of making phone calls at four in the morning. A scientific study of the matter led me to the conclusion that although I get more phone calls during the day than at night, it requires much less energy to rise from an easy chair three or four times and walk into the bedroom than it does to climb out of bed even once, strap on my leg, and stagger, half-asleep, into the front room.
When the phone rang at eight a.m., I simply reached over and grabbed it without even bothering to wake up.
“Fumph,” I said intelligently.
“Tom Halleran,” a cheery voice said. “You awake yet?” “No,” I said. I sat up, shook my head, then replaced the receiver to my ear. “Partially now. Go ahead.”
“Both customers were D.O.A.,” he told me. “The short one caught a bullet at the juncture of the frontal bones, it penetrated downward clear through the medulla oblongata and exited—“
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “I don’t know a frontal bone from an elbow, but I know what killed the guy. All I’m interested in is his previous wound. Had his arm in a sling, didn’t he?”
“That’s right. Apparently a day-or-two-old gunshot wound. Shattered the right humerus. Seemed to be only one wound though.”
“That’s all I expected,” I told him. “That question about two bullets was just to confuse Warren Day. Would you say it was a serious wound?”
“He’d have gotten over it, if that’s what you mean. Might have developed a stiff arm. A shattered bone is never exactly a minor injury.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
“The big guy’s previous wound was a little more complicated,” he said.
“What?”
“I said the big guy’s previous wound was more complicated.”
I thought this over awhile and finally asked, “What previous wound?”
“He had a stomach wound about two weeks old. He still had a compress on it, and I’d say he hadn’t been out of bed more than a week.”
“Thanks again,” I said. “Call me any time you need a fresh corpse.”
As soon as I hung up, I lifted the receiver again and phoned Homicide.
“Inspector Warren Day, please,” I said.
After a moment Day came to the phone. “Yes?”
“Manny Moon,” I said.
“You’re phoning from bed,” he accused. “You couldn’t possibly be up this early.”
“I’ve already done the laundry and got the kids off to school,” I told him. “How’s the chief this morning?”
“All right. I just phoned the hospital. He checks out in an hour. The doc wants him to rest at home today, but he’ll be in tomorrow.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “What you got that’s recent on Dude Garrity and Harry Sommerfield?”
“About ten pages of teletype. One or the other was wanted everywhere but Greenland and British Somali-land. Get specific.”
“Where would Garrity have picked up a stomach wound about two weeks ago?”
“Nowhere,” he said promptly. “I got the record memorized.”
“Then recheck your memory,” I told him. “Doctor Tom Halleran just phoned me, and Garrity’s got one.”
Day was silent for a minute. “So what difference does it make now?” he asked finally.
“Maybe none. But do me a favor and recheck, eh?”
“All right,” he said grumpily. “Drop down later on and maybe I’ll have something. You hear from Quisby yet?”
“No. I’m going to phone him now.” “Ring me back if he has anything,” Day said, and hung up in my ear.
The next call I made was to Fausta’s apartment. Grace Lawson answered.
“Good morning,” I said. “You people had breakfast yet?”
“Just getting ready to fix it.”
“Hold off a half hour and I’ll join you,” I said.
“All right. I’ll tell Fausta, but you better hurry. And listen, Mr. Moon. Is it all right if Arnold comes up to see me here?”
“Not unless I’m there, too. Has he tried to?” “He’s downstairs now, but Mr. Greene won’t let him up.”
“Good for Mr. Greene,” I said. “See you in a half hour.”
I made another call, to Professor Laurence Quisby’s house. His sister answered the phone.
“Laurence tried to phone you three times,” she said. “But your line has been busy for fifteen minutes. He had to leave because he had an eight-thirty class, but he wants you to stop by the school.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Do you happen to know if he deciphered the message?”
“Laurence never discusses his police business with me,” she said in a cool voice.
My last phone call before getting out of bed was for a taxi. In the fifteen minutes it took for it to arrive, I managed to shave, shower, and dress.
I got to El Patio about a quarter of nine.
At the bottom of the stairs to Fausta’s apartment I found two people. Mouldy Greene sat on the third step with his arms folded. Glowering at him with his hands on his hips and his face red from anger was Arnold Tate.
I said, “Good morning, gentlemen,” to which Mouldy waved languidly and said, “Hi, Sarge.”
Arnold swung around. “Mr. Moon, will you tell this—this gentleman it’s all right for me to see my wife?”
“Had breakfast?” I asked.
“Yes. I mean no. I had a cup of coffee. How can I eat when I don’t know how Grace is? And why aren’t you with her?”
“Mr. Greene and I are working shifts,” I told him. To Mouldy I said, “Let him go up. Breakfast ought to be ready by now, so he can’t poison it.”
Grace greeted her husband as though they had been separated two years instead of two nights. They sat holding hands through the whole meal, hardly touching the pancakes and sausages Fausta went to the trouble of preparing. To make Fausta feel better, Mouldy and I ate their shares.
“Why aren’t you in school?” I asked Arnold, when the immediate business of breakfast was disposed of.
“I cut,” he said. “I can’t study or sit in class or anything when I don’t know whether or not Grace is in danger.”
Fausta went out to the hall in answer to a knock on the door and returned with the morning paper. She scanned the headlines, glanced up at me sharply, then continued to read, frowning deeper the farther she read.
“Manny Moon!” she said when she had finished the item. “Why did you try to get shot before you came to take me out?”
“I needed the reward money before I could afford you,” I said.
“Playing hero!” she said scornfully, and tossed the
paper to Grace.
It went from hand to hand, with me getting it last. The write-up was page one and was by-lined by Carl Saunders, the Globe’s top feature writer. It referred to my “daring, singlehanded assault on two of the nation’s most desperate criminals” and made me sound either like a movie-style hero or a suicidal idiot, I couldn’t decide which.
Neither could the other persons present, apparently, for reactions were mixed. Grace turned starry-eyed with admiration, even shifting her attention temporarily from Arnold to me. Arnold examined me with a peculiar expression which indicated he thought I was mad, and Mouldy Greene inquired, “Those the same characters I almost got before you chased them away?”
“Yes,” I said. “Want half the reward?”
“No, no,” he said magnanimously. “After all, you was on the spot.”
At nine-thirty I left with Fausta and Grace again in tow, after firmly telling Arnold to get back to school and stop worrying about his bride’s safety. He reluctantly agreed only after Grace backed me up by appealing to the scholastic side of his nature.
“Suppose you failed a course, Arnold,” she said. “You’d never get to be a university president, and I’d be so ashamed.”
This would have left me cold, but apparently it touched an inner chord in Arnold, for he gave up without further struggle.
My two female companions were dressed more conservatively today, Fausta wearing the same dirndl and peasant blouse she had discarded in favor of a sunsuit yesterday, and Grace wearing a backless sun dress which exposed a good deal of her top, but at least covered her thighs. I still felt a bit like the manager of a burlesque house, but I lost the feeling that I should keep looking over my shoulder to see if the cops were raiding the joint.
At the state teachers’ college we caught Professor Quisby during a ten-minute break between classes. He handed me a typewritten paper without comment. It was a transcript of the complete note written by Don Lawson, and it read:
Dear Ann:
I hate to leave this way, because undoubtedly the publicity will be unpleasant for you, but I think it the wisest course. Explain things to Grace. Uncle Doug may be able to make you understand better, for he knows my condition. I can’t stand to just sit and wait for death, so I’m going forward to meet it. I’m writing to you instead of (Here the word Kate was scratched out) Grace because you’ve been the only person aside from Uncle Doug and Maggie who ever made any attempt to understand me.
Love, Don.
I read it over twice, then handed it to Grace and let her read it.
“Why it was suicide after all, then!” Grace said when she had finished. “Why do you suppose someone cut off the bottom part?”
Professor Quisby cleared his throat. “Perhaps,” he intoned, “someone deliberately wanted it to look like murder.”
Fausta read the transcript, screwed up her nose, and said, “I think you made a lot of trouble for nothing. This is no more than you had before.”
“Let’s see what Warren Day has to say about it,” I suggested.
We found the chief of Homicide in his office poring over teletypes for the last part of June and early July.
“I think I got it,” he greeted me when I opened his door in response to a shouted “Come in!” Then his eyes bugged out as he saw Fausta’s bare shoulders, shifted to Grace’s scanty sun dress, and he blinked rapidly twice.
“Hello, hello,” he said in a faintly strangled voice. “Come in and sit down.”
“What do you think you’ve got?” I inquired when we had all found chairs.
“Eh?” He glanced surreptitiously at Fausta’s shoulders for a second time, hurriedly dropped his eyes, and studied a sheet of teletype he was holding upside down.
“You said you thought you had something,” I reminded him patiently.
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” he said, coming back to earth. He inverted the teletype sheet and scanned it quickly.
“This is for June twenty-eighth,” he said. He paused, started to hunt in his ash tray for a used butt, then changed his mind and produced a fresh cigar from his breast pocket, apparently in honor of his female guests. “June twenty-eighth two masked bandits tried to stick up the Central Trust Bank at Peoria, Illinois. A teller managed to sound the alarm, and they were beaten off without getting anything. One was believed to be wounded. They headed southwest, switched cars with a traveling salesman after knocking him out with a gun butt, and their trail was lost at the Illinois border.”
He paused long enough to shift his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “No one was able to give a very good description of the bandits, even as to size. You know how those things go; everybody sees something different. But at least two of the witnesses agreed that one was tall and the other short. And they all agreed that both were dressed either in white gabardine or Palm Beach.”
The inspector stopped and peered at me over his glasses.
“Could be our boys,” I said. “And the date is only two and a half weeks back.” I tossed him the transcript of Don Lawson’s suicide note.
When he had read it, he frowned at me and asked, “What do you make of this?”
“What do you make of it?” I countered.
He reread the note, then looked up puzzledly. “Can’t see a reason in the world why anyone would cut off the lower part. As far as the reference to Doctor Lawson is concerned, he himself told us young Don fancied he had every disease in the book, and called at his office regularly with fatal symptoms. We also knew Don didn’t get on too well with his sister here, but was fond of Maggie and Ann—Mrs. Lawson. Think the maid could have cut it off because her name appeared and then was scratched through?”
“Not likely,” I said. “She wouldn’t have been able to tell what the scratched-out word was without a microscope.”
“Then I don’t get it at all,” the inspector decided. “Just offhand I’d say this pretty definitely establishes the boy’s death as suicide, and knocks our last theory right in the head.” He glanced quickly at Grace, as though afraid she might know what the last theory was.
I shook my head. “You can’t get around Vance Logan’s income and a certain other person’s small bank account.”
Day frowned at me. “You mean you still go for the theory you had yesterday?” Again he glanced at Grace self-consciously.
I nodded. “I not only go for it. This clinches it. I’m sure who the murderer is.”
XXVI
MY REMARK DREW A MOMENT of dead silence from everyone. Grace was the first to speak.
“It isn’t anyone we know, is it?” she asked inanely.
When I glanced at her, her face was suddenly white, and I felt a twinge of pity.
“I mean,” she said in a small voice, “it isn’t any of the people—” Her voice trailed off and disappeared.
“I’m afraid it is,” I said gently.
Warren Day scratched his head uncertainly, glanced at Grace, and then averted his eyes. “Since you’ve gone this far, you might as well tell her who it is.”
I cocked one eyebrow at him. “We haven’t a shred of evidence, and I can’t afford to be sued for scandalmonger-ing. At least till I collect the reward money on Garrity and Sommerfield.”
“If you get any,” he said shortly.
“What do you mean, ‘If I get any'?”
“Most of the rewards were ‘for information leading to arrest and conviction,’ “ he said impatiently. “Besides destroying the only evidence we had, you cost yourself at least eight thousand bucks by being trigger-happy. So far we have only three bulletins offering rewards dead or alive, and they come to only twenty-one hundred dollars.”
I shrugged. “So what’s wrong with twenty-one hundred dollars?”
He lowered his glasses and gazed at me forbiddingly over them. “It’s customary in the department for at least half the reward money to go to the family of any cop killed during the operation. Two were killed in this one.” His lips pursed, and he said more slowly, “Of course y
ou’re not in the department, and can be a heel if you want to.”
I felt myself flush. “Were both the cops who were killed married?”
“Sure. And with a total of five children.”
“All right,” I said irritably. “Whatever there is, divide it between them.” To Fausta I said, “For those dates we have, you just fell out of the formal-clothes league. You can wear what you have on.”
Her beautiful shoulders lifted and fell. “I do not care. I am used to hamburgers and beer when you take me out, anyway.”
Warren Day said, “Listen, Moon, I want a word with you privately.” He turned to Grace and Fausta. “Do you ladies mind stepping out in the main office a few minutes?”
Both ladies indicated they would not mind. When we were alone, the inspector said, “Now we can talk without using code. Listen, I got an idea.” “What?”
“If we pull Mrs. Lawson in without evidence, Jonathan Mannering will slap us with a writ of habeas corpus before we can even question her. Suppose we drop out to her home and throw what we got at her without making an arrest? Just possibly she might break wide open.”
“Suits me,” I said.
The inspector cleared his throat. “Listen, Manny—” His voice trailed off.
“What?” I asked cautiously. When Warren Day wants a favor, my name becomes “Manny.” When he gives orders, it remains “Moon.”
He turned his nose toward the window, watching me from the corners of his eyes. “I know this is a little irregular, but would you mind doing the talking to Mrs. Lawson?”
“Why? I have no official police position.” “Well,” he said, flushing slightly, then ended lamely, “I’ll deputize you and make it official.” “No, thanks.”
He turned his face from the window to face me. “Listen, Manny, it’s not often I ask you a favor.” I didn’t say anything.
“We’ve known each other a long time. Why, I practically regard you as a brother—”
“Son would be more appropriate,” I interrupted.
“As a son, then,” he said agreeably. “It’s not very much to ask. It’s not that I’m afraid to tell her, understand. But you’ve got a knack at that sort of thing. I’ve often said to the chief, if there’s one guy who knows how to worm a confession—”
Gallows in My Garden Page 20
