Murder for Two

by George Harmon Coxe

  “Come on, will you?” he stormed. “It’s late. We’re liable to miss her. What’re you sitting here for?”

  “I’m getting a drink,” Casey said, “before the bar closes. And anyway,” he said, “I’m getting sick of your yapping. You know everything, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Show her your shield, that ought to help.”

  Logan’s face darkened. He opened his mouth, closed it. “All right,” he said. “I hurt your feelings. I apologize. Now get the hell off that stool and come on.”

  Casey looked at him; then he grinned. He finished his drink, poured another, told the bartender he was taking it out back and paid him.

  Dinah King’s dressing-room was the best the Club 17 had to offer—it had a window. It also had two doors, one giving on the alley and one opening from the corridor along which Casey and Logan had just come.

  “Oh, hello, Flash,” she said when she opened the door.

  “Hi, Dinah. Can we come in a minute?”

  “All right.”

  She stepped away from the door, a full-blown woman in her late twenties with a show-girl figure, auburn hair, milk-white skin, and a red, mobile mouth. Apparently she was just going out, for she wore a dark blue dress and a hat, and her fur coat was tossed on the couch. She waited in the center of the room while Logan closed the door, smiling faintly at Casey and then looking questioningly at Logan.

  “This is Lieutenant Logan,” Casey said.

  “Oh.” The word came out on a rising inflection. “How do you do.”

  “Hello, Miss King,” Logan said.

  “Won’t—you sit down?”

  She backed to the couch and sat down, folding her hands on her knees. Logan took the rocker and that left the vanity bench for Casey.

  “Is this a social call, Flash?” Dinah King said.

  “He wanted to meet you,” Casey said. He felt a little awkward now and wished he hadn’t come. “I said I’d introduce him, but he has to do his own talking.”

  “Well, Lieutenant?” Dinah King said.

  Logan had a time getting started. It was obvious that he was impressed with this woman, and that was natural. Her size was impressive to begin with and she had a fine figure, well-rounded, not fat—though she might be later—and her voice was warm and throaty and touched by the faintest of accents. It was both the warmness and the accent that gave that extra something to her singing, explaining in a large measure her popularity with the patrons of Club 17.

  She had been singing here steadily for nearly two years—and that’s a long stand in a night club. She did a local radio program once a week, nothing very pretentious but she had a sponsor, which was more than most of them have. Casey had met her a year ago, bought her a drink now and then when she wasn’t busy elsewhere. There was nothing else. It was part of her job and she was pleasant about it and she was just as popular with the college boys as she was with the butter-and-egg men. Watching her now while Logan got out cigarettes and offered her one, Casey decided that Russell Gifford’s infatuation—if that was what it was—was easily understandable.

  “You’re a friend of Russell Gifford’s, aren’t you?” Logan asked finally. “I suppose you know his wife.”

  “Yes.” Dinah King’s smile remained at the corners of her mouth but it died instantly in her eyes.

  “Did you know—”

  “That she was killed tonight? Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “How?”

  “Mr. Gifford phoned me.”

  “Did he tell you how she was killed?”

  “He said she was shot. In her car, wasn’t it?”

  Casey took some of his drink, admiring the woman’s composure, liking that faintly accented tone. He watched Logan scowl at the end of his cigarette. Logan hadn’t expected such forthrightness and it stumped him momentarily. He rose and moved to the window, turned and came back, a slender, black-eyed man with straight black hair. He did not, Casey realized, look much like the layman’s idea of a lieutenant of detectives. His clothes were good and well-kept. He wore them well too, with occasionally a boutonniere and sometimes a dark Homburg. Good-looking in a lean dark way, there was an air of competence about him, a suggestion of hardness lurking in his make-up that, never flaunted unnecessarily, could be summoned instantly when needed. Now he came back, approaching his subject more directly.

  “You called on Miss Taylor tonight.”

  Dinah King considered this, as though trying to guess just how much Logan knew. “Yes,” she said finally.

  “You left her apartment about nine. Mind telling me the reason for that call?”

  Dinah King rose quickly and picked up her coat. “I’m afraid I do, Lieutenant. It was purely a personal matter and I don’t care to discuss it.”

  Logan looked at her and took his time doing it. He wasn’t insolent in his inspection, just casual. A crooked smile slid across his mouth and vanished.

  “All right, Miss King,” he said. “You see, we already know the reason for the call. Mr. Gifford was more frank with us.”

  Dinah King’s glance wavered and suddenly stopped wavering and her eyes took fire. Spots of color touched her cheekbones and when she answered her voice was not warm, but slow and deliberate.

  “Then you know everything, don’t you?”

  “Nearly everything,” Logan said. “I just wanted to see if your reasons were the same as Mr. Gifford’s. Oh, by the way, I suppose you came over here after you left Miss Taylor.”

  Dinah King had turned away to slip on her coat. She felt her hair and wrapped the coat more snugly as she raced Logan.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a show here at ten-fifteen.”

  Casey got up and drained his glass. From the way he felt he might as well have had a glass of water. He didn’t like this scene and he thought Logan was cockeyed in assuming Dinah King had anything to do with the death of Rosalind Taylor. Furthermore he had an idea that no more would Dinah King sit at a table with him and talk and have a drink when he needed company.

  He said good-night and she answered him, which was something, and he and Logan went down the corridor. Out in the main room tables were being shoved around with the chairs on top and the cleaning corps was getting down to business. The barmen had all gone and Casey left his glass on the counter and followed Logan out into the night.

  “Satisfied?” he said, when they got in the car.

  “No,” Logan said.

  “You don’t know a damn thing more than you knew before.”

  “I met her, didn’t I? And I’ll give you one thing. She’s nice, all right. Very nice. Of course that wouldn’t stop her from being a murderess—”

  “Oh, quiet,” Casey said wearily.

  “But she is nice.”

  “What good does it do you? After tonight she wouldn’t look at you unless you had a warrant.”

  “I know,” Logan said. “That’s what a guy gets for being a cop. Especially a homicide cop. Well, where do you want to go?”

  “The paper,” Casey said. “I got a bottle there—if some louse hasn’t been at it.”

  Chapter Seven

  KAREN HAS A VISITOR

  TOM WADE WAS DROWSING in his tipped-back chair in the studio anteroom waiting for one o’clock to come. His eyes were half-closed as he looked at the door and, although he hadn’t realized it, it seemed to him that he was dreaming; at least he saw a vision, and such a lovely one that he was afraid to think about it for fear it would go away.

  She stood in the doorway, this vision, a slim, blond girl with wind-swept hair and slim, straight legs. She wore a light, camel’s-hair coat, with the collar turned up, and under her arm was an over-sized patent-leather handbag.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice as bright and friendly as her face. “Is Mr. Casey in?”

  Wade jumped up, knocking over the chair, and was instantly awake. “Hello,” he stammered. “Gosh.” He gulped and fumbled for the chair, because such visions never came to the studio and the immediate shock was great. “I thought I was dreaming,
” he said, and encouraged by her laugh, grinned back at her. “Come on in. He isn’t here now, but he might come by any time. Sit down here. Let me take your bag.”

  He pulled the chair from Casey’s desk and put her bag down. She threw back her coat and took the offered chair.

  “I’m Karen Harding,” she said.

  “I’m Tom Wade.”

  Karen Harding said, “How do you do,” and then, after a momentary silence, “Have you been here long?”

  “Oh, sure,” Wade said. “About five years.”

  She laughed. “I meant tonight.”

  “Oh. Well, about an hour or so, I guess.”

  She looked at her wrist watch. It was twelve-forty. “He hasn’t been in then?”

  Wade shook his head. He was a plump-faced, blue-eyed youth, good-natured, happy-go-lucky, and enthusiastic about almost everything. This girl, he realized, was different from most girls he knew. Just how the hell Casey ever got to know her he couldn’t imagine, but the point was she knew Casey and unless he, Wade, did something in a hurry she would probably walk out on him.

  “But he ought to be in,” he said quickly. “Would you like a drink? I think there’s some in Casey’s desk—”

  “No, thanks,” Karen Harding said. “I’ll just wait a few minutes.”

  “How about a beer then, and maybe a sandwich? I generally go out for something about this time,” Wade lied. “You can wait here and I’ll be right back.”

  Something about Tom Wade’s eagerness stopped Karen Harding’s refusal before it passed her lips. She didn’t know why, but she did sense that her acceptance really meant something to this boy and so she smiled and nodded.

  “I think that would be very nice. Cheese, I think,” she said. “On rye bread.”

  “Beer or coffee?”

  “Beer.”

  Wade went out fast and she opened her bag and took out the Leica. She looked at it for a while and then, sitting up, she began to re-wind the film. When Wade came back she was sitting there smoking.

  “I’ll get a glass,” Wade said when he opened the bottles.

  “Oh, I can drink out of a bottle.”

  Wade didn’t believe it. He watched until he saw her do it without spilling any on her chin.

  “You can at that,” he said, and pulled up a chair. “Look. I’ve been thinking. Are you one of those A.W.V.S. girls that Casey teaches?”

  “Why—yes.”

  Wade said, “Oh-oh,” sorrowfully.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Wade, but what he thought was, And you thought you were needling Casey!

  “He’s very nice, isn’t he?” Karen Harding said.

  “Nice? I never heard anyone call him that before. He’s big but he doesn’t shove little guys around. He goes around grumbling and crabbing and finding fault with this and that, but it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s an act. You know why? Because he’s got a heart that big and he doesn’t want anybody to know that ’way down deep he’s a sentimentalist or that he’d break a leg for a guy he liked. To hear him tell it you’d think he never had a break. You’d think he had all his illusions kicked out of him, that he hated his job, and that if he could he’d quit it in a minute. Hah! He wouldn’t trade places with Rockefeller. He tried to get in the Army this morning. To fight. He could have had jobs with a couple of those picture magazines. He could have been taking pictures in Australia or Egypt or any place else, only he didn’t want that. Well, they turned him down this morning because he had a trick knee. They don’t know what they’re doing, those guys, but—I don’t know. I’m kind of glad they didn’t take him. He’d probably get himself killed the first damned day they gave him an assignment, the big lug.”

  Karen Harding sat very still, aware now that Wade was looking at something a long way off and that for the moment he was not conscious of her, nor of the half-eaten sandwich in his hand. What Tom Wade had said was neither very polished nor grammatical, but thinking of what he meant she knew she’d never heard a nicer tribute.

  “You like him very much, don’t you?” she said.

  Wade looked at his sandwich. He took a bite. He remembered his first days when he hardly knew the difference between a flashbulb and a spread light. He remembered Casey coaching him and bullying him and covering up for him when he missed assignments and getting him out of jams his own recklessness and stupidity had fashioned. He took a swallow of beer.

  “He’s just the greatest guy in the world, that’s all. And the best damned photographer.”

  He took some more beer and put down the bottle; then he looked at her and seemed to realize that for a few moments he had been a long way off. He grinned, embarrassed.

  “I guess I kind of got wound up.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “But don’t ever tell him what I said,” Wade cautioned. “He’ll break my neck.”

  “All right,” Karen Harding said and then, as the silence came between them, she thought of the film in her bag. She glanced at her watch. “Can you develop infrared film?” she asked abruptly.

  “Sure.”

  “Could you develop this?”

  Wade looked at the 35 millimeter film. He grinned at her again. It was like asking him if he could brush his teeth.

  “You mean now? Come on. What’ve you been doing, fooling with blackout bulbs?”

  Karen Harding said she had and Wade led her through a doorway, past the dimly lighted printing-room to the row of inky cubbyholes beyond. After that she could hear him doing things but she couldn’t see a thing until after the film was in the developer a few minutes and he turned on the dark-red safelight recessed in the wall.

  Presently they were in the printing-room and Wade was drying the film in front of a hot air fan. He sounded a little shocked when he saw how much film had been wasted.

  “You only got five exposures here,” he said.

  Karen Harding said it didn’t matter and watched him adjust the enlarger. Wade made five prints without really looking at the subject matter and she asked him please to make an extra one of the print she had taken of the two men with Henry Byrkman. It wasn’t until Wade had taken the six prints from the ferrotype dryer that he realized three of the pictures were of the same subject.

  He looked at them closely, turned quickly, and went into the anteroom for a more thorough inspection. What he saw in that distorted light-scheme which infra-red film produces was a sedan standing at the curb with someone leaning inside the front door and a white-coated ambulance attendant waiting beside it; what he saw was an ambulance—or part of one—with the sedan in the background and a crowd of people on the sidewalk; what he saw was a man (Russell Gifford, though Wade did not know that then) talking to Lieutenant Logan, and Flash Casey standing near by.

  Wade looked up, his face all humps and wrinkles. “What’s this?”

  “Why—that’s Rosalind Taylor’s car and the ambulance and that man there is—”

  “What?” Wade started, big-eyed and mouth open. “Were you there?”

  “Why—yes. With Mr. Casey.”

  “And you took these?” Wade gasped air and almost fell over. “Oh, brother,” he said. He almost hugged her and compromised by grabbing her arm. “Look, Miss Harding, can I have one of these? Can the Express have one?”

  Karen Harding could not help laughing at Wade’s excitement. But there was a pleasant vibration too that ran along her spine.

  “Of course,” she said. “Take them all. I brought them for Mr. Casey.”

  Tom Wade wheeled and ran from the room. “Oh, brother,” he said as he went through the door. “Oh, brother!”

  Karen Harding sat down at Casey’s desk. She looked at the print of Casey she had taken, at the two prints Wade had made for her of the men with Henry Byrkman. There was something else in her bag too that she thought about but did not touch. It was a manila folder with some papers inside and she had folded it once again when she stuck it into her bag. She was worried about that folder. She wasn’
t sure she had done the right thing. She brushed aside this uncertainty now by trying to ignore its significance, by looking again at the two prints.

  Presently she opened the center drawer of the desk and put one of them inside, hoping Casey would think she had done the right thing. There was a scratch pad here and she found a pencil and wrote a little note for him which she put under the telephone. The remaining print she put in her bag together with the roll of film.

  Wade came back, his round face all grin and his voice gleeful. “Blaine died,” he said.

  “Blaine?”

  “He’s the city editor. He likes to ride Casey. He’s a cold-blooded so-and-so but he’s a damned fine desk man. I showed them to him, all three at once.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I’m telling you. He died. He wanted to know where I got them and I asked him did he want them or didn’t he. Boy, how he wanted ’em. I let him think Casey had something to do with it. Of course Casey won’t let that ride. Tomorrow he’ll tell Blaine you took them but just for tonight—if you don’t mind too much—”

  “But I want Mr. Casey to get credit,” Karen Harding said.

  Wade grinned. “Look,” he said. “Forget the Mister Casey. He won’t like you. It’s Flash. Everybody calls him that mostly. You know, from flashgun.” He shook his head in wonderment. “Though how you sneaked those shots, with Casey right there and drawing nothing but a blank—I guess it was Logan’s fault, hunh? And he wasn’t watching you. Look, do you want to wait some more?”

  Karen Harding said no. She said she thought she had better go along.

  “Okay, I’ll go along with you,” Wade said; then eyed her covertly. “I mean, at least as far as a taxi.”

  At the corner of Tremont, Wade put her in a cab. She said she was grateful for his help, that she had loved the sandwich and the beer.

  “You’re swell,” Wade said simply. “Even without those prints that killed Blaine. Good-night,” he said, “and if Casey ever gets tired teaching that class, let me know.”

  Karen Harding’s apartment was on the Hill, not far from Louisburg Square. Her home was in Dedham but with her older brother in the Navy and her father in Washington, there was no one there now but her grandmother and her kid brother; and when the gasoline shortage became acute it was a question of getting a small place in town or giving up her war work. So she had taken this apartment on the top floor of this old narrow-front red-brick house which, remodeled somewhat inside, was quite like the others in the block, its one distinguishing feature being the number on the front door.