“All right, Blount,” he said wearily. “Now let’s have it all, right from the beginning.…”
CHAPTER TEN
Friday—9:05 P.M.
The headwaiter of Del Veccio’s Alpine Restaurant was in somewhat of a quandary. The four men who had entered in a group were so different, one from another, that the question of proper table assignment posed a very real problem. The first gentleman, of course, with his neat clothing, sharp blue eyes, and general air of authority obviously rated the very best. The bulky man beside him, with the grizzled hair that needed cutting and the suit that did not fit, was a totally different case. And the slender man with the graying temples and frayed necktie, whose dark eyes were so piercing, further complicated the situation. Not to mention the fourth who, while dressed well enough, looked as if he had had a great shock—or too much to drink—and was still not too steady on his feet.
The headwaiter’s problem was solved for him, however, when Inspector Clayton pushed past him and led the way calmly to the nearest table, followed by his three companions. The four men drew out chairs and seated themselves; the elderly waiter for the table looked toward the headwaiter for instructions, but all he received was a slight shrug of resignation. He lifted his eyebrows and approached with the wine list.
“Scotch and water,” Inspector Clayton said, waving away the list.
“That sounds all right,” Captain Wise said.
“Just beer,” Clancy said.
Roy Kirkwood, the fourth of the group, looked up at the waiter stonily. “Double scotch, straight for me,” he said. “No ice, no water, no nothing.”
The waiter nodded in satisfaction, his original analysis of his customers more or less confirmed. He walked away; Kirkwood turned to Clancy, sitting to his left.
“You really scared me, Clancy,” he said quietly. “While I was sitting in that room at headquarters with Quinleven, and those two patrolmen at the desks like guards, it suddenly occurred to me that you might suspect me of planting that bomb in the judge’s chambers. My office is in the building, you know.…”
“I know,” Clancy said. “If I had ever seriously suspected you during this case, a large part of the blame would have been yours. After I got through telling you not to try and duck the men I was putting on to cover you, Matthews mentioned in his report seeing you ‘come in.’ Which means that you had gone out. And a girl was killed while you were gone; and somebody took shots at me and Kaproski.”
“I went out to eat,” Kirkwood said. “And then I went to the movies. I wasn’t trying to duck anyone; it’s just that I hate being home alone, and Eva and the kids were gone.…”
“Yeah,” Clancy said. “And then, of course, from what I heard at Judge Kiele’s place, he was going to jump on you with both feet in a radio address. I couldn’t tell how serious you might have thought something like this to be.…”
Kirkwood stared at him. “You didn’t think I’d kill a man just because of something he might say about me in a campaign speech, did you?”
“No,” Clancy said. “I didn’t. Although I’ll tell you this: motive is what’s in a man’s mind when he commits a crime, and that’s all it is. It’s what he considers a motive, not what we consider a motive. People have been killed for lot weaker reasons. However, in this case I knew you were in the clear once I started to see the thing.…”
The elderly waiter appeared with their drinks balanced precariously on a tray, and served them. More in deference to the inspector’s appearance—whom he assumed to be the host—than to the customer himself, the waiter had brought Clancy a bottle of Heineken’s. Clancy nodded, pleased, and poured himself a full glass. The inspector raised a hand.
“I think we owe a toast to Lieutenant Clancy,” he said.
Glasses were raised and clinked. Clancy grinned. “Thank you.”
Captain Wise sipped his drink and then set it down. “All right, Clancy,” he said. “Suppose you tell us about it. What made you settle on Wells? And why did you say, in that interrogation room, that a large part of the reward should go to Roy, here?”
“Oh, that? That was simply shock treatment for John Wells. Although actually the case was solved mainly because Roy moved to Washington Heights. Or at least that helped the most.”
Three faces stared at Clancy blankly. He smiled.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you from the beginning. We have their confessions, now, but we had Wells nailed, even if Blount hadn’t been picked up. It’s astounding how careless he was.…” He drank his beer, pushed his glass away, and leaned back, lighting a cigarette.
“You know,” he said slowly, “when you start to explain something like this, or write it in a report, it always seems to come out so straight-line, if you know what I mean. But none of these cases really work out that way. Ideas come and go; you take three or four blind steps forward, take one or two backwards, duck off on side trails—and it’s only when some major fact comes along, usually forcing itself on your attention despite yourself, that you begin to see light. Then, once you do, some of the apparently illogical things, or minor things you had scarcely even noticed before, begin to fit in and make a case.”
He crushed out his cigarette, pulled his glass closer, and finished his beer. The other three men were watching him solemnly.
“Take this case,” he went on slowly. “The only thing I had to start with was the fact that I was never satisfied with any of the reasons given to explain why Cervera would break out of prison when his parole was so close. Everybody had a different idea, but none of them made any sense to me. Last Tuesday night, when I was at Judge Kiele’s, John Wells advanced the strongest argument of any I’d heard—that Cervera had come to the end of his rope. What Blount tried to confirm tonight in that long-winded speech in which he claimed Lenny was stir crazy. Yet the way the mother spoke to Stanton didn’t seem to bear this out, and she had been visiting him regularly. And the warden had no notion of it, although the guards in a prison are constantly on the lookout for just this sort of thing. Later, of course, when I read that last letter he wrote to Marcia, it was even more obvious—he actually sounded as if he hadn’t minded his time up there much, at all.”
He frowned. “So, as I say, since I wasn’t happy with any of the other reasons for the escape, I got this offbeat idea: what if he hadn’t left of his own free will? What if he’d been taken out—kidnaped, you might say? Crazy? Well, it’s true it didn’t make much sense, but none of the other explanations did, either. Then, just about the time I had tucked this idea away in the back of my head, Marcia was killed and somebody took some shots at me and Kaproski. My first reaction was to forget my offbeat theory, because at least now I could see a reason for Lenny wanting out—to take revenge on the people who had hurt him. Apparently he was stir crazy and nobody had noticed it. I hadn’t thought he knew about Marcia, but—also apparently—he had.”
He reached to his pack of cigarettes which he had laid on the table, but instead of taking one out, he merely twisted the pack about in his hands, his mind still on his explanation.
“But did he? Was he? His letter to Marcia could have been read either way, but the more I thought about it, the odder it appeared. If he knew that Marcia was the one who had given us the information to send him up, first of all where did he get that fact? That was a closely guarded secret, as Roy here knows. Then, too—if he knew that Marcia had talked, wouldn’t he have told his gang? Would he have left them thinking that Marcia was aces, as they actually did? Or would Mrs. Cervera have been as close to Marcia as she was? The whole thing just didn’t click.…”
He looked up suddenly. “And speaking of that night, once I had gotten over my scare at being shot at, it also struck me as strange that whoever was in that car, certainly shot far enough over my head. With nobody around, and no particular rush, you’d think he would have either gotten us, or at least come a lot closer. It was just one more little thing to hide in a corner of my brain.”
He suddenly smiled.
“And then, of course, came those weird dreams of mine. They weren’t really weird at all, of course; they were merely a repeat of the problems, of the inconsistencies, coming back to me from my own subconscious. Such as—who financed the escapes? And why would an escape be financed, apparently by someone with no connection with the people involved? And the second thing—and even more important—finally came to me from that constant dream about the conversation that Kaproski heard, and that I listened to on that tape. I should have seen it earlier, I admit—but I didn’t. This voice on the telephone suggested meeting at the place where Marcia and Lenny first met, and Marcia started to say ‘But—’ before she was cut off. It seems so simple now, so obvious, but at the time it escaped me. She was about to point out that they couldn’t meet where they had first met, at least not ‘at once’ nor at that hour. And later it was confirmed. They had first met miles from the city.…”
Inspector Clayton leaned forward. “But she must have known, then, there was something wrong with that conversation. Why did she run out of her apartment?”
Clancy shrugged. “Of course we’ll never really know for sure, but my guess is that she certainly knew that there was something wrong. And that whoever was trying to sucker her, knew where she lived, obviously. And that if she hurried, she could get to someplace a lot safer—her family’s, maybe, before anything could happen. We’ll never really know, of course.…”
He returned to his story. “In any event, that proved one thing to me, definitely. That whoever had called, it hadn’t been Lenny, nor had it been anyone calling on Lenny’s part. Whoever had called had wanted to get the girl out of the house for the sole purpose of killing her. But why? Could her killing be unrelated to the escape? I don’t believe in coincidence that much. It seemed to me the most logical solution would be, of course, to make it appear that Lenny had killed her. But why place the blame on Lenny? Only if it were being established as a pattern that Lenny was out to get rid of anybody who had hurt him.…”
The elderly waiter was hovering about the table, carrying his outsized dinner menus. Inspector Clayton waved a hand in a circle, indicating another round of drinks, and the waiter withdrew gratefully. Clancy went on.
“Then, at long last, I finally began to use my head. Somebody was setting up a deal with Lenny as the scapegoat.” He turned to Roy Kirkwood. “And that’s when I took you off the list. As far as I knew, only three people were aware that Marcia had given the dope that jailed Lenny: myself, you, and Judge Kiele. And all three of us knew that Lenny had no idea of it, because we’d made it our business to keep it quiet. But whoever killed her knew she had talked to us—and assumed that Lenny also knew it. Who? Later, of course, when I saw the whole thing I realized it had to be John Wells. The judge had told him about the case; apparently he had mentioned that Marcia had talked, and had let it go at that.
“Anyway, about that time I went back to my first crazy idea: suppose Lenny had been used, just because at one time he had threatened some people? With him an escaped convict, on the outside, if any of these people were killed, the logical place for the blame would be him. But, I said to myself—and I’m sorry to say I said it to myself far too late to help—if we didn’t have him to blame, where would we start looking? When Judge Kiele died, for example, if we didn’t have Lenny as a scapegoat, what would our first question be? We would automatically ask one question ahead of all others: who stood to gain? And in Judge Kiele’s case the answer would have been very simple: John Wells, married to the judge’s only heir, and a man who was undoubtedly tired of having his father-in-law’s wealth flaunted at him.
“Lots of things fell into place when I reached this point, but I still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced myself. Maybe I was imagining the whole thing—maybe Lenny had bombed the judge; maybe Lenny had known about Marcia and killed her; maybe Lenny really was stir crazy, etc., etc. The usual jitters when you can’t pin things down clean—we’ve all had them.…”
The waiter was back. He handed the drinks over everyone’s shoulder carefully, and backed away. His customers were far more serious than he had anticipated; maybe all they were going to do was drink? Clancy poured his beer and leaned back.
“And then, of course, somebody called Roy at his new apartment and threatened his children. I kept dreaming of telephone booths and children being threatened—or protected—but it wasn’t until I was sitting in your office—” He looked across at the inspector. “—that I finally saw it. Who could have gotten Roy’s telephone number? We at the precinct had trouble enough. When I finally checked with the desk sergeant he told me the place he had finally gotten the number—after trying everybody else—was through the Democratic Election Headquarters. How would Cervera, or Blount—because at this point I was also considering Blount—or anyone else, for that matter, have known that Roy had moved? Or known how to get in touch with him? Wells, I found, was on the Democratic Committee—apparently he opposed the judge, his father-in-law, in everything he could. He found the new number easily enough and, without thinking, had tried to continue the pattern of blame for Lenny by tackling Kirkwood, the last of Cervera’s supposed enemies.…”
He sighed. “That was his biggest mistake. I had suspected him before, but once that call was made, I knew I was on the right track. And once I knew I was on the right track, the rest was merely a question of gathering evidence. The escape had to be arranged by someone with contacts in Sing Sing, and a member of the Parole Board had those contacts. And the money necessary? Well, Wells didn’t have any of his own, and it isn’t as easy to borrow money without security as you might think. Not from legitimate sources, that is. But Williams, through Marcus, got the name of an illegitimate source, and illegitimate sources are right down Porky Frank’s alley. Maybe it was luck, but we deserved some at this point; in any event he located the loan within four hours.”
He looked around and shrugged. “You heard the confessions. The contact man was Williams. Blount and Marcus were chosen because of their history with explosives. They didn’t know it, of course, but they didn’t care. All they knew was that somebody wanted Cervera on the outside, and it got them out, too.
“Once we started looking, we found all we needed. Even without Blount, we had him. He was remarkably careless, but of course he thought he had a foolproof scheme. Gomez located the car, and the place he sold it. Stanton located telephone calls from his hotel in Ossining to the dead guard’s place—and even found one he had made to Mrs. Blount in Albany. Wells was lucky, and very lucky, that that cop in Ossining died, because after that Blount was sure of the chair. And he knew Blount would say anything he wanted if he could be assured his wife would come out of it with enough money to take care of herself. And all Blount cared about was his wife. What did Blount have to lose? He was dead, anyway.”
Captain Wise interrupted. “If he wanted to establish a pattern of Lenny killing his enemies, why did he aim high when he was shooting at you?”
Clancy grinned. “I’ll bet now he wishes he hadn’t. But all he was trying to do was establish a pattern, not actually kill all of them. What would he have gained by killing me? Shooting at me served the same purpose; killing the girl was one thing, but killing a policeman? That’s one sure way of getting everyone looking down every crevice and crack until the answers come out.” He shook his head. “He certainly didn’t want to kill me, any more than he wanted to hurt any of Roy’s kids. He just wanted to get us thinking along certain lines. Obviously he didn’t think we were smart enough to see through the scheme. And he was almost right.…”
Inspector Clayton leaned over, interested. “And how did you know that Cervera was dead?”
Clancy looked at him evenly. “They could scarcely have left him alive. He was the fall guy; the excuse. The alibi. They certainly couldn’t leave him in a position to deny everything. Or even of possibly holding them up for blackmail. No—he was as good as dead and buried, as soon as he was picked for the role of the stir-crazy convict breaking out of Sing
Sing to get revenge on all his enemies. He was lost.”
The four fell into silence for several minutes. They sipped their drinks, staring at the tablecloth, each busy with his own thoughts. Suddenly Captain Wise sighed loudly and, apropos of nothing whatsoever, said:
“Telephones …!”
Clancy grinned. “Don’t mention them.” His eyes came up; his grin faded and his mouth fell open. Approaching them with a plug-in instrument in his hand was the headwaiter. “Oh, no …!”
The headwaiter bent over the table, addressing himself—naturally—to Inspector Clayton. “I beg your pardon, but did you ask for a telephone?”
To his surprise he found himself facing four faces smiling in relief.
“No,” the inspector said easily. “We were asking for menus.”
“Which sounds like telephones,” Captain Wise said with heavy sarcasm, and winked at Clancy.
About the Author
Robert L. Fish, the youngest of three children, was born on August 21, 1912, in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended the local schools in Cleveland and went to Case University (now Case Western Reserve), from which he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. He married Mamie Kates, also from Cleveland, and together they have two daughters. Fish worked as a civil engineer, traveling and moving throughout the United States. In 1953 he was asked to set up a plastics factory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He and his family moved to Brazil, where they remained for nine years. He played golf and bridge in the little spare time he had. One rainy weekend in the late 1950s, when the weather prohibited him from playing golf, he sat down and wrote a short story that he submitted to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. When the story was accepted, Fish continued to write short stories. In 1962 he returned to the United States; he took one year to write full time and then returned to engineering and writing. His first novel, The Fugitive, won an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery. When his health prevented him from pursuing both careers, Fish retired from engineering and spent his time writing. His published works include more than forty books and countless short stories. Mute Witness was made into a movie starring Steve McQueen.
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