“I heard you the first time.” MacShane turned in his chair, leaned back, a quick grin fading. “But here’s something. If it’s a story you’re after, and you get it, damn you if you don’t make it break right for me. Don’t forget, I work for the Herald. Next to that I guess the Courier’s all right. But I don’t want none of these other rags stealin’ our stuff—”
“Give me what I want and I’ll break it right.”
MacShane grunted and reached for the telephone. “Bring in your pictures. I don’t know if I can get these guys tonight, but I’ll have something by tomorrow afternoon—probably a blank.”
Murdock saw the first police car when he swung out of the taxi. It was near the mouth of an alley. As he shouldered his plate-case and started into the sidewalk shadows he saw that a second car had been driven into the alley proper so that its headlights splashed a weird yellow glow down the length of the walled canyon.
The policeman beside this second car stopped Murdock, who said: “Bacon sent for me. What’s up?”
The policeman grunted, leaned close. “Oh, hello, Murdock. He sent for you, huh?” He hesitated uncertainly. “Then how come you don’t know what’s up?”
“Bacon’s funny that way. He said: ‘Never mind why, get the hell down here.’ ”
The policeman turned and called to Bacon. The answer came back profanely and the policeman said: “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Murdock squeezed between the car and the rear wall, stepped into the light-rays. A little knot of men were grouped about some object at the far end of the alley and over to one side. By the time he was half-way to the group, Murdock saw that this object was a man. Instinct, the urgency of Bacon’s telephone conversation, which he received just after he had sent MacShane the halftone proofs Ben had made for him, told him the man was dead. But he did not know who the victim was until he pushed in between Bacon and Sergeant Keogh.
Spike Tripp lay on his back, his arms outstretched, his eyes open and staring. The examiner was still making a cursory inspection of the body, and the vest had been unbuttoned, disclosing a reddish blotch that extended clear across one side of the chest. This red-stained part of the shirt was stiff; the limbs, the set of the body, made an impression of complete rigidity that was unnatural, grotesque.
Bacon turned, glared at Murdock, spoke angrily. “A smart trick, huh?” he growled. “Run out on us yesterday and this is what it got him.” He began to curse, stepped back from the body, and tugged savagely at the brim of his hat.
Murdock let the plate-case slide from his shoulder. He watched the examiner for a moment; then he, too, looked away. For some moments the thoughts which surged in a vortexing jumble through his brain made him forget his surroundings. Bacon had been right—he himself had been right. Tripp had been upstairs in the hall outside Redfield’s apartment for a longer period than he had admitted. And apparently he had seen someone come back after the party had broken up. He had seen Archer and probably Joyce. Who else?
Sam Cusick’s words came back to him on a rush of memory: “There are two guys who know where I was last night.” Murdock exhaled through loose lips, thought: “I guess there’s only one who knows now.”
He glanced about. Night hung pitch-black over the alley. The windows facing it and extending up the side of the four-story loft building opposite caught this blackness, exaggerating and reflecting it. Surrounded by a neighborhood that was sordid and decadent, this man-made crevasse was abandoned. Dust, refuse, old papers, staves and hoops from a shattered barrel, littered the ancient cobblestone floor. And along this floor there swept a breeze which stirred the papers, giving them life, and spread a chill at Murdock’s ankles which seemed to mount until it infused his thoughts.
Bacon turned back to him. “One slug, right in the ticker. He was in the doorway here.” He turned and waved an arm at the shadows beyond the body. Murdock had not noticed it before, but he saw now that there was a doorway set deep in the wall of the building. The door was closed.
The examiner stood up and spoke irritably. “I can’t do much more here. I’ll have to get him where I can work on him. But he’s been dead quite a while, probably around noon.”
“It wasn’t tough enough before,” Keogh growled irrelevantly. “He has to go get himself knocked off and make it tougher.” He began to swear.
Murdock, speaking to Bacon, asked:
“Just found him, huh?”
“Some kid found him. The killer tucked him in the doorway out of sight.”
Murdock opened his plate-case and took out a tripod.
Bacon said: “I’m gettin’ sick of this. I’m chiseling on the other button-pushers to give you a break, and what do I get out of it? Hell, get lucky or something!”
Murdock said: “It looks as if you’d have to find Cusick.”
“It’s his kind of a job,” Bacon said. “And if we get some decent idea of when he was killed—”
“Decent?” exploded the examiner, who was just starting to leave. “What do you want, a miracle? You let him lay around for twelve hours and then expect me to work out the time of death by a mathematical formula.”
Bacon held himself in check until the doctor left; then he snarled: “Noon, huh? And Archer skipped out at four-thirty.”
“I told you he looked good to me,” Keogh said.
“He looks good to me now,” Bacon said sharply. “We found out he hired a plane at the airport. And when I get him back here—and I will—I got an idea I’m going to persuade him to tell us where he was at noon today.”
Murdock did not say anything; he just busied himself with his camera and flash-bulbs and felt more worried about Tripp’s death than he cared to admit. Maybe Joyce could give Howard Archer an alibi. But it would take something more than lack of an alibi to get convictions and he knew it. And here he was kidding himself that he could solve the Redfield case.
Murdock called MacShane when he got back to the office, told him about Tripp, and said that he had some pictures as first payment on the job MacShane was doing.
He reached his apartment a half-hour later. The door was locked, and when he stepped into the darkened room and snapped on the light, he was aware of just one thing: the chilled, complete emptiness of the place.
18
THE POLICE DRAGNET was out. When Murdock arrived at headquarters the next morning at Bacon’s request, there were already fifteen or twenty thugs and hoodlums of varied experience and reputation in the hold-over. All leaves and vacations were suspended; every plain-clothesman in the city was out on the street checking, or trying to check, Tripp’s movements and looking for Sam Cusick.
The Commissioner of Public Safety had a long telephone conversation with the Mayor. His Honor had added his sentiments to those received, and passed them along to the District Attorney and the Police Commissioner. The main hall of headquarters buzzed with activity—the hum of voices, the rap of feet on the bare stone floors. Plain-clothesmen hurried in and out of the main entrance, rode the elevators, and occasionally brought in a suspicious character. The Bureau of Records clerks were pawing through fingerprint cards; the photographers and fingerprint men were still combing the alley for a worth-while clue.
The upshot of the whole thing, Murdock learned when he entered Bacon’s office, was nothing. There were two newspapers on his desk. The News said: TRIPP MURDERED IN ALLEY. The Herald had one of Murdock’s pictures on the front page, and a more conservative head reading: REDFIELD WITNESS SLAIN.
Bacon chewed on a cigar and nursed a grouch. Keogh sat disconsolately in one corner. Quinn, from the District Attorney’s office, glanced at Murdock as he entered, and then took up his former position and stared gloomily out the window.
Murdock said: “Well, I guess there isn’t anything new, huh?” He dropped his plate-case beside the doorframe, put the camera on an old sectional bookcase, his hat on top of the camera.
“Nothing new?” snapped Bacon. “No, damn it! But to read these lousy rags you’d think somebody’d
murdered the Governor. What’s the matter with me, anyway?”
Murdock waited.
“I give you a break and then your paper starts to yell for my job, for all of our jobs.”
“The Herald?” Murdock snapped, frowning. “We didn’t—”
“Well,” growled Bacon, “the News and the Globe are the worst. Crucify us, huh?” He broke off, took out his cigar, glared at it, and slammed it into the battered cuspidor with a curse. The gesture made an essential outlet for his feelings and he continued more evenly: “The Super was just in and he kinda laid it on to me. From now on newspaper guys are out till we know where we stand.”
Bacon hesitated and Quinn turned to look at him. Murdock took his hat down, put it on. He appreciated Bacon’s position. In fact, he felt a certain sense of guilt that bothered him.
He’d gone along on his own hook and given Bacon or the police no help at all. True, what he had held back had no apparent importance. The Tripp thing yesterday morning had only been a hunch. Certainly he had not hindered the case, and he had not yet heard from MacShane. He continued stubbornly:
“You got Cusick yet?”
“No, damn it!”
“Where was Girard?”
Bacon took a deep breath and looked at Quinn. “Girard,” he said regretfully, “is in the clear. We couldn’t figure him for the Redfield job anyway, and now we know he didn’t do it.”
“How?” pressed Murdock, stifling his interest.
“The examiner’s turned in his report,” Bacon said sourly. “He says Tripp was shot once in the heart with a forty-five slug. He was shot some time around yesterday noon—and before two o’clock, and—”
“A couple hours after he ran out on us,” Murdock broke in.
“—neither Girard nor those two hoods he hired could’ve done it,” Bacon continued, ignoring the interruption. “All three of them had lunch with McGurk and his secretary.”
Murdock nodded and arched his brows. “The Representative?”
“Yeah. They had lunch early, so they could go to a double-header out at Braves Field. They ate at eleven-thirty and were out at the field at twelve-forty-five.”
“Then,” Murdock said, “that leaves Cusick.”
“And Archer,” rapped Keogh.
“Hell,” pressed Murdock, “haven’t you turned up anything that—”
“No,” groaned Bacon. Then, forgetting in his despair that he was to give no further information, he added: “Nothing but this.” He opened a desk drawer, took out a roll of bills, and tossed them on the desk.
Murdock stepped forward, straightened out the once folded sheaf of greenbacks. Bacon said: “Twelve hundred and forty bucks,” but Murdock paid no attention to him, his interest held by the fact that of the total amount the greater part was in crisp new bills—fifties.
He picked up the money, counted it. The new bills amounted to one thousand dollars and he saw that the numbers ran consecutively. The rest of the amount was in old fifties and twenties.
“Figure it for me,” he said dryly.
“What’s there to figure?” Bacon grunted. “Tripp always had money. It coulda been his or—”
“Or,” cut in Quinn, stepping away from the window, “he blackmailed somebody for that thousand—he’s done it before. Somebody paid him so they could get a chance to turn around and knock him off.”
Murdock stared at the new fifties for some seconds, finally stepped back and lit a cigarette.
“If he blackmailed somebody, on the Redfield job, why wouldn’t this guy take back the thousand after he’d killed him?”
“It can be figured,” Bacon said. “Look.” He sat up and put a fresh cigar in his mouth without biting off the end. “Tripp was in that upstairs hall all the time that party was going on. He hung around after it broke up, waiting for that dame of his. And he saw something. When we let him go he probably starts promoting the shakedown. Maybe that’s one reason why he ran out on us yesterday; must’ve already made the date to collect. This guy—Cusick or Archer—says he’ll pay. Why? To make Tripp think it’s okay and get him out where he can crack down on him.” Bacon spread his hands, and the cigar swiveled with his grimace of disgust. “Tripp falls for it and gets one in the vest.”
“That doesn’t explain why the money was left,” Murdock said.
“What of it? Maybe the gun was scared off after he shot him; maybe he didn’t dare wait around searching the body. Maybe he’d rather lose the thousand than take a chance; and maybe he left it on purpose just to try and ball us up.” Bacon bit the end from the cigar, struck a match, and puffed a smoke-screen about his scowling face.
“Well, to hell with that part. I don’t care a damn about that thousand. It don’t mean anything. Tripp was blackmailing the guy that killed him. That’s all we know. That’s all we need to know. Cusick—Archer. Gimme those two and you can worry about the money.”
“I doubt like hell,” Murdock said sardonically, “if you could get a conviction if you had the two of them right here now—unless one of them had the murder gun.”
“Yeah?” leered Quinn. “Well, ten’ll get you twenty we convict. We’ve got a few things, but we can’t connect ’em up right till we get a chance to work over Cusick—or this lad Archer. It makes a difference when we’ve got a fellow here. There’s ways of persuading him, and once he starts to talk, things tie in fast.”
“You could be right,” Murdock said, pulling his camera from the bookcase and moving to the door. “Tried to check up on that money—those new fifties?”
“Starting from scratch,” Bacon said, “it’ll be hard. The bills are too small for banks to keep a record of who they gave ’em to—and they might’ve been drawn out for weeks. To hell with the money.” He broke off suddenly as though just remembering his former instructions.
“G’wan,” he grated sharply, but not unkindly. “Get out! Didn’t I say no more inside dope? Show something and we’ll play ball with you; otherwise you and all the rest of you calamity howlers are out.”
Phil Doane, patrolling the main-floor corridors, spotted Murdock as he stepped from the elevator. “Boy!” he cheered. “How you take ’em!”
“What?” said Murdock absently, still trying to put together the information he had received in Bacon’s office.
“You did it again,” Doane wheezed. “Those pictures of Tripp. And I just missed you last night.” He sighed and went on disgustedly: “Know where I was? At the Somersett getting some red-hot crap from the Independent Women’s Community League; one of Van Husan’s bright ideas.”
Doane cursed, and followed Murdock out to the street. “You’d just left when I got back. Nobody knew where you’d gone. Why didn’t you—”
“Bacon called me,” Murdock said, hailing a taxi. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was over the phone. I didn’t know what it was all about till I got there.”
Murdock got in the taxi, and Doane crowded in behind him. Murdock gave the driver his instructions and turned to the youth at his side. “Where the hell you going?”
“With you. I ain’t supposed to be down here anyway.”
“You’d better stick to Van Husan,” Murdock told him good-naturedly, “or he’ll tie the can to you.”
“If I don’t turn in something big pretty soon,” Doane moaned, “I won’t have any more job than a rabbit anyway.”
Murdock got rid of the youth at the office. After discarding his photographic paraphernalia he went directly to the library and called Jerry.
He was a man grabbing at straws now. The police activities rested upon the capture of Cusick and Archer. There was nothing Murdock could do about that end. All that remained was to follow his lead with MacShane—if he had any luck in finding the information he wanted. And he was not content to sit around and do nothing while he waited. He had to keep busy. Anything to keep his mind occupied.
The only thing he could think of was to review the murder of Joe Cusick, Sam’s brother, and the Girard trial. At the time, he had not been pa
rticularly interested, had not followed the case as closely as he might have done. But there might be something, some bit of information that would furnish a lead or—
Jerry shuffled into view round the corner of a bookcase, stopped in front of Murdock, and pulled steel-rimmed spectacles down from his forehead.
“Can you get me all the dope on the Girard trial?” Murdock asked.
Jerry nodded. “Don’t know why not.”
“And I want it all, Jerry, from the time the two Cusicks tried to give Girard the shakedown.”
As Jerry turned away, the telephone rang. The call was for Murdock.
“I got the dope on that plane Archer hired,” Jack Fenner said.
“I thought you’d died,” Murdock said.
“Yeah? Well the lead wasn’t so very exclusive. The police turned it up. They had a guy over here waiting for the pilot. He stayed overnight in Washington.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Washington, you cluck!”
“Didn’t know what happened to Archer?”
“Nope. Paid him off and took a cab.”
“Okay, Jack.” Murdock grinned at the telephone. “Send me a bill—and don’t forget the cut rate.”
Murdock pressed the receiver arm, held it a moment without hanging up. When the operator answered he gave the number of Archer’s house in Brookline, asked to speak to Joyce. She was in and her voice did things to him, made him forget, for a moment or two, his worries.
“How did it seem,” she asked, “to have your apartment back?”
“Empty,” Murdock said. “I didn’t like it. You spoiled it for me.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Why don’t you be nice and say you missed being there?”
“I don’t want to pamper you.”
“All right.” Murdock hesitated and his voice got casual. “I found out something about your brother. They went to Washington.”
“Oh,” the voice was dull. “Have the police—”
“They don’t know any more than I do.” He hesitated again, deciding against telling her about Tripp. She might read about it in the paper, but—
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