The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

by Deming, Richard

The lieutenant’s eyebrows raised. Settling himself in his chair, he clasped hands over his stomach and said mildly, “Shoot.”

  “What started me on this was Harry Nolan here. Coming in to report his wife missing,” the sergeant explained. “The desk sent him to see Joe Murphree, but by accident he got to me instead and told his story before either of us realized he was talking to the wrong guy.” Briefly, Murphy recounted the facts of Helen’s disappearance, the negative results of the investigation made by Sergeant Joe Murphree, and the subsequent investigation he and Harry had made that day.

  “We ended up by reading Dale Thompson’s column for the past two months,” he concluded. “Three weeks ago he hinted at an exposure in his column of a local political big shot being tied in with the dope racket. The next day he mentioned firing an employee for lifting what evidence he had and peddling it to the political big shot. Only this time he made it more definite by calling him the racketeer politician who runs Wright City.”

  “Big John Gault,” Lieutenant Blair said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly. Day before yesterday he announced he had gotten hold of a certain black ledger which would put Mr. Big Shot away for forty years, and the next day he would start printing excerpts from the ledger. But the next day he died, and when his final column appeared, it contained no mention of the ledger.”

  Lieutenant Blair considered his sergeant thoughtfully. “So you think perhaps he was bumped to stop publication of whatever was in the ledger, and somebody substituted another column for the one he had ready to submit? Good enough motive, but pretty thin evidence of homicide in the face of a natural causes death certificate.”

  “I’ve got more,” Murphy assured him, “Six weeks ago Thompson mentioned in his column having a physical examination and passing with flying colors. I just phoned his regular doc, who verified he had never detected any heart condition. And Thompson’s regular doctor was not called in the case. The first he knew, about it was where he read it in the papers. He doesn’t know who was called.”

  “Hmm,” the lieutenant said.

  “Add to that Thompson’s secretary disappearing so completely there isn’t even evidence she ever existed, and the secretary who presumably was fired three weeks ago reappearing and claiming she had never left the job, and at the very least you’ve got evidence of conspiracy. My opinion is Thompson was murdered and Mrs. Nolan disappeared because of the black ledger Thompson mentioned.”

  For a few moments Lieutenant Blair said nothing, simply pursing his lips and frowning at one corner of the room. At last he looked up with a crooked smile.

  “Big John has been pretty careful about tangling with this department, Don. I kind of doubt he’d take a chance on trying to cover up a murder.”

  “To beat a forty-year rap I’d try murder myself, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah, I see your point. But you know this department is in a peculiar position. For ten years we’ve been in a state of armed truce with the rest of the city administration. Gault and his crew never try to fix a homicide case, and in return we keep our noses out of everything that isn’t homicide business. And for ten years we’ve all known the minute either side steps over the line, it’s all out war.”

  Sergeant Murphy asked quietly, “You mean forget it, Lieutenant?”

  The lieutenant’s face remained gentle, but his eyes could have chipped stone. “I mean if you make a mistake, the next head of the Homicide Squad will take orders from John Gault.” He glanced at his watch. “You go on duty in an hour. It’s your case. Move quietly and be sure there’s no leak at all until you have it airtight.”

  “Yes, sir. Any other instructions?”

  “Yeah. For your autopsy order stay away from Judge Bender and Judge Livingston. Bender blabs and Livingston is in Gault’s pocket. Contact either Judge Ward or Judge Centner.” He paused a moment, then added reflectively, “If the autopsy is negative, we’ll have to pull in our horns fast and I start thinking up alibis.”

  “Sure—if it’s negative.”

  When they were once again outside, the sergeant said to Harry, “Go on home and sit tight. There isn’t a thing we can do until we get an autopsy report, and that will take twenty-four hours. If anything comes up, I’ll phone you at Mrs. Weston’s. If you don’t hear from me, call me at home Monday morning and I’ll give you a briefing.”

  “But what about Helen?” Harry asked.

  Murphy dropped a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll just have to sweat it out. We can’t make a move until we definitely establish Thompson’s death was homicide. You heard the lieutenant.”

  “Suppose you can’t prove it’s homicide?”

  The sergeant grinned dryly. “Then I’ll ask you to give me a job reference over at Ajax. In the meantime, don’t bother me by calling up for progress reports before Monday. I’ll have enough on my mind until then.”

  * * * *

  So Harry went back to Mrs. Weston’s rooming house to sweat it out. It was the longest period of sweating he ever did. From four o’clock Saturday afternoon, when he reached his room, until Monday morning he left the room only for meals, afraid Sergeant Murphy might phone while he was gone. But the sergeant did not phone.

  Just before dusk Sunday evening the downstairs bell rang and Harry glanced out his window to see a squad car at the curb. A few minutes later a burly policeman went down the front steps with Mrs. Weston, helped the landlady into the car and drove away. As the car started off, Harry glimpsed Sergeant Murphy in the back seat.

  Overpowering curiosity almost made him phone Headquarters to inquire what this meant, but he was deterred by the definite instructions of the sergeant. He spent a second sleepless night and phoned Murphy at home at exactly eight a.m. Monday.

  “Aren’t you working today?” the sergeant asked.

  “Working? You think I could calmly go to work without knowing whether Helen’s alive or dead?”

  Sergeant Murphy said quietly, “It’s my guess she’s alive.”

  Harry’s heart jumped. “You’ve found out where she is?”

  “No. Let’s take one thing at a time. First, the autopsy on Dale Thompson showed poisoning by potassium cyanide, apparently administered in coffee. The guess is he got it at breakfast a couple of hours before eleven a.m., the time on his death certificate. We’ve got the doc who signed the certificate, but I think he’s in the clear. He’s seventy-eight years old, half blind, half deaf and semi-retired, which probably was why he was called. The medical examiner tells me unless he suspects poisoning or happens to catch a whiff of bitter almonds, any doctor might diagnose a cyanide death as a simple coronary. This guy was a cinch to. He was called to Thompson’s penthouse at eleven o’clock by Dorothy Wentworth, who told him she was Thompson’s secretary.”

  Harry asked, “Did she kill him?”

  “Unless she’s a wonderful actress, she didn’t even know it was murder. But that’s ahead of the story. Soon we got the autopsy report, we quietly pulled in Dorothy Wentworth, Mrs. and Mr. Kurt Arnold, the apartment manager, Mrs. Johansen and Mrs. Weston. We stuck them in separate cells, let them brood awhile, and then informed all but Dorothy Wentworth we were charging them with conspiracy to commit murder. We told the Wentworth woman we were holding her on suspicion of first degree homicide.”

  The sergeant emitted a dry chuckle. “Wentworth broke first, and as soon as the others learned of her break, they all started squealing like rats. Dorothy Wentworth’s story is she was phoned by a man named Gerald Crane, apparently the same man to whom she sold the evidence that got her fired. He told her Thompson had unexpectedly died of a heart attack and he wanted her to put on an act for him. He told her she’d get two thousand dollars if she went to Thompson’s penthouse, pretended she was still his secretary and phoned a certain physician to come at once because her boss had just had a heart attack! He warned her someone would prob
ably call trying to locate the real secretary, and the police might even come around asking about her. But he told her the investigating cop would be in on the deal, and all she had to do was deny ever hearing of the woman. She says she suspected the plot had something to do with stopping the item about the ledger, but she thought Crane was simply taking advantage of Thompson’s sudden death, and she didn’t suspect murder.”

  Harry asked, “Who is this Gerald Crane?”

  “A flunky of Big John Gault’s. The rest of the story we got from our other witnesses. Crane contacted the apartment manager first and fixed him with a thousand dollars plus decorating expenses to get in a crew of workmen and change your apartment around. The Kurt Arnolds were moved in by Crane a half hour before you got home from work. Their fee was only five hundred. Apparently Crane got stingier as he went along.

  “From the apartment manager Crane learned the former addresses of you and your wife. He fixed Mrs. Weston with two hundred bucks, had your personal stuff moved from the apartment back to your old room, and had the lock from your apartment transferred to your room door.

  “At your wife’s old rooming house apparently Crane ran into a snag. Seems Mrs. Swovboda was honest. We don’t know where she is, but she definitely didn’t sell out to Mrs. Johansen and move to Florida. Mrs. Johansen is an old-time bit actress, and she was moved into the rooming house by Crane about an hour before you arrived with Sergeant Joe Murphree. All she got was a mere hundred. She grew quite upset when she learned she was at the bottom of the salary scale.”

  Harry asked, “Have you got this man Gerald Crane?”

  “Not yet,” Sergeant Murphy said. “We’re a little handicapped because there are only eleven men on the Homicide Squad. If we put out a general call on him, we could draw on the whole police department, but there’s too many leaks in the department. Crane would know about it within minutes. We want Crane under wraps before anybody even knows we’re investigating the case.”

  “I see,” Harry said dubiously. “But what about Helen? What’s the reason behind all this elaborate plot? And what makes you think she’s still alive?”

  “It’s pure theory from here on,” the sergeant admitted. “But I think it’s sound reasoning. Obviously, as Thompson’s secretary, your wife knew about the ledger, too. I don’t think Gerald Crane or Big John Gault have their hands on the ledger yet. If they had, probably your wife would simply have been killed in a traffic accident or some such thing. Since she wasn’t, they must be holding her somewhere trying to pry out of her where the ledger is.”

  Harry said slowly, “You mean torture?”

  Murphy hesitated a moment. Then he said reluctantly, “Possibly. But that’s better than being dead.”

  A wave of sickness ran over Harry. In a numb voice he said, “I still don’t understand why they went through this elaborate farce of changing the apartment and all.”

  “You would if you thought about it,” Murphy told him. “If Dale Thompson’s secretary mysteriously disappeared the same day the columnist died, it would look suspicious as the devil. And with that item about the ledger appearing only the day before, the finger would point straight at Big John Gault. The only way they could hold her without raising such a furor that even the FBI might start nosing around to see if maybe she’d been kidnapped, was to make it appear she never existed. So when Thompson died, his secretary continued on public display in the person of Dorothy Wentworth.”

  “I see,” Harry said slowly. “Is there any way I can help from here on out?”

  “Yeah. Just sit quiet and stay out of our hair till we break this thing. And we will, don’t worry.”

  Yes, Harry thought as he hung up. But in the meantime what kind of pain was Helen suffering?

  After fifteen minutes of sitting on the bed and smoking cigarettes, he knew he could not possibly spend another day simply waiting in his room. He had to have some kind of action or go crazy.

  The wild thought occurred to him of looking up Big John Gault’s address, calling on the man and beating out of him Helen’s whereabouts. But immediately he realized the man probably not only had bodyguards, but any such attempted act would blow wide open the secrecy Sergeant Murphy wanted to maintain. Reluctantly he decided the Homicide Squad was undoubtedly better equipped to deal with murderers than a half crazed husband would be.

  Finally he settled on the innocuous action of going to the post office to see if he and Helen had any mail.

  Though the post office was only three blocks from their apartment on Carlton Avenue, a factor in their deciding to keep the box even after they had a permanent address, it was fifteen blocks from Mrs. Weston’s rooming house. Harry took a streetcar.

  There was some mail. An envelope containing a coupon worth ten cents on the purchase of a large box of soap flakes, a card addressed to Miss Helen Lawson from Helen’s aunt in Des Moines, who had not yet been informed her niece was married, and a slip informing him there was a package at the package desk.

  As he started toward the package desk, two men crowded against him from either side. Politely he waited for them to move out of the way, but neither moved. Instead he felt the prod of something hard and round in his left kidney.

  The man on his left, a tall lank individual with a gray face said, “Yeah, it’s a gun. Just move toward the door like we was three pals, or it’ll go off.”

  Slowly, Harry glanced from the gray-faced man to the plump, round-headed man on his right. The latter gave him a happy grin.

  “There’s another one right close to your right kidney. Do like the man says.”

  At a gentle prod from the man on the left, he began to move without hurry toward the door. All about them people were waiting in queues, stamping letters or exasperatedly trying to write with post-office pens, but no one paid the slightest attention as the closely grouped trio left the building. The sidewalk was full of hurrying people too, but not one so much as glanced at them.

  At the curb, in a space marked, Reserved for Post Office customers — Ten minute parking only, stood a green Buick sedan. The round man on Harry’s right opened the rear door and the gray-faced man prodded Harry in. He followed behind Harry to sit beside him, while the plump man rounded the car to slide behind the wheel.

  As he pulled away from the parking place, the man behind the wheel said breezily, “We been waiting for you since the post office opened at eight. We figured you’d come after your mail eventually.”

  Harry asked, “What do you want with me? If this is a holdup, all I’ve got with me is twelve dollars.”

  The plump man laughed. Harry’s seat companion said nothing, merely quietly holding his gun pointed casually in Harry’s direction.

  Harry grew conscious that he was still gripping his mail in one hand. As he stuffed it into his inside breast pocket, the gray-faced man glanced at him sharply, but made no comment.

  The rest of the trip was made without conversation. It was not a long trip, about twenty-five blocks, but the plump man drove leisurely and obeyed all traffic regulations. When the car left the downtown business district, they passed through a middle-class residential district then through a poorer class district and finally through the slums, always moving in the general direction of the river.

  In the waterfront area, on a street consisting largely of vacant warehouses and decrepit office buildings which had been condemned by the city to make room for a waterfront parkway which never materialized, the car suddenly swung through the open truck entrance of what looked from the outside like an unoccupied warehouse. As his seat mate backed from the car and gestured with his gun for Harry to alight, the plump driver returned to the truck entrance and closed the doors.

  Then the two men urged him up a flight of stairs and into a barnlike room large enough to office at least fifty clerks. There were no longer any desks in it, however, its furnishings now consi
sting of only a kitchen table and a few straight chairs, three folding canvas cots containing single blankets and a packing case with a table model radio on it.

  One corner of Harry’s mind noted that two men sat at the kitchen table and a third sat on one of the cots, but the notation was merely automatic, for his attention centered on the figure stretched full length on a second cot. It was Helen and she was alive.

  Ignoring the sharp command of the gray-faced man, Harry ran to his wife and took her in his arms. She looked up at him wonderingly, her face drawn with fatigue and streaked with dried tears, then buried her head in his shoulder with a little whimper.

  After a moment she exhaustedly lay back on the pillow and looked up at him with sorrow. “I hoped they’d let you alone,” she whispered. “Why did they have to involve you?”

  “Have they hurt you?” Harry demanded.

  “My feet,” she said. “Just my feet.” She closed her eyes with an expression of pain.

  Twisting in his seat on the cot, Harry stared down at his wife’s feet. Both were encased in bandages.

  An almost insane rage engulfed him. Slowly he rose to his feet and glared through a crimson haze at the five men in the room. The man seated on the other cot was thin and pock-marked and had cold eyes which stared back at Harry indifferently. Of the two men seated at the table, one was huge and red-faced and carried about him an air of bluff good humor. The other was slim, and distinguished-looking, with a thin, austere face and iron-gray hair which curled upward over his ears. The two men who had brought him in stood just inside the door.

  Harry took a step toward the table. “Which one of you…?” he said with muffled incoherency. “I’m going to—”

  Casually, the pock-marked man on the cot produced a knife with a thin six inch blade. He balanced it on his palm and studied Harry appraisingly. Harry swung his gaze to the man. “Are you the one?” he asked softly.