“At the Eagle Hotel in Minneapolis.”
The lieutenant wrote it down. “Don’t you check out of there without letting me know. And while you’re here on the grounds check in at the secretary’s office every couple of hours in case we want you.”
“I’ll do that,” said Quade. “And Lieutenant, here’s something. This book. I picked it up from the ground. It seems to have been the dead man’s.”
The lieutenant tore it from Quade’s hands. But when he looked at the title, he sniffed. “Yeah, it was his, but it don’t mean nothing. You heard the sergeant say he was president of the Arnold Publishing Company. They publish school books and they got an exhibit inside the building. I saw it myself. They got five hundred of these books.”
“Then let me have this one. I’m interested in history.”
“This is evidence. Go buy yourself a book.”
Quade snorted and picked up his case, which contained a good many copies of The Compendium of Human Knowledge. He had hoped to sell these books here today. That was his business—selling these encyclopedias.
He bucked the throng held at bay by the circle of special police and broke through, to a lunch stand that was next door to the Education Building. There was a whole string of these grease joints along the Midway, some operated by professionals, some by amateurs. This one was an amateur’s stand. It bore a banner: “South Side Church.” A half-dozen attractive girls were inside the booth.
Quade caught the eye of the best looking girl. “Coke,” he said.
The girl brought the bottle, opened it and put a straw in it. “You’re the man—uh …”
“I am,” said Quade, “but I didn’t do it. This is Labor Day and I never kill a man on Labor Day. Haven’t for years.”
The girl was easy on the eyes. In her early twenties, blonde and rather tall. The white uniform she wore added to, rather than detracted from, her appearance.
He said, “My name’s Oliver Quade.”
She smiled, finally. “You announced it loud enough and often enough when you were making that—pitch, I guess you call it.”
He grinned. “What’s your name?”
She shook her head. “I have no name. I’m just one of the girls from the church. Reverend Larsen warned us—”
“That you were doing this for the church and not to get picked up by fresh young men.”
“Exactly.”
“All right. Let’s keep it on a business basis then. You were listening to my pitch—”
“What else could I do? You drowned out even the noise from the grandstand.”
He chuckled. “You can’t make money by whispering. Look at your own business here. You’ve got a cleaner stand and serve better food than Joe Grein over there, but look at the way he drags them in.”
She saw the logic of what he said and frowned. “What with that yelling of his and cane waving—”
“Cane,” said Quade. “That reminds me. I’ll see you later. I’ll leave my case here, to make sure I come back.”
He heaved it over the counter and set it by her feet, then grinned at her open-mouthed face and walked off quickly.
A hundred yards down the Midway Quade spotted a concession and muttered under his breath. He stopped behind a burly man in a checked suit, who was trying to drive a twenty-penny spike into a pine log. He wasn’t having much luck with it. He swung lustily, but somehow the hammer always slipped off the nail, or struck it a glancing blow, bending it.
Quade made a clucking noise with his tongue and the big man whirled. His angry face relaxed when he saw Quade. Then he winced.
“Uh, hello, Ollie. I was just comin’.”
“Is that so, Mr. Boston?” Quade asked sarcastically. “Tell me, my friend, how much money have you spent here trying to win one of those lovely, lovely canes?”
Charlie Boston scowled. “Not much. Maybe a couple bucks.”
“For a cane you could buy in town for thirty cents.” Quade sighed and signalled to the concessionaire. “Hi, Johnny! Let me have your hammer a minute. I want to show this oaf how to drive in a nail.”
The concessionaire chuckled. “I didn’t know he was a pal of yours. He’s gone for about four bucks. I’ll give it back—”
“No, let him pay for his fun.”
Johnny grinned crookedly. He tapped a spike about a half inch into the log, then handed Quade his own hammer. With one half the energy Boston had expended on a blow, Quade drove the nail two inches into the wood. With the second blow he sent it to within a half inch of the block. The third, a light one, drove the nailhead flush with the log.
Johnny Nelson sang out: “And the gentleman wins a cane!” He handed him a yellow stick. Quade winked at him, then pulled Boston away from the booth.
“Charlie,” he chided the burly man, “how often have I told you not to try to beat the other fellow at his own game?”
“Aw, you don’t have to rub it in,” growled Boston. “Anyway, you were lucky, that’s all. My hammer kept slipping.”
“Of course it did. It was supposed to slip. The ball had been rounded on an emery wheel. You’ll recall Johnny handed me his own private hammer. With it even you might have—”
“Why, the dirty crook!” Charlie Boston turned to plunge back to the cane concessionaire, but Quade grabbed his arm.
“We’ve no time for that. While you were frittering away your time I got mixed up in a murder mess.”
Boston gasped. “Murder!”
“Yes. I was making a pitch and someone tossed a dart into a prospective customer’s shoulder. There was poison on the dart.”
“Is that what all that commotion was about awhile ago?” cried Charlie Boston. “Gawd! I saw everyone rushing but I figured it wasn’t nothing more than a dip lifting someone’s poke.” He whistled as astonishment overwhelmed him. “A murder at your pitch!”
“While you were trying to win a cane!”
Boston sulked. “All right. All right.”
“Got a job for you, Charlie. One that suits your peculiar talents. Next to the Education Building there’s a grease joint, run by some girls from a church. Go down there with that nice, new cane of yours and give the girls your personality.”
Boston looked suspiciously at Quade. “Is this a rib?”
“No. This murder happened right next door to them. Pump the girls. Find out if they saw anything. Wait there for me. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Boston walked off briskly. The assignment was one he relished. Quade shook his head dolefully after his pal and went off in the other direction.
A few minutes later he stopped at a tent concession. There was a board backdrop in the tent, over which was spread a sheet of canvas, with red hearts painted on it. One or two customers were throwing darts at the hearts.
“Abe,” Quade said to the concessionaire, “did you lose a dart here today?”
Abe Wynn, a bald, fat man, grunted. “I lose a dozen every day. The yaps swipe ’em.”
“The cops been here yet?”
Wynn winced. “No, but I heard—and I’ve been expectin’ them. I don’t know a damn thing. It happened at your pitch, huh?”
Quade nodded. He picked up a handful of darts and began tossing them at the red hearts. “And the dart had your trademark. I s’pose you wouldn’t remember the people who tossed here today?”
“No. It’s been a good day and there’ve been two-three hundred. Any one of them could have slipped a dart into his pocket. But, Ollie, you know damn well one of these darts wouldn’t kill a man unless it struck a big vein or the heart.”
“There was poison on it. A deadly poison.”
“That lets me out, then. None of these darts have poison on them. I know because I wipe them with an oily rag every day to keep them from rusting.”
“Well, I was just asking. If a Lieutenant Johnson talks to you, he’s tough.�
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Quade worked his way to the front of the Fair Grounds, to the Administration Building. He located the secretary’s office and had scarcely stepped inside, than Lieutenant Johnson grabbed him. “I was just going to look for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Some people have been picked up. I want you to look them over and give me the nod if any of them were in that crowd when you were selling those books.”
“There were five hundred. I wouldn’t know them all.”
“You might remember some of the faces…. In here.”
In the secretary’s office were eight or ten men and one woman. Quade’s eyes ran quickly over the gathering. He whispered to Lieutenant Johnson. “The stocky fellow in the gray suit—I’m sure of him. And the girl, she was there for a minute, although I think she left before it happened.”
The detective smacked his lips and stepped up to the middle-aged man in the gray suit. “Mr. Colby, you were Arnold’s office manager, weren’t you?”
Colby nodded. There was apprehension in his eyes. “I’m also a stockholder in the company. I thought a great deal of Arnold. I’m sure Ruth will bear me out in that.” He nodded toward the girl.
The girl’s eyes were tear-stained and she was wadding a moist handkerchief in a gloved hand. “My father always spoke very highly of Mr. Colby.”
She was, then, the dead man’s daughter. Which puzzled Quade. She had been in the crowd when he’d started, but she hadn’t been with her father—and had left before he was killed. Or had she left?
Lieutenant Johnson was still working on Colby. “Today’s a legal holiday. But you can save us time, Mr. Colby. We’re putting an auditor into the business tomorrow. You can save yourself a lot of trouble right now by telling for how much you tapped the till.”
Colby exclaimed angrily. “I resent that question. If I’m under arrest I demand to be allowed to telephone my attorney. If I’m not under arrest, I insist on courteous treatment.”
“This is a murder case, Mr. Colby,” snapped Johnson. “If my questions seem pointed, please bear in mind the gravity of the crime. It’s my business to ask questions, so could you venture an opinion as to why someone would want to murder Mr. Arnold?”
“I could not,” retorted Colby. “The Arnold Publishing Company is a corporation. L. B. owned sixty percent and I believe ten percent is in Miss Arnold’s name. She will naturally inherit her father’s stock. I stand to gain nothing by Arnold’s death.”
“Is that right, Miss Arnold?” the detective asked.
The girl nodded. “I believe so. Father told me only yesterday that the business was in bad shape.”
“That’s right!”
The exclamation came from a stocky man with huge, black eyebrows and a Hitler mustache. Lieutenant Johnson whirled on him. “Your name?”
“Wexler. Louis Wexler.”
“You were a friend of Arnold’s?”
“Creditor would be a better word. He owed me for printing.”
Colby interrupted. “Do you have to advertise it to the world? You got plenty of money from Arnold over a period of years. That he was a little hard pressed at the moment …”
“Hard pressed?” cried Wexler. “What about me? I’ve got a plant and a payroll. I got to lay it out every week—”
“So you were sore at Arnold?” Lieutenant Johnson said softly.
Wexler glared at the detective, then seemed to realize that he had laid himself open. Abruptly, his manner changed. He even attempted a smile. “Just in a business way, you understand. After all, you don’t kill a man who owes you money. You can’t get it back, then.”
Quade nudged the lieutenant. “Ask the girl why she slipped away from my pitch,” he murmured.
Johnson inhaled softly. Then he pounced on Ruth Arnold. “You were at the scene of your father’s murder. Did you leave before or after he was killed?”
Ruth Arnold’s hand flew up to her mouth and her eyes popped wide open. The tall young man beside her gripped her arm. He scowled at the detective. “Ruth was with me all afternoon.”
“Let her answer my question!” Johnson thundered.
“I left before,” Ruth Arnold whispered.
“Why’d you leave—because you saw your father?”
That question scored, too. But the girl’s supporter answered, “She left to meet me. It’s all right, now, Ruth. They’ll find it out anyway.”
“That you and Miss Arnold are engaged?” cut in Oliver Quade.
The girl gasped, but the man beside her, nodded. “Yes. Ruth’s father objected to her having anything to do with me.”
“What’s your name?” demanded Johnson.
“Jim Stillwell.”
Oliver Quade cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask Mr. Stillwell a question?”
Lieutenant Johnson shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“All right, Mr. Stillwell, who was the first man in American history to win the Republican nomination for president?”
“What the hell!” snorted Lieutenant Johnson angrily. “You playing games?”
“No, I’m interested in history and I thought I’d ask—”
“I don’t mind answering,” said Jim Stillwell. “John C. Fremont, in 1856, was the first Republican nominee. Right?”
“Surprisingly, yes.”
“You got any more questions?” the detective lieutenant asked, sarcastically.
“Yes, who was vice-president during Lincoln’s first term?”
“Get out of here!” cried Johnson.
“In one minute. Did you find out what poison was on the dart?”
“Well, the doc says it was dipped in some hydrocyanic acid. But where the devil would they get that stuff?”
Quade said: “In a drugstore—or if a fellow was real smart he could go out into a cornfield where there was some Indian corn. He could pick out a stunted stalk, and in some crotch find enough hydrocyanic acid to kill fifty people. It forms in stunted Indian corn and—”
The lieutenant sawed the air. “Yeah, I know you’re a smart guy. But get out of here!”
Quade left the room. On his way out, he picked up, from a desk, a copy of Arnold’s American History.
At the grease joint operated by the girls from the church, he found Charlie Boston in command of the situation. He was leaning against the counter, twirling his new cane and chatting with a dark-haired girl.
“Hi, pal,” he greeted Quade. “It’s all fixed. This is Mildred Rogers. She’s mine. Yours is the blonde. Her name’s Linda Starr.”
The blonde was the girl who had repelled Quade’s advances a while ago. He shook his head at her. “So you’d accept a blind date—after turning down my own noble advances.”
“You beat about the bush instead of getting down to business,” she retorted. “Anyway, I’d seen you and I hadn’t the blind date.”
“Where’ll we pick you up at seven-thirty?” he asked.
She gave him a number on South Lindell. “And if you don’t show up, I’m knitting some ear muffs for my regular boy friend who’s at West Point and I’d like to stay home an evening and finish them.”
“Ear muffs are against army regulations,” he replied. “So we’ll be around at seven-thirty.”
They moved away from the lunch stand and Quade whispered to Boston. “Well, what’d you find out?”
“Why, nothing. They didn’t see a thing. But they are real nice girls and we didn’t have anything to do this evening, anyway.”
Quade swore softly. “Nothing except earn money. Do you realize that the four bucks you threw away trying to win that cane was our grub money? I had to shell out all of mine to pay for the Fair privileges.”
“But it’s only three o’clock. You can still make a pitch or two and get some money.”
“I’m not in the mood, now.�
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Boston groaned. “So that’s coming on again. You weren’t in the mood all summer. That’s why we’re away up here in Minnesota at the last fair of the season and without a dollar of get-away money.”
“Stop it, you’re breaking my heart. All right, I guess I’ll have to make a pitch. We can’t stand up the dear girls!”
He made the pitch, but his heart wasn’t in it. He sold four books at $2.95 each, working to a crowd of four hundred. Ordinarily, he would have disposed of twenty books to a crowd that size.
It was six o’clock when they climbed into the heap of tin and wheels they had parked in a parking lot outside the Fairgrounds.
On the eight-mile drive to Fourth and Hennepin in Minneapolis, Quade passed two red lights and almost ran over a traffic cop.
Charlie Boston groaned when the last blasts of the cop’s whistle died out. “I think he got your number!”
“Is that so?” Quade asked, absent-mindedly.
Boston snarled. “If you’re going to daydream, let me take the wheel. You know damn well our insurance lapsed on this buggy three months ago.”
Quade roused himself. He grinned crookedly at Boston. “Charlie, tell me—who was Thomas Hart Benton?”
“I don’t know. There was a Doc Benton in my home town of What Cheer, Iowa, but I don’t think he had any relative by the name of Thomas Hart Benton.”
Quade sighed. “Your abysmal ignorance is sometimes appalling, Charlie. Thomas Hart Benton was senator from Missouri from 1821 to 1851.”
“If you knew, why did you ask me? I only carry your books. I don’t read ’em.”
“You’ll read one this winter, in Florida, if I have the strength to make you. Now here’s an American history I picked up today. A very interesting subject. Americans don’t study it enough. Would you believe there were people who didn’t know who won the War of 1812?”
“I’m one of them,” said Boston, sarcastically. “But there’s things I know you don’t know. One of them is the swingeroo. We’ve got a date with a couple of jitterbugs tonight and you’re going to be an awful disappointment to them.”
“Why, Charlie, I’m sure that nice Linda girl would rather discuss cultural subjects than jump around a crowded dance floor.”
Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia Page 26
