Headed for a Hearse

by Jonathan Latimer

Finklestein gave her his symphony concert manner. “Madam, we are indeed sorry to disturb you.” He held his hat so the diamond ring caught the hall light. “We are conducting a final investigation of last spring’s tragedy. It is essential we look over the apartment.”

  The woman’s eyes did not miss the ring. “I suppose I’ll have to let you nose around.” She slouched towards the living room.

  Gray terra-cotta walls rose from a mulberry rug—walls covered in two places by glittering coin tapestries from India, and in another with a flamboyant portrait of a Spanish boy thrusting huge purple grapes into his red mouth. At one end was an apartment-size Steinway; in the center, facing a fireplace of marble, was a chaste black-silk davenport. Plain chairs, two antique tables were the other pieces of furniture. On two sides were windows. Miss Hogan pushed a switch, flooding the room with indirect light.

  She said, “They found her body by that table.”

  While the others waited, Crane, in the best Sherlock Holmes manner, went over the carpet with a small magnifying glass. He examined the faintly discolored spot where the blood had been, inspected the table by it with care. He felt around the sides of the davenport, lifted the cushions, pounded the back, slid part way under the bottom.

  The woman’s vivid lips curved scornfully. “The murderer must have got tired of waiting under there.” She leaned a curved hip against the other, larger table.

  Back at the small table again, Crane asked, “Have you got a pin? And some string?”

  Miss Hogan frowned, said, “I guess so.” She sauntered toward the hall.

  Williams followed her with glistening eyes. “That fanny looks like the Follies, or high-grade burly-que,” he said.

  Crane sat on the floor. “Open the doors to the dining room, will you, Doc?” He pointed to the small glass-paneled sliding door at the end of the living room near the hall entrance.

  Williams slid the doors open, looking down the corridor toward Miss Hogan’s bedroom. The dining room had a red tile floor, a large unpolished table with wrought-iron legs: on the wall was a gaudy painting of a salmon-pink bridge over a too blue river. The swinging door to the kitchen was to the left, in the direction of the outside hall.

  Miss Hogan returned and dropped a straight pin and a ball of brown twine in Crane’s lap. She smelled strongly of lilacs. He caught another glimpse of her leg, wondered if she had anything on under the silk dressing gown.

  “There is only one door to this place, isn’t there?” Crane asked her.

  “You came in by it.”

  “But there is an opening in the kitchen for packages?”

  “Sure, but nothin’ bigger than a monkey could get in there.”

  “That makes you fairly safe at night, doesn’t it?”

  Green-brown eyes behind the mascara were haughty. “I don’t need doors to keep me safe at night.”

  Mr. Williams said, “This must be a sissy town.”

  “The lady is lovely,” Finklestein said reprovingly, “but we are supposed to be working.”

  Williams stared boldly at Miss Hogan. “I could stop anytime.”

  Crane waved the twine at him. “Go open the door between the dining room and the kitchen and the place for the packages.” He looked at Miss Hogan. “The lady isn’t interested in us.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.

  Crane went into the hall and looked at the front door. It fitted tightly in its frame, and there was no place at the bottom or top to poke any sort of a key through. The special lock had been plugged up, but he could see it was the kind you had to turn with a key to fasten. He came back and walked into the kitchen, where Williams was propping open the swinging doors. He told him: “You go out in the outside hall for a second, Doc.”

  The opening for groceries was head high and about one foot square. Nobody could get through it. When Williams got around to the other side, in the hall, Crane handed him the end of the twine. “Hold this.” He unrolled the ball, passed through the dining room, and halted by the small table. He took a book, Candide, and drove the pin firmly into a crack in the table. He cut the twine from the ball, looped the end loosely around the pin. Then he took the line and pulled it up so that it was firm, but not tight enough to pull out the loose knot around the pin. He followed the line back to Williams, keeping it fairly taut. The girl and Finklestein wonderingly followed him. He took a latchkey, threaded it on the cord, and let it coast down to where the cord turned against the dining room wall to go into the living room, holding his hand by the grocery entrance. The key would not go around this turn and he gave the cord a swing. The cord slipped off the pin, and the key tinkled on the tile floor.

  “Hell!” Crane said. “That won’t work.”

  Williams came around through the hall. “Come on, Master Mind; tell us what you’re doing.”

  Crane wound the piece of cord on the ball. “I thought maybe you could slide the key from the grocery place in the kitchen to the table and then jerk the cord from the pin and through the key so that the key would stay on the table.” He pulled the pin from the table and handed it and the ball of twine to Miss Hogan. He could see she had on, at least, a pale yellow brassiere. “Every flossy detective story has a trick like that in it. You can just see the murderer working patiently out here for hours after the murder, trying to slide the key back on the table and having the cord slip off the pin. Maybe somebody asks him what he’s doing and he says, ‘I just knocked off a lady in there and I want to make it appear as though somebody else with a key locked the door from the outside.’”

  Finklestein said, “Maybe he had a trained monkey that carried the key back for him. A monkey could get through the grocery opening.”

  Mr. Williams nodded. “Or a seal he sent up through the drain in the bathtub.

  Miss Hogan put a hand on her right hip. “Say, what asylum did you guys escape from, anyway?”

  “Don’t tell on us,” Crane said. “It’s the first time we’ve been out in years.” He sat on the black silk davenport. “Miss Hogan, suppose you wanted to make the police think this place had been locked by Mr. Westland’s key from the outside. You have either to leave the key on the table and get out some other way than the door, or you have to go out by the door and then get the key back on the table in some way without unlocking the door again. How would you do it?”

  “I couldn’t.” Miss Hogan shook her orange head with decision. “I bet you Mr. Westland’s key locked the door. I read about it in the newspapers, and I thought all the time he done it. You can’t trust them rich playboys.”

  “How do you know you can’t?”

  “I’ve had some gentlemen friends in my time.”

  “I’ll bet.” Crane thought it must have cost them plenty, too. “But, Miss Hogan, we are working for Mr. Westland, and we have to assume he is not guilty.”

  “You won’t be working for him long.” Miss Hogan pulled her robe tight across her slim buttocks. “Not unless you find out something in a hurry.”

  “It doesn’t look as though we are going to get anywhere here,” Finklestein observed.

  Crane said, “Williams, you go and see if there’s a chance of getting out by the bedrooms. I’ve got a feeling there’s some way of beating this business.”

  “The fellow couldn’t have used the windows because they were locked from the inside,” Finklestein said. “And there’s only one door.”

  Miss Hogan moved out of the room behind Williams, again exposing her slim, tanned legs.

  Crane’s eyes followed her. “If I want to do anything I better get out of here. I wonder how the hotel clerk got her.”

  “Depression.” Finklestein looked at the lighted boulevard from one of the windows. “She’ll toss him over as soon as some real dough comes along.”

  “I go for a gal like that,” said Crane. “You always know just where you are. You know you have to sleep with one eye open to keep from having your throat cut. Then, when she double-crosses you, you’re not as surprised as you are when a ni
ce girl does.”

  “You don’t think a girl—maybe that Miss Brentino—crossed up Westland?”

  “She’s pretty chummy with Woodbury, she told me so herself; and he could have taken Westland’s gun if Simmons is telling the truth.”

  “What would be the motive? Why not just knock off Westland, if you want him out of the way?”

  “I don’t know,” Crane said wearily. “I wish Colonel Black was here instead of in Europe. I’m a hell of a detective: thinking makes my head ache.” He pushed himself out of the davenport. “I wonder if that old clerk, Sprague, was talking through his hat when he said he’d tell us the motive?”

  “He doesn’t look all there to me. I think he was just talking.”

  Mr. Williams came back with Miss Hogan. “No way out at all through the bedrooms,” he reported.

  “I suppose we’d better scram,” Crane said. He pinched the sullen-eyed Miss Hogan’s cheek. “I’ll be seeing you, sweetheart.”

  She said, “Not this century, I hope.” She looked at Finklestein with a friendly expression as he went into the hall. “If I can ever help you, Mister…”

  “Finklestein,” said the lawyer.

  After the door closed, Crane said, “Whew, you must be eupeptic to win that tambo’s heart so quickly.”

  The lawyer brushed a piece of lint from his camel’s hair top coat. “I get around,” he admitted.

  Robert Westland had received another basket of fruit from Emily Lou, and after a dinner of chipped beef on stale bread, and coffee, he passed it to Varecha. The candy peddler had cried only a little all day. He selected a green pear.

  “T’anks,” he said. His smile revealed black teeth. “Onc’t I sold fruit myself.” His neck was a purplish abrasion.

  Connors, taking a handful of grapes, said: “You and the little Heeb are gettin’ pretty chummy, ain’t you?”

  “I feel sorry for the fellow,” Westland said. “He ought to be in a hospital instead of in here.”

  He put the basket on the floor, shivered in the chill draft from the corridor. He wondered again how the gangster could bear the cold without clothes above the waist.

  “Listen,” said Connors. “I’ve been thinking about that Grant. They didn’t just happen to pick that time to knock him off. They got him because they were afraid he was going to spill something they didn’t want spilled.”

  “I think you are right, but what are we to do? We haven’t time to chase the fellows that killed him. Only three days left.… We have to get something that will help me.”

  Connors spoke from the corner of his mouth, not moving his lips. “If you got the guys who hired those killers, you’d have the guy that gave it to your wife.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. We might be able to link him with my wife’s murder ultimately, but in the meantime I’d be…”

  “I get the idea. You havta get hold of somethin’ that will prove you’re innocent.”

  “Sure. If I can get a stay, I’ll have more time to get hold of the real murderers.”

  Connors secured an apple, sank his teeth in it. “It wouldn’t hurt to look into that shooting, anyway. It was a pro job, I’ll tell you that. I got some friends that’ll be glad to listen around to see what outfit done it.”

  Another bite carried away half the apple. “You’ll find it’s some guy who’s interested in seeing you out of the way.”

  “But, my God, I never had anything to do with a gangster in my life. Why would they be interested in me?”

  The wind breathed steadily on Westland’s neck. From the distant Burlington yards came the puffing of an engine moving a heavy train.

  “You see that I get a note out to my pals,” said Connors; “and we’ll see what we can find.”

  Finklestein had left them downtown, saying he had some important work to do. They went to their rooms at the Hotel Sherman and washed and spent about an hour drinking Canadian rye with White Rock.

  “This is the damnedest job I ever had,” said Crane as they were leaving their rooms for dinner. “I never wanted to get drunk so much in my life, but I don’t dare.” He turned the key in the lock. “In an ordinary case you’ve got a lot of time, a year if you need it, but here you have to have everything by Friday. I think I’m going daffy.”

  Williams said, “I wish the Colonel was here.”

  A sleek Italian in a pea-green suit joined them in waiting for the elevator. When the steel doors swung open, he pushed roughly past them and stepped inside. All the way down he glowered at them. He smelled of perfume, and his dark face was heavily powdered. He pushed past them again on the way out.

  “I don’t like that guy’s looks,” Williams observed conversationally as they walked past the coin machines in the lobby.

  Crane said, “He didn’t like ours, either.”

  They walked over to a steak place on Dearborn Street. After the waiter had taken their order, Williams said, “I wonder what Finklestein’s doing that’s so important?”

  “I’ve got a good idea.” Crane took a nickel from his pocket, walked over to a phone booth by the cashier’s cage, and called a number. “Miss Hogan’s apartment,” he said. In a minute he spoke again. “This is the State’s Attorney’s office, we must speak to Mr. Finklestein.” There was another pause. “Mr. Finklestein?—I suggest, Mr. Finklestein, that you have the decency to pull the living-room blinds.”

  He returned to the table, as pleased as if he had solved the Westland case.

  CHAPTER IX

  Tuesday Night

  They decided after dinner to talk to Deputy Strom at the Detective Bureau. It was not so windy outside, and a quiet fall of very dry snow had begun, as though someone was cutting up an ostrich boa with a pair of nail scissors. Already the streetcars glided silently along covered rails, automobiles moved cautiously on the white pavement, and State Street, subdued and clean, was quite pastoral. As they walked south they stared admiringly into the windows of the great department stores.

  William Crane was thinking about Westland. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere fast,” he observed gloomily.

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Williams said. “I still don’t think it would be a bad idea to keep an eye on Woodbury.”

  They walked under the elevated structure and into the honky-tonk district south of Van Buren Street. They passed a penny arcade with a shooting gallery; a burlesque show with “Fifty New York Cuties”; another show which, according to a red sign, “Daringly Exposed the Vice of a Big City with Seven Living Models”; a tattooing establishment and a pawn shop.

  “Look,” said Mr. Williams: “if you ever get tattooed, don’t let the guy put your girl’s name on the job.”

  “I don’t ever want to get tattooed.”

  “Well, if you ever do, have somethin’ like a broken heart, or the Statue of Liberty, or one of them doves with a bunch of grass in its mouth put on, but no names. You never can tell when you’re going to change your girl, an’ let me tell you them marks is hell to take out.”

  They were nearing the Detective Bureau, and the street was dim. On their right were junk and coal yards, surrounded by dirty board fences. Across the street was a row of brown, four-story tenement houses. They passed only an occasional person.

  “I had a babe named Mary onc’t,” Williams continued, “and I had a guy over in Hoboken put a mermaid with Mary wrote under it on my chest. That was O. K. until I hooked up with an Italian girl named Angela. She wouldn’t have anythin’ to do with me until I got the ‘Mary’ taken off. She said it wasn’t religious, but I still don’t see why she was so upset.”

  Crane said, “Maybe she didn’t like to commit sacrilege and adultery at the same time?”

  Mr. Williams looked over his shoulder. “Christ!” He put his arm around Crane’s waist, tripped him. Both fell heavily on the sidewalk. There was a quick irregular sound like a broomstick being pushed very fast along a picket fence, and a touring car with black side curtains went past at thirty miles an hour. A man was leaning ou
t of the front seat, shooting at them with a sub-machine gun.

  The snow was ice cold on Crane’s face.

  Williams pulled his revolver out of the tangle of his overcoat and returned the fire in quick flashes. Back of them, under a yellow street light, a spruce nigger in a derby hat and a tan overcoat watched pop-eyed. The man with the machine gun fired a last burst at them and disappeared inside the tonneau. Crane ducked again, and when he raised his face from the snow the car had gone and the nigger was flopping around in the gutter like a hooked black bass in a rowboat.

  Crane unsteadily rose from the cement, fumbled for his hat. The nigger slithered halfway up on the sidewalk, making swimming motions with his legs and arms, and then slid back off the curb into the street. He moved in convulsive jerks when Williams bent over him.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Williams said. “Where’d it hit you?”

  The nigger’s eyes were as big as poached eggs. He pointed at his leg. Blood oozed from the trouser bottom, was bright and thick on the snow. Williams put his gun away and slit the trouser leg with a knife.

  The nigger moaned, said, “That’s my bes’ suit.”

  “You don’t want to bleed to death, do you?” Williams took a polka-dot silk scarf from the colored man’s protesting neck, and wound it around the leg above the wound. He and Crane each took an end, pulled it tight. Then he knotted it.

  A truck pulled up beside them. “What’s the matter?” asked the driver. The truck was marked “Bachelors’ Friend Hand Laundry.” Below this was printed: “Why Get Married While We Are in Business?”

  Williams said, “This jig got hurt. Hit-and-run driver.” He showed a nickle badge. “You take him over to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

  The driver’s face was fat and young. “Yes, sir.” He helped them lift the nigger into the front seat, drove off rapidly.

  William Crane said, “We better get the hell out of here.”

  “You said it! If the police find us here, we’ll have to do a lot of explaining…”

  “I was thinking of those guys in the touring car.”

  “Those mugs!” Williams’ voice was scornful. “I wish they would come back. They can’t shoot worth a damn.”