The servant in Simmons made his voice humble. “I didn’t tell the police Mr. Sprague was out here because I didn’t know if Mr. Finklestein would want me to. I’m sorry if I’ve done wrong.”
“That’s all right. Suppose you tell us what happened.”
Inside there was a tinkling noise as though a butter knife had struck a glass half filled with liquid.
Simmons spoke hurriedly, loudly. “Mr. Sprague telephoned me and said he was coming out to see me. He seemed very excited when he got here, and I must say very strange. He had me lock the door after I let him in, and before he said a word he went to the window and looked down at the street.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He didn’t say, but I had an idea he was afraid someone was following him.” Simmons was speaking less guardedly, and his whole face was in the light now. “He pulled the curtains shut and came over to me and said: ‘Simmons, I believe I know who killed Mrs. Westland.’”
Simmons was making the most of his dramatic opportunity, and he hissed, “Mrs. Westland,” through his teeth like the villain in East Lynne.
“‘I believe I know who killed Mrs. Westland,’” he repeated. “He used just those words, but when I asked him who he only shook his head and said, ‘I have to make sure first.’ Then he asked me some questions about Mr. Westland’s gun.”
They paused while the automatic elevator went by the floor. In the circular glass panel of the door, as it passed, were framed fleetingly a pretty girl’s bored face, heavily painted, and the white silk scarf and black overcoat of a man in evening clothes.
When the rumble had ceased, Crane asked, “What did he want to know?”
“He asked me when the gun was taken, and I told him on the evening of the murder because I had seen it when I was cleaning that afternoon. Then he inquired as to who had been in the apartment that evening, and I told him about Woodbury.”
“Did he seem pleased about that?”
“He just nodded his head. He said it didn’t matter, anyway.”
“Didn’t matter?”
“That’s what he said—it didn’t matter.”
“The hell!” Crane rubbed his ear. “What else did he want to know?”
“That’s all.”
William Crane echoed him. “That’s all!” He turned indignantly toward Williams. “Sprague comes up here, asks about the gun, finds that Woodbury might have taken it, then says it doesn’t matter anyway and goes home. What kind of sense does that make?”
Williams said, “Maybe our little friend here ain’t tellin’ all he knows.”
“I swear, gentlemen, I’ve told you everything Mr. Sprague said. I thought it was queer myself.”
Crane watched the man’s eyes. “He didn’t leave any papers for you to keep?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you ever been in jail, Simmons?”
“Jail!” Simmons’ eyes glittered venomously behind his bleached skin. “Who says I been in jail?”
“Nobody. I just asked you.”
Simmons’ face was completely in the shadow now. “Well, I’ll just answer you. I’ve never been in jail—” he closed the door until the chain hung in a deep loop—“if it’s any business of yours. Good-night.”
Crane and Williams stared in slow astonishment at the closed door. “Got kinda tough, didn’t he?” Williams observed.
Punching the button for the elevator, Crane said, “We wouldn’t have learned anything more from him anyway.” He jerked open the green door and added, “Not that we learned anything in the first place.”
They walked out of the building in silence and climbed in the taxi. The driver slammed the door, asked, “Where to?”
“We want to go to 5123 Sheridan Road,” Crane replied, “but we’ll stop at a saloon on the way out there.”
His arm linked with the leather strap, Williams inquired, “Isn’t that where Miss Martin lives?”
“The saloon?”
“No, you dummy, that number on Sheridan Road.”
“Any saloon do?” asked the drover.
Crane answered them both. “Yes.”
In the saloon, after an old-fashioned, Crane telephoned Major Lee at the Crime Detection Laboratory, learned he would be back about ten o’clock. On the glass shelf back of the bar, between a fat bottle of benedictine and a thin one of Goldwasser, stood a clock. He tried to make out the time, leaning over the bar. His eyes didn’t seem to focus very well, and he shook his head.
Williams said, “If you’re trying to see that clock, it’s nine-five.”
“The hell it is! That means we only got time for two more drinks.”
When they went back to the taxi, Crane blew his breath in puffs from his mouth, interestedly watched the silver mist form in the cold air. He stopped and tried to blow a circle, but he couldn’t. “That’s a point for the cigarette manufacturers,” he announced. “You gotta have smoke on your breath to blow rings.” As Williams shoved him into the cab, he asked petulantly, “Why hasn’t the American public been informed of this fact? Is this a conspiracy of silence?”
Smoothly the driver started the cab and began to drive north over level pavements. The window by his left arm was open a few inches, and air from the outside freshened the warm air in the cab. Crane leaned back on the leather cushions, closed his eyes, breathed heavily, and presently fell asleep.
When they reached the Sheridan Road address, Williams shook him violently. “You’re the damndest detective I ever heard of,” he said. “The good ones sit up with hot coffee every night for about a week to solve a case, while you sleep every chance you get.”
Crane was indignant. “Who’s been asleep?” He climbed out of the cab, told the driver to wait, and briskly and somewhat unevenly entered the imitation marble lobby of the three-apartment building. A buzzer sounded on the inner door in response to his pressure on a black button opposite the name Albert Prudence. He held the door open for Williams, then followed his feet up three flights of green-carpeted stairs.
Mr. Prudence did not resemble his pretty niece. He was an old man with hair like absorbent cotton and a high-bridged nose. He had on a green smoking jacket and slippers trimmed with rabbit fur, and his shoulders were bent. Williams explained who they were.
“Come in, come in.” Mr. Prudence’s voice was high and frail and impatient, as though he might be deaf. “Miss Martin is home.”
They made their way through a hall into a large living room with three windows. A lazy wood fire burned in a circular fireplace; subdued hooked rugs islanded the maple floor; a pair of very old pewter candlesticks, faint traces of copper showing through the powdered silver surface, were reflected in a mirror on the mantel.
“Mama, here are some men to see Emily Lou,” Mr. Prudence said.
Mrs. Prudence was a big-bosomed woman with haughty eyes and hair more black than gray. She hoisted herself out of a deep chair with projecting wings and advanced toward them, a mechanically pleasant expression stamped on her face.
Her husband continued, “They’re detectives for Mr. Westland.”
Indecision erased the mechanical pleasure from the woman’s face. Did you treat detectives as you would servants, or were they a shade better? She halted, obviously decided to take no chances. “I’ll call Miss Martin,” she said, “if you will be good enough to wait.” Her voice was the patronizing voice one used for servants. She walked around a small spinning wheel and disappeared down the hall.
Mr. Prudence fidgeted. “Pretty cold outside,” he stated.
“You bet,” said Williams. “Pretty cold.”
They looked at the room. Crane saw that it was Early American and wondered if the spindly chairs were antiques. He admired the lustrous ruby hue of four goblets, one cracked, and a pitcher on the thin shelves of a small cabinet built in the eight-foot paneled wall.
“Hello.” Emily Lou advanced from the hall. Her skin was delicate and rosy, her hair darkly red in the firelight. “What are you two doing here?”
Crane made a valiant effort to hold himself steady, shook her hand, and said, “Just checking on that telephone call angle.”
“The telephone call…?”
“Yes, the one that sounded as if it came from you.”
Mrs. Prudence, hovering behind Emily Lou, laughed contemptuously. “I never believed in that telephone call. Why should Mr. Westland say at first that my niece called him and then change his story and say it was someone whose voice sounded like hers?”
“I don’t know,” said William Crane. “Why?”
“Because he made the story up, and then had to get out of it when he saw Emily Lou wouldn’t support it by lying.”
“Now, Auntie Mae.” Emily Lou’s voice was angry. “We’ve had all this out before. The story of the telephone call didn’t help Robbie’s case anyway, so he wouldn’t have any reason for making it up.”
Mrs. Prudence snorted like a sea lion. “Reason or no reason——”
“Mama,” her husband interrupted her, “these men want to find out something.”
Crane looked at the fire with distrust. The heat was making him feel giddy. “It’s this way, ma’am,” he said. “If the telephone call was made, the person who made it must have known where Miss Martin was at the time. He, or she, couldn’t have taken the chance that Miss Martin was with Westland at the time, or out of town, or something. Therefore they must have had some way of knowing where she was.”
“She was right here with us,” said Mrs. Prudence. “Anybody could have seen her come in.”
“Yes, but whoever called had to be sure that Westland wouldn’t call back. Once he had reached Miss Martin the plot would have been spoiled.”
“Plot!” exclaimed Mrs. Prudence with fine contempt.
Mrs. Prudence’s clear blue eyes were circles of wonder. “You mean the telephone here must have been tapped?”
“That would be the only way you could intercept Westland’s return call, if he made one.”
Mrs. Prudence said triumphantly, “But he never said he made one.”
Under her disapproving eye Crane wrestled stubbornly with his overcoat, finally got it off. “That doesn’t make any difference. They had to be prepared for it whether he made it or not.”
Emily Lou Martin’s figure was petite and nicely rounded, and she filled her apple-green dress with seductive curves. She said, “But how could anybody tap our line?”
“That’s what we want to see. Would you mind if Mr. Williams looked at your telephone connections? He’s an expert on wire tapping.”
Williams looked mildly surprised, said, “I wouldn’t—”
Crane held up his hand. “Now don’t be modest.” He bowed politely to Mrs. Prudence, nearly fell on his head. “If we could see the telephone…?”
The telephone was in the hall they had come through and was within easy hearing distance of the living room. Williams examined it gingerly. It was like all the telephones he had ever seen, but he said, “Hmm.” The others watched him interestedly.
“Somebody couldn’t have come in here while you were in the back of the apartment and used the phone?” Crane asked.
Mrs. Prudence said, “There’s a safety catch on the door and besides—” she snorted nastily—“we were in the living room at the time Mr. Westland said the call was made.”
“I wasn’t,” Emily Lou said. “I was in my room.”/
“Maybe somebody could see her there,” Crane suggested, “and in that way could tell she was in. You’d need two parties, one to tap the phone and one to see if she was in.”
Mr. Prudence injected himself mildly into the conversation. “Couldn’t the person have already tapped the phone and then watched from some vantage point?” He looked appealingly at his wife. “She could have made the call as soon as she saw Emily Lou was in her bedroom.”
“That’s a strong possibility,” Crane declared. “A strong possibility, Mr. Prudence.” He spoke heartily in an effort to dispel a feeling of faintness. “We’d better take a look out Miss Martin’s bedroom windows. Perhaps we can spot the point from where she was observed.”
Mrs. Prudence said, “Hrrmp!” She took her husband’s arm, led him into the living room. “We’ll let Emily Lou show the men her bedroom.” Her tone implied Emily Lou had invented a new kind of immorality.
The bedroom was very feminine. Silver-backed toilet articles, a huge powder box with a rose-colored puff, oddly shaped perfume bottles, covered a low boudoir table facing a tall mirror. An open closet door was armored on the inside with shoes in individual pockets, and in back of them were rows of dresses. The wall paper was flowered to match the window curtains, and there was a mingled smell of perfume and pine crystals.
Crane opened the window and took a deep breath of the cold dry air. He felt better at once. Miss Martin, standing beside him, smelled faintly and pleasantly of lilies of the valley. The window looked into the court of a large apartment hotel built of yellow bricks. It would be possible from about fifty windows to look into Miss Martin’s room. In one of the nearer windows an athletic man in green silk shorts was taking setting up exercises with a pair of dumbbells, pushing them above his head, lowering them, thrusting them out to the side. His chest was designed with black hair, his face was rapt.
Crane said, “Nice view … for a lady.”
Miss Martin’s lips curled in scorn. “I’ve learned the facts of life by watching that court.”
The athletic man put his dumbbells down, started to take off his shorts. Miss Martin hurriedly turned away. Doc Williams, who had been standing behind them, was looking into a bureau drawer. “That your marriage certificate?”
Miss Martin picked up a framed certificate. “No, it’s my mother’s.”
“Oh, I just saw the name Emily Lou Martin.”
“My mother’s name was Emily Lou.”
Crane said, “We’d better look into the tapping possibilities. Where does the telephone wire go?”
“It runs along the hall,” Miss Martin said. “This is an old building, and the wires don’t run in the walls. At least, that’s what the telephone man said when he installed it.”
As they went into the hall to look for it, Williams asked, “They wouldn’t tap it in the apartment, would they?”
Crane examined the place where the wire went under the wainscoting below the telephone. “Where else could they tap it? It would be next to impossible to pick out the Prudences’ wire once it got into the main cable with hundreds of other wires. They’d either have to get it here, or in the basement.”
“They’d have a hard time in the basement,” said Emily Lou. “The janitor lives down there, and he keeps a police dog.”
They went down to the basement anyway, routed an aggrieved janitor, who closely resembled Chic Sale, out of bed, and examined the exposed phone wires. They were in perfect condition.
“Nobody come down here without my knowing it,” the janitor assured them, holding on to a pair of discolored pants with one hand and with the other trying to keep his unbuttoned shirt together. “The purp’s here all day, and I’m here all night.”
On their way up the wooden back stairs, Miss Martin explained that the dog slept in a kennel in the yard. “He spends most of his time barking at cats,” she added.
In the white kitchen they found the hole where the wires went down to the basement. “This is the top of three apartments, isn’t it?” Crane asked. When Emily Lou nodded, he continued, “How about the apartments below? Either of them empty?”
“They’re both occupied by people we know.”
Doc Williams, who had been tracing the wire along the hall like a bloodhound, exclaimed, “Hey! Look here!” His shout took them through the darkened dining room to the hall entrance. He had a piece of the baseboard off, was examining the wire. Quite obviously it had been cut at that point, then carefully spliced.
Crane bent over and examined it, shook his head. “Now that we’ve found something, I don’t know what it means.”
W
illiams asked, “How could anybody have gotten in here to do that?”
“Fiddlesticks!” Mrs. Prudence, hands on hips, stood watching them. “The telephone man did that when we complained about the service. He said something must have accidentally cut the wire.”
“When did the telephone man come to fix it?” Crane asked.
Emily Lou’s eyes were round. “He came on the day before the murder—that is the day before Mrs. Westland was found.”
“Nonsense, my dear.” Mrs. Prudence shook her head. “He came on the day the body was found. I remember distinctly because Mr. Woodbury tried to telephone you and couldn’t. Don’t you remember he had to send a telegram?”
“Yes … but the man I’m thinking of came on Sunday, the day before that. I was here all alone when he came. He said he had orders to test the wire.”
Crane was helping Williams replace the baseboard. “You mean there were two telephone repair men?”
“There must have been. Auntie had one come on Monday, and I saw one on Sunday. What do you think…?”
“The first one must have been a phoney,” said Williams. “He must of tapped the wire.”
“Cut it,” Crane corrected him. “He must have cut it so the phone wouldn’t ring in the apartment in case Westland called back after the fake Emily Lou had talked to him.” He stood up, brushed his hands on the seat of his trousers. “Let’s see where he could have run a wire.”
Right around the corner from the hall was a curtained dining room window. It overlooked the roof of a two-story apartment building and a vacant lot. “The wire could have gone out here,” said Crane.
Mrs. Prudence glared at him. “No it couldn’t. We always keep these windows closed.”
“That wouldn’t make any difference. The man could have closed the window over the wire. You wouldn’t have noticed it, particularly if you didn’t use the dining room on Sunday evening.”
“We don’t,” said Miss Martin.
“Then, when the call had been completed,” Crane said, “the man could have simply jerked the wire loose, hoping that you would attribute the broken connection to an accident.”
Mrs. Prudence was adamant. “I don’t think the wire could have gone out this way—not that I’m admitting there was any such wire.”
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