“Lies!” he kept repeating. “You can talk and talk and talk. But there’s not a single damned thing you can prove!”
“Sir,” inquired Dr. Fell, “are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“I warned you,” said Dr. Fell, “that I returned tonight partly to detain all of you for an hour or so. It gave Inspector Tregellis time to search Mr. Ireton’s house, and the Inspector has since returned. I further warned you that I questioned the maids, Sonia and Dolly, who today were only incoherent. My dear sir, you underestimate your personal attractions.”
Now it was Joyce who seemed to understand. But she did not speak.
“Sonia, it seems,” and Dr. Fell looked hard at Toby, “has quite a fondness for you. When she heard that last isolated “shot” this morning, she looked out of the window again.
You weren’t there. This was so strange that she ran out to the front terrace to discover where you were. She saw you.”
The door by which Dr. Fell had entered was still open. His voice lifted and echoed through the hall.
“Come in, Sonia!” he called. “After all, you are a witness to the murder. You, Inspector, had better come in too.”
Toby Curtis blundered back, but there was no way out. There was only a brief glimpse of Sonia’s swollen, tear-stained face. Past her marched a massive figure in uniform, carrying what he had found hidden in the other house.
Inspector Tregellis was reflected everywhere in the mirrors, with the long coils of the whip over his arm. And he seemed to be carrying not a whip but a coil of rope—gallows rope.
The X Street Murders by Joseph Commings (1913-1992)
Joseph Commings began writing short stories during World War II in a tent in Sardinia. They were written for the amusement of his companions, but back home he had no trouble finding magazines that would take them. Some appeared in the later pulps (which by then were a dying breed) but a lot more appeared in the singularly offbeat magazine Mystery Digest. Perhaps this is why these stories, so much in the tradition of the Golden Age Carr with their ingenious impossible crimes and larger-than-life detective, Senator Brooks U. Banner, are so little known. Banner featured in about thirty stories but amazingly only two of them seem to have made it into anthologies. It is therefore with all the more pleasure that we present a third, as Banner, stogie at a provocative angle, tackles that most perplexing and ingenious series of criminal occasions, “The X Street Murders.”
CARROLL LOCKYEAR came out of the attaché’s private office at the New Zealand Legation on X Street, Washington, D.C. He was tall and skinny. The sallow skin of his gaunt face was drawn tight over his doorknob cheekbones like that of an Egyptian mummy. The resemblance to a mummy did not end with the tightness of his skin. Sticking out from his sharp chin, like a dejected paintbrush, was a russet-colored King Tut beard. He looked like a well-dressed beatnik. In his left hand he carried a brown cowhide briefcase, his long fingers curled under the bottom of it.
The secretary in the reception room, Miss Gertrude Wagner, looked up at him. He approached her desk and laid his briefcase carefully down on it, then towered over it toward her.
“Yes, Mr. Lockyear?” she said.
“I have another appointment with Mr. Gosling on next Tuesday, Miss Wagner.”
Gertrude penciled a line in an appointment pad.
“Good day,” said Lockyear. He picked up his briefcase and walked out.
Gertrude smiled thinly at the Army officer waiting on the lounge. He was reading a copy of the Ordnance Sergeant, but it wasn’t holding his attention as much as it should. He wore a green tunic with sharpshooter medals on the breast, and his legs, in pink slacks, were crossed. Gertrude stopped her professional smile and picked up the earpiece of the interphone and pressed a button.
“Mr. Gosling,” she said, “Captain Cozzens is waiting to see you.” She held the earpiece to her head for a moment, then lowered it. “Captain,” she said. Cozzens looked up with bright expectancy from his magazine. “Mr. Gosling wants to know if you’d mind waiting a minute.”
“Not at all,” said Cozzens, eager to agree with such a good looking girl. No doubt, visions of dinners for two were dancing in his head.
Gertrude stood up suddenly and tugged her skirt straight. She had black hair cut in a Dutch bob and dark blue eyes. The austere lines of her blotter-green suit could not entirely disguise her big-boned femininity. She gathered up a steno pad and a mechanical pencil and started to walk toward the closed door of Mr. Gosling’s private office. Glancing at the slim baguette watch on her wrist, she stopped short. It was as if she had almost forgotten something. She went back to her desk. On it lay a sealed large bulky manila mailing envelope. A slip of paper had been pasted on its side. Typed in red on the paper was the Legation address and:
Deliver to Mr. Kermit Gosling at 11:30 a.m. sharp.
Gertrude grasped the envelope by the top and proceeded into Gosling’s office, leaving the door open. This private office, it was carefully noted later, was on the third floor of the building. It had two windows and both these windows were protected by old-fashioned iron bars. It was a room in which an attaché might consider himself safe.
Captain Cozzens had been following Gertrude’s flowing progress with admiring eyes. Those narrow skirts did a lot for a girl if she had the right kind of legs and hips. And Gertrude definitely had the right kind.
Another man sitting near Cozzens was watching her too. He was red-haired and young, with a square face and a pug nose. The jacket of his black suit was tight across his shoulders. He was Alvin Odell and it was his job to watch what went on in the office. He was an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But he too was watching Gertrude with more interest than his job called for.
From where Cozzens and Odell sat they could see the edge of Gosling’s desk. They saw the closely-observed Gertrude stand before it, facing across it, and she held the bulky envelope up waist-high.
There was a slight pause.
Then three shots spat harshly.
Cozzens and Odell, shocked at the sudden ripping apart of their daydreams by gunfire, saw Gertrude flinch before the desk. Then the two men sprang up together and rushed in to her side.
Gosling, a heavy-featured man with limp blond hair, was tilted sideways in his desk chair. Blood stained his white shirt front; Odell stared at the three bullet holes under the left lapel of the grey business suit.
Captain Cozzens voice was hoarse. “Those three shots—where did they come from?”
Gertrude’s blue eyes, dazed, searched Cozzen’s face as if she had never seen him before. Dumbly she lifted up the heavy envelope.
Before Cozzens could move, the FBI man was faster. Odell snatched the envelope out of her hand.
It was still tightly sealed. There were no holes or tears in it. Odell started to rip it along the top. A wisp of bluish smoke curled up in the still air.
Odell tore the envelope wide open and out of it onto the desktop spilled a freshly fired automatic pistol.
Heavy blunt-tipped fingers on speckled hands turned over the brown State Department envelope. It was addressed to Honorable Brooks U. Banner, M. C., The Idle Hour Club, President Jefferson Avenue, Washington, D.C.
The addressee was a big fat man with a mane of grizzled hair and a ruddy jowled face and the physique of a performing bear. He wore a moth-eaten frock coat with deep pockets bulging with junk and a greasy string tie and baggy-kneed grey britches. Under the open frock coat was a candy-striped shirt. On his feet were old house slippers whose frayed toes looked as if a pair of hungry field mice were trying to nibble their way out from inside. He was an overgrown Huck Finn. Physically he was more than one man—he was a gang. Socially and politically he didn’t have to answer to anybody, so he acted and spoke any way he damned pleased.
He was sipping his eighth cup of black coffee as he read the letter.
It was from the Assistant Secretary of State. In painful mechanical detail, it reported the murder on X Street with as much passion as there is
in a recipe for an upside-down cake. Toward the end of the letter, the Assistant Secretary became a little less like an automaton and a little more human. He confessed to Banner that both the State Department and the FBI were snagged. They couldn’t find an answer. And considering the other harrowing murder cases that Banner had solved, perhaps he could be of some help in this extremity.
Banner crumpled the letter up into a ball and stuck it into his deep pocket. Thoughtfully his little frosty blue eyes rested on the white ceiling. He had read about the case in the newspapers, but the account had not been as full as the State Department’s.
He pulled the napkin from under his chin, swabbed his lips, and started to surge up to his feet. He looked like a surfacing whale.
A waiter hurried up with a tray. On it were three more cups of black coffee. “Aren’t you going to drink the rest of your coffee, sir?” asked the waiter in an injured tone.
“Huh?” said Banner absently. Already his mind was soaring out into space, grappling with the murder problem. “I never touch the stuff,” he said and went lumbering out.
Jack McKitrick, who looked like a jockey trainer, was an FBI department chief. He stood near Captain Cozzens in the New Zealand Legation office. When Banner came trotting in the door McKitrick said sideways to Cozzens: “That’s Senator Banner. They don’t come much bigger.”
Cozzens shook his head as he eyed the impressive hulk that rumbled forward.
“Morning, Senator,” said McKitrick to Banner.
Banner grunted an answer, mumbling words around a long Pittsburgh stogie clamped in his teeth.
“Senator,” continued McKitrick, “this is Captain Cozzens of the Ordnance Division, U.S. Army.” The two men clasped hands. “Cozzens is a small firearms expert.”
“Mighty fine,” said Banner.
“You were an Army officer yourself, weren’t you, Senator?” said Cozzens.
Banner truculently chewed on the stogie. “Yass. I never got above the rank of shavetail. We were the dogfaces who gave ‘em hell at Chateau Thierry. But I’ll tell you all about my war experiences later, Cap’n. We’ll all work together on this. Not nice seeing our New Zealand friends getting bumped off. Not nice at all.”
“No, certainly not,” said Cozzens.
Banner struck an attitude of belligerent ease. “Waal, I’m lissening, Cap’n. You were one of the witnesses to this murder. What were you doing at the Legation?”
Cozzens frowned. “I was here by appointment, Senator.
Mr. Gosling wanted me to suggest a good handgun for his personal use and to give him instructions in how to handle it.”
“Why?”
“I think,” said Cozzens slowly, “he wanted to use it to protect himself.”
“Against what?”
“He never had a chance to tell me. But I think this might supply part of the answer.” He held up a wicked-looking pistol. “This is what did the trick, Senator. It’s all right to handle it. No fingerprints were found on it.”
Scowling, Banner took it from him. “So that’s the Russian pop-pop.”
“Right,” said Cozzens. “A Tokarev, a standard Russian automatic. It’s a 7.62-mm. with a Browning-Colt breech-locking system and it uses Nagant gas-check cartridges.”
“This was the gun in the sealed envelope,” said Banner. “Are you sure it wasn’t some other gun you heard being fired?”
Cozzens slowly shook his head. “I’ve spent a lifetime with guns, Senator. I’ve got to know their ‘voices’ just the way you know people’s. When you hear an accent, you know what part of the world the speaker comes from. That’s the way I am with pistols and revolvers. So I’ll stake my reputation that the shots we heard had a Russian accent, meaning they were fired from a Tokarev automatic, slightly muffled. Besides that, ballistics bears me out. The bullets found in Gosling’s body were indisputably from that gun.”
Banner grunted. “And all the while the gun was sealed up tight in an envelope and you could see the secretary holding the envelope while the shots were fired?”
“That’s right,” answered Cozzens.
“How d’you explain it, Cap’n? What’s your theory?”
“Theory? I haven’t any. I can’t explain it. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Anything else you have to offer?” asked Banner.
“Nothing. That’s all.”
The stogie in Banner’s mouth was burning fiercely. He looked around the office where the murder had been committed. It was a completely equipped modern office. Nothing had been disturbed. He mumbled: “Gosling knew his life was in danger!”
Banner turned to McKitrick. “I’ll see Odell.”
Cozzens left while Banner was being introduced to the FBI agent, Odell.
“You heard Cozzen’s story about the shooting, Odell.” said Banner. “Have you anything to add to it?”
Odell shook his red-haired head. “No, it happened just that way, Senator.” His frank boyish face was grave.
“Why were you stationed here?”
“At a request from Mr. Gosling. He asked for our security.”
“How long’ve you been hanging out here?”
“About a week, Senator.”
McKitrick interrupted to say: “Odell asked for this assignment.”
Banner studied the young man with the rusty hair. “What’s the reason, Red?”
Odell hesitated, growing crimson around the ears. “Well, Senator—a—Miss Wagner—Well, you’ll have to see her to appreciate her—”
Banner suddenly chuckled. He was thinking of his own misspent youth chasing the dolls.
Odell sobered. “She’s a hard girl to make friends with,” he admitted ruefully.
“It’s tough, Red,” grinned Banner. “Fetch in the li’l chickie and we’ll see if I can’t make better time with her than you did.”
Odell went out of the office and returned with Gertrude. She looked scared at Banner. Big men in authority seemed to have given her a sudden fright. Her shoulders were hunched up as if she were cold. Odell held her solicitously by the elbow.
“Hello, Gertie,” boomed Banner as familiarly as if he had helped to christen her. “Siddown.”
She dropped gratefully on the leather lounge as if relieved to get the strain off her shaky knees.
“Gertie, there’s no reason why you should think I’m gonna panic you. I’m your big Dutch uncle, remember?”
She smiled at him.
“Now, Gertie,” he resumed, “you live with your people, don’t you?”
“No,” she said hoarsely, then she cleared her throat. “No, Senator. I have no relatives in America. They’re all living in Germany.”
“Germany?” Banner make a quick pounce. “What part of Germany?”
“On a farm outside of Zerbst.”
Banner’s little frosty blue eyes looked shrewd. “That’s in East Germany, ain’t it, Gertie?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about ‘em. And how you got out?”
It wasn’t too complicated a story. Gertrude had been born just after the end of World War II. She grew up in a Communist dominated land, where everybody was schooled in the Russian language. She learned to speak English too—from an ex-Berlitz professor who ran a black market in verboten linguistics. Farm life had been stern, as she grew big enough to help her father and crippled mother with the chores, but Gertrude had become sturdy on plenty of fresh milk and vegetables, and she used to walk back from the haying fields with her rakehandle across her back and shoulders and her arms draped over it. It made her walk straight and developed strong chest muscles.
“Yass,” muttered Banner at this point. “Like those Balinese gals carrying loads on their heads.” He dwelt silently on Bali for a moment, then he said: “Go on. How’d you get outta East Germany?”
She had, she explained, visited East Berlin several times, helping to bring farm products to market. Each time she came an urge grew stronger in her to see all the things she
had heard rumors about, the free and wealthy people of the West, the shops and cinemas along the Kurfurstendamm, and the opportunities for a better life. One day, at the Brandenburg Gate, the urge overcame her. She made a wild, reckless dash, eluding Soviet soldier guards, and made it, panting, falling into the arms of sympathetic West Berliners in the American Sector. She had thought that she would surely find somebody who could help to get her crippled mother and her father free too, but so far there was nobody who could perform that miracle.
Her good looks and quick-learning ability eventually got her sponsored for a trip to the United States. Mr. Gosling, of the New Zealand Legation, had proved kind to her and had got her the job.
She stopped talking, her brunette head with the Dutch bob bent low.
“Haaak!” Banner cleared this throat, making a sound like a sea lion. “Who re you living with now?”
“Nobody. I have a small apartment to myself. I have become an American citizen.”
Banner sourly eyed the chewed wet end of the stogie in his hand. “Now about this envelope with the gun in it. When did it come to your desk?”
“Sometime near 11:00 o’clock in the morning, Senator.”
“Who brought it?”
“A man from the special messenger service.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“I think I would.”
“Was your boss, Mr. Gosling, engaged at 11:00?”
“Yes, Mr. Lockyear was in there.”
“What time did Cap’n Cozzens come into the reception room?”
“Around 11:15.”
“Did anyone tamper with that envelope once it reached your desk, Gertie?”
“No, sir. No one.”
“What time did Lockyear come outta the private office?”
“It was nearly 11:30.”
“When he came out,” said Banner carefully, “did he go straight out?”
“Yes—he stopped only to make an appointment for next Tuesday. I jotted it in my pad.”
“Then what’d you do?”
“I spoke to Mr. Gosling on the interphone,” she said in a low hushed voice. “I told him that Captain Cozzens was waiting to see him next. He told me to withhold him for a minute and for me to come in with my notebook. I started to go in, then remembered the envelope. The sticker on it had said: Deliver to Mr. Kermit Gosling at 11:30 a.m. sharp. I went back to my desk for it.”
Death Locked In Page 36
