When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to call.
The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary—a noiseless slim sharp-eyed man of forty—brought me into the bedroom.
The old man’s head was small and almost perfectly round under its close-cut crop of white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too flat to the sides of his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers, a short compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered blunt hand. His eyes were round, blue, small and watery. They looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and under the bushy white brows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you’d try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.
He ordered me into a bedside chair with a two-inch jerk of his round head, chased the secretary away with another, and asked:
“What’s this about my son?”
His voice was harsh. His chest had too much and his mouth too little to do with his words for them to be very clear.
“I’m a Continental Detective Agency operative, San Francisco branch,” I told him. “A couple of days ago we got a check from your son and a letter asking that a man be sent here to do some work for him. I’m the man. He told me to come out to his house last night. I did, but he didn’t show up. When I got downtown I learned he had been killed.”
Elihu Willsson peered suspiciously at me and asked:
“Well, what of it?”
“While I was waiting your daughter-in-law got a phone message, went out, came back with what looked like blood on her shoe, and told me her husband wouldn’t be home. He was shot at ten-forty. She went out at ten-twenty, came back at eleven-five.”
The old man sat straight up in bed and called young Mrs. Willsson a flock of things. When he ran out of words of that sort he still had some breath left. He used it to shout at me:
“Is she in jail?”
I said I didn’t think so.
He didn’t like her not being in jail. He was nasty about it. He bawled a lot of things I didn’t like, winding up with:
“What the hell are you waiting for?”
He was too old and too sick to be smacked. I laughed and said:
“For evidence.”
“Evidence? What do you need? You’ve—”
“Don’t be a chump,” I interrupted his bawling. “Why should she kill him?”
“Because she’s a French hussy! Because she—”
The secretary’s frightened face appeared at the door.
“Get out of here!” the old man roared at it, and the face went.
“She jealous?” I asked before he could go on with his shouting. “And if you don’t yell maybe I’ll be able to hear you anyway. My deafness is a lot better since I’ve been eating yeast.”
He put a fist on top of each hump his thighs made in the covers and pushed his square chin at me.
“Old as I am and sick as I am,” he said very deliberately, “I’ve a great mind to get up and kick your behind.”
I paid no attention to that, repeating:
“Was she jealous?”
“She was,” he said, not yelling now, “and domineering, and spoiled, and suspicious, and greedy, and mean, and unscrupulous, and deceitful, and selfish, and damned bad—altogether damned bad!”
“Any reason for her jealousy?”
“I hope so,” he said bitterly. “I’d hate to think a son of mine would be faithful to her. Though likely enough he was. He’d do things like that.”
“But you don’t know any reason why she should have killed him?”
“Don’t know any reason?” He was bellowing again. “Haven’t I been telling you that—”
“Yeah. But none of that means anything. It’s kind of childish.”
The old man flung the covers back from his legs and started to get out of bed. Then he thought better of it, raised his red face and roared:
“Stanley!”
The door opened to let the secretary glide in.
“Throw this bastard out!” his master ordered, waving a fist at me.
The secretary turned to me. I shook my head and suggested:
“Better get help.”
He frowned. We were about the same age. He was weedy, nearly a head taller than I, but fifty pounds lighter. Some of my hundred and ninety pounds were fat, but not all of them. The secretary fidgeted, smiled apologetically, and went away.
“What I was about to say,” I told the old man: “I intended talking to your son’s wife this morning. But I saw Max Thaler go into the house, so I postponed my visit.”
Elihu Willsson carefully pulled the covers up over his legs again, leaned his head back on the pillows, screwed his eyes up at the ceiling, and said:
“Hm-m-m, so that’s the way it is, is it?”
“Mean anything?”
“She killed him,” he said certainly. “That’s what it means.”
Feet made noises in the hall, huskier feet than the secretary’s. When they were just outside the door I began a sentence:
“You were using your son to run a—”
“Get out of here!” the old man yelled at those in the doorway. “And keep that door closed.” He glowered at me and demanded: “What was I using my son for?”
“To put the knife in Thaler, Yard and the Finn.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I didn’t invent the story. It’s all over Personville.”
“It’s a lie. I gave him the papers. He did what he wanted with them.”
“You ought to explain that to your playmates. They’d believe you.”
“What they believe be damned! What I’m telling you is so.”
“What of it? Your son won’t come back to life just because he was killed by mistake—if he was.”
“That woman killed him.”
“Maybe.”
“Damn you and your maybes! She did.”
“Maybe. But the other angle has got to be looked into too—the political end. You can tell me—”
“I can tell you that that French hussy killed him, and I can tell you that any other damned numbskull notions you’ve got are way off the lode.”
“But they’ve got to be looked into,” I insisted. “And you know the inside of Personville politics better than anyone else I’m likely to find. He was your son. The least you can do is—”
“The least I can do,” he bellowed, “is tell you to get to hell back to Frisco, you and your numbskull—”
I got up and said unpleasantly:
“I’m at the Great Western Hotel. Don’t bother me unless you want to talk sense for a change.”
I went out of the bedroom and down the stairs. The secretary hovered around the bottom step, smiling apologetically.
“A fine old rowdy,” I growled.
“A remarkably vital personality,” he murmured.
At the office of the Herald, I hunted up the murdered man’s secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.
She said she hadn’t known anything about my being called to Personville by her employer.
“But then,” she explained, “Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was—I don’t think he trusted anybody here, completely.”
“Not you?”
She flushed and said:
“No. But of course he had been here such a short while and didn’t know any of us very well.”
“There must have been more to it than that.”
“Well,” she bit her lip and made a row of forefinger prints down the polished edge of the dead man’s desk, “his father wasn’t—wasn’t in sympathy with what he was doing. Since hi
s father really owned the papers, I suppose it was natural for Mr. Donald to think some of the employes might be more loyal to Mr. Elihu than to him.”
“The old man wasn’t in favor of the reform campaign? Why did he stand for it, if the papers were his?”
She bent her head to study the finger prints she had made. Her voice was low.
“It’s not easy to understand unless you know—The last time Mr. Elihu was taken sick he sent for Donald—Mr. Donald. Mr. Donald had lived in Europe most of his life, you know. Dr. Pride told Mr. Elihu that he’d have to give up the management of his affairs, so he cabled his son to come home. But when Mr. Donald got here Mr. Elihu couldn’t make up his mind to let go of everything. But he wanted Mr. Donald to stay here, so he gave him the newspapers—that is, made him publisher. Mr. Donald liked that. He had been interested in journalism in Paris. When he found out how terrible everything was here—in civic affairs and so on—he started that reform campaign. He didn’t know—he had been away since he was a boy—he didn’t know—”
“He didn’t know his father was in it as deep as anybody else,” I helped her along.
She squirmed a little over her examination of the finger prints, didn’t contradict me, and went on:
“Mr. Elihu and he had a quarrel. Mr. Elihu told him to stop stirring things up, but he wouldn’t stop. Maybe he would have stopped if he had known—all there was to know. But I don’t suppose it would have occurred to him that his father was really seriously implicated. And his father wouldn’t tell him. I suppose it would be hard for a father to tell a son a thing like that. He threatened to take the papers away from Mr. Donald. I don’t know whether he intended to or not. But he was taken sick again, and everything went along as it did.”
“Donald Willsson didn’t confide in you?” I asked.
“No.” It was almost a whisper.
“Then, you learned all this where?”
“I’m trying—trying to help you learn who murdered him,” she said earnestly. “You’ve no right to—”
“You’ll help me most just now by telling me where you learned all this,” I insisted.
She stared at the desk, chewing her lower lip. I waited. Presently she said:
“My father is Mr. Willsson’s secretary.”
“Thanks.”
“But you mustn’t think that we—”
“It’s nothing to me,” I assured her. “What was Willsson doing in Hurricane Street last night when he had a date with me at his house?”
She said she didn’t know. I asked her if she had heard him tell me, over the phone, to come to his house at ten o’clock. She said she had.
“What did he do after that? Try to remember every least thing that was said and done from then until you left at the end of the day.”
She leaned back in her chair, shut her eyes and wrinkled her forehead.
“You called up—if it was you he told to come to his house—at about two o’clock. After that Mr. Donald dictated some letters, one to a paper mill, one to Senator Keefer about some changes in post office regulations, and—Oh, yes! He went out for about twenty minutes, a little before three. And before he went he wrote out a check.”
“Who for?”
“I don’t know, but I saw him writing it.”
“Where’s his check book? Carry it with him?”
“It’s here.” She jumped up, went around to the front of his desk, and tried the top drawer. “Locked.”
I joined her, straightened out a wire clip, and with that and a blade of my knife fiddled the drawer open.
The girl took out a thin, flat First National Bank check book. The last used stub was marked $5,000. Nothing else. No name. No explanation.
“He went out with this check,” I said, “and was gone twenty minutes? Long enough to get to the bank and back?”
“It wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to get there.”
“Didn’t anything else happen before he wrote out the check? Think. Any messages? Letters? Phone calls?”
“Let’s see.” She shut her eyes again. “He was dictating some mail and—Oh, how stupid of me! He did have a phone call. He said: ‘Yes, I can be there at ten, but I shall have to hurry away.’ Then again he said: ‘Very well, at ten.’ That was all he said except, ‘Yes, yes,’ several times.”
“Talking to a man or a woman?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Think. There’d be a difference in his voice.”
She thought and said:
“Then it was a woman.”
“Which of you—you or he—left first in the evening?”
“I did. He—I told you my father is Mr. Elihu’s secretary. He and Mr. Donald had an engagement for the early part of the evening—something about the paper’s finances. Father came in a little after five. They were going to dinner together, I think.”
That was all the Lewis girl could give me. She knew nothing that would explain Willsson’s presence in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, she said. She admitted knowing nothing about Mrs. Willsson.
We frisked the dead man’s desk, and dug up nothing in any way informative. I went up against the girls at the switchboard, and learned nothing. I put in an hour’s work on messengers, city editors, and the like, and my pumping brought up nothing. The dead man, as his secretary said, had been a good hand at keeping his affairs to himself.
3
DINAH BRAND
At the First National Bank I got hold of an assistant cashier named Albury, a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so.
“I certified the check for Willsson,” he said after I had explained what I was up to. “It was drawn to the order of Dinah Brand—$5,000.”
“Know who she is?”
“Oh, yes! I know her.”
“Mind telling me what you know about her?”
“Not at all. I’d be glad to, but I’m already eight minutes overdue at a meeting with—”
“Can you have dinner with me this evening and give it to me then?”
“That’ll be fine,” he said.
“Seven o’clock at the Great Western?”
“Righto.”
“I’ll run along and let you get to your meeting, but tell me, has she an account here?”
“Yes, and she deposited the check this morning. The police have it.”
“Yeah? And where does she live?”
“1232 Hurricane Street.”
I said: “Well, well!” and, “See you tonight,” and went away.
My next stop was in the office of the chief of police, in the City Hall.
Noonan, the chief, was a fat man with twinkling greenish eyes set in a round jovial face. When I told him what I was doing in his city he seemed glad of it. He gave me a hand-shake, a cigar and a chair.
“Now,” he said when we were settled, “tell me who turned the trick.”
“The secret’s safe with me.”
“You and me both,” he said cheerfully through smoke. “But what do you guess?”
“I’m not good at guessing, especially when I haven’t got the facts.”
“’Twon’t take long to give you all the facts there is,” he said. “Willsson got a five-grand check in Dinah Brand’s name certified yesterday just before bank closing. Last night he was killed by slugs from a .32 less than a block from her house. People that heard the shooting saw a man and a woman bending over the remains. Bright and early this morning the said Dinah Brand deposits the said check in the said bank. Well?”
“Who is this Dinah Brand?”
The chief dumped the ash off his cigar in the center of his desk, flourished the cigar in his fat hand, and said:
“A soiled dove, as the fellow says, a de luxe hustler, a big-league gold-digger.”
“Gone up against her yet?”
“No. There’s a couple of slants to be taken care of first. We’re keeping an eye on her and waiting. This I’ve told you is under the hat.”
“Yeah. Now listen to t
his,” and I told him what I had seen and heard while waiting in Donald Willsson’s house the previous night.
When I had finished the chief bunched his fat mouth, whistled softly, and exclaimed:
“Man, that’s an interesting thing you’ve been telling me! So it was blood on her slipper? And she said her husband wouldn’t be home?”
“That’s what I took it for,” I said to the first question, and, “Yeah,” to the second.
“Have you done any talking to her since then?” he asked.
“No. I was up that way this morning, but a young fellow named Thaler went into the house ahead of me, so I put off my visit.”
“Grease us twice!” His greenish eyes glittered happily. “Are you telling me the Whisper was there?”
“Yeah.”
He threw his cigar on the floor, stood up, planted his fat hands on the desk top, and leaned over them toward me, oozing delight from every pore.
“Man, you’ve done something,” he purred. “Dinah Brand is this Whisper’s woman. Let’s me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow.”
We climbed out of the chief’s car in front of Mrs. Willsson’s residence. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crêpe hanging over the bell. Then he said, “Well, what’s got to be done has got to be done,” and we went up the steps.
Mrs. Willsson wasn’t anxious to see us, but people usually see the chief of police if he insists. This one did. We were taken upstairs to where Donald Willsson’s widow sat in the library. She was in black. Her blue eyes had frost in them.
Noonan and I took turns mumbling condolences and then he began:
“We just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. For instance, like where’d you go last night?”
She looked disagreeably at me, then back to the chief, frowned, and spoke haughtily:
“May I ask why I am being questioned in this manner?”
I wondered how many times I had heard that question, word for word and tone for tone, while the chief, disregarding it, went on amiably:
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