Detective Duos

by edited by Marcia Muller

  “Accessory,” corrected Miss Withers firmly.

  “If you want Larsen,” Malone said easily, “he's next door in my drawing room, wrapped up in the blankets.”

  “Sure, sure,” said the sergeant, mopping his face. “Wise guy, eh?”

  “Somebody helped Larsen escape – escape out of this world, with a shiv through the – through the – ?” Malone looked hopefully at Miss Withers.

  “The latissimus dorsi,” she prompted.

  The sergeant barked, “Never mind the double–talk. Where is this Larsen?”

  Then Lolly, who had pushed open the connecting door, let out a thin scream like tearing silk. “It is Steve!” she cried. “It's Steve, and he's dead!”

  Momentarily the attention of the law was drawn elsewhere.

  “Now or never,” said Miss Withers coolly. “About the Mr. Roberts thing – I just remembered that there was a play by that name a while back. All about sailors in the last war. I saw it, and was somewhat shocked at certain scenes. Their language – but anyway, I ran into a sailor just after I started that fire, and he said he was looking for the latrine. Sailors don't use Army talk – in Mister Roberts they called it the head!”

  Suddenly the law was back, very direct and grim about everything. Miss Withers gasped with indignation as she found herself suddenly handcuffed to John J. Malone. But stone walls do not a prison make, as she pointed out to her companion–in–crime. “And don't you see? It means – ”

  “Madam, I am ahead of you. There was a wrong sailor aboard this train even after Larsen got his. The murderer must have taken a plane from Chicago and caught this train at Toledo. I was watching to see who got off, not who got on. The man penetrated Larsen's disguise – ”

  “In more ways than one,” the schoolteacher put in grimly.

  “And then after he'd murdered his victim, he took Larsen's sailor suit and got rid of his own clothes, realizing that nobody notices a sailor on a train! Madam, I salute your subconscious!” Malone waved his hand, magnificent even in chains. “The defense rests! Officer, call a cop!”

  The train was crawling into one of the tunnels beneath Grand Central Station, and the harried sergeant was beside himself.

  “You listen to Mr. Malone,” Miss Withers told their captor firmly, “or I'll hint to my old friend Inspector Oscar Piper that you would look well on a bicycle beat way out in Brooklyn!”

  “Oh, no!” the unhappy officer moaned. “Not that Miss Withers!”

  “That Miss Withers,” she snapped. “My good man, all we ask is that you find the real murderer, who must still be on this train. He's wearing a Navy uniform ...”

  “Lady,” the sergeant said sincerely, “you ask the impossible. The train is full of sailors, Grand Central is full of sailors.”

  “But this particular sailor,” Malone put in, “is wearing the uniform of the man he killed. There will be a slit in the back of the jumper – just under the shoulder blade!”

  “Where the knife went in,” Miss Withers added. “Hurry, man! The train is stopping.”

  It might still have been a lost cause had not Lolly put in her five cents. “Don't listen to that old witch!” she cried. “Officer, you do your duty!” The sergeant disliked being yelled at, even by blondes. “Hold all of 'em – her too,” he ordered, and leaped out on the platform. He seized upon a railroad dick, who listened and then grabbed a telephone attached to a nearby pillar. Somewhere far off an alarm began to ring, and an emotionless voice spoke over the public address system. ... In less than two minutes the vast labyrinth of Grand Central was alerted, and men in Navy uniforms were suddenly intercepted by polite but firm railroad detectives who sprang up out of nowhere. Only one of the sailors, a somewhat older man who was lugging a pet container that wasn't his, had any real difficulty. He alone had a narrow slit in the back of his jumper.

  Bert Glick flung the leather case down the track and tried vainly to run, but there was no place to go. The container flew open, and Precious scooted. Only a dumb Siamese cat, as Malone commented later, would have abandoned a lair that had a hundred grand tucked under its carpet of old newspapers.

  “And to think that I spent the night within reach of that dough, and didn't grab my fee!” said Malone.

  But it developed that there was a comfortable reward for the apprehension of Steve Larsen, alive or dead. Before John J. Malone took off for Chicago, he accepted an invitation for dinner at Miss Withers' modest little apartment on

  West 74th Street

  , arriving with four dozen roses. It was a good dinner, and Malone cheerfully put up with the screamed insults of Sinbad and the well–meant attentions of Talley, the apricot poodle. “Just as long as the cat stays lost!” he said.

  “Yes, isn't it odd that nobody has seen hide nor hair of Precious! It's my idea that he's waxing fat in the caverns beneath Grand Central, preying on the rats who are rumored to flourish there. Would you care for another piece of pie, Mr. Malone?”

  “All I really want,” said the little lawyer hopefully, “is an introduction to your redheaded niece.”

  “Oh, yes, Joannie. Her husband played guard for Southern California, and he even made All–American,” Miss Withers tactfully explained.

  “On second thought, I'll settle for coffee,” said John J. Malone.

  Miss Withers sniffed, not unsympathetically.

  Lawrence G. Blockman

  (1900–1975)

  Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, pathologist of the Pasteur Hospital in mythical Northbank, New Jersey, and his Hindu assistant, Dr. Motilal Mookerji, on scholarship from Calcutta Medical College, were the first team of forensic sleuths in crime fiction, the forefathers of TV's Quincy and such contemporary detectives as Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta. Along with police lieutenant Max Ritter, Coffee and Mookerji were featured in numerous short stories published in Collier's and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. Their cases, which utilize modern (circa 1950) laboratory procedures in pathology, chemistry, serology, microscopy, and toxicology, have a uniform sense of realism, the result of the author's extensive research in forensic medicine.

  Diagnosis: Homicide (1950), the first of two Dr. Coffee collections, was considered by Ellery Queen to be of sufficient import in the development of the detective short story that it became the 106th and final entry on the Queen's Quorum list of most influential collections. The team of pathologists also appears in Clues for Dr. Coffee (1964), and in a single novel, Recipe for Homicide (1952), a readable but minor work. The duo's talents, as Blochman himself seems to have realized, were better suited to the short–story form.

  Although Dr. Mookerji speaks a sort of “babu” English, he is never portrayed as anything other than Dr. Coffee's equal professionally and as a human being. Lawrence Blochman lived in India for several years in the 1920's, while working as a foreign correspondent, and both understood and respected the Indian culture; his re–creation of an educated Hindu's English speech patterns may seem dubious by today's standards, but it carried no racist overtones. Dr. Mookerji's considerable forensic talents are prominently featured in several of the duo's investigations, among them “The Phantom Cry–Baby,” the strange case of a woman who hears an infant crying in the night even though there is no baby in her house.

  Lawrence G. Blochman created numerous other series characters during his four decades as a crime–story writer, many of these for the magazine markets at which most of his fiction was aimed. Inspector Leonidas Prike of the British Criminal Investigation Department is the featured performer in such excellent early novels as Bombay Mail (1934), set aboard a train bound from Calcutta to Bombay, and Red Snow at Darjeeling (1938), which takes place in the northern Indian tea–growing region in the shadow of the Himalayas. Other Blochman novels of note are Blow–Down (1939), a mystery–adventure tale set in a sleepy Central American banana port, and See You at the Morgue (1941), which concerns murder and a stolen shipment of valuable furs in New York City.

  THE PHAN
TOM CRY–BABY

  DR. DANIEL WEBSTER COFFEE AND DR. MOTILAL MOOKERJI

  NEW JERSEY C. 1950

  Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee was preparing a test for undulant fever. Intent on scraping the emulsion from a culture plate, he was not aware that he had a visitor in his laboratory until the man cleared his throat noisily.

  “Dr. Coffee? I'm Leonard Philips. The Superintendent sent me to you.”

  The visitor extended a big, muscular hand. Dr. Coffee put down his platinum loop and shook hands with a gangling, white–haired, pick–faced man in a seersucker suit. Leonard Philips had the appearance of a country judge and the demeanor of a bass–voiced brush salesman. The aggressive smile and the long jaw above the black bow tie were vaguely familiar to Dr. Coffee.

  “The Superintendent says you have a foreigner working in your lab,” Philips said. “His name is Mookerji.”

  “Dr. Motilal Mookerji is our resident pathologist,” Dan Coffee said. “He's a Hindu.”

  “I'm an attorney,” Philips said. “Your Hindu friend has got himself in trouble with a client of mine. Do you know Mrs. Louise Gable?”

  Dr. Coffee nodded. Then he laughed. The nod was for Mrs. Gable. Everyone in Northbank knew Louise Barzac Gable, a dark, handsome widow, the sole heir of the late Jacques Barzac, a Frenchman who had pyramided a side–street restaurant and a tomato farm into a ten–million–dollar food cannery. The laugh was for Dr. Mookerji. Somehow Dan Coffee could not picture the round, brown, pink–turbaned Hindu in trouble with a beautiful young American widow.

  “Is your Hindu friend an M.D.?” Philips asked.

  “Dr. Mookerji is a graduate physician from CalcuttaMedicalCollege. He's continuing his studies here in America on a fellowship.”

  “You tell your Hindu resident that if he doesn't stay away from Mrs. Gable, I'll have him arrested for practicing medicine without a license,” Philips declared. “He's been prescribing for my client.”

  Dr. Coffee frowned. This was serious – and puzzling. Dr. Mookerji was training for the laboratory, not the clinic. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  Leonard Philips carefully placed his straw hat on the centrifuge. “I guess you know that Mrs. Gable's husband was in the Air Force. The Japs killed him; shot him down over the Burma jungles a few days before Very–Just Day, the same day his son was born here in Northbank. The baby died a week later. Louise hasn't been quite right since. And lately she's been acting very strange indeed. She hears a baby crying at night in that big house of hers – and of course there isn't any baby.”

  “Where does Dr. Mookerji come in?” Dan Coffee asked.

  Dr. Mookerji came in, the attorney said, when Philips urged Mrs. Gable to see a psychiatrist. Dr. Mookerji told her that there was nothing wrong with her except that she ought to remarry; that she needed a husband, not a psychiatrist.

  “Damn it, Doctor,” Philips said, “the woman can't get married if she's got a screw coming loose. It's not fair to the prospective husband or to a possible child. Don't you agree that she ought to see a psychiatrist?”

  “I wouldn't prescribe without seeing the patient,” said Dr. Coffee.

  “She's completely goofy,” Philips declared. “I'm executor of her father's estate, and I've never been able to settle the estate because she won't sign papers. She loses them. She gets mad and tears them up. She wants to turn that big house of hers into a foundlings' home, but she won't listen when I try to explain about titles and encumbrances. She's got to see a psychiatrist, Doctor. Will you tell this Mookerji to keep his advice to himself?”

  “I'll speak to him,” said Dr. Coffee. He handed Leonard Philips his hat.

  Two hours later Dr. Motilal Mookerji returned to duty. The fat little Hindu waddled into the pathology laboratory, looking a little like a brown duck in a double–breasted suit and pink turban except that he stuck out in front instead of behind. His ready–made trousers settled in horizontal folds about his shoe–tops. He said, “Good afternoon, Doctor Sahib,” took off his coat, and flipped up the tail of his turban so that it would fall outside the back of the white jacket he put on.

  Dan Coffee looked up from his microscope. “Dr. Mookerji, what's this I hear about your trying to persuade a rich widow to marry you?”

  “Widow? Marry?” The Hindu resident's mouth opened until his three brown chins made perfect accordion pleats. “Said statement is honeycombed with inaccuracies, Doctor Sahib. Item A: While Hindu widows no longer incinerate selves on funeral pyre of late husbands, widows still enjoy great disfavor in India regarding further matrimony. Item B: Am personally betrothed since age of nine years and married since seventeen. Having one wife and three assorted children currently residing with father in Bengal, am of opinion that bigamous courtship of American ladies would no doubt entail legal consequences.”

  “But you do know Mrs. Gable, Dr. Mookerji?”

  “Q.” Dr. Mookerji's long black lashes drooped over his intelligent brown eyes. He looked at his hands – long, incongruously slim hands for one of his build. “Mrs. Gable's late deceased husband, Leftenant Gable, was semi–intimate friend of self while stationed Calcutta–side.” Lieutenant Gable, it seemed, had become quite chummy with Motilal Mookerji before he was moved to a forward base in Assam. Lieutenant Gable was more interested in the Hindu classics than in Karaiya Road, and even after he began flying combat missions, he spent his leaves in Calcutta and read Bhagavad Gita with the future Dr. Mookerji. On his last leave he had charged Mookerji with sending his annotated copy of Bhagavad Gita to his wife in case he did not come back. He had also counseled Mookerji to use his American fellowship by accepting a residency in Northbank. New York was too cosmopolitan. California was practically an independent country devoted to lotus–eaters, motion pictures, and citrus fruits. The South would not like the color of the Hindu's skin. The Middle West was the only place to learn about the real America. ...

  “Distinctly remember Leftenant Gable's parting words,” said Dr. Mookerji. “`Come to Northbank,` he was advising, `and we will eat cobbled corn and fried catfishes and strawberried brief–cake together – after the war.` After Leftenant Gable's heroic demise, was therefore honored to bring sad volume of Bhagavad Gita to Widow Gable with own hands.”

  About Louise Gable's sanity? Well, Dr. Mookerji wasn't a psychiatrist and he wasn't exactly sure. One couldn't be sure about any woman. All women were a little crazy, even Hindu women, and American women were particularly difficult for the Oriental to understand.

  “American ladies appear somewhat schizophrenic,” said Dr. Mookerji, “displaying stern male traits of boldness and commerce by day–time, while reverting to softish lures of timid female kitten at night–time.” About the baby she heard crying in the big house – the phantom baby that cried at night? Well, Louise Gable was a little crazy on the subject of babies. She had adopted – by absentee parenthood – a dozen European war orphans and a dozen Chinese babies. She wanted to make an orphans' home of the house which was much too big for her – and which Attorney Philips wanted to sell to a syndicate launching a new country club.

  Dr. Mookerji had never heard the baby which was supposed to cry in that house; nobody had; the servants lived in rooms over the garage and had never been in the house when the phantom baby cried. However, Dr. Mookerji was confident that the crying would stop if only Louise Gable would remarry and have another baby of her own. “According to Manu, Hindu lawgiver,” said Dr. Mookerji, “women and oxen are superior creatures when yoked in team than when roaming at large. Therefore am enacting role of Kama, who is Hindu god somewhat resembling Cupid.”

  Louise Gable had two suitors, the Hindu said: Roger Gable, her late husband's brother, a former captain in the 101st Airborne who had been wounded at Bastogne, and who flew down from New York every weekend to court Louise; and Jim Stoneman, the handsome young manager of the Barzac Cannery. Roger Gable, it seemed, wanted to marry Louise whether she was crazy or not; the crazier, the better; he was a little crazy himself since that German shell fragme
nt made a hole in his head. Jim Stoneman didn't say very much, but he did considerable courting of Louise five days a week and didn't mind the gossip about his courting the cannery.

  “Am personally favoring suit of Captain Gable,” the Hindu said. “Hindu tendency favors retaining betrothals in some family, if sufficient brothers survive. Besides, Captain Gable is splendid guy.” Unfortunately, Louise Gable seemed to favor Jim Stoneman. Stoneman was quietly serious, an excellent administrator, and the ideal man to look out for the family canning interests. Roger Gable was a big, irresponsible, irrepressible boy. Lovable, but – Dr. Coffee interrupted to report the visit of Leonard Philips – and Philips' threat. “You will be careful about giving Mrs. Gable medical advice, won't you, Doctor?” The Hindu wagged his bulky turban once to the left. He sighed. “Am of opinion that patent attorneys should remain glued to patents, even when canning inventions catapult same to position of power and glory. Am also of opinion that Barrister Philips is behaving like bulldog in cow–manger. Am desirous you should make acquaintance of Widow Gable, Doctor Sahib.”