The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  Woolworth’s down the block was about to close but he had time to buy a screwdriver, flashlight and a whisk broom that fit into the pocket of his coat. He took his time walking to 38th Street; he strolled the block between Madison and Fourth Avenue on the south side, returned on the north. The demolition workers at No. 39 were gone for the night. The streetlamp on the east corner was out, adding to the darkness. Traffic was light, pedestrians few.

  The hinge holding the lock on the wood-panel gate in front of the construction site was easily pried off with the screwdriver. The house was noticeably colder and damper inside than out. He groped his way down the hall before he switched on the flashlight—a lucky decision since the floor in the next room had been removed. Stepping carefully to the left, into what had been the parlor, he circled to the back of the house. The stairway to the basement was intact. The dank air was so thick with moisture it swirled in the flashlight’s beam.

  He skewered two rats with the light as they darted into a corner. He crossed the floor to the front wall, where the coal chute, now sealed shut, led up to the street.

  Crouching down, he used the whisk broom to clear the space where the coal bin had been; he brushed it several times and slowly moved the light over the area he’d cleared. The patchwork repair job done to the floor was unmistakable. The rough surface indicated it had been a hasty, amateurish one. Bits of black were embedded in the concrete, as though it were still wet when the coal was piled on. He ran his finger over the slightly raised ridges, tracing a slightly irregular rectangle the size of a grave.

  Nan Renard was in the usual booth. The room was nearly deserted. The waiter delivered a fresh martini and removed the old glass. Unsmiling and sad, she seemed either preoccupied or mildly stunned by the martini’s effect on an empty stomach. She nodded but said nothing as he slipped in beside her on the banquette.

  The maitre d’ deposited a Scotch on the rocks in front of him, plenty of ice. He was annoyed to find her this way, glum, silent, on her way to getting drunk. He wanted her sober and clear-headed, attentive as possible to what he was going to say.

  She lifted her glass and touched it to his, but put it down without taking a drink.

  He sipped his Scotch. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything.”

  “For instance?”

  “Mr. Wilkes.”

  “Worse than usual?”

  “He said the most terrible things. He thinks the project is going nowhere. He’s threatening to close down the whole operation.”

  “Let him.”

  “Just what I need, a dose of Irish fatalism. Fortunately for you, your entire future isn’t about to make a giant sucking sound as it circles down the drain.” She consumed half her drink in a single gulp.

  “Go easy.”

  She finished her drink. “I’ll go any goddamn way I please.”

  The waiter went to pick up the empty glass. “Another,” she said.

  Dunne covered the glass with his hand. “Not yet.”

  She moved far away enough that she could face him. “My, my, you’re getting good at giving orders. ‘Not yet.’ ‘Be at the Coral at nine.’ That’s something all men seem good at, no matter how inept they are. Well, I can issue commands too, so go to hell.”

  The waiter stared with practiced attention at the far wall, as if searching for something. Dunne kept his hand over the glass. “It’s important you hear me out. After, you can have all the drinks you want.”

  She sat in silence for a few seconds, as if deliberating; she took out a cigarette and lit it. “Say whatever you’re going to say. Just don’t take all night.”

  Dunne said nothing until the waiter walked away. “Any case I take, I try never to let myself spin theories from a limited number of facts. Before long, the theory wins out over the facts; the ones that don’t support or advance the theory get tossed or ignored.”

  “Sounds like the opening lecture for ‘Detective Work 101.’”

  “The Crater case is no exception. Depending on which facts you select, you can believe that he was murdered by the mob, by his girlfriends, by his fellow politicians, by his wife, or that he engineered his own disappearance. At one time or another, a select number of facts have been used to support all these theories.”

  “But nothing’s ever come of any of it.”

  “Because the investigators kept looking outside the investigation when all the time the crux of the case lay inside. Missing that fact, the investigation set off in the wrong direction, a mistake aggravated when the lead detective, a man who might have found his way back to the starting point, was compromised and lost interest in the case.”

  “Does ‘crux’ have a name?”

  “For now, let’s call him X.”

  “I’m not in the mood for games, Fin.”

  “It’s not a game. I want you to provide the answer for yourself.”

  “Go ahead.” She took an impatient puff on her cigarette. “Just don’t take all night.”

  “Let’s start with X, a young cop making a name as a hard-nosed detective. Meets a chorus girl. Before long they’re in love. He proposes to her. But she prefers to postpone marriage until her career is established. In 1927, she gets a part in a Schumann brothers’ revue at the Winter Garden—a walk-on—but she’s gorgeous, amd people notice. By 1928, she’s up for the lead in a show called ‘Cuddles & Cuties.’ Meanwhile, a politically connected lawyer, close to the Schumanns, is pressuring her to have sex with him. A familiar routine. Give him what he wants, he puts in a good word; don’t, he blackballs you. She refuses. He goes to her bosses in the Schumann organization, who lean on her the way they’ve leaned on a thousand other girls. Finally she gives in, gets it over with. The part is hers. Then she learns she has syphilis, a gift from the lawyer. She doesn’t tell X. But it eats at her until one morning, while X waits for her in bed, she sneaks his revolver into the bathroom and blows a hole in her heart.”

  “Am I supposed to guess who X is?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good, because I’m stumped.”

  “Distraught at her suicide, X can’t figure out why she took her own life. Didn’t she have everything to live for? The answer comes when a close friend and former housemate of his dead lover comes pleading for help. She’s the next target for the lawyer’s attentions, and she blurts out that she doesn’t want to happen to her what happened to X’s girlfriend.

  “X starts to plan revenge, but not the kind that will send him to the electric chair. He watches the lawyer carefully and renews his acquaintance with the lawyer’s chauffeur, an ex-cop who he worked with briefly when they were assigned to the Prohibition Bureau’s Transportation Division. X notices the chauffeur’s disapproval of the lawyer’s sexual antics and his growing regard for the lawyer’s innocent wife.

  “X’s desire for revenge is complicated when the governor elevates the lawyer to the bench of the State Supreme Court. His removal will result in a massive outcry and manhunt, so the plan has to be absolutely watertight. The lawyer, now a newly minted judge, has made the girl his main interest. Repulsed and scared but desperate to keep her job, she doesn’t know what to do. X does. Summer recess is just beginning in the courts. He induces her to telegram the judge in Maine that she has to see him. The judge doesn’t panic—this has undoubtedly happened before—but now he’s facing an election in the fall and more worried than usual.

  “When the chauffeur returns to the city after depositing the judge and his wife in Maine, X works on him insistently, tells him how the judge has hurt so many women and how much better off his wife would be free of such an ogre. He doesn’t mention murder but suggests they scare the hell out of the judge, make him leave the bench, set his wife free.

  “Another telegram arrives in Maine. Annoyed but concerned, the judge arranges to return to the city but, never one to separate pleasure from business, meets some colleagues for sexual recreation in Atlantic City. Back in the city, he goes to see the woman who’s sent him the telegrams.
She threatens blackmail. Says she doesn’t care if he goes to her bosses. She’s fed up. She wants money or she’ll go to the newspapers and to the officials who’ve already threatened an investigation into the magistrate’s court.

  “He warns her that if she does she’ll only wreck both their careers. He needs a little while to return to Maine and allay any suspicions his wife might have. Once he does, he’ll be back, and they can have a reasonable conversation about the best way to proceed for both of them. Having been confronted with similar situations in the past, he’s not surprised when he succeeds in calming her down, unaware it’s all part of a trap.

  “He arrives back in Maine, sure the situation is in hand. He’ll put in a call to the Schumanns—keep her happy by seeing to it she gets a ripe part. If she wants money, he can always get enough to keep her quiet. He slips away from his wife and telephones the woman, just to reassure himself things are under control. But they’re not. She tells him she was about to send another telegram. She can’t wait any longer. She’s got a boy-friend, and he’s caught wind of what’s going on. She needs to get out of town. She needs five grand right away. She has to talk with the judge. He should come to her place on the evening of the 6th, at ten o’clock.

  “Back in the city, but determined not to arouse any suspicions about the business he has to attend to, the judge goes about his normal routines. X keeps careful tabs on him all day on the 6th, watching as he goes into Bobby Duncan’s Café. He calls the chauffeur and tells him where to rendezvous. At 9:15, in a cab borrowed from the Prohibition Bureau’s impoundment yard on Pier 57, the chauffeur pulls up to the northwest corner of West 45th, facing south on Eighth Avenue. When the judge exits, the cab arrives to pick him up.”

  “But why take that risk? Why not let him make his own way?” There was no trace of anger or sadness in Nan Renard’s face, or any trace of the several martinis.

  “A couple of reasons. One, if he gets in a cab on his own, there’d be a witness to where he went and when. Second, there was always the chance he’d change his mind at the last minute, go back to Maine and pressure the Schumanns to take care of the matter for him. Third, however unlikely, he could decide to bring along hired muscle, somebody to make clear that there was only so far he could be pushed.”

  “Wouldn’t he recognize the taxi driver as his chauffeur? Wouldn’t that alert him something was up?” She rubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

  “Not at first. By the time the cab turned onto Ninth, it didn’t matter. Crouched in the well of the front passenger seat, X springs into action. The judge presumes he’s the boyfriend the woman mentioned, but X reassures him that his only goal is to arrange a satisfactory outcome.

  “The judge isn’t happy with the development and, maybe now, recognizing his chauffeur, realizes he faces a significant blackmail attempt. Yet, on another level, he’s probably not entirely displeased by X’s presence. The man is calm and direct, maybe even affable. Instead of an outraged, irrational female, the judge imagines this is someone he can reason with; and as betrayed as he may feel at the collusion of his chauffeur, he doesn’t feel in physical danger. As they pull up to their destination, he’s already figuring how best to finesse the situation and what it’s going to cost him.

  “The chauffeur imagines X will put the fear of God into the judge, scare him into leaving the bench and ending the fraud he’s perpetrated on his wife. Never supposes X plans to kill the judge. How could anybody be crazy enough to think they’re going to kill a State Supreme Court judge and get away with it? The woman thinks the same thing. When X and the judge come to her apartment, she pours them drinks. She enjoys the judge’s discomfort. It’s nice to see him squirm for a change. She figures that at the very least they’ll get a quick five thousand out of him.

  “They start to talk money. The judge paces the floor in front of the fireplace, raises his voice. He hasn’t brought the cash with him. He quibbles about the sum they’re asking for, reminds them that if he loses his job, they lose their hold on him. Maybe X planned to do away with the judge by drugging him first or knocking him out, but, at this display of arrogant self-confidence, X grabs the poker next to the fireplace and with one tremendous blow crushes the judge’s skull.”

  Nan put up her hand. “Excuse me, Fin, but you sound as if you’re reading from X’s signed confession. Do you have any eyewitnesses?”

  “Some of the details are conjecture, but not the basic facts. When it comes to the murder, X gave an account of it himself when he visited the judge’s widow in Maine and had her reenact it.”

  “Now the sixty-four thousand dollar question: what did X do with the body?”

  “I suspect the original plan was to wrap it up and bury it in some remote part of the countryside. But confronted with the reality of getting the bloody, brain-leaking corpse back into the taxi, X thought better of it. He summoned the super, a widowed, working-class woman, who not only abetted the sex trade in the building but knew the judge as a frequent visitor. He tells her there’s been an altercation and she now has a justice of the State Supreme Court lying dead on the floor of the apartment. If the police are dragged in, they’ll rip apart the building from ceiling to cellar. The newspapers will make a sensation of it and put her at the center of it.

  “She agrees to help get rid of the body. X summons the chauffeur, who discovers he’s become an accessory to the murder of a state judge. The super guides them to the basement, where they empty the coal bin and dig a grave. They do a hasty patch job on the floor, and when it’s barely dry, they pile the coal back in. X reminds them the slightest slip up on their part and they’ll take turns getting zinged in the electric chair in Sing Sing.

  “X had factored in that the judge probably wouldn’t be missed for a day or two and this gave them time to cover their tracks and settle into their ordinary routines. The next night, in one last brazen act, he slips through the service entrance of Crater’s building and into his apartment. He finds the five grand and change and sees the two briefcases filled with files. He takes them as well as the money for the single reason that their disappearance will provide the police a false lead. He burns the contents without even looking at them. He gives the five grand to the landlady. Tells her not to spend any of it. For now, just sit still.

  “Remarkably, a week later no public alarm had been sounded. Uncertain about the judge’s whereabouts and afraid he might be spilling his guts out to state investigators about judicial corruption, the politicians were doing their best to keep his absence under wraps till they had a handle on what had happened to him. To keep things looking normal, X has the chauffeur return to Maine on the day he’s expected. For her own sake, he says, the judge’s wife should be encouraged to remain there as long as possible.

  “When the alarm is raised, X is back working his regular beat on the homicide squad. He shows up at Missing Persons as one of the first among the many cops who offers or is summoned to help. Before the investigation can find its way to the murder site, X acts preemptively. He sends a letter calling attention to the location, then volunteers to check it out. Finding nothing of interest, he reports there’s no need to return.

  “He worries about how reliable the chauffeur is. But as well as having a solid alibi, Kipps is protected by his reputation as a retired cop made slightly goofy by shell shock. In the end, he stays mum. A more substantial worry is the lead detective, a highly intelligent, tenacious cop with the kind of nose that just might smell an inside job. In a moment of weakness, X visits the judge’s wife in Maine and tries to convince her the only way out of her predicament is to take the fall for her husband’s disappearance. One of the few mistakes he makes. He gets nowhere with the judge’s wife but exposes himself to possible identification. Yet it turns out to be a coup. The story of his visit reinforces the notion that she’s a self-deluded hysteric whose testimony is worthless.

  “The following spring the lead detective ends up undercutting his role in the investigation. The woman in whose apartme
nt the murder took place goes to Hollywood where she enjoys a brief stardom but is never free of her fear of being found out. The super moves to another city, happy with her obscurity and the added comfort of her $5,000 nest egg. The chauffeur spends the rest of his life regretting his part in the murder and in love with the judge’s wife.”

  “And X, what happened to him?”

  “He stays a detective. Develops a reputation for fearless confrontation, someone who not only doesn’t avoid shoot-outs and showdowns with gangsters and robbers but seeks them out, and leaves them dead. When the war comes, he gets in on the action and gets better and better at his work.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Very much so. He does so well in the war that the government brings him back to deal with a new set of enemies. As a cover, they help get him a job that gives him license to continue traveling and do what he does best. Kill people.”

  “How did you manage to uncover all this?”

  “I had an assistant.”

  “Who?”

  “Time.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Before time eradicates, it exposes what’s buried or hidden. Ancient artifacts. Nuggets of gold. A misplaced file. An old man who takes a last opportunity to make a one-word confession. A woman tired of the world’s scorn who produces a hidden relic.”

  “Are you sure you can substantiate it all?”

  “The general outline is correct. But we’re going to have to bring in more people to nail down all the details. And we have to start right away, beginning with the excavation of the basement at 39 East 38th Street.”

  “Mr. Wilkes will be ecstatic. He’ll pay whatever it costs.”