by Otto Penzler
“What was it, Miss Conklin?”
“I’ve been robbed,” she said calmly. “And I don’t like it. I don’t like the feeling of not being able to trust my own household.”
I said that was understandable. She went on: “There was $1,864 taken from my desk drawer. There was an envelope containing slightly more than $50,000 in negotiable bonds directly beside the money, but that wasn’t touched. No one had broken in the house and it’s self-evident that some one in the house itself is guilty of the theft. I don’t wish to have the police tramping over my house and asking innocent people a lot of silly questions, but I do want to catch the thief.”
“Suppose I find the guilty person. Will you turn him—or her, if that’s the way it turns out— over to the police?”
She shook her head and said: “I will not. I have an odd household, Mr. Shay. If you’ll ride up to the house with me, I’ll explain that remark on our way.”
I took my gun from its place in the upper desk drawer and started to slip it in the clip under my arm—and she frowned and said:
“You will not need a weapon, Mr. Shay. I’m sure there’ll be no necessity for one.”
So I put the gun back and reached for my hat instead. She hadn’t talked about payment for what I was or wasn’t going to do, and I thought I’d better look over things before bringing the subject up.
I wasn’t worried; people who leave eighteen-hundred-odd dollars loose in desk drawers can usually pay a private cop’s starvation wages.
Her chauffeur was an ugly bird that looked as though he’d just got out of jail. And the funny part of it was he just had. She told me all about it on the way up to the house. She said:
“My house is staffed with people who have been … well, let us say in houses of correction. I believe they should be given a helping hand and a chance to earn an honest living, once they have paid their debt to society.”
“And you keep eighteen hundred dollars, loose, in a desk drawer. Along with fifty thousand dollars worth of bonds that could be hocked with any fence.”
She said: “I have never been robbed, young man. Never.”
“What about now?”
She sounded stiff and old-ladyish now. “There is some mistake, young man. Of that I am sure. One of my people must have faced a problem that only money could solve. Something he or she couldn’t come to me about.”
I told her I faced the same sort of a problem every rent day and listened to more. She had a nephew and niece with her, besides the jail help. And then I got a shock. She said:
“My nephew is George Lawrence, Jr. His sister is Frances Lawrence. I understand they are fairly well-known among the younger set.”
“I know Georgie, Miss Conklin,” I said. “If you have your driver stop, I’ll get out here and go back to my office.”
She asked me what was the matter and I told her. I said: “I had the pleasure of knocking young Georgie almost over the Black Cat Club’s bar, just night before last. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it—the newspapers had a lot of fun with the thing.”
“I know all about it,” she said placidly. “In fact, that’s one reason I came to you. George has had that coming to him for some time. He came home with a black eye, after my lawyer bailed him out of jail, and told me all about it.”
“What did he say?”
She twinkled her eyes at me and said: “You can depend on it not being the truth. But I asked questions and found out the truth. That should happen oftener to the boy.”
“You’re not sore about it?”
“My goodness no! I’m grateful to you, Mr. Shay. You’ll find George isn’t the kind to cherish a grudge, Mr. Shay…. Just forget all about the episode.”
Personally I thought young Georgie would carry a grudge until the day he died, but I didn’t care a whoop whether he did or not. He was one of those loud-mouthed freshies that grates on me, and I was perfectly willing to knock him over a bar whenever we met. A bar was the logical place to look for young George. The kid was a society swack and they don’t come any swackier than that.
And then we pulled into the driveway and up to her house.
It could have been turned into a library without much trouble; it had the lines and the size. An old place and very dignified. I helped her, judging her to weigh not over eighty pounds wringing wet and with lead in her shoes, and as we watched the chauffeur swing the car on and around toward the garage, she cautioned me:
“Now use tact, Mr. Shay! I want none of my people worried. The innocent shouldn’t suffer for the thoughtlessness of one.”
Then the butler opened the door and we went in.
I got a break right off the bat. Fresh from the griddle. The butler was Preacher Toomey, who usually did his time for slipping up on some confidence racket. Of course he’d taken one jolt for armed robbery and another for assault with intent to kill, but they were outside of his regular field of endeavor.
“Why hello, Preacher,” I said.
He bowed and looked at me out of mean little eyes.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Shay.”
Little Miss Conklin twinkled her eyes at both of us and marveled: “Well, isn’t this nice. You know each other then?”
“You might say a professional acquaintance, eh, Preacher?” I said.
Preacher said: “Yes, sir.”
And then Miss Conklin and I went in the library and found the maid.
She hadn’t been dead long … and her name had been Mary Morse. At least that was one of them. She’d done time for everything from shoplifting on up. Somebody had caved in her right temple with something that hadn’t broken the skin at all. The skull bone there is not much thicker than paper and it was crushed in all right, but there was no blood. Just a sort of darkening, where blood vessels below the skin had broken.
Miss Conklin and I had walked in on her together, and I turned to catch the old lady when she fainted, but she just caught the corner of the desk to steady herself.
“My goodness sake!”
“I’ll call the police,” I said.
She waved her hand, palm up, in front of her, but didn’t speak for a moment. And then she said: “Not for a little while, please. I ask that, Mr. Shay.”
“It’s the law, Miss Conklin. They have to be notified at once.”
“Not for a little while, please. I can handle any trouble resulting from your not calling them at once, I can assure you.”
I thought the moment I got a chance at a phone I’d call, so didn’t argue. Just looked at the dead girl.
She’d been pretty. She was maybe twenty-five or twenty-eight, not over that, and she’d been a good-sized wench. Probably around a hundred and thirty, though she didn’t look half that big lying there.
Dead people never do look their weight— they seem to shrink.
There was no sign around of anything she could have been hit with; I decided it was probably a shot-filled sap, though it could have been some home-made affair, filled with sand or anything like that. She was right by the desk, and the drawer above her was half open, as though she might have been searching in it. She was dressed in a neat little black and white outfit—the kind that has a little apron all frilled at the edges and a cap to match.
The cap was still on her head, but it was riding a little cock-eyed.
“This is murder, Miss Conklin, and the first thing to do is call the police.”
“I know exactly what to do, Mr. Shay,” she said. “Please don’t ask any questions now. Just come with me.”
We went out in the hall then and found Preacher Toomey still puttering around there. Miss Conklin said:
“Toomey, have there been any visitors?”
“Why no, Miss Conklin,” he told her. “Mr. Franks is here calling on Miss Lawrence, but that is all that I know of.”
“Is Mr. Lawrence in?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You haven’t been out, have you, Toomey? You’d surely know if there’s strangers here?”
“I’ve been here all afternoon, ma’am.”
“Noticed anything wrong?”
“Why no, ma’am.”
She told him that was all and we went back to the library. She said then, in a tired voice: “Well, I wanted to be sure. I’ll call the police now…. It was possible somebody else had killed poor Mary, but now it’s surely someone in the house. Toomey would say if there’d been anybody else here.”
“Would he know for sure?”
She said: “If he knew this had happened, he’d have said that various unknown people had been in and out. Toomey is no fool, Mr. Shay; he would realize that he and everyone else in the house would be under immediate suspicion. Because of their past lives, you know.”
That made sense. Then there was a knock on the door and Toomey followed it, stopping just inside where he couldn’t see the dead girl’s body.
“Might I have a few words, Miss Conklin?”
She said he could. He looked at me and said: “Of course I know Mr. Shay is here investigating the robbery, Miss Conklin. I’d just like to say I know nothing about it. I want to tell both you and Mr. Shay that I’m innocent, that I’m leading a decent life.”
“I’m sure you are, Toomey,” she said. “But I’d like to know just how you knew about the robbery. I told no one.”
“Morse told me of it, ma’am. I’m sure I don’t know how she knew…. She informed me it was confidential, but all of us seem to know of it.”
He bowed then and left, and Miss Conklin said: “I told no one about the robbery but George and his sister. Do you suppose one of them could have told poor Mary?”
I didn’t know the sister but I knew George, and the way he chased girls. And I knew that Mary had just adored being chased—and had never run very fast when pursued. And she’d still been a good-looking gal and young George had money. I got the answer right away, but I only said:
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I’ll call the police now,” she sighed. “I do wish this hadn’t happened. The police will certainly be most abrupt with my people—there’s nothing I can do to prevent it.”
I thought her using “abrupt” as a description of what the police would be with her collection of jailbirds was a miracle of understatement, but I let that go along with the other. She picked up the telephone and I wandered out in the hall.
Toomey was waiting for me. He beckoned me away from the door, and when I followed he said:
“Look, shamus! That’s gospel that I gave in there. I haven’t done a thing.”
“I believe you,” I said, “that’s the funny part of it. If it had been you, you’d have taken the bonds along with the dough. You’d have gone hook, line, and sinker—and left the town because you couldn’t take that along too. Okay! Now what?”
“I didn’t want you picking at me all the time, is all. Maybe I’m no lily, but I’m clear on this deal.”
“I get it, Preacher. You were holding off— waiting to get a chance at a real killing. Who’s this guy Franks you told Miss Conklin was here?”
“He’s the gal’s sweetie. He tags her all around. He comes here every day.”
“What kind of a guy is he?”
He shrugged. “She likes him. She’s going to marry him.”
I went back in the library and Miss Conklin hung up the phone and said: “The police tell me they will be here at once. Oh my goodness! The trouble my poor people will have.”
I grinned and she saw it. She said sharply: “Mr. Shay! These poor unfortunate victims of our society are entitled to decent treatment, once they have made penance. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be treated as any decent citizen should be. I want you to think of that.”
I thought of Preacher Toomey and the cutthroat that had driven us to the house—and the Lord knows what other specimens she had around—and said:
“You think of it, Miss Conklin. I’d as soon live in a cage with wild tigers as here.”
“That is very unfair,” she said.
I waved toward the desk that shielded the dead Mary Morse and said: “If Mary could talk, I’ll bet she wouldn’t agree with you.”
The cops came and there was merry hell to pay. They lined up the help and of all the collection I ever saw they won in a walk. They’d have made the average police line-up look like a meeting of the Ladies Aid. The chauffeur had served time in Dannemora and Joliet. One gardener had taken a course at McAlester, in Oklahoma, and a P.G. at Folsom, in California. The other one had graduated from Leavenworth, which is a Federal pen. The cook was an old gal who’d killed her husband with a frying pan and had done seven years for the trick. The two other maids were about in the dead Mary Morse’s class, though they didn’t own the looks she’d had.
And then there was young George Lawrence, who was a worthless bum if one ever walked. He was half drunk, and when he saw me he wanted to pick up the argument where we’d left it off two nights before.
The cops stopped him quick on that—telling him they’d do all the fighting necessary.
Franks, the Lawrence girl’s fiance, was a thin-faced, dark young fellow. He seemed to be okay. I didn’t know anything about him, but I wondered how a honey like the Lawrence girl could go for him. She could have done better, with what she had to work with, which was practically everything it takes.
She was small and blonde, and had that wide-set appealing stare that makes you want to pick
‘em up and cuddle ‘em and tell ‘em everything will be all right.
Nobody had any alibi—the cops found that out right away. Nobody had any notion about who didn’t like Mary Morse. Or said they hadn’t. And then I got a break. The cops were ganged up, talking to one of the gardeners, and Preacher Toomey caught my eye and beckoned me over to him. He said, so no one else could hear it:
“Listen, Shay! I’ll do you a favor and maybe you can do one back for me. The kid, young Georgie, was mixed up with the gal. She was clipping him for all the dough he could get his hands on.”
“You sure?”
“Certain. She bragged about it.”
“Did his aunt know about it?”
“Listen, Shay! If there’s one single, solitary thing goes on in this house that she don’t know about, I’ll put in with you. She’s so smart it’s painful.”
“Nuts!” I said. “If she was, she’d never have a bunch like she’s got here around her. Was the kid still playing around with the Morse dame?”
“Sure. But she was taking him for dough and he was sore about it. He beat the hell out of her three weeks ago…. His aunt kept her from calling the cops in on it. That’ll give you an idea of how much she knows about it. You going to tell the cops?”
“Why don’t you?”
He said gloomily: “That’d make ‘em think I was trying to pass the buck to somebody else. The best thing I can do is keep my mouth shut.”
I told him I thought it a very good idea … and I did the same. I figured there’d be plenty of time to tell it later.
It ended right there. The Captain in charge, Chick Williams, grumbled to Miss Conklin: “And what can I do about it? I tell you I’ll take your crew down to the station for questioning and you tell me that you’ll have ‘em out on a writ of habeas corpus as soon as you can get in touch with your lawyer. What can I do, lady?—You tie my hands.”
“I know very well what would happen to them at the station,” Miss Conklin said primly. “They would be brow-beaten, if not physically beaten. They have told you what they know.”
“Every damned one of them has stood in front of me and lied by the clock.”
“Can you prove that, officer?”
Williams admitted he couldn’t. Miss Conklin said: “Then I certainly wouldn’t make the statement. These people look to me for protection and I intend to see they have it.”
Williams went away, growling about making a check on everybody in the place and on the dead girl’s past life. And as soon as he left I told Miss Conklin what Toomey had told me. She ga
ve me a queer stare and said:
“But you didn’t tell the police?”
I said that I hadn’t as yet….
“Give me a couple of days, Mr. Shay. If I don’t think of a plan by that time, you and I will go together, taking Toomey with us, and see he tells his story to the police. I naturally don’t want my nephew in jail if he’s innocent, though if he’s guilty that’s the place for him.”
I said: “Will you tell me honestly what you think about it?”
“I don’t think George is guilty—I can tell you that much,” she said, pursing her lips and looking like a grandmother making up her mind about how many jars of pickles to put up. “No, I really don’t.”
“Why not?”
“He hasn’t the nerve, Mr. Shay. He’s too dependent on me to do a thing like that. Rather than kill the girl, he’d have come to me and made a clean breast of the matter.”
“He did—once. When he beat the girl up and you went to the front for him and kept her from calling in the cops.”
“Toomey told you that, too?”
“You bet.”
She smiled then. “Doesn’t that support my theory, Mr. Shay? If he’d had murder in his mind, wouldn’t he have committed it then, rather than just abuse the girl? He knew then I’d find it out.”
“People can change,” I told her. “Sometimes a man can be driven just so far. And then he’ll back up.”
She admitted that maybe I was right and that she’d get in touch with me at my office in a day or so. And I left, wondering why I didn’t tell the cops what I knew and have them take the young punk down to the station and sweat a confession out of him.
He was my customer for the killing and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind about it. And the only thing holding me back from turning him in was the old lady. In my business, a client’s always right, at least until proved a mile wrong. She was a client and so I went along with her on the two days of grace she asked for. I couldn’t see it, but there was an outside chance of somebody else having done the killing—and it was just possible that she had an idea who it was.
