AHMM, June 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Everybody,” reassured Haskell as they drew up outside of it, “that was here at the time is still on tap, we saw to that! Season's over anyway, place was half empty. It's just that we were getting nowhere so fast, I decided to wire in to you people—”

  Clip, who was in complete darkness, just to keep his oar in, took a stab at a remark that didn't turn out to be the dumbest one in the world after all. “Of course, the mere fact that you've got ‘em all bottled up is no guarantee; it might have been somebody from the outside, that didn't belong in the place at all.” And kept wondering to himself, “What the hell's up anyway—a Peterman job, a jewel robbery, a—”

  “It is the most brutal murder we've had here in the hundred and fifty years of this town's history!” Haskell added in an undertone as he led the way up the veranda steps.

  Clip Rogers stiffened and felt a chill go down his back. Enough of a sketch has been given of his activities to show that he was no plaster saint. But he had his code, and he stuck to it more unswervingly than many an honest man. He'd gypped and bamboozled and swindled, but he'd never taken a life. And it wasn't because he lacked the courage, either. To him murder was filthy, and he detested it. Give the credit where the credit's due. He used his brains to do his fast-work, and not at the point of a gun, nor nitro, nor a jimmy.

  And, though he probably didn't realize it himself, it wasn't the easy money that kept him racketing as much as the actual excitement of carrying out the swindles.

  He was a thrill-chaser on the shady side of the street, that was all. Just an old-fashioned adventurer in an up-to-date streamlined world. As he might have put it himself, he liked his crime clean.

  “Brutal?” he corrected Haskell ironically. “I never heard of a murder yet that was gentle.”

  * * * *

  They went into a gloomy, old-fashioned lobby lousy with rubber-plants, each one of which seemed to have an old maid gawking from behind it at Clip. They would probably beat any underworld grapevine in existence when it came to spreading news, he figured.

  “See if you can put the soft-pedal on who I am and what I'm here for,” he mouthed to Haskell. “I don't want it to get around; it cramps my style.” He wasn't taking any chances; there just might be someone in Wildmere who had once seen the real Griswold or a picture of him.

  “Now where would you like to begin?” the sheriff asked deferentially.

  “On the spot,” said Clip.

  They went up in a mousetrap elevator to the third (and top) floor, accompanied by a hand-wringing manager and a pouter-pigeon of a desk-clerk. Both constables stayed below. They all went down a long hallway with a seedy strip of red runner in the middle of it, and around a couple of hairpin-turns, and finally stopped in front of a door numbered 310. Haskell unlocked it, and Clip went in and looked around.

  The body had been removed, but the bed was a wreck, looked as though it had been drenched with iodine. On the mirror of the dresser, in cold-cream, a skull and crossbones were outlined, and under that two crosses. Nothing else was disturbed.

  Haskell said, “She's over in the basement of our station-house; we haven't got a morgue here. If you'd care to come over and look—of course, we took pictures, like they do in the big cities.”

  He opened a briefcase and handed Clip a group of macabre stills. He glanced briefly at the top one only. It showed him a dead woman sprawled on this same bed, mouth open, half of a building-brick balanced across her forehead.

  “The other half had fallen to the floor beside the bed. We're sending them both in to Capital City, for fingerprints—”

  “All that's passé,” Clip said, handing the pictures back. “I use psychology. Now go on, gimme the background, one at a time.” He flexed his finger at the manager. “Name, length of stay, habits, and so on.”

  “She registered from New York five days ago, name of Doll Henderson, took this room and the adjoining one, with a communicating bath between, for herself and her little boy—”

  “Where's the little boy now?”

  “My wife's looking after him,” the manager said.

  “All right, now you.” He signaled the desk-clerk with his head. “Any phone-calls, any visitors?”

  “Plenty, and all from one guy. Fellow here that got stuck on her. They were out on the lake together all afternoon yesterday in an outboard motorboat. He called her again last night at midnight, just a little while before it must have happened—”

  “Don't worry, we're holding him,” put in Haskell grimly at this point. “Been grilling him all morning, before you got here. He's trying to side-track us by saying that while they were out in the boat together she told him she had some mysterious admirer who would kill her if he caught her with this other guy—”

  Clip tuned him out with a chop of the hand. “Who was the first one who found her?”

  The clerk spoke up again. “I was, unless you count that poor little kid of hers—”

  “Oh, the little boy found her first?”

  * * * *

  “He came downstairs to me at nine this morning, poor little devil, hair all neatly combed and face all shining with soap-and-water. He came up to the desk and pulled me by the sleeve. ‘Mr. Frost,’ he said in a scared little voice, ‘I can't wake Mom up; she won't answer me.’ I went back upstairs with him and found her, the way those pictures show her. Oh, it was ghastly, awful! Of course, the child didn't realize it even then; he thought somebody had been playing rough-house with her, that's all. Heartbreaking!” said the clerk sentimentally.

  “Headbreaking, you mean,” said Clip morosely.

  “But,” said Haskell impatiently, “you're withholding the most important fact of all from the inspector! The kid saw the man in the act of committing the crime! He was an eye-witness.”

  “Now,” said Clip softly, “we're getting some place.”

  “He had a nickel in his hand when he came down to me this morning,” the clerk shuddered. “On the way up he dropped it and went after it; that's how I happened to see it.”

  “What's that got to do with it?” Clip asked.

  The sheriff took up the spiel. “He heard a noise in his mother's room, some time during the night. He can't tell time yet on the clock, so that leaves us guessing. Anyway, he climbed out of bed, went through the bathroom, and looked in through the side-door, that one over there. He says he saw a man hitting his mother with a brick, and he said to him: ‘Don't hurt my Mom! What are you doing to my Mom?’ So the man turned around and answered, ‘You go back to bed, sonny. You're just dreaming this.’ And he gave him a nickel and pushed him back where he came from.

  “So the kid climbed back in bed again and fell asleep, right on top of what he'd just seen! This morning he really thought it was a dream, but, of course, the fact that he still had the nickel clenched in his little fist proves that it wasn't.”

  “What does he say the guy looked like?” Clip wanted to know.

  Haskell shrugged discouragedly. “What d'ya expect from a kid of seven? First it was the boogy-man. Then it was the sandman. Then it was Jack-the-Giant-Killer. Every time we ask him, he hands us another. He's one of those youngsters with too much imagination, and he still thinks he dreamed it, anyway.”

  “How about matching him up with this suspect you're already holding?”

  “That was almost the first thing we did,” Haskell said. “We put him into a sort of impromptu line-up, along with the elevator boys here from the hotel and all the rest of the male members of the staff, and sure enough—he picked him out!”

  “Did he say that was him?”

  “No, what he did was stick his finger out at him and say, ‘Why did you do that to my mom? Now she won't talk to me any more.'”

  Clip sank down in a chair and looked blank. “Well, if that's the case, why did you send to Capital City for me?"

  “Because this guy, this Joe Fisher, has been able to prove that he didn't come near here all night last night! His younger brother's down with pneumonia, and he passed through t
he crisis in the early hours of this morning. We have the testimony of two disinterested people, the doctor in attendance and the trained nurse, that he hung around outside the door of the sickroom from the time he came in at twelve, after calling her up, until daylight. He was asleep on the sofa when we went there after him at half-past ten this morning.”

  “Then, why,” Clip wanted to know, “are you holding him?”

  “Because the kid picked him out of a line-up of ten people, without having been tipped off ahead of time what they were assembled for.” Haskell looked at him helplessly. “It's kind of a vicious circle, that don't make sense.”

  * * * *

  III

  “Oh, there's plenty of loopholes in it, don't worry,” Clip assured him. “How far is the Fisher house from here? The doc and the nurse couldn't have had their eye on him every minute, if they were busy with a critical patient.”

  “Well, we checked on that pretty thoroughly, and the longest stretch of not noticing him either one would admit to, was fifteen minutes at a time—at any time. It takes half an hour from there here, by car. He kept getting in their hair all night long; the doc even bawled him out several times.”

  “Then the loophole's somewhere around the other side of the circle. How about sending the kid up here and letting me see what I can get out of him?”

  "Here, in the same room?” objected the manager squeamishly.

  “I thought you said he didn't understand what it was all about, even yet?” He shook off the blood-stiffened clothes and kicked them under the bed. “We don't have to have that staring us in the face anyway. Anybody got anything sweet?” The desk-clerk silently handed him a stick of gum from his vest-pocket.

  In about five minutes the manager's wife came in with a little boy of about seven. He was a stocky little fellow, intelligent-looking, with a cowlick of ash-blond hair hanging down over one eye. He wore a white blouse, serge knickers, “sneakers,” fuzzy stockings, and had a sweatshirt or pull-over sweater thrown over his shoulders, tied by the sleeves under his chin. His face was all grimy and sooty, as though he'd been burrowing in the dirt.

  Clip motioned everyone out except Haskell and the manager's wife, whose feminine tact he felt might come in handy. His own experience with youngsters was strictly limited.

  “Aren't you ashamed to have the nice man see you like that?” the motherly woman was cooing. “You were so nice and clean just a little while ago, before you went out to play—Why won't you wash your face like a good boy?” she went on.

  “I will wash my face!” the boy said in a reedy treble. “But I don't wanna wash it down in your bathroom, I wanna wash it up here in my own bathroom!”

  “Hello, son,” purred Clip, crouching forward above his knees, “what's your name?”

  “Jimmy,” said the boy.

  “Like chewing gum, Jimmy?”

  “I only like to lick the sugar off it.” He peeled off the tinfoil, stuck out his tongue, and began to strop the gum back and forth across it.

  “Jimmy,” said Clip, “what was this man like that gave you a nickel last night, when you dreamed someone was hitting your mom?”

  “I told you a million times!” said Jimmy impatiently. “He was big, tall man in a gray suit, with lots and lots and lots of freckles—”

  “Joe Fisher to a T,” murmured Haskell behind the back of his hand.

  Clip signed, as though he felt sorry for the poor motherless shaver. “Well, Jimmy,” he said, “you've certainly got a very dirty face for such a little fellow.” He took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, reached for the boy. “C'mere and let's see if I can't get some of it off for you.”

  But Jimmy reared back, dodged behind the woman's skirts. He seemed to be afraid of Rogers all at once, for some unknown reason. “I know how to wash myself!” he shrilled. “My mom showed me how ever since I was five!”

  “Well, let's see you do it then,” Clip suggested genially.

  * * * *

  The kid seemed to have gotten into a bad temper, without cause.

  “I don't let nobody see me do it!” he piped. “I do it when no one's looking!” He dodged out from behind the woman, swerving to get out of Clip's way, and fled into the bathroom, banging the door after him. They heard him slip the bolt on the inside. A minute later the second door, giving on the next room, had slammed and clicked. Water began to splash.

  “He don't seem to like you," commented Haskell, raising his brows. “I got along dandy with him all morning.”

  “He's been begging and pleading with me to let him come up here,” the manager's wife whispered. “He seemed to want to wash his face, but I couldn't get him near our bathroom!”

  Clip had fallen strangely silent all at once, was staring at nothing lost in thought. His face began to harden, to set grimly in a mask of repulsion as he sat there. He went over to the locked door, finally, crouched down, and put his eye to the keyhole. He straightened up and came away again.

  “What's he doing?” asked the woman breathlessly.

  “He's hung a towel over the inside of the keyhole,” was the answer. The door had no transom.

  Clip motioned to them to get out, then raising his voice so suddenly that the manager's wife jumped nervously, boomed out: “Let's all go downstairs and look around!” In a hurried whisper he went on, “You'd better go, both of you; this is going to be very unpleasant!” He ushered them out, stayed on the inside of the room-door. “No matter what sounds you hear coming from here, don't interfere. Watch that other door down the hall and don't let anyone out, not even the kid!”

  Then he slammed the door noisily and cut himself off from them.

  There wasn't a sound for the next ten minutes. The manager's wife beat a prudent retreat, but Haskell stayed within earshot out at the end of the hall, and had one of the constables sent up to lend him moral support.

  At the end of the ten minutes there was a sudden crash of glass, as though somebody had broken a window between the two rooms, then an ear-splitting screech like a noon factory-whistle, followed by a hoarse exclamation from Rogers. “Got you now—”

  Haskell looked whitely at the constable and breathed, “The killer must a’ been hiding in that bathroom all night and all morning! Looks like the kid knew, too. Somebody that won his confidence, most likely, and got him to keep his secret. Griswold must ‘a’ caught on just now—”

  “But we was in and outa there a dozen times—” The constable took a step forward. Haskell motioned him back. “We gotta obey him to the letter; don't interfere no matter what happens, he said.”

  The uproar continued unabated. Somebody tried to get out the nearer door and was knocked aside. There was a scuffling back and forth.

  “Griswold” gave a sudden sharp yelp of pain, followed by a deeper groan. There was a momentary lull in the strife, as though he'd been badly hurt. The two out in the hall looked at each other ominously.

  * * * *

  Then the nearer door flashed open and the frantic little boy darted out, beside himself with terror. Foam-flecked like a mad dog, he darted between them before they could stop him and scurried down the hall. Sounds like a peanut-stand whistle came from him.

  Haskell's knees were knocking together. “He's gone out of his mind with fright! They've driven him into convulsions!” he shuddered.

  He threw open the door and looked in. “Griswold” had a gash down the side of his neck from ear to shoulder, pumping blood. An open razor lay at his feet. He had stripped a pillowcase from the bed, was ripping it into a hasty tourniquet. “Hurry up!” he breathed heavily. “Tighten this around me before I pass out! Just missed my jugular by inches—”

  Haskell fashioned him a neck-cloth that nearly strangled him, but stopped the flow.

  “Where'd he go?” the constable asked, coming back from the other room, where the woman had been slain.

  Clip didn't answer. He went loping down the hall in the direction the kid had gone. They went after him. They caught up to him around the sec
ond turn of the hall, in front of the elevator. The car was down, but the shaft-door stood partly open; through the narrow slit the counterweight could be seen moving upward.

  “Get down there, head that car off before it lands!” Clip rasped. The constable darted down the stairs, off to one side. Clip funneled his hands and boomed down through the opening: “Bring that car back, operator!”

  “In the name of the law!” amended Haskell.

  The counterweight reversed itself, the car-roof flushed upward. As it came abreast of the floor, Clip shoved the slide all the way out, gave the horrified Haskell a glimpse of Jimmy, the mad boy, crouched spitting on the roof, clasping the center cable with one hand.

  “Hold it, that's high enough!” The ascent stopped, with the car-roof at waist-level. Under it were sprawled two women passengers in a dead faint.

  Clip reached in, gave a yank, with his jaw-line set like concrete, the steel-thread cable twanged like a big harp-string, and little Jimmy came out squirming and kicking at the end of his long arm, held up by the scruff of the neck like a frothing little beast.

  Clip carried him that way all the way back to the room, Haskell at his heels babbling, “What's got him—hydrophobia? What's he slavering like that for?”

  Clip slammed the room door on the three of them, threw the clawing Jimmy bodily into a big easy-chair with one arm. “Hydrophobia, hell!” he spat out. “He's a forty-year-old midget I interrupted in the act of stealing a shave!” He's the murderer of that woman, that went around posing as his mother!”

  Haskell nearly sat down backward on the floor.

  “I'll get it out of him!” the raging Clip went on. “Take a flying leap at me with an open razor from the top of a dresser, will he? I'll make him talk! Get your shorthand pad, sheriff—” He stepped into the bathroom, returned with a tough leather strop. “Posing as a kid, eh? Well, here's where he gets a kid's medicine!” He stepped one leg up on the chair, pitched the “little boy head-down across his knee.