I waited quietly until he had made the last delicate adjustment, laid down the pliers and removed the powerful jeweler’s glasses from his eyes. For them he substituted a plain horn-rimmed pair, then blinked up at me inquiringly.
Handing him my license, I waited until he had studied it, then said, “I’m working with the Homicide Department on the Ford case. I have Inspector Day’s permission to ask questions in the name of the department and I’d like to ask you some. Maybe you’d like to check me by phone with Inspector Day first.”
He gave me a pleasant smile as he handed back my license. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Mr. Moon. I’m sure the help I’ll be able to give you will be so small it won’t matter whether you have police authority or not. As a matter of fact, I told some lieutenant everything I knew about Walter Ford over the phone.”
“That was Lieutenant Hannegan,” I said. “Mind going over again what you told him?”
Jessup said he didn’t mind at all. He still had the slip of paper on his desk containing the notes he had made from his files for Hannegan’s benefit, and he referred to it to refresh his memory as he talked.
“The only work we’ve ever done for Mr. Ford was the engraving of gold initials on the ivory grips of six twenty-five-caliber automatic pistols,” he said. “They all came in at different times, the first last March twelfth. It was picked up three days later. That was engraved M.S.”
“Madeline Strong,” I said.
“I wouldn’t know what any of the initials stand for. The next came in May second, was picked up on the fourth, and the initials were H.D. Then on May fifteenth we engraved one A.M.”
Apparently those were the two women the police had located through Ford’s address book and cleared as having no possible connection with the crime.
“Then we didn’t do any more until last month,” Jessup went on. “June eighth we engraved one E.K. and on June twenty-eighth B.D.”
Evelyn Karnes and Beatrice Duval, I thought, which jibed with the dates both girls claimed to have received their pistols from Ford.
“How about the last one?” I asked.
“That came in just a few days before Mr. Ford was killed. July seventh, to be exact. Our instructions were to engrave it T.H.”
“Did Ford bring all these guns in personally?”
“No. He sent them by Pickup Service and had them picked up the same way.” Then he frowned thoughtfully. “At least the last one came that way. I’d have to check with Leona about the others.”
When I looked at him without understanding, he explained, “Usually I don’t get out front much except when we’re rushed, and we’re hardly ever rushed. Leona handles the store trade and I work back here. Last week she was out sick and I had to handle everything, which is why this mess of work accumulated.” He gestured at the littered table top. “So I know Pickup Service brought in the last gun, but Leona would have received all the others.”
Rising, he walked to the workroom door, saw that the suave brunette had no customers and called her to the back of the shop.
“Those pistols of Mr. Ford’s the police phoned me about,” he said. “How’d they usually come in?”
“Mr. Ford always brought them in personally and picked them up again when they were finished.”
Jessup thanked her, and when she had gone away again he sat down in the lone chair and looked up at me uneasily. “Does that mean anything, Mr. Moon? The messenger brought along a note from Ford requesting a hurry-up job and asking us to have the gun ready the next day. I recall it was the same messenger boy who came after it.”
I frowned thoughtfully. “This boy have anything to identify himself?”
He looked even more uneasy. “I didn’t inquire, Mr. Moon. He just said he was from Pickup Service and gave me a large envelope containing the gun and note. Of course under ordinary circumstances I would require identification before releasing a customer’s property to a messenger, but since the same boy who brought the gun in came after it too, I hardly thought it necessary.”
Asking if I could use his phone, I looked up the number of Pickup Service and got hold of the dispatcher. After explaining who I was and that I was working with the authorization of Warren Day, I asked him to check his records for July seventh and eighth to see if he had any calls either from a Mr. Walter Ford or from anyone else for trips to Jessup’s.
After about a five-minute wait the dispatcher informed me the company had made no such delivery or pickup for Walter Ford or anyone else.
When I hung up, Jessup was looking worried.
“It’s the sort of thing anybody would be taken in by,” I reassured him. “Nobody will hold you responsible. I’d guess whoever it was had the engraving done simply hired some kid to act the part of a Pickup messenger. Probably he was waiting right outside the store while the boy was inside both times. How was the engraving paid for?”
“By the messenger, in cash.”
“It all fits,” I said. “The person who ordered the engraving couldn’t afford to let you see him because he wasn’t Walter Ford, and he had to assume the police would make at least a routine check with you eventually. You’ve been a big help, Mr. Jessup.”
Asking if I could use his phone again, I dialed Warren Day’s office. When I told the inspector what I had learned, he was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “We’ve got to get hold of that kid and find out who hired him.”
“How?” I asked. “There are probably ten thousand kids in town answering to the same description.”
“How about running a personal ad offering a reward if he’ll contact us? You know. ‘If the young man who delivered a package to Jessup’s Jewelry Store on July seventh and picked it up on July eighth will phone number so-and-so, it will be to his financial advantage.’ Something on that order.”
“And have the murderer read it too? We’d find the kid all right. Dead.”
“Yeah,” he said in a dissatisfied voice. “I guess we better just put out a general call. Let me talk to Jessup.”
When I relinquished the phone, apparently Day asked Jessup for a complete description of the messenger, for the jeweler said, “About seventeen, Inspector. Five-ten, I’d say, and about a hundred and thirty pounds. Brown hair in a crew cut and a kind of long face. What? I don’t know. Just an ordinary complexion. Neither dark nor light. Just ordinary. I don’t know what color eyes he had. Both days he wore brown cotton slacks and a plain yellow sport shirt with the tail outside his belt. No, nobody else saw him because my girl was out sick last week and I was here alone.”
When he hung up, I had the feeling that I was finally getting my teeth into the case. Day’s reaction to the fake messenger boy indicated he was now convinced Tom Henry had been framed, and from here on out I could expect an all-out effort on the part of Homicide to catch the real murderer instead of merely an effort to consolidate its case against my client.
As—except for vague suspicions that there was something phony about the evidence against Thomas Henry—this was the first definite progress I had made, it occurred to me Madeline Strong would want to know about it at once. Since her apartment was less than a mile from Jessup’s, I drove over instead of phoning.
Madeline’s place was on Park Lane near Mason Avenue, one of the most expensive residential districts in town.
Since the opposite side of Park Lane was Midland Park, the view from the apartment house was one of trees and well-kept grass as far as you could see. The view alone probably added fifty dollars a month to the rent, I thought, and wondered again just how much money the girl had.
Madeline’s apartment was 3-C. A virtually silent self-service elevator took me to the third floor and I waded along an ankle-deep carpet to the door of 3-C. There was no bell in evidence, but when I lifted a highly polished brass knocker in the shape of a knight’s shield, it caused a mellow tinkle of chimes within the apartment. When I released the knocker, it sank silently back into place instead of clattering against its metal f
aceplate.
Barney Amhurst came to the door. When he saw me, his dimples showed in a smile of pleasure.
“Come in, Mr. Moon,” he said hospitably. “Madeline and I were just talking about you.”
I followed him through a large living room furnished with quiet but expensive taste, through an equally tastefully furnished dining room and into a bright and immaculate kitchen. Madeline Strong was in the act of making a plate of chicken-salad sandwiches.
When Amhurst entered the room, she looked up at him inquiringly, then saw me. Dropping the spoon she was using to ladle mayonnaise, she came toward me with both hands outstretched.
“I was just thinking about calling you, Mr. Moon. Have you learned anything new?”
“A little,” I said, letting her work off emotion by squeezing both my hands. The emotion was for Tom Henry, I knew, and was transferred to me only because she hoped I could give her some news about her fiancé, but it was pleasant to be on the receiving end of even secondhand affection from such a pretty girl.
I glanced at the plate of sandwiches, then at a wall clock which said eleven forty-five. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you at lunch time. It didn’t occur to me you’d eat this early.”
“We had an early breakfast because we had to be in court by nine.” Releasing my hands, she glanced at Amhurst and said with a touch of self-consciousness, as though she felt called upon to explain his presence, “Barney was good enough to drive me down so I invited him for lunch. Will you stay too? I only have sandwiches and cake, but there’s plenty of both.”
As there seemed to be enough sandwiches on the plate to feed an average wedding party, I said, “Thanks. Be glad to. I can bring you up to date during lunch.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WE HAD LUNCH in the dining room, Barney and I volunteering to set the table while Madeline made coffee. As we munched on chicken-salad sandwiches, Madeline repeated what Warren Day had already told me about the judge refusing to release Tom Henry on bond.
“I think we’ve finally got Homicide on our side,” I said. “He hasn’t exactly come right out and said it, but I believe Warren Day is as convinced as you are that Tom Henry was framed.”
When I told her about my visit to Jessup’s and the resulting pickup call that had gone out for the pseudo messenger, she almost went into ecstasies.
“Now they’ll have to let Tom out,” she said. “They haven’t a thing to hold him on.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t that simple,” I deflated her. “From the police point of view there’s still the possibility that it was Henry himself who stole the gun from Ford’s set and had it initialed. If you asked them, they’d probably admit they couldn’t think of any plausible reason for his doing such a thing, but I’m sure they won’t release him until they definitely establish who did have the engraving done.”
This subdued her jubilation, but she was too happy at the possibility of Tom being cleared to remain depressed very long. A moment later she was inquiring eagerly, “How long will it take to locate this messenger boy? Do you think they might find him today?”
“They have only a rather slim description,” I hedged. “And the kid may not live anywhere near Jessup’s. Whoever hired him to pose as a Pickup messenger may have brought him from clear across town, or even from out of town.”
“Oh,” she said, depressed again.
“Day wanted to run a box ad offering a reward to the boy for coming forward with information,” I said. “Probably the kid doesn’t realize he was involved in anything illegal and wouldn’t hesitate to report in if he saw the ad. But there’s always the possibility the murderer would see the ad too, and decide the kid was too dangerous to leave alive. We have to try to locate him quietly.”
“Do you think Ed Friday is behind this?” Barney asked abruptly.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why do you ask?”
He looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, it was pretty obvious he was sore at Walt the other night for passing at Evelyn. And I think that boy Max of his would kill anyone Friday told him to. Then Madeline told me you asked her if she knew of any reason Friday wouldn’t want you to look into the case, which leads me to assume he must have approached you in an attempt to get you to drop it.”
Ignoring the implied question in his final sentence, I said, “I’ve been considering Friday as a possibility, but somehow I can’t see him risking murder over a woman. I’d be happier if I could discover some other motive for him to get rid of Ford. Of course there’s always the possibility Friday was one of Ford’s blackmail victims.”
“Blackmail?” Amhurst repeated, openmouthed.
“Ford had a habit of snapping infrared photographs of women. He had a confederate whose job was to get the women into compromising positions. There isn’t any evidence that his blackmailing activities took any form other than that, but blackmailers aren’t very particular. I suspect Ford would have put the screws to anyone he had something on, and I understand he once worked for Friday. Possibly he was holding something out of the past over Friday’s head, and Friday got tired of paying off.”
“I don’t think so,” Madeline objected. “They always seemed friendly enough until Walt started paying too much attention to Evelyn. Mr. Friday always seemed to me to treat Walt with a touch of tolerant contempt, but I think he liked him all right. At least I never noticed anything in his manner to suggest he feared Walt.”
“Wasn’t it Ford who brought Friday into the Huntsafe Company?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Amhurst said. “That was part of my deal with Walt. I agreed to give him a share of the stock if he could get legislative action on the Gimmick and also produce a backer for manufacture.”
“I know,” I said. “A ten-per-cent share, according to Ford’s widow. That right?”
Barney flushed slightly. “That’s right. Ten per cent.”
I examined his flush curiously. “Wasn’t that kind of high payment for the services involved?”
Madeline said to Amhurst, “You ought to look embarrassed, Barney.” To me she said, “The only inventor I ever knew who had any business sense was my brother. He always had an ironbound contract for everything he did, and it was always in his own favor. But Barney hasn’t any more business sense than my Tom. He’d have given all the stock away if I hadn’t found out what he was doing and put a stop to it. He signed over twenty per cent to me to cover Lloyd’s interest in the invention, though he wasn’t legally required to give me anything, ten per cent to Walt Ford, and forty per cent to Ed Friday for putting up the money for manufacture. He’s only retained a thirty per-cent interest for himself. If I had known what he was doing in time, I would have stopped it. We didn’t need Mr. Friday’s money. I would have backed the company myself for another twenty per-cent interest, and Barney could have retained sixty per cent. And there was no necessity for giving Walt Ford any interest. He simply should have been on the payroll as an employee of the company.”
Barney said defensively, “At the time I made the agreement, I didn’t have anything to offer but a share of the invention.”
They were still arguing the point amiably when we finished lunch. Madeline refused our offer to help with the dishes, saying she merely wanted to stack them, as she intended to run right over to the jail and tell Tom the good news and didn’t want to take the time to do dishes.
The rest of that afternoon I spent catching up on the sleep I had missed the night before. Late in the afternoon I phoned Warren Day to check if any progress had been made in tracking down Alberto Thomaso. The inspector told me the address shown on the youthful gunman’s driving license had been correct, but by the time the police checked it, the bird had flown.
Eighteen twelve Sixth Street was a rooming house, Day said, and according to the landlady Alberto had come home some time in the wee hours, packed and had taken off immediately. The landlady’s room was just below Thomaso’s and apparently she was a light sleeper, for she had heard him come in and leave again. She hadn’t
turned on a light to see the time, but estimated this had occurred around four A.M.
“We found the Chrysler abandoned near Midland Park,” the inspector said. “The owner didn’t even know it was stolen until we gave him a ring. Seems he’s been on a toot the last few days and thought he just couldn’t remember where he parked it. We also ran down the owner of that river cottage.”
“Get anything from him?”
“Nothing important. He’s a guy named Robert Baxter. Thomaso rented the cottage from him last summer, but it hasn’t had a tenant this summer. Apparently Thomaso just decided to appropriate it for a couple of weeks, because Baxter claims he didn’t have authorization from him to use it.”
“Get anything on the Woodsman?”
Day’s voice turned pleased. “Yeah. Ballistics tied it to an unsolved gang killing of nearly a year ago. This kid is even dumber than most hoods. Imagine a guy dumb enough to hang onto a gun after he’s used it for murder.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Even Alberto isn’t that dumb. I hate to spoil your dreams, but I’ll bet my little playmate is clear of that one. Five gets you ten he bought it in a pawnshop subsequent to your year-old murder.”
“I suppose,” Day said glumly. “I thought of that too. If a ready-made solution to a killing ever fell in my lap, I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Making any progress in locating that kid messenger?”
“Naw. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Hannegan came up with a bright idea we’re going to try in the morning. On the off-chance that the kid may be enrolled in summer school, we’re asking all the high schools to question all male students fitting the description. Not one kid in ten goes to summer school, but it’s a chance.”
I told the inspector I’d check with him again the next day and rang off.
Since my date with Fausta was at nine and I wanted to see Bubbles Duval first, I showered and dressed before dinner. At seven I was at Bubbles’s apartment and was waiting in front of her door when she came in from work.
Give the Girl a Gun Page 10
