Man on a Rope

by George Harmon Coxe

  “I may need a car, Inspector,” he said. “So if you don’t mind I’ll use Eddie Glynn’s and follow along behind you.”

  Police Headquarters, the nerve center for the entire colony as well as for Georgetown, occupied a sizable plot of land and was made up of several wooden buildings built around a paved quadrangle. Eddie Glynn parked in the open area beneath the one opposite the entrance, and when Barry stepped out he saw a man coming down the exposed lower stairs.

  He did not see Barry, but continued on, a stooped and skinny figure whose tan suit seemed too large for him and who moved with a shuffling gait that seemed vaguely familiar. There had been but a quick glimpse of the mustached face. Still curious, Barry watched him move across the quadrangle, and now recognition came finally and he knew this was the man he had asked for a match, the one who had stood beside the tree outside Colin Lambert’s house the night before. The incident had slipped his mind entirely during the previous questioning, but as remembered things came back his curiosity mounted.

  “Eddie,” he said, moving back to the car. “Did you see that fellow in the tan suit that just went by?”

  Eddie stuck his head out the window and craned his neck to look at the retreating figure. “Him?” he said. “Yes, sir. That’s George Thaxter. Used to be a foreman for Mr. Colin Lambert.”

  Barry filed the name away as he went upstairs to a corridor from which several offices opened. Louis Amanti sat alone on the bench that stood against one wall, and although Cantrell and Hudson had preceded Barry they were nowhere in sight at the moment. He asked Amanti about it as he sat down beside him.

  Amanti grunted, his round face a bit grim, as though he resented the indignity of being kept waiting. “They went in there,” he said, indicating a closed door at the end of the hall.

  “Have you seen Kerby yet?”

  “I gave him a statement.” Amanti crossed his knees and folded his arms, the fingers of one hand tapping his biceps. “He asked me to wait.”

  Barry offered a cigarette, was refused, and lit one for himself. He was about half finished with it when a door diagonally across from him opened and Kerby came out with Muriel Ransom. He said something about appreciating her co-operation and walked with her to the head of the stairs. When she started down he nodded to Barry.

  Kerby’s office overlooked the quadrangle and was furnished with a desk and its swivel chair, three other wooden chairs, a filing cabinet, and bookcase. Two maps adorned the walls, one of the city and surrounding territory, the other of the colony itself. Both were stuck with roundheaded pins of various colors. At one end of the desk a uniformed police-woman sat waiting, her stenographer’s notebook open before her. What Kerby said explained her presence.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” He indicated a chair and then added the routine warning that anything Barry said might be used against him. “But if you’ve no objections,” he said, “I’d like a simple statement detailing your movements from, say, nine o’clock last night until the two constables arrived. I may interrupt from time to time, but tell it in your own words.”

  Barry sat down and put his thoughts in order. When he began, he varied his facts to omit telling of his original discovery of the body, and he did not mention seeing the man Eddie Glynn had identified as George Thaxter. This omission was deliberate because he wanted to find out more about Thaxter and at the moment he had no way of telling just how long the man had been standing under that tree. The fact that he had been in this building indicated that the police were interested in him and Barry knew that if Thaxter had mentioned seeing him he would hear about it from Kerby.

  Now, at a nod from the Superintendent, the woman closed her notebook and left the room. Kerby leaned back in his chair and fixed his gaze on the map of the city. He said it would take only a few minutes to type the report; if it was in order, Barry could sign it. Then, nothing changing in his voice, he said:

  “Amanti told me about that business at his office last night. Is there anything you can add to it? He seemed a little vague as to just why you had stopped there at all.”

  Barry said he could understand that. He said the reason he stopped was a little vague even to him. He said it was nothing more than an impulse motivated by a desire for more information.

  “I’ve been thinking about the will that was missing,” he added. “Couldn’t that be reconstructed from Miss Sanford’s notebook?”

  Kerby’s glance moved back to Barry and a faint smile touched the corners of his eyes, as though he appreciated the thought.

  “I asked about that. It seems the notebook was also taken…. Odd, isn’t it?” he said. “The will had not been signed and was of no value—unless it held a special clause that someone would like to forget.”

  “Was anything else missing?”

  “An envelope, apparently having to do with Boyd McBride. It seems that it was given, sealed, to Mr. Amanti for safekeeping by Colin Lambert. Unfortunately Amanti doesn’t seem to know what was in it. He thinks it might be a note given by McBride for some loan on that amphibian he owns.”

  “It wasn’t among those papers on Lambert’s desk last night?”

  “No.”

  “Is that list of any help?”

  “List?” Kerby’s brows climbed. “What list?”

  Barry described the two-page list he had noticed after he telephoned the police. He said it looked like a tabulation of Lambert’s various holdings, or an evaluation of his estate.

  The lifted brows had dipped into a frown. “Are you sure?” Kerby said, and when the reply came, he sat up and pushed a button on his desk. A moment later an orderly opened the door.

  “If Mr. Amanti is still outside, ask him to step in.”

  Louis Amanti still wore the grim and persecuted look as he entered the office and walked up to the desk. He was a lawyer and he knew his rights, but in this instance his legal knowledge did him little good as he listened to Kerby repeat Barry’s description of the list.

  “I saw no such list,” he said flatly. “I touched nothing on the desk.”

  Kerby looked back at Barry, the frown deepening. “You saw this list after you telephoned for the police?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long after that before Mr. Amanti came?”

  “Two or three minutes.”

  “You were in each other’s sight all that time?”

  Barry was convinced now that Amanti had taken that list and knew he must have done so when he, Barry, walked across the room to the doorway when he heard the police car. He did not say so because it was nothing he could prove.

  “I wasn’t watching him all the time,” he said. “I was too upset to pay much attention to him.”

  “Assuming you did not take the list, Mr. Amanti,” Kerby said, “are you familiar with it?”

  “If it’s the one I think it is, yes. I drew it up.”

  “Hah!” said Kerby and stood up. “In that case there should be a carbon copy, shouldn’t there? Suppose I send a man along with you to pick it up at your office.”

  Amanti’s lips firmed and his dark eyes were unreadable behind their protecting lenses.

  “It would be a waste of time,” he said. “The copy is also missing.”

  Kerby stared at him, his neck beginning to redden and the muscles hardening along the line of his jaw. This time when he spoke there was a snap to his voice.

  “You forgot to mention that.”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “What was the nature of this list? Why was it made in the first place?”

  “Lambert wanted a proper accounting before he sailed so that we could go over it with the bank and know exactly what he owned. He wanted the list as a matter of record, and his request was understandable.”

  “You delivered such a list?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Very well.” Kerby’s mouth tightened and his mustache bristled with the movement. “Since the list seems to have disappeared, I think we’ll make a thorough sea
rch of your office in case something else slips your mind. With your co-operation, or with a warrant if you prefer. Wait outside, please.”

  Amanti turned without a word. As he opened the door the police stenographer came in with Barry’s statement. Kerby told him to read it; if it was correct, to sign it. When Barry had complied and put down the pen he saw that the Super-intendent’s annoyance was still showing, but he pretended to ignore it.

  “I’ve answered your questions,” he said. “Maybe you’ll answer a couple of mine.”

  “What are they?”

  “Was the doctor able to fix the time of death?”

  “In his opinion, Lambert died quickly but not necessarily instantaneously. We’ve put the time of the shooting between nine thirty-two and nine forty-one, but not because of a medical opinion.”

  Barry got it then. “You mean, it happened during the shower.”

  “It had to happen then unless the shooting was done elsewhere and the body moved. We don’t think it was…. Those two shots made a bit of noise,” he said. “That’s a quiet street and the houses stand rather close together, though Lambert’s had more grounds than most. On one side, the family happened to be out. The other neighbors were home. Albert’s place is no more than fifty feet from the rear of the house. Those shots would have been heard ordinarily. That they were not heard is proof enough that they were fired during the downpour. When it opens up like that, especially on a house with a tin roof, as most of them have, you can hardly hear yourself think. It would take a shell from a twenty-five-pounder to attract any attention.”

  It was a lot of talk for Kerby and he seemed to realize it. He jabbed a knuckle at his mustache and smiled. “Does that answer your question?”

  Barry said yes. When Kerby began to straighten things on his desk he knew the interview was over.

  “Thank you for coming in,” Kerby said. “We’ll be in touch with you. If you think of anything you’d like to add to that statement come and see me.”

  This time Amanti had company on the hall bench. Beside him Boyd McBride sat lopsidedly and at ease, his big body clad in shorts and shirt. When he saw Barry he flipped one hand and grinned.

  “Hi,” he said. “Have you confessed yet?”

  “I’m trying to make a deal.”

  “Smart boy.”

  Arthur Hudson, pulling at one of his filter-tipped cigarettes, had been pacing the hall, and now as he came up to Barry he fastened his hand on one arm.

  “Come on,” he said impatiently, “I got things to do.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AT FIRST, when Barry Dawson heard what Hudson had in mind, he found it hard to believe. They were sitting in the back seat of Eddie Glynn’s taxi as it rolled toward the center of town and Hudson had been speaking quietly, and from the corner of his mouth.

  “What do you say?” he asked when he had explained his idea.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re crazy.”

  “Okay, so I’m crazy. So humor me. You still got a hundred bucks coming and you don’t have to open your kisser. You know these people better than I do, and where they live. You get me in and I’ll do the talking.”

  Barry still did not believe it, for, put simply, Hudson still wanted the diamonds. What was more, he talked as if he expected to get them one way or another.

  “I got the dough,” he said. “I want the deal.”

  “I still say you’re nuts,” Barry said. “Look, those diamonds are hooked up with murder now. Whoever has them is not going to deal with you. How does he know you won’t run to the cops?”

  “You talk like a baby.” Hudson grunted softly and crumpled a stick of gum in his mouth. “Let the cops worry about the murder…. Suppose you got the diamonds,” he said while Barry considered the irony of the situation. “You don’t dare make a move because whether you killed Lambert or not the cops will think you did once they tag you with ’em. So I come and offer you a hundred grand in U.S. dollars. Would I give up good dough for hot diamonds if I was going to turn ’em in? I button up, don’t I? Now I’m in a spot if I’m caught. Sure I take a hell of a chance. If I get grabbed before I can get rid of ’em, all I can say is I bought ’em from you. And what do you say—after you’ve salted the cash somewhere? You say: ‘Hudson is nuts. He’s blown his rug…. Me,’ you say, ‘I never saw those rocks in my life.’”

  He took a breath and said: “You got the cash. You’re not going to talk. Why the hell should you? You don’t want to frame me, do you? You don’t say nothing. Neither do I because I wind up minus everything.”

  Convinced now that Hudson meant just what he said, Barry could only marvel at his recklessness and wonder once more about his character and background and the things that made him tick. He had known such men in the army, city men mostly, whose lives seemed devoted to finding the angles and beating the system. These were the gamblers, the smart-money boys, the odds-makers, the thieves, and it seemed now that Hudson had a little of all these qualifications in his makeup, though on a somewhat more prosperous level.

  Where, he asked himself, would Hudson get a hundred thousand dollars? Well, why not, with more money floating around the States than ever before in history? Plenty of men with less polish than Hudson had made infinitely more money.

  He had said he had come down looking for a spot to put some cash, and with the country beginning to open up he was not alone in this. They were drilling for oil in the Northwest. Columbite and manganese holdings were being developed by American companies for the first time; roads were being built, a new stretch of railroad being surveyed. There was always the chance of finding new gold and diamond fields, and bauxite production was greater than ever. Hudson was looking for a fast deal and he had found one. It had fallen apart before it could be consummated, but why should he be so anxious? Why should he stick his neck out so far with the odds so stacked against him?

  Barry could find no answers for such questions, but it suddenly occurred to him that he was being given an opportunity that it would be silly to ignore. Hudson wanted him along for introductions, after which he apparently intended to present his proposition in the hope that someone could produce the diamonds if the price was right, someone who would be greedy or reckless enough to make a trade.

  So why not play out the string and see what happened?

  The more he, Barry, knew about the people involved in the murder the better. If he kept his ears open and used his head, maybe he could find out who had hidden the diamonds in his room and tried to frame him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I still think you’re nuts, but if you keep me out of it I’ll go along for the ride. Who do you want to see first?”

  “How about the dame? That Ransom woman?”

  Muriel Ransom lived in what might have been called a three-story house in the States although only two of the floors were suitable for living-quarters. Part of the ground floor was closed off with latticework, but much of it was open, providing additional ventilation, storage space, and a garage. In remodeling the place, the owner had tacked an outside stairway on one side and enclosed it; a new entrance had been cut on the second floor and this apartment consisted of a combination living and dining-room at the front, a bedroom and bath, and a kitchen more modern than most.

  Muriel Ransom wore a simple navy-blue dress that was a little snug at breast and thigh but quite appropriate for her mood, which was subdued. She wore no jewelry of any kind and her milk-white skin carried no more than a trace of lipstick and a tiny smear of eye shadow. Her upward-slanting dark eyes were grave and thoughtful as she admitted her visitors and her voice was properly grave as she said how-do-you-do to Hudson when Barry made the formal introduction. She asked them to sit down and went over to close the kitchen door on the maid who was ironing, and when she had seated herself on the couch opposite them she was ready.

  Barry leaned back and waited while Hudson cleared his throat and said that he hoped what he was about to say would not offend he
r. He spoke with some care, avoiding the language of the city streets which had spawned him, and his manner was deferential as he said he had heard about her coming marriage and understood how deeply shocked she must be.

  “But I’m a businessman, Mrs. Ransom,” he said. “If Mr. Lambert had lived another day or two we could have made a deal that would have been profitable for both of us. I’d still like to make that deal.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “You knew about the diamonds? You knew he was going to sell them?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  Hudson hesitated, as though he found the going more difficult than he had expected. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He readjusted the dark glasses.

  “What I mean is,” he said finally, “I want those diamonds. I’m ready to pay cash.”

  For a moment then she stared at him, a new narrowness growing in her eyes. She looked at Barry. When she looked back at Hudson her mobile mouth was grim.

  “Then why are you here?” she demanded, her voice edged with suspicion. “Do you think I stole them?”

  “No,” Hudson said hurriedly, gesturing with one hand. “I don’t know who stole them. If I did I’d go direct to the proper person. But somebody did steal them, Mrs. Ransom…. The field is sort of narrow, ain’t it?” he added, his grammar slipping.

  “Who’ve we got?” He began to tick names off on his fingers as he worked his gum. “Including all possibilities, we’ve got Dawson here, and me, and you, and the son, Ian, and Amanti, and that pilot guy, McBride.” He hesitated. “And maybe that colored guy, Albert—he knew where the combination was. Okay, I’m making my pitch. To you and everybody else. I want the word to get around, and if I have to I might pay some sort of bonus for the right kind of tip.”

  He stood up, as though aware that there was little more that he could add.

  “To you maybe this murder is a very personal thing, and I don’t blame you for getting sore. But me, I only just met Lambert. I didn’t kill him and don’t know who did. That’s a job for the cops. For myself, I’m willing to do business, and if you ever want to talk you can find me at the Windsor. It’ll be confidential. Dawson here”—he glanced at Barry—“thinks I’m nuts and is only along this morning for the ride.”