The Man with the Lumpy Nose

by Lawrence Lariar

  Burtis swallowed his humiliation. “And who might Homer Bull be?”

  “Who might Homer Bull be?” Cassidy mimicked his assistant. “Homer Bull might be Santy Claus, but he ain’t. He happens to be a bigshot writer in the first place. You ever heard of Dr. Ohm?”

  “The comic strip?” Burtis was an avid reader of the pen and ink classics. “Sure, I follow him in The Star every day.”

  “Of course you do,” sneered Cassidy. “As who doesn’t? Well, that little gent writes the stuff, sec? He makes it all up out of his own head, like a story in a magazine, understand?”

  “Yeah,” said Burtis, who didn’t understand at all. In his mind’s eye all comic strips were invented by their artists. “The guy must be smart.”

  “Like a fox. He’s terrific, that Homer Bull is. You remember the Giggles Shemple case, don’t you? Well, that little fat boy there in the chief’s office broke the Shemple case wide open. McElmore would be back in Flatbush if he didn’t run into this guy Bull. Happened in a bar one day when McElmore was going nuts from worry about losing his job. The mayor was at his neck about Shemple. ‘Find Shemple,’ says the mayor. ‘And find him quick, or back you go to Brooklyn!’ So what does McElmore do? He goes nuts, is all. He winds up at The Eight Ball Bar, telling his troubles to a bottle of Scotch. Homer Bull happens to overhear him and that’s how the two of ’em get together.” Cassidy patted the cigar and tucked it away. “Great little guy, Homer Bull.”

  Inspector McElmore opened the door. “Bull get here yet, Cassidy? Good.” He strode into his office and slapped Homer on the back. “Glad to see you, Homer. You’re looking well. Getting fat around the tail again, though.” He sat down heavily and reached for a brown box of cigars with an automatic gesture. Homer took one, bit it, spat it and lit it.

  McElmore eyed him with a glassy eye. “I suppose you’re sitting there thinking to yourself that McElmore is going nuts again, hah?”

  “I’m not thinking,” said Bull. “I’m smoking.”

  “You came over awful fast.”

  “I’m always fast.”

  “What’s the matter, you tired of writing your damnfool comic strip again?”

  Homer puffed and closed his eyes. “I’m still smoking, Dick. You’re smoking and stalling.”

  McElmore laughed a bit, but his heart wasn’t in it. Homer Bull had a habit of striking deep to the truth. Homer had always been that way. Six months ago the little comic strip continuity writer stepped into The Eight Ball Bar, downed six or seven straight ryes and attacked the Giggles Shemple mystery. A week later it was solved.

  You couldn’t fool Bull. McElmore knew. Not with pretty speeches and side-slipping statements.

  “I’m not exactly stalling, Homer. Honest. There’s really nothing new down here, nothing remarkable, and that’s the hell of it.”

  “Your cigars have improved,” said Bull. “But your dialogue still stinks.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure, sure I do. You called me down here to give me a cigar.”

  McElmore half smiled. “Listen, if I sound mixed up about things, it’s only because I am mixed up. Almost everything we’ve had down here for the last few months has been routine.” He leaned over the desk and tapped a long finger on the ashtray, which was his way of telegraphing an important statement. “That’s the trouble with it—all routine.”

  “And that bothers you? The city is giving you an unscheduled vacation, Dick. You should sit back in your little den, smoke your five-cent cigars and dream all day of Irish pixies.”

  “Should I?” McElmore growled. “It’s bothering the pants off me.”

  “Amazing.” Bull’s left eye opened, then closed again, slowly. A cheap little clock bonged six tin chimes from the corner filing cabinet. Outside, the voice of Cassidy at the desk mumbled into a telephone. Homer said, “You’re letting me in at the back door, Dick. Start at the beginning.”

  “Beginning? There’s no beginning I tell you. Everything is routine—and that’s what’s burning my onions. Did you ever try to understand routine murder?” He leaned his big frame over the desk and played with his fingers. “Here’s how it goes. A man is stabbed in the back over in Red Hook, near the water. Simple, isn’t it? Just a stevedore lush in a brawl, no?”

  Bull nodded in his sleep.

  “Another one is shot on the sidewalk—you know how those things run. Some second-rate gangster is rubbed out by competition. The man on the sidewalk is killed by some heel in a car, who shoots his lead and scrams before anybody in the neighborhood can get the number of his license plate. Routine, isn’t it?”

  “Routine,” said Homer Bull.

  “Sure, routine. Well, I got a belly full of these routine cases. They all look alike and figure alike, whether they’re murder, robbery, rape or arson.” McElmore fiddled with a sheaf of papers, thumbed them briskly, holding out three sheets. He waved these slowly in the air. “But these things are different, Homer. Here are three routine cases that smell to high heaven of something else. You take this first one, for instance. A man is shot leaving a drugstore. Somebody in a private car did the job, then beat it up a side street in Flatbush. A young girl leaving the drugstore saw the license plate, wrote it down and gave it to us.”

  “And you can’t find the car?”

  “You’re kidding. We found the car. It was stolen the same night and abandoned out near the airport after the shooting. Somebody hated our man on the sidewalk, borrowed the car, did the job, ditched the car and then went home to bed. Simple?”

  Bull’s cigar bobbed up and down.

  “Yeah,” sneered McElmore. “Simple as hell, except for the fact that the little guy on the sidewalk is Mr. Nobody. He is a typical John Doe, a clerk in the telephone company in Brooklyn. Mr. Average American, he is. Get it?”

  “Almost. You had several of these cases?”

  “Not several—three. All of ’em routine, or made up to smell that way.” He frowned down at another sheet. “This one is a tootsie. I’m called over to Queens about two weeks ago to take a look at this one. We get over into the cheap rent section of Flushing and walk up three flights to this apartment. I find a cute little dame, no older than twenty-five, stretched out on her bed with a knife wound in her chest and signs of a terrific struggle. The room is turned upside down. Another simple one, hah?”

  “Assaulted?”

  “You’re as dumb as I am, after all.” McElmore chuckled. “Makes me feel young again when I hear you say things like that in such a hurry. No, it wasn’t assault as you mean it. The coroner found no signs, no bruises. The little dame was simply surprised in her bedroom and stabbed—probably after she had fallen asleep. The furniture was carefully upset after the murder, chum, or else the people downstairs would certainly have heard the battle. You know how those flats are, one bedroom under the other from the roof to the cellar. No, Miss Jane Doe was deliberately killed, and without any motive. She was a music teacher. Taught piano in a fancy music school over on the Heights. No jealous boyfriend either. She was engaged to a fiddle player who works up at Radio City and was in the orchestra all that night.” He threw up his hands. “No motive, no enemies, no disappointed boyfriends. How can you figure a thing like that?”

  “Robbery?”

  McElmore shook his head violently. “Not a red dime missing, not a piece of jewelry taken from her handbag. We checked with a good friend of hers, and unless that friend is mistaken, the lady wasn’t robbed.”

  “Might have been a sex case.”

  “Sure. Long Island pervert follows dame home and takes his pleasure by stabbing her in the chest? Don’t make me laugh!”

  “You don’t know your Krafft-Ebing, Dick.”

  “I won’t argue with you.” McElmore squinted mournfully at the third sheet. “This is the last one, Homer—happened just three days ago. Man by the name of Bartlett, he was. When
this one came in I began to worry, because I didn’t like another knife murder so close to the last one. It means trouble for the office when two cases die that way by the knife. It means that some smart little reporter is going to make a stink about all this. You can just imagine the headlines when those sheets get the angle. We’ll be having another Jack the Ripper!”

  Homer Bull flipped his cigar stub across the room and made the cuspidor. “Mr. Bartlett was stabbed in bed?”

  “No, Mr. Bartlett was stabbed on the sidewalk over in Bay Ridge. He left his house bound for a movie. Next thing Mr. Bartlett knows, he is dead, stabbed several times through the heart and back. Cold-blooded massacre. The man didn’t die quickly enough for the murderer. He must have squirmed a bit on the sidewalk. So our menace rolls Mr. Bartlett over on his belly and jabs him in the back until he stops squirming. Nobody saw Mr. Bartlett get cut up. He was found by some kid about an hour afterwards.”

  “I get the idea, Dick.” Homer Bull reached for another cigar. “You’re worried about systematic murder? Murder Incorporated stuff?”

  “That’s it. And that isn’t it, exactly. I want to stop these murders before the papers get at ’em. I’ve got a suspicion these last two knife killings were done by the same man.” He ran his fingers through his hair, stared hard at a yellow sheet on the desk. “Then, there’s this thing. This business of finding one of our boys burned to a cinder downtown this afternoon. Cramer was one of our best boys down there. What he was doing in that place I’ll never be able to understand.”

  Bull took the yellow sheet. “Aren’t policemen supposed to enter burning buildings?”

  “Are you kidding? We don’t mind him entering. But standing in there to be burned to a crisp—that’s different.”

  “He entered that place for a reason. Your survey shows that the lower back room was being used for some kind of illegal printing since there’s no record of a print shop at that address. Seems to me it should be easy to discover why your man entered that place if we approach the business from the point of view of the cop.” Bull closed his eyes again. “Your man Cramer is pounding his beat. He sees smoke pouring out of the back alley of that tenement. What is his first impulse?”

  “Cramer was a good man. His first impulse would have been to get the firemen. Phone in a report.”

  “I doubt it. There was no phone in the hall of that tenement and Cramer must have been in plenty of those houses—he knew he couldn’t find a phone inside.”

  McElmore nodded slowly to his blotter.

  Bull said, “However, suppose Cramer saw somebody enter that building at almost the same time when he saw the smoke—then what?”

  “You mean that Cramer went into the building to nab somebody?”

  “Why not? Perhaps he thought he had an arsonist. We don’t know. We can assume, however, that Cramer could have left that building under his own steam if all things were normal when he got into that hall. All policemen are experienced firemen, aren’t they?”

  “More or less.”

  Homer Bull fanned himself with the yellow sheet. “You can follow only one line in this, McElmore. That line is the line of murder, or I miss my guess. If Cramer was the cop you say he was, he must have been slugged and slugged hard just after he arrived in that smoke-filled room. Whoever slugged him must have been desperate. The murderer knew that if Cramer remained alive there was a strong chance that the cop would identify him at some future date. One and one makes two.”

  McElmore blew his nose violently. “But why? What in hell were they printing in that dump to warrant a cop’s murder? We’ve had men examining that press all afternoon. They haven’t found a crumb of evidence that points to, let’s say, filthy pictures or counterfeit dollar bills. Just a simple little printing machine is all.”

  “Fascinating. Are your men checking the surrounding engraving shops? A thorough shakedown of the engravers may yield you a few clues.”

  “They’re working on it. Any other suggestions?”

  “Several. First, check thoroughly on Cramer. He may have been the best cop in New York and still have taken a few sly bucks in graft money. Next, check with all paper companies to determine the source of paper supply for this printing nest. Finally, check all the surrounding tenements for possible witnesses to the criminal’s escape.”

  “Now you’re insulting me, Bull,” McElmore grunted and thumbed through a mass of paper on his desk. “We’ve already questioned everybody in each neighboring house. I can’t find the report, but I remember that we had only one story that means something.” The big man leaned over his desk and pounded a fist into his palm. “A janitor in the house next door reports that he saw somebody running back through the alley when the place was thick with smoke.”

  “Ah. But he couldn’t give you an accurate description? Too much smoke?”

  “Not at all. He was on the first floor looking right at the guy. His description is swell. A big man, small head, hat pulled down over his eyes, seemed to run with a slight limp.”

  “Splendid. And his face?”

  “Couldn’t see his face. The man had his hat down over his eyes.” The chief of detectives sighed. “Only distinguishing highlight was the mug’s nose, according to our witness.”

  “The nose? That’s interesting. What was the man’s nose like?”

  “Just big. The witness reported a big nose. A lumpy nose.”

  Homer Bull stirred in his seat and finally stood. “Well, that’s something to work on, isn’t it, Dick? All you have to do is find a man with a small head and a big and lumpy nose. Let me hear from you when you get more facts on these items.”

  McElmore wanted him to stay. He was a lonely man in search of sympathy and advice. “Have dinner with me, Bull?”

  The little fat man looked at his watch. “Impossible tonight, Dick. I’ve got a meeting of The Comic Arts Club. Wouldn’t miss it for the best murder in town. If anything turns up you can get me at the Danton Hotel later. I’ll see you soon.”

  When the door closed, McElmore stared at the sheets, shook his head sadly, clicked off the desk light and walked into the night for a beer.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the corner of Forty-Fifth Street and Sixth Avenue Raleigh Peters, a young student of cartooning, met Dino Bragiotto and Marcia Prentiss. More exactly, Raleigh met Dino, for Marcia only waved to him and hurried away as he crossed the street toward them.

  He pumped Dino’s hand. “Gosh, Mr. Bragiotto, it’s swell meeting you again. That was Marcia Prentiss, wasn’t it? She’s just about the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Dino beamed. “You said it, sonny. That little lady will soon be Mrs. Bragiotto.”

  “Really? Well, say—congratulations!” Again he shook Dino’s hand. “It’s been a long time between visits, hasn’t it? Since I last saw you I’ve done lots of new stuff.” He patted a small portfolio under his arm. “Would you like to see some of it now?”

  Dino looked at his watch. “I’m sorry, Raleigh, but I’ve got an important date. Maybe some other time, eh?”

  Raleigh was crestfallen, but optimistic. “Sure. Could I—well, will you be at the meeting later? Maybe I can show ’em to you there?”

  “Good.” Dino edged away and flung up an arm to punctuate his goodbye.

  Raleigh felt better after that.

  Raleigh Peters had boarded the BMT subway at Beverly Road, a main artery in the Flatbush district of Brooklyn. On the train he had sketched his fellow travelers in black crayon on the back of his newspaper all the way up to Forty-Second Street. He did this because he had once read in a book that Denys Wortman (the creator of Metropolitan Movies) sketched this way all the time. All the art books, the instruction manuals and the mail order courses advised sketching, too.

  He was an eager youth, short and slim with a crest of untidy hair on his freckled brow. He dressed in the manner of a high school boy
, with brilliant bow ties and loose sweaters, and he smoked an insignificant pipe.

  After Dino’s abrupt farewell, Raleigh hurried on toward the Hotel Danton. There, in the lobby, he met another of his casual acquaintances among the professionals. He was approaching the desk when Tim Alfonte crossed his path.

  Raleigh ran up to Alfonte, pulled gently upon his sleeve and said, “Why, hello, Mr. Alfonte! Do you remember me? I’m the fresh kid who interrupted your chalk talk when you were lecturing the art classes at Erasmus.”

  Tim Alfonte, the Arrow-collar juvenile in the marts of cartoonery, pulled at his thin mustache, sucked his cigarette and let his answer drop slowly. “Sure. Hello, kid.”

  Raleigh guided his new-found hero skillfully to a couch. He talked endlessly in the naïve, open-jawed manner of high school artists.

  “It must be swell,” he said earnestly, “to feel that you’ve climbed to the top in the business. I guess everything comes pretty easy after you hit the top of the ladder, eh, Mr. Alfonte?”

  “Don’t be a sucker, kid—this is a tough racket. Tougher than selling insurance.”

  “You mean it’s hard even now to sell your work?”

  Alfonte allowed himself a measured suck at his cigarette. “Cartooning is the hardest stuff in the world to peddle. You can’t really sell it, see? You show a man a cartoon. Either he laughs at it or he makes a face. Well, suppose he makes a face? Think you can sell him the idea of laughing? Not a chance. Either the joke is funny or it stinks.”

  “But that’s only at the start, isn’t it? I mean—after a while you only draw funny stuff, don’t you?”

  “You draw what you think is funny. No man on earth can be right about laughs.”

  Raleigh swallowed and shook his head dubiously.

  “Yessir,” continued Alfonte, “it’s a tough grind all the way up, and when you get to the top, where in hell are you? Don’t think because most of these men you see here are dressed and well fed that it’s all peaches and cream.”

  “Oh, no,” said Raleigh in a tremulous voice. “I know how all artists suffer on the way up.”