The Man with the Lumpy Nose

by Lawrence Lariar

  “Two.”

  McElmore motioned to two heavy policemen and they moved down the street.

  At the studio door Bull knocked three times. “He’s in there. This place has been watched since noon.”

  “Open up!” barked McElmore, “or we’ll break down the door!”

  There was no answer.

  Four hundred and thirty-two pounds of law and order hit the door in a grunting lunge. The old door cracked and burst open and they were in the studio. Bull switched on the lights. There was a startled cry from the corner near the easel.

  It was Raleigh Peters. He rose shakily and struggled for speech. But his tongue was dry with horror. He took a few steps toward McElmore, whispered a fragile word and then collapsed in a frightened heap at their feet.

  One of the policemen ran to the big north window and stared into the yard. There were shouts from below. Then a shot.

  “He’s up on the roof!” said the cop. “They’ve got him up on the roof!”

  Another shot. Then a fainter crack from directly above the studio.

  “He’s firing back, Chief. You want me to go up after him?”

  “Stand where you are!” McElmore ran into the hall. “If he comes down at all, he’ll have to come this way. Give the boys in the yard a chance, Sullivan. I’ve got Dinniger back there—he’s the best shot in the force.”

  Homer Bull was staring down at the crumpled figure of Raleigh Peters. He shook his head slowly. “This is a new angle, Dick. This is a small piece of the puzzle that completely escaped me.”

  The gunfire had ceased for the moment. In the sudden silence the sound of feet on the tar roof above filtered down to them. McElmore followed the sound with his eyes. “He’s trying to cross to the next roof, Homer. I’m going up and take a crack at him.” And he sprinted nimbly up the old stairs.

  Again a gun barked, but this time the answering crack echoed down through the narrow hallway. Then came an ear shattering crash as the skylight smashed into a thousand pieces and a figure hurtled down into the studio. Sullivan advanced, pulling at his holster. But the figure didn’t move after it hit the floor. It lay face down on the small rug before the easel and a pool of blood grew around its head.

  “The Chief got him—but good!” grinned Sullivan.

  The other cop joined him to squint down at the corpse. He tilted his cap back on his head and scratched diligently at his bald pate. “You mean to tell me this lily was the guy who did all them murders? The guy looks like one of them artist fellers.”

  “He was an artist—in murder,” said Bull. “The first cartoonist murderer in history.”

  McElmore burst into the room. “He dead? I nabbed him on the wing—he was trying for the next roof just like I said.” He leaned over the body and then drew back in surprise. “I’ll be damned—it’s hard to believe this guy was a killer, Homer.”

  “I know, I know,” said Dumbo. “You’re going to tell us he looks like a sissy—like one of them artist fellows?”

  “Yeah,” muttered McElmore. “He does, doesn’t he?”

  “He does indeed,” said Bull. “Matter of fact, he was almost as good a murderer as he was a cartoonist. A good cartoonist doesn’t fuss much with background detail—a good murderer does. Winters, an intelligent murderer, should have known the ingrown manifestations of habits that stem from the subconscious. The hand that ties the shoelace takes no orders from the brain, McElmore.”

  “Is that so? And what does that mean, exactly?”

  “You would have to have a cartoonist’s point of view to understand. You’d have to know, for instance, that a sudden dip into high art fakery will not erase the strong and solid tricks of drawing by rote. Lincoln Winters should have known that, though he copied Rowlandson, he couldn’t possibly draw an original Rowlandson without including a few of the modern tricks of drawing that dripped off his pen unthinkingly. Haven’t you ever analyzed comic strip art, McElmore?”

  “I stopped when Mutt and Jeff went out of style.”

  “Too bad. But I can bring it home to you with a simple illustration. You cross your knees? Of course. Then, which knee is on top?”

  McElmore closed his eyes to cross his knees in his brain’s eye. “The right.”

  “You couldn’t be sure for a moment, could you? That’s what I’m getting at when I tell you that Winters couldn’t help drawing by rote. For years he drew all his shoes the same way—all his fingers, his head shapes. How could he prevent habit from creeping into a fake Rowlandson drawing when all these things were really out of his control? We have the answer in the foolish drawing he did for the little Fascist journal. He couldn’t hide himself in the dust of Rowlandson’s technique—nor could any other cartoonist with so rich a background in the comic business.”

  When Dumbo Waddell entered The Quill, he waved a grey slip of paper in his right hand and smiled almost the width of his face.

  “You got the raise?” smiled Bull.

  “Plus a shot in the arm, from the way he’s showing his teeth,” said MacAndrews

  “Elegant deduction.” Dumbo crooked a finger at the waiter. “Give the boys what they want. I got a lot more than the lousy raise, Homer.”

  “Splitting the profits with the publisher?”

  “Nuts. Look, the old man gave me green cabbage and put me on a paying basis starting from now. Then I pulled a gag. I asked him to let me sell this yarn to the Sunday screamers—you know, a feature story with blood and all. He was feeling ripe as a rutabaga. He not only bought the yarn for the Sundays but guaranteed me a wad of the syndication dough. This is my party, chums—drink your fuzzy heads off!”

  McElmore grinned into his suds. “You going to write this yarn, eh?” He nudged Homer tenderly. “Maybe I ought to let your assistant explain it all to me, Homer. You think he can do it?”

  “He’s a great hand at fiction.”

  “He must be,” said MacAndrews. “I will gladly pay him the price of five hundred Sunday supplements to hear the last chapter of the mystery as the great Waddell figured it.”

  Dumbo protested “You make me blush, gents. I am slowly suffering under my skin. I don’t know beans about this thing, honest. I am like the kid at the circus—I saw a lot of things happen, sure—but I only saw them with my eyes. This feebly feathered conk never even attempted to plumb the reasons for what went on. For my money I was in the dark all the way from Earl Chance’s office to the studio of our old friend Lincoln Winters. I had ideas, of course, even as early as the hour after Chance’s murder.”

  “Yeah,” said McElmore. “Like me. I had ideas, too. It was the business of Chance’s penthouse that got me screwy. I couldn’t figure why his apartment was given the heat.” He turned to Homer Bull.

  The little fat man toyed with his glass. “You’ve got to go back beyond the incident in Chance’s penthouse, Dick. You’ve got to go back before the meeting of The Comic Arts Club for the real start of this case.”

  “You mean all the Nazi stuff?”

  Bull nodded. “We can’t possibly plumb the background of all the Nazi plottings behind this affair. We should begin from the cartoonist angle, if Waddell ever hopes to make a story of the thing. The threads of the case were woven in a fine pattern, but the design was confusing—as confusing as Lincoln Winters meant it to be.”

  “Then he was the brains?”

  “The supreme command. But let’s not start with him, McElmore. We had, in the first place, Earl Chance—an editor bitterly hated by almost everybody who knew him. This group of haters included most of the magazine cartoonists, a clan of introverts who might hate most diligently but who would never do physical violence unless in self-defense, I’m sure.”

  “Including Bragiotto?” asked McElmore. “I thought he was a hothead?”

  Raleigh Peters scowled an adolescent scowl. “Dino was a great guy.”

  “Of co
urse he was, and much too sensible for murder. Do we get an encore on the drinks, Dumbo? Good.” Homer called the waiter. “You can’t label a man murderous because he once brawled over a girl.”

  “I was only asking,” murmured the inspector.

  “A good question, McElmore. But, to get back to Chance. The murdered man himself handed us our first real clue. He called the police to tell them that his life had been threatened. The police were at that moment much concerned with a mysterious tenement fire downtown. That tenement held the hidden press that printed the Fascist booklets. If we had had all the facts at the time Chance phoned in his fears we would have known that Earl Chance was the man who started that fire. He knew that he had been seen and was in fair danger of being murdered for his crime against the Third Reich.”

  “Chance an arsonist?”

  “Think of him as a frightened Fascist first and the arson won’t be too shocking. Think of him as an arrogant and secret Fascist. He never dreamed his murderer would strike so soon. It was his self-confidence that killed him, really. He thought that Winters was at heart only another cartoonist—a fellow who would steam in his wrath for a long time before striking. It was here that he made his fatal mistake. Lincoln Winters was the coldest murderer in the world—and for a good reason. Winters had only to order murder—he was the index finger, you might say. Our friend Lumpy Nose did the killing for him.

  “We can reconstruct the relationship between Chance and Winters very simply,” Bull went on. “It’s a cozy picture, up to a certain point. Both of these men were Nazis. They decided to collaborate on a new propaganda journal. Winters must have been happy at that point, for he knew that the famous editor must remain one of his stooges from that day on. But Winters didn’t reckon with the famous Chance personality. The editor was not a man to be bullied. Chance must have balked when he discovered that wholesale butchery was going on in the name of the Fatherland. He probably told Winters that he was finished and then insisted that his writings be returned to him—unpublished. When Winters refused to return the manuscripts, Chance went down to the tenement and set fire to the print shop.”

  Bull held a hand up to silence McElmore. “Don’t interrupt yet, Dick. The continuity from this point on is rather important to Dumbo’s story.

  “We now have this picture of Earl Chance—an enraged editor who has openly defied a man who might possibly do him physical violence. But we must take into account the character of our man Chance. His contempt for Winters was natural. His arrogance and cockiness prompted the visit to The Comic Arts Club meeting despite the fact that he knew Winters would be there. He felt that he could handle Winters until the police came to visit him at his apartment later in the evening. At the same time, he had already decided to dismiss Winters from the magazine and was on the way toward hiring Marcia Prentiss to take his place with a comic feature. This was the reason for Marcia’s visit to Chance’s office on the night of the murder. He was about to give her a rush order on a new cartoon panel which would take the place of Winters’ regular drawing.”

  “So Winters calls in his pal with the nose and tells him how and where he can bump off the editor,” said McElmore. “Fine. But how about this little guy who was stabbed downstairs?”

  “Smith? Before we consider Smith’s murder, we should think a bit about our big man with the lumpy nose, Dick. Let’s look at the murder from his point of view.”

  Dumbo shuddered. “That ape must have been some sort of maniac. No normal human being could have been so cold-blooded about murder.”

  “Nazis aren’t normal human beings,” suggested Hank. “To them all killing is a daily chore, to be followed by a beer and a good night’s rest.”

  McElmore snorted. “He got his rest, all right. I wonder if he got a beer beforehand? And talking about beer, how about another mug for this end of the table, Waddell?”

  Waddell waved a hand at the bar and a new beaker appeared.

  Homer said, “Our man with the lumpy nose entered the building late in the day and remained hidden in a washroom, probably. He waited until the building was empty before summoning the night man to the third floor. He was operating on schedule, you see. He had been given all instructions by Winters, who knew exactly when Chance reached his office on Thursday evenings. The murder of Chance was a snap for the brute. But we must allow him at least a few normal reflexes after he committed the crime. It’s quite likely that he ran down the stairs and almost knocked over Smith, who was on his way up to Chance’s office. In the sudden fresh excitement, Lumpy Nose acted quickly. He killed Smith because he was a perfect witness. He didn’t know it at the time, but he killed one of his Nazi pals on that stairway.”

  “Smith was in on the murder ring?”

  “No—Smith was practicing simple blackmail. The indications are he was collecting steady revenue from Chance. He might have seen Chance at a few higher council meetings and decided to milk a brother Nazi in the approved Schicklgruber manner. His payments were irregular, but sizable.”

  “And this dame up in the Bronx—who took her away?”

  “Winters ordered her away. It must have occurred to the man with the lumpy nose that he had murdered an ally. He reported this murder to Winters and our cartoonist friend immediately saw the possibilities for the police in this clue. He sent Brower to the Bronx. Brower shipped Smith’s lady friend to California at once. Winters realized, of course, that many government men were exploring the depths of the Bunds in this country. He wanted to hide all Nazi trails in Chance’s murder. That was why he sent No Nose Frenchy and Lumpy Nose to Chance’s penthouse.

  “This, again, is a reflection of Winters’ cunning. He ordered his henchmen to destroy all evidences of Chance’s Nazi activities. There were very few traces of that sort of thing in Chance’s apartment. But Lincoln Winters knew that Chance might have had carbons of his recent writings and it was important to erase completely the tie between the editor and the little journal with the phony Rowlandson in it. In this way, again, he would cover all traces of political murder and attempt to divert the police to other sources of motive. His prime purpose was to brand another man the killer, you see. He knew that if he could confuse us we would suspect only the obvious and accept Dino Bragiotto’s death or disappearance as an admission of guilt.” He winked slyly at McElmore “It almost worked, didn’t it, Dick?”

  “For my money it did work. But I still don’t see why Winters knocked off his two pals in the racket. I can understand him getting rid of Bragiotto, all right—a good disappearance always looks guilty as hell after a murder. But did he have to kill Lumpy Nose and No Nose Frenchy?”

  “The Nazi ideology was founded on blackmail, Dick. Winters feared Chance after he broke away. Don’t you think it possible that he began to fear the two men who had killed so often for him? Wiping the slate clean of henchmen is a common practice in Nazi Germany—the hot blood purges are all examples of the same philosophy. There comes a time, in Nazi political life, when your best friends become your future enemies. Winters thought the moment had come for the liquidation of the two men who were closest to him. Having made up his mind, he moved fast, for by taking care of his pals and Dino on the same night he was completing a master stroke of criminal logic—he was wiping away his background of murder with one last gesture.”

  “So he instructed Frenchy to rub out Lumpy?” Dumbo looked up from his pad with a sly grin: “Or am I guessing wrong again?”

  “Stet,” said Homer. “On Ninety-Fourth Street, Frenchy shot the knife expert, then followed Winters out to Long Island. There Winters shot the Frenchman and locked his body in the luggage carrier. He drove the murder car over the pier into Great South Bay where he must have known a deep channel lay. Here we were very lucky. The deep hole that Winters selected had been filled by the WPA a few years ago, otherwise that sedan might have been rooted in the muck until the end of time.”

  The waiter brought food. Bull signale
d an intermission by attacking his meal. Dumbo lifted his pencil again when the coffee came. “Winters must have been a clever nut, all right. I can’t see, though, how he knew his goose was cooked when you raided his studio. He was on the move when you got him. How did he know you were that close to his tail?”

  “Brower explained that when we caught him in the phone booth,” murmured McElmore. “The Nazi doorman was wise to us tailing him.”

  “Brower must have frightened him when he made that phone call from the drugstore. You must remember, though, that Winters’ point of view changed as soon as Chance burned the hidden press. From that moment on Chance might be the man to spill, so he had Chance murdered. He became wary. He set about murdering his assistants. He wanted his tracks covered completely. But he was plagued by too many henchmen—the secret Fascist movement in the New York area was loaded with willing little helpers. All this can be disconcerting, even to a man with a Nazi soul.”

  Bull winked broadly at Raleigh Peters, who blushed into his coffee. The fat man put an arm on the boy’s shoulder. “Raleigh’s visit came at the split second of usefulness to us. This kid will go places in the cartooning world. He’s a keen student of style. He collected so much of Winters’ handiwork that he was able to detect his maestro’s fine hand in the Rowlandson drawing we found in that pamphlet. Show the inspector that drawing, Raleigh, and explain how you were able to credit it to Winters in a few moments while it took me hours of research at the library.”

  Raleigh held aloft the Rowlandson drawing, then thumbed nervously through a sheaf of Winters’ reproductions.

  “I guess it came natural to me, the idea that Winters did this job,” he said. “You have to take a look at lots of his stuff to see what I mean. For instance, look at the way he does all his shoes in his regular stuff for the magazines. He always does ’em the same way. If you take a good look at the Rowlandson thing you’ll see that he put the same kind of shoes on an old-fashioned figure that he always puts in his up-to-the-minute drawings. Also, the way he does hands. Now this hand here in the Rowlandson reminded me of Winters right away. Isn’t that it, Mr. Bull?”