The 31st Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Sam Merwin Jr

  A moment later Correll had got him to his feet, handcuffed him and led him from the suite with a caution that he’d be back for affidavits later. Anne, who had stood paralyzed during the affray, suddenly ran to Cam, who looked surprised to find himself holding his late employer’s daughter in his arms.

  “But you can’t, Anne,” he said before she pulled his head down and kissed him. “I haven’t any dough. Heck, I haven’t even got a job.”

  The rest was silence, save for Amy’s chuckle as she recalled the razor blade deal she had made and thought of the deal she was about to make with the young man’s invention. She turned to Yvonne, who was refilling her glass at the barette.

  “Bring that bottle of gin over, will you dearie?” the fat woman asked. “This one seems to be dead.”

  DEATH FROM A FAMILY TREE (Bonus Mystery Story)

  Originally published in Popular Detective, May, 1948.

  Wilfred I. Hull sat in the outer office and reminded himself sternly that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a certified public accountant, he visited many more impressive places almost daily without a qualm. But here on his own business, he could not escape the same nervousness that had assailed him on his first job-seeking interview.

  Seeking reassurance, he stared at Mr. Orrin S. Gorman’s secretary, who sat alongside her monitor board, serenely typing away. The triangular black-and-gold name plate on the desk in front of her proclaimed her a Miss Carroll.

  But the very perfection of her pert profile—from carefully curled carrot top to twenty-four inch waist, where the desk abruptly shut off the view—was somehow alarming. As if aware of his regard, she paused in her labors to lift her head and bestow upon Wilfred a quick little smile that revealed a dimple and dazzling, even, white teeth.

  “You say you haven’t received Mr. Gorman’s letter, Mr. Hull?” she inquired politely.

  “N-not yet, Miss Carroll,” Wilfred stammered, wondering what you had to do or be to converse easily and assuredly with such a piquant goddess. “You know—the mails. If Mr. Gorman is too busy, I’ll…but I did want to know.”

  “Of course you do,” said Miss Carroll soothingly. “Mr. Gorman is busy on a very important case this morning, but I think perhaps he can work you in.”

  “Th-thank you very much—I shan’t take long,” said Wilfred. Overwhelmed by Miss CarrolI’s kindness, he shifted his gaze to survey the other two men in the outer office.

  One of them, the younger, was casually, even sloppily dressed, but he wore his tweed jacket and baggy flannel slacks with an easy lack of self consciousness. He had a craggy homely-handsome face and his voice was very deep.

  “If Weaver puts over his pitch before we get a chance with ours—what then?” he asked.

  “Gorman didn’t get his reputation as a genealogist by listening to only one side of a problem,” said the older man who sat beside him on the office sofa. “Relax, Hollingsworth.”

  He was a well-combed, gray-haired, pink-faced older man, addicted to costly looking dark coat, striped trousers and white-piped waistcoat. His left hand rested on a new looking pigskin brief case, which he had firmly refused to let go of since his entry several minutes earlier.

  “I wish he’d see us all at once,” said the other man.

  “Leave it to Gorman,” the gray-haired man advised. He stood up, walked to Miss Carroll’s desk and informed her unblushingly that he wanted to wash his hands. She gave him the key to the washroom and he departed, carrying his brief case. His companion lighted a cigarette and sat back on the sofa.

  The door to the inner office opened then and out stepped a tall, sleekly-tailored, dark-haired young man who wore his natty clothes like a motion picture leading man. He smiled smugly at the young man on the sofa and lifted a hand in salute.

  “Good luck, cousin mine,” he said, ran a thumb and forefinger across his upper lip. “Gorman will see you now.” He winked at Miss Carroll and walked on out into the hall.

  Hollingsworth got up quickly and glared angrily at the closed outer door. His lips moved briefly in silent profanity. Then he punched a fist into his open palm and swung hastily through the door to the inner office and disappeared as it swung shut behind him.

  Alone with the terrifyingly beautiful Miss Carroll, Wilfred cleared his throat. He was working himself up to a conversational gambit when the sharp unmistakable sound of a shot fired somewhere nearby rang out.

  “Backfire?” said Wilfred hopefully. Miss Carroll, jumping up from behind her desk, hurled him a look of scorn.

  “Twenty-two stories up?” she said. “Come on!”

  They entered Gorman’s office together.

  There Hollingsworth stood staring stupidly at a towel on the carpet, a towel whose white midsection had been disfigured by a jagged hole surrounded by an ugly brown patch of burned cloth. Perhaps six inches from it lay a gleaming nickel-plated revolver. Hollingsworth stared at it like a man hypnotized.

  It was Miss Carroll who crossed to a half-open closet door. Wilfred followed her cautiously and wished he hadn’t. Mr. Gorman was lying half in and half out of the closet, which contained a lavatory and water cooler. No man could be alive with the hole he had in his head.

  “The gun came through the door,” said Hollingsworth with apparent irrelevance until Wilfred saw, through the haze that had formed in front of his eyes, that the betweeded young man was nodding toward another door to the corridor.

  “But it couldn’t have,” said Miss Carroll earnestly. “That door is always kept locked.”

  “Well, it did,” said Hollingsworth. He took a quick step toward it, but Miss Carroll got in front of him.

  “Don’t touch it!” she said. “Maybe fingerprints…”

  The gray-haired man with the white-piped waistcoat and brief case came through from the reception room, took one look at the proceedings and knelt by the corpse.

  “Gorman’s dead,” he said, verifying the obvious. “Miss Carroll, call the police—the Homicide Bureau.” He rose, dusted off his hands, picked up his brief case and herded them all back into the outer office.

  “Did you kill him, Tom?” he asked Hollingsworth. Then he added, “No—don’t answer that here. Witnesses.”

  “Well, I didn’t!” snapped young Hollingsworth. “I don’t understand it. When I went in there I only—”

  “Save it for the police,” said the older man. “Remember, I’m your lawyer.” He turned to fix first Wilfred, then Miss Carroll, with a fishy stare. “And remember, you two are both witnesses to all that has happened.”

  “But we didn’t see anything,” said Wilfred. “All we heard was the sound of the shot.”

  “How do you know what you saw or didn’t see?” said the attorney sternly. Uncomfortable silence ensued until the whine of sirens in the street below announced the police.

  * * * *

  Out of the apparent confusion of Homicide in action, order was not slow in appearing. A stocky, cigar-smoking officer in plain clothes, Lieutenant Venner by name, took over the questioning as soon as Photography had done its stuff and the Medical Examiner’s boys got to work.

  “What sort of an outfit is this?” he asked Miss Carroll. “Gen-genealogy is a new racket to me.”

  “Genealogy,” explained Miss Carroll with the air of one who has had to do it often, “is the determination of the ancestry of an individual or a family.” She went on to explain how, frequently, it was essential to lawyers seeking to prove the rights of legatee clients in estate litigations. She then cited a case in hand.

  “Mr. Hollingsworth here and Mr. Leffords, his lawyer,”—with a nod toward the gray-haired gentleman—“are trying to prove Mr. Hollingsworth’s right to a share in the Lucius Weaver estate. It’s all very complicated.”

  “Weaver left just before the shot,” said Mr. Hollingsworth, thereby earning himself a frown from his attorney.

  “H
e won’t get far if he’s mixed up in this,” said Lieutenant Venner. “Hey—but if Weaver’s alive, how come you’re trying to get a share of his estate?”

  “It’s Mr. Lucius Weaver who is dead,” said Miss Carroll brightly. “This was his nephew, Mr. Morgan Weaver.”

  “He’s not his nephew until he proves it in court,” said Mr. Leffords hotly. “We claim he is only a nephew by marriage through a second cousin once removed who had the same name. My client is a true nephew through his mother.”

  Lieutenant Venner simply stood there and looked at Leffords. The lawyer subsided, white piping and all.

  “How much dough is in the estate?” Venner asked.

  “Allowing for taxes and—litigation costs and other expenses, it should be probated for upwards of a half million dollars,” said Mr. Leffords pompously.

  “That ain’t sisal,” said the detective. He then inquired as to where he could get hold of the missing Morgan Weaver and was given his address by the attorney.

  “How come there’s any dispute about it if your boy here is the rightful heir?” Venner asked.

  “There isn’t,” said the lawyer testily. “Mr. Weaver was attempting to prove a collateral relationship which, combined with his tie by marriage, might entitle him to a share of the estate. He and my client tentatively agreed to let Mr. Gorman issue an opinion out of court.”

  “I get it,” said Venner. “In English, this meeting here was a showdown of sorts—right?”

  “In the vernacular—yes,” replied the attorney.

  He questioned both Hollingsworth and Leffords about the murder. Both men denied ownership of the revolver, both denied having killed Gorman. Then Morgan Weaver, who had been found, was brought in and put through the same ritual. Then and only then did the detective turn on Wilfred.

  “And now, Mr.—er—Hull, what were you doing here?”

  “I’ve—I’ve been having an ancestor of mine looked up to see if he was my ancestor,” said Wilfred inanely. “That is, I wanted to see if he was, and Mr. Gorman promised to let me know yesterday. But the letter he mailed me didn’t come and since my office is nearby, I thought—”

  “Who was this ancestor?” Venner asked. “Did he have anything to do with this Weaver estate business?”

  “It’s most unlikely,” said Wilfred earnestly. “You see, my middle name is Isaac and it occurred to me that Captain Isaac Hull, who commanded the Constitution when she beat the Guerriere in the War of Eighteen-Twelve, might have been one of my forefathers. Mr. Gorman was very interested. He seemed to think there was a chance.”

  Wilfred knew it sounded silly. His statement failed utterly to express the longing of a lonely, totally undistinguished person for even a vicarious claim to fame. But something of his earnestness must have come through, for the lieutenant didn’t rub him about it.

  “What do you do for a living, Hull?” he asked instead.

  * * * *

  Wilfred told him about being an accountant. The detective then asked him to give an account of what he had seen since entering the office some ninety minutes earlier.

  After a couple of stammering false starts, Wilfred forgot his shyness in his desire to be of service, forgot even that he had an audience. With an unsuspected gift for mimicry, he acted out everything he could remember, which was considerable, thanks to his trained mathematical mind.

  He showed how Leffords and Hollingsworth had been sitting, how the lawyer had left with his brief case, how Weaver had appeared from the inner office, stroking his upper lip and smiling smugly at his rival, how the shot had sounded a moment later, how he’d hoped it was a backfire.

  It was far from a brief performance and, when he had finished Hollingsworth had been carted off to the tombs and dusk had fallen outside. Somehow Wilfred found himself walking-through the lobby of the building with Miss Carroll trotting along at his side. Her curly red hair, he saw with some surprise, came barely above the level of his shoulder. Somehow, he had thought her to be taller.

  “Can—can I take you anywhere?” he inquired with a blush at his own temerity when she showed no signs of taking leave of him. She gave him a pleased smile, as if he were a very young puppy who had just done something unexpectedly bright.

  “Why, yes,” said the red-head. “I’m hungry.”

  Somehow he found himself sitting across a table from her, his fingers fumbling with the stem of an unaccustomed cocktail glass. Across snowy napery, Miss Carroll looked like something he had heretofore met only in the movies.

  “You can call me Leonie,” she said, fishing with graceful determination for the olive in the bottom of her glass. “Which of them do you pick as your killer?”

  “Do you think one of them did it?” said Wilfred, horrified. “I mean, they all seemed so—so gentlemanly.”

  “You’d be surprised at what passes for a gentleman these days—or at the passes some gentlemen make,” said Leonie Carroll. “My money’s on old Leffords, the lawyer. He had the best chance with that hall door. These locks aren’t foolproof by any means. Poor Mr. Gorman. If he hadn’t kept everything locked in his own head, we might know who did it.”

  They argued it out over dinner and then Wilfred took Leonie home in a cab. All the way uptown he was very conscious of the warmth and fragrance of her on the back seat beside him. But he didn’t know what to do about it, so soon after a murder. So he compromised by merely sitting.

  On the way back to Greenwich Village, where Wilfred lived in a one-room-bath-and-kitchenette apartment, the driver spoke up as they were stopped by a traffic signal.

  “Hey, bub,” he said. “Has that babe got a husband?”

  “Goodness, no. I mean—not that I know of. Why?”

  “I think somebody’s tailing us,” said thejehu.

  “It seems highly unlikely,” said Wilfred as they got under way again. But all the same he peered out the rear window and noted the ominous twin headlights that stayed a block or so behind them no matter how they turned.

  “What’d I tell you, bub?” said the driver as they went through Madison Square. “Oh—oh! Here he comes!”

  Half expecting to hear the sudden rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire, Wilfred cowered low in the seat as their pursuer, a big gray car with a multitude of chromium fittings, swept past them and went serenely on its way. Wilfred discovered that he was sweating and mopped his brow.

  “Guess I’m a little nervous,” he said. “Who ain’t?” the driver replied philosophically. They went on down to the Village without further incident and Wilfred paid him off in front of his apartment house.

  He stood on the curb for a moment as he put his wallet back in his pocket and turned to enter the building. It was then that he heard the hum of a racing automobile motor. Instinctively he looked around—to see the headlights of a swiftly moving car as it mounted the sidewalk and came leaping at him like some infernal nightmare chariot.

  Wilfred screamed. At least, afterward, he decided he must have screamed, for his mouth was still open when he regained the power of conscious thought. He was lying flat on the sidewalk up against the wall of the building, staring at a pair of tail lights as they disappeared around the corner. Somehow he had been able to get out of the way.

  He lay there for a moment, noticing that his fingernails felt raw and scraped from trying to dig into the concrete. Then, slowly and a little unsteadily, he got to his feet and automatically began dusting himself off.

  “Crazy drunken fool!” he told himself. But he didn’t convince himself. And the car that had so nearly wiped him off the face of the earth had been a big gray car. He had caught a brief impression of flashing chromium fittings as it swept past him.

  Somehow he made the self operating elevator work and got up to his apartment. He was trembling like a leaf as he sank into the lone armchair his place boasted.

  When he felt up to rising again, he walked to
the telephone. The more he thought about it, the less it seemed like the vagary of a drunken driver. Lieutenant Venner ought to be told about it. He, Wilfred, should demand protection. He was not entirely unacquainted with what had happened more than once to witnesses in a murder case.

  The only trouble was that he hadn’t witnessed the murder. He had only heard the shot go off. Lieutenant Venner would probably think he was merely suffering from the vapors. Wilfred looked at his scraped fingertips. No, it had been real enough, but he was safe in his own apartment.

  He withdrew his hand from the telephone—after all, a descendant of Captain Isaac Hull of the Constitution should be able to face his troubles alone. After fixing the chain on the front door, he undressed and went to bed.

  Visions of the body of poor Mr. Gorman were succeeded by those of a racing gray car and a lovely red head in quick succession and he began to fear a wakeful night. But just as he was about to turn on the light and read, he was awakened by the ringing of the telephone and opened his eyes to discover that the sun was shining once more.

  “Venner,” said a familiar voice. “I want to see you in Gorman’s office in an hour. Can you make it?”

  “I’ll be there,” said Wilfred gamely. He was glad now that he hadn’t reported his near misadventure of the night before. Somehow it didn’t seem so deadly in daylight.

  But when he reached the office, Leonie was there and, when he saw her, he had to tell her about it. Her light brown eyes widened as she listened to his recital. Unlike himself, she was unwilling to dismiss the episode lightly.

  “Lieutenant Venner!” she said, calling him from a conference with Hollingsworth and Leffords at the other end of the room. “Someone tried to kill Mr. Hull last night.”

  “What’s this?” roared the detective. His eyes, cold and blue, narrowed as she recited Wilfred’s story.

  “Is this true?” he asked Wilfred. When Wilfred nodded, Venner exploded. “Why in the devil didn’t you let me know when it happened? If I thought you had any dangerous knowledge, I’d have put a man on you.”