“I’ll begin at the beginning. Marriage with Dick was hell on earth. There wasn’t enough money, and he blamed me. He had terribly morbid spells when he threatened to kill me and commit suicide. He got worse when Mr. Ullendorf began paying me attentions. He included Mr. Ullendorf in his threats, and I really thought he might carry them out.
“Then he conceived his mad plan for me to divorce him and marry Mr. Ullendorf—making me promise to force a divorce and a cash settlement from Mr. Ullendorf as soon after marrying him as possible. Then Dick planned to remarry me and that we could live on the money extracted from Mr. Ullendorf.
“It sounds utterly fantastic—insane. It was. I couldn’t hold out against Dick. I began to feel that anything in the world to free myself from bondage to him was worth trying.
“There’s no use going into the details. Dick planned it all. Mr. Ullendorf was easily trapped. I lost all self-respect, all sense of shame. My second marriage was an empty farce. I hated Mr. Ullendorf because I had wronged him.
“Dick was after me for money all the time. I think he got a lot from Mr. Ullendorf for agreeing not to name him as co-respondent in our divorce. I don’t know. Dick wouldn’t admit it, and I didn’t ever mention it to Mr. Ullendorf.
“The final decree of my second divorce was hardly signed before Dick was after me to remarry him. I refused. The first and only brave thing I ever did. I gave him a quarter of the four hundred thousand dollars Mr. Ullendorf settled on me. I thought I was rid of him.
“One doesn’t rid oneself of a Nemesis so easily. He left me alone for two years. Then he was back for more money. I gave him ten thousand. I see, now, that was a fatal mistake. He kept coming back every time he needed money. I gave it to him to get rid of him.
“Finally I began to get desperate and started cutting down the amounts. He raised the very devil and forced me to make a will naming him as sole beneficiary.
“In August, I gave him two thousand dollars and definitely told him that was the last cent he could expect to bleed from me. He has been back several times since. I think he plans to murder me if I continue to refuse him money.
“I shall continue to refuse. I am making a new will to take precedence over the other one. I’m going to have the last laugh if he does kill me. He’ll hang for it without getting a penny. What a joke that will be.
“This is the truth, so help me God.
“DOROTHY ULLENDORF.”
The last sheet fluttered to the table as we sat there in silence. The District Attorney turned to Burke and said, “It looks as though you played a winning hunch in letting Chief Jelcoe grab all the glory for solving the Malvern-Ullendorf cases.”
Burke nodded and stroked his chin. “It begins to look that way.” He added, to me, “Devoe must have been looking for something like that in her desk.”
The District Attorney said briskly, “We’d better find Devoe and grab him right away.”
“I’ve got two men trailing him,” Burke admitted.
The District Attorney’s mouth sagged open. For the first time since the case began, I saw a look of admiration for Jerry Burke on another man’s face. The District Attorney and the Judge began to chuckle. The District Attorney said, “The Free Press is going to have some tall retracting to do.”
Burke got to his feet slowly and turned to me. “Let’s have a talk with Devoe,” he said.
We went out and down the street to the gambler’s hotel. A plain-clothes man was lounging on the sidewalk outside. He sidled up to us as we approached and spoke out of the side of his mouth: “He ain’t come out yet.”
Burke nodded as though he wasn’t interested and we went in. None of the loungers recognized Burke as we went up to Devoe’s room. I rapped twice and then once on his bedroom door. We heard bedsprings creaking and padding footsteps coming to the door. It opened and Devoe stood before us in striped pajamas, with tousled hair and sleepy eyes.
He said, “Hello,” to me and gaped at Burke. We went in and Burke said, “I’m arresting you, Devoe, for the murder of Dorothy Ullendorf.”
Dick Devoe stood by the door and blinked at Burke as though he didn’t understand English. A snarl twisted his lips as comprehension came to him. He looked at me and sneered, “Stool-pigeoning for the dicks, huh?”
I nodded, not feeling any too good about the part I had played.
“That’s all right.” Burke’s voice was gruff. “Get into some clothes and come along with us to headquarters.”
“Sure—sure—why not?” The snarl went off Devoe’s face. His voice became tremblingly soft. “You ain’t got anything on me. Where the hell do you get that stuff?”
“Never mind. Get your clothes on. We’ve got plenty.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Burke said wearily, “Start dressing, or I’ll take you down in those fancy pajamas.”
Devoe began to laugh softly. He didn’t act quite sane. Seeing that Burke wasn’t in any mood for discussion, he began to dress. He wasn’t trembling any more. His actions were strangely assured.
Burke stood with folded arms and watched him keenly. I knew his right hand was on the butt of a shoulder-holstered pistol. My legs got weak and I sat down. Devoe began talking as he dressed.
“You’re making a silly play. I’m warning you. I don’t mind going to headquarters. Hell, no! I’ll get my mouthpiece and collect a nice slice for false arrest and ruining my reputation. Not asking me any questions, huh? Just grabbing me and taking me along like that? I suppose I’m accused of murdering Malvern, too. Why not? Pile it on. You’re making that much more of a sap out of yourself. I suppose I killed Dorothy even if I happened to be some place else when she was getting knifed?” He was pulling on a pair of pleated pants and slipping gaudy suspenders over his shoulders.
“I’m not interested in any alibi,” Burke growled. “Maybe you didn’t swing the knife. I doubt if you did. It takes guts to handle a knife at close quarters. The man who hires it done is just as guilty as the man who does it.” That took a lot of assurance out of Devoe. I hadn’t thought of that angle. I guess he hadn’t either.
But he sneered, “Nuts! You’re sore because Jelcoe turned up the real murderer yesterday. I suppose you’ll be claiming that I hired Anthony Gray to bump Dot?”
Burke said patiently, “I’m charging you with first-degree murder. That’s all. Better save your talking for the Judge.”
“Then you ain’t interested in where I was night before last?”
“Not at all. You’d better pack a few things for a long stay in jail.”
“Naw. I ain’t packing anything. My mouthpiece’ll spring me before I need a change.” He faced Burke with white-faced bravado. “You’re going to look plenty silly when I prove that I was sitting in a poker game with half the big shots in the city when Dot was getting bumped.”
Burke began to betray irritation. “I’ll take a chance on that. It’s up to you if you don’t want to pack a bag. Stick out your hands.” Shiny handcuffs dangled from his fingers.
Devoe hesitated and looked as though he was going to jump Burke. I got hold of my chair, ready to swing it. Then he held out his hands with a nasty laugh. “Have it your way. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Burke put the cuffs on him. Devoe wilted when the cold steel closed about his wrists. But he had plenty of nerve to carry him through.
“Slip your coat cuffs down over them and come along quietly,” Burke growled. “I won’t call a wagon and there won’t be any fuss if you’re good.”
Devoe saw sense in that. He went between us quietly, to the elevator, down, and through the lobby. Burke nodded to the detective who still loitered there. He sauntered along in front of us, and at the corner another plain-clothes man dropped into the procession behind us.
No one paid any attention to us as we walked the few blocks to headquarters. Jelcoe came in with a funny look on his face while Burke was booking Devoe on a charge of first-degree murder. He began throwing questions around, but Burke didn’t answer any
of them until Devoe was taken away to a cell and he went into his office.
Jelcoe followed us in, striving to pull himself together and act as though he considered the proceedings a great joke.
“What’s the big idea?” he asked querulously as he closed the door. “Who is that guy?”
“Dick Devoe,” Burke said placidly, sitting down with evident enjoyment. “We’ve got some pretty strong evidence that he’s been planning to kill his ex-wife for months.” He hesitated and added as if to himself, “I don’t know—”
Jelcoe was sputtering mad. He lost all control of himself, accusing Burke of deliberately framing Devoe to make an ass out of him, Jelcoe.
Burke heard him out without protest. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. When Jelcoe was all through, Burke hunched his thick shoulders and said imperturbably, “As far as I’m concerned, you can have Devoe on the murder charge. I doubt like hell whether we can make it stick. We can convict him of extortion, but—I—don’t know—”
I stared at him, wondering if he had gone off his nut. This was a little too much caution. It seemed to me that there had to come a time when even the most cautious man would be willing to accept plain facts and stick by his guns. I had thought Burke’s wishy-washiness was all over when he arrested Devoe. Now he was backing down again.
He saw the consternation on my face and smiled. “Don’t get sore, Asa. Remember, I told you yesterday I had three hunches. Two of them point to Devoe. The other doesn’t.” He paused and took out his pipe, then added calmly, “I’ve also had Devoe’s handwriting checked against the note forging Ricardo’s name to the assignation that took Mrs. Ullendorf to her death in the street. Our expert says Devoe did not forge the note.”
He paused, went on: “I didn’t tell you my other hunch because you wouldn’t have worked so hard helping me run down Devoe. I’ll tell you now: I don’t think the cycle is completed.”
Jelcoe must have been as astonished as I was. We both stared at Jerry Burke in silent consternation.
“It’s a little thing,” Burke went on. “I can’t get it out of my mind that the murderer signed M-U-M for some specific reason. It sticks in my craw that Malvern was number one, and Ullendorf was number two. Malvern-Ullendorf—M-U. Who is going to be number three? Another M? It’s logical. That’s the way a criminal mind works.”
Jelcoe and I sat there staring, trying to digest Burke’s startling theory.
Then, as though fated to come at that precise moment, I heard the shrill cries of newsboys rising above the clamor of the crowd in the street outside.
I looked at the others and saw that they heard it, too. We all went to the window without saying anything. A boy was distributing papers on the street to eager buyers while his chant came clearly to us:
“Another Mum murder tonight! Advertised in the Free Press! Get your copy here! Exclusive Free Press extry!”
He moved on down the street and his cry faded out in the hubbub of excitement following in his wake. Jerry Burke filled his pipe and lit it with concentrated attention, as though that was the only important thing in the world at the moment. Jelcoe and I kept our mouths shut for once.
I suppose I felt much as Jelcoe did about this latest development. While I hadn’t stuck out my neck publicly, I had been just as sure of Devoe as Jelcoe had been of Anthony Gray.
I couldn’t refrain from mentally damning Burke as we sat there with the shout of the newsboys in our ears. His sense of timing was too perfect to be quite human. And his outward lack of emotion at this crisis was enough to drive any ordinary man mad with envy.
Chapter Seventeen
A POLICEMAN CAME BUSTING into Burke’s office with a paper a few minutes later. His eyes were bulging as he pointed out the advertisement—the third in the series of death notices:
STILL BLUNDERING AROUND IN THE DARK, MR. BURKE? HERE’S YOUR LAST CHANCE. NUMBER THREE IS SLATED TO GO AT 4:30 TOMORROW MORNING.
MUM.
A messenger arrived from the Free Press office just as we finished reading the advertisement. The editor had sent over the original, along with the dollar bill and the envelope it came in. Another of those same cards with which we were familiar. The ad was typewritten except for a blank space where the exact time had been filled in with a pencil.
Burke went through the formality of sending the stuff in to the identification department, his manner indicating that he knew it for an idle gesture.
Again there wasn’t anything to do except wait.
I won’t bore you with a tedious description of the hours between noon and four-thirty the next morning. There were sixteen and a half of them. Burke and I got away with two bottles of brandy waiting for the call to come. We were at my place, waiting for the phone to ring. I confess I was a little groggy from loss of sleep and too much brandy, but
Jerry Burke seemed to get keener and more alert with every drink.
At four-thirty we were straining our ears, but the phone did not ring. Fifteen minutes passed. The phone remained silent. Then, suddenly, Burke went haywire on me. He paced up and down the floor. There wasn’t the slightest pretense of calmness about him.
There, by the gods, was something worth waiting a long time to see. Despite my own tenseness, I took time out to gloat over this evidence that Jerry Burke was human after all. It was good, somehow, to see his outer defenses crack. It gave me a warm feeling of being closer to him than I’d been before.
He called headquarters at four-fifty to make sure a report hadn’t come in. He was assured there hadn’t been any murder report.
He paced up and down for another fifteen minutes. Dawn was breaking. Both of us were fools enough to begin to hope that the cycle of deaths had been, somehow, disrupted.
It was broad daylight when the telephone rang. Burke jumped to answer it. He listened and said, “All right,” curtly, hung up, and started out the door. He didn’t say anything until we were off with a screaming siren.
He had got hold of himself again and his voice was as bleak as his face. “An old scientist named Montgomery. Poisoned. His wife just discovered his body.”
It was out on Tularosa. A neat little one-story bungalow with fresh paint and carefully tended vines. Jelcoe pulled up in a squad car just in front of us. Two police cars were already there, sent from strategic points where they had been stationed all night.
It was pretty awful. Inside the cheery little bungalow we were greeted by a motherly little gray-haired woman whose black eyes glistened with tears that refused to flow. She was Mrs. Montgomery, of course, but the shock of her husband’s death didn’t seem quite real to her.
She came to Jerry Burke instinctively, with outstretched hands, as soon as he entered the door.
“Please—you’ll do something, won’t you?” Her voice quavered but there was no other sign of weakness about her.
Jerry took her hands and said, “I will—before God,” and the little old lady bravely led him through the neat living-room to a rear annex which was fitted out as a chemical research laboratory.
She stood aside to let Burke go in, and her smile was the most pathetic thing I ever looked at. I followed and stood by Jerry, looking down at Mum’s third victim—the body of Dr. Rufus Montgomery stretched out on the floor.
A shrunken little man, with wispy gray hair. A quiet smile lingered on his lips as though he hugged a secret to his bosom in death. He wore a laboratory worker’s apron over an old gray suit. By his side, also peaceful in death, the body of a superb Persian cat stretched. There was a saucer half full of milk by the cat. A quart milk bottle stood on the laboratory bench, open and half emptied.
The doctor’s hand grasped a glass out of which he must have been drinking when he slumped silently to the floor. Milk had spilled out of the glass. The first rays of a new sun came through an open east window while Burke and I stood in the doorway looking at the scene. Behind us we heard the muffled sobs of the little old lady who was trying to be brave.
In falling to the floor, the doctor�
��s outflung arm had pulled an electric cord from a wall socket. The hands of the electric clock on the other end of the cord stood at 4:32, grisly evidence of the killer’s inhuman accuracy in timing his murder.
Burke stepped over the body and gingerly picked up the bottle of milk. A white card was loosely stuck to the bottom of the bottle. Burke dislodged it and read it without a change of expression. He handed it to me and I saw that it was the third of Mum’s cards: Number 3. Mum’s the word.
Burke handed the bottle to Jelcoe with compressed lips. “Have it checked for prints, the contents analyzed, find the driver who delivered it and get him here.”
Jelcoe was so surprised by the curt order that he couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Yes, sir.”
He went out, and Burke’s gaze roved about the little laboratory, finally coming to rest on the dead man’s face. He stepped over him again and said, “We’d better talk to Mrs. Montgomery.”
We found her rocking back and forth in the neat living-room. She was all through sobbing. There was a hurt look on her face, as though she asked God why He had let this happen to her.
Burke was as gentle as he could be with her. It was not difficult to elicit the salient facts concerning Dr. Montgomery.
A retired industrial chemist, he had fitted up a private laboratory for experimentation a year ago when inaction began to pall on him. It had begun as a sort of hobby, Mrs. Montgomery said, but during the last few months he had believed he was on the verge of an epochal discovery and had worked in his laboratory every night with his assistant, a young chemist who had worked with him before retirement and whom he had privately employed when his experiments led him to believe he was on the track of something important.
It had been his custom for years to work at night and sleep during the day. Two quarts of milk were delivered at the front door every morning between four and four-thirty, and it was the doctor’s invariable habit to bring in one bottle soon after it was delivered, give a portion of it to Tommy, the Persian cat, and drink a full glass himself.
Mum's the Word for Murder Page 13
