Mum's the Word for Murder

by Brett Halliday

  She didn’t know how many people knew of this custom. Half a dozen of his cronies, perhaps, and probably all of the neighbors with whom the old couple were intimately acquainted.

  She had arisen at five o’clock, as was her custom, and gone out to bring in the other quart of milk. It was standing on the kitchen table, unopened.

  Burke interrupted long enough to order the other bottle taken down to headquarters for inspection and analysis. Then he gently went on with his questioning.

  Did she know of any enemies Dr. Montgomery might have? She shook her head in decided negation. From her we got a picture of a simple, lovable old gentleman, kind-hearted and generous to a fault.

  She hesitated when Burke asked her about the value of the discovery the doctor had been about to make, and whether she had thought it might have any bearing on his death.

  It was the first touch of indecision in her prompt replies. She seemed to be debating what she should say. At last she leaned forward, and in a gentle, modulated tone, said, “It wouldn’t be fair to Rufus to keep the truth from you. I’m sure Steven poisoned him—to take credit for the doctor’s formula.”

  Burke said, “Steven who?”

  “Steven Luzon. The doctor’s laboratory assistant. Rufus has been like a father to Steven and I just can’t believe it. But I know it must be. Steven has been changed since they started work on this discovery—something about synthetic gasoline. Rufus felt it. We talked about it. I begged him to send Steven away. I saw an awful light in his eyes when he looked at the doctor. But Rufus was stubborn. He was so good—he couldn’t see the vileness in another person. He wouldn’t recognize it when he did see it. He admitted that Steven was getting queer. That he showed a greed and envy about the doctor’s discovery. And now Steven has done it!” She ended on a note of disbelief which tore at our heart-strings.

  “Was Steven here last night?”

  “No. He telephoned in the afternoon to say he was visiting his sister on the other side of town for the night and wouldn’t come to work.”

  “Give me his sister’s name and address, and describe him.”

  Burke jotted down the name and address and her faltering description of the man who had been like a son to Dr. Montgomery.

  Estevan Luzon. About thirty-seven. Tall and very dark. An American citizen of Spanish parentage. Reared and educated in the United States. Assisted through college by Dr. Montgomery, taking his degree after returning from the war, and immediately going into a local chemical plant as the doctor’s assistant.

  “We always called him Steven,” she said. “Everyone calls him Steven.”

  Mrs. Montgomery couldn’t give us a more definite description. He was a bachelor and lived at a downtown rooming-house. A quiet young man, engrossed in his profession, with few friends and no bad habits.

  Burke dispatched men to Luzon’s rooming-house and to his sister’s address. He sent his description to headquarters to have a pick-up order relayed all over the city and countryside.

  There was nothing more to be learned from Mrs. Montgomery for the moment. Some neighbor ladies had come in. We left her with them and went out to the front porch, where Jerry Burke whirled into action. He had orders for every man standing around waiting for orders. At the moment, he concentrated on the search for Estevan Luzon, whom the old lady believed to have murdered his benefactor.

  Men were sent to study every available source of information concerning the laboratory assistant. Burke directed radio warnings sent out to all near-by cities in Mexico and on this side of the Rio Grande, using the vague description we now had, with instructions to supplement it with a fuller description as soon as obtainable.

  Other men were dispatched to interview every person known to have been even remotely acquainted with Dr. Montgomery and his work; to the industrial plant where he and Luzon had formerly worked; to a list of Dr. Montgomery’s conferees—with instructions to gather every iota of information relative to Dr. Montgomery, his work, and particularly any data or conjecture concerning the doctor’s impending discovery, its value, importance, and possible industrial antagonism a synthetic gasoline might arouse.

  Burke didn’t have any time for me. He was a dynamo of aroused energy. It was as though every cell in his body had been eagerly awaiting this moment to spring into action. Contrasting his method of handling this case with the other two murders, I realized that the other investigations had been conducted against an inward feeling of futility.

  He had instinctively run down clues before, but with the secret knowledge that his work was but an idle gesture.

  I felt that from the very first we had been marking time until the end of the Mum cycle gave him something concrete upon which to proceed. There was no indecision about him now. Whether or not Luzon was the criminal, he was leaving no stone unturned leading to his capture; nor was he neglecting the smallest clue in piecing together a solution of this case, which I knew he felt would unravel the gruesome skein of three deaths.

  The neighbor ladies took Mrs. Montgomery to a near-by house to give her what solace they could. Burke set up an informal field headquarters in the living-room, where he received reports, interviewed prospective sources of information, and gave curt orders.

  The first news of importance came from headquarters. Two sets of fingerprints had been found on each bottle, indicating that both bottles had been handled by the same person, and each of them by one other person—supposedly the milk-wagon driver and Dr. and Mrs. Montgomery. A full set of prints was being rushed to us for identification.

  Analysis of the milk showed each bottle to contain sufficient poison to deal instantaneous death to a dozen people. A little-known poison, soluble and tasteless in milk, killing by instant paralysis of the brain.

  The next report was that the milk deliveryman had been apprehended and was being brought to us. A regular employee of the most reputable local dairy, who had been delivering the Montgomerys’ milk for years.

  Luzon’s sister was located and interviewed by a detective who concealed the reason for his interest in Estevan. She reported not having seen her brother for weeks, and denied that he had visited her the preceding night, or that she had any knowledge of his intention to do so.

  Ransacking Luzon’s downtown room brought forth no evidence of disarray or departure. His belongings appeared to be intact, and his landlady testified that he had walked away without any luggage the foregoing afternoon with no evidence of perturbation, and had not been seen since.

  The milk driver and the fingerprints from headquarters arrived at about the same time. The driver was a sandy-haired youth of twenty-odd, with a guileless, pleasant face, a little awed and a little pleased at finding himself the central figure in a murder investigation.

  He readily gave his prints for identification, and answered Burke’s questions in an impressively straightforward manner.

  He had covered his early-morning route today exactly as he had done for years. He recalled delivering the Montgomerys two quarts, but insisted he had noticed nothing unusual. That the two bottles had come haphazardly from a case well down in the load, emphatically denying that there could have been the remotest possibility of those two bottles having been tampered with before he deposited them on the doorstep.

  He delivered the milk about four-fifteen, and hadn’t noticed anyone lurking in the vicinity of the house, though he admitted that a person could easily have been hiding in the thick shrubbery. All his bottles, he explained, had the new-type caps which fit down over the top of the bottle, easily removed and replaced without leaving evidence of having been tampered with.

  The three sets of prints had been checked by the time Burke was through interrogating him. His prints were clearly on the bottles. Dr. Montgomery’s prints were on the bottle found in the laboratory, and Mrs. Montgomery’s on the one she had brought in.

  Burke ordered the driver held temporarily, and passed on to the next phase of the investigation.

  Reports were coming in from the
men detailed to gather pertinent facts about the doctor and his assistant. Boiled down to their essence, they revealed with remarkable uniformity that Dr. Montgomery had been loved and respected by all who knew him.

  Estevan Luzon, on the other hand, emerged from the reports as a curious personality. Extremely talented, scourged by driving ambition, reticent to the point of sullenness, respected by his associates, but not well liked. Two or three persons who knew him intimately did not hesitate to say that they considered him too brilliant for mental balance. A supreme egoist whose consuming passion was to become a leader in his chosen field and attain wealth.

  It was an ugly picture. We had evidence of Dr. Montgomery’s almost paternal interest in the man, of specific instances in which the kindly doctor had saved him from the consequences of his own folly and led him back into the confidence of those who would have spurned him had it not been for the doctor’s unwavering interest.

  Information about the doctor’s scientific discovery was much more difficult to unearth, and much more vague. No one seemed to know exactly how far he had progressed in his endeavor. By noon of that day Burke’s men had found three of Dr. Montgomery’s colleagues to whom he had confidentially revealed that he was on the verge of an epochal discovery.

  The three men met with Burke in the living-room, and he gravely explained to them the importance of any possible light which any of them could throw on the affair, stressing the fact that he believed the underlying motive for this crime would be the key to the puzzle of three deaths.

  None of the three could tell him much. Dr. Montgomery had been closemouthed. They agreed that he must have been very sure of his basic facts to have said even as much to them as he had. They agreed, also, that Luzon was the one man in position to carry on the doctor’s work and profit by it.

  Most damning of all, the elder of the trio, Dr. Edward Noble, related in substance a conversation he and Dr. Montgomery had had a few days ago.

  “I put it to Dr. Montgomery plainly,” said Dr. Noble, stroking his goatee, “that I wouldn’t trust that assistant of his with anything too big. Curiously enough, prophetically, we may now say, Dr. Montgomery rather nervously agreed with me. We’d spoken of Luzon before, and Montgomery always pooh-poohed anything I had to say against him. On this occasion he reluctantly told me that he was thinking of letting the man go. I recall his words distinctly—his manner of speaking them impressed me.

  “‘Noble,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand that young man. I’ve given him every chance. He knows I intend he shall have half the credit and half the profit accruing to us when our product is perfected. But I feel, Noble, that he wants more than half.’ Then with a deprecatory laugh, as though refusing to take himself seriously, he added, ‘I swear that I’ve lately had a feeling he would kill me if I stood in the way of his greed and overweening desire for public honors.’”

  That was all we got from the trio of Dr. Montgomery’s closest associates. It was enough. From that moment onward, every facility of the entire department was thrown into the search for Estevan Luzon.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I DON’T MIND going out on a limb and saying that I believe Luzon is our man,” Jerry Burke said.

  We were having lunch together about two o’clock that afternoon in a restaurant near headquarters. He drank some iced coffee and went on: “Everything hangs together too perfectly. It’s another case of being just a little bit too clever. Luzon began his downfall years ago when he let people suspect the truth about his character. Montgomery’s death is so nearly a perfect crime that I shudder to think of trying to solve it if Luzon hadn’t tipped himself off to different people in the past—and hadn’t played the fool by disappearing just when he should have stuck around close and brazened it out.”

  “You think he is Mum? Responsible for all the murders?”

  “It all hangs together.” Burke leaned back and talked more expansively than he had hitherto permitted himself to do. “From our reports on Luzon there emerges the perfect portrait of a mentality that might plan such a series of crimes and carry them through without faltering. For instance, he’s a Spaniard, born and reared in El Paso. Now you and I know that no matter how much we talk about racial equality, our schools and our thought are permeated with a feeling of Anglo-Saxon superiority. From all reports, Luzon was far above the average in mentality. Yet through childhood and early manhood he had to endure the superior attitude of those about him simply because it is his misfortune to be of another people.

  “Don’t you see the smoldering resentment that must have been an integral part of his development? Particularly since he knows himself to be the mental superior of those who look down on him. Don’t you see how that could curdle into a species of monomania? He doesn’t show it often, but now and then a flash of it crops out—enough to mark him among those intimately associated with him.

  “There are countless cases on record of persons who have murdered their benefactors. It is a recognized psychological fact that the surest way to make an enemy is to do a favor to a certain type of man. An inferiority complex is set up, which manifests itself in hatred for the one who has done the favor. I judge Luzon to be an aggravated case of that type. The more Dr. Montgomery did for him, the deeper would be his hatred.”

  “That’s a damnable theory,” I protested. “Are you talking about human beings or animals?”

  “I don’t know any animals that betray this characteristic,” Burke said soberly. “Go to psychology to find out about your own species. But to get on with it: That’s the type I’ve been looking for. A brilliant mentality, with a real or fancied grudge against the world at large and the final victim in particular. Can’t you see the plan festering in his morbidly unbalanced mind?

  “The entire plan must have been conceived as a whole. I believe that we’ll find he typed all the advertisements and the murder cards at one sitting. The ads weren’t dated. He reserved them to mail in when the time came to strike. He left the time blank and filled it in later, except in the second one where he wasn’t explicit.”

  “Do you think he selected the first two victims beforehand?”

  “That’s hard to say. My guess is that he didn’t. I suspect that he marked time and selected Malvern and Ullendorf with care—picking out an M and a U to fit the alias he used. Keep in mind that the first two murders were committed under perfect conditions of escaping detection, for throwing suspicion on another party, and at a time and place where an outside person could have known they would be by observing them for a few days.”

  I couldn’t help squirming and admitting it was the most diabolical plan I had ever heard of.

  “It was,” Burke agreed grimly. “But I think we’ve come to the end of a twisting trail. Luzon can’t escape the net we’ve thrown out.”

  We finished lunch and walked back toward his office. The newspapers had got the Luzon angle. His picture was spread over the front sheet. A thin, strong face, with a cruel mouth and hooked nose.

  Jerry Burke’s name was back in the public eye with a fanfare of praise from the newswriters for his tenacity in staying with the case and not allowing himself to be led astray by false clues such as the Arthur Malvern-Anthony Gray-Dick Devoe fiascos.

  Burke was pretty well pleased with the way things were breaking. This was what he had looked forward to from the first—being played up as the mastermind who had lain low, letting Jelcoe have the credit, and now the discredit.

  A queer silence greeted us as we walked into headquarters. Everyone stopped talking and turned to look at Burke. There was a suspicion of sneering pity in their eyes instead of the admiration I expected them to manifest.

  I didn’t understand it. I think Burke saw it, too, and was as surprised as I. He took no notice of it, however, striding on toward his office, meeting the men’s glances with a level gaze.

  Jelcoe stepped out of his office and confronted us as we went down the hall. His face was pasty-white and his eyes bulged. He made a little squawking no
ise in his throat and put his hand out to detain Burke.

  Burke stopped impatiently and said, “All right.”

  Jelcoe cleared his throat and muttered, “We’ve got him—in here.”

  Burke didn’t ask him who they had. He shoved Jelcoe aside and went in. I followed him, wondering about the stricken look on Jelcoe’s face.

  Estevan Luzon stood there, surrounded by five detectives. There was a humorless smile on his cruel mouth. His hooked nose reminded me of the beak of a predatory bird. He was manacled, and his clothes were rumpled. You could, have heard a feather drop when he and Burke confronted each other.

  I knew something was wrong. So did Burke. He looked Luzon over, then turned to Jelcoe with an urgent, “Well?”

  Jelcoe wet his lips and his eyelids flickered. “We picked him up a few minutes ago—just as he was leaving police court.”

  Burke waited for him to go on. Jelcoe did go on, in a flat, unnatural voice, as though he didn’t believe what he was saying—but there it was: “He had just been released with a suspended sentence on a drunk and disorderly charge. He’s—been in jail all night. Arrested at five o’clock yesterday afternoon for raising hell in a restaurant and resisting arrest.”

  God in heaven! I pitied Jerry Burke. He took it with his chin up, but it knocked all the fight out of him for a moment. He looked at Jelcoe for a long time. All the timbre had vanished from his voice as he asked hopelessly, “You checked the story?”

  Jelcoe’s head bobbed up and down. “There’s the arresting officer.” He pointed to one of the cops. “There’s the man who booked him at five-thirty.” Pointing to another: “And there’s the man who was on duty in his cell block all night. He was fingerprinted when he came in, and I’ve verified the identification.”

  Burke said in a flat voice, “Lock him up for investigation.” Then he went out and into his own office.

  He was standing by the window staring out when I followed him and closed the door. Without turning his head, he said, “May God strike me dead if I ever permit myself the luxury of another theory in this or any other murder case! The Lord knows I tried to be sure of my ground before spouting off. Which goes to prove, Asa, that God doesn’t think I’ve got enough gray hairs yet.”