The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  “Mr. Lansing,” I said, “we have just come in on this. It has the look of an uncommonly ugly affair.”

  “Mr. Lansing has looked at it,” Gibby said. “Mr. Lansing is aware of what it is. Mr. Lansing has for many years been a generous contributor to the Police Athletic League. That puts Mr. Lansing in a position to know the right way of going about this. Mr. Lansing was about to teach us our job, Mac. Don’t interrupt him.”

  Lansing smiled and it was a good smile. It was warm and friendly and generous. “Young man,” he said, “I can give you only the most general sort of advice, but it applies to any job you have to do. A job goes better without loss of temper.”

  “Sorry,” Gibby said curtly.

  Lansing didn’t belabor it. He turned to the business at hand; and, after a few moments, I could tell just by the way Gibby was standing and listening to him that I could relax. Gibby would carry this man’s message to the Old Man and be glad to do it. Lansing was not trying to push us and he was not trying to lead us around by the nose.

  “Homer Coleman,” he said, “was with us at Fiveborough National. I have known him for more than thirty years, and for at least fifteen of those thirty years it has been a close association. I have known but one man who was loved by everyone who knew him. That man was Homer Coleman.” Gibby moved to interrupt, but Lansing went on talking, and Gibby listened. “I know you’ve already been told that,” Lansing said. “I wouldn’t be bothering you with it now, if it wasn’t that I realized that to you it must seem the usual empty thing that people say of a man who has died. The point is, Mr. Gibson, that here it is a fact you will have to take into consideration. Of Homer Coleman it was true. He had no enemies. He could not possibly have had an enemy. Everybody loved the man.”

  Gibby wanted it more specific, but he showed no impatience.

  “Who was he?” he asked.

  “He was one of our vice-presidents,” Lansing answered. “He was also my very good friend.”

  “Our vice-presidents?” Gibby echoed.

  “Fiveborough National Bank,” Lansing said.

  “He was here with you?”

  “We are all here,” Lansing told him. “It is a matter of principle that all the officers should come.”

  “It’s a Fiveborough National party, then?”

  “The Bank Club dinner and dance,” Lansing explained. “Our people have it annually.”

  It seemed an odd way of putting it, as though he as an individual, and also as speaking for the bank management, were disowning any responsibility for this three-star binge that appeared to have spilled all over the fifth floor of the Hotel Butterfield.

  “This is a party you give for the bank employees?” Gibby was going to have complete clarification.

  “No,” Lansing said. “The Bank Club is an employees’ organization. The club gives the party. We, the officers, are here as their guests.”

  Gibby nodded. “You’re a guest,” he said. “Mr. Coleman was a guest.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they have other guests? Anybody outside the bank personnel?”

  “Not at the dinner,” Lansing answered. “We are a large organization. It is a difficult matter to find a place to hold the party where the facilities will not be too much taxed by feeding our bank family alone. Guests from outside would make the dinner too large to be housed in any one room and splitting it up would not be desirable.”

  Cary Willard came back into it. He added his explanation. “Other guests do come to the dance after dinner,” he said. “Husbands, wives, dates, quite the usual sort of thing.”

  Obviously we were going to have to go into the sort of thing that could hardly have been so usual. As it happened, the subject was opened for us. There was a knock at the door and Brady went to take care of it. It was Ellerman. Brady let him in. Ellerman’s a detective assigned to our office. He’s a very good routine man and he disguises his lack of imagination behind an air of cynicism. Ellerman would like one to believe that he was quite incapable of astonishment or shock, that he was a realist who could take anything in his stride. Actually, Ellerman does shock rather easily. He was busily covering it with a thin veil of cynicism when he came in.

  Brady shut the door after him. Ellerman waited while Brady locked the door. Then he spoke to Brady.

  “You guys find a pair of pants in here?” he asked.

  “Pants?” Brady perhaps should have been prepared for the question, but it did take him by surprise.

  “Whose pants you looking for?” Gibby asked.

  Ellerman shrugged. “A skinny jerk,” he said. “He lets these girls take his pants off of him. Can you beat that?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He was running around the corridor in his shorts with his shirttails hanging out. It wasn’t decent. I’ve got him wrapped in towels and locked up in one of the rooms.”

  “And now you’re trying to find his pants for him. Are you looking everywhere or do you have any reason for looking here?”

  “They said they hid them in here.”

  “Who said?”

  “Them girls. He’s chasing them when I pick him up. You know what that looks like, a guy with his pants off chasing girls, even if it is a skinny squirt like him and it’s maybe a dozen babes he’s chasing. I ask him what he thinks he’s doing. He says them babes they held him down and they took his pants off of him and he’s chasing them because he wants his pants back. Can you beat that?”

  “You caught the girls, too?” Gibby asked.

  “Yeah. He gave me their names. I been some time catching up with them, but I got them in another room with a man to hold them there. The funny thing is they back this jerk up. They say that’s the way it was. They held him down on the floor and they took the pants off of him. They say they hid them in here. They say they would’ve given them back, only they can’t get in here.”

  “Where did they hide them?”

  “Sofa, under the cushions, they say.”

  There was only the one sofa in the room. We investigated it. Neatly laid out under the cushions was the pair of gray pants. Pink and white suspenders were buttoned to them. So far as I could remember it, the ensemble matched up. The pants would go with the coat we had seen on the debagged character in the corridor, and the suspenders were a nice match to his shorts.

  Gibby said, “Here’s one aspect of it I don’t get. Isn’t it pretty free and easy behavior for a party to which the officers are invited?”

  Lansing nodded. “It is free and easy behavior under any circumstances,” he said. “We shall have to do something. You see, ordinarily none of us, none of the officers that is, would be up here. We stay down in the ballroom. We make it a practice that we don’t come up to these private rooms. It would seem as though we were snooping if we did.”

  Ellerman’s veneer of cynicism split wide open. He was shocked.

  “Private rooms,” he growled. “At least half them girls, they’re jail bait. They oughtn’t be at no party with private rooms.”

  Willard explained the private rooms.

  “All the departments have department funds,” he said. “All the employees pay in small sums each payday, and the money is used for a box of candy in the department when it is someone’s birthday, a department Christmas tree, a little department Christmas party, wedding presents for people in the department, small amenities of that sort. A department might have five or six girls who cannot conveniently go home between the close of business and the Club dinner and who cannot get home at the hour when the party breaks up. The department fund takes one of these suites for this group of girls. There are two beds in the bedroom and they may have a cot put in. A girl might sleep out here on the sofa. They have a place where they can change into their party clothes and they have a place to sleep after the party.”

  Ellerman had his cynicism gathered around him again. “There’s a lot more going on in these suites than that,” he said.

  Gibby cut him off. “I see,” he said. “Since
the officers stay in the ballroom, situations would develop up here, and there might well be a gap of a couple of parties before you could become aware of them.”

  Lansing sighed. “Regretfully, I am forced to believe exactly that has happened,” he said. “We assumed that our chiefs and assistant chiefs would be a leavening influence and there would be nothing unseemly. It appears that we have reposed too much confidence in them.”

  Gibby nodded. “You have a problem there,” he said. “Unfortunately, we have a problem, too. You said Mr. Coleman was a v. p.?”

  “A senior vice-president,” Lansing said. “The finest man we had.”

  “An officer,” Gibby said. “We will have to learn what brought him up here. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you what brought you up here tonight. Any departure from custom, you understand.”

  Willard went crimson. “Now really,” he protested. “This is too much.” He was spluttering.

  Lansing quickly put a stop to that. “Make an effort, Cary,” he said. “You don’t have to be a pompous fool, if you make an effort.” He turned to Gibby. “It must seem puzzling to you,” he said. “Naturally Cary and I came up here immediately when we were told about Homer.”

  “Yes,” Gibby said. “But we shall have to know what brought Mr. Coleman up here. That might have a good deal to do with what happened to him.

  Lansing shook his head. “It couldn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. “It couldn’t possibly. You see, of all of us, Homer Coleman occupied a rather special position. He had a very special popularity. We thought the world of him, but our people felt about him quite as we did. To them he was never so much an officer of the bank as he was a friend. He was the only one of us who really knew the employees. He knew every last man and woman on the pay roll. He knew them all by name and he was interested in them. He was their friend and they knew it. Homer Coleman came up here because he was invited to come. None of our people had a party without asking him to come. They don’t ask the rest of us, but they always asked him. There was nothing unusual about it. It always happened.”

  “In other words, he was an exception to your rule that no officer came up to these rooms?”

  “It wasn’t a rule, Mr. Gibson,” Lansing explained. “The officers of the bank come to the dinner and the dance as guests of the Bank Club. They invite us. These rooms are taken by the people in individual departments. If they want anyone in their rooms they invite him. Mr. Coleman would be invited and the others of us wouldn’t. If you want to call it a rule, you might say that we made it a rule not to go where we had not been invited.”

  “Thank you,” Gibby said. “That makes it clear enough. Which department has these rooms?”

  “I don’t know,” Lansing replied. “We can get you the information easily enough.”

  There was a pause and Ellerman took advantage of it.

  “What do I do about the squirt and the pants?” he asked. “Also them girls?”

  Gibby gave instructions for the quick processing of the pants. There wasn’t much likelihood that they would yield anything helpful, but they were in the room and they could hardly be taken out of there before the lab crowd had been over them.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Gibby said. “I’ll also talk to the girls. I’ll take him first.”

  He started out of the room. Lansing spoke.

  “I would guess,” he said, “that by now the girls are badly frightened. They have undoubtedly learned their lesson.”

  “Could be,” said Gibby. “That’s not in my department. What they know about this room and about what happened in here is in my department.”

  We went out of there. Ellerman and Brady came with us. Ellerman took us back up the corridor and around the turning. He knocked on a door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Police,” Ellerman said. “Let us in.”

  The young man let us in. He had a lighted cigarette hanging from his lower lip. There was something about the way he let the smoke curl upward over his face while he looked at us through it that made me think that this no-hands smoking was a trick he had long practiced, a trick he regarded as an interesting accomplishment. The towels in which Ellerman had wrapped him were in a heap on the floor. He stood before us in his shorts.

  Ignoring the rest of us, he spoke to Ellerman. “Didn’t you find them?” he asked. “You been gone long enough, for gosh sakes.”

  Ellerman didn’t answer him. “These gentlemen have some questions to ask you,” he said instead.

  The young man looked at us. Behind his little cloud of cigarette smoke he looked bored and impatient.

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s not be making a big deal out of this.”

  Gibby stepped into it. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  The lad took it belligerently. “What’s it to you?” he snarled.

  Gibby reached up and took the cigarette from between the boy’s lips. He ground it out in an ash tray. Then he planted his hand against the boy’s chest and he pushed. The boy sat down. It was all done with a uniformly grim firmness. Gibby was making it clear that he wasn’t roughing the lad up any, but he was also taking no nonsense. The boy sat and sulked.

  “What’s your name?” Gibby asked again.

  “Look. You can’t find my pants, it’s all right. I’ll just sit here and wait. Those kids, they’ll get tired of their joke sometime and they’ll get them back to me. I’ll wait.”

  “While you’re waiting,” Gibby said, “what’s your name?”

  The boy looked at Ellerman. “You all cops?” he asked. “How many cops does it take to find a pair of pants?”

  Ellerman didn’t answer. Gibby was keeping the play in his own hands. “We have your pants,” he said. “You’ll get them when we’re through with them. That may be pretty soon and it may be a long time. It also may be a long time before you’ll be needing them again. So just forget them for now and answer questions.”

  “I don’t get this. What have I done?”

  “That’s what you are going to tell us,” Gibby said quietly.

  “Look. For gosh sakes, I already told him how it was. He went after the gals. I gave him their names and everything. What more do you want?”

  “I want to know about you,” Gibby said. “Your name?”

  The kid was beginning to sweat. He quite forgot and reached for where his hip pocket should have been. It wasn’t there. He remembered then and he took the handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his jacket and he wiped his face and hands with that. He kept the handkerchief balled up in his hand.

  “My name’s Gleason,” he said. “Albert Gleason.”

  “Address?”

  He gave his address. It was a street name I didn’t recognize. “Brooklyn?” Gibby said.

  “Yeah, Brooklyn.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Fiveborough National. Main office.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “Clerk.”

  “What department?”

  “Branch Banking.”

  “Your department have a room up here?”

  “Yeah. We got a suite.”

  “What number?”

  “524. It’s 24, 25, and 26.”

  “Where were you when you lost your pants?”

  “In the room.”

  “Which room?”

  “The sitting room. I don’t know which number it was.”

  “The sitting room of 524, 25, and 26?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You stayed there?”

  “Yeah. Only not in the sitting room.”

  “Tell us exactly what you did do.”

  He told us. He told it haltingly, but that didn’t strike me as meaning anything. Under the circumstances I had hardly expected he would be glib. Anyone would feel several kinds of a fool telling it. The girls had held him down and taken his pants off. They had left him on the floor of the sitting room and they had run out into the hall with his pants. He had chased them, bu
t when he came to the hall door he remembered that he couldn’t go out into the corridor with only his shorts on.

  “You changed your mind about that later,” Gibby said.

  “Look, I wasn’t going to hide all night. I would have chased them right then except I couldn’t with Mr. Coleman out there in the hall. I saw Mr. Coleman and I didn’t want him seeing me like that. I ducked back into the room.”

  “The sitting room?”

  “Yeah. The sitting room. The same room where it happened.”

  “Where what happened?”

  “Where they took the pants off of me. I told you what happened.”

  “Then what?”

  “I went in and I shut the door after me but right away I see the doorknob is turning. There’s somebody coming in. I ducked through to the bedroom and I watched through the door. I have it open a crack, see. I figure maybe it’s them crazy kids coming back with my pants.”

  “Was it?”

  “No. It was Mr. Coleman, so I close the door and I keep quiet. Mr. Coleman, I guess he’s looking for somebody because I hear him go into the other bedroom and then come out again and he comes to the door of the room I’m in. He knocks and I don’t know what I should do, so I go into the bathroom. Mr. Coleman, he comes into that bedroom and he looks around and he goes away again. I stay in the bathroom till I figure he must be gone, then I slip out and there’s nobody in the hall. So I start looking for them kids with my pants.”

  As he told it, he had spent a miserable half-hour of prowling the corridors and darting into empty rooms whenever he heard someone coming. It had been at the end of the half-hour that he had spotted the girls and given chase. That was when we had seen him and when Ellerman had picked him up.

  “Empty rooms?” Gibby asked. “How would you know they were empty? A lot of these rooms up here seem to be in use.”

  “I figured that out,” Albert Gleason answered. It was obvious that this was the first detail he could give us which made him feel as though it might do him some slight credit. He gave it eagerly. “It’s the sitting rooms is being used. Nobody’s in the bedrooms this time of the night. I figured which doors was bedroom doors and I went in those. I worked all over this floor, from bedroom to bedroom till I caught up with them kids.”