The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  “Did you see anyone with Mr. Coleman?”

  “No. He was alone. He was going around like he was trying to find someone, like he was looking for somebody.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THAT WAS the story Albert Gleason told us, and it was the whole of his story. He had seen no one but Homer G. Coleman. He had heard nothing. He knew nothing. He had been looking for his pants. We left him, and he didn’t like that. He wanted to know what was going on. He wanted to know when he would get his trousers back. He wanted to know why he should be treated like a criminal or something. Nobody told him.

  Gibby wanted to talk to the girls. Ellerman took us along the corridor to another room, a room that was filled to overflowing with a bevy of crestfallen Amazons. I had miscounted them. They weren’t a dozen, only eleven, and Ellerman had two cops to ride herd on them. The cops didn’t look any happier than the girls. They had evidently been having a stormy time of it.

  Of the bunch, four of the girls stood out—two because they were crying, one because she wasn’t and looked as though she might be the better for it if she would let go, and the fourth because it was all too evident that she was the one who had been worrying the cops.

  She was putting on quite a show, that girl, and it might have been patterned on the first act of Carmen. She was being tough, hard-boiled, incapable of remorse or regret, and seductive. It was obvious that she had nothing but contempt for the rest of the band, that in her eyes they were lacking in spirit. I had a feeling that if they hadn’t failed to match her mettle, this one miss would gladly have organized a movement for them to extricate themselves from their predicament by debagging the lot of us. Alone she could hardly undertake it, even though she was a big girl, big even for that group. I would have put her at a good five foot ten and a good 180 pounds. She was pretty in a slightly gargantuan fashion, but everything about her was formidable. Her attempts at seduction were almost comically formidable.

  First she picked on Ellerman, but it was evident that it was only because he was the one she had seen before. She took a coquettish, but firm, grasp on the lapel of his coat and took on what she might have hoped would seem a clinging attitude. She was too stalwartly built to cling successfully.

  “Are we ever glad to see you back,” she cooed. “You didn’t mean to keep us shut up here all this time, did you?”

  She was talking to Ellerman, but her eye was roving. It roved to Brady, who is young and considerably more personable than is Ellerman, and it wandered to Gibby. I think she caught a twitch at the corner of Gibby’s mouth, the small morsel of a grin that he had by that much failed to suppress, because she winked at Gibby. He looked at her levelly.

  “Are you the leader of this girl scout troop?” Gibby asked.

  She dropped Ellerman’s lapel and went for Gibby.

  “Look,” she said. “So we hid his pants. So he’s got them back. Now what’s the matter?”

  “Where did you hide them?”

  “On the sofa under the cushions, like we told your boy, here.”

  “Which sofa?”

  “There wasn’t only the one sofa, the sofa in our room.”

  “Our room?”

  “Room 524. Branch Banking, we got 524, 525, and 526.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s it to you what’s my name? I ain’t committed no crime, have I?”

  “The world’s full of people who haven’t committed crimes,” Gibby said. “They all have names.”

  “I’m Gert Cullinan,” she said, “and don’t think there isn’t going to be trouble about this.”

  “There’s trouble now,” Gibby said.

  “It ain’t nothing to the trouble there’s going to be. I got a boy friend at this dance, and he’s no Albert. We all got boy friends and they’ll be wondering maybe where we are. They’ll come looking for us, it’ll be trouble. I’m warning you.”

  “That,” said Gibby, “will be rough. It was in 524 you committed this assault on Albert Gleason?”

  “If you mean we raped him, brother, it’s a lie. We didn’t.”

  “You used force to deprive him of his property,” Gibby said.

  “Look. We didn’t steal his old pants. He’s got them back, hasn’t he?” The girl who wasn’t allowing herself to cry pulled herself together and edged over toward me. She spoke softly.

  “Please,” she said. “Please find Mr. Coleman and bring him here. It’s Mr. Homer Coleman. He’s a vice-president. If you just find him, everything will be all right.”

  Gibby turned to her. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Her lips trembled. I could see that she wasn’t like the others. There was something soft and feminine about her, something the others didn’t have, not even the ones who were blubbering.

  “Rose Salvaggi,” she said.

  “Do you work in the Branch Banking Department, too, Miss Salvaggi?”

  She shook her head. “I am Mr. Coleman’s secretary.”

  “Have you seen your boss tonight?”

  “I saw him at dinner. I danced with him.”

  “When was that?”

  “An hour ago, more than an hour, but he’ll be here. You’ll find him.”

  “Have you seen him up here?”

  “No,” she said. “Someone said he’d come up here. We—” She broke off and bit her lip. She was flushed when she spoke again. “I came up here to look for him.”

  “Why?”

  “I really don’t remember why now, not after all this.”

  Gibby regarded her quizzically. The words might have sounded lame, but they didn’t the way she spoke them. Listening to her, I quite forgot why she was in that room. Gibby didn’t forget.

  “You couldn’t have been looking very hard when Albert Gleason lost his pants,” he said.

  She took a long breath and slowly she let it out. Her eyes went dull and expressionless. Wearily she turned away from him.

  Gert Cullinan threw a mighty arm around her and drew her back. “You don’t have to take any of their lip, Rosie,” she said gently. “Why don’t you tell them?”

  Rose looked at Ellerman. “I did tell him,” she said.

  “What did you tell him?” Gibby asked.

  “She told him that she didn’t have anything to do with it,” Gert offered. “She told him she was just an innocent passer-by.”

  Gibby looked at Ellerman. Ellerman shrugged.

  “He was chasing these babes,” he said, “and you know how he was. I grab him and I let the babes go. They got their clothes on. He tells me his story, so I go look for the babes. I catch up with them and I bring them in here. They tell me where they put the pants and you know how that is. So they all tell me this babe didn’t have nothing to do with it. It just happened she stopped to talk to them a minute when I come along. They tell me she wasn’t even upstairs when they jumped the Gleason squirt. I should believe them, maybe?”

  Gibby nodded. He turned to Brady. “Take Miss Salvaggi to Gleason,” he said. “See what he has to say about her. If he makes no charges against her, let her go with Ellerman’s apologies.”

  Brady took the girl out of there. Gert Cullinan grinned. I could see that she felt she was making progress. She had won one victory. As Gibby went on with his questioning, her grin never wavered. That girl was very sure of herself. The way she told it, the story fitted well enough with the one we had already had from Albert Gleason. They had taken his pants and they had run out into the hall with them. They had waited outside expecting Albert to come after them.

  “Without his pants?” Gibby asked.

  Gert laughed. “He did in the end anyhow,” she said, “but we weren’t thinking he would. We thought he’d find something to put around himself, like a bedspread maybe, and there’s all our office clothes there in the bedrooms. He could have took one of our coats or a skirt or something.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “No. He didn’t come out at all. Then Mr. Coleman come along, and he went in there, s
o we brought the pants back. We didn’t want Mr. Coleman getting mad at us or like that. Mr. Coleman’s all right.”

  “Miss Salvaggi’s boss?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Mr. Coleman.”

  “You gave Mr. Coleman the pants?”

  “No. We went in and there was nobody there, not Albert, not Mr. Coleman. We figured they was in one of the bedrooms, so we put the pants under the sofa cushions and we went away from there.”

  “Seeing no one?”

  “That’s right, seeing no one.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Downstairs, back to the dance.”

  They had danced with their boy friends and had watched for the return of Albert Gleason. Albert had not returned and they had left their boy friends, pretending to go and powder their noses.

  “We come up here to see what made with the jerk,” Gert said. “Our boy friends, they must be thinking we’re a long time powdering our noses.”

  “You found Gleason?”

  “He found us. We got out of the elevator and we go around to the room but it’s all locked up, and then he comes jumping out of another room and he starts chasing us. We went back downstairs.”

  “Why that?”

  “We see there’s cops around. We figure we better be dancing.”

  Gibby looked at her feet. “I saw you when Gleason was chasing you,” he said. “You didn’t have shoes on then.”

  “We’d been dancing. We like to dance with our shoes off.”

  “Did you go back to your dancing?”

  “We never got there.” She jerked her head toward Ellerman. “He come after us.”

  “You have your shoes on now,” Gibby observed.

  “Sure. He waited while we got them and put them on.”

  Gibby nodded. “You saw Mr. Coleman go into 524,” he began. He broke off when Brady came back into the room. Brady was alone.

  “Gleason says she wasn’t in on it,” Brady said.

  “Good,” said Gibby and resumed with Gert. “You saw Mr. Coleman go into 524,” he said again.

  “We already told you, we saw him go in.”

  “When you went in there, he wasn’t there.”

  “Nobody was there.”

  “Have you seen Mr. Coleman since?”

  “No, I ain’t seen him.”

  Gibby turned to the other girls. They all shook their heads.

  “While you were around 524, did you see anyone else come in or go out?”

  “No. Nobody else,” said Gert.

  “Nobody,” the other girls said in a mumbled chorus.

  Gibby told Ellerman to get all the names and let the girls go. We went out of there. Brady came with us. We went past the elevators on our way back to Room 524. Near the elevators Gibby slowed down noticeably. I could guess that something had caught his eye, but I couldn’t imagine what. I could see nothing that seemed even faintly out of the ordinary, certainly nothing to approach the fantastic chase we had witnessed when we first stepped out of those elevators. There was a young man at the elevators. He was wearing a gray topcoat with the collar turned up and he was wearing a gray soft hat. Between coat collar and hat I couldn’t see much of his face, especially since he was standing with his finger on the elevator call bell and that meant he was faced away from us. I never thought to look at the young man twice. He seemed to me a very usual sort of young man.

  Gibby spoke and it was a just audible murmur. It was directed out of the side of Gibby’s mouth and beamed straight for Brady’s ear.

  “Guy’s familiar,” Gibby whispered. “Can you place him?”

  Brady turned and looked. Quickly he started toward the young man who had his finger on the elevator call bell. The young man saw him coming and broke toward the door with the red light over it. He wasn’t waiting for the elevator. He was going to use the fire stairs. He didn’t make it. Brady had him.

  “Well, hello,” Brady said.

  “Hello,” the young man mumbled.

  Gibby and I came up. “It’s Art Fuller, isn’t it?” Gibby said.

  The youth raised his head and looked Gibby straight in the eye. Then I remembered him. It took a lot of remembering. It had been almost two years and then it had been a minor assault with a deadly weapon charge, one of those threatening-with-a-loaded-gun deals where it doesn’t do a man any good to swear that he would never have fired it. The potential is there, and the law disapproves the potential. As I remembered it, Art Fuller had gone up for something like five years, and this then would be parole. I couldn’t recall Art Fuller as the escape-from-Sing Sing type.

  “Hello, Mr. Gibson,” Art Fuller said.

  “For a moment there I thought you were being unfriendly, Art,” Gibby said.

  Fuller worked hard on a smile. He was a nice-looking lad and I found myself thinking that it was a pity he couldn’t make a go of the smile. It just didn’t come off.

  “We’ve never exactly been pals, have we?” he said. He said it ruefully, is though he were making himself face the grim truth. It wasn’t bitter or resentful. It just had some pain in it.

  “Conditions were against it,” Gibby said. “Isn’t it different now? That’s all in the past. You’re out now.”

  “Parole?” Fuller said. “Out on parole. It’s something like being out on a leash, Mr. Gibson.”

  Gibby asked, “Got a job?”

  Fuller nodded. “A good job—draftsman,” he said. He named one of the better firms of architects. It was an outfit that was well known for its office buildings and other business structures.

  Gibby grinned. “Upper class,” he said.

  “They treat me well,” Fuller told him.

  “I’m glad to hear that. You been at this party?”

  “What party?”

  “Big party here,” Gibby said. “Down in the ballroom, all over this floor.”

  “Yes,” Fuller said. “I noticed. I figure I have the wrong floor.”

  “What floor do you want?”

  “I don’t know. I was just going down to the desk to find out.”

  “How come you don’t know?”

  Fuller looked down at his feet. “It’s kind of a snafu, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “You see, this fellow I used to know, he called me and said he was in town for the night, maybe I could come down to his hotel and we could talk about old times a little. I said sure, and he tells me it’s the Hotel Butterfield, Room 509. I got up here and I saw right off I got it wrong. I was going down to the desk to ask what the right room number is.”

  The elevator had come up and the boy was waiting with the door open. Gibby took Art Fuller’s arm. “We were just going down there ourselves,” he said. “We can all go down together.”

  “Sure,” Fuller said. “Sure. That’s fine.”

  “What did you say your friend’s name was?” Gibby asked, as we were entering the elevator.

  “I didn’t say,” Fuller answered.

  “Secret?” Gibby asked.

  “No secret,” Fuller murmured. “As long as you’re on that leash you don’t have secrets. The fellow’s name is Jackson.”

  We were down to the lobby. We got out and started toward the desk.

  “It’s a better name than Smith,” Gibby said. “What’s his first name?”

  “This is going to sound funny,” Fuller said apologetically. “The fact is I don’t know. We always called him Jack. Jack Jackson, but that wasn’t his name. Jack was just short for the Jackson part of it. I never did know what his real name was.”

  “Didn’t know him well?”

  “In the army. Used to see him around. You know how that was.”

  “I know,” Gibby said. “Where does he live when he isn’t spending a night here?”

  “I don’t exactly know that either. Some place out West—Omaha, Kansas City, one of those places. I remember he was always talking about the steaks you could get in his town. It was one of those stockyards places. I don’t remember which, if I ever did know.”

  “He mu
st remember you pretty well, calling you when he comes to town,” Gibby remarked.

  “Everybody remembers New York,” Fuller said. “You don’t get New York confused in your mind with any other place, and my name, too. They didn’t call me Full Fuller. They called me Art. He’d know my name. Jack Jackson, you don’t know what it would be.”

  “Yes,” said Gibby. “I can see that.”

  We were at the desk, and we waited while Fuller talked to the clerk. He asked for Mr. Jackson’s room number. The clerk went to look it up. He was back quickly. They had no Mr. Jackson registered.

  Shrugging, Fuller turned away from the desk. “I guess that tears it,” he said. “I thought I had the room number wrong, but it looks as though I did better than that. I seem to have the hotel wrong, and I was sure he said the Butterfield.”

  Gibby took his arm and drew him away from the desk. “I was hoping they’d have a Jack Jackson,” he said. “There would have been questions anyhow, the way things are, but it would have helped some if there had been a Jack Jackson. The way I remembered you, Art, you were an intelligent boy. You were all right. The breaks had gone against you, and you had lost your head, but it wasn’t much more than that. I would have sworn you were going to be all right. I would have sworn you’d have too much sense to try to slip your leash.”

  The lad’s face was worse than white. It had gone grayish. I had to force myself to look at him. Gibby and Brady weren’t having it any easier.

  “Look,” Fuller said. “I got the wrong hotel. Anybody could have done that. What’s so terribly wrong about that?”

  “What’s so terribly wrong about going into a bar for a beer?” Gibby said. “The best people do it all the time, but you can’t do it. For you it’s off limits.”

  Fuller shook his head. “I know that,” he said. “I know the rules. I’ve been watching them, every one of them. I haven’t been off base once.”

  “And then you go into the wrong hotel,” Gibby said.

  “There’s nothing in the rules about that.”

  “Maybe not, except that you got the wrong floor, too.”