Gibby laughed. “Bring me up to date on nature, Mac,” he said.
I handed him a theory that was very much like his own but with one important difference. The way I made it, it would be no business of ours how Rose Salvaggi had spent the evening of the Bank Club dinner dance.
“We can assume she did have a date,” I said. “A girl wouldn’t come to an affair like that without a date; and, as you say, she is quite pretty enough so that she shouldn’t have had any trouble on that score. She leaves her date for a couple of moments and runs foul of Ellerman. He locks her up with the rest of the girls, and he keeps her that way for quite a while. Let’s say her date gets tired of waiting. He gets sore and takes off. When we turn her loose, she looks for him. She looks and she looks and she can’t find him. She doesn’t want to go to the checkroom and say that her date went off without her and he has her coat check. She starts home without her coat.”
“What kind of a lad would play a dirty trick like that on a sweet and pretty girl called Rose?” Gibby asked.
I shrugged that question off. “Many’s the pretty girl,” I said, “who’s made the mistake of falling for some short-tempered, irascible lug who, under the circumstances, would pull just such a trick on her.”
Gibby nodded. “You bring up another interesting possibility,” he said. “Her date was some short-tempered, irascible lug. He might be sufficiently short-tempered, sufficiently irascible, and sufficiently a lug to put altogether the wrong interpretation on her girlish enthusiasm for the boss man. Did you mean to suggest the possibility of a crime of passion, Mac?”
“Nuts,” I said. “Now you are reaching for it—way out into left field.”
“Perhaps,” Gibby said. “But just so we’ll sleep better, before we call it a night, we’ll make one small check on these theories of ours. We’ll take a look at the stuff the boys found in Homer G. Coleman’s pockets. Maybe we’ll find some checkroom tickets.”
We did make this check of Gibby’s, but this was one time when he was quite wrong. What we found contributed nothing to our sleeping better. There had been a checkroom ticket, only one, and the boys had taken care of that. They had presented it to the Butterfield checkroom and had been given for it one black Chesterfield overcoat and one black Homburg hat, both the property of the late Homer G. Coleman. They furnished us a complete catalogue of the contents of the Coleman pockets and, if Gibby was disappointed at the absence from the list of any second checkroom ticket, he didn’t dwell on it. There was another omission from the list that caught his attention and he concentrated on that.
Fiveborough National’s late senior v. p. had been carrying all the things he might have been expected to be carrying, with one notable exception. Gibby pounced on the exception. He hunted up the man who had made up the list and he questioned him closely on it. They went over the catalogue item by item—handkerchiefs, cigarette case, cigarette lighter, billfold, contents of billfold, checkroom ticket, watch, and watch chain; but no keys. The man was most definite. His list was accurate and complete. There had been no mistake, no omission. There had been on Homer G. Coleman’s body no keys. Nobody had taken special notice of the fact until Gibby had pounced upon it, but that didn’t change anything. There were no keys.
“Maybe he lost them,” I suggested sleepily.
Gibby grinned at me. “You think he was having a bad night,” he said. “First he lost his keys and then he was murdered.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think we better get over to his place, just on the chance that it was the other way around.”
I yawned. “What other way around?” I asked, not carrying too much.
“That he was murdered,” Gibby said, “and then lost his keys.”
I stopped yawning and tried to take that in. “Murdered for his keys?” I asked.
“Something like that,” Gibby said. “We’re going around to his place to see.”
We went. It didn’t occur to me to question our going. I didn’t think to ask how we proposed to get in without keys. If I thought about it at all, I suppose I assumed that there would be a servant who would unlock the door or, failing that, an apartment house superintendent who would have a master key.
It was a Murray Hill address, to the east of Madison Avenue, and when we drew up in front of it, I was a bit nonplussed. I’d had it fixed in my mind that it would be an apartment. That, after all, is the normal expectation on Manhattan Island, and the man’s secretary had told us that Homer G. Coleman was unmarried. One would assume something small in the way of a bachelor’s apartment.
The address, however, was not an apartment building. It was a private-dwelling house, something small in the way of a house, but nonetheless a house. Even for this Old World corner of the city, the house had a notably Old World look. There were only two stories of it, two stories and a basement, and taller buildings flanked it on both sides. A little flight of steps led up to a handsomely fanlighted front door, and at the second story an elaborately scrolled wrought-iron balcony ran across the windows. The little house was completely dark.
We went up the steps, and Gibby rang the doorbell. Nothing happened. He waited a decent interval and rang again. After another interval he put his finger on the bell and kept it there. He had no response.
“Coleman lived alone,” I said. “Bachelors often do.”
“Senior vice-presidents of Fiveborough National don’t make their own beds,” Gibby growled, leaning on the bell. “There should be a servant.”
“A maid or a man who comes in by the day,” I suggested. “Doesn’t sleep here.”
Gibby nodded. He backed down the steps and looked up. “Even though all the windows are closed,” he said thoughtfully, “upstairs windows are left unlocked a lot of the time.
I had a premonition. “What are you planning to do?” I asked.
He came back up the steps to the front door where I was waiting. “From here,” he said, “if you give me a leg up, I can catch the balcony railing and pull myself up there.”
“And then what?”
“If there’s an unlocked window, we’re in.”
“You’re in,” I said.
“I’ll come down and open the door for you,” he promised.
“Thank you very much,” I said without any enthusiasm. “I was going to suggest some more official method.”
“Don’t be stuffy,” Gibby said. “We may be too late already.”
“Too late for what?” I asked.
“Those stolen keys might just be our entry into cracking this case,” Gibby explained patiently. “We may already be too late to get any good out of them. Give me a leg up.”
I would have argued some more but I didn’t like the way Gibby’s eye was measuring the distance from the steps to the wrought-iron railing of that upstairs balcony. I could see that he already had it in mind that if I wouldn’t help, he would try doing it without help. I knew Gibby. If it had been necessary he would have jumped for it. My instructions were to keep him as legal as possible. The Old Man had never told me that I was to let Gibby break his neck. The Old Man is fond of Gibby, even though our boy is often a sore trial to him. I gave Gibby a leg up. He made the railing easily and, standing on my shoulders, he took a grip on the top of it. In a moment he had pulled himself up and over and was standing on the balcony.
I backed down the steps to the street and watched him from there. He was trying the windows. He tugged for a moment and a window came up. He stooped and stepped through it. I watched him shut it behind him.
When Gibby had first remarked it, I had been forced to confess that the absence of any keys from the inventory of the contents of the late Mr. Coleman’s pockets was extremely odd. Now it seemed even more so. It did suggest murder and robbery; but try as I might to make some sense of the suggestion, I could find none. It was impossible to assume that anyone would murder the man just to steal his keys. It was contrary to all known patterns of crime. Burglars don’t go to such fantastic le
ngths, and the ease with which Gibby had just climbed to the balcony and gone in one of the second-story windows made the lengths seem more than ever fantastic. I gave it up and just waited for Gibby to open the door.
I took to wondering what might be taking him so long and I looked at my watch. The dial showed just two-thirty, but since I hadn’t looked at it when Gibby had gone in that upstairs window, I had no way of knowing how long he had been. I was telling myself that it was my nerves, that in this sort of thing one’s judgment of the passing of time went completely off, when the door did open. A draft of warm air came at me from the inkily dark hall, and I welcomed it. It reminded me that I had been miserably cold out on those front steps. I hurried into the warm house.
I suppose it was the way we were coming into that house and the fact that Gibby had not switched on any lights as he had come through from upstairs that worked on my imagination to give me the feeling that we were embarked on some exceedingly stealthy operation. I do know that I tiptoed in; and, when I was inside, I whispered.
“You took long enough,” I grumbled. “Can’t we have some lights around here?”
Gibby didn’t answer. I thought I heard his breathing somewhere quite close to me, but I couldn’t locate it exactly. Then I heard the front door click shut at my back and that did locate the breathing for me. He would be behind me now. He had pulled the door shut after me. I assumed that he hadn’t heard my question. It is difficult to hear whispering unless it is directed straight at one’s ear. I was about to turn and whisper to him again. I couldn’t see a thing. Out on the steps it hadn’t been as bright as day, but there was a street light out there and it did give a considerable amount of illumination. My eyes were taking time to adjust to the almost total darkness of that hall.
Just as I was turning, it hit me. I remember it distinctly, the hard blow that struck more on my neck than on the back of my head. I even remember thinking that it was lucky it hadn’t been a little higher, that this way my turned-up coat collar was cushioning it a bit. A fountain of nausea sprayed up through me, and I concentrated hard on tucking my head even deeper into the protection of my coat collar. I was thinking that there might be a second blow and that it might be better aimed. After that thought I didn’t have another for a while. I was out cold.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE AWAKENING was not pleasant. If your judgments of the resiliency of the human body should be based on the capacity of radio and television sleuths for the sopping up of physical punishment, you are going to have Gibby and me set down as a couple of pantywaists; but that can’t be helped. When a blow on the head has been administered to us by the well-known blunt instrument, we go down and we stay down for a while. When we do get up, we get up with all the ills that flesh, thusly abused, is heir to. We’re dizzy. We’re shaky in the knees. Our heads ache. We see spots before the eyes. We are not full of eagerness for another quick whack on the cranium. We are not more than ever full of the good old fight.
We have never pretended to be more than men. Our bottoms are completely human bottoms, not contrivances of steel springs to bounce us back into the fray. We leave it to those supersleuths of the airwaves to say: “My strength is as the strength of ten because my skull’s been freshly fractured.” However mild our concussions, they tend to make our dispositions even milder.
I know that I came out of it that night with a disposition as mild as May. I also recall that Gibby, who ordinarily is the more truculent of the two of us, was that night several things, none of which was truculent. He was unsteady. He was confused. He was disgusted. He was worried. He was troubled, but he was a man of peace.
The first I can recall, he was speaking to me and he was saying something about blood. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I didn’t want to make any sort of effort. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to be allowed to drop back into that lovely, dark unconsciousness. I saw only one alternative, and that was being sick to my stomach, and I was telling myself that only a fool would open his eyes for that.
Gibby spoke to me again. “Have you been bleeding, boy?” he asked. I was focusing enough now to recognize that it was a question.
I didn’t know the answer and I wanted to tell him to shut up and not bother me with it. I got to feeling definitely sorry for myself. How was I to know whether I had been bleeding or not? If he wanted to know, why didn’t he look and see?
I forced my eyes open and promptly shut them again. I hadn’t seen much past the spots and what I had seen I didn’t even want to try to begin understanding. I had seen Gibby. I had seen him fuzzily; but, even in the fuzz, I had had a distinct impression that he had been swaying. Of course, everything was swinging in a wide arc, and he was swinging, too; but, as it seemed to me, he did have another motion all his own. Everything was swinging. Only Gibby swayed as well.
I also had the distinct impression that he held wadded up in his hand some sort of bloodstained rag. There was a red haze over everything. When I had my eyes shut I seemed to be seeing the red haze inside my head, but I was certain that the rag in Gibby’s hand had been rather specially red. I opened my eyes and looked again.
“If you’ve been mopping blood off me,” I mumbled, “then I have been bleeding.”
Gibby scowled. “I haven’t been mopping you,” he said. “I haven’t been mopping anybody. I found this.”
I let my eyes close again. “The hell with it,” I told him. “Throw it away. I’m not feeling at all well.”
I heard Gibby move around the place for a moment or two, and then there was a noise that sounded altogether too much like the roaring in my ears. It took me a little time, but I got it separated and I figured it out. It was the sound of dialing, and then I could hear Gibby on the telephone. I listened with only mild interest. He wanted policemen and he wanted a doctor. By the time he had finished at the telephone, I had my eyes open again and I was looking around at things.
We were in a little hall. There was a narrow flight of stairs running up to the second floor and there was the table with the telephone on it and a chair. Gibby was in the chair. I was on the floor, and right beside me was an average-size silver candlestick. It had blood on it, and, when I studied it, I noticed a couple of dark hairs clinging to it.
I was now aware of the soreness at the back of my head and neck. I put a hand back there and felt. The soreness was no delusion. There was a lump, and the whole area was tender to the touch. It was also a bit wet. I took my hand away and looked at my fingers. No blood on them. I had just been feeling the sweat in my hair.
I looked at Gibby. He was still holding that red-stained rag and he kept looking fixedly at the thing in his hand. I could see it was worrying him. I looked at his face. Have you ever been at a party where somebody has spilled a drink into a full ash tray? Gibby’s face looked like that.
“You look terrible,” I said.
He managed a grin. “I look like a guy who’s just gotten up off the floor after he’s been creased with a candlestick,” he said. “Wait till you try to get up. You’ll feel the way I look.”
“I feel that way now,” I said. Then I did try to scramble to my feet and I felt worse. I felt as though I had no bones in me from the knees on down. “I see what you mean,” I groaned.
“Sit down,” Gibby advised. “Don’t try to do it all at once.”
There was a second chair. I staggered to it and took it.
“I haven’t been bleeding,” I said. “Have you?”
“No,” Gibby murmured. “I haven’t.”
“There’s somebody’s blood on the candlestick,” I said.
“And somebody was mopped at with this handkerchief,” Gibby added. “Whose blood?”
“Let him worry,” I suggested. “We have troubles of our own. Just what did happen after you opened the door for me?”
“I didn’t,” Gibby said. “I never got that far.”
“Somebody did.”
“Character with candlestick. Charact
er had a busy night of it, worked the candlestick overtime—me, you, and X. X bled.”
“Poor X. A man could be killed with a candlestick like that. Do you suppose X is somewhere around here dead?”
“Do you feel up to looking for him?” Gibby asked.
“No,” I said promptly. I wasn’t certain of much just then, but of that I was completely certain.
“Nor I,” Gibby said, and he pulled himself to his feet. “If X is dead,” he moaned, “he can wait, but if he’s dying or needs help…”
He left it dangling, but I knew what he meant. I struggled to my feet and prepared to do my duty. It was no good talking about how awful I felt because I could see that Gibby felt no better. We dragged around the place together, turning up the lights as we went. There were two rooms on that floor. They opened one to the other and each opened to the little hall. There were also the stairs going up to the second story and another flight down to the English basement. We ignored the stairs just then and worked on the floor where we were. That took enough effort. The front room was rather a formal job. You might call it a living room, but it was something more elegant than that, something like a small drawing room. The room at the back was a study or library or den. Call it what you will, it was the room in which the late Homer G. Coleman had evidently done his living. It was a snug room and a comfortable one, a room where a man would look right and feel right, smoking a pipe. There were bookshelves and books, an efficient-looking fireplace, good reading lamps, good easy chairs, a filing cabinet, a desk.
Those easy chairs got me. I tried not to think of how good it would be to drop into one of them and shut my eyes again and let X worry about himself. I was so preoccupied with being stern with myself that Gibby had to speak to me twice before I even heard him. It was at the door to this back room that he had come upon the bloodstained handkerchief. I tore my gaze away from the easy chairs and looked around the room.
“Nobody in here,” I said.
Gibby wandered over to the desk and stood swaying beside it.
The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends Page 6
