The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  “It’s a good thing he was a bachelor,” he said.

  I looked at him sharply. It struck me that the crack he had taken could have been worse than mine had been. I wasn’t feeling up to much but I was reasonably certain that my mind wasn’t wandering. I wondered about his.

  “It’s a good thing who was a bachelor?” I asked, riding along with it.

  “Homer G. Coleman,” said Gibby.

  “He’s dead,” I told him, spelling it out. “We have his body downtown. He couldn’t have been clipped with a candlestick. It couldn’t be his blood, and anyhow marital status hasn’t anything to do with it.”

  “Wives,” Gibby declared, “do not tolerate dust. Come and see.”

  I went over to the desk. I was swaying some myself. I put my hand out. It seemed a good idea to steady myself against the desk. Gibby grabbed my hand. We swayed together. We weren’t going to touch that desk, not either of us. Gibby pointed and I looked. It wasn’t a cluttered desk. There was a blotter on it and one of those desk fountain pen sets, and a neat humidor for cigars. There was also a picture, a picture in a good leather frame. Otherwise there was nothing but dust, a thin film of dust all over the polished wood of the desk top.

  The picture I recognized at a glance. It was Nicholas Cooper Lansing, president of Fiveborough National, and it was one of those terrific camera jobs that come out of the studios of photographers who specialize in men because they know how to make them come out more masculine than life, more important than life, and more impressive than life.

  Obviously Gibby had also recognized the Fiveborough National president at a glance. He was more interested in the film of dust and specifically in an area where there was no dust. It was really two areas. It was as though somebody had run a fingertip across the desk top in an absolutely straight line for a distance of about ten inches and then another fingertip, smaller than the first, in another straight line absolutely parallel to the first for a distance of about four inches. The two lines were some three inches apart; and, if you had drawn a perpendicular through the center point of one, you would have precisely bisected the other.

  I don’t know that I would have figured it out so quickly if the Lansing picture hadn’t been on the desk; but, as it stood, it fairly screamed at me. There had been a second leather picture frame standing on that desk. The lines were absolutely right for it. I could see that even before Gibby lifted the Lansing picture off the desk to demonstrate.

  “A picture,” I said, “and it’s gone.”

  “Looks like it,” Gibby said.

  “Somebody kills Coleman and steals his keys. The killer comes up here to swipe a picture from Coleman’s desk. We interrupt him and he blips both of us with a candlestick and makes off with the picture. Why?”

  “Don’t forget Mr. X,” Gibby reminded me.

  I dismissed Mr. X. “A night watchman,” I suggested, “or a servant. We rang the bell, expecting a servant. Servants who’ve been knocked cold with candlesticks don’t answer bells.”

  It was as though by speaking of it I had brought it on. A bell shrilled through the little house. I jumped.

  “Right,” Gibby said, “and it leaves it up to us to answer this one.” He weaved away from the desk. I wanted to sit down, but I was proud or something. I weaved along with him. It may have been the state I was in, but I seem to remember the bell as being unnaturally loud, unnaturally insistent. Police, it seems to me, have their own way with bells. The ring has a peculiarly imperious quality when it is the finger of a cop that is pressing the button.

  We made our way to the door and opened it. The precinct boys flocked in, and they did have a doctor with them. He looked us over and he asked us questions. From what Gibby told that doctor I drew my first clear and coherent notions of just what had happened to us in the late Mr. Coleman’s house. When Gibby had gone in the balcony window, he had crossed a bedroom and come out in the upstairs hall. He hadn’t stopped to investigate anything. I was waiting outside on the doorstep, and the first move was to trot downstairs and open the door for me.

  He had made it down the stairs. He could see me, as the street light silhouetted me against the glass door panel. He had taken one step toward the front door, and, before he’d started the second, he had been neatly blipped behind the ear.

  “It didn’t feel much more than a tap,” he said. “A hard tap, but it didn’t feel hard enough to put me out. I can even remember that my knees folded and on the way down I was thinking it was no way for them to behave.”

  The doctor felt around behind Gibby’s ear. “A light tap,” he said, “but very neatly placed, As far as I can see, it didn’t damage you any but it did put you out for a while.”

  “For about twenty minutes,” Gibby said. “I was on the floor when I came out of it, and it took me a minute or two to get things anchored. I just lay there a bit and I got around to recognizing floor and then what floor and then I remembered that Mac was outside and I had to let him in. I got up and started walking, but things were swinging on me badly and I walked the wrong way. I walked toward the back of the house. My hand hit a light switch, so I snapped the lights on. That straightened me around, but before I turned and started the other way I ran on the wet handkerchief with the blood on it. I figured somehow or other Mac had gotten in and he’d been mopping at me with the wet handkerchief.”

  The doctor interrupted. “You haven’t been bleeding at all,” he said. “The skin is unbroken.”

  “Yes,” Gibby said. “I found that out by feel and I couldn’t figure it at all. When I started back toward the door, I saw Mac. He was on the floor just inside the front door and he was out cold, too. That made me figure it could be his blood.”

  The doctor was looking me over. He didn’t seem to think the whack I had taken was quite so neat a job as Gibby’s had been. Mine had been the harder blow but clumsily aimed. I had my coat collar to thank for it, that I had come out of it without a serious head wound.

  “Your coat collar saved you,” he said. “It’s just luck that you’re no worse hurt than Mr. Gibson.”

  “That much luck we can use tonight,” Gibby said.

  “And I haven’t been bleeding either?” I said.

  The doctor shook his head. “Somebody,” he said, “didn’t have his coat collar turned up.”

  “X,” Gibby said.

  The police were all over the little house by then. Gibby caught one of them and suggested that they give special attention to trying to find X or traces of X or the remains of X.

  They turned up nothing. In fact, they drew such a complete blank that they began to look at us askance. There was a sergeant in charge, and he laid it on the line.

  “No sign of breaking and entering or anything like that anywhere, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “Nothing except the upstairs window, and you tell us we can ignore that one. It was you coming in that way.”

  “It was,” Gibby said.

  The sergeant nodded. “Then we haven’t got a single indication anybody else was in here,” he said flatly.

  “There wouldn’t be any indication,” Gibby told him. “Mr. Coleman’s been murdered and somebody has his keys. You don’t break into a murdered man’s house when you have a key to let you in.”

  The sergeant scratched his head. “But we can’t find anything that looks like it was disturbed. You know how a place looks when there’s been a burglary.”

  Gibby swept that away. “What about us?” he asked. “Don’t we look as though we had been disturbed? What about the wet handkerchief I found and the bloodstains on it? What about the candlestick with blood and hair on it? We weren’t more than half conscious and we found those.”

  “Yeah,” the sergeant said grudgingly, “but there’s nothing else, nobody else around the place and nothing else.”

  “There’s a picture that was taken from the desk in the back room,” Gibby said.

  That was too much for the sergeant. He just gaped. I lined it out for him.

  “A picture in a
frame like the one that’s there now,” I explained. “You can see the marks in the dust where another frame just like it had been standing.”

  The sergeant went back to look. It didn’t help him much. He came back scratching his head.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The picture like you said, but the desk drawers, they’re all locked and the filing cabinet’s locked. All the locked-up stuff around here, it’s still locked. Nobody’s been trying to jimmy anything open or anything or working on locks or like that.”

  Gibby gave up on the sergeant. Our own men arrived, Brady and Ellerman, and he took it up with them. They were quicker at fitting it together. Since no keys at all had been found on the body of Homer G. Coleman, it could be assumed that it was not only the latch-key to his house that had been taken, but his whole key ring. We could accept the probability that our assailant had entered the house by unlocking the front door and that he had had ready access to any locked drawers or closets or files he had chosen to enter. The desk key, key to the files, all keys would naturally be on any ring that might have been removed from the person of the dead Mr. Coleman.

  The doctor was after us to go home and go to bed. He assured us that we had suffered no serious damage; but, nevertheless, he did advise rest. It is the standard medical answer to even the mildest of concussions. I saw eye to eye with him from the first. To me the very thought of bed was so sweetly poignant that it brought the tears to my eyes. Until Brady and Ellerman had turned up, however, Gibby was stubborn, but once he had watched them take over, he seemed grudgingly satisfied that he was leaving things in reasonably competent hands and he was notably less impatient in brushing the doctor off.

  We were on our way out to the car—and he had so far surrendered that he was even allowing a cop to come along to do the driving for us—when Brady came up with something. It held us there for a couple of minutes longer. We didn’t go back into the house because Brady’s discovery was not actually inside the house. It was down in the entrance to the English basement.

  You know how those entrances are laid out. It’s three steps down from the street into a tiny patch of paved courtyard. Then, under the steps that led up to the main front entrance, you have a doorway that is shut off with a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the gate you have a small cubicle of space under the stairs and a door into the basement hall.

  The precinct cops had been down to the basement and had found everything in order down there. Both the basement door and the wrought-iron gate had been locked on their snap locks, and all basement windows had been closed and locked. The dining room was in the basement, and an array of silver on the sideboard looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed. Behind the dining room was a butler’s pantry and the kitchen, and both were in apple-pie order.

  The precinct cops, however, had been looking for signs of burglary. On Gibby’s orders they had been looking for the body of X. They had found nothing. Brady had looked with a sharper eye and a greater receptivity for anything at all that might be significant.

  We went down to the little cubicle under the front steps to have a look at his discovery. It was there and there was no mistaking it; but, in justice to the precinct boys, I must say that it wasn’t anything that leaped to the eye. It was only a smudge of blood and in a place where I don’t know that I would have thought to look for smudges of blood. It was in that little space inside the wrought-iron gate under the stairs. It was on the stone directly opposite the basement door.

  There wasn’t much of it, just a smudge on the wall about thirty inches above the pavement. I was inclined to take it calmly, but it excited Gibby so much that for a bit there I was wondering whether the doctor mightn’t have been mistaken about Gibby’s tap on the head. I was afraid our boy might have been hurt worse than we knew.

  I had it all figured. It wasn’t X. It wasn’t the body of X. It wasn’t really anything we hadn’t already had. Since neither Gibby nor I had done any bleeding, everybody was ready to concede that the candlestick had been the instrument of three assaults, that there must be three victims, the two of us and one unknown. The candlestick alone was sufficient evidence for that. The wet, bloodstained handkerchief was corroborative evidence. This, as I saw it, was a further bit of corroboration, but no more than that. Gibby was acting as though it might be something that would set Long Island Sound on fire.

  I must confess at that moment I didn’t much care if it was. I wanted to get out of there. It was cold in that little basement areaway, and I was feeling far too wobbly to cope with the cold.

  “Yeah,” I said impatiently. “More evidence of X. We didn’t find him in the house, so we know that he had left the house. Now we know which way he went out.”

  Gibby was kneeling on the cold flags of the pavement and examining the smudge of blood. “X,” he said, “or the character with the candlestick. He could have had some of X’s blood on his hands and he might have wiped his hand against the stone when he came through here after blipping us.”

  “They both left the house,” I argued. “We don’t need this to tell us that.”

  Gibby let out a yip of joy. “X,” he said. “There’s a bit of hair here. He made it out to here and he rested here, sat on the pavement and rested his head against the wall while he gathered up his strength to get away.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Not a doubt of it, and what does that get us?”

  “It gets us not one, but two, people in here tonight who had no business being here,” Gibby said.

  I didn’t quite follow that. “Not counting ourselves,” I said.

  “Not counting ourselves. We have the character with the candlestick and we have X. X went all out on getting away from here after he had been conked.”

  That made very little sense to me. “Would you expect him to wait around to be conked again?” I asked. “A servant or a watchman. His head’s been cracked open with a heavy candlestick. He watches his chance and gets out of here. He’s in no shape to stay and battle anyone. What else can he do?”

  “Not a servant,” Gibby said. “It’s a six-room house. Dining room and kitchen in the basement. The two rooms we saw upstairs, two bedrooms on the second floor, and they are obviously the master bedroom and a guest room. No servants’ quarters. That means help comes in by the day, and help that comes by the day wouldn’t be in the house at night when the boss has been out for dinner and the evening.”

  “Might be,” I insisted. “We haven’t the slightest idea of what arrangement Coleman might have had with his help.”

  “Unlikely,” Gibby said.

  “What about a watchman?” I asked. “A lot of these streets have private watchmen.”

  Gibby asked the precinct cops about that. There was no private watchman on that street. I persisted in my theory of a servant.

  Gibby knocked it down. “A servant would have been to the police long since,” he said. “He would have gone straight to the police or he would have gone to a doctor. Either way, the precinct would have heard from him by now.”

  I wouldn’t let it be knocked down. “You’re assuming he’s thinking straight,” I said. “With his head cracked open he wouldn’t necessarily be thinking straight. He might have crawled home and fallen into bed and passed out. He might have fallen in a gutter and be lying there now.”

  “And,” Gibby added, “he might be hiding out and taking care of himself out of the first-aid book while he hopes that we don’t catch up with him.”

  We left it at that. He had his theory and I had mine; but the both of us had aching heads and wobbly knees, and there wasn’t much we could do about either theory just then. There was, in fact, nothing much we could do about anything until we’d had some sleep, since sleep is, after all, the only effective restorative for a man who has been blipped on the head.

  Reluctantly Gibby let himself be dragged away from that minor smear of blood on the wall of the basement entrance. The cop that took over the driving for us was a careful boy. I don’t know whether he had been briefed by the doctor
or he was just a lad who took his responsibilities seriously. In either event, he drove with the most extraordinary care and deliberation. He was treating us as though we were at death’s door or possibly as though we had already gone through the door and were riding in our funeral cortege.

  To me it didn’t matter much. Gibby was fretting about it, but after only a few blocks of our stately progress I dropped off to sleep. We had agreed that Gibby would spend what little there was left of the night at my place, and I slept in the comfortable expectation that that the cop could wake us when we got there.

  Nobody woke me. There was a light shining square on my face and that made me come awake. It was a street light. We were parked at the curb, and both Gibby and our cop-driver were out of the car. I blinked and looked around me. It was an unfamiliar street. This wasn’t my place and it wasn’t Gibby’s either. I know his street. It’s as familiar to me as is my own. Gibby and the cop were on the sidewalk, talking to a man. I was pulling myself together to climb out of the car when they came back and climbed in. I didn’t have to bestir myself.

  “What was that?” I asked sleepily.

  “Just stopped by on the way home,” Gibby said. “I thought it would be a good idea to check up.”

  I rather resented his being up to having ideas at all, whether good or bad, at that time and I was not displeased that he sounded as tired and dispirited as I felt.

  “Stop by where?” I asked.

  “Grove Street.”

  We were rolling along again, and if we had been a couple of bundles of loose eggs in the back seat, that cop couldn’t have been taking it more carefully. I watched the streets as we went along and I oriented myself. We were taking a lot of turns, and Grove Street explained that. We were going through the web of twisting and haphazard thoroughfares that makes up Greenwich Village. I recognized the solid rows of five-story houses that have been chopped up into small, Village apartments.

  “Check up on what?” I asked.

  “Art Fuller,” Gibby told me. “That was his tail we were talking to.”