The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  “What did you have Fuller tabbed for? Was he going to be X or is he the bird that conked us?”

  Gibby yawned. “One or the other,” he said. “I don’t like it when these things get overpopulated. We seem to have Fuller and the squirt that lost his pants and the Salvaggi girl and now two more people up at the house. It would help if we could narrow the field down a little.”

  “Don’t forget all those babes who took the squirt’s pants,” I said. It he wanted to talk absurdities, I could always match him.

  “Them,” he groaned, “I’ll never forget.”

  “What did Fuller’s tail have to say?” I asked.

  “Fuller went straight home when he was turned loose. He went into the house and he hasn’t come out since.”

  “Disappointing, isn’t it?”

  Gibby made an effort. “Reassuring,” he said. “If it had been Fuller up in Coleman’s house, that would have meant that it does us no good at all to put a tail on a guy. It’s nice to know that our detectives are that reliable. If we’re having a man watched, we can take our minds off him.”

  “Right now,” I said, “my mind’s off everything.”

  “Good idea,” Gibby said.

  He closed his eyes and went to sleep. I’d been way ahead of him on that. I went back to it. The next time we woke it was because our cop woke us, and that time we were out in front of my place. He wanted to go up with us and help us get to bed, but we told him we could manage and we did.

  Bed was wonderful, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it. It wasn’t even light when Gibby had me up out of it. My head was clear enough when he woke me. It still ached some but not badly, and I could hardly pretend that I was any the worse for my encounter with the candlestick the night before. I was much the worse for want of sleep, but Gibby dismissed that as sloth and would have none of it. It was seven o’clock and time we were up and doing.

  “Up and doing what?” I asked.

  “Our job,” said Gibby smugly.

  “My job,” I said, “can wait till daylight.”

  “Okay,” said Gibby. “I’ll see you at the office when I get there.”

  That wasn’t at all what I meant. I sat up. “Where are you going at this ungodly hour?” I asked.

  “Fiveborough National, main office,” Gibby said.

  I laughed at him. “Nothing begins to happen in a bank at seven o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  “We have to get some clothes on and we’ll need some breakfast and we have to get down there. It will be after seven then.”

  “Still too early.”

  “Not for what we want.”

  “What do we want? Are we going to rob the place?”

  “We want a look at the office of the late v. p.,” Gibby said. “We want to see it before they have time to make any changes in it.”

  “Pictures on his office desk?”

  Gibby shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been visualizing his missing key ring. I think it would have on it his house key, the keys to his desk and filing cabinet at home, and also the keys to his office desk and such.”

  “Plus the key to his car if any,” I added, “and his luggage keys, including the key to the suitcase that wore out on a trip five years ago and was thrown out last year when they cleared out the attic. You can visualize almost anything on a missing key ring.”

  Gibby didn’t argue that. Instead he urged me to take a more practical view of the thing. We did have emerging from the evidence some sort of pattern of events and motives. It was quite true that there might be further reaches to this pattern, obscure ramifications, to which we held no clue; but that did not mean that we were any the less obliged to follow out the pattern as far as we could project it.

  While we dressed and breakfasted Gibby projected. It was good projecting, and by the time we hit the main office of Fiveborough National at just a minute or two after eight, he did have me convinced that there was some point in our expedition. This line of investigation we were following had started with the realization that the body of Homer G. Coleman had had on it all the personal possessions a man might be expected to carry, all with the exception of his keys.

  It had, of course, been quite possible that just that evening Mr. Coleman had gone off without his keys, had absent-mindedly left them on his bedroom dresser at home or on his desk at the office; but it had also been possible that Mr. Coleman’s murderer had taken those keys. On the hunch that the second possibility would bring us to pay dirt we had gone up to the murdered man’s house where we had struck pay dirt of sorts. Now we could have a look at the other place where we could readily assume the late Mr. Coleman’s keys might be useful—in his office.

  The granite pile on William Street had not yet opened for the day’s business, but we found an entrance with a guard on it. The guard seemed to think we should come back later, but once we had identified ourselves, that was no trouble at all. Bank guards almost invariably are retired members of the armed forces or retired cops. This one happened to be a retired cop. Our credentials looked like old times to him, and in no time at all he was expediting merrily. He did a bit of telephoning, and another guard turned up to guide us to the office of the senior v. p.

  This one was a retired sailor, and to him we were a new experience. He found us enormously interesting. He took us up to the tenth floor, and our footfalls echoed along an empty marble corridor as he led us past a line of offices. Halfway down the line he stopped and threw open an office door. Before us lay a large and handsome paneled room. The morning sunlight was gilding its broad windows and a thick shaft of the sunlight fell across the big mahogany desk and struck bright luster from the patent leather of the heel of a woman’s shoe. The heel projected from behind a corner of the desk.

  Gibby sprang forward and I went with him. The retired sailor sprang too. We had become an exciting experience. On the floor behind the desk lay Rose Salvaggi. She looked the complete secretary in her neat dark blue suit and her white blouse, but flat on the carpeting of the handsome office with one of those black canvas straps tight around her throat, she looked even more like a fresh case of murder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MIRACULOUSLY she was not. It was a miracle that takes a bit of explaining, and feminine readers are likely to see it more quickly than a man would. She was breathing when we got to her and she wasn’t choked at all. The canvas strap was pulled as tight as it would go but, luckily for her, it was pulled tight not on her throat but on her necklace. That will sound like nonsense unless you are more up on your costume jewelry than I was.

  The necklace was a hoop of some gold-plated stuff. It wasn’t made in links the way those things are usually made. This was a rigid job, a circlet of metal made in two pieces joined by a hinge. A gal just opens the thing up, puts it around her throat, closes it, and snaps the catch shut; and there she is with a solid, metal ring around her throat. If you can’t picture it, ask some girl you know. She may even own one.

  In any event, she was wearing this necklace and, although the people who make those things intend them to be ornamental, this one she had on that morning couldn’t have been more useful. It had served her as protective armor against garroting. Her throat wasn’t even marked.

  The guard brought her some water, and she came to without any difficulty. She had merely fainted; and, when we took the black strap off and showed it to her, I thought she was going to faint again. The guard gave her some more of the water, and she pulled herself together. Gibby questioned her, and I stood by and watched. She rather surprised me. She was calm. I thought almost too calm. During the night I had felt strongly that Gibby had been reaching at random to work up any suspicions he had of her.

  Now I was swinging completely over to the other side. I found myself believing not a single word she said. I found myself taking on every one of Gibby’s doubts of the girl and rapidly spawning an extensive set of my own. Taken just by itself, the story she told us was reasonable enough. To the bank
guard who was with us it must have seemed completely reasonable since it was evident that word had not yet come to him of the death of Homer G. Coleman.

  He had been on the night shift and had not heard the radio news reports nor seen a morning paper. That was understandable. Trying to give the girl the benefit of every doubt, I told myself that she might be one of the very few who dressed and breakfasted without a radio obbligato, that she might make the long trip by subway from Queens without a morning paper. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t make it seem any more than only barely possible and even in such bare possibility I couldn’t for one moment believe. In the first place, this had obviously not been any ordinary morning for her. She had had a rather difficult time with the police the night before. Ostensibly she could have attributed all that police activity in which she had been involved, however mistakenly, to nothing more than the silly business of Albert Gleason’s pants.

  She seemed an intelligent girl. A girl doesn’t get to be private secretary to a senior v. p. at Fiveborough National if she is a complete dim-wit, and I was convinced that only a complete dim-wit could have believed that so many cops, so much activity, could have been occasioned by nothing more than the Gleason britches. A girl with any sense at all would necessarily have told herself that there must have been more to it than the britches. A girl with any sense at all would have been curious. She would have switched on her radio for the morning news reports just on the chance that there would be some story about the strange happenings at the Hotel Butterfield the evening before. She would have picked up a newspaper on her way in to the office and looked for the story.

  I couldn’t get around it. That would have been normal behavior, I tried to tell myself that we could accuse her of nothing worse than a singular lack of curiosity. It wouldn’t work. I was in my mind accusing her of worse, of much worse. I had had a glimpse of the papers, and the scare headlines that didn’t read “MURDER AT THE HOTEL BUTTERFIELD” did read “FIVEBOROUGH NATIONAL VICE-PRESIDENT SLAIN.” She couldn’t possibly have missed those headlines. She had necessarily seen them a hundred times over in the course of her subway ride in from Queens.

  Even a dim-wit could not have been so little curious that she wouldn’t have picked up a paper and read the story, but here she was behaving as though she expected her boss to come in at any moment and start the business day, as though she had no grisly associations with the black canvas strap beyond the obvious one that the thing had been around her own throat.

  This girl was an extraordinarily cold specimen. It was obvious that she was putting on an act. Although she answered Gibby’s every question readily enough, I didn’t believe a single one of her answers. Gibby asked her what she had been doing in the office so early, and she explained that it was her custom to come in early. She liked to have the mail opened and sorted for Mr. Coleman before he arrived in the morning, and she found that there were many matters of office routine she could clear from her desk in the morning hours, matters that would be more difficult to handle once the day’s business had begun. She also explained that by coming in early she missed the worst of the subway rush hour.

  “I was a little earlier than usual today,” she said, “but I always come in a little specially early the day after an office party.”

  “Why?” Gibby asked.

  “It has been my experience,” she said a touch primly, “that the day after a party we have many absentees and many people late and many of those who are here are not operating at full efficiency. It is always a difficult day, and I like to have as much done as possible by the time Mr. Coleman comes in, because then I am completely free to help him with the special problems that come up.”

  “So you were earlier than ever today,” Gibby said.

  “Not earlier than other days after parties,” she answered.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Ten minutes of eight.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “I came in and I went to the closet and put away my hat and hung up my coat. I came out of the closet and went to my desk to set down my purse. I opened my purse to take out my keys, and somebody grabbed me from behind. The next thing I knew you were giving me water.”

  “Someone grabbed you from behind. Did you catch a glimpse of this someone?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Not hands, not anything?”

  “No. Something dark flashed before my eyes, and then I felt someone grab me. The something dark was the strap. I know that now.”

  “Then you wouldn’t even know if it was a man or a woman?”

  “A man.”

  “Did he speak?”

  “No.”

  “Then it was something you saw or felt that tells you it was a man?”

  “No. If it had been a woman, I would have noticed perfume.”

  “There are some women who don’t use it,” Gibby said. “You yourself don’t use much.”

  “As close as that I would notice even a little.”

  “Some women use none at all.”

  “They don’t smell of cigars.”

  “You did smell cigars?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Have you any idea of what someone might have wanted in here?”

  She shook her head. “There isn’t anything,” she said. “There isn’t anything anyone could possibly have wanted.”

  “But someone was here. Someone even tried to kill you.”

  She put her hand to her throat and adjusted her rigid necklace.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I can’t imagine why. It’s horrible. It’s frightening.”

  “You’d know it if there was anything missing here in your office?” Gibby asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would know it.”

  “Is anything missing?”

  She looked around the office, and that did seem dim-witted. It was so obvious that there was nothing anyone would take, much less try to kill for.

  “No,” she said, “nothing.”

  “You had better look in Mr. Coleman’s office,” Gibby suggested. She nodded and crossed the room and opened a door to an adjoining office. It was larger than hers and even more handsomely appointed. We went in and she looked about.

  “Nothing missing here,” she said.

  “Stuff in his files or in his desk,” Gibby murmured.

  “No,” she said, “only he and I have keys to the files or the desks. Nobody could get at those.”

  “Good,” Gibby said. “Let’s go back a bit. Almost the last thing you remember you had opened your purse to take out your keys. Did you take them out?”

  “I might have. I remember I did have my hand on them.”

  “What did you want them for?”

  “To unlock my desk. I keep my purse in my desk. I was going to put it in there and then I would have unlocked the files, mine and Mr. Coleman’s.”

  She had carried her purse with her when we went into Coleman’s office. Gibby reached for it. “Let’s see if you do have your keys there,” he said.

  She didn’t give him the purse. She opened it and looked through it herself. She went white. “No,” she said. “They’re not here.”

  She hurried back to her own office and searched frantically. She looked on her desk. She searched the floor. She opened the closet door and searched the closet. She went through the pockets of her coat and through the pockets of her suit. She dropped to all fours and looked under the desk. She seemed genuinely distraught.

  “Stupid of me,” she said, coming out from under the desk. “I’ve left my keys home. I must have forgotten to change them from my other purse.”

  She returned to the closet, and before the mirror fixed to the inside of the closet door she started putting on her hat.

  “Where are you going?” Gibby asked.

  “I’ll have to go home again for my keys,” she said. “I’ll leave Mr. Coleman a note in case he comes in before I get back. I can’t do a thing without my keys.”

 
“He’ll have his,” Gibby reminded her. “Hadn’t you better wait for him?”

  “No,” she said. “I’d better go home and get mine.”

  “Yes, of course,” Gibby said. “He wouldn’t have the keys to your desk or your files, and you’ll need those.”

  “He has all the keys,” she said, “but he may not be in until late.”

  “You don’t really think you’ll find yours at home, do you?” Gibby asked.

  “There’s no other place they can be. They’re not here.”

  “You remembered you had your hands on them just before you blacked out,” Gibby reminded her.

  She changed color; but, biting her lip, she made a recovery.

  “I must have been mistaken,” she said, “because they’re not here.”

  “Suppose you weren’t mistaken,” Gibby said. “Suppose the keys were what the man was after. Suppose he tried to murder you for those keys.”

  She shook her head. “That’s impossible,” she said. “I must have been mistaken. We have nothing here, nothing but bank records and correspondence, nothing anybody could want.”

  “Was it a key ring?” Gibby asked.

  “Yes.” She was shrugging into her coat.

  “Any other keys on it?”

  “Personal keys. They aren’t important.”

  “Do you remember what they were?”

  “The latchkey to my apartment and the key to the drawers of my dressing table at home.”

  She had her coat on and we escorted her out of the office. She was forgetting to leave that note for her boss. Gibby reminded her. She changed color again, but she went back and scratched a note on the memo pad on the desk in Coleman’s office. I looked at the cigar humidor that was part of the desk furnishings. We were out of the building before she realized that we were going with her. Gibby had her by the arm and on the street she made as if to draw her arm away.

  “Thanks for everything,” she said. “You always seem to turn up just in time to rescue me. I go to the subway.”

  Gibby kept his hold on her arm. “That’s all right,” he said. “We have the car. We’ll drive you out.”