The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  Gibby picked up the picture frames. They were both handsome jobs, one neatly simple in well-polished silver, the other a fine piece of dark leather. He had them in his hands when Rose came in leaning on the plump, pink arm of the super’s wife. That lady had paused on her way to fetch the master key. She had bound about her head a bright colored kerchief that set off her blond pinkness very well. It also concealed the hair curlers. Furthermore, she had changed from the Indian blanket to a black silk thing which she now clutched about her.

  “Did you find anyone here?” Rose whispered through numb lips.

  “Did you expect we would?” Gibby asked. “Who?”

  Her eyes fixed on the empty picture frames Gibby held in his hands. A trace of color came back into her lips.

  “There must have been someone,” she said. “Someone must have done this.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ROSE SALVAGGI that morning was a girl of very odd reactions. So far as I could see, after fainting on the threshold to her ransacked apartment, she had bounced back into a mood that wasn’t too far short of being joyous. She moved about in that unholy mess her burglar had left her and from the look of her you could have said she was a girl who had just made a round trip to hell and was happy as larks to be back home again.

  Riding out to Queens she had been hating us because Gibby had insisted that the theft of the keys from her purse must mean that her would-be killer had wanted to gain entrance to her apartment. She had scoffed at any such possibility. She had insisted that the keys hadn’t been stolen, that she had merely forgotten to transfer them from one purse to another.

  Now she did a complete about-face. Now it was she who pointed out that her door showed not a single mark on it, that no force had been used to open it, that it had obviously been opened with a key. Now it was she who called our attention to the drawers of the chest in her living room and the drawers of her bedroom dressing table. Those, too, had not been forced. They had been opened with the proper keys. Eagerly she told Gibby how right he had been, and you might have thought that she had been rooting for him to be right all along.

  Now she was completely on Gibby’s side, but two can play at that game. Gibby also switched over. She fastened on all the unforced locks, but Gibby took those in his stride. He was finding in the shambles his own little collection of items which he chose to fasten upon as significant. “You have this apartment alone?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Alone.”

  “Nobody sharing it with you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I was thinking maybe there might be some girl who stays here with you occasionally, somebody who has a key.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “You were so right. It’s just as you thought it would be. It’s the man who tried to kill me. He stole my keys.” The super’s wife, who had been tut-tutting over the wreckage, tutted no more tuts. Her jaw dropped and she left it that way, forgetting to close her mouth. She just stood there, all eyes and all ears.

  “I could be right again,” Gibby said.

  “You’ve been right all along,” Rose said quickly. “I have the only latchkey except for the super’s master key, and the super doesn’t have master keys for my bureau drawers. Nobody could have gotten into those this way if they hadn’t stolen my key ring.”

  Gibby nodded. “Quite,” he said. “I was suggesting you might have given a friend an extra latchkey. It never occurred to me that you could have given anyone keys to your drawers.”

  “Nobody has a latchkey,” Rose said firmly.

  “Except the man who stole your key ring,” Gibby reminded her.

  “Yes, him, of course,” she said quickly.

  The super’s wife gave voice to an inarticulate gurgle. We looked at her. Unaware that her mouth had been hanging open, she had begun to speak. Her jaw hadn’t been in position for it. She closed her mouth, and this time she made it.

  “Dearie,” she shrieked. “How awful. They want to do you just like they did that nice Mr. Coleman.”

  Rose stared at her. “Mr. Coleman?” she said. “What about Mr. Coleman?”

  “What about Mr. Coleman?” the super’s wife echoed. “Haven’t you heard the radio? Haven’t you seen the papers? I haven’t even gotten dressed yet, what with reading every word of it, seeing as how it was almost like I knew the poor man, him being your boss and all.”

  “Mr. Coleman in the papers?” Rose turned to us. “What is she talking about? What’s happened to Mr. Coleman?”

  “You heard her,” Gibby said gruffly. “They did him just as they tried to do you, even to stealing his keys. Mr. Coleman didn’t have your luck. He wasn’t wearing a necklace like yours.”

  The tears started in her eyes. She ignored them, and unchecked they rolled down her cheeks.

  “Mr. Coleman’s dead,” she said in a small, choked voice.

  “Mr. Coleman’s been murdered,” Gibby told her.

  “Last night,” she said. “It was last night. Even when I was asking for him, you didn’t tell me. It was Mr. Coleman. It wasn’t Albert Gleason at all. I understand now.”

  “That puts you one up on us,” Gibby said. “If you understand it, you had better explain it to us.”

  “I understand now why you bothered about me,” she said. “I understand how you knew how it was going to be here, why you insisted on coming with me. I understand why there were so many police—not for Albert, for Mr. Coleman.”

  Gibby sighed. “I was hoping you might be more understanding than that,” he said. “I was hoping that you might know enough of your late boss’s business to have some idea of who it might have been who would do a thing like that to him.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Nobody would do a thing like that to Mr. Coleman. He was everybody’s friend.”

  “We’ve had that before,” Gibby growled.

  “But he was,” she insisted.

  “All right,” Gibby said. “Let’s get back to you. When you started for the office this morning, how did you leave this place?”

  “As I always leave it. You don’t think it was like this?”

  She noticed her tears, and she wiped them away. She dried her eyes and blew her nose and resolutely she put her handkerchief in her pocket. She had wept for the demise of her beloved boss and that was that. She was now set to go on to other things. It struck me as being just a little bit quick. It isn’t that I have delusions about secretaries. There’s many a private sec around town who wouldn’t drop a single tear over the death of her employer, but this girl had protested too much. She had told us she worked for a saint. She had expressed the most complete devotion for the late Mr. Coleman. It might have been more natural if it had been something more of a struggle for her to get the better of her grief.

  “You’d made your bed?” Gibby asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’d eaten your breakfast?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d cleaned up the kitchen after breakfast—washed your dishes and stuff, put things away?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Your guest was still sleeping, so you couldn’t make that bed,” Gibby said. He slipped it in smoothly, but Rose Salvaggi was completely on the alert. She was right in there fencing.

  “You can see for yourself,” she said. “There is only the one bed. That’s my bed and I made it before I left this morning.”

  “Yes,” said Gibby. “Excuse me. I should have realized that. There is only the one bed.” He made a quick switch. “That accident you had getting your breakfast,” he said. “Did you cut yourself badly?”

  She stared at him. “I didn’t have any accident,” she said.

  “No,” said Gibby. “Then it must have been your guest.”

  She stamped her foot. She looked as though she wanted to scream at Gibby. She was that exasperated.

  “I told you I didn’t have any guest,” she said, holding her voice down with an obvious effort of will. “Yo
u know as well as I do how that man got in here. You know how he got my keys.”

  “We have theories,” Gibby said airily. “I’m trying to fit some facts to mine.”

  “Even if you have to invent them?” she asked, just a touch waspishly.

  “You made enough coffee for the both of you,” Gibby said. “What you didn’t drink of it you left in the pot on the stove.”

  She took a grip on herself and spoke very firmly. “I was here alone. I made two cups of coffee. I always drink two cups with my breakfast. I emptied the grounds out of the pot and I washed it and I left it on the sink to drain. Now do you want to know what brand of coffee I use?”

  “The brand,” Gibby said, “is immaterial. Perhaps you’d like to take a look at your kitchen.”

  She jumped at the suggestion. Gibby let her go, and he waited for the super’s wife to go with her. The super’s wife had evidently seen kitchens before and she had seen Rose Salvaggi before. I assume she was more interested in us. She remained in the bedroom, goggling at us. Gibby gave her a gentle nudge.

  “I don’t think Miss Salvaggi should be alone,” he said. “She’s had a series of bad shocks this morning. She needs a woman with her.”

  The super’s wife came to with a start and went off after Rose. Gibby quickly dropped to his knees and started scrabbling through the heaped-up stuff on the floor.

  “What are we looking for?” I whispered.

  “Pictures,” he said. “They may not be here, but I’m hoping they are. The pictures that came out of the two empty frames.”

  I got down and looked with him. It was less of a needle in the haystack deal than you might think. There was plenty of stuff to plow through, but it was all silk and cotton and nylon, and you could take up a handful of those soft things and know right away whether there was anything stiffer buried in it, anything like that heavy paper on which they print photographs.

  After scrabbling around for a minute or two without success, I looked under the bed.

  “Eureka,” I whispered. “They’re under here.”

  I reached under the bed and pulled them out. Gibby grabbed them from my hand before I even had a chance to look at them. We looked at them together. It was Gibby who commented. I was speechless.

  “Not a girl friend,” Gibby whispered.

  I had no time for what it wasn’t. I was too busy taking in what it was. He gave me only a moment for it and then he carefully slipped the two photographs into his coat pocket. I probably wouldn’t have registered so quickly if I hadn’t had my memory refreshed by seeing him the night before, but the likenesses were excellent, and I recognized him at once. One picture was a very nice shot of Art Fuller and the other was an even nicer shot of two heads. It was Art Fuller and Rose Salvaggi photographed almost cheek to cheek.

  “Now, look,” I began. “I know what you were kicking around last night, but we know this guy. He isn’t the jealous lug type. If anything, this puts him in the clear.”

  “Plenty of time to think about where it puts him,” Gibby whispered. “First we can handle where it puts her. We won’t say anything about the pictures right now.”

  I shrugged. “You’re dealing them out,” I said. “It’s just that it makes a lot of things clearer.”

  “Balanced neatly by the things it makes more obscure,” said Gibby. “Hold it. They’re coming back.”

  I could hear them in the living room. The super’s wife was taking on in a big way, and Rose was answering her in monosyllables. The kitchen had evidently outraged the super’s wife. She was appalled at a murdering burglar who would have the audacity to take time in a pillaged apartment to cook himself a stolen breakfast. They came back into the bedroom.

  “Well?” Gibby asked.

  Rose shrugged. She had taken her time in the kitchen, and I could see that not all of that time had been given to inspecting the state of that room. She had grasped at the opportunity to pull herself together. There had been a great improvement in her composure.

  “I’m out a couple of eggs and a couple of slices of bread and some coffee and bacon,” she said. “It’s a small matter when you compare it with what he’s done to the rest of the place.”

  “Very small,” Gibby agreed. “As small as a single piece in a jigsaw puzzle, for instance. Each individual piece of the puzzle is a small thing, but they do fit together to give you the whole, big picture.”

  “Very likely,” Rose said dryly. “That, of course, will be your job, the big picture. If you’ll excuse me now, I’d like to make a start on putting my place back in some sort of order.”

  “You’d better let us help you,” Gibby suggested.

  “I can manage alone, thank you.”

  “That’s what you thought when you were coming back here for your keys,” Gibby reminded her. “That time I was right and you were wrong.”

  She forced a smile. It took a lot of forcing and even then it was a pretty bitter sort of smile. “And you will never let me forget that you were right once,” she said.

  Gibby returned her smile, and there wasn’t a trace of bitterness in his. “Not that,” he said. “This being right is habit forming. Now I want to go on and do it some more.”

  “You should,” she said. “You should do that right away and leave me to put my place in order.”

  “Not nearly as important as putting your life in order,” Gibby murmured. “I think you’re going to need our help with that.”

  She gave him a steady look. “We might do much better,” she said, “if you come right out with what you have on your mind. All these unnecessary games you’ve been playing with me, last night and again today. If you had only told me last night about Mr. Coleman, everything could have been so much simpler.”

  “You didn’t know last night?”

  She gasped. The question was a shock to her, but she pulled out of it. “Did I behave as though I knew?” she said, parrying the question.

  “You behaved oddly. One possible reason why your behavior was so odd could be because you did know. The other possible reason we’ll take up later.”

  “Of course I didn’t know,” she said loftily. This was the full treatment of the secretary-to-the-senior-vice-president manner. It is otherwise known as putting on the freeze. “I was devoted to Mr. Coleman. You can’t possibly understand how I feel. If you would only leave me alone, I could make myself clear up this mess and it would be the best thing for me. It would give me time to get used to the awful thought of Mr. Coleman’s being gone.”

  “I know,” Gibby said, and his tone couldn’t have been more sympathetic. “That would be good, and I wish we could do it. You have to see our side of it, though. We’re investigating a murder and an attempted murder and some burglaries, and we don’t even know yet what all else. You should be able to have some thoughts that could help us; and if we can have them from you raw and fresh, just as they come to you before you have a chance to get used to them, they are likely to help us even more.”

  “My thoughts,” she said, “aren’t for you. My thoughts are all of Mr. Coleman, how good he was and how kind and thoughtful and sweet and considerate, how he never bore malice toward anyone, how he helped everyone, how genuinely he was interested in everybody’s welfare, what a horrible thing it is that anyone should even have raised a finger against him, how much poorer a place this world is without him.” She broke off with a sigh. Her voice had gone husky and tremulous as she spoke. Now sighing, she regained control of it. “None of that could be of any use to you,” she said, and again she was speaking in her official, Fiveborough National manner.

  Gibby nodded. “We’ll guide your thinking a bit,” he said. “Take a good look at your bathroom and think about that some.”

  Wearily she went to her bathroom door and looked in. “More of the same,” she said, “though what anyone could have wanted in the laundry hamper I can’t imagine.”

  “We’ll leave imagining that for later,” Gibby told her. “Now, let’s think about blood. You said yo
u didn’t hurt yourself this morning. You didn’t cut yourself getting breakfast or anything like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Take a look at the damp towels. They’re bloodstained.”

  She came away from the bathroom door, and she was very white. “Please,” she said. “You’re making me feel sick. Please, I don’t want to faint again.”

  Gibby was still sympathetic. “Perhaps you would like to lie down while we talk,” he suggested.

  The super’s wife had an idea she liked better. “If you have some whisky here,” she said eagerly, “whisky or rum or even a bottle of gin, I’ll fix you a drink. It will make you feel a lot better right away.”

  Rose shook her head. She perched on the edge of the bed. It made a low seat for her with the mattress off the box spring.

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  “It’s the best thing for fainting and for shocks,” the blonde urged. “I could use a spot myself with all the excitement there’s been this morning.”

  “I haven’t anything here,” Rose said. She turned to Gibby. “Mr. Gibson,” she said resolutely. “This man, whoever he is, the man who killed Mr. Coleman and who tried to kill me, the man who took my keys and came here, this man is a maniac. Nothing has ever been plainer than that. Everything he has done has been insanity, complete insanity. Without any of this, without his trying to kill me, just on the one thing, the fact that he did kill Mr. Coleman, you can put it down as definitely known and true that the man is a maniac. Last night when I hadn’t the faintest thought that anything had happened to Mr. Coleman, you asked me about him and I told you. You were inclined to scoff at me then and this morning again you are inclined to scoff at me.”

  “In our job,” Gibby said, “we don’t often meet saints. In our job it is automatic to look for the cloven hoof.”

  She nodded. “I can understand that,” she said, and her tone was slightly warmer than it had been, noticeably warmer. “You will make a mistake if you think of Mr. Coleman automatically. Mr. Coleman was a saint. You don’t have to take my word for it. You can ask anyone. Ask Mr. Lansing and ask the porter who sweeps out Mr. Coleman’s office. Go through the bank from top to bottom and ask anyone. You’ll find nobody who feels that he was anything less than a saint, that killing him could have been anything but an act of the most awful insanity.”