The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  “How’s your Latin?” Gibby asked.

  “Latin?” She was startled. “High-school Latin.”

  “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” Gibby said.

  “Of the dead nothing unless it is good,” she said after him. “You can’t really think this is the usual soft soap people talk after a person has died. Last night when I couldn’t even dream that anything had happened to him, I told you the same thing.”

  Gibby nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll grant you that. Whatever you knew last night, you spoke nothing but good of Mr. Coleman.”

  There was a flicker of her eyes by which I could tell that she hadn’t missed the strong reservation contained in what Gibby had said to her. She chose to ignore it. She went back to her argument instead.

  “As I was saying,” she resumed, “only a maniac could have harmed Mr. Coleman. Therefore, we know from the start that this man is a maniac. Why do you find it strange that he has been following that first maniacal act with others as crazy? Only a maniac would have stolen my keys. Only a maniac would have tried to kill me for them. Only a maniac would have come here and ripped this apartment apart. There isn’t anything here worth that much. My clothes, my few household things. What could anyone hope to find here? While he was here he cut himself or scratched himself or something and he used a couple of my towels to wash the blood off. You asked me if I hurt myself while I was getting breakfast.” She held her hands out toward Gibby. They were neat hands, well shaped and well kept, and they were at the same time strong and useful hands. “You can see for yourself, I have no cuts or scratches. But you don’t know about this maniac. He could have hurt himself while he was ripping things apart here or while he was fixing himself that breakfast he forgot to eat. That’s no crazier than any of the rest of it.”

  She stopped and waited for Gibby to answer her argument. He didn’t. He went off on a tangent and he made her angry.

  “Quite a while back,” he said, “you asked me to observe that you have only the one bed here. I also observed that out in the other room you have a sofa. Put some sheets and blankets on a sofa like yours and it makes a fairly satisfactory bed. People put guests up that way all the time.”

  “Let’s not go back to that,” she snapped. “I’ve already told you. I had no guest.”

  “There is all the necessary bedding out in your living room, Miss Salvaggi,” Gibby said.

  “And there is an uneaten breakfast in my kitchen,” she answered. “Tell me why he cooked that breakfast and then didn’t eat it and I’ll tell you why he started to fix himself a bed on the sofa and then didn’t go through with that. The man is obviously crazy.”

  Gibby found himself another tangent. He picked up from the floor the two empty pictures frames, the one of silver and the leather job.

  “These are yours?” he asked.

  She looked at them. “One of them is,” she said. “The other one I’ve never seen before, and isn’t that crazy, too?”

  “Which is yours?” Gibby asked.

  “The silver one.”

  “You kept a picture in it?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I hope I’ll find it in all that mess on the floor. I hope it hasn’t been damaged.”

  “You value it?”

  “Would I have had it around otherwise?”

  “Whose picture was it?”

  “My mother’s.”

  Gibby grinned at her. “I meant of whom,” he said.

  “It’s a picture of my mother.”

  “And you’ve never seen the leather frame before?”

  “No. I told you it was crazy.”

  Gibby nodded. “Yes.” he said. “It does seem that way, but there is a design to it. We are dealing with a killer. This killer, after murdering Mr. Coleman, stole Mr. Coleman’s keys. He used the keys last night to enter Mr. Coleman’s house, but he was no ordinary thief. Obvious stuff, like valuable silver that was lying around in plain sight, wasn’t touched. This morning you seem to have surprised him in the office, and he tried to kill you. You tell us that there was nothing he could have wanted in the office, since there was nothing there but bank records and correspondence. Now this killer also stole your keys. He has been here in your apartment and he has ransacked the place. It’s no good asking you if there is anything missing.”

  “I couldn’t begin to know until I had cleared all this stuff up,” she said.

  “Yes,” Gibby agreed. “That will be the next step. We’ll leave you to it, but meanwhile there are certain ideas we can have of this man we must deal with. He took all your pictures down and he ripped the backing off the frames. Obviously he was looking for something that could have been concealed in a picture frame, a paper of some sort—a document, a piece of correspondence, perhaps a bank record. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?”

  “But I’ve never had anything of that sort here,” she protested. “I don’t bring bank papers home.”

  “Our killer may not know that. Our killer may have thought you might and he may have looked just in case. We know that he looked. We don’t know that he found anything.”

  “He didn’t find anything.”

  “In which case it might be expected that he would look farther. I want you to think very hard about your missing keys. There were the keys to your desk and files in the office, your latchkey, and the keys to your chest and your dressing table here. Any other keys?”

  She shook her head slowly. “A couple of luggage keys,” she said. “The luggage was in the closet and it was empty and unlocked.” She indicated a couple of suitcases by the closet door. “That’s the luggage,” she said.

  “And no other keys?”

  “No. There were no others.”

  “No key to Mr. Coleman’s house?”

  She gasped. “Mr. Coleman’s house?” she asked. “Why would I have a key to Mr. Coleman’s house?”

  “Secretaries often have a key to the boss’s house,” Gibby answered. “A man is out of town and he wants something out of his desk at home. He phones his secretary and she goes up to the house and gets it and sends it on to him.”

  “I had no keys to Mr. Coleman’s house,” she said.

  “Good,” said Gibby. “May I use your telephone?”

  The telephone stood on the bedside table. She nodded toward it, indicating that he might use it. He picked up the phone and called the local precinct. He reported to them the burglary in her apartment and, explaining who we were and that we were working on the Coleman killing, he asked if they could let us have a detective for Miss Salvaggi’s protection.

  She made a small sound of distress. It struck me that it even might have been a strangled sound of protest. Gibby hung up.

  “They’ll have a man right over,” he said.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” she murmured. “I’ll be all right here.”

  “The killer still has your keys,” Gibby reminded her. “He might come back.”

  She obviously recognized his tone. He was back to the manner he had used on her in the car when she had tried to convince him that there was no need for us to go up to her apartment with her.

  “All right,” she sighed. “I’m going to feel like a fool with a police bodyguard.”

  Gibby laughed at her. “Don’t think of him that way,” he said. “Just think of him as a pleasant and attentive young man. Cops aren’t bad company. I used to be a cop myself.”

  She let that pass, but she looked as though she were trying to keep out of her face any betrayal of her feelings that he had offered her a rather poor recommendation. Wearily she began picking things up and sorting them out. She worked slowly and, so far as I could see, she was showing very little disposition to get on with it. We watched her, and the super’s wife helped. The super’s wife was no whiz but in her languid way she was working rings around Rose Salvaggi.

  The detective came. Gibby went out to the hall to talk to him, but he asked that I stay with the women.
/>   “We can’t take the risk of letting Miss Salvaggi out of our sight even for a moment,” he said.

  Miss Salvaggi scowled. It was obvious enough. She wanted us out of the way so that she could look for those pictures. She was afraid to make an honest effort at picking the place up for fear that she would uncover pictures to our inspection and they wouldn’t be pictures of her mother. I stayed and watched her. She picked up three pairs of nylon hose and examined them most carefully. She was pretending that it was important to her to determine whether the killer, in addition to his other crimes, might have laddered them.

  When Gibby returned he had the detective with him, and I could see that he had given the man his instructions. Rose Salvaggi was not going to do any picking up without official surveillance of each item as she picked it up.

  We pulled out of there. Driving back to Manhattan, I sounded Gibby out. I could see that he was allowing the young woman plenty of rope in the expectation that she would hang herself, but I wasn’t quite certain of his purpose in this course of action. It seemed to me that Rose Salvaggi was quite sufficiently hanged already.

  I said as much.

  Gibby grunted a careless agreement. “If hanging her was our job,” he added, “we could tie the bow on the package right now.”

  “What do we do with the pictures in your pocket?” I asked.

  “We think about them.”

  “I have been thinking,” I said. “It would have been Art Fuller in the silver frame in her bedroom.”

  “Yes,” said Gibby, “and the pair of them in the leather frame on Coleman’s desk.”

  “Which,” said I, thinking aloud, “would mean that she went to Coleman’s house last night and took the picture of her and the boy friend out of there. That would be important. She wouldn’t want us to know that there ever had been any connection between Art Fuller and Coleman.”

  “It would be most important,” Gibby agreed.

  “It would also be important that we shouldn’t know she had a key to Coleman’s house and that we shouldn’t suspect her at all. She put the black strap around the necklace thing on her neck and faked the attempt on her life. Same method as was used on the boss and same theft of keys. It was a good way of getting her keys out of the way so we couldn’t look at them.”

  “That would mean she messed up her own apartment before she left for work this morning,” Gibby put in.

  “Of course,” I said. “That took time, and she was fixing her breakfast when she realized that to fake a murder on herself at the office she had to be in early. She took off and left her breakfast uneaten.”

  Gibby nodded. “That hangs her,” he said, “but there’s the party who spent last night with her in her apartment. We can hardly let that party go unhanged. Remember the bedding in the living room and the towels that were used to wash away blood.”

  I tried to simplify that. “Wait a minute,” I said. “She’s been building a picture for us that reads crazy killer. The bedding in the living room could be part of that picture just as those frames are part of the picture and all the mess she made in her own apartment. She had to leave the leather frame in her place because it clinches the pattern of the madman who stole a picture from Coleman’s desk and then turned her place inside out. It would be crazy for this character to carry the picture with him when he went to do a job of burglary on her place and to abandon it there, and she didn’t want that to be the only crazy item. The bedclothes in the living room she tosses in by way of corroboration.”

  “And the towels that washed away blood?” Gibby asked.

  I had that figured and I was ready for him. “Easy,” I said. “She blipped you with that candlestick last night and she blipped me and she blipped Coleman’s servant. From the servant she drew blood. We know that. She could have had some of that blood on her hands. She had to wash it away. When she got home she did a thorough job with the towels.”

  Gibby looked doubtful. “Blood on her hands,” he said. “She turns on the tap and washes her hands under the running water. She doesn’t sponge them off with a wet towel. You sponge with a wet towel when you are cleaning a wound.”

  “She’s pretty hysterical by then,” I argued. “She washes her hands, but she doesn’t get all the blood off. What she didn’t wash away came off on the towels when she wiped her hands.”

  “Would she wipe them with wet towels?” Gibby asked.

  “She saw the blood on the towels and she tried to wash it out of the towels.”

  Gibby shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “She would have to be a terrible laundress, though.”

  “These modern girls who go to business and wear nylon,” I said. “They aren’t like their mothers.”

  “We don’t even know what her mother was like,” Gibby said. “Our Rose didn’t want us to find the pictures. Why did she leave them under the bed?”

  That one was more difficult. I thought about it a bit and it came clear.

  “She had turned her place out completely,” I said. “She didn’t want us seeing those pictures; but they mean a lot to her and she didn’t want to destroy them either. There was no place she could put them. She thought she would establish that she had had a burglar and that we’d leave her alone to pick the place up. Then she could put everything away neatly and bury the pictures at the bottom of some drawer. Her report to us would be that she had found one picture frame that didn’t belong to her and that she had never seen before and that nothing had been missing but the picture from her silver frame, a picture of her mother. She’ll go into a panic when she gets the place picked up and doesn’t find the pictures. She’ll know we have them.”

  “She’s being watched. We’ll have a report on that.”

  “Can we hope for a report on whether she smokes cigars?” I muttered.

  Gibby grinned. “Doesn’t strike me as the cigar type,” he said.

  “She strikes me,” I told him, “as exactly the type who wouldn’t know a thing about the killer except that one bright bit she came up with—she smelled cigars.”

  “An interesting detail for her to have noticed,” Gibby said thoughtfully. “It makes a good deal of sense that she should have noticed and should have remembered. A girl is fighting off a strangler. We can assume that at a time like that she is concentrating hard on her breathing. Breathing becomes enormously important and enormously noticeable then. It is, after all, the one bodily function at issue. It wouldn’t be a too bad guess that people in the process of being strangled might be more than normally sensitive to odors.”

  “It also might not be too bad a guess,” I countered, “that a girl who’s pulling a fake and who wants to make it look good would hand us just a useless detail like that to build up an appearance of trying to help. She’s racked her memory for everything she could give us. Is it her fault that the one thing she comes up with could make it almost anybody? Such a conveniently useless clue.”

  “Not entirely useless,” Gibby said. “We know she was attacked by a man.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “A woman cigar smoker?” Gibby grinned at me. “We can’t look for that kind of luck. They’re too rare.”

  I answered that just for the sake of argument. My thinking was going off in another direction. “A woman setting out to commit murder,” I said, “might make herself smell of cigars.”

  “To lay a false scent?” Gibby asked.

  “Possible,” I said. “The thing is, though, that your thought of special olfactory sensitivity setting in when a person is being strangled—it doesn’t fit.”

  “Special olfactory sensitivity,” Gibby repeated after me. “Boy, you could dazzle a jury with words like that.”

  “I’d rather tell a jury that since she wasn’t being strangled at all, since that gold thing around her neck was taking all the squeeze, there wasn’t any fight for breath and therefore no special reason for her to have noticed a cigar smell or to have remembered it.”

  Gibby gave me an argument on that. He sugges
ted that even though there was no actual strangulation, there would have been a powerful illusion of strangulation and that psychological reaction to illusion would be virtually indistinguishable from reaction to the real thing.

  “You’ve really turned against her,” he added. “You don’t want to believe anything she says.”

  I shook my head.

  “When she says something that could apply to almost any man in the world,” I said, “it’s just too pat and convenient.”

  “It wouldn’t apply to Art Fuller. He belongs to a generation that doesn’t use cigars.”

  I granted him that, but it was a point on my side.

  “Which makes it that much more pat,” I said. “She wants us to look for a man, almost any man but her boy friend.”

  Gibby smiled.

  “That’s where we fool her,” said Gibby.

  We had come across the Queensboro Bridge, and Gibby swung down Park Avenue. He pulled up before a lower Park Avenue office building. In the lobby we picked up a man. He was a detective. He was working the day shift on Art Fuller. Gibby took his report. It had been a quiet night. Fuller had not come out of his house. He had come out after nine in the morning and had come straight up to his office. He was up there now.

  We went up. They were handsome offices. The firm had a reputation for building business premises that would enhance the dignity of any enterprise. They had decorated their own place of business in a manner that enhanced their own dignity admirably. We conferred with a receptionist who was so correct that she might have been gowned and groomed by her employers, and she had Art Fuller come out to speak with us. The boy was looking haggard and on the back of his head he was wearing a neat surgical dressing, a square of gauze that was dazzlingly white against his dark hair.