The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

“Who hit you?” Gibby asked.

  “I slipped on the soap in the shower,” Fuller answered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WAS SOMETHING of an impasse. The thing couldn’t have fitted together more neatly, and yet we had nothing. The theory that it fitted, of course, was Gibby’s, not mine; but I had enough of a picture of what Gibby had been building to appreciate the problem. This boy Fuller should be giving us all the answers. It should have been he who had used that bedding in Rose Salvaggi’s living room. It should have been his head that had been sponged with the wet towels in her bathroom.

  I knew that Gibby had never had much use for my notion that the missing person who had taken the third blow from the candlestick would have been a Coleman servant, but I did not quite see how I could rearrange things in my own thinking to make that third person Art Fuller. I had come around to visualizing Rose Salvaggi as the gal who had conked Gibby and me but I couldn’t work into the picture her conking Art Fuller and at the same time taking him home to nurse him, not to speak of treasuring his pictures despite the great risks involved.

  I wondered whether there mightn’t have been a fight. I wondered whether it couldn’t have been that Fuller himself had swung the candlestick on Gibby and me and had then conked some third person who had gotten in a retaliatory lick that would explain the blood in Coleman’s house, the blood on Rose’s towels, and the patch on Art Fuller’s head. There was a bothersome twist to the thing; but accepting Fuller’s explanation that he had slipped on the soap in his shower wasn’t any good either. That left us where we had been to start with. We still had all the blood to explain.

  I kicked it around in my head, and I got nowhere. After all, where could I get in the face of the report we’d had from the detective downstairs? Art Fuller had gone straight home when we had turned him loose at the Butterfield the night before. He had stayed there till morning and in the morning when he had come out of his house he had gone straight to work. Overnight in his own place he had come up with a broken head. Who were we to say he hadn’t slipped on the soap in his shower?

  As I put this down I can visualize all the wise guys who by now will be asking what sort of brains they have in the Manhattan D. A.’s office that it didn’t occur to us that the Fuller lad hadn’t been in his place all night, that he had been around town on his own little errands, and that, since these had been errands on which he would not have wanted a police tail, he had just slipped out and in by a back door. That naturally would be the easy answer, but that one wasn’t available to us because we had been past the house where Art Fuller lived.

  Those deals in Grove Street are converted private dwellings. They are the brownstone fronts that about the turn of the century were standard in New York. They have the flight of steps that leads up to the front door, and under the front steps there is the entrance to the English basement. I have already gone into detail on the arrangement. Coleman’s house had it. Those places don’t have any back way out. They have, instead, two front doors, one at the top of the steps and one under the steps. Our man stationed in the street in front of the house would have seen Fuller if he had come out either of the doors, and those are all the doors those houses have.

  I did think of the possibility that he had climbed out and in a back window, but that would have gotten him nowhere but into the back yard and those back yards give no access to the street except through the house again and out one of the two front doors.

  If Gibby was troubled as I was by this problem, he didn’t show it any. He acted as though he didn’t have a thing on his mind except Art Fuller’s health and well being. He asked if he had hurt himself badly, if he had cut his head, if he was sure he had sterilized the cut properly, if he had been to see a doctor. The boy was not much appreciative of all this solicitude. He acted as though Gibby were making a great fuss about nothing.

  He tried to turn it off with a laugh. “Don’t give it a thought, Mr. Gibson,” he said. “I’m lucky I landed on my head. I might have hit something I could hurt.”

  Gibby went along on the laugh. “You’re not kidding,” he said.

  It was all as inconsequential as that, and I stood by, waiting for Gibby to show some sign of going somewhere with it. It was evident to me that Art Fuller was also waiting. His laughter was conspicuously hollow. For what it was worth, the boy was feeling the tacit pressure, but I was telling myself that the pressure would have to stop being merely tacit before anything could happen. A kid out on parole lives under tacit pressure. You can’t expect that even a special application of it will do too much to him.

  People were wandering in and out of that reception room, and our jolly little group drew a few curious glances. Then Jeb Wilberforce came wandering out. I had never seen the man before and I had no notion of who he was. My first impression was just a chap in shirt sleeves, but quickly the shirt grew on me. A man doesn’t look that good in shirt sleeves unless it is an English shirt, unless, in fact, it is a custom-made, Jermyn Street shirt. He came straight over to us and dropped a friendly hand on Art Fuller’s shoulder.

  “Let’s take this into my office, Art,” he said. “I have a little speech to make to these gentlemen, and we can allow them the courtesy of making it in private.”

  The kid flushed. “Thanks, Jeb,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t bother about me. Thanks all the same.”

  The man laughed. “You,” he said. “Who’s bothering about you? I have this man Fuller working here and when a fellow’s as good at doing a rendering as he is, I’ve got to bother about him.”

  He turned to us and, sticking out his hand, he introduced himself. All he had to give us was his name and it registered. It was the name on the door to those offices. It was a name you hear all the time. It was a name you read on cornerstones of some of the more impressive buildings in the business community. He could afford Jermyn Street shirts.

  We identified ourselves, and I was braced for those few discreet words about how buddy-buddy he was with our boss or with the Governor or with the whole Supreme Court bench, but they didn’t come. He just nodded and turned to that well-turned-out receptionist. Telling her that he would be occupied for a while with “Mr. Fuller and these gentlemen,” he swept us before him into his own private office.

  That was an office. It made Homer G. Coleman’s wood-paneled dandy down at Fiveborough National look like a dog kennel, and it wasn’t only that Coleman’s office had no bar while this one had a beauty. It was everything.

  Wilberforce settled us comfortably in custom-made chairs. He supplied Gibby, himself, and me with fine, fat Coronas. I tried to catch Gibby’s eye when Wilberforce passed up Art Fuller with a crack about not wasting good cigars on a benighted cigarette smoker. Wilberforce went over to the bar and came back with a bottle of Scotch. I was half prepared for that being custom-made too; but it was Ballantine’s, the twenty-year-old, and that goes fine with the shirt and the Coronas and the office and the rest of it.

  He waved the bottle carelessly. “How do you take it, gentlemen?” he asked.

  I gulped, and Gibby looked something less than happy. Ordinarily we can take whisky or leave it alone, but stuff as good as that isn’t waved at you often. We managed to mumble something or other about not during working hours, and Wilberforce looked disappointed.

  He sighed. “Art won’t touch it for another couple of years,” he said, “but I hoped you would have a drink. I have a feeling I should be making the atmosphere as pleasant as I can because what I have to say to you won’t be pleasant at all.”

  “That’s all right,” said Gibby. “We’re thick-skinned.”

  Wilberforce raised an eyebrow. “Along with being thick-headed?” he asked. His tone couldn’t have been friendlier.

  “That’s laying it on the line,” Gibby said. “Let’s have the rest of it. What’s the beef?”

  “My boy here,” Wiberforce said. “You interfere with his work. He does important work. What do you do?”

  At that moment I knew what I d
id. I looked at the walls of his office. I looked at his pictures. In an architect’s office you always know what to expect in the way of pictures. Here they were up to expectations. They were pictures of jobs he had done; and as soon as I had pried my eyes loose from that distracting bottle of wonderful whisky, I had begun to register on them. There was a big deal of granite masonry and there were some very pretty columned porticoes. Even though the renderings made the buildings look as though they stood quite alone with nothing else around them, they were still quite recognizable. The big one was down on William Street, and the others were all over town. I couldn’t be certain that Gibby had turned an eye to the interior decoration. I took the ball and carried it just long enough to make certain.

  “Nothing quite like building banks for Fiveborough National,” I said, “but every once in a while we do get results that are quite as much in the public eye.”

  Wilberforce glanced at his pictures. “How do you get these results?” he asked. “By taking a great, big, blind jump at conclusions or by laboring a coincidence?”

  “By asking questions,” I said.

  “And by refusing to believe most of the answers,” Gibby added.

  Wilberforce nodded. “Just what I wanted to take up with you,” he said. “I know everything there is to know about my boy Fuller. I know that he has stuff to take him places that ten years from now will have all of us going around telling people we knew him when. And just as I know where he’s going, I know where he’s been. He came to me the day after they let him out of Sing Sing. He told me where he came from and he told me what he had been doing there. He told me he went there because he’d lost his head and gotten rougher than the law allows. He told me that it had seemed to him at the time that he’d had sufficient provocation, but that the law thought different. He told me that he didn’t expect me to see it any way but the law’s way. He also told me that he could do a good rendering and that he honestly thought he wouldn’t lose his head again because he’d found out the hard way that it wasn’t worth the price. I looked at his portfolio and it was clear that he wasn’t kidding himself about the kind of renderings he could do. I made a bet then that he wasn’t kidding himself about any of the rest of it either.”

  Gibby yawned. “And you hired him,” he said.

  “I showed him where to set up his drawing board and I told him I wasn’t worrying any about his getting tough around here because we keep in good shape in this office and we could whip the tar out of him any time.”

  “All of which,” said Gibby, “is neither here nor there.”

  Wilberforce shrugged. “I don’t often make a noise like a taxpayer,” he said. “But here I go. Up in Sing Sing he’s just another man who’s costing us taxpayers good money. Behind his drawing board in my office he’s doing useful work, he isn’t costing us taxpayers a cent, and he’s right in there with the rest of us feeding his money into the tax kitty. If there is any sense in spending good tax money on hounding the man till you’ve reduced his usefulness or in keeping him uselessly and expensively up in Sing Sing, I’m a monkey’s uncle. Who the hell do you dopes think you are—the bloodhound out of Les Miserables?”

  “We,” Gibby said, “are a couple of Assistant District Attorneys who are bothered by the fact that in a place where a murder had just been done we stumbled on a lad who’s out on parole. We are bothered by his explaining his presence there with a story that is too neatly without any possibility of corroboration. We are most of all bothered by the perfectly clear evidence that, despite his denials, he was no stranger to the people involved in that murder last night.”

  “Nuts,” said Wilberforce. “I loved Homer Coleman like a brother. Everybody did. There’s never been a man who will be more widely or more sincerely mourned. But, my friends, none of that changes the fact that we installed the last doorknob in the Fiveborough National main office six years ago, and they haven’t even built a branch in the last three years. Art does renderings and only occasionally he meets clients. He never meets old clients who were last around here a couple of years before he ever came to work for us. Where does that leave your clear evidence that he was no stranger to the people involved in that murder last night?”

  “Just where it was before we knew that you were Fiveborough National’s architect,” Gibby answered. I almost stepped into it. I thought he was yielding too much ground.

  “Laboring a coincidence,” Wilberforce said. “Art was in the hotel where Coleman was killed. You can’t do anything to him for that except annoy him and, as I’ve already told you, I can raise one hell of a beef about your wasting his time and my money on just annoying him.”

  “You don’t know all the coincidences we’re laboring,” Gibby said. “We can start with the coincidence of that patch on your boy’s head. There is a candlestick with blood and hair on it. It was found in Coleman’s house last night after the murder. It will be a routine matter to check on whether the type of the blood on the candlestick matches Fuller’s blood type and whether the hair matches a sample of Fuller’s hair. Fuller, since he is out on parole, is hardly in a position to refuse us the necessary blood sample and hair sample.”

  Wilberforce grinned. “When I came into the office this morning,” he said, “I noticed a new ornament in the lobby. I do notice things like that because I designed this building, I like the job I did with it, and it annoys me to have anything added that wasn’t in my original plan. The ornament had an unmistakably police look, and Art tells me he found this ornament on his doorstep this morning. Art tells me he followed Art up here when Art came to work and that a twin to him followed Art home from the hotel last night. I’ve jumped to a conclusion of my own. I am assuming that these ornamental figures have been keeping constant watch. You saw Art last night and he had no patch on his head. He had no patch when he got home last night. You had his house watched all night and he never left home till he started here this morning. Then he had the patch. Do you want to argue that the boy never takes a shower, or is it that he doesn’t use soap?”

  Gibby nodded. “Good enough,” he said. “But there is still that possibility that the blood on our candlestick will match Fuller’s blood type and that the hair will match a sample of his hair. I am betting on that possibility because we have some other coincidences. There is the coincidence that after Coleman’s murder last night, Coleman’s secretary—Rose Salvaggi, a remarkably pretty girl—had some difficulty with getting her coat from the checkroom at the Butterfield. She told us she had come to that bank party unescorted and she had lost her checkroom ticket.”

  “And you want to involve Art with that?” Wilberforce asked with only slightly dissembled scorn.

  “We might,” said Gibby. “You can see that it would be neater and it would make better sense to assume that Miss Salvaggi had come to the party with Art Fuller. She had left him alone for a while, and during that period when he was alone he had noticed that the place was filling up with cops. Wisely he decided that a place full of cops was no place for a lad out on parole and he made himself scarce. Unfortunately, however, he had Rose’s checkroom ticket and he had come back to look for her because he could hardly let her go home without her coat.”

  “You said she had trouble with the checkroom,” Wilberforce reminded him. “Would she have had trouble if Art had come back for her?”

  “Not if he had found her,” Gibby said. “We ran into him while he was looking and that finished him for the night.”

  Wilberforce seized on the last of that. “Exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said. “From that point forward you had the boy watched. He was clearly out of action for the rest of the night. Right on your own words, it is clear that when you talk about blood and hair and matching types and all that, you are merely trying it on and you haven’t a thing to back you up.”

  “Wait a bit,” Gibby said. “We haven’t run out of coincidences yet. So far as we have been able to determine, there was only one thing stolen from Coleman’s house last night. Whe
n we looked the place over, there was on his desk one picture in a leather frame. Marks in the dust on the desk top indicated that there had been another picture in an identical frame, and it had been removed. This morning in Miss Salvaggi’s apartment out in Queens there was a burglary. Her whole place was turned inside out. In her bathroom we found wet towels with bloodstains on them. That blood may also match Fuller’s type. In her living room there was bedding, and it looked as though someone had spent the night on her sofa. In her kitchen there was an uneaten breakfast. In her bedroom we found two empty picture frames. One was a silver frame which she said was hers. The other was a leather frame, the twin to the one we had seen on Coleman’s desk the night before, and she said she had never seen that one before. We also found in her bedroom a couple of pictures that fit the frames.” Gibby brought the pictures out of his pocket and laid them on Wilberforce’s desk. “Here’s one of Mr. Fuller,” he said, “and it is a neat fit to Miss Salvaggi’s silver frame. This other one of Mr. Fuller and Miss Salvaggi happens to be a nice fit for the leather frame Miss Salvaggi never saw before.”

  Wilberforce scowled. “Did you ask the young woman about these pictures?” he said.

  “I preferred to ask Fuller first,” Gibby said.

  Fuller had dropped his head into his hands. He said nothing. The silence extended itself painfully. It was Wilberforce who finally broke it.

  “As I understand it,” he said, “you did ask Art whether he knew Homer Coleman. You didn’t ask him about Rose Salvaggi. I have secretaries here and I dare say they all have boy friends. I don’t know the lads and they don’t know me.”

  Gibby grinned. “We called it a coincidence,” he said, “but, brother, how the coincidences do pile up. For example, down in Miss Salvaggi’s office at Fiveborough National this morning we’ve had another crime. The same sort of black canvas strap, the same method, and again a theft of nothing but keys. This morning Miss Salvaggi was the victim of the garroting.”