The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  Art Fuller’s head came up out of his hands. His eyes had the black look you see in the eyes of the blind. They seemed as though they had no function but to fill with anguish.

  “Rose,” he moaned. “Rose, baby.”

  Wilberforce dropped his cigar into an ash tray and took a couple of long strides across to his bar. He splashed that beautiful twenty-year-old Ballantine into a tall tumbler till it was half full. Then he went to Art Fuller and poured the whisky into him. Fuller took it down in a couple of convulsive swallows. I don’t think he even knew he was drinking.

  Gibby just went on talking, and I thought he was talking only for my benefit. It didn’t seem to me that either Fuller or Wilberforce was hearing a word of what he said.

  “I don’t like to think,” he said, “that the chaps we’ve had watching Fuller fell down on a simple job like that. Of course, they did fall down to some extent since they did let him see he was being followed and watched. I am assuming, though, that at no time during the night he came out of either of the front doors of that house he lives in. It’s my guess that he knew he was being followed and he went straight home. Then, I think, he went up to the roof of his house and went along the roofs to the house on the corner. It would be easy to come down through that house on the corner and come out of it not on Grove Street, where our man was watching, but on Hudson Street around the corner. That way he could be about his business all night, getting conked on the head, sleeping in Miss Salvaggi’s living room, having his broken head bathed with wet towels by Miss Salvaggi. It is really quite simple. He comes back the same way, going in through the corner house that has its front door on Hudson Street and back over the roofs to his own place.”

  It was obvious. It had to be that way. I could see the whole thing. “Then he comes out his front door and deliberately lets our man pick him up to follow him here to his office,” I added.

  Wilberforce astonished me by raising his head from his ministering to the stricken Art Fuller and with a couple of words pricking this balloon Gibby had blown up and I had so hastily taken for my own.

  “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You can’t have Art already in Miss Salvaggi’s apartment because he spent the night there and also have him going to her office after that to murder her and steal her keys to get into that same apartment.”

  I know my face fell. I looked at Gibby and to my astonishment he looked not in the slightest nonplussed. If there was any consternation going about, it landed on Wilberforce. Fuller pushed him away and staggered to his feet.

  “It’s no use, Jeb,” he said. “Thanks for trying, but it’s no good any more. None of it matters now because she’s dead. I don’t care any more, Jeb.”

  Wilberforce turned on him, snarling. “Don’t be a damn fool,” he growled.

  Fuller shook his head. “She’s dead,” he shouted. “Didn’t you hear the man? She’s been murdered and it’s my fault. Does anything matter after that?”

  “Your fault?” Gibby asked. “Why did you kill her?”

  “I should have stayed out of her life, or I should have gone to you from Coleman’s house last night. I shouldn’t have let her talk me out of it.”

  Gibby looked at him quizzically. “You killed her because she wouldn’t let you talk to us?” he asked.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Wilberforce snapped. “He didn’t kill the girl. Can’t you even see what’s happening to him? Can’t you see he was in love with her?”

  “I see it,” Gibby said, “and it could be a reason for killing her. Some men are built that way.”

  Wilberforce bluntly furnished us with his opinion of that. I could say that he called it hogwash. That wasn’t the word he used, but his words, and there were several of them, had better be glossed over.

  Fuller stood and waited. “Any time you are ready to take me in,” he said, “I’m ready to go.”

  “What about getting ready to talk?” Gibby said.

  “Anything you want to know. I don’t care any more.”

  “I want to know everything. Sit down and start talking.”

  Moving like an automaton, Art Fuller sat down and he started talking. The story poured out of him, and there was no system or organization to it. He was all over the place in the telling of it, and a couple of times Wilberforce had to step into it and give him a hand with it. Several times Gibby had to stop him and shoot a few questions to get the thing straightened around. It didn’t change anything in what he told us. It merely untangled the chronology and laid the thing out in a straight line. He minced no words in saying that the garroting of Rose Salvaggi was his fault but he denied having any actual hand in putting the black canvas strap around the girl’s throat. He had known her. He had loved her.

  He took us back to the days before his arrest and conviction, the stormy and reckless days when he had been fresh back from the war and had run himself into trouble. He had known many girls then and he had had many friends, but abruptly he had found himself in the Tombs awaiting trial and he had no friends. There had been only the one girl, Rose Salvaggi. She had come to see him in the Tombs and she had written him and visited him while he was at Ossining. Through that long succession of months she had come to be his entire world.

  Then had come the time when he had been up for parole. She had written him then. It had been a long letter, a letter about the man for whom she worked. She had been promoted out of the anonymity of the stenographers’ pool in the bank and now she was secretary to a vice-president. She had made little in her letter of this advancement but she had made much of the v. p. who was now her boss. In that letter she had told him that Homer G. Coleman was the most wonderful man she had ever known, a man who had time for everyone, thought for everyone, understanding for everyone. She told him of the people he had helped and had tried to help, of all the little people in the bank who had been in trouble one time or another, and of how Homer G. Coleman had learned of it and with the magic of his friendly interest had found a way to help them.

  She had even written him about a man in the bank whom Coleman had been trying to help. The man had been stuck for years in a dreary, routine job and he had been passed over so many times that he had all but been forgotten. He would have been completely forgotten if it hadn’t been for Homer G. Coleman. Mr. Coleman had gone to bat for him. He had won him a promotion and he had been bitterly disappointed when the man, whether through timidity or lack of ambition, had turned it down and had chosen to remain where he was, in the dreary routine of his mechanical job.

  “It didn’t bother this guy that he wasn’t getting anywhere,” Fuller said, “but it bothered Coleman. She wrote me how Coleman couldn’t rest, how he wanted to help this fellow even against the fellow himself. The way she wrote about Coleman she made him out a saint, and I couldn’t get it. Up in Sing Sing you get so you don’t believe in saints. Rose, I knew she was an angel, but that was Rose.”

  He choked up and Wilberforce began to go on with it for him, but Fuller took a quick hold on himself and resumed his story. In this letter Rose had explained to him that she had told Coleman about him and that Coleman was interested and would help him as soon as he was released on parole. He had expected nothing, but Coleman had helped him. Coleman had driven Rose up to Sing Sing the day Fuller came out. Coleman had taken the boy to his own house, had told him he would live there till he found a job, had wanted to buy him clothes and lend him money till he got on his feet.

  “You owed him money?” Gibby asked.

  Fuller shook his head. “Not money,” he said. “I don’t know what I owed him. What do you owe a man who never said the wrong thing or made the wrong gesture? What do you owe a man who knew how to be kind when you needed it most, who knew how to do things for you the way you would have wanted them, not the easy way or the way that would build up his own ego or anything like that?”

  Gibby wanted it specific. He wanted to know exactly what Coleman had done and Fuller told us. Even before Fuller had been out Coleman had talked of
him to Wilberforce. He had sent him to Wilberforce that very first day and the boy had landed the job. Fuller went on about that, about how good Wilberforce had been to him, and Wilberforce cut in on that with some of the stuff we’d already had from him, the stuff about how Fuller was going to be a great man in his profession and all that.

  It added up to a simple sum in any event. Fuller had had what you might wish every boy who comes out of jail on parole might have. He’d walked into a job the very first day, the kind of job he wanted. The pay had been good. The opportunities had been good, and he had been doing the work he had wanted to do. We could believe Wilberforce when he said the boy had kept his job and done so well with it because he was good at it; but that took nothing from the fact that it was Homer G. Coleman who had managed to get it for him, Homer G. Coleman who had provided the immediate opportunity.

  It had been a fine picture. Art Fuller had been on his way. Sweating out his parole had been easy. He’d had this good job. He’d been making good money. He had a bright future in his profession. He had a girl whom he loved and his girl loved him. He had a friend, and Homer G. Coleman had been such a friend as only the very fortunate ever have.

  “We were all set,” he said. “Rose and I were going to be married the first day my parole was up. I was the guy who had taken a knockdown, but right into a patch of four-leaf clover.”

  “Whose idea was it that you wait till your parole was up before you got married?” Gibby asked.

  “Mine,” Fuller said. “It was all mine. Rose wanted to get married right away. Mr. Coleman urged me to do it. Jeb said I was a dope not to, but that was one thing I was stubborn about and I was right. The trouble was I was only half right. I should have stayed away from her, clean away from her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now she’s dead and it’s my fault that she’s dead.”

  “What about Coleman? Is he your fault, too?”

  Fuller shook his head.

  Gibby brought him back to his factual narration. He explained why he hadn’t married Rose. It had been for her protection. He had felt he couldn’t marry until his parole was up, until he was completely a free man, free of even the remotest threat of being pulled back up the river to serve out the rest of his sentence. It was evident that he now felt that this remotest threat had materialized.

  We let that pass and Gibby nudged him along in his story. Homer G. Coleman had been their friend. They had given him the picture of the two of them and he had put it on the desk in the library of his home. The two of them and the august Mr. Lansing in identical frames. They had been completely happy.

  With that he came to the more immediate events—to the Bank Club party the night before. He had called for Rose at her apartment and had taken her to the Butterfield. Since the dinner had been for bank employees only, he had left her there and had taken dinner alone and had then dropped in on a newsreel theater for an hour till it was time to join her at the Butterfield for the dance.

  He had gone to the Butterfield and they had danced together. Everything had been wonderful. They had been having a marvelous time. As he told it, they had been looking for Coleman, because, after all, Coleman was their friend. They had not seen him in the ballroom and Rose had gone up to the fifth floor to look for him. Art had waited for her in the lobby. While he waited, he began seeing police and plain-clothes men all over the place. They had made him nervous.

  Gibby interrupted at this point. “Why?” he asked. “You were completely within the rules. What was worrying you?”

  Fuller shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “Everything. When you are out on a leash, you worry. There was a lot of drinking going on at the party. I hadn’t had anything, but I got this feeling. There wouldn’t be so many police, just for instance. Something had happened and it was something bad. If I stayed around there I was going to be recognized sooner or later and the minute I was recognized I’d be picked up for questioning. I knew that.”

  “If you were as clean as you say,” Gibby remarked, “questioning couldn’t hurt you.”

  “It could hurt Rose. These were the people she worked with. There was nobody there who knew anything about me except Mr. Coleman. I wasn’t going to put her through that, letting everybody know her boy friend was a jailbird. I got my hat and coat and I got out of there quick. I went to a drugstore near by and called the hotel and had Rose paged. They couldn’t find her. I couldn’t understand that then but now I know you were holding her upstairs with that nonsense about some dope’s pants. I couldn’t understand it and I kept trying and it was no good. After a while I gave up, but I couldn’t leave it like that. She would be wondering where I’d gone and I had the check ticket for her coat. I went back to the Butterfield and tried to find her. I thought I could manage it that way. I’d just be a guy who came into the hotel. I wouldn’t be with her. Even if I was picked up, nobody would know I had anything to do with Rose.”

  It made good enough sense, as he told it, but I was reserving judgment. I was waiting to see how out of all this innocent bad luck there could develop a situation in which an attempt on Rose Salvaggi’s life could possibly have been called his fault. I was remembering that he had himself called it that and I wanted to know how he might manage to have it both ways.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HE DIDN’T HAVE to tell us much about his behavior on the fifth floor at the Butterfield. He had already given us a clear picture of the spot in which we had found him. The rest explained itself. He had returned to the hotel. He had looked around the lobby. He had looked into the ballroom. He had seen Rose nowhere.

  “We figured that out afterwards,” he said. “It was more bad luck. You’d turned her loose and she hadn’t been able to find Mr. Coleman and then she couldn’t find me. She figured that all right. She figured that I’d seen all the cops and had taken off, but she expected I’d go right home. She was in the ladies’ room trying to get me on the phone at my place. That’s how I missed her then.”

  She had left him to go up to the fifth floor to look for Mr. Coleman. He decided to try the fifth floor. The elevator boys wouldn’t take him up and then he went into a panic. Rose was up there and they wouldn’t let him go to her. He lost his head and went up the stairs to the fifth floor. When he got there, he didn’t know what to do. He looked for Rose and he dodged police. He was getting nowhere and he was just giving up on it when we picked him up.

  At first he had hoped desperately that he would be able to get away with the story he told us; but, when we showed him the body of Homer G. Coleman, he was left with little hope of anything. He had lost a good friend, and that was bad enough. As he saw it, he could have no hope for himself any more. He could try only to keep Rose out of it. For her sake he had been stubbornly silent.

  It had surprised him when we let him go, but he immediately guessed that he would be followed. He watched and he saw he was. He went straight home but he was desperate with worry about Rose. He didn’t stay home. He went out just as Gibby had guessed, going over the roofs to the house at the corner and going down through that house to come out on the cross street.

  Once he was out he had headed for Rose’s apartment and he had waited for her there. He had been waiting in the shadows across the street when we had brought her home. In her apartment they had compared notes. He’d told her that Coleman was dead. He’d told her how he had been caught on the fifth floor at the Butterfield.

  “At first she couldn’t think of anything but Mr. Coleman,” he said. “We couldn’t either of us think of anything but that. What had happened to him was too horrible. It was awful to think that there could be anyone in the world who would do that to him. Then she began worrying about me. She remembered the picture we had given him. That was on the desk in the library. She remembered that he’d had some correspondence about me, letters in his files at home and in the office. She had the keys, a key to his house and keys to his desk and his files. She wanted me to wait for her out at her place while she went to his house and
got the picture and the correspondence out of the files.”

  Of course, he hadn’t allowed her to go alone. They had expected the expedition to be nothing at all. Coleman had a manservant who came in by the day. There would be no one in the house. Rose had been there often on errands for Mr. Coleman, she knew her way around in his house and in his files and in his desk. They had gone to the little house on Murray Hill and had let themselves in with Rose’s latchkey.

  They had gone directly to the library. Rose had unlocked the desk and found the letters she wanted in the folder there. She had unlocked the files and had removed from them all items relating to Art Fuller.

  They had started to leave when she remembered that she had left the picture on the desk. She had gone back for it and he had waited for her out in the dark hall.

  At that point he pulled a blank. He had been out there only a moment and then he had known nothing till he woke with a wet and aching head and Rose was mopping at him frantically with a wet handkerchief. The sound of the doorbell was shrilling through the hall. Rose had dragged him to his feet and had helped him down the stairs to the basement. They had gone quietly through the basement and out the basement door. There they had been stopped because I was out on the street waiting for Gibby to let me in. Fuller had rested in the little space under the stairs, and Rose had watched me. The moment she saw me go into the house she had had Art out of the basement areaway and down the street to the avenue. Around the corner she had picked up a cab and taken him home to her apartment.

  She had bathed and bandaged his head and she had put him into her own bed. She had slept out on the sofa in the living room. In the morning when he woke, she had already gone off to the office. She had left him a note. She was going in early to take from the desk drawer in Coleman’s bank office a couple of snapshots of herself and Art Fuller that happened to be there. He was to get up when he felt up to it. She gave him instructions for fixing his breakfast and she told him to go home, getting in the same way as he had come out the night before. She had lined the whole thing out for him. He was to come out of his house and pick up his police tail and go to his office. There he was to tell the whole story to Jeb Wilberforce, the only friend they had left and the only person outside themselves who had known that Coleman had been instrumental in getting Art Fuller his job. That was his story, the whole of it.