Gibby let him finish and then he took him back to that moment when he had blacked out in the hall of Coleman’s house. He pressed the boy for details, but it was no good. He had seen no one, had heard no one. He remembered nothing—only a moment of pain and then nothingness. Gibby dropped it. He had other questions.
“You woke this morning in Rose’s bed and you found her note,” he said. “Take it from there. What did you do then? I want it in complete detail, everything.”
Fuller sighed but he braced himself to go on talking. “I picked up the phone,” he said, “and called the office. I left a message for Jeb that I would be in a little late this morning and that I would explain when I saw him. Then I dressed and went out to the kitchen to fix myself some breakfast. I was going to eat it on the fly and get out of there. While I was waiting for the eggs and toast to get ready I even put on my hat and coat. Then I heard a key in the front door. I couldn’t think anything but it would be the woman who comes in to clean for Rose. I know she had a woman who came in a couple of hours a couple of days a week. I thought Rose had forgotten this was one of the woman’s days and I couldn’t let anybody find me there. I just turned off the gas under the eggs and the coffee and I let myself out the back door. I went out by the service hall, went back to my apartment, and went in through Hudson Street. I shaved and showered and changed my clothes, grabbed a glass of milk and a slice of bread and came here to the office. I’d only just gotten through telling Jeb the whole story when you came in.”
“And kicked your story full of holes,” Gibby said.
“My story doesn’t matter,” Fuller mumbled. “It was Rose who mattered. She thought she could get me clear on this thing and I don’t say I didn’t want to be clear. I wanted it for her sake, but I thought if I couldn’t get clear on it I could keep her out of it anyway. With her gone, nothing matters any more.”
“Except that you do see it’s your fault she’s gone,” Gibby said, pressing the boy relentlessly.
Wilberforce exploded. “The hell with that,” he growled. “Nobody can make it Art’s fault.”
“It is my fault,” Fuller insisted. “After I was conked at Mr. Coleman’s house, I knew how dangerous this was. I should have seen that it was dangerous for Rose. I should have gone directly to the police then. It might have been tough on her but she would be alive now. It’s my fault.”
“Nuts,” said Wilberforce. “You’d had your head cracked open. It was all you could do to walk with her half carrying you. Were you supposed to think, too?”
“I should have been stronger,” Fuller moaned. “For her sake I should have had more guts.”
“Guts,” Wilberforce snorted. “You were hardly half-conscious.”
“This morning I was all right. When I woke this morning and read her note, I should have known there would be danger for her. There had been danger in Coleman’s house last night. I was stupid. I could have picked up the phone and called the police then.”
Wilberforce went to him and perched on the arm of his chair. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and shook him gently. “Art,” he said softly. “I know how tough this is, but you’ve got to think, boy. You’ve got to think straight.”
“What’s there to think about?”
“What you’re saying. You woke this morning and you hurried to get out of her apartment. With all your hurrying you were still there when somebody put a key in the lock. You know who was putting the key in the lock. It wasn’t any woman coming in to clean. It was the killer. Last night this killer murdered Homer Coleman and took his keys. He used those keys to get into Coleman’s house, and he was there and he tried to kill you with that candlestick. This morning he was in the office down at Fiveborough National and he killed the girl. He took her keys. He used her keys to let himself into her apartment. How fast could he get from Fiveborough National out to her place? When you woke up this morning it was already too late. You couldn’t have done a thing. You must see that.”
“It was my fault,” Fuller said stubbornly. “I should have stayed clean away from her.”
Gibby relented. We had everything we wanted there. It was obvious that nothing further could be milked out of Art Fuller’s grief and despair.
“It was only a try,” Gibby said. “She did have the black strap around her throat, but it didn’t kill her.”
It was too sharp a turnaround for the boy to grasp it quickly. He blinked, but Wilberforce was right in there.
“Of all the low, sneaking, dirty, lousy tricks,” he shouted. “I’d pick pockets. I’d pimp. I’d kick my sick grandmother in the mouth before I’d pull a trick like that.”
Fuller shook himself. He looked as though he had just come up from under water.
“Where is she?” he asked. “Is she hurt? Is she all right?”
“She’s back in her apartment, setting it to rights. She’s going crazy worrying about these pictures because she can’t find them, of course, and she’s worried about who might have them. She would have phoned you long ago if I didn’t have a detective in there with her, cramping her style.”
Fuller waved that away. It wasn’t important to him. “But you said the black canvas strap just like Mr. Coleman,” he panted. “Has she seen a doctor? Can you be sure she’s all right?”
“She was wearing a gold hoop thing around her neck,” Gibby told him. “The strap caught on that and never closed on her throat at all. Maybe you better take to wearing one yourself.”
Fuller was on his feet. “I want to go to her,” he said.
Gibby picked up a phone from Wilberforce’s desk. He dialed information and asked for the number listed for Rose Salvaggi at the Queens address. He didn’t have to wait for information to come up with it. Fuller was eager. He gave Gibby the number. Gibby dialed it.
As soon as his call had gone through, it was evident that it wasn’t Rose who had picked up the phone at the other end. It was the Queens detective we had left with her. Gibby gave him his instructions and Gibby was playing it rough. He wanted her brought down to the Fiveborough National main office. We would pick her up down there.
“Tell her to lock the door on her place and not bother about it now,” he said. “It’s no good her looking for the pictures or worrying about them. We found them before we left her place and we have them with us. You can also tell her that we’ve had a talk with her boy friend and that he’s been singing. We’ve got the whole story.”
Both Fuller and Wilberforce were listening. Wilberforce looked pained. Wilberforce looked as though he would like to slug the two of us. Wilberforce eyed the telephone cord, and I could see that he was telling himself that there would be nothing to be gained if he ripped it out of the wall.
Fuller, on the other hand, was simpler. Fuller just looked worried, worried and unhappy. He plucked at Gibby’s elbow.
“Let me talk to her a minute,” he begged. “Just let me talk to her.” Gibby scowled a moment and then, relaxing, he nodded. He went on with his instructions for the detective out in Queens. He told him that Fuller wanted to talk to the girl and that we were going to permit it. She was to be given Gibby’s message before the detective put her on and while she was talking he was to stay with her.
“No harm in their talking,” Gibby said, “so long as they won’t be doing it privately. We’ll be monitoring his end of it. You stay on top of every word she says. Tell her now. I’ll hold on.”
Fuller was reaching for the phone but Gibby held it. Obviously the detective was repeating Gibby’s message to the girl and it was taking her no time at all to grasp it. After a few moments Gibby, with a jerk of his head, indicated the second extension. Fuller picked that instrument up and Gibby held his. Fuller didn’t seem to mind. He wanted to talk to Rose and he couldn’t be stopped by anyone who might be listening in.
I heard only his side of the conversation and it amounted to very little. From what he was saying I could make out easily the whole pattern of what they were telling each other. She was full of concern
for him, full of worry about the trouble he might be in. She was evidently blaming herself for it because he was pushing away all these worries of hers. He was telling her that it wasn’t in any way her fault and that in any event he didn’t matter. It was she who counted. Was she all right? Had she been hurt? Was she quite sure she was all right? I gathered that she reassured him on that score as much as he could be reassured and that wasn’t too much. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had seen her.
She must have said something about his spilling the whole story because he explained that he had thought she’d been killed, but that it made no difference anyhow. The fact that an attempt had been made upon her was enough for him. He could hold back nothing if she was in the slightest danger. It was her safety that counted. Alongside that nothing mattered.
That was it. He hung up and we took him out of there. We took him down to Fiveborough National. Wilberforce wanted to come along, but Gibby told him we wouldn’t need him. We left without him.
Back on William Street we were taken in hand by Cary Willard. Fiveborough National’s pompous trouble shooter was in a sad state. He had a big cigar between his teeth and he had chewed it to a rag. He was up against a problem and he was busily building the problem up into a crisis. The problem concerned the desks and the files in the offices of the late Homer G. Coleman and his secretary. There were no keys to those desks and no keys to those files. Worse than that—and he shuddered at the thought—the only known keys were now in the hands of some unknown person.
“Yep,” Gibby said calmly. “And this unknown person is a killer.”
Willard’s look was withering. “It doesn’t matter what he is,” he said. “It is intolerable that there should be bank records to which the bank does not have access and it is calamitous that there should be bank records to which some unauthorized person does have access. This is a situation you cannot allow to go on, Mr. Gibson. The bank will not tolerate it.”
I’ve had no other experience of bank trouble shooters, but when it came to shooting trouble Cary Willard was nowhere near being up to his job. His aim was conspicuously poor. I found myself wondering how this mental lightweight had come to be a vice-president. I could imagine that Homer G. Coleman, who had been everyone’s friend, might have persuaded the bank to reward this man’s patient plodding with a vice-presidency, and that Cary Willard—unlike the simple fool, James Sully, who was at least wise enough to recognize his own limited abilities—had been a pompous fool and had allowed the Coleman generosity to move him into a position where he was clearly out of his depth.
Gibby straightened him around. He told him to call in a locksmith and to call the people who manufactured the metal files. They could tend to opening the desks and the filing cabinets and to changing the locks on them.
“You’ll want that done for your own peace of mind,” Gibby said. “As far as we are concerned there won’t be anything there for us. The killer has taken out of there and destroyed anything that would have told us what we might want to know about him.”
Willard was appalled. “Nobody destroys bank records without authorization,” he spluttered.
“Do people murder your vice-presidents without authorization?” Gibby asked.
Willard mumbled resentfully but he did get moving on doing something sensible about the locks. He had gone off to do it when the detective we had left out in Queens turned up with Rose Salvaggi in tow. This was a new Rose. I saw that at once.
Art Fuller made for her the first second the man brought her in. Gibby did nothing to stop it. The boy took her in his arms. He touched trembling fingers lightly to her throat. He took her to the windows and he held her so that the full sunlight fell on her and slowly he examined her. We waited while he reassured himself that she was unharmed.
She was equally solicitous of him, but even then there was a determination and a firmness in her manner that I had not detected there before. I could read it clearly for what it was. All her evasions had been broken down. All her deceptions had been stripped from her. She had been forced out to confront us in the open and she was ready to confront us. She was not going to cower. She was not going to weep or to plead or to look for mercy. She was going to fight, and she had no question in her mind of whom she would be fighting. She was going to fight us.
Gibby broke in on their vis-a-vis. The girl came right out of it. She came on her toes with her guard up. Fuller didn’t come out of it at all. His eyes remained glued on her face and, so far as he was concerned, we might not have been there at all.
Gibby made her go through the whole story. He drew from her lips every last word of it, even those parts that we had already had in complete detail from Art Fuller.
She went through with it. Every time she came to a point on which she had previously lied to us, freely and without embarrassment she admitted that she had lied. It was obvious that she felt that no woman could have done less for the man she loved and that she expected us to recognize that love had its own laws and that those laws took precedence over any laws on the statute books of the State of New York.
There was little she told us that we hadn’t already had from Art Fuller or had not been able to surmise from his story. When we had talked to her the night before, she had been almost completely honest with us. She had known nothing of the murder, but she had been intelligent enough to surmise that there must have been something amiss that would be of greater consequence than the incident of the purloined pants. There had been too many police about, and she had recognized that the police and their activities constituted far too much effect to have arisen from so trivial a cause.
Under the circumstances, she had been loath to have it known that Art Fuller had been her date for the party. She insisted that she had had not the slightest thought that the trouble could in any way have involved Homer Coleman and she further insisted that she was completely certain that it in no way concerned Art Fuller. She was still confident of that and she explained to us most painstakingly that her efforts to keep him dissociated from the events at the Butterfield had arisen not from any fear that he might be involved or even that he might be suspected. She had merely been acting on the assumption that the mere presence of a parolee in a hotel where there was so much police activity might automatically result in the lad’s being picked up for questioning.
“You would feel that you had to question him,” she said, “and I knew that the truth of the matter was that it was nobody’s business that he had been there. The trouble was that it would make no difference. It was the Bank Club party, and there was nobody there who knew about Art, nobody but Mr. Coleman and myself. If you picked Art up and questioned him, everybody would know. Can you blame me for trying to avoid that?” When she asked us that way, I did feel that I hardly could blame her.
In my mind, however, I didn’t labor the question. I was wondering whether we could believe her or not. She was giving good excuses for it, but nothing could have been plainer than her record. She had lied to us doggedly and not too unskillfully through at least two long interviews. Gibby gave no indication of how he might be feeling about her. Inexorably he moved her back to the main line of her story.
When we had turned her loose, she had gone downstairs and looked everywhere for Art. Not finding him, she had surmised that, seeing the police activity, he had prudently taken himself out of there. She had gone to the ladies’ room to telephone his apartment. Having no answer, she had tried again and again, always without success. Finally it was late, and the party was breaking up. She had to leave the hotel, and Art had the ticket for her coat. She had started home without her coat and when we picked her up outside the hotel she still had not the slightest inkling that it could have been anything but a bit of ill luck that brought us out at the moment when she was out there shivering while she waited for a cab. She still knew nothing of what had happened to Mr. Coleman, and she was determined that, since, as she believed, Art Fuller had successfully removed himself from the scene, she was not going to bri
ng his name into whatever it was that had the police so much agitated.
“It was only after you had left me at my place last night,” she said, “that I even began to understand any of it. Art was there waiting for me and he told me about Mr. Coleman. At first I was too stricken by that even to begin to think about anything else but then I asked him how he knew and he told me.”
“What did he tell you?” Gibby asked, slipping it in smoothly.
If he had hoped to catch her even momentarily off guard, it didn’t work. She answered readily and she answered simply. “You know what he told me,” she said. “He told me how he came back to look for me; and, not finding me downstairs, tried the fifth floor where he ran into you. He told me that you had questioned him and shown him Mr. Coleman’s body and that he had denied knowing Mr. Coleman and had told you that story about going to meet a friend and getting the wrong hotel. He was keeping me out of it. You see that, don’t you?”
Gibby didn’t answer. He kept her talking. She told us how the two of them sat in her apartment and talked about Mr. Coleman and the horror of what had happened to him. Then she had remembered that letters, mentioning Art Fuller, would be in Mr. Coleman’s desk at home and that on the desk was the picture of herself and Art that they had given him. She confessed readily enough that she had lied to us when she’d said she had no keys to the Coleman house. She did have a latchkey and keys to his desk and his files. She had wanted Art to wait for her at her place while she went to the Coleman house and got the letters and the picture, but he had insisted that he wouldn’t let her go alone that time of night. They had gone together.
The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends Page 14
