The Corpse Who Had Too Many Friends

by Hampton Stone

  His look of roughness carried over into his clothes. He was wearing not-too-clean army fatigue pants, a pair of well-scuffed army shoes, and a faded blue shirt frayed at the collar. The shirt was open at his throat. It was, in fact, open halfway down his hairy chest. Of course, none of this was too remarkable. You can go all over town and find men who look as rough as did Michael Halloran. You’ll find them down by the docks. You’ll find them on the truck-loading platforms. You’ll find them digging up streets.

  You won’t, however, find them holding up their pants with a black canvas belt. That belt caught my eye first thing when they brought him in, and all the time Gibby worked on him my eyes were straying to that belt.

  Gibby took him right down the line. He got his name and his address, the fact that he was a truck driver, where he worked, all that basic and routine stuff. He had been picked up on his job, and Gibby almost apologized to him because the police had bothered him. When he had finished with that, he went after the thing chronologically. He found out that Mickey had known Gert Cullinan since they were kids in grammar school together. He learned that they were engaged to be married. He learned that Mickey didn’t even care to pretend that, in the event that he might learn of what he called any “messing around,” he would not with his bare hands kill Gert and any man who was “messing around” with her. He also learned that in the opinion of Mickey Halloran Albert Gleason was a little squirt who could not be suspected of having messed around to sufficient purpose to warrant killing.

  “First chance I get my hands on him,” Mickey said, “I’ll beat the living daylights out of him and there ain’t no cops is going to stop me.”

  He accompanied the words with another hitch at the black canvas strap around his waist. Gibby let the threat pass.

  He took the boy back to the night before, made him tell about how he came to the dance and met Gert there after the dinner, how he had been left cooling his heels for more than an hour, how nobody could do that to him. Gibby took him over it step by step and then he took him over his movements of the morning step by step. Halloran denied having so much as seen Albert Gleason.

  “If I’d seen him you’d of known it,” he said darkly. “In a bank like this they couldn’t wipe up that much blood without you knowing it.”

  “If you took that belt from around your waist and strangled him with it,” Gibby said in the mildest of voices, “there wouldn’t be any blood.” Halloran looked down at the black strap he was using as a belt.

  “You mean like that Mr. Coleman was killed last night,” he said. “That ain’t for me, brother. That’s for the kind of little squirt he can’t take care of himself with his bare mitts. I don’t need no black belts.”

  “Except to hold up your pants,” said Gibby.

  Halloran nodded. “For that,” he said, “it works real good.”

  Gibby asked him where he got the strap, and he said that Gert brought them home all the time, that all her little brothers and sisters used them to carry their books to school, that she had given him the one he used as a belt.

  “That the only one you have?” Gibby asked.

  Halloran shook his head. He couldn’t be certain. He probably had a couple more of them kicking around his place.

  “We go to the beach,” he said, “they’re handy to put around your towel and your suit. They’s always a couple lying around for things like that.”

  On that point he couldn’t be shaken. The black canvas straps were for things like that. They weren’t for murder. Murder by garroting was only for little squirts who couldn’t take care of themselves with their bare mitts.

  Michael Halloran had not the first doubt about the prowess of his own bare mitts. He challenged Gibby to produce Albert Gleason and promised that he would in that event provide us with a demonstration.

  Gibby let it go at that.

  “Okay, tough boy,” he said. “You have me convinced. You’ll have to stick around a while. You’ll be told when you can go.”

  Halloran didn’t like that. “Why?” he growled.

  “Because I’m a tough boy, too,” Gibby said, “and because Albert Gleason’s dead.”

  Halloran grinned. “Just hearing I was after him,” he said. “Just hearing that and it scared him to death.”

  “That,” said Gibby, “is a new theory.”

  He turned his back on Halloran and he asked Lansing how things were coming along on the tellers. Lansing told him that some of them had already arrived and that others were on their way.

  “Good,” Gibby said. He turned to Brady. “We’ll keep Bare Mitts here,” he said. “Send the tellers in. I want to talk to them.”

  Brady was gone a short while and when he came back he was herding nine tellers along ahead of him. Gibby told them that he wanted them to wait in the corridor outside the offices of the president. He told them that people would be coming along that corridor and going into the office. He wanted them to look at those people as they went by and if they recognized a depositor in the group they were to tell one of the policemen who would be stationed in the corridor with them. He asked them if they thought they could do that.

  “Yes, sir,” they said in chorus.

  “Good,” said Gibby. “Now look at all of us here before you go out. Any of your depositors in this room?”

  They stood in a row and solemnly scrutinized our faces. I could see that they were every one of them aware that they were under the eyes of the president of Fiveborough National. They were showing him how seriously they took their work. One young fellow stepped forward.

  “Mr. Halloran has an account with us, sir,” he said.

  Gibby asked the young man which branch was his. He named it, and Gibby took note of the fact that it was a branch within a few blocks of Halloran’s home address. He thanked the young man and the young man looked pleased with himself. Lansing thanked him, and he beamed. The other eight were trying not to look as sour as they felt.

  They filed out to their station in the hall and Halloran growled questions about what kind of crime it might be for a man to put his money in a bank and since when was there anything wrong with having a checking account. Gibby left the questions unanswered. We waited a few moments until Brady and Ellerman and a flock of cops came up with our whole gang.

  It was the complete lot, even to Cary Willard and Jeb Wilberforce. I was a bit astonished that the latter should still be around, but with one look at him I knew that if he was allowed to he would stick around to take care of his boy, Art Fuller, and he wouldn’t stop doing it till hell froze over. I could tell it by the way he looked at Gibby. Ferocious would be the word for it.

  The others were milder. Rose Salvaggi looked tragic. Art Fuller looked haggard. His eyes never left Rose’s face and it was as though he were making the most of every moment he might have left to him. Cary Willard looked clearly out of his depth and trying hard to look knowing. Sully looked grave and distressed, and I thought it was a pity he hadn’t taken the vice-presidency. He had quite a good manner for it, the banker deploring the occurrence of such unconventional departures from banking custom during banking hours. Gert Cullinan looked almost as tragic as did Rose. The difference I thought was only one of personality. They were both steeped in tragedy to the top of their bent. It was just that the monumental Gert had less depth of understanding and less depth of feeling for it.

  Lansing’s secretary, with the assistance of several cops, dragged in chairs. Gibby waited till the whole gang had been seated. Rose Salvaggi and Art Fuller sat side by side. Their hands crept together and held tight. Two people were watching them closely. One was Wilberforce, who sat behind them and who from time to time would lean forward and drop on their shoulders fatherly little pats of reassurance. The other was Gert, who from across the room watched them hungrily in the intervals when she wasn’t looking at the hulking Mickey Halloran. Mickey responded to her every glance with a menacing scowl.

  Gibby ignored all these little byplays. He started talking and he addr
essed his words to Lansing.

  “Mr. Lansing,” he said. “You have been having here at Fiveborough National something which overnight has grown into a major crime wave, no less than six felonies.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Two murders,” he said, “the killings of your vice-president, Mr. Coleman, and of a clerk in your Branch Banking department, Albert Gleason. Your third crime is the attempted murder this morning of Miss Salvaggi. Three more are burglaries: Mr. Coleman’s house after his murder last night, Miss Salvaggi’s apartment this morning, and Mr. Coleman’s office this morning. I expect to prove that all of these crimes are closely connected and that they all spring from one earlier parent crime, at the moment not yet uncovered.”

  One of the cops came in with a note for Gibby. Gibby told him to give it to me. I looked at it. The tellers out in the hall had had their look at the gang the cops had brought up to Lansing’s office. Several of the boys had distinguished themselves. The note listed depositors who had been recognized. Wilberforce had a checking account in the branch near his office and a smaller household account in a branch near his home. Art Fuller had one account, in the branch near his apartment in the village. James Sully had an account in a mid-town Manhattan branch. Even Brady had been recognized. Brady had an account in an uptown bank.

  While I looked at the list, Gibby had gone on talking. He had asked me to hold on to the note till he was ready for it. He had been explaining that he would put off going into the as yet uncovered crime until he had completed consideration of the known crimes, since it was the nature of these known crimes that would lead us back to the parent crime that had initiated the crimes we knew about and which would explain them.

  He started with the Coleman killing.

  Only briefly did he go into the character of Homer G. Coleman. The man’s virtues had been manifest and, when Gibby asserted that the late Mr. Coleman had been a man who could have called everyone who knew him his friend, there was not a soul in that room who displayed even the faintest touch of doubt. I have never known a point on which there had been such unanimity. No sane human being could have been an enemy to Homer G. Coleman.

  “That leaves us with only two alternatives,” he said. “In any difficult case there is always the easy answer of the mad killer. The District Attorney’s office just doesn’t like to settle for that easy answer. It may well be that we do have in this case a mad killer; but, if it is madness, it is such madness as runs in a pattern sane people can understand. To close this case we have to understand it.”

  With that point Mr. Lansing did take the issue. “I,” he said firmly, “shall never be able to understand how anyone who called himself a human being could have brought himself to murder Homer Coleman.”

  Gibby nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, “but not because the crime is so mad. You have trouble with it because the crime is so evil. Evil is a difficult thing for the minds of good men. I spoke of two alternatives and this brings me to the second, not the mad crime but the peculiarly evil one. Mr. Coleman was murdered not for any fault in his own character. He was murdered because he was a good man, so good that he had to be killed. He was murdered because he was everyone’s friend. Since everyone includes the killer, he was also the killer’s friend and that was at least one friend too many for any man to have. If Mr. Coleman had been a hard man or a vindictive man or even a man who would righteously put justice before mercy, he would have been alive today.”

  Rose Salvaggi interrupted. “It isn’t true,” she said. “You know it isn’t true.”

  “What isn’t?” Gibby asked.

  “That any of us who had known his kindness could have been his killer.”

  “Kindness is all right in its way,” Gibby told her. “But to be kind to a truly evil man is a dangerous practice. That is the risk Homer Coleman took and that’s why he’s dead. The pattern could not be clearer. Mr. Coleman was killed. He had money on him and he had valuables, but none of those was taken from his body. Nothing was taken except his keys. I am not saying that he was murdered for his keys. That would be silly. The murder and the keys are both part of the larger picture. It would have availed the killer nothing to have had the keys if Mr. Coleman had remained alive, and it would have availed the killer nothing to have killed Mr. Coleman and not had the keys. He needed both.”

  “Art needed neither,” Wilberforce put in.

  “I am just laying out the design of the thing,” Gibby said. “When you design a building, do you plan it one room at a time or do you build first the whole pattern of the structure to work in the details later?”

  “Okay,” Wilberforce said. “Lay out your pattern.”

  “The killer took the keys and with them entered Homer Coleman’s house. Mr. Coleman had a fine house, beautifully appointed. There are many things in Mr. Coleman’s house that would interest a burglar, things ready to hand out in full sight, things like the silver on the sideboard in the dining room. So far as we have been able to determine, the killer took from the house nothing of monetary value. We have been faced with the problem of what he did take; or, if he took nothing, what he looked for there.”

  “Papers,” Carey Willard contributed. “Records. He was after something this morning in Mr. Coleman’s office, and that could have been nothing but papers of some sort.”

  “We’re coming to that,” said Gibby. “Last night, however, while he was in the Coleman house, other visitors came. Miss Salvaggi and Mr. Fuller used Miss Salvaggi’s key, and they came in. They did come to remove papers, letters concerned with Mr. Fuller. They removed those and they have since destroyed them. The killer, however, encountering Art Fuller in the hall, struck him on the head with a silver candlestick, knocking him out. At that time the killer made no attempt on Miss Salvaggi.”

  Wilberforce interrupted. “There was an attempt on Miss Salvaggi this morning,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Yes,” Gibby said. “We’ll come to that. The way the killer behaved in the Coleman house last night, it would seem that he had no interest in doing any killing just then. He had come for something he had expected would be in the house. He had found it and he was interested only in getting away from there undetected. He knocked Art Fuller out, and when Mac and I came along, he knocked both of us out. We, like Fuller, stood in the way of his getting out of that house undetected. As Mr. Wilberforce reminded me, though, that wasn’t the end of it. The killer wasn’t through. This morning he was at it again. In Mr. Coleman’s house last night he saw Miss Salvaggi take from Mr. Coleman’s desk a framed picture. He couldn’t have known what she would want with the framed picture and he jumped to the conclusion that it would be something concealed inside the frame.”

  The door opened and the boys brought in a fresh flock of tellers. The men from the far-flung branches had arrived. Gibby waited and there was a strained silence while these new tellers looked over our whole company and then filed out. As soon as they were gone, Gibby resumed.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “whether it was with a double purpose or a triple purpose that the killer came here to the office early this morning. I do know that he came with the intention of killing Miss Salvaggi and stealing her keys. Whether he also intended to go through Mr. Coleman’s desk and files or not and whether or not he did go through the desk and files, I don’t know. It is a minor point and it doesn’t matter.”

  “Tampering with bank records,” Cary Willard groaned. “It matters very much.”

  “Not nearly as much as murder,” Gibby snapped. “We do know that the attempt was made on the life of Miss Salvaggi. We do know that her keys were stolen. We do know that the killer, using her keys, entered her apartment and ransacked it. He ripped all the pictures from their frames, including the picture Miss Salvaggi had taken from Mr. Coleman’s house. Miss Salvaggi has gone through her things and has found nothing missing, which means that either the killer found something she hadn’t even known she had or else he had found nothing he wanted. That is also of little consequence.”
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  “He found nothing he wanted,” Rose Salvaggi offered. “I know what I had in my apartment.”

  “Yes,” said Gibby, “unless there was something concealed inside the frame of the picture you took from Mr. Coleman’s desk. You wouldn’t know whether or not the killer found something there.”

  “No,” she conceded. “There would be no way for me to know that.”

  One of the detectives assigned to us came in with more of those little notes. He gave them to me. Rose Salvaggi had an account in the branch near her home. John Jameson had an account in one of the Brooklyn branches. Gert Cullinan also had an account in a Brooklyn branch. I sorted the little notes into coherent order and handed them to Gibby.

  He took them and went on with his explanation. “That leaves us only one more of the obvious crimes,” he said, “the killing of Albert Gleason. In a room at the Hotel Butterfield Gleason had been set upon by a gang of girls and robbed of his britches. When the girls had made off with his pants, he had wanted to give chase, but Homer Coleman had come along at that point, and Albert Gleason had been forced to hide in a bedroom. While he was hiding, he witnessed the murder of Homer Coleman. He witnessed the murder and he did nothing about it. He made no effort to save Mr. Coleman. He made no effort to raise an alarm. He left it for Mr. Sully to find the body and raise the alarm.”

  “But he said he had seen nothing,” Sully objected. “I questioned him this morning and he said he had neither seen nor heard anything.”

  “We questioned him last night,” Gibby said. “He told us that he had left the suite despite his pantlessness and had crept from one unoccupied room to another, looking for the girls. He also told us that he had seen and heard nothing. Now that he is dead, we can be certain he was lying. He did see or hear something, and it was just because of what he had seen or heard that he didn’t give the alarm. It was for just that reason that he lied to us.”