The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack

by Richard Deming

  I grunted. Looking back at Clayton, I said, “You didn’t answer my question about where you were last night.”

  Janet said a trifle quickly, “He was here, Sergeant. He is living here.”

  I returned my attention to her. “He didn’t leave the house all night? Perhaps after you were asleep?”

  “I slept in his arms,” she said firmly. “He hasn’t been out of my sight for more than a few minutes at a time since yesterday morning.”

  I looked back at Clayton. Raising his coffee mug again, he smiled at me over the rim as he sipped at it. When he lowered it, he said, “You heard the lady.”

  From years of listening to untruths I had developed a sort of built-in lie detector that tipped me off when witnesses or suspects were deliberately lying. I felt its silent blips now. There was nothing I could do about it at the moment, though.

  A trifle sourly I said to the woman, “If you’re all ready, let’s go.”

  En route downtown I remembered Janet Schroeder had mentioned having a phone conversation with her husband the previous day. I asked her what it had been about.

  “He still had some of his things at the house. I let him pack his clothing and take it along the evening I had the locks changed, but he left behind some other personal things. He wanted permission to come by for them. I told him he could come by today.”

  “When was this conversation?” I asked.

  “He phoned from his office about noon.”

  “He mention anything that might be a clue to his murder?”

  She shook her head. “Aside from what I told you, all that transpired was his usual pitch for a reconciliation, and my recapitulation of the terms necessary before I would even discuss it.”

  We drove in silence for a few moments. Eventually I said, “Now that your second husband is dead, do you think his partner will make a settlement with your first one?”

  “Jake Moore? Of course not. So you see, Sam will get nothing now. Doesn’t that prove Sam had absolutely no motive to kill Walt, even if he didn’t have an alibi?”

  I could think of one. If the dead man hadn’t changed his will, which he probably hadn’t, since he was attempting to arrange a reconciliation, probably his widow would inherit half interest in the company. No doubt this would amount to a lot more than any settlement Sam could have gotten for his invention.

  The city morgue was on the first floor of the Coroner’s Court Building. We first stopped in the office of the coroner’s physician to find out if the body had been washed and tagged. When we learned it had been, I led Janet to the door of the morgue.

  Pausing before I opened it, I said, “I guess I better prepare you for a shock. Whoever killed him took a few kicks at his head after he was dead. His face is kind of a mess.”

  She turned a trifle pale, but her voice was steady when she said, “I have a strong stomach, Sergeant. I can face it.”

  I opened the door and led her inside. Apparently old Jimmie Creighton, the morgue attendant, had just finished washing and preparing the body for autopsy, because it was lying naked on a wheeled cart in the center of the room. The face was no longer bloody, but it was still battered beyond recognition. There were five purple-ringed holes in the chest and stomach. Next to one of the holes was a butterfly-shaped red birthmark.

  Janet’s already pale face drained of all color, but apparently her stomach was as strong as she claimed, because her voice remained steady. Gazing at the birthmark, she said, “It’s Walter.”

  I led her from the room and back to the office of the coroner’s physician. Police headquarters is only a half block from the Coroner’s Court Building. I phoned the garage and ordered a car and a driver to take Janet home. I told the dispatcher to have the driver report to the waiting room of the coroner’s physician’s office.

  While we were waiting, the door to the private office of the coroner’s physician opened and two reporters I knew stepped out. Plump, white-haired Dr. Lyman Fish paused in the doorway behind them.

  Mel Powers of the Post said, “Hi, Sod. Doc Fish says you’re working the one found in Forest Park this morning.”

  Harry Fenner of the Globe said, “Kind of weird sense of humor on the killer’s part, laying him out with that flower in his hands.”

  I looked at Dr. Fish, who said, “That was all right to tell, wasn’t it, Sod?”

  Before I could answer, Mel Powers, noting Janet’s paleness, said, “Are you here to identify the body, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was my husband.”

  “Mrs. Janet Schroeder, gentlemen,” I said. “She has just officially identified the victim as her husband, Walter Schroeder.”

  Both reporters momentarily lost interest in me in order to question her about what her reaction had been to the news and if she had any theories about who had killed her husband. I took advantage of the diversion to ask Dr. Fish if he had looked at the body yet.

  “Only briefly,” he said. “I would guess he died sometime during the night. Say between nine p.m. and three a.m. I’ll probably be able to refine that for you after the autopsy. I’ll get a preliminary postmortem report to you tomorrow, and the full report in a couple of days.”

  He went back into his office and closed the door. A uniformed policeman came in from the hall and asked generally, “Sergeant Harris?”

  “That’s me,” I said. “You from the garage?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want you to run Mrs. Schroeder here home. She lives down on Russell Boulevard.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I broke in on the reporters’ questioning of the widow to tell her the chauffeur had arrived and to thank her for making the identification. Apparently they had gotten everything they wanted from her, because they made no attempt to hold her up with more questions. After she and the driver had left, they turned back to me.

  “I don’t know any more than Doc Fish told you,” I said. “We have no suspects and we don’t know what the motive was—except it wasn’t robbery. He had three hundred dollars in his wallet.”

  They hadn’t known that, because Dr. Fish hadn’t. The wallet had gone to the lab, not to the morgue. The two reporters tried to push me into speculating on why the money had not been taken, but I was too old a hand for that game. Usually when some idiot statement is attributed by the press to the cop working on a murder case, you can bet that he was badgered into it by reporters in order to spice up the story.

  I broke away from Powers and Fenner after a time and, because by now it was after twelve, drove to a restaurant for lunch. After lunch I checked the restaurant’s phone book for the address of the Schroeder-Moore Electronics Company. It was on Spring, north of Chouteau.

  The place turned out to be a one-story brick building a half block long. A girl at an information desk just inside the main door directed me along a hall to the Schroeder-Moore executive offices.

  The office I was looking for had lettered on its door in gold leaf: Walter Schroeder, Jacob Moore. Inside, I found a large reception room where a striking redhead of about thirty sat behind a desk on which there was a phone with a number of push buttons. On either side of the room were closed doors. The one to the left was lettered: Walter Schroeder. The one to the right read: Jacob Moore. Apparently the redhead was the joint secretary of both partners. “Hi,” I said. “Mr. Moore in?”

  She gave me a polite smile. “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  Taking out my wallet, I showed her my badge. “Sergeant Sod Harris, Homicide.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You must be here about Mr. Schroeder. We heard it on the air just before noon. It’s simply terrible.”

  “It is that,” I agreed.

  “Have you arrested him yet?”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Clayton.”

  I regarded her curiously. “You think Sam Clayton kill
ed him?”

  “Well, it was the same way Mr. Schroeder was left before. With a flower clasped in his hands, I mean. And he had an appointment with Mr. Schroeder last night.”

  “Clayton had an appointment?”

  She nodded. “Mr. Schroeder had me phone the message to Mr. Clayton. He said to tell him to stop by his apartment at nine p.m. and they would work out the details of the settlement.”

  “The settlement for the Clayton Cutting Torch?”

  She nodded again. “I assume so, although Mr. Schroeder didn’t say. He simply gave me the message and I phoned Mr. Clayton to pass it on.”

  “When was this?”

  “Just as he was leaving the office at four-thirty yesterday.”

  I raised my brows. “He didn’t wait to find out whether or not Clayton could make it?”

  “Oh, he knew he would be available, because he had talked to his wife earlier in the day—about noon. Mr. Schroeder had moved out and Mr. Clayton was staying with her, you know.”

  I grunted acknowledgment.

  “Mrs. Schroeder was insisting that Mr. Schroeder had to make a financial settlement with Mr. Clayton over his invention before she would consider reconciliation. Mr. Schroeder said he would think it over, and asked when Mr. Clayton would be available to discuss it. She said any time at all, including that evening.”

  “You listened in on the conversation they had, huh?” I asked.

  “It was an accident,” she said defensively. “Mr. Schroeder had me get his wife on the phone, and I just forgot to hang up.”

  I grunted again. At that moment the door to the right opened and a tall, well-built blond man of about forty looked out.

  “Marybell, will you get me that audit report?” he asked. Then he looked at me.

  “This is Sergeant Harris of the police, Jake,” she said. “He’s here about Mr. Schroeder.”

  “Oh. Come on in, Sergeant.”

  He stepped aside to let me enter his private office. Closing the door behind me, he offered me a chair before his desk and went around to seat himself behind it.

  “It was quite a shock to hear of Walt’s murder on the radio,” he said. “I had been phoning his apartment all morning to find out why he hadn’t showed for work, but there was no answer, of course. Have you made an arrest yet, Sergeant?”

  “Not yet. When did you last see your partner, Mr. Moore?”

  “When we both left work at four-thirty yesterday afternoon. We walked out to the parking lot together.”

  “Then you overheard him tell your secretary to phone Sam Clayton?”

  He nodded. “I guess Walt was offering him some kind of settlement for an invention of Clayton’s on which we hold the patent. I don’t know what kind of settlement he planned, because Walt always handled business details and I run the plant.”

  “You weren’t interested enough to inquire?” I asked quizzically.

  “Of course I was interested,” he said, flushing slightly. “But Sam Clayton was an embarrassing subject I preferred to avoid. He was the first husband of Walt’s wife, you know, and Janet recently kicked Walt out and took Clayton back. When Walt asked Marybell to phone Clayton, he told her to call him at his own home. Wouldn’t that have left you too embarrassed to ask questions?”

  Not if my business partner was going to make a financial commitment that was going to cost both of us, I mused; but I merely emitted a noncommittal grunt.

  The door opened and the redheaded secretary came in. She laid a bound document about a quarter-inch thick on Jacob Moore’s desk. Reading upside down, I saw that the cover page bore the letterhead: Austin-Hubbard, Inc., Certified Public Accountants, and an address on Lindell Boulevard. Centered in the page was typed: Annual Audit of the Financial Records of the Schroeder-Moore Electronics Company, a Partnership.

  “Thank you, Marybell,” Moore said.

  “Okay, honey.”

  I cocked a quizzical eyebrow at her back as she went out the door. When I turned back to Moore, I saw he had turned somewhat red.

  “We’re engaged,” he explained. “She’s really not supposed to do that around the office, though.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “She’s a very attractive girl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your fiancée mentioned something about the flower clasped in Schroeder’s hands being the same way he was left before. You interrupted us by coming from your office just then, so I didn’t have a chance to ask what she meant. Do you know?”

  “Oh, sure. I assume you know Sam Clayton spent time in the State Penitentiary at Jefferson City for beating Walt up.”

  “Uh-huh. He’s been out only a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, what Clayton did was catch Walt alone on the sixth tee of the Forest Park Golf Course while Walt was playing a solo round. He beat poor Walt unmercifully. Broke his nose, both cheekbones and several ribs. Then he stretched him out on his back, unconscious, folded his hands in the center of his chest and clasped a flower in them. Only that time it was a daisy instead of a dandelion. Walt might have died if a foursome playing through hadn’t spotted him lying there and called an ambulance.”

  “That puts a different complexion on things,” I said. “I think I’ll go back to headquarters and pull the case file on that assault.”

  The case was in the Homicide files, because assaults are investigated by Homicide. Cliff Marks, who was no longer with us, had made the investigation. The circumstances had been essentially its Jacob Moore had described them, and Clayton had been convicted of assault with intent to kill in the Circuit Court for Criminal Causes.

  I phoned Communications and had the nearest squad car to the house on Russell Boulevard sent to pick up Sam Clayton. When he was brought in a half hour later, I told him he was under arrest for investigation, suspicion of homicide. Then I started to read him his constitutional rights.

  “I know all that,” he interrupted impatiently. “This is my second time here, remember. I want to make a statement. I know nothing at all about Walt’s murder.”

  “He was laid out in a manner remarkably similar to the way you left him after beating him up,” I said. “How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t have to. Ask his killer when you catch him. Sergeant, I was listening to a radio news report of the murder when the cops arrived to arrest me. It said Walt had three hundred dollars on him. I sure as hell wouldn’t have left that if I’d killed him. I’m practically broke.”

  “You have pretty good prospects if you beat this bust,” I said. “I imagine your ex-wife, whom I assume you also plan to make your future wife, will inherit half interest in Schroeder-Moore.”

  “But I never left the house last night, Sergeant. Janet verified that.”

  “You both lied,” I said flatly. “Let’s not beat about the bush, Clayton. I know you had a nine o’clock appointment with Schroeder last night.”

  He blinked. After a moment he said in a depressed voice, “You talked to Walt’s secretary, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Her call surprised the devil out of me. As Jan told you, Walt had phoned her at noon about picking up some stuff he still had at the house, and as usual she bugged him about settling with me. But he hadn’t committed himself to anything, and she said he didn’t sound too encouraging. Then I get a call from his secretary that he wants me to drop by his place to work out the details of the settlement. But he wasn’t home when I got there.”

  “No?” I said unbelievingly.

  “Honest. I waited around until past ten, ringing the bell periodically, but he never answered.”

  “Anybody see you waiting around?”

  “A couple of tenants once. But that’s no help to me, because it only proves I was there. I had Jan’s car, and most of the time I waited in it. About every ten minutes I went in to ring the bell, and once a couple got of
f the elevator and went into an apartment down the hall while I was ringing. That was about quarter to ten.” The admission that he was at the murdered man’s door only a short time before Schroeder probably died cinched it for me. I suspected he had mentioned it only because he had been seen and wanted to get in an advance explanation before I talked to the witnesses.

  I took him down to the booking desk, had him booked and put into a holding cell at Central District.

  That night when my wife Maggie and I settled in the front room after dinner, we as usual split the evening paper. She always started with Section A, while I got first crack at the sports pages.

  We had been silently reading for only a few minutes when she said, “You didn’t tell me you had that awful Forest Park case.”

  “I try to forget my work when I get home,” I said.

  “The killer certainly had a macabre sense of humor, leaving a flower clasped in the poor man’s hands.”

  “Yeah, he sure did.”

  “What kind of flower was it?”

  “A dandelion.”

  “That doesn’t seem very appropriate,” Maggie said.

  I lowered my paper to look at her. “Appropriate?”

  “In the language of flowers a dandelion stands for coquetry. Whoever heard of a man being guilty of that?”

  “I don’t think the killer was using the flower as code,” I said. “I think he picked a dandelion because it was the only kind of flower growing in the immediate area.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  The next morning I found a preliminary postmortem report on my desk. Five .38 caliber lead slugs had been dug from the corpse of Walter Schroeder, two of them good enough for comparison purposes if we ever turned up the murder weapon. The others had been smashed out of shape by hitting bones. Estimated time of death had been reduced from the original span of six hours to between ten p.m. and midnight.

  There was also an envelope on my desk containing the photographs Art Ward had taken. Among them were the two close-ups of the heel-print on the victim’s forehead, blown up to actual size.

  I had logged in a few minutes before eight. It was just eight when I finished looking at the photographs. I switched on the transistor radio on my desk for the eight o’clock news.