The Judge Is Reversed

by Frances Lockridge

  Jerry got up, walked through the hallway to the other large room, the bedroom, at the rear of the apartment. Conceivably, Ackerman might have fallen asleep. Or, succumbed in some fashion to his own excitement.

  The large bedroom—also well furnished—was empty. Somewhat absently, Jerry looked into a closet—a large closet. Clothes hung neatly in the closet. Shoes were neat on the floor. Ackerman was not in the closet. Why on earth should he be in the closet?

  All right—having gone so far in a fruitless charade, make sure. Jerry went back into the hall and opened one of the two doors. The door opened into a bathroom. Nobody in the bathroom.

  Jerry tried the other door—the kitchen door.

  Floyd Ackerman was in the kitchen. He was hanging, straight, neat, his feet six inches from the floor. He was hanging by the neck on a length of thin rope—actually, a very heavy cord—which had been hitched around a thick pipe which ran across the kitchen, just below the ceiling. A small stool lay on its side on the floor, just out of reach of the dangling feet. He was wearing his glasses.

  If Floyd Ackerman had had a right to live, he had elected not to exercise it further.

  Jerry found a knife in a kitchen drawer and cut the body down. The action would not, he supposed, be approved, but it was inevitable. He could not leave the thin little man, who would never shake again—never raise a shrill voice again in hysteria—dangling grotesquely there. He touched the body as little as he could, lowering it with hands under armpits. He did not touch the tipped-over stool and did not tamper with the knots.

  There was warmth in the body. Dead now—Jerry made as sure of that as a layman can—Ackerman had not been dead long. He could not have been—it had not been long, not much more than three-quarters of an hour, since he had talked on the telephone, and talked in fear. He must have killed himself almost at once after Jerry North had said, so slowly, so carefully—so ineffectually—“Wait.”

  It made no sense. There was no use trying to guess sense into it. The telephone was in the living room. Jerry went into the living room.

  By a little after four on Monday afternoon it began to look that, as a suspect, Graham Latham had what it took. Mullins was, admittedly, pleased with this; he had brought Latham back as a suspect, more or less on a silver platter, and Weigand, listening, had said “right” several times before they got at it—by telephone, through the cooperation of precinct detectives. They had been lucky.

  That Latham had a motive as good as any, and better than most, leaped to the mind. Half a million dollars in a daughter’s name is half a million dollars in the family—in a family which, obviously, could use it. Between Latham and the money there was little chance that whim might intervene. “The girl might change her mind about this guy Mears,” Mullins pointed out, pointing it up. “Not about daddy.” Latham impressed Mullins as a tough guy—tough mentally and physically. The girl—Mullins wasn’t so sure about the girl. Sorta nice, the girl seemed to be. So—

  Latham had played bridge with Blanchard and two other men, at Blanchard’s apartment, the night before Blanchard died. The two other men, reached at their offices by telephone—for once things broke smoothly—had agreed to this. There had been nothing unusual about the bridge game—Latham had won fifty dollars or so, but there was nothing unusual about that. “Be a hell of a lot better off if he’d played cards instead of the market,” one of the men said. “Good old Gray.” The game had ended around midnight, because Blanchard had to get up early to go to Forest Hills.

  Latham had stayed overnight at the Princeton Club, precisely as he said, and had left early—around eight—also as he had said. “Plenty of time to have dropped by to knock Blanchard off on his way home,” Mullins pointed out, and Bill Weigand said, “Right, sergeant.”

  He would have had to “drop by” after Mears had left, if Mears was telling the truth. He could have been there, with Blanchard dead, when Ackerman rang the doorbell—if Ackerman was telling the truth. “Wouldn’t say, ‘Come on in, lookit what I’ve just done,’” Mullins pointed out.

  “Give him a ring,” Bill said. “Ask him, nice, if he’d like to come in and give us a little more information. And—get the locals to stand by.”

  But the luck ran out, then. Mrs. Graham Latham—answering the telephone in Southampton in a crisp voice which carried the accent, the intonation, of good New York—was sorry, but her husband was not in. He had gone to the city. Nor was Hilda in. She was playing tennis at the home of friends. Why, yes, she thought Mr. Mears was one of the players. But she hadn’t, certainly, queried her daughter as to that. She was sure that her husband, when he did return, would be glad to get in touch with Sergeant Mullins. She was sorry that she did not know where, in the city, he could be reached.

  The “locals”—but actually the State police—would keep an eye on things and, if it seemed indicated, provide transportation into town for Mr. Graham Latham. When—and of course if—he showed up.

  “Pretty sure I didn’t scare him off,” Mullins said. “Of course—if he got worried—”

  Bill doubted it.

  “Could be,” Mullins said, “he’s come in to start shopping.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Could be he has, Mullins.” He drummed his desk with active fingers.

  They had, of course, only a theory—call it, at best, a probability. They hadn’t placed Latham in, or near, the apartment house on Riverside Drive. Without that—

  The telephone rang. Mullins answered, said, “O.K., Mr. North,” and handed the receiver to Bill Weigand, who said, “Yes, Jerry?” And listened. And said, “The hell he has,” and, “Wait for us.” And hung up.

  “Floyd Ackerman’s hanged himself,” Weigand said.

  “The hell he has,” Mullins said. “That’s a hell of a note.”

  He spoke in sorrow. He had been rather pleased with the contents of his silver platter.

  “Of course,” he said, “it don’t have to mean—”

  He did not finish. His heart was not in it.

  “Jerry North walked in on him,” Bill said.

  “Damn,” Sergeant Mullins said. “They sure make things screwy, don’t they?”

  13

  Pam’s first thought had been of Jerry, and of the shock it must have been to him to find Floyd Ackerman dangling from a pipe. Jerry agreed it had been but, after a second drink, added that he would live, through it. Unlike Floyd Ackerman.

  “The poor man,” Pam said. “Why? I suppose because he killed Mr. Blanchard and—and what? Remorse? Or merely fear that he would get caught?”

  Jerry could not help her, except by guessing. He had thought Ackerman, talking on the telephone, was a man afraid. Certainly he had indicated that he was a man about to run. But, instead, he had killed himself. Bill might know more, when he came.

  They had finished dinner, then, and were waiting for Bill Weigand. When the police had arrived at Ackerman’s apartment, Jerry North had told his story once, and told it briefly. Bill had said, “Right, you want to wait here or shall I come around?” Jerry had had no desire to wait there—wait in the way of technicians; wait while the thin body of Floyd Ackerman, dead by strangulation—dead, grotesquely, with his thick-lensed glasses on—was taken away.

  Jerry hated to think of the glasses. It was not quite clear why they had added a final macabre touch—except that, when he had opened the hall door, the light had caught the lenses and been reflected from them, so that, for a hideous instant, the dangling man had seemed to be winking at Jerry North—winking as if they shared a secret between them. When he had finished remembering this—and not telling Pam about it—Jerry had had another drink.

  It was almost nine when Bill came. He came alone; he looked tired. Always, they could tell how long Bill had been at it, and to some extent how it went, by the tiredness in his face. He looked, now, as if it had been going on for some time, and not going well. But when Jerry let him in, and raised enquiring eyebrows, Bill said they had found nothing to indicate that things were not as
they appeared to be—that Ackerman had not killed himself.

  He was offered a drink and took coffee, instead. He listed, briefly, the facts which did not contradict appearances.

  The stool was where it would have been if Ackerman had stood on it, pushed it away when he was ready. The noose around his neck had been made by tying a bowline in the rope’s end and forming a loop by running the line through the bowline’s eye. In effect—in all that chiefly mattered—it had been a hangman’s knot. The other end of the rope had been passed twice around the pipe, and made fast. The thick pipe, left exposed as so often happened when the building was remodeled, had been more than adequate to support Ackerman’s light weight. It appeared that Ackerman had left some slack, but not enough for the purpose, which would have been to break his neck. So—he had strangled.

  He had left no note. As often as not, they left no notes, especially when the decision came suddenly and the action, afterward, was almost immediate. The cord he had used was three-eighths of an inch in diameter (and hence had cut deeply into the man’s thin throat) three-ply, brown, natural fibre. More simply, it was such a strong cord as is frequently used to tie up heavy parcels. Ackerman might have received such a parcel and saved the cord—conceivably for the use to which he had finally put it; more probably for any use which might crop up. He might at some time have bought the cord to tie up some heavy parcel he was shipping—a box of books to someone, for example. The cord—or thin rope if they preferred—would have supported the weight of a much heavier man than Ackerman.

  It was possible, of course, that he had gone out and bought the cord after making up his mind, which presumably would have been after his telephone conversation with Jerry. Which brought them back to that. So—

  Jerry went over it again, trying to remember, trying to quote. It had not been coherent.

  “Right,” Bill said, when he had listened. “You thought he was afraid? Of us—of the police—chiefly? That he wanted to tell you something and—run. Why you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “We’d met. I suppose he could have heard that we’ve been—mixed up in things like this. But I don’t know.”

  “You told him you’d come? Asked him not to do anything until you did? Promised not to call us in?”

  In effect—yes.

  “You should have had more sense.”

  Jerry knew he should have had more sense. He had done this much—he had told his secretary to call the police if she did not hear from him within an hour.

  “The only thing,” he said, “Ackerman said he would be watching. Would hide if the police came. I believed him. And—he sounded scared, Bill. Scared to death.”

  “He was,” Bill said. “Apparently he was. You waited—how long?”

  Jerry had waited in the apartment almost exactly ten minutes before he went into the other rooms, before he found Ackerman hanging. He—

  He stopped suddenly.

  “Bill,” he said, “if I’d looked earlier—found him earlier?”

  “I doubt it,” Bill said.

  “But you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know. You saw nothing to indicate there had been anyone else in the apartment?”

  Jerry North shook his head slowly. And Pam, sitting beside him on a sofa, put her hand over his, pressed his hand. “All right,” Jerry said. “I—” Again he broke off, and now looked at Bill Weigand, looked intently.

  “I told you,” Bill said. “Everything is consonant with suicide.”

  “Even the glasses?”

  “He could see almost nothing without them, the M.E. says. Judging by the lenses. He would—well, he would have needed them to tie the knots.”

  “Speaking of the knots,” Pam said, “what’s this one you call a bowline? I never heard of it.”

  Bill told her, as well as the shape of a knot can be told without demonstration.

  “He’d know how to tie one?” Pam said. “It sounds—complicated.”

  Sounded more than was, Bill said. He smiled suddenly, and weariness ebbed from his face. He said that if she was looking for some special person—a sailor, perhaps? If so, they had nothing to indicate that Ackerman had ever been a sailor.

  Pam said, “Really, Bill. Although I did see a movie the other evening—one of the old ones? On TV? And there everything depended on a man’s tying a square knot. A square knot. Even I—don’t I, Jerry?”

  “At least half the time,” Jerry said, with gravity, but felt better, with Pam back. He thought of mentioning the laws of chance, but decided against it.

  “All right,” Pam said. “Forget knots. Bill—you say ‘consonant’ with. A—a careful word?”

  “A detective should always be sceptical,” Bill said. “Says so in the manual. But—no cigarettes still burning, Jerry? No faint odor of perfume?”

  He spoke lightly. He sounded serious. Jerry North shook his head.

  “Nothing heard? No distant closing of a door? No window eased down?”

  “Nothing,” Jerry said, “except somebody going downstairs. Somebody I first thought was Ackerman, coming down from where he had been hiding. Only—Probably just somebody going out to market. Anyway, no pause outside Ackerman’s—” He stopped abruptly. He was being looked at hard.

  “My friend,” Bill Weigand said, “it took you quite a time.”

  Jerry looked at him blankly.

  “To remember the footsteps,” Bill said. “Oh—I can see they wouldn’t have had any meaning. Unless, Jerry, you knew that the floor above Ackerman’s—the only floor above—is unoccupied. Nobody lives there, Jerry. Nobody goes down from there to the corner grocery.”

  There was rather a long pause. Jerry dented it, slightly and after some seconds, by saying, “We-ll.” And then Pam, with some reproach, said, “Jerry!”

  “Man or woman?” Bill said, and Jerry—feeling now a little put upon, and that this was not his day—shook his head. He said he couldn’t be sure. He had at first thought the footsteps those of Ackerman himself. So he could not, obviously, have been sure they were those of a woman. But, subsequently, he had explained them—with the fraction of his mind available to something of so little importance—as the footsteps of a woman on her way out to buy food for dinner.

  “Jerry!” Pam said.

  Jerry said he was sorry. He said that, at the time, he had not known Ackerman was dead.

  “A murderer,” Pam said. “Only a wall away. And you just—sat there.”

  “Hold it,” Bill said. “Hold it, Pam. There’s no evidence—”

  “Killed the poor little—man,” Pam said, evidently having rejected “crackpot” out of deference to the dead. “Made it look like suicide. Heard Jerry coming. And—Jerry. Don’t tell me you rang the bell?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “I guess you didn’t bring me up right, dear.”

  “You,” Pam said. “And, since he couldn’t come down, because you were coming up, went up and waited and—really, Jerry.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Jerry said, doing what little he could to strengthen it. He looked at Bill Weigand.

  “Right,” Bill said. “It’s possible, obviously.” He smiled, however. If there was faint tolerance in the smile, Jerry preferred not to notice it.

  “Is there anything else you two haven’t got round to passing on?” Bill Weigand said.

  “I can’t think of any—” Jerry began, but again Pam said, “Jerry!” Jerry stopped, obediently.

  “Miss Somers,” Pam said. “I said we ought to. That she—”

  But this time Bill Weigand interrupted. He said, “Somers?” Then he said, “Damn. You did mention her before and I—damn!”

  They waited.

  It was nothing, he told them. Almost certainly nothing. That morning, while he had been talking with a lawyer named Notson, something had tugged at his memory and nothing in his memory had responded. Now he knew what had tugged—a name. The name of Somers; a name repeated. One Alex Somers, dying intestate; Blanchard his administrator. One Mad
eline Somers, keeper of a cat store. Presumably it meant nothing; was one of those coincidences which plague life, and investigations. Still—what about Miss Somers?

  They told him of Miss Somers—of her revelation to Pam, that morning, that she was about to go out of the cat business and back to Los Angeles; the suggestion, by no means conclusive, that she had gone out of business very suddenly, and closed the shop. (Although at least one potential customer had undertaken to return.) It wasn’t, Pam admitted, much to go on. Miss Somers might merely have gone out to lunch—a rather late lunch.

  “Or, of course,” she added, “gone out to deliver a cat. I do hope she didn’t sell Winkle.”

  They both looked at her. They looked at each other.

  “Nothing definite,” Pam said. “It just—came into my mind. That if we bought her—the little queen—we might call her Winkle.”

  “Why?” Jerry asked, and made it simple.

  “She felt like Winkle,” Pam said. “Don’t always ask me why.”

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Gladly.”

  “It’s subject to change,” Pam promised him. “And we don’t even know if we’ll get her. We want to look at her again. Tomorrow, probably. Anyway—Mr. Ackerman was there this morning. I’m almost sure it was he. Just as Jerry described him. If you’re trying to make a check on his movements.” She paused. “By there,” she said, “I mean at the cat store. With Miss Somers. Not that it means anything. At least, we thought it didn’t.” She paused again. “While he was alive, that is,” she said, finishing it off.

  “Buying a cat?” Bill said. “Or—or what?”

  “Now,” Pam said, “how would I know. You want me to intute?”

  “By all means.”

  “He said something about would she let him know, and she said she’d call him. So I supposed, something to do with the Committee against whatever it is. Probably, a contribution, because Gebby says she was one of them.”