HARRY WHITTINGTON
CALL ME KILLER
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Also Available
Copyright Page
1
SAM GOWAN looked from the empty automatic in his hand to the dead man’s body twisted on the floor between his legs, one leg drawn up, one arm extended. Chill moonlight filtered through the wide casement window that laid bare the east wall of the darkened office. Each separate pane of the window was a framed picture of a deep-sleeping city in the chilly hours before dawn.
For a long time he stood rigid, staring down at the bloody splotch that had been Ross Lambart’s face. His mind was numbed with horror, and all he could think was, I’ve got to get out of here!
He stepped slowly away from Lambart’s body, almost expecting his legs to stretch rubber-like, the fantastic way they might in a dream. He ran woodenly toward the frost-glassed corridor door, conscious only that he was cold, that his fingers were stiff with cold.
But at the door he stopped and looked again at the darkened office. And through the numbness in his mind, he began to see it as the police were going to see it.
He shook his head. “I couldn’t have killed him,” he said aloud. He was just a guy named Sam Gowan who had never wanted to kill anybody in all his life. He was medium tall, just under thirty. His straight brown hair was flopped over his high, sweated forehead. The nostrils of his straight nose were distended at the sight and horror of death.
He’d always thought of himself as one of those average fellows you wouldn’t look at twice On a crowded street. A fifty-five dollar a week job. A pretty wife with plenty of faults. A mortgaged cottage, a car maybe next year if prices dropped any. That’s me, Sam would have told you.
All he could remember was meeting Ross Lambart this afternoon at four o’clock. Some bar, he couldn’t remember where. He couldn’t remember having had anything to drink beyond that first beer. All that had gone between that time and now was lost to Sam.
He forced his gaze once more to the body of Ross Lambart. There was a widening rim of blood under Lambart’s head. Sam gagged. He jerked at the door knob. The door was locked.
He looked around him. The moonlight was patterned in warped squares across the desk. In its light, he saw the orderly stack of gray papers, an overturned fountain pen holder, an upset desk lamp, and a telephone receiver lying ten inches from its cradle.
His eyes moved from the upset receiver on the desk across to the filing cabinets. There was a closed door directly before him, and one, half ajar to his left. A leather covered chair had been knocked over. He looked down again at the dead man, and inevitably back to the telephone, uncradled on the desk.
How long had it been like that? How long before it would be investigated?
Sam was breathing through his mouth. He thrust the cold metal automatic into his coat pocket and ran back to the desk.
He clutched up the receiver, and threw it back onto its cradle.
Fascinatedly, he watched the receiver slide off crazily and thud dully against the glass desk top. He saw that one of the guard bars was broken off the base of the cradle. He thought sickly, I’m leaving fingerprints, and I’m not fixing anything. He covered-his hand with his handkerchief and wiped the receiver. Then he righted the fountain pen holder and pushed it tightly against the telephone to hold the receiver arm in place.
As he turned away, he saw that his handkerchief was smeared with blood. I’ll get rid of it, he promised himself. He realized he was breathing as though he’d run a fast mile. His legs trembled.
He sank tiredly against the desk and rested his weight on the palms of his hands.
He began to be sick at the feel of blood under his fingers. He backed away, holding his spread-fingered hands before him. There was a thick streak of it along the cuff of his coat. Then he saw that there was blood on the desk, on the penholder, and all over the broken base of the telephone.
He crossed the room and threw open the first door. There was nothing inside this niche except empty coat hangers strung along a small cross-bar. On the floor at Sam’s feet were two overcoats and two hats, crumpled and forgotten where they’d been carelessly thrown.
He moved on to the closed door beyond. When he opened it, light from a shaded bulb over a medicine chest mirror struck him blindingly. He stepped into the small room and closed the door tightly after him. Carefully he washed the congealing blood from his palms, from between his fingers and out of the small hairs across the back of his hand.
He looked at the thick smudge of blood on the cuff of his coat. “I’ll burn the coat,” he thought, “when I get out of here, I’ll burn the coat.”
He looked about. There was no towel, not even the paper variety, and there was no toilet paper on the rack beside the stool. He rubbed his hands along the front of his coat.
Again in the darkened office, he straightened the leather chair. Then he started once more for the corridor. But remembering the two hats and overcoats in the closet, he went back across the room. If he left a hat and coat in this room, what chance in the world did he have?
The first hat perched on top of his head. He cast it to the floor and picked up a top coat and the other hat, a bowler dress derby. He knew before he sat it atop his head that it didn’t belong to him. He realized all this was wasting more precious time. Hats and coats belonged, he was suddenly aware, to Ross Lambart. Why were they on the floor? He laughed bitterly. How could he explain a minor detail like that?
Sam cracked the exit door cautiously and stood in the slit of it for a moment. He held his breath, listening. His eyes searched the dim-lit length of the corridor.
He stepped out into the hall and closed the door after him. He heard a sharp clack as the night bolt slid into place. Sam thought, it has closed now. He couldn’t get back in there no matter what happened, no matter what damning evidence he had left behind.
He glanced toward the fire escape, shook his head. All he needed now was to be caught by a cop on a dark fire escape. No, he had to take his chances on getting out of the building entrance. He was almost to the elevator when he stopped.
There was certainly a night operator on duty unless this was an automatic lift. Sam didn’t know, and he couldn’t take a chance. He looked at the buttons beside the grilled elevator doors and smiled grimly. The stairway was beyond, a huge nine painted on the face of its door.
Sam pushed through it. The marble stairways were wide, with marble banisters. The steps were littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts.
He held to the banisters with his right hand and hurried down the marble steps. There was a scrubwoman at the eighth floor landing. In his haste, he almost stepped on her. She was on her knees, scouring with soapy lye water.
She looked up, smiling toothlessly at him. There was a smear of soap across her forehead where she’d trailed it in raking a hank of thin gray hair from her face. Her eyes were dulled with the hypnosis of half-sleep. He supposed she worked in that semi-waking state. Her eyes always fixed on the unchanging gray of the stairs, red, bony hands moving instinctively from lye water to marble, and back again.
Sam halted, face flushing. His breath burst thickly across his parted
lips. He stared at her for a moment without moving.
She wakened enough to speak, her pale old eyes crinkling. “Good morning, sir. I’m almost through now, sir. Seems like everyday it takes longer.”
Sam nodded curtly and stepped around her. But at the mouth of the next stairwell, he paused. The biting odor of lye and strong soap were pungent in his nostrils as he looked starkly back over his shoulder at her. Through his mind raced the thought: if she lives, she is a witness against me.
His clenched right fist brushed the cold gun pocketed in his gaudy sport coat. His hand shuddered, recoiled from touching the automatic. He began to run down the steps, ignoring the throbbing of his heart, the weakness of his legs. And he knew as he rounded the landing on the third floor that he was running from that old woman up there.
At the second floor, he halted. He opened the exit door an inch. He listened, watching the silent corridor. When he was certain it was vacated, he moved along the wall. At the elevator, he impatiently prodded the orange colored button.
He waited with breath held against his aching throat until he heard the elevator doors clang together, and the low hum of the elevator mechanism.
He smiled then with bitter satisfaction and returned to the stairway. He ran all the way down the deeper well between the second and ground floors.
He checked only to see that the elevator was closed. Then he stepped boldly into the foyer and started purposefully toward the outer exits.
He heard the sharp crack as chair legs hit marble flooring. The sound struck him like a blow in the small of the back. He stood straight, stock still. The youth in the second elevator doorway spoke respectfully to him.
“Would you mind checking out, sir?”
Sam turned slowly, dragged the tip of his tongue across his mouth.
The boy was tow-headed, with a sharp, narrow face set in a triangle of protuberant ears and prominent Adam’s apple. He seemed to read the puzzled frown on Sam’s brow.
“Just came on duty,” he explained with a smile. “Julius just answered a call upstairs. Prob’ly some damned scrub woman wants him to buy her a Coke to take her pills with.”
“What time is it?” Sam said. Why ask that? Well, there was nothing like setting the very hour in which he’d been here.
The boy looked carefully at his watch. Then gave a careless answer. “Little after five,” he said. “If you’ll just sign out on that book. Everybody signs in and out between ten at night and six in the morning.”
Sam hunched up his shoulders and nodded. It seemed a mile across the floor to the heavily bound ledger chained to a wall rack. As he walked, he heard the other elevator returning from the second floor.
“It’s begun to rain outside,” the operator was saying. “Damn it all, anyway. Been rainin’ every mornin’ for a month. Starts when I get up to come to work, and rains just long enough to make everything miserable.”
Sam moved his finger down the list. He stopped at the signature of Ross Lambart, April 25th, eleven-thirty p.m., suite 918.
He exhaled. The name above Lambart’s was that of a man named Mye. David Mye. No time and no office designated. Gratified, Sam glanced up at the brass name plate above the wall rack: Citizens Trust and Home Loan Building.
He took another quick glance at Ross Lambart’s affectedly scrawled signature. Then he wheeled about and moved hurriedly toward the street, fearful his legs were going to buckle under him. The elevator door opened. The tow-head shouted after him.
“Hey, sir. Wait a minnit! You didn’t sign out!”
“My name wasn’t on there,” Sam called. He kept his face turned away and pushed through the heavy glass doors to the drizzling rain of the murky dawn.
It was very cold in the street. He shrugged the sport jacket up on his shoulders. He shivered in the chill of the rain. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned west in the blustery drizzle. His eyes searched the rain-slick thoroughfare for a taxi.
“If I can get home to Elsa,” he told himself. “If I can get home to Elsa, I’ll be all right.”
He turned all the way around in the middle of the sidewalk, searching miserably for a cab. There was none.
He saw the girl then.
She hastened toward him from the darkened doorway of the Horseshoe Bar next door to the Citizens Trust building.
She put out one hand toward him, and with the other held her cheap coat clutched in tightly about her thin waist.
She called out to him. At the frantic tone of her voice, he swung around to look at her again. There was a street light behind him in the drizzle. It shone upon her as she hurried toward him.
Her cloth coat was trimmed with a drenched fur that she’d turned up about her straight brown hair. Her olive dark face was pulled with worry. Her black eyes were shadowy though they appeared bright with pleasure at seeing him.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered. “You’ve finally come. I’ve been waiting so long.”
He stared at her, shook his head. ‘There’s a mistake,” he said hollowly. “I’m sorry. There’s a mistake.”
A cruising taxi, its yellow roof-light glowing, rolled around the corner beyond the girl. Sam threw up his arm to signal it, and raced away from her into the street.
“David!”
Her voice was sharp with appeal. Puzzled, he hurled a last look at her as he leaped into the moving cab.
Through the back glass, he could see her, still standing in the middle of the wide sidewalk. Drizzling rain glistened in the glow of the street lamp. There was agony in her face. He watched until she was only a blur, then he frowned again, leaned forward and gave his Wilkins Road address to the driver.
2
HOMICIDE DETECTIVE sergeant Barney Manton tooled his inexpensive maroon coupe into a no parking zone outside police headquarters. His radio aerial snapped at the sudden stop. He pushed back his coat cuff and looked at the Gruen watch strapped to his hairy wrist. It was two minutes after six a.m., the morning of April 26th.
He stepped out of the coupe, shrugged his light top coat up about his shoulders. He rolled up the window on the driver’s side, standing in a flat puddle of oil and water in the red brick pavement.
He noted the two tramps huddled together in the light of headquarters doorway. He winced a little at the daylight just shivering in over the top of the Railway Express ware-house.
He was proud of the way he noted things, was Barney Manton. “Look out for the little things,” Barney was overly fond of saying. “One eye always out for the cute little things.”
It pleased Manton that his remark had a double edge, for he was amused by angles, and appreciated things that cut both ways.
He slammed the coupe door shut. Shoulders hunched, he angled around the car and across the walk to the doorway of police headquarters. He was thirty-four. He had recently celebrated his birthday. With a stupid blonde and a fifth of cheap whiskey. Slightly under six feet tall, he wore a size seven-and-one-half snap brim felt, pulled rakishly over a quirked right brow. His neck, cheeks and jowls were thick, for he weighed an indolent hundred and eighty pounds. His eyes were hazel, bitterly unsmiling and hostile even in his pleasanter moments. His nose was straight, if rather small in his well-fed face, his nostrils seemed habitually flared, pulling creases of scorn about his twisted mouth.
As he went up the steps, he cast a quick look over the two tramps, noting things that would make them easy for him to find again. He hated them, looking at them because they were bums and might remotely oppose him from their side of the law. One of them wore new shoes that were too large for him so they creased across the instep and turned up slightly at the toes. The other had lost the thumb of his left hand, and trembled, either from the damp April cold, or from palsy. In passing, Manton noted the lines of their battered, ineffectual faces; things about them that neither they nor time could change or alter very much.
It was almost two hours before his usual time for reporting for duty. But Milligan had called, letting the phone ring twent
y times until Manton, lying sleepless on his rumpled, uncomfortable bed, had answered it at last.
When he came into Lieutenant Milligan’s office now, the place was already alive with activity. At the first sight of all this action, Manton slowed down perversely. “I’ll just leave my motor running,” he told himself. He closed the door quietly so that he couldn’t attract Milligan’s attention, and took in the scene.
He didn’t like surprises. Manton told himself he was sure of what he wanted, and what he was going to do, he didn’t like to be caught up and swept along. He liked to see where he was headed. He read nothing but the signposts of his road.
Two uniformed patrolmen, obviously on the ten p.m. to six shift, sat together beyond Milligan’s desk. They’d been caught in some last minute assignment. Their eyes were heavy and swollen with weariness. At Milligan’s desk, the others of the homicide detail, i.d., leg men, photographers, and the F.B.I. trained career sergeants, were huddled.
The scorn deepened about Manton’s straight nose.
Milligan looked up in time to read the derision in Manton’s eyes. A tired, bushy-haired, gray man of sixty, Milligan was deeply honest. He honestly disliked Manton, and his weary face showed it now.
“Good afternoon, Mister Manton. Did you over-sleep well last night, sir?”
“I’m here,” Manton replied. His left eyebrow lifted slightly, the lines deepening about his mouth. His own contempt for his superior flared to meet Milligan’s dislike.
“All right,” Milligan said. “Here’s the pitch, Barney. There is no switchboard operator on duty in the Citizens Trust Building at night. Calls are handled on the private board by an elevator operator. He noticed the light burning for 918. Nobody responded when he plugged them in, but they didn’t hang up either. He decided something was wrong, but didn’t do anything about it until another operator came on duty at five. They called the telephone company. A trouble shooter went over and found a broken telephone in the offices. He also found a dead body, and that’s when they finally got around to calling us.”
Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime) Page 1
