Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime)

by Harry Whittington

  The detective looked at him. “Sure,” he said. “You come along with your little woman.”

  The look Elsa hurled at Peters at the words, “your little woman,” would have fried him to a crisp, Sam realized, if the man had bothered to notice. But Alex Peters didn’t even look at her as they went out the front door.

  5

  IT WAS almost eleven o’clock of a very long morning and Lieut. Milligan, Chief of City Homicide, was tired. He had been sitting on his can, he thought, for hours talking to all manner of people concerning the heinous murder of that leading citizen, Ross Karsley Lambart. Four hours sitting down, but it was his feet that ached!

  That was habit, he supposed. Back in his patrolman days, his feet had always hurt him when he was tired. Now he invariably became aware of fatigue or weariness first in his number twelves.

  When he heard the knock on the door, he knew it was Alex Peters. Alex the faithful, the plodding, would have returned by now from the long drive out to Wilkins Road. He’d have with him — the Chief glanced at the note paper before him — a Mrs. Gowan. A wild goose chase that he’d been prodded into by the heckling of that sarcastic and hateful young Barney Manton.

  But he was a patient man. He knew that whatever record he had made with the police in his long career, he could credit most of it to patience. He knew by now that he was known as the polite cop, the lawman who could arrest you and your neighbor wouldn’t even know it had happened. He knew that inside, he was neither patient nor polite. It was just that he had learned that in criminal work, the police couldn’t overlook one thread of evidence, just as the criminal couldn’t afford to make one mistake. And as to being polite, he had been in uniform long enough to see a lot of innocent people hurt by careless police procedure. He didn’t like to hurt people: that was what had first turned him from the little back room and strong lights to the laboratory. It was slow, and like many sciences not yet exact, but it was the only way Milligan would work any more.

  He admitted he was no nearer anything on the killing of Lambart than he’d been at six o’clock this morning. Laboratory tests showed that all blood samples taken in the office at the Citizens Trust belonged to Lambart. It was now established that Lambart had fought violently and bled profusely before he died. They were still working on fingerprints. These prints had been forwarded to the F.B.I., but Milligan held little hope for anything from them.

  He was afraid they’d all been made by a slovenly charwoman who had gone about straightening everything in the office, but cleaning nothing.

  Anyway, it would be some time before they knew for sure. And in all his years, Milligan had never seen so many people tell what not only sounded like the truth, but proved to be the truth when it was checked by his leg men. Now, he was tired, and he didn’t want to talk to a Mrs. Elsa Gowan of Wilkins Road.

  “Come in,” he said.

  • • •

  “My husband has been found,” Elsa said immediately. “This is my husband. He simply came back home as quickly as he left.”

  “That’s fine,” said Milligan who knew nothing of the search the City police had been charged to make for a missing husband. That belonged to another department.

  “That isn’t why I asked you to come in, Mrs. Gowan,” he continued. “An important citizen has been killed. One of our civic leaders. His loss will be a great shock and a great hurt to City. Few people knew this man who didn’t become indebted to him for his great generosity and kindliness. The murder of Ross Lambart will be a blow to all who knew him.”

  “L-Lambart?”

  If Elsa had been a weaker woman, Sam thought, she might have fainted. This puzzled him, for although Elsa knew Lambart, it was only a casual acquaintance. He sat there remembering: Once last summer they’d gone to a beach where Lambart and his family were swimming. Elsa had been swept into Lambart’s arms by the waves, and it had been obvious to Sam, and anyone else who cared to see, that the great man was quite human. Sam recalled that Lambart was all hands as he helped Elsa right herself in the surf.

  Sam remembered he had teased her about it, and she had blushed. But they had forgotten it. Why shouldn’t even the most highly placed be moved by normal instincts? Sam had thought. But ever afterwards he’d called Elsa’s especial attention to the latest news stories on the man of philanthropy.

  And now Lambart was dead, Sam thought, and he would be accused of killing him. He had no recollection whatever of shooting this man whose life was dedicated to helping others. All he knew was that he hated him. He didn’t know why. If he had killed him, senselessly, in insanity, he would give himself up to the law. Yet the law had once punished him when he was innocent. Why should he be punished again when he had no sense of guilt?

  Elsa’s knuckles were white on the chair handle. Her warm face seemed drained of color.

  “I know you are surprised and shocked,” the Chief was saying. “We all were, and if he was a close friend of yours — ”

  “Oh, no. No, he wasn’t,” Sam heard Elsa saying. “I hardly knew him. I had never even talked to him until after my husband disappeared. He and his wife came to call. They had heard that Sam had abandoned me — ” Sam felt Milligan’s eyes regarding him coldly — “and they wanted to offer any help they could. Mr. Lambart offered to lend me money for current expenses through the aid-organization that he — he was head of. But of course, I refused. I wouldn’t take aid from strangers when my own husband left me nothing.”

  She does hate me, Sam thought.

  “I understand,” the Chief said. If he’d intended asking her difficult and damning questions, he now refrained. “Did you get to know the Lambarts very well?”

  “I went to their home two — three times,” Elsa corrected herself.

  “Did they — did Mr. Lambart call on you again?”

  “Yes. He did. I learned why so many people thought him wonderful. He did everything he could to make my difficulty easier. I didn’t take any money from his organization. But Mr. Lambart hired private detectives to find my husband. Something I wanted to do, but could not afford, naturally.”

  “I want to thank you, Mrs. Gowan for coming down here. Everyone has been very kind in cooperating. And everyone has been shocked at the murder of Ross Lambart.”

  “I am stunned,” Elsa said evenly.

  “We all are, Mrs. Gowan.” Milligan turned his dispassionate eyes toward Sam. “Why did you leave your wife, abandoning her without money, Gowan?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “Where were you?” Milligan persisted.

  Again Sam shook his head. What would Milligan think, he wondered, if he were to insist he knew nothing until that moment when he seemed to come awake, to be released from blackness, with Ross Lambart lying dead between his legs?

  He felt his heart thudding oddly against his ribs. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly.

  He saw the contempt in Elsa’s face, the disbelief in Chief Milligan’s.

  “You’d say you’ve been the victim of amnesia, then?” Milligan said sharply.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. ‘I only know I must have been ill. Elsa says I’ve been gone from her since last November, It’s God’s truth that I don’t know where I have been.”

  “And the police have been looking for you all that time?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, they have been,” Elsa said harshly. “As well as detectives hired by Mr. Lambart.”

  Milligan was looking at Sam. He spoke to Elsa. ‘Would you know the name of the detective firm employed by Mr. Lambart, Mrs. Gowan?”

  Elsa considered a moment. At last she shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know their name.”

  The police lieutenant lifted his shoulders. “I can find that out,” he stated, “with very little trouble.”

  Elsa seemed about to speak, but she said nothing. The detective looked again at Sam. “If your husband has been ill, a victim of amnesia, Mrs. Gowan, why don’t you take him to see a psych
iatrist?”

  It was plain to Sam that Milligan didn’t believe he was the victim of any mental ailment whatsoever, but was instead a man who, tiring of his responsibilities, simply abandoned them.

  “If your husband has been ill,” Milligan went on, “a good psychiatrist should be able to help him.”

  Elsa looked at Sam. In her face Sam read the same doubt that he had seen in Milligan’s.

  “I think I will,” she said. Her jaw was set in a firm line. For some reason Sam saw that she was going to leave him without an alibi such as amnesia if it was possible to expose him as a liar and fake.

  Each moment, he thought, reveals how deeply she does hate me!

  “You might take your husband to Dr. Mesaje Terasake. He’s an American born Jap. He did a lot of good work during the war on guilt neuroses. He’s the one man in City whose word I’d take on the honesty or sham in a man’s mental condition.”

  As they went through the outer office, Sam became aware of another man’s eyes on him. He felt himself tremble, and knew his face flushed. Guilt. Guilty conscience, he thought miserably. He felt strongly the urge to return to that office he’d just left and give himself up. His steps slowed, he felt the backs of his knees weaken as he stood there.

  Half turning, he met the eyes that were watching him. The new man seemed about thirty-four, handsome except for thinning hair and a lax-fat face. He had a scornful twist to his mouth, and flared nostrils. His eyes were gray and cruel. He looked like every hardboiled servant of the law Sam Gowan had ever met since the time when as a kid he had fallen afoul of the police.

  If Sam had intended to give himself up, the cruel and inhumane look in the eyes of the detective lounging on the small of his back in a chair propped against the wall, stopped him.

  His eyes met those of Barney Manton. He supposed his own hatred showed there, for the cruel gray eyes lighted a little, a left brow quirked insolently. And in that flash of time, it seemed to Sam, sick and gone inside, that they understood each other. Two men: the relentless, conscienceless, eternal hunter, and the hunted, doomed and insecure.

  Manton’s gaze moved on to Elsa then, and without astonishment, Sam saw the response he had anticipated. The detective remained the hunter, the aggressor. To the detective, with eyes veiled as he surveyed her, Elsa was pretty ankles, swelling thighs, round, plush breasts, parted mouth.

  God help the poor-devil who approached such a man seeking mercy, Sam thought. He closed his eyes and shuddered.

  • • •

  They left the police station and walked along the crowded sidewalks toward the business district of the City. The streets where, in the cold drizzle of rain, Sam had run seeking a taxi this morning, now swarmed with people in the bright midday sun.

  It was difficult for Sam, with Elsa at his side to believe all that had happened. But as they approached the entrance of the Horseshoe Bar, his thoughts turned once more to the girl who had called him David. He seemed certain that she was near him in the crowd, and he searched every face, every door as he walked with Elsa.

  They were in the foyer of the Citizens Trust Building before Sam even knew that the address Milligan had given Elsa had sent them to the last place in the world to which Sam wanted to return.

  The doctor’s office on the eighth floor was very plain. The receptionist was a thin, blonde young woman with a sharp, long nosed face and close set, rather large blue eyes.

  She took Sam’s name and address and asked if he’d ever been in to see Dr. Terasake before. Sam said no. She listed his age, his occupation, how long he had held the job, if he had held any others before that one. There was a short list of minor physical conditions, which Sam knew from reading were grouped under a general psycho-somatic heading. He had been troubled with almost none of these.

  “The doctor will see you in just a moment,” the girl said at last. She hesitated. “The doctor’s rates are very nominal, or will be in your case, since the doctor fixes them after a credit investigation.” She smiled. “However the first visit is the same to all patients. The price for a first visit with the doctor, since it entails so much is fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty dollars!” The breath exploded from Sam in a bitter laugh. There was nothing better for him anywhere. But as he opened his mouth to speak his thoughts — that Dr. Terasake had by his initial fee put himself far out of his reach — he became aware that Elsa, her mouth set again, was fumbling in her purse.

  At the sight of the money, the flat fold of bills so casually taken from the handbag, he stared, incredulous.

  Elsa had told him she was broke. She had made quite a point of the fact that all her money was gone.

  6

  DR. MESAJE TERASAKE smiled at them across his simple, uncluttered desk. He was a small man whose toes barely touched the floor when he tilted back in his chair to regard them over the thick lenses of his glasses. His tight-skulled, leather-colored head sprouted fine white hairs, his nose was almost flat, his almond eyes dark and liquid.

  “A breakdown is the total of a series of shocks, or a long, continued emotional strain, like worry or apprehension, over a sustained time without any cease, that finally breaks us. Such tiring and destructive emotional stress due to prolonged struggle with an insoluble problem — which, by the way we’re not meeting — honestly — may cause fatigue and mental agony and finally cause the break.”

  “But do you think that Sam may have been the victim of — of a thing like that?” Elsa said.

  Terasake merely smiled at her. “That will call for a careful and prolonged examination,” he parried. “It will take time.”

  Time, Sam thought, time that I do not have.

  “Why should we even think Sam was in such a state?” Elsa persisted. “He had a good job. I was a good wife. At least, I gave him nothing to worry about. I’m sure he was under no emotional strain.”

  “There are many types of emotional anguish. Long drawn out fear, or shame, or resentment. Any intense emotion, or conflicts inside when pent-up angers aren’t released against the object of the anger. It would take a lot of study, Mrs. Gowan. It would take a great deal of time.”

  Elsa stood, impatiently. “You’ve been with my husband now for over an hour. What do you think, Doctor? Is he sane, or isn’t he?”

  Terasake, regarding her mildly, seemed to Sam to answer her as she wished to be answered, without regard for any subtler shadings of truth.

  “A quickened pulse, accelerated heartbeat, three or four other minor alterations in normal body functioning, that’s all, Mrs. Gowan. Right now I say your husband is sane. As sane as you or I.”

  Sam saw Elsa look at Dr. Terasake and nod as though this was what she had paid to hear.

  • • •

  Before they boarded the Boulevard bus downtown, Sam bought the afternoon papers. There was no opportunity on the overcrowded coach to glance at them, but talk and speculation buzzed all around him. There was one topic of conversation: the death of that wonderful man, Ross Lambart.

  By now, the newspapers were howling for immediate police action. At home in the front room, Sam read in minutest detail the stories by the police reporters. He read that the charwoman on the eighth and ninth floors had seen no one except the morning supervisor on his routine inspection. August Reamly, the elevator operator had seen only a drunk who wandered in from the streets. Julius, the other operator, about to go off duty after a dull night had answered a call on the second floor, found no one there. About this the police advanced and discarded several theories, finally to have it all explode when one of the younger sweeping women, without admitting that she had buzzed from the second floor, did admit to calling Julius at all hours during the night, “just to talk to him.”

  Chief Milligan, of Homicide, said they were following a clear trail and promised a quick arrest. Several arrests had in fact been made, but so far no charges had been preferred, and no names would be released. “A case like this goes along just so far,” the Lieutenant was quoted, “and then it op
ens up.” He recalled the case of a man who’d used his carpenter tools to dissect and destroy his wife, only to be trapped by blood on those tools that his oil rag had failed to clean.

  It was the editorial writers who were having a field day. The complete story of Ross Karsley Lambart’s long and honorable career as public benefactor was detailed. Early estimates would reveal, the writers said, that Ross Lambart, leaving only a small estate was not the rich man he had been judged to be. More than twenty years ago, he had left his real estate business to head a local chapter of the Red Cross, and had never again been closely associated with any business. Rather he had devoted all his energies to civic works.

  During the war, he had been director of the City draft boards. He had been behind movements to raise funds for Crippled Children hospitals, welfare clinics, Mothers’ clinics. He was chairman of many civic organizations, and on the board of directors of two of the City’s largest non-denominational hospitals. Once he had been Mayor of the City, and had served two terms as a Councilman.

  His selfless life had been an example to lesser men. He had been a friend of the weak and the beset. That the police department should be allowed even to sleep until the conscienceless killer of the City’s number one citizen was behind bars, was unthinkable.

  One newspaper incautiously suggested that all responsible citizens make it their duty to keep the police department alerted to their objective: the swift apprehension of the mad dog who deprived the City of its beloved leader.

  Sam Gowan shuddered.

  He looked at the French style telephone sitting on the end table across the room. His heart was thudding heavily against his ribs. Suppose he had been the murderer? Had he the right to go on living now?

  Elsa came into the room, and startled, he dropped the Call-Bulletin from his hands.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  He looked at her, for the moment unable to answer. She was wearing a house frock and apron, a pair of saddle shoes without stockings.

  “I thought you were going to your mother’s,” he said slowly. “Why don’t you go, Elsa? I realize how you feel about me. I won’t blame you.”