Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime)

by Harry Whittington

  “You said you know. You think Sam killed Ross Lambart. It’s all very pretty in your mind. He was jealous of me. And he killed Lambart. Is that what you think?”

  She turned to face him.

  “Pretty much,” he admitted. “I’ve got a lot to go on.”

  “Well, you’re wrong, Mr. Manton. Sam didn’t kill him. Sam couldn’t have killed anyone.”

  He shook his head. “Save that loyal wife act, sister. This is Barney Manton. I know by now just what percentage of wives are loyal, what percentage are faithful — and you don’t crowd into either one of those low numbered groups.”

  “It’s not loyalty. It’s the truth.” She faced him levelly. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “That’s all I’ll take,” he said.

  “Well, start looking somewhere else, Mr. Manton. Sam didn’t even know anything about Ross Lambart. Ross — Mr. Lambart never even started coming to this house until after Sam was gone.”

  “How do you know where Sam was gone? How do you know how far away he was?”

  “I tell you Sam didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Suppose he did know. Suppose he found out. Suppose Lambart told him. Suppose a little bird told him?”

  “He still couldn’t have done it,” she snapped. “Sam was the most spineless man I ever met. He even did what the bus drivers told him to do. He was a weak fool, a real life Caspar Milquetoast, cringing from trouble like some cur dog.”

  “My. You are bitter, aren’t you?”

  “You’d know. If you’d ever been married to a man like that.”

  He smiled. “From a spineless man like Gowan, to a windbag like Lambart. Baby, you can’t pick ‘em.”

  She looked at him, her face straight with anger, and did not reply.

  He shrugged. “So your Sam was one of these mild men who kept all his hurts inside him, eh? Have you ever seen a man like that blow his stack, sister?”

  She still did not reply.

  He came near her again. There was an odor about her. There was a warm scent in her hair, a pleasant aroma about her body. He felt his pulses quicken.

  But no woman had ever stopped Manton when he was at work. Probably none ever would. He stepped away from her making a mental note of that warm, inviting smell of her.

  “When did Sam Gowan come back home?”

  “The morning of April 26th.”

  “How did he look?”

  She hesitated. “He was drenched to the skin. And shivering with cold.”

  “Where had he been?”

  “He said he didn’t even know.”

  “Could I see the coat he was wearing?”

  “He wasn’t wearing a coat.”

  “Oh? It was raining and pretty cold, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. I hadn’t been out.”

  “About what time was it, would you say, when Sam got home that morning?”

  “A little after seven o’clock. Maybe seven thirty.”

  For the first time he produced a small note book and jotted down this time. He looked at her as he wrote. “Have you any particular reason for having noted the time?”

  She studied his face for a moment, her blue eyes crossed his gray ones, but only fleetingly. She looked down at her hands. She shook her head.

  “No,” she said.

  Somehow, Manton was certain she was lying about this. But it was a minor thing and he overlooked it.

  “Did your husband ever wear sport coats?”

  She looked at him pityingly. “He never wore anything gaudier than an oxford gray suit with black shoes and dark blue ties.”

  He dropped the tiny notebook into his inner coat pocket. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be back to see you again.”

  He stepped near her, and was conscious of the fragrance of her. Warm. Tempting. Belonging to her full body, it wasn’t something you could buy across department store perfume counters.

  “Why do you suspect Sam?” she said.

  “It’s in me, sister. All night, I’ve tried to follow up other angles. But something, I don’t know what it is, it won’t let me follow any other angle. You take a guy writes a book. Can you say why he can write a book while you can’t? Or another joe can paint your picture so it looks just like you, while if you did it, it would look like a dog maybe, or a camel maybe. Some guys can do one thing — well, this job is the only one I can do. But I can do it, baby. And I’ll be right — no matter how many people try to lie me out of it, you included, 111 get the truth. Because I won’t stop until I do. And don’t you forget it”

  9

  THE PERSONNEL EXECUTIVE, Abner Grinnel, was a short stout man with a round face. He looked honest, and Barney Manton facing him across his desk, supposed he was. He looked too dumb to be anything else. With Grinnel, honesty was also the safest policy.

  He was reading the latest newspaper accounts of the Lambart murder when Barney Manton was shown into his office. He lay aside his newspaper and smiled a professional smile of welcome.

  Manton showed his credentials. “I’ve come about one of your employees, sir. His name is Samuel Gowan. I wonder if there’s any way I could find out anything about him?”

  The Personnel Executive, faced with an actual task, paled and pressed buzzers summoning the assistant executive and his private secretary.

  To both of these people, Manton again explained why he had called at the manufacturing company office. “This man has disappeared,” he explained, “and I wondered if you had any idea where I could get in touch with him?”

  The private secretary motioned to the assistant executive. They conferred for a moment and then she brought the folder on Sam Gowan, employee 568. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He has resigned from this company.”

  Barney stared at her. “When was this?”

  “I believe he dated his resignation on April 27th,” the Secretary said.

  This was interesting, Manton told himself. “Would you mind saying if there was any reason for his resigning?”

  “The employee got his job in the first place nine years or so ago, through fraud,” the assistant executive said, “Naturally when Mr. Grinnel discovered this, two courses lay open. The. employee could be sued for defrauding the company, or he could be allowed to resign. Mr. Grinnel generously allowed him to resign.”

  “In what way had he defrauded the company?” Manton inquired. “Did he appropriate funds? Steal?”

  “He lied on his application papers. He did six months in the State Reformatory at one time for car theft. He said in his application that he had never been in jail. This is a most serious matter.”

  Manton felt his heart pounding, quickening. This was it. He was sure of it. Guilty of one crime, guilty of many. He felt the excitement mounting inside him. Elsa Gowan’s mild husband had a past, a whale of a past. There was a great deal more to him than Elsa suspected!

  “I’ll know all about him before I’m through,” Manton promised himself as he left the office building. “I’ll know enough to — cook him up brown.”

  • • •

  Mrs. Kersh, the aged little scrubwoman, lived in a dingy boarding house down in the Rumfort Section. Her landlady shook her head when Barney Manton asked to see Mrs. Kersh.

  “She’s so tired. Havin’ to sleep days in all this noise and confusion. I declare it seems to me a sin to wake her up if she had got to sleep at all.”

  Manton brushed her aside. “Tell me her room, Mom, and you won’t have to wake her up. I’ll wake her up myself.”

  Intimidated, the haggard woman pointed to the second floor. “It’s the third door back, on the left,” she said. “But it does seem a sin.”

  Manton rapped loudly on the woman’s door. When she did not answer, he kicked against the scarred wood until he heard a feeble protesting from within the room.

  “All right. All right. I’m coming. You won’t need to knockdown the house.”

  She unlocked the door for him, standing in a baggy woolen nightgown that rea
ched to her thin old ankles. Her straggly gray hair was pigtailed, and Manton supposed this was a sleeping habit from her girlhood. And God only knew how long ago that was. There was the smell of age in the very room itself.

  Manton sat in a straight chair while the old woman gazed at him through sleep-drugged eyes.

  “Gran’ma,” he said. “I don’t think you knew what you were talking about when you said you saw no one the night Ross Lambart was killed. Somebody, a man, walked past you on the stairs, didn’t he? What did he look like?”

  Mrs. Kersh seemed to come awake. “I told you. I saw only the superintendent, when he came on his rounds.”

  “Mrs. Kersh, do you take any kind of dope? I mean, even medicine, patent medicines?”

  “Only Aunt Millie’s Life Giver,” the woman replied haughtily.

  “What do you take that for?”

  “It’s for everything. It costs a dollar a bottle. But I take it mostly because my joints pain me so terribly. I can take one dose of Aunt Millie’s Life Giver, and I feel better. Sometimes, I don’t see how I could work without it, at all.”

  “How often do you take the stuff a night?”

  “Oh, lordy, sometimes late, before dawn, I have awful pains, in my back — not the small of my back mind you, but up higher — in my ribs. I have to take three or four doses an hour. It’s all right. Nothing in it to hurt you. The druggist says it’s all right.”

  “Could I see a bottle?”

  Proudly she produced a small bottle with smiling Aunt Millie on its face. Aunt Millie’s Life Giver was seventy per cent alcohol, and the rest apparently drugs used as sedatives, for even the pure food laws allowed a certain vagueness, and Aunt Millie had taken advantage of this.

  Manton handed the bottle back to Mrs. Kersh and smiled. “Do you wake up with headaches, Granny?”

  “Oh, sometimes they’re terrible,” she said. “ ‘Specially when I wake up in the middle of the afternoon. But one dose of Aunt Millie’s — and I feel wonderful again — ”

  “The hair of the dog that bit you,” Manton said sharply as he crossed to the door. He stopped with his hand on the knob.

  “What’s your superintendent’s name — this fellow who passed you on the steps the morning of April 26th?”

  “Uh — now, just a minute. Ain’t that the queerest? I got his name right here on the tip of my tongue. Why, I know it as well as I do my own — it’s Foster — Bill Foster. That’s it. You’d like him. A nice chap.”

  “We’ll see,” said Manton.

  • • •

  Foster lived with his wife and three kids in a frame, four-room house in a bare yard on an unpaved street behind the City Bus garage on the South Side. Foster was asleep and his wife refused to waken him even when she saw Manton’s badge.

  “I don’t know who you think you’re talking to,” Manton said sharply. Two kids under eight were clinging to her shabby dress.

  She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “Bill has a hard job. Bad hours. He needs his sleep. I ain’t wakin’ him up. He ain’t done nothin — and I ain’t wakin’ him up.”

  Manton had been a long time without sleep now. He had done a lot of driving, a lot of listening. His eyes were dry with lack of sleep.

  When she refused to waken her husband, Manton who could never sleep well, flared up angrily. He drove the back of his hand hard across the woman’s face. She staggered under the blow and almost fell.

  She took it silently, but one of the children screamed. The other began to bawl in horror at the top of its lungs. Foster came lunging through the bedroom door, his hair wild, his eyes puffed with sleep. He wore only his underpants, caught over his lax belly by one button.

  “Wha’s matter?” he yelled. “Wha’s matter?”

  The children began to scream, pointing accusing fingers at Manton, but the mother silenced them with soothing hands on their heads. She stood straight, her face white except for the imprint of Manton’s hand. She spoke very quietly. “This man has come to see you, Bill. From the police.”

  Foster ran his hand through his wild hair. “What is it?” he said, yawning painfully and dropping into a worn-out easy chair.

  “Mrs. Kersh said she spoke to you on the morning of April 26th,” Manton said. “On the eighth floor of the Citizens Trust Building. I think she lied.”

  “What you mean, lied?” Foster sat forward in his chair. “I made my rounds. I make my rounds every night.”

  “I don’t think you were on the eighth floor that night, mister. That old biddy, drunk as she was, saw only one man — and I happen to know that man wasn’t you.”

  “What you trying to do?” Foster demanded. “Cost me my job? If she says she saw me, why sure hell, she saw me.”

  The children began to cry again. The mother, her hands moving on their upturned heads, soothed them.

  Manton took a step toward the man in the broken down easy chair. “I don’t give a damn in hell about your job. But I mean to have the truth out of you, mister. Do I get it easy? Or do I beat it out of you?”

  “Now see here,” Foster blustered.

  “Bill, please,” the wife begged softly. “Please, Bill — ”

  Foster glared at her, but he must have seen the quiet Strength in her, the assurance that her soothing hands gave their children, for he sucked in a deep breath and sank back in his chair.

  “All right,” he breathed at last, “I didn’t get around there that night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Jesus God, man! I’m in charge of six scrub women, three janitors, a couple of stokers, I have to see to the lights, the heat, the air conditioning in the offices that have it. I’m in charge of repairs. I work like a damn mule all night long, and then on top of that, I’m supposed to inspect all the work those women do. It’s Christ’s own impossibility — but I don’t tell the boss so, ‘cause I got to have that job.”

  Manton exhaled deeply. “So you weren’t on that floor?”

  “No, sir. I wasn’t.”

  • • •

  It was eight o’clock at night before Manton reached the 9-0 Club on Ellis Street. He’d been a long time seeking the rooming place of August Reamly. The Citizens Trust people had an address on him, but he had moved twice since then.

  There was already a gang inside the 9-0 Club, both doors were tied back to the wall and inside a woman was singing against the discordant accompaniment of piano and trumpet.

  Going up the dark steps next door to the 9-0 Club, Manton realized he was hungry for he’d not stopped to eat all day.

  The unrhythmic music followed him as he rapped on the door of Reamly’s room. At once he heard the boy’s voice:

  “Okay dokay, friend. Hold all you got. Reamly’ll open for yuh.”

  The long faced youth paled when he saw that it was a police detective. He waved an awkward, long fingered hand.

  “Come on in, friend. I was just dressin’ to go down to the 9-0 Club. Hear that music? Wonderful, ain’t it? That’s why I moved here. Somethin’ doin’ all the time.”

  The single room was square, crowded with washstand, dresser, three-quarter bed, and straight chair. There were pin-up pictures all over the walls, a bright light was suspended from the center of the ceiling. The one window was closed and its shade run all the way to the top so that Reamly wouldn’t miss any of the excitement of Ellis Street as he dressed to run down into it.

  His hair was greased, his face freshly shaved, he was wearing a bright shirt, and high waisted, tight cuffed trousers. He was just knotting a violently gaudy tie as Manton entered, and he turned back to the mirror now to finish tying it. But his fingers were no longer steady.

  “Dressin’ to go out,” he said again, brightly. “Never like to stay in when something is doin’ outside.”

  “I won’t keep you long,” Manton said. “I just want to know why you lied to the police? Why did you tell them that you thought the man you stopped in the lobby the night of the 26th had come in from the street?” />
  “I don’t wanta get nobody in trouble, mister.”

  “Don’t you know that man is a murderer? And that you made it possible for him to walk right out from under the noses of the police?”

  “I didn’t know he was a murderer,” Reamly turned with his back against the mirror. “He said his name wasn’t on that book. I thought maybe Foster or somebody had left the lock off some of the front exits — it has been done, mister.”

  “But you know those doors were locked, don’t you?”

  “I think so. I think they were.”

  Manton came nearer. “You know damned well they were, don’t you?”

  “I was mixed up. I was scared. I don’t want to be no witness in any murder case. I just wanta have a good time, mister. I work hard. And I don’t hurt nobody. I’m goin’ out now and — ”

  “What did that man look like?”

  “God knows, mister. I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you two jerks do something about that phone off its hook in 918?”

  “Lambart was a queer duck, mister. We didn’t think nothing. He was up there all hours. People with him. Girls. Young babes. High school stuff. Jail bait. All hours. Julius can tell you. I seen ‘em, too. We didn’t think nothin’ of that phone being off the hook — to us it just meant Old Lambart was goofin’ off up there and didn’t wanta take no calls. That’s all I know, mister. Let me get dressed now.”

  “You ain’t goin’ anywhere, kid, until you decide to tell me what that man looked like.”

  “I don’t know!” Reamly yelled in desperation. “Let me alone. Don’t crowd me, mister. Get back from me. I ain’t no criminal. I ain’t done nothin'.”

  Manton brought his hand up, cuttingly across Reamly’s face. The sound of it was sharp in the room. Lines appeared in the new shaved skin. Before he could move, Manton’s hand came down, open and raking. Now left across his cheeks, and back to the right.

  “Goddamn you,” the boy whispered in agony and terror. “Somebody’ll get you for this. Somebody — ”

  “What’d he look like, kid?”

  “I don’t know — oh, Jesus God — don’t!”

  “Would you know him if you saw him again? Would you know him if I brought him here to this room? Could you look at him and say you knew him?”