Target Practice (Stout, Rex)

by Rex Stout

  He crossed the street and rang the janitor’s bell. After a minute’s delay there appeared in the areaway below a hard-looking customer with a black mustache.

  “What do you want?” he demanded gruffly, looking up at the boy on the stoop.

  Dan smiled down at him.

  “Are you the janitor?”

  “Yes.”

  Dan descended to the areaway.

  “I’m from Mr. Leg’s office, the lawyer for the man held for the murder committed here. I want to look through the flat. Is there a policeman in charge?”

  “In charge of what?”

  “The flat.”

  “No.”

  “Is it sealed up?”

  “No. They took the seal off day before yesterday. But I don’t know who you are, young fellow.”

  “That’s all right. I have a letter here from Mr. Leg. See.” As Dan pulled the letter from his pocket a five-dollar bill came with it. The letter was soon returned, but the bill found its way to the janitor’s grimy palm.

  “I’d like to go through the flat, if you don’t mind,” Dan repeated.

  “All right,” the other agreed more amiably. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, seeing as it’s for rent.”

  He turned and led the way through the dark hall and up the stairs. Dan observed as they passed that the corridor on the ground floor was quite narrow and deserted, there being neither telephone switchboard nor elevator. This was evidently one of the old houses erected on the Heights between 1890 and 1900, with its entire lack of twentieth-century middle-class show.

  “Here you are,” said the janitor, stopping at the door on the right two flights up. He selected a key from a bunch, unlocked the door and passed within, with Dan at his heels.

  With one foot across the threshold, Dan stopped short in amazed consternation. What he saw was a flat bare of furniture, with discolored wall paper and dirty floors; in short, that dreariest and dismalest of all sights on earth, a vacant and empty apartment.

  “But—but—” the youth stammered in dismay. “But there’s nothing here.”

  “Nope. All empty,” returned the janitor placidly.

  “But how—do the police know of this?”

  “Sure. I told you they was here day before yesterday and took the seal off. They said we could take the stuff out. One of the cops told me they had the man that did it, so there wasn’t any use keeping it locked up any longer.”

  “Where’s the furniture and things?”

  “In storage. Hauled away yesterday.”

  For a minute Dan gazed at the dismantled flat in dismayed silence. If there had been anything here which would have been of value to his untrained eye it was now too late.

  “Spilt milk,” he finally observed aloud. “No use crying.” He turned again to the janitor.

  “Who got the stuff ready?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you take away anything, did you leave papers and everything in the desks and drawers, if there were any?”

  “Sure I did.” The janitor appeared to be a little nettled at this slight aspersion on his integrity. “I didn’t take nothing. Of course there was a lot of papers and trash and stuff I cleaned out.”

  “Did you throw it away?”

  “Yes. It ain’t gone yet, though; it’s still down in the basement.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look at it?”

  So they returned downstairs, and there, in a dark corner of the basement the janitor pointed out a dirty old bag filled with papers and all sorts of trash. With a feeling that he was making a silly fool of himself, Dan dragged the bag out into the fight and dumped its contents on the cement floor. Then he began to pick the articles up one by one, examine them, and replace them in the bag.

  There was a little bit of everything: magazines and newspapers, a broken inkwell, stubs of lead pencils, writing paper, banana skins, combings of hair, bills from butchers and delicatessen shops.

  There was a lot of it, and he pawed through the stuff for an hour before he came across anything that appeared to him worthy of attention. This was a small piece of white paper, rectangular in shape. In one corner was an imprint of the seal of the County of New York, and across the middle of the sheet was written in ink:

  Bonneau et Mouet—Sec.

  Dan carried the paper to the window and examined it attentively, and ended by sticking it in his pocket.

  “I’m crazy, I suppose,” he murmured to himself. “It’s all right to have an idea, but there’s no sense in expecting—However, we’ll see.”

  In another thirty minutes he had finished with the heap of trash, having found nothing else of interest. He found the janitor in the front room of the basement, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. On a table before him was a bucket of beer. Already Mr. Leg’s five-dollar bill was cheering humanity.

  “Through?” asked the janitor, glancing up with a grin that was supposed to be amiable. “Find anything?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. And now, mister—I didn’t get your name—”

  “Yoakum, Bill Yoakum.”

  “I’d like to ask you a question or two, Mr. Yoakum, if you don’t mind. Were you at home on the night of Saturday, April third, the night of the murder?”

  “Yep. All evening.”

  “Did you hear or see anything unusual?”

  Mr. Yoakum grinned, as though at some secret joke. “I sure didn’t,” he replied.

  “Nothing whatever?”

  “Absolutely nothin’.”

  “When did you first know of the murder. What time, I mean.”

  “Let’s see, Monday morning,” replied the janitor, still grinning.

  “Monday morning!” exclaimed Dan in amazement. “Do you mean you didn’t hear of it till thirty-six hours afterward?”

  “I sure didn’t.”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, you see,” replied Mr. Yoakum slowly, as though regretful that his joke must end, “I didn’t get here till Monday morning.”

  “But you said you were at home—”

  “Sure, I was home, so I wasn’t here. I was janitor down on Ninety-eighth Street then. You see, I’ve only been here about ten days. I came after the murder was all over, though I had to clean up after it.”

  Mr. Yoakum cackled. Dan interrupted him:

  “So you weren’t here a week ago Saturday?”

  “I sure wasn’t.”

  “Do you know who was janitor here before you?”

  “Nope. Don’t know a thing about him, only he sure put the hot-water boiler on the bum. He was ignorant, that’s all I know.”

  So there was nothing to be learned from Mr. Yoakum, except the name and address of the agent of the apartment house. Dan wrote this down in a memorandum book, refused Mr. Yoakum’s offer of a glass of beer, and left to go above to the ground floor, where he rang the bell of the tenant on the right. By then it was nearly seven o’clock, and quite dark outdoors, but the amateur detective had no thought of halting his investigations for anything so trivial as dinner.

  His ring was answered by a woman in a dirty blue kimono, who informed him that she had lived in the house only two months; that she had never seen the murdered woman, and that she didn’t want to talk about so disgusting a subject as murder anyhow. The other flat on the ground floor was vacant.

  Dan mounted a flight of stairs and tried again.

  Here he had better luck. He was told by a pale young woman in a kitchen apron that she had spoken many times to the murdered woman, who had lived there under the name of Miss Alice Reeves. Miss Reeves had been an old tenant; she had been there when the pale young woman came, and that was over two years ago.

  She had been very pretty, with dark eyes and hair, and a beautiful complexion; she was always quiet and reserved, not mixing with anyone; she had sometimes had callers, especially one gentleman, who came quite often. The pale young woman had never got a good look at him, having seen him only on the dark stairs; besides, he had always worn a sor
t of a muffler over the lower part of his face, so she couldn’t describe him except to say that he was rather tall and very well dressed and distinguished-looking. She wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him.

  Yes, said the pale young woman, they had a new janitor. She didn’t know what had become of the old one, who had been a little gray-haired Irishman named Cummings. He had been there Saturday evening to take off the garbage, but at midnight, the time of the murder, he could not be found, nor did he return on Sunday; they had been compelled to go without hot water all day. Monday morning the new man was sent up by the agent. He wasn’t as good as Cummings, who had been very capable and obliging.

  It took an hour for the pale young woman to tell Dan all she knew.

  At the other flat on that floor he found a new tenant, who could tell him nothing. Another flight up and he was on the floor on which Mrs. Mount, or Alice Reeves, had lived. Here, in the flat across the hall from hers, he met a Tartar in the person of an old music teacher who said that he lived there alone with his wife; that he never poked his nose into other people’s business, and that he expected them to do the same.

  Dan retreated in good order.

  On the two top floors he had no better luck; he found no one who had known Miss Reeves, though some had seen her often; nor could he get any description of the mysterious caller who, according to the pale young woman, had always worn a muffler across the lower part of his face. He did find the persons who had arrived first at the scene of the murder, a young husband and wife on the floor above.

  Their story tallied with Mount’s; they had been attracted by his scream, which they described as piercing and terrible, and, running down to Miss Reeves’s flat, they had found her lying on the floor in a pool of blood, with Mount, the dripping knife in his hand, standing above her. It was the young husband who had summoned the police. According to him, Mount had appeared absolutely dazed—half mad, in fact. He had made no attempt whatever to get away, but had remained kneeling over the dead body of his wife until the arrival of the police.

  But Dan’s greatest disappointment was that he was unable to find among the tenants any trace of the man who, according to Mount’s story, was standing in the lower hall with a suitcase in his hand when Mount entered. No one had seen him or knew anything about him.

  It was a quarter to nine when Dan found himself again on the street.

  A block or two down Broadway he entered a dairy lunchroom for a sandwich and a glass of milk, after which he sought the subway on the downtown side. The train was well filled, though it was too late for the theater crowd, for everybody is always going somewhere in New York. At the Ninety-sixth Street station Dan got out, walked two blocks north on Broadway, and over to West End Avenue, and entered the marble reception hall of an ornate apartment house.

  “I want to see Mr. Leg,” he said to the West Indian at the switchboard. “Tell him it’s Dan Culp.”

  The negro threw in a plug and presently spoke into the transmitter:

  “Thirty-four? Don Koolp to see Mr. Leg. All right, sir.”

  He disposed of Dan with a lordly gesture toward the elevator.

  Mr. Leg appeared to be surprised, even alarmed, at the unexpected visit from his office boy. Dan, ushered in by the manservant, found his employer entertaining four or five friends in a session of the national game—not baseball.

  “What is it, Dan? Something happened?” queried the lawyer, advancing to meet the youth at the door with a pair of kings in his hand.

  “No, sir. That is, nothing important. I just wanted to find out if you got a photograph of Mount.”

  “Yes, the police let me have a copy of the one taken for the gallery.”

  “May I have it, sir? I’m going up to the drugstore to see if they remember seeing him there.”

  “By Jove, you are certainly on the job,” smiled the lawyer. “Yes, of course you can have it.” He went to a desk at the other end of the room and returned with a small unmounted photograph. “Here you are. But what’s the hurry? Couldn’t you have gone tomorrow just as well?”

  “No, sir. You see, he was there at night, just about this time, so I’m more apt to find somebody who saw him. I didn’t want to wait till tomorrow night.” The youth appeared to hesitate, then continued, “There was something else, sir. May I have your night pass to the office building? I want to go down and look at something.”

  The lawyer’s smile became a little impatient. “Well, really now, Dan, isn’t that a little bit unnecessary? It isn’t long till tomorrow morning.”

  “All right, sir, if you don’t want—”

  “Oh, I don’t care. Wait a minute. I don’t know where the blamed thing is.”

  This time Mr. Leg had to search for what he wanted, and it was finally found hidden under some papers in the bottom drawer of his desk.

  Back uptown went Dan, to One Hundred and Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, one of the busiest spots in Harlem, where he found a drugstore on the southwest corner. He failed to get any satisfactory information. The two clerks and the boy at the soda fountain declared that they had been on duty all evening on Saturday, April 3, but they had no recollection of seeing anyone who resembled the photograph of William Mount. The man at the newsstand outside said that he had an indistinct memory of such a man, but that he couldn’t tell just when he had seen him.

  “It’s been two weeks, so I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything,” thought Dan as he turned away.

  As he boarded a downtown train he was telling himself that Mr. Leg had stated the case mildly when he said that it was a little bit unnecessary to make a trip down to the office so late at night. It was worse than that, it was absurd.

  Not for worlds would Dan have disclosed to anyone the extent of its absurdity by confessing the nature of his errand; he was himself trying to scoff at the wild idea that had entered his head that morning, and he felt that he was doubly a fool to entertain it as a possibility. Nevertheless, he was so completely possessed by it that he felt he couldn’t sleep till he had sought the slight corroboration chance had offered him.

  “But even if it’s the same it won’t really prove anything,” he muttered, gazing out of the window down at the never-ending row of lighted shops as the elevated train rumbled along through the night.

  At the office building he was admitted and passed into the night elevator by the watchman on showing Mr. Leg’s card. He carried a key to the office, since he was always the first to arrive in the morning. A queer sense of strangeness and loneliness came over him as he switched on the electricity and saw his desk and Miss Venner’s, all the familiar objects, revealed by its cold rays.

  What a difference artificial light, with the night outside, makes in a room which we have previously seen illumined only by the soft, natural light of day!

  Dan passed into the inner room, went straight to Mr. Leg’s desk, turned on the electric reading globe, and cast his eye over the accumulation of books and papers. There were publishers’ announcements, social invitations, personal letters, and other things. Almost at once, with an exclamation of satisfaction, he pounced on a typewritten sheet of paper with a name written at the bottom.

  He spread this out on the desk, pulled from his pocket the slip he had found in Mr. Yoakum’s bag of trash bearing the words “Bonneau et Mouet—Sec,” and, sitting down in Mr. Leg’s chair, began to examine with minute attention first the name on the letter, then the words on the slip. He did this for a full half-hour, with his brows wrinkled in concentration and the glow of discovery in his eyes.

  “Of course,” he muttered finally aloud, as he put the typewritten sheet back where he had found it, “I may not be a handwriting expert, but those were written by the same man as sure as my name’s Dan Culp. He’s mixed up in it somehow.”

  He placed the slip back in his pocket, and going to a case devoted to law volumes and similar works at one side of the room, took out a large blue book and carried it to the desk. He opened it at the front, ran his finger down the li
st of illustrations, stopped about the middle, and turned over the pages till he came to the one he wanted. It showed a full-page reproduction of a photograph of a man. He looked at it a moment, then carefully tore it out of the book, folded it, and placed it in his pocket.

  There was a scared look on the youth’s face as he turned out the lights and turned to leave the office. As the lock of the door clicked behind him there came faintly the sound of Trinity’s midnight chimes.

  Chapter V

  The Police Commissioner

  Despite the fact that he didn’t get to bed till nearly two o’clock, having consumed half an hour explaining his late arrival to his mother and accepting her good-natured banter on his coming career as a great detective, Dan arrived at the office at half-past eight the following morning. He sat at his desk reading till nine, when Miss Venner appeared.

  “Well, did you find the murderer?” she inquired sweetly, as he drew out her chair for her.

  “Maybe,” Dan replied in a tone so professionally cryptic that she burst into a peal of laughter.

  “All right,” continued Dan calmly, “wait and see.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” remarked Miss Venner as she sat down and took her embroidery from the drawer. “If you win Mr. Leg’s case for him—for, of course, he can’t do it—I’ll give you this scarf I’m working on.”

  The splendid vanity of this proposal appeared not to occur to Dan. “No; do you mean it?” he exclaimed.

  Miss Venner’s reply was lost in the sound of the door opening to admit Mr. Leg. Greetings were exchanged. Dan sought his own desk.

  A few minutes later, called into the other room by his employer, he proceeded to give him an account of his activities of the day before. He told him all that he had learned at the apartment house, from the janitor and tenants, and of his failure to find anyone at the drugstore who remembered seeing Mount. But there was one thing he did not mention: the slip of paper he had in his pocket; nor did he inform the lawyer that one of his books had been disfigured by having a photograph torn from it.