The Nine Mile Walk

by Harry Kemelman

  “Then according to you, he had an appointment some time between midnight and five-thirty—”

  “We can draw it much finer than that. Remember, it takes him four hours to walk the distance. The last bus stops at twelve-thirty A.M. If he doesn’t take that, but starts at the same time, he won’t arrive at his destination until four-thirty. On the other hand, if he takes the first bus in the morning, he will arrive around five-thirty. That would mean that his appointment was for some time between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

  “You mean that if his appointment was earlier than four-thirty, he would have taken the last night bus, and if it was later than five-thirty, he would have taken the first morning bus?”

  “Precisely. And another thing: if he was waiting for a signal or a phone call, it must have come not much later than one o’clock.”

  “Yes, I see that,” I said. “If his appointment is around five o’clock and it takes him four hours to walk the distance, he’d have to start around one.”

  He nodded, silent and thoughtful. For some queer reason I could not explain, I did not feel like interrupting his thoughts. On the wall was a large map of the county and I walked over to it and began to study it.

  “You’re right, Nicky,” I remarked over my shoulder, “there’s no place as far as nine miles away from Fairfield that doesn’t hit another town first. Fairfield is right in the middle of a bunch of smaller towns.”

  He joined me at the map. “It doesn’t have to be Fairfield, you know,” he said quietly. “It was probably one of the outlying towns he had to reach. Try Hadley.”

  “Why Hadley? What would anyone want in Hadley at five o’clock in the morning?”

  “The Washington Flyer stops there to take on water about that time,” he said quietly.

  “That’s right, too,” I said. “I’ve heard that train many a night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d hear it pulling in and then a minute or two later I’d hear the clock on the Methodist Church banging out five.” I went back to my desk for a timetable. “The Flyer leaves Washington at twelve forty-seven A.M. and gets into Boston at eight A.M.”

  Nicky was still at the map measuring distances with a pencil.

  “Exactly nine miles from Hadley is the Old Sumter Inn,” he announced.

  “Old Sumter Inn,” I echoed. “But that upsets the whole theory. You can arrange for transportation there as easily as you can in a town.”

  He shook his head. “The cars are kept in an enclosure and you have to get an attendant to check you through the gate. The attendant would remember anyone taking out his car at a strange hour. It’s a pretty conservative place. He could have waited in his room until he got a call from Washington about someone on the Flyer—maybe the number of the car and the berth. Then he could just slip out of the hotel and walk to Hadley.”

  I stared at him, hypnotized.

  “It wouldn’t be difficult to slip aboard while the train was taking on water, and then if he knew the car number and the berth—”

  “Nicky,” I said portentously, “as the Reform District Attorney who campaigned on an economy program, I am going to waste the taxpayers’ money and call Boston long distance. It’s ridiculous, it’s insane—but I’m going to do it!”

  His little blue eyes glittered and he moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue.

  “Go ahead,” he said hoarsely.

  I replaced the telephone in its cradle.

  “Nicky,” I said, “this is probably the most remarkable coincidence in the history of criminal investigation: a man was found murdered in his berth on last night’s twelve-forty-seven from Washington! He’d been dead about three hours, which would make it exactly right for Hadley.”

  “I thought it was something like that,” said Nicky. “But you’re wrong about its being a coincidence. It can’t be. Where did you get that sentence?”

  “It was just a sentence. It simply popped into my head.”

  “It couldn’t have! It’s not the sort of sentence that pops into one’s head. If you had taught composition as long as I have, you’d know that when you ask someone for a sentence of ten words or so, you get an ordinary statement such as ‘I like milk’—with the other words made up by a modifying clause like, ‘because it is good for my health.’ The sentence you offered related to a particular situation.”

  “But I tell you I talked to no one this morning. And I was alone with you at the Blue Moon.”

  “You weren’t with me all the time I paid my check,” he said sharply. “Did you meet anyone while you were waiting on the sidewalk for me to come out of the Blue Moon?”

  I shook my head. “I was outside for less than a minute before you joined me. You see, a couple of men came in while you were digging out your change and one of them bumped me, so I thought I’d wait—”

  “Did you ever see them before?”

  “Who?”

  “The two men who came in,” he said, the note of exasperation creeping into his voice again.

  “Why, no—they weren’t anyone I knew.”

  “Were they talking?”

  “I guess so. Yes, they were. Quite absorbed in their conversation, as a matter of fact—otherwise, they would have noticed me and I would not have been bumped.”

  “Not many strangers come into the Blue Moon,” he remarked.

  “Do you think it was they?” I asked eagerly. “I think I’d know them again if I saw them.”

  Nicky’s eyes narrowed. “It’s possible. There had to be two—one to trail the victim in Washington and ascertain his berth number, the other to wait here and do the job. The Washington man would be likely to come down here afterwards. If there was theft as well as murder, it would be to divide the spoils. If it was just murder, he would probably have to come down to pay off his confederate.”

  I reached for the telephone.

  “We’ve been gone less than half an hour,” Nicky went on. “They were just coming in and service is slow at the Blue Moon. The one who walked all the way to Hadley must certainly be hungry and the other probably drove all night from Washington.”

  “Call me immediately if you make an arrest,” I said into the phone and hung up.

  Neither of us spoke a word while we waited. We paced the floor, avoiding each other almost as though we had done something we were ashamed of.

  The telephone rang at last. I picked it up and listened. Then I said, “O. K.” and turned to Nicky.

  “One of them tried to escape through the kitchen but Winn had someone stationed at the back and they got him.”

  “That would seem to prove it,” said Nicky with a frosty little smile.

  I nodded agreement.

  He glanced at his watch. “Gracious,” he exclaimed, “I wanted to make an early start on my work this morning, and here I’ve already wasted all this time talking with you.”

  I let him get to the door. “Oh, Nicky,” I called, “what was it you set out to prove?”

  “That a chain of inferences could be logical and still not be true,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “What are you laughing at?” he asked snappishly. And then he laughed too.

  The Straw Man

  It was my turn to be host to the County Attorneys’ Club. It is purely a social organization and calls for little more than a good dinner and an evening of shop talk afterwards, largely pleasant bragging about the interesting cases we had handled since the last meeting.

  Fairfield County is a quiet, orderly community where little that is sensational comes our way. Hence, when it came my turn to tell of a clever bit of pleading or of some abstruse legal point which had enabled me to break up a vicious racket, I had nothing that could interest that company and perforce fell back on an account of Nicky Welt’s logical reconstruction of a crime and my own meager activities in the case of The Nine Mile Walk.

  They heard me out politely, although their attitudes indicated that they thought I was dramatizing the facts a bit in order to improve my story. When I had f
inished, Ellis Johnston, who as attorney for Suffolk, the most populous county in the commonwealth, was dean of our little company, nodded perfunctorily and said, “That’s all very well. Sometimes you get a hunch like that and it works out. But where you have hundreds of cases a year, you can’t rely on hunches to solve most of them. You’ve got to use plain, down-to-earth routine, just plugging away at every little fact you’ve got until you squeeze out the truth. It’s not inspiration but perspiration that solves criminal cases.”

  The others nodded sycophantically.

  “Now here’s something that will show you what I mean,” he continued. From his inside breast pocket he brought forth a large wallet from which he extracted a square of glossy paper. He tossed it on the table and we all left our seats to look at it. It was a photostat of a ransom note of the type which has become all too familiar these days—little blocks of newsprint pasted onto a blank sheet of paper to spell out the message:

  Fifty Thousand dollars IN SMALL USED bills or GLORIA will Never be seen again. The Same IF YOU Communicate WITH the POLICE. Further Instructions WILL be telephoned.

  It was a common enough note, except for one thing: in each block of newsprint, highlighted by the black powder which the police photographer had used, was a clear, unsmudged fingerprint.

  Johnston sat back and watched us as we bent over the paper. He was a square, thick-set man with fleshy lips and a determined jaw. And although he owed his position more to politics than to legal ability, he was considered a first-rate man at his job.

  “It’s routine to test for fingerprints,” he remarked, “but we could see these even without dusting. Those squares of paper are not ordinary wood-pulp newsprint. They were cut from glossy-paper magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post, which show fingerprints nicely. Now here’s my point. We don’t sit down and moon over why a man who goes to such elaborate precautions to conceal his identity should then ruin it all by leaving his fingerprints. In the hundreds of cases that come through our hands we find that criminals are continuously pulling boners like that. In the present case it may be an oversight, or maybe it’s just plain swank. We see a lot of that, too. It’s almost characteristic of the criminal mind. But whatever it is, we don’t let it sidetrack us. We’ve got a routine, see? And it’s routine—with the whole department working together—that solves cases, not inspiration or hunches or the sort of moonbeam inferences your friend the professor used,” he added for my benefit.

  “We get many cases like this,” he went on, “a lot more than the public thinks. The public thinks that kidnappings are rare and that they happen only when they hit the headlines. But actually it’s not an uncommon crime at all. Like blackmail, the criminal has every advantage and that tends to make it a pretty common crime. In most cases, the victim pays off within a day or two and that’s the end of it. Most of the time they don’t even notify the police after it’s over—afraid of retaliation of some sort.

  “And that’s what happened here. Dr. John Regan got that message, paid off two days later, and got his daughter Gloria back. The kidnappers had kept her doped up and so she could tell us nothing. She and her father had gone to the Silver Slipper, a night club and gambling joint. Her father had been called away to answer the telephone. When he got back, the waiter told him that his daughter had met some friends and had gone on to another club with them. There was nothing unusual in that. He stayed on, spent a couple of hours in the gambling rooms upstairs, and then went on home alone. The letter came in the mail the following morning. Later that day, he got a telephone message telling him where to leave the money and where to pick up his daughter. The kidnappers were true to their word, and the following day he got his daughter back.”

  “And then he called your office, I suppose,” I said.

  Johnston shook his head. “As a matter of fact, he didn’t. This is one of those cases we ordinarily would not have heard of. Even when we did get into it, Dr. Regan was less than cooperative. His point was that he had made a bargain and that he had to live up to it. That’s nonsense, of course, but I suppose he didn’t like to say that he was afraid. And we couldn’t put pressure on him. He’s an important man in our town—trustee of a couple of charities, serves on civic committees, that sort of thing. And he’s rich. I don’t mean the sort of wealth that a fashionable doctor would have. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t practiced for years, except maybe on his older brother Philip who had a bad heart and who lived with him. His money comes from real estate. He owns a lot of property in the city. Well, a man like that you can’t push around.

  “A private detective, name of Simes, who runs the local office for National Investigation, gave us the tip and brought us the note.” He gestured toward the photostat on the table. “Philip Regan, the older brother, had called him in. He was not supposed to do any detecting, just to act as go-between and handle the transfer of the money. The idea was, I suppose, that if the doctor himself should try to handle the matter, he might be double-crossed—pay out money and get nothing in return except maybe a demand for more money. It turned out that it wasn’t necessary. The kidnapper called the doctor who followed their instructions and got his daughter back. When I asked him why he hadn’t had Simes handle it, he said that he had never intended to and had engaged him only because his brother had been so uneasy.

  “Well, the daughter was back and Dr. John Regan wanted to drop the whole matter. But the next day his brother Philip had another heart attack, and died. Simes was bothered by the whole business. There was nothing wrong about the death, mind you. Philip Regan was about sixty and had had a coronary condition for years. He was apt to go at any time. I suppose the excitement of the kidnapping, and the girl coming back all doped up, may have caused it. But Simes was uneasy about concealing the kidnapping, and the death of his client on top of that made him even more uneasy. It was probably just a coincidence, he thought, but on the other hand, there might be some connection. He got in touch with his New York office and they told him to report it to us. The fact that he had dealt with Philip and not with the doctor made it a little easier for him. He was not obligated to follow the doctor’s wishes in the matter since, strictly speaking, he wasn’t the one who had engaged him.

  “Of course, we checked into Philip’s death, but there was nothing there that concerned us. He had been suffering from a bad heart for a long time. He did nothing—just hung around the house, puttering in the garden in old clothes, gossiping with passersby over the fence. In the summer he’d sometimes take a few of the neighbors’ kids and go fishing. He was a harmless old coot.” He brushed aside the idea with an impatient gesture of the hand. Then he smiled a shrewd, self-satisfied smile. “But, naturally, we have to investigate all kidnappings.”

  He leaned back in his armchair and spread his hands. “There you have the whole picture. Now what are we doing about it? Well, one thing we’re not doing is trying to fathom why the kidnapper put his prints on the message. As I said, criminals are always making mistakes like that. If they didn’t make mistakes of some kind, we could never hope to catch them. We just went right ahead with our routine. We sent copies of those prints down to Washington, on the off chance that they had them on file. They didn’t, of course—that was too much to hope for. But we weren’t disappointed. You see, when you work on a routine, you know that most of your leads won’t amount to anything. It doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, one of them does actually lead somewhere, and then you’ve cracked your case. We had a paper expert go over the message and determine what magazines they had been cut from. You can’t tell from the photostat, but just a casual inspection of the original showed that although they were all glossy stock, they came from different magazines. Then we set someone to trying to figure out which issue of each magazine was used. That wasn’t too hard because all of those words were snipped from story heads—just tedious routine—and the printing on the reverse of each unit of type helped establish where each came from. When we found out that four different magazines had bee
n used, all current issues, we sent men to call on every bookstore and magazine counter in the postal district from which the letter was mailed. The idea was that some clerk might remember someone coming in and buying a lot of magazines at the same time.

  “Then we called in Blackie Venuti, who runs the Silver Slipper, and we grilled him. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he had had something to do with it. He’s been in some pretty dim activities, and we’ve had our eye on him for a long time. We didn’t get anything out of him, because we haven’t got a wedge to open him up with. But he gave us his reservation list, which in turn gave us the names of the people who were at his club that night.

  “Of course, that story of Gloria having met some other people and gone off with them is phony. We figure that she may have been called out the way her father was, on the pretext of a telephone message. The waiter said she told him she was leaving and that that was all he told her father. I fancy her father assumed that she had met some people and gone on to another club with them. He was vague about just what the waiter did tell him, when we questioned him a second time. We’re planning to question him some more. And we’re going to question everyone who was at the club that night. The chances are that she slipped away during the floor show, when the place was pretty dark, but still somebody may have noticed her. But”—he held up a forefinger and looked around at us impressively—“one thing we know, and that is that if we can judge by past experience, someone will pop up who saw something or who can give us some sort of clue, and we’ll follow that clue until we finally have a case.”

  He sat back with a self-satisfied air, and I felt that I had been properly squelched. I was going to explain that I had not offered my story as a workable method, when the doorbell rang and I remembered that it was Friday night, my regular evening for chess with Nicky, and that I had forgotten to cancel our appointment.

  I hurried to answer the door myself. It was Nicky, of course. He wouldn’t forget. He caught sight of the company and looked at me sharply out of his frosty blue eyes. I stammered apologies and then quickly added to mollify him, “We were just talking about you, Nicky. Won’t you join us?”