His reflections were interrupted by the arrival of Bryce for lunch. Fenner instantly perceived that his colleague had something to report. When the waiter had taken their order and moved out of hearing Bryce said: “We got a line on Morton’s car. Didn’t find it but we found the garage where he keeps it. Packard sedan. Morton left word on Wednesday to have it completely serviced, gassed up and oiled. He came for it around one-forty-five yesterday afternoon and hasn’t been back since. What do you think of that?”
“You say he left word on Wednesday to have it serviced? Do you know whether he indicated that he contemplated a trip?”
“That’s exactly the question I asked the garage man. He couldn’t recall that Morton said that he was going anywhere, but the fellow says that somehow he got that impression.”
“Well, it looks as if Morton’s away on the quiet, all right. But it must be for some reason of his own not connected with this business at all. You see, in the first place, he had no way of knowing there’d be any loose money lying around that vault, and, in the second, he didn’t know until he reached his office on Thursday morning that he’d be going there at all. Another thing: I talked to his assistant this morning,—a fellow named Coles. Morton told him before he left on Thursday morning that he was going to Detroit and had even mentioned the possibility on Wednesday.”
Bryce’s jaw dropped a little as he digested these facts but he countered: “Still, if it wasn’t an inside job it’s more likely to have been Morton than either of the other two. He was carrying the briefcase, which would make it easier for him, and if he intended going away for some other reason, why, he wouldn’t have to worry about a getaway. He was all set!”
Fenner was silent for a long moment, then mused: “I never met the fellow in my life, but by reputation in engineering and building circles he’s highly conservative. For instance, if soil is good for five tons per square foot he designs his foundations so that the load is only four; if an eight-inch brace is apparently required he specifies a ten or twelve. He’s not a type that takes chances; he always wants to be sure. Now this theft, if it’s not an inside job, was born of a quick impulse. It’s not the sort of a thing a fellow like Morton would be apt to tackle.”
Bryce was not quite convinced but he knew from experience that Fenner’s intuition in these matters seldom led him astray, so he changed the subject.
“By the way,” he said, “I worked one of my men into the job-office at the new building. A clever chap by the name of Quade. Got him put on as an assistant timekeeper. He’ll keep an eye on Dickson and Morton and Borden on the job for us. Drop in on him sometime and then let me know what you think of him. He’s been doing vice squad work but wanted to get out of it.”
Fenner promised to do as Bryce asked. They ate the rest of their meal in silence broken only by occasional comment on the food and service. At its conclusion Bryce lit his cigar and Fenner’s cigarette and settled back comfortably. He glanced from the end of his cigar to his companion.
“Max,” he presently ruminated, “what about our friend, Mr. Hanley?”
Fenner returned his look without surprise and said: “I expected that question sooner or later. One canvasses all of the possibilities. Hanley has been badly burned in the market. He had a lot of stuff on margin at the first break and has been covering all the way down. However, that fact alone doesn’t mean a thing! I found out that about half of the officers of the bank are in the same boat. I believe that has something to do with the anxiety to have this conclusively proved to be an outside job. There are so many people in the bank with what you might call ‘known motive’ that if the thing isn’t cleared up fairly speedily the situation there will be very uncomfortable.”
“Well, if one of these other birds doesn’t make a misstep soon I’ll begin to believe myself that it was an inside job,” Bryce said. He dragged heavily on the cigar and went on thoughtfully: “You know more about the bank end of it than I do. Tell me something: Hanley was pretty positive this morning when he said they’d found everything in such apple-pie order. Now with all the red tape and rigmarole they have in a place like that, how can he be so sure so quickly? There are a lot of employees besides the Donegans. How about some of those guards, or almost anyone on the inside?”
“As a matter of fact, he can’t be. They have a pretty thorough system of checking up from minute to minute but of course it isn’t one hundred percent foolproof. I think Hanley is to a certain extent guided by his instincts in the matter; but on the other hand, the instincts of a fellow with his experience and position are likely to be pretty accurate.”
“Maybe his wishes are father to his instincts,” Bryce suggested.
“Anything is possible.” This was Fenner’s stock reply in lieu of no answer at all.
“Who was that other bird with him at first yesterday? Mortimer?”
“‘That other bird’ as you call him, Mortimer, is the power behind the throne in the Consolidated American Company, and also in a lot of other outfits around here. I’ve heard of him often but never encountered him face to face before.”
“Didn’t have much to say, did he?”
“He never does. I think that’s half his secret. It builds up an aura of mystery about him that awes people who don’t understand the psychology of it. I guess he’s got something on the ball, though, and money no end!”
“Funny that I should never have heard of him.”
“Not at all. Few people have. He keeps off directorates and out of the papers. That’s more of his secret.”
They smoked for a few moments in silence. “Morton’s a little crowded, too, financially,”
Fenner resumed. “The foundations for the new Consolidated Building are about all he has on his drawing boards right now. He was caught in the market, too, but not quite so drastically. Strangest of all, though, is Dickson. I suppose you gathered from his talk yesterday afternoon that he is anxious? Well, he’s in to his ears, with the margin clerks pestering him from dawn to sunset. Rather surprising, too, because until a year ago he wouldn’t touch the market with a ten-foot pole. Had all of his investments in high grade bonds and real estate.”
“In other words,” the inspector concluded for Fenner, “they all needed the dough!”
“Exactly.”
The talk lagged until Bryce pushed back his chair and said: “I’ll go back to headquarters now. I have hopes of that car of Morton’s being turned up somewhere pretty quick.”
“Good. Well, I’ll be at the bank in case you want to get hold of me.”
Fenner sat for a few moments after Bryce left. He was pondering, not for the first time, Mr. Hanley. That gentleman, he reflected, had motive enough and as much opportunity as any of the others to commit the theft and, furthermore, he was the only one on the inside who could have anticipated the vault inspection by the engineers and arranged to take advantage of it. Yet with a little shrug Fenner dismissed Hanley from his list of possibilities, or, perhaps better, relegated him to his list of “improbables.” His reason for this was one he would have been too modest to explain to Bryce, namely: that though he had solved only several simple cases for the Consolidated Bank it was common knowledge in inner bonding and banking circles that he had brought to successful conclusions a number of involved and difficult ones which had bid fair to defy solution; and Fenner did not believe Hanley would have had the temerity to call him in had the bank manager himself been involved.
After several minutes of musing along these lines Fenner, too, left the restaurant and went back to the bank.
2
Fenner found Hanley about to leave. His face had a gray pallor, his eyes a heaviness that bespoke complete exhaustion.
“I feel I could go home and sleep for a solid week,” the manager mourned. “Anything new?”
“Nothing much. Bryce has got a line on Morton’s car they’re working on. It might net something.”
“Yesterday I would have sworn that would be the last direction in which to look. Today
it seems to be about the only hope we have left,” Hanley sighed.
Covertly Fenner searched Hanley’s face but could detect no trace of purposiveness behind the remark.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Quite frankly, I’m not especially hopeful on that score. To watch and to wait—that’s our program now. Eventually it’ll bear fruit.”
“I wish I could share your optimism,” was Hanley’s gloomy rejoinder.
Before the manager went out Fenner arranged to go over certain of young Donegan’s books and also the vault records. Without any specific objective he wanted a plausible opportunity for being in the bank and for conversing with Jerry and old Jeremy. He had just gotten down to the former’s cage when one of the bank’s office boys tapped his shoulder.
“Mr. Fenner, sir? There’s a call for you on Mr. Hanley’s phone. Will you take it here?”
“Yes, thanks.” He picked up Jerry’s phone and in a minute heard Bryce’s voice at the other end.
“Will you step around to Adolph Knoeckler’s shop?” Bryce requested. “There’s been an accident. It may be just that but to me it looks kind of queer.”
Without waiting for details Fenner hung up and hurried out of the bank. It was less than a ten-minute walk around to Knoeckler’s shop. When Fenner got there he saw the familiar blue Police Department roadster parked in front of the place and Bryce waiting in the door.
“When I got back to the station,” the inspector explained, “I was just in time to hear the desk sergeant get this call from the officer on the beat. Old Knoeckler was found dead at the foot of his cellar steps. It seemed odd that such a thing should happen just now to this fellow indirectly connected with our case, so I hopped over.”
“By all means.”
“The coroner will be here directly,” Bryce went on, “and the photographer and a finger-print man.
In the meantime we can look around.”
They turned into the shop, Bryce repeating: “As I say, I’m not sure this isn’t a pure accident. There’s nothing offhand to indicate anything different, but I just had a hunch—”
Inside the shop Fenner saw a policeman in uniform, a man very patently a plain-clothes detective, and a third, older man, the last distraught and nervous, leaning on and clinging to the counter.
“That’s the man who found him,” Bryce explained, inclining his head toward the last of the trio. “We’ll take a look downstairs and then come up and talk to him.”
“As you say.”
The entrance to the cellar was in the extreme rear of the shop. Bryce opened the door at the head of the stairs and snapped on the light. It was a poor light but by its feeble glow Fenner could see a dim form sprawled on the cement floor at the foot of the stairs. Bryce preceded him down the stairs and they stepped gingerly around the body.
Fenner glanced around and saw in the far end a heating plant and a small pile of coal. Other than to house these, the cellar apparently served only as a repository for the accumulation of a miscellany of junk. He walked to the furnace and opened the door. The firebed was black and quite extinct, but it radiated a faint residual warmth that indicated it had been out for only a few hours.
He came back and looked at the body thoughtfully. He had talked to Adolph Knoeckler less than twenty-four hours before. Now the man lay on his face, quite lifeless; his arms stretched out before him, his face smudged in a small dark pool of his own congealed blood.
Fenner bent down and felt the dead man’s cheek; it was quite cold. He lifted a frail forearm and found it rigid.
“Last night some time,” he said briefly.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go up.”
Even to Bryce, a hardened veteran in matters of crime and violence and death, it was a relief to get up out of the dank cellar into the fresh daylight of the shop.
“You had better tell Mr. Fenner what you told the officer and me, Schmidt,” Bryce said to the old man.
“Yah—yess,” the man agreed nervously. He was a German of about Knoeckler’s age and conducted a newsstand and stationery store two doors from Knoeckler’s shop. He went ahead with his story, using good English except when he became excited, at which time he dropped into the German accent. He had known Adolph for ten years, he told them—ever since he had opened his little magazine shop. Of late he had been taking his dinner with him quite often at a German restaurant a few blocks away. The old man’s daughter was out a great deal of the time lately. Last night he’d sort of expected the old man but when he hadn’t showed up Schmidt had thought nothing about it because they had no definite arrangement. “Then this morning he didn’t come in for his paper—first time in months except when he was away—so I got to wondering and kept my eye on his shop. There didn’t seem to be anyone around so when I come back from my lunch I tried the door. I found it open and went in. Adolph wasn’t downstairs. I called and nobody answered. I looked upstairs in the sittin’ room and in the bedrooms and nobody was there. I thought he’d probably gone off somewheres and forgot to snap the lock on his door, so I thought I’d lock it for him. Then I thought I’d peek in the cellar first and—ach! ven I turned on de light dere he vas!” The old German shuddered at the recollection.
Schmidt had scarcely finished when the coroner, a Dr. Pollard, and two other men from Headquarters arrived. Bryce introduced Fenner and the three went downstairs to the cellar.
The coroner leaned over the body for a brief examination.
“Dead from eighteen to twenty-four hours,” he said as he stood up. “Fractured skull—frontal.” He looked up to the head of the cellar steps, then down at the body meditatively. “He must have just about pitched all of the way down, though, and landed head first on the stone floor, too, to get a nasty fracture like that. However, we can tell more from an autopsy. It’s too dark here.” He turned to Bryce. “Do you want any pictures before we move the body?”
Bryce in turn looked at Fenner.
“Better take them,” the latter advised, and to the coroner he said: “In your opinion, then, Doctor, he’s been dead between eighteen and twenty-four hours. Which would you say was nearer?”
The coroner stooped over the body again. “It’s hard to be sure—Hmm—rigor-mortis pretty well advanced—muscles pretty well contracted. Probably twenty-one hours is closer than either, though it might have been as little as eighteen.”
“That would put it around five-thirty yesterday afternoon but possibly as late as eight-thirty in the evening—say, between five and nine?”
“That’s a safe assumption, all right,” Dr. Pollard agreed.
“I know he couldn’t have taken his tumble much before then, because I was in here talking to him a little after four. He wasn’t exactly a healthy looking specimen but he certainly didn’t look ready to keel over, either. Well, let’s see—“ Fenner bent down and picked up each of Knoeckler’s hands, turning them palms up to examine them. “Anything strike you as odd about them?”
Bryce and the coroner looked at them. Bryce leaned down and drew his palm across the cement floor, then looked at it, grayed with dirt and ashes. He looked again at Knoeckler’s upturned palms. “Pretty clean, ain’t they—for a man that’s fallen forward from the top of those stairs?”
Fenner did not reply.
Bryce called his photographer down and instructed him to take the customary pictures. Then they went upstairs to get Schmidt’s testimony for the coroner’s records.
The newsdealer repeated his story substantially as he had told it first to Bryce and later to Fenner.
When he had finished Fenner asked: “Knoeckler lived in the rooms upstairs, did he?”
“Yes.” Schmidt nodded.
“Anybody else?”
“Oh, yes; Elsa, his daughter. She sort of keeps house for him.”
“Where is she; do you know?”
“She works somewhere near here in an office. She’s a secretary.” He made the announcement with a certain deference. He shook his head a little sadly and went on: “
She’s gone now, though. She went away last night.”
“Yes? Whereto?”
Schmidt shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. She’s hard to keep up to, lately. She went away with a man in a car. She had a suitcase.”
“When?” Fenner smothered his impatience. “Last night. I just came back from supper a little before. It must have been seven o’clock.”
“Tell us more about it. How did you happen to notice it?” Fenner urged.
“From about four o’clock on I stay out by my stand—the afternoon papers—people going home then,” Schmidt explained. “Usually I stay out about a half an hour after supper. People buy magazines then. Not long after I came back from supper a car pulled up and stopped about halfway between my place and here. I saw Elsa get out and run inside. It struck me kind of funny they hadn’t pulled right up to Adolph’s instead of stopping almost next door. There was a man driving the car. As soon as Elsa went inside he got out and walked around the car, kicking the tires and sort of looking it over. Then he went inside too. In about fifteen minutes they both came out. Maybe it was a little longer—twenty minutes or so. I’d gone in my shop a couple of times, it seems to me, to wait on customers. He had her suitcase. They got in and drove off. Pretty soon after that I shut up for the night.”
“What kind of a car was it?”
“Why, it was a big expensive looking, closed car.”
“Would you know it again if you saw it?” Bryce put in.
Schmidt scratched his head. “I’m not sure if I would or not.”
“Would you know the man?”
“Maybe; but it was pretty dark then.”
“Where’d you say the girl worked?”
“I don’t know; except it’s around here somewhere. She walked back and forth and sometimes came home at noon.”
“When did you last see Knoeckler alive?” Fenner cut in abruptly.
Schmidt thought a minute, then replied: “He came in about four o’clock yesterday afternoon. I gave him a late paper and we talked a few minutes. Then he went on back. It wasn’t long after that when you were here.” Schmidt addressed the last remark to Fenner alone.
The Bank Vault Mystery Page 6
