“I don’t know,” I told her, “and I reckon you’re right. There’s no use talking about it. The thing to do is drink, though there doesn’t seem to be much body to this gin.”
“That’s you, not the gin. Do you want an honest to God rear?”
“I’d drink nitroglycerine tonight.”
“That’s just about what you’re going to get,” she promised me.
She rattled bottles in the kitchen and brought me in a glass of what looked like the stuff we had been drinking. I sniffed at it and said:
“Some of Dan’s laudanum, huh? He still in the hospital?”
“Yes. I think his skull is fractured. There’s your kick, mister, if that’s what you want.”
I put the doped gin down my throat. Presently I felt more comfortable. Time went by as we drank and talked in a world that was rosy, cheerful, and full of fellowship and peace on earth.
Dinah stuck to gin. I tried that for a while too, and then had another gin and laudanum.
For a while after that I played a game, trying to hold my eyes open as if I were awake, even though I couldn’t see anything out of them. When the trick wouldn’t fool her any more I gave it up.
The last thing I remembered was her helping me onto the living room chesterfield.
21
THE SEVENTEENTH
MURDER
I dreamed I was sitting on a bench, in Baltimore, facing the tumbling fountain in Harlem Park, beside a woman who wore a veil. I had come there with her. She was somebody I knew well. But I had suddenly forgotten who she was. I couldn’t see her face because of the long black veil.
I thought that if I said something to her I would recognize her voice when she answered. But I was very embarrassed and was a long time finding anything to say. Finally I asked her if she knew a man named Carroll T. Harris.
She answered me, but the roar and swish of the tumbling fountain smothered her voice, and I could hear nothing.
Fire engines went out Edmondson Avenue. She left me to run after them. As she ran she cried, “Fire! Fire!” I recognized her voice then and knew who she was, and knew she was someone important to me. I ran after her, but it was too late. She and the fire engines were gone.
I walked streets hunting for her, half the streets in the United States, Gay Street and Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, Colfax Avenue in Denver, Aetna Road and St. Clair Avenue in Cleveland, McKinney Avenue in Dallas, Lemartine and Cornell and Amory Streets in Boston, Berry Boulevard in Louisville, Lexington Avenue in New York, until I came to Victoria Street in Jacksonville, where I heard her voice again, though I still could not see her.
I walked more streets, listening to her voice. She was calling a name, not mine, one strange to me, but no matter how fast I walked or in what direction, I could get no nearer her voice. It was the same distance from me in the street that runs past the Federal Building in El Paso as in Detroit’s Grand Circus Park. Then the voice stopped.
Tired and discouraged, I went into the lobby of the hotel that faces the railroad station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to rest. While I sat there a train came in. She got off it and came into the lobby, over to me, and began kissing me. I was very uncomfortable because everybody stood around looking at us and laughing.
That dream ended there.
I dreamed I was in a strange city hunting for a man I hated. I had an open knife in my pocket and meant to kill him with it when I found him. It was Sunday morning. Church bells were ringing, crowds of people were in the streets, going to and from church. I walked almost as far as in the first dream, but always in this same strange city.
Then the man I was after yelled at me, and I saw him. He was a small brown man who wore an immense sombrero. He was standing on the steps of a tall building on the far side of a wide plaza, laughing at me. Between us, the plaza was crowded with people, packed shoulder to shoulder.
Keeping one hand on the open knife in my pocket, I ran toward the little brown man, running on the heads and shoulders of the people in the plaza. The heads and shoulders were of unequal heights and not evenly spaced. I slipped and floundered over them.
The little brown man stood on the steps and laughed until I had almost reached him. Then he ran into the tall building. I chased him up miles of spiral stairway, always just an inch more than a hand’s reach behind him. We came to the roof. He ran straight across to the edge and jumped just as one of my hands touched him.
His shoulder slid out of my fingers. My hand knocked his sombrero off, and closed on his head. It was a smooth hard round head no larger than a large egg. My fingers went all the way around it. Squeezing his head in one hand, I tried to bring the knife out of my pocket with the other—and realized that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him. We dropped giddily down toward the millions of upturned faces in the plaza, miles down.
I opened my eyes in the dull light of morning sun filtered through drawn blinds.
I was lying face down on the dining room floor, my head resting on my left forearm. My right arm was stretched straight out. My right hand held the round blue and white handle of Dinah Brand’s ice pick. The pick’s six-inch needle-sharp blade was buried in Dinah Brand’s left breast.
She was lying on her back, dead. Her long muscular legs were stretched out toward the kitchen door. There was a run down the front of her right stocking.
Slowly, gently, as if afraid of awakening her, I let go the ice pick, drew in my arm, and got up.
My eyes burned. My throat and mouth were hot, woolly. I went into the kitchen, found a bottle of gin, tilted it to my mouth, and kept it there until I had to breathe. The kitchen clock said seven-forty-one.
With the gin in me I returned to the dining room, switched on the lights, and looked at the dead girl.
Not much blood was in sight: a spot the size of a silver dollar around the hole the ice pick made in her blue silk dress. There was a bruise on her right cheek, just under the cheek bone. Another bruise, finger-made, was on her right wrist. Her hands were empty. I moved her enough to see that nothing was under her.
I examined the room. So far as I could tell, nothing had been changed in it. I went back to the kitchen and found no recognizable changes there.
The spring lock on the back door was fastened, and had no marks to show it had been monkeyed with. I went to the front door and failed to find any marks on it. I went through the house from top to bottom, and learned nothing. The windows were all right. The girl’s jewelry, on her dressing table (except the two diamond rings on her hands), and four hundred odd dollars in her handbag, on a bedroom chair, were undisturbed.
In the dining room again, I knelt beside the dead girl and used my handkerchief to wipe the ice pick handle clean of any prints my fingers had left on it. I did the same to glasses, bottles, doors, light buttons, and the pieces of furniture I had touched, or was likely to have touched.
Then I washed my hands, examined my clothes for blood, made sure I was leaving none of my property behind, and went to the front door. I opened it, wiped the inner knob, closed it behind me, wiped the outer knob, and went away.
From a drug store in upper Broadway I telephoned Dick Foley and asked him to come over to my hotel. He arrived a few minutes after I got there.
“Dinah Brand was killed in her house last night or early this morning,” I told him. “Stabbed with an ice pick. The police don’t know it yet. I’ve told you enough about her for you to know that there are any number of people who might have had reason for killing her. There are three I want looked up first—Whisper, Dan Rolff and Bill Quint, the radical fellow. You’ve got their descriptions. Rolff is in the hospital with a dented skull. I don’t know which hospital. Try the City first. Get hold of Mickey Linehan—he’s still camped on Pete the Finn’s trail—and have him let Pete rest while he gives you a hand on this. Find out where those three birds were last night. And time means something.”
The little Canadian op had been watching me curiously while I talked. Now he started to say someth
ing, changed his mind, grunted, “Righto,” and departed.
I went out to look for Reno Starkey. After an hour of searching I located him, by telephone, in a Ronney Street rooming house.
“By yourself?” he asked when I had said I wanted to see him.
“Yeah.”
He said I could come out, and told me how to get there. I took a taxi. It was a dingy two-story house near the edge of town.
A couple of men loitered in front of a grocer’s on the corner above. Another pair sat on the low wooden steps of the house down at the next corner. None of the four was conspicuously refined in appearance.
When I rang the bell two men opened the door. They weren’t so mild looking either.
I was taken upstairs to a front room where Reno, collarless and in shirt-sleeves and vest, sat tilted back in a chair with his feet on the window sill.
He nodded his sallow horse face and said:
“Pull a chair over.”
The men who had brought me up went away, closing the door. I sat down and said:
“I want an alibi. Dinah Brand was killed last night after I left her. There’s no chance of my being copped for it, but with Noonan dead I don’t know how I’m hitched up with the department. I don’t want to give them any openings to even try to hang anything on me. If I’ve got to I can prove where I was last night, but you can save me a lot of trouble if you will.”
Reno looked at me with dull eyes and asked:
“Why pick on me?”
“You phoned me there last night. You’re the only person who knows I was there the first part of the night. I’d have to fix it with you even if I got the alibi somewhere else, wouldn’t I?”
He asked:
“You didn’t croak her, did you?”
I said, “No,” casually.
He stared out the window a little while before he spoke. He asked:
“What made you think I’d give you the lift? Do I owe you anything for what you done to me at Willsson’s last night?”
I said:
“I didn’t hurt you any. The news was half-out anyhow. Whisper knew enough to guess the rest. I only gave you a show-down. What do you care? You can take care of yourself.”
“I aim to try,” he agreed. “All right. You was at the Tanner House in Tanner. That’s a little burg twenty-thirty miles up the hill. You went up there after you left Willsson’s and stayed till morning. A guy named Ricker that hangs around Murry’s with a hire heap drove you up and back. You ought to know what you was doing up there. Give me your sig and I’ll have it put on the register.”
“Thanks,” I said as I unscrewed my fountain pen.
“Don’t say them. I’m doing this because I need all the friends I can get. When the time comes that you sit in with me and Whisper and Pete, I don’t expect the sour end of it.”
“You won’t get it,” I promised. “Who’s going to be chief of police?”
“McGraw’s acting chief. He’ll likely cinch it.”
“How’ll he play?”
“With the Finn. Rough stuff will hurt his shop just like it does Pete’s. It’ll have to be hurt some. I’d be a swell mutt to sit still while a guy like Whisper is on the loose. It’s me or him. Think he croaked the broad?”
“He had reason enough,” I said as I gave him the slip of paper on which I had written my name. “She double-crossed him, sold him out, plenty.”
“You and her was kind of thick, wasn’t you?” he asked.
I let the question alone, lighting a cigarette. Reno waited a while and then said:
“You better hunt up Ricker and let him get a look at you so’s he’ll know how to describe you if he’s asked.”
A long-legged youngster of twenty-two or so with a thin freckled face around reckless eyes opened the door and came into the room. Reno introduced him to me as Hank O’Marra. I stood up to shake his hand, and then asked Reno:
“Can I reach you here if I need to?”
“Know Peak Murry?”
“I’ve met him, and I know his joint.”
“Anything you give him will get to me,” he said. “We’re getting out of here. It’s not so good. That Tanner lay is all set.”
“Right. Thanks.” I went out of the house.
22
THE ICE PICK
Downtown, I went first to police headquarters. McGraw was holding down the chief’s desk. His blond-lashed eyes looked suspiciously at me, and the lines in his leathery face were even deeper and sourer than usual.
“When’d you see Dinah Brand last?” he asked without any preliminaries, not even a nod. His voice rasped disagreeably through his bony nose.
“Ten-forty last night, or thereabout,” I said. “Why?”
“Where?”
“Her house.”
“How long were you there?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you stay any longer than that?”
“What,” I asked, sitting down in the chair he hadn’t offered me, “makes it any of your business?”
He glared at me while he filled his lungs so he could yell, “Murder!” in my face.
I laughed and said:
“You don’t think she had anything to do with Noonan’s killing?”
I wanted a cigarette, but cigarettes were too well known as first aids to the nervous for me to take a chance on one just then.
McGraw was trying to look through my eyes. I let him look, having all sorts of confidence in my belief that, like a lot of people, I looked most honest when I was lying. Presently he gave up the eye-study and asked:
“Why not?”
That was weak enough. I said, “All right, why not?” indifferently, offered him a cigarette, and took one myself. Then I added: “My guess is that Whisper did it.”
“Was he there?” For once McGraw cheated his nose, snapping the words off his teeth.
“Was he where?”
“At Brand’s?”
“No,” I said, wrinkling my forehead. “Why should he be—if he was off killing Noonan?”
“Damn Noonan!” the acting chief exclaimed irritably. “What do you keep dragging him in for?”
I tried to look at him as if I thought him crazy.
He said:
“Dinah Brand was murdered last night.”
I said: “Yeah?”
“Now will you answer my questions?”
“Of course. I was at Willsson’s with Noonan and the others. After I left there, around ten-thirty, I dropped in at her house to tell her I had to go up to Tanner. I had a halfway date with her. I stayed there about ten minutes, long enough to have a drink. There was nobody else there, unless they were hiding. When was she killed? And how?”
McGraw told me he had sent a pair of his dicks—Shepp and Vanaman—to see the girl that morning, to see how much help she could and would give the department in copping Whisper for Noonan’s murder. The dicks got to her house at nine-thirty. The front door was ajar. Nobody answered their ringing. They went in and found the girl lying on her back in the dining room, dead, with a stab wound in her left breast.
The doctor who examined the body said she had been killed with a slender, round, pointed blade about six inches in length, at about three o’clock in the morning. Bureaus, closets, trunks, and so on, had apparently been skilfully and thoroughly ransacked. There was no money in the girl’s handbag, or elsewhere in the house. The jewel case on her dressing table was empty. Two diamond rings were on her fingers.
The police hadn’t found the weapon with which she had been stabbed. The fingerprint experts hadn’t turned up anything they could use. Neither doors nor windows seemed to have been forced. The kitchen showed that the girl had been drinking with a guest or guests.
“Six inches, round, slim, pointed,” I repeated the weapon’s description. “That sounds like her ice pick.”
McGraw reached for the phone and told somebody to send Shepp and Vanama
n in. Shepp was a stoop-shouldered tall man whose wide mouth had a grimly honest look that probably came from bad teeth. The other detective was short, stocky, with purplish veins in his nose and hardly any neck.
McGraw introduced us and asked them about the ice pick. They had not see it, were positive it hadn’t been there. They wouldn’t have overlooked an article of its sort.
“Was it there last night?” McGraw asked me.
“I stood beside her while she chipped off pieces of ice with it.”
I described it. McGraw told the dicks to search her house again, and then to try to find the pick in the vicinity of the house.
“You knew her,” he said when Shepp and Vanaman had gone. “What’s your slant on it?”
“Too new for me to have one,” I dodged the question. “Give me an hour or two to think it over. What do you think?”
He fell back into sourness, growling, “How the hell do I know?”
But the fact that he let me go away without asking me any more questions told me he had already made up his mind that Whisper had killed the girl.
I wondered if the little gambler had done it, or if this was another of the wrong raps that Poisonville police chiefs liked to hang on him. It didn’t seem to make much difference now. It was a cinch he had—personally or by deputy—put Noonan out, and they could only hang him once.
There were a lot of men in the corridor when I left McGraw. Some of these men were quite young—just kids—quite a few were foreigners, and most of them were every bit as tough looking as any men should be.
Near the street door I met Donner, one of the coppers who had been on the Cedar Hill expedition.
“Hello,” I greeted him. “What’s the mob? Emptying the can to make room for more?”
“Them’s our new specials,” he told me, speaking as if he didn’t think much of them. “We’re going to have a augmented force.”
“Congratulations,” I said and went on out.
In his pool room I found Peak Murry sitting at a desk behind the cigar counter talking to three men. I sat down on the other side of the room and watched two kids knock balls around. In a few minutes the lanky proprietor came over to me.