Authors: Stuart Palmer
“I’m afraid at your age, Oscar, your diary would be about as spicy as the almanac. Very well, I’m sorry I peeked. But I don’t see why you mind my knowing that the Phoenix police report that David Cawthorne, 56, no criminal record, was a patient in a TB sanitarium there until two weeks ago, when he left one night late without the formality of being discharged. It’s a blind alley anyway—you can’t believe that the man got angry because Marika stopped sending him money, sneaked out of the hospital, and then hitchhiked his way back to New York City just to kill her, do you?”
“Say, that’s not a bad idea at that, we’ll look into it. Anyway, somebody did. Kill her, I mean.”
“And this is one crime you can’t pin on Andrew Rowan, because he’s still locked up in the death-house!”
He shrugged. “Rowan is the least of my troubles, now.”
“Perhaps. Yet, if the man is actually executed next Monday, and then later it all comes out that he was innocent, how do you suppose you’ll sleep at night?”
“
Lousy
, just like I do now!” But the Inspector gave her an odd look. “See here, Hildegarde, all kidding aside. Are you just still playing a wild hunch, or do you know something I don’t know?” He took out a cigar and studied it searchingly, as if he expected to find a worm in it. “Look, I haven’t forgotten about that trick will of Rowan’s. And remembering some of the rabbits you’ve pulled out of the hat in the past, I have a certain healthy respect for your feminine intuition or whatever you call it. If you could give me one simple solitary fact pointing to his innocence—”
“But facts aren’t always simple and solitary, Oscar. Anyway, I guess it’s time to break the news to you that I didn’t drop in just to peek at your desk and needle you about the progress you’re not making. I came to report a threat.”
“A which?”
“To report threatening telephone calls made this morning to Miss Iris Dunn, the girl who’s been trying to help Mrs. Rowan and me get to the real truth about the Harrington murder.”
“Oh, yes, the roommate. She inherited Midge’s personal stuff, because there weren’t any relatives. A giddy type, I remember her at the morgue. You should have seen her—”
“Save it for your reminiscences. Oscar, I’m trying to tell you something important, something that makes me so mad inside I could
spit
!” And she went on to tell about her surprise visit to Iris’ apartment.
“Let me get this straight, so there isn’t any mistake,” Piper said with obvious masculine superiority when she had finally run down. “You say the phone rang and the girl answered and she heard a man laughing. He called again this morning, still laughing. Is
that
all?”
“I confess it doesn’t sound like much, the way you put it. But, Oscar, she said it was very peculiar laughter.”
“
She
says! A hysterical snip of a girl—”
“Well,
I’m
not a hysterical snip of a girl, as you very well know! Oscar, in all your experience have you ever run into anything like that, where somebody just calls up and then laughs on and on and on?”
“I have not. And I don’t believe that anybody else has either.” He smiled a superior smile.
“Don’t be in a hurry to lay bets on that,” Miss Withers told him grimly. “I confess that at one time I almost made the same mistake you’re making. I thought Iris was simply dramatizing, making it all up just as an excuse to back out of the whole thing. I should have realized that it would take something drastic to make a down-at-the-heels actress turn her back on a nice cut of a twenty-thousand-dollar reward, which is what Natalie Rowan has offered.”
“Wow!” the Inspector said, opening his eyes.
“Yes, Oscar, wow. But listen. When I got home this afternoon and was right in the middle of washing up our brunch dishes,
my
phone rang! I dried my hands as fast as I could and hurried out into the living room—you know how Talley always gets excited when the phone rings, and barks and paws at it and sometimes even knocks it off the hook? I picked it up and said hello and then—well, Oscar, I heard something I never heard before, something I’ll remember to my dying day.”
“A proposal?”
But she sailed on, not deigning to notice the jibe. “Oscar, it was a man—laughing. He didn’t say anything, he just laughed. It was heavy, strange, horrible laughter, like a drunken idiot’s.”
The Inspector looked sharply at her. “Hildegarde, are you all right?”
“I’m as all right as anybody could be who heard that awful bellowing. It was inhuman, it was ghoulish and evil, like laughter bubbling up from the deep wells of hell.”
“Come, come,” said Piper uncomfortably. “Nerves—”
“Stuff and nonsense! I have no more nerves than a baked potato. Besides, what about Talley? Is my poodle having a nervous breakdown too?”
“How could anybody tell?” the Inspector said. “That fool dog—”
“Talley isn’t a fool, except in the classical sense. He’s a clown, a cheerful extroverted clown. Listen. I told you how interested he always is in the telephone, especially when one doesn’t answer it right away. As I sat there holding the instrument and shivering in my boots at that awful sound that went on and on longer than any normal human being could laugh without choking or stopping for breath, I held the phone down to Talley’s ear to see if he heard it too or if maybe I was ready for a straitjacket. Do you know what he did? Oscar, as heaven is my witness, he just shut his eyes, opened his mouth—”
“And yawned?”
“And
howled
, Oscar! A dreadful, thin, agonized howl such as I’ve never heard him let loose since the violinist upstairs moved away. So there!” She sat back in her chair, and waited.
“Well,” said the Inspector after a moment, “that’s a new one on me. I don’t suppose the Bell System has suddenly hooked up the tie-lines with Gehenna. Maybe this is a case for a psychiatrist—oh, I don’t mean to psychoanalyze you or your dog. But any murder that gets into the papers attracts a lot of half-demented people. They start coming down here and confessing, or else they claim they’re a reincarnation of the victim or something equally screwy. This business sounds to me like the work of some nut, who ought to be certified and on his way to Matteawan.”
“And how, pray, would this so-called nut of yours know that Iris Dunn and I are the only two people who are trying to help Natalie Rowan reopen that old murder case?”
“How do I know?” snapped Piper irritably. “How does anybody know what a madman knows—or will do in a given situation?” He blew a large but ragged smoke ring. “The thing just doesn’t make sense. Are you trying to suggest that the murderer of Marika is so afraid of you two women that he’s trying to scare you off by calling up and giving you the eerie ha-ha?”
“I’m not suggesting at the moment. I’m insisting that you must find out where those calls are coming from. You must tap our telephone lines and put policemen there to listen—”
“Sure, sure!” he cried. “Your phone and the girl’s and I suppose Mrs. Rowan’s too—with eight-hour shifts that’s nine men pulled off their beats, sitting around some cellar wearing earphones on the long chance that some nut, who has nothing to do with the murder, will call up again and pull his phony act. And if we did tap the lines the listening officers wouldn’t hear anything more than you hear. We’ve got an automatic dial system in New York, remember. There’s no way on God’s green earth for them to check back through the robot switchboards in time to find out where the call is originating.”
“Oh,” said the schoolteacher, deflated.
“Besides,” the Inspector went on soberly, ‘look at this angle. Just suppose for the sake of argument that the same man killed Midge Harrington and Marika Thoren. Why would he go calling attention to himself by those phone calls made to the women who are trying to link the murders? He’d want to sit tight and let Rowan be executed, wouldn’t he? No, Hildegarde, I stick with my theory that it was just some demented joker. If he calls you again, interrupt! Get him to say something, so you can hear his voice.”
The schoolteacher gave him a look. “Oscar, that’s easy to say, but you haven’t heard that laughter. It would be like—like trying to interrupt Niagara Falls or a hurricane or hell’s bells ringing in the rafters …”
“Take it easy!” Piper looked worried. “This has really got under your skin, hasn’t it?” He stood up quickly. “Let me get you a nice glass of cold water.”
“I do not have the slightest desire for a glass of cold water!”
The two old friends glared at each other for a moment, and then the tension was broken by a dark young man in shirt sleeves and uniform trousers who poked his head in the door and said, “Oh! Busy, Inspector?”
“Not at all!” Piper assured him heartily, obviously and unflatteringly happy at the interruption. “Come on in, Gino. Got anything yet?”
The newcomer carried a big block of drawing paper under his arm. “Maybe, sir.” He shrugged expressive Latin shoulders.
“Gino’s our anatomist,” the Inspector observed to Miss Withers. “Started out to be a sculptor and wound up in the Department. You should see him reconstruct a face with clay and stuff when he has nothing to start with but a moldy old skull—” He took the drawing block and studied it thoughtfully. “Not bad, not bad at all. Recognize him, Hildegarde?” He turned the pad in her direction, and she saw a pencil drawing of the head and shoulders of a stocky man in trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat, a man wearing heavy-rimmed glasses above a truly remarkable nose.
“I recognize the hat at any rate,” admitted the schoolteacher. She squinted, trying to see Riff Sprott, or Nils Bruner, or even little George Zotos in the rough sketch. Then she shook her head.
“None of your Three Musketeers? That’s what I thought.” Piper pressed a button on his desk, “Smitty? Have the Fink woman brought back over here.”
They sat in silence. “Oscar,” said the schoolteacher, “while you’re not busy there’s an auto license number I’d like you to check for me.” She handed him a slip of paper. “Would it be too much trouble to find out who owns this car?”
“Sure, sure.” Piper took it, and then stuck it on a spike on his desk when Mrs. Fink was ushered in. But the landlady was evidently fed up with the police and out of sorts with everything. She absolutely refused to look at anything more until she had a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a nip. However, she finally settled for the first two items and a promise of the other on her way home—just as soon as she had made her decision as to how close the artist had come to re-creating her description of the man who had passed her on the stairs last night.
“Beautiful!” was her first verdict. She stared at Gino, obviously surprised that he didn’t wear a beret, a Windsor tie, and a smock. “You did that?”
“What we want, Mrs. Fink, is for you to tell us what changes the artist should make. All we have to go on is the hat, and your description in your statement.”
“Well,” the woman said doubtfully, “the hat’s wrong.”
Miss Withers choked, and the Inspector said, “Wrong? But that’s the one thing we’re sure of!”
Mrs. Fink shook her head stubbornly. “It’s still wrong.”
“If I might make a suggestion,” put in the schoolteacher gently, “perhaps the brim was turned down?”
“Try it, Gino,” ordered Piper wearily.
The young man took a bit of blackened gum from his pocket, magically removed the brim of the hat, and turned it down in front with a few quick strokes of a soft black pencil.
“Better,” admitted Mrs. Fink judicially, as she sipped her coffee. “But I think maybe it was down in back too.”
Gino attended to that. “Anything else wrong?” the Inspector demanded.
Mrs. Fink labored long, and finally decided that the mouth was too large, also the ears. Swiftly the pencil made changes, corrections. “The eyes are too wide apart,” she said. “And—” She stopped, uncertain.
“And what?”
The man I saw coming up the stairs looked cold, somehow,” admitted the landlady. “You know, like people look coming in out of a snowstorm?”
“But there wasn’t any snowstorm,” Inspector Piper objected. “Look, lady, it’s been a warm September!—”
“Wait, Oscar,” put in Miss Withers. “I think I know what she means. When my pupils used to come in off the playground on a cold winter day their noses and sometimes their ears were almost white. Do you suppose—?”
The Inspector nodded to Gino, who swiftly made nose and ears several shades lighter than the rest of the pictured face. “Now that’s
him
!” sighed Mrs. Fink in weary approval.
“Okay, Gino, wrap it up.” As the artist spread a protecting coat of fixative over the drawing from a little atomizer from his pocket, Piper pressed a button on his desk, “Smitty? Order a car and have somebody take Mrs. Fink up to Ninety-sixth Street. Oh yes, and first she’s to have one for the road, understand …?”
But Sergeant Smith, instead of being where he belonged at the other end of the line, was standing in the open doorway, a hopeful smile on his face. “Is it all right for me to take her up myself, sir? I live up that way, and I’m off duty anyway in half an hour.”
“Why—” the Inspector frowned, and then said, “Okay, okay.” He turned to Miss Withers. “You want a free ride uptown too?”
The schoolteacher declined with thanks, feeling in no mood for racing through late afternoon traffic in a police car with sirens screaming. Then she noticed that the sergeant, about to usher Mrs. Fink triumphantly out through the door, had stopped short to stare at the drawing propped up against the Inspector’s desk. Smitty walked slowly toward it, whistling.
“Hello!” cried the brisk young officer. “If it isn’t Banana-Nose! What’s my old pal been up to now?”
“Judas-Priest-in-a-jug!” whispered the Inspector after a moment of turgid silence. “Smitty—do you actually—I mean, do you recognize this face?”
“Why, sure.” Sergeant Smith closed his eyes, snapped his chubby fingers, and rattled off: “Rollo Banana-Nose Wilson alias Rob Wills, age about 36, numerous arrests as cat-burglar and second-storey worker, served four years Auburn and minimum of three to ten Sing Sing, now out on parole.” He opened his eyes and smiled. Miss Withers half-expected him to run forward toward the audience, arms outstretched for applause, like an oldtime vaudeville acrobat.