John Baer - The Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 5, No. 5 — August 1922)

“It sounded like a moan — a sort of dull, throaty groan!

“Every hair on my scalp rose straight up. I turned my head involuntarily in the direction from whence the sound came.

“ Through the door I saw the old man sitting behind his desk, his head hanging over the back of his chair! The handle of a knife was sticking out of his chest, and his whole breast was covered with blood!

“Right then and there I opened the door and fled. You couldn’t have held me in that room with a million dollars.”

“Did you see anyone in the corridor as you passed out?” I asked.

Tompkins looked sheepish.

“That’s one of the reasons I hurried right here, Chief,” he answered. “One of the fellows who cleans the rooms — janitors I guess you’d call ’em — was puttering around in the hallway a dozen doors down. I’m pretty certain that he saw me. They all knew me by sight, probably, and I knew that as soon as the murder was discovered he’d remember seeing me come out and report me.

“My first idea was to beat it out of town. But I’m short on money and I knew that you’d get me sooner or later anyway. So I decided to get to you first, make a clean breast of what actually happened and turn myself over to you for attempted burglary before you got me for murder.”

“How long ago did this happen?” I demanded.

Tompkins shuddered.

“Not over ten minutes,” he answered. “You know the Torrence Building’s only six blocks away and I hurried here as fast as my legs would carry me.”

I jabbed the button which brought Moore of the Detective Bureau to my side.

“Get a couple of your best men and come with me!” I told him. “Somebody’s snuffed old Levi Jones’s light out.”

Moore gave a quick glance at Tompkins.

“The old devil’s been flirting with trouble for the past ten or fifteen years!” he remarked dryly, as he turned to obey my order. “Meet you in the hallway, Chief, with Dugan and Miles, in about two minutes.”

Things in Jones’s office were as Tompkins — who was shaking as if with the ague when we entered the room — had described them. In the outer office the lights were still burning as he had said he had left them. They disclosed to view a safe rather larger than the ordinary, the door of which was standing wide open. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents scattered about the floor.

Giving Dugan, who was a finger-print expert of more than ordinary ability, his instructions, the remainder of us entered the smaller office.

Jones was seated in a high-back, broad-armed, leather-upholstered chair, his right side turned toward the door. His body was slumped backward, his head hanging over the back of the chair in an indescribable — almost grotesque — position. His eyes were wide open, staring glassily at us. Never a handsome man, with his long hooked nose and thin, cadaverous face surmounted by its thatch of unkempt hair, in death he was positively repulsive.

From his left breast protruded the handle of a knife. It had evidently been driven from behind over his shoulder and with tremendous force straight to the heart. That death had been instantaneous there was not a doubt. A thin stream of blood had flown from the wound, staining the shirtfront a dull brownish crimson.

I took one of the old man’s claw-like hands in my own. The body was already beginning to grow cold. I deduced — and Moore and Miles agreed with me — that he had been dead at least an hour.

I turned to Tompkins, who had dropped into the nearest chair and was again sniveling to himself.

“Have you ever seen that knife before?” I asked, pointing to the weapon in the dead man’s breast.

Tompkins nodded.

“God! Yes!” he answered. “It was his. Somebody gave it to him once — always kept it on his desk for a paper weight and letter opener.”

I called Dugan from the other room.

“Look that knife-handle over for prints!” I told him.

The little detective busied himself with his magnifying glass for a brief time. Then he turned to me with a shrug of his thin shoulders.

“Th’ fellow that did this job didn’t even go to the trouble of wearin’ rubber gloves, Chief. He did the same with this handle that he did with the safe — wiped everything off with a cloth. Maybe used alcohol. There isn’t even a chicken track on either one of them!”

I turned to Moore.

“Find the caretaker and have him bring up the janitor who takes care of this floor,” I instructed.

Then I commanded Tompkins to make a hurried inventory of the contents of the safe. He skimmed over the various papers inside of the pigeonholes and on the floor, completing his task inside of five minutes.

“There was over five thousand dollars in there when I quit this afternoon,” he announced. “In addition several securities that I have noticed in one of the drawers — valued probably at ten or fifteen thousand — are gone. I know that they were there when I left the office, because the old man had been checking them over, and I saw him put ’em back. It was past banking hours, then, so that the thief must have taken them.”

I looked at Dugan.

“How was the box cracked?” I asked.

The little detective grinned.

“ ’Twasn’t cracked. Chief,” he answered. “The fellow that got inside that box worked the combination. The only fellow that I know who’s clever enough for such a job is Eddie New.”

The sniveling Tompkins let out a lusty squawk.

“I tell you it can’t be!” he wailed. “Nobody knew the combination except old Jones and myself!”

I turned to the telephone on the desk and called up Headquarters.

“Lenny,” I instructed the sergeant who answered, “look up the records and tell me where Eddie New is right now.”

In less than a minute the answer came back over the wire: “Chief, Eddie’s laid up with a broken leg — result of an automobile smashup — in Greely’s hangout. Got hurt the week after he got out of stir.”

I hung up the receiver with a bang.

Obviously the murderer and thief was not Eddie New, the only crook in the city really competent of opening a strictly modern safe such as that before us without damaging the mechanism. Nor was Eddie New the sort of man to commit a murder; he was of the more modern, “Jimmie Valentine” sort — clever with his fingers, clever with his head, planning his work as carefully as a business man plans his deals, guarding every contingency before taking a step.

There was a bare possibility that Jones had opened the safe himself while entertaining some visitor, and that later the visitor had taken his life and made away with the money and securities. But granting that such was the case, why had the murderer gone to the trouble of carefully wiping the finger prints off from the safe? For in such a case the only prints would be those of the dead man himself. Verily the affair was assuming some angles that gave food for thought.

Moore entered with Grady, the head janitor, and a pale, dull-appearing man whom he introduced as Billy Murphy, who, according to Grady, did the cleaning on the fifth floor. Tompkins identified him at once as the man he had seen cleaning the corridor at the time he made his escape from the office after discovering the murder.

Murphy, readily admitting that he had noticed Tompkins leave the office hurriedly about midnight, came forward with a story which complicated matters worse than ever:

He had been working some distance down the hallway between ten and eleven o’clock. At that time, chancing to pass Jones’s office, he had seen a light shining through the ground-glass door. About half an hour later, again passing the door, he had heard the sound of voices — one low and indistinct, the other plainly recognizable as that of the money lender himself.