Хал Эллсон - Mink Is for a Minx

“Upon what grounds?” Harrison snapped.

“That the lost coat has been accounted for after a mistake and so you are returning the insurance settlement. I can promise you that the company will have no further interest in the matter.”

Harrison stalked to a desk, ripped out a checkbook and, writing quickly, finally thrust a check for the full amount at Chip Stack.

Chip bowed with admiration. “A most generous surprise for your wife, Mr. Harrison. This coat is rather worn and she wanted to give it to Valerie Snowden anyway.”

He left the house humming softly. There was only one remaining chore now, to clear the check girl officially and get Rosa the coat that had been left in the switch.

Chip Stack felt quite chivalrous. Everybody was getting what they wanted, including himself. A very just reward for minx — and finks.

We couldn’t get an id on the corpse for three days. When, through a lucky accident, we finally did learn the man’s name, we refused to believe it. And by the time we figured out the motive for his murder, the dead man himself had to reveal some hidden evidence before we could prove it.

But maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

I’m Randall, Lieutenant of Detectives in Riverside. Riverside is a comparatively small and crimefree community. So when this unknown man was found by a newsboy early one morning, lying in a gutter on Catalpa Street with his skull bashed in, I thought that it was just another hit-and-run killing or, at worst, a simple local bludgeon murder.

That kind of killing we could run down easily enough, because violent death is so rare and essentially unprofessional in Riverside.

I began to realize I was wrong, however, when the unknown man continued to remain unknown for three days, despite my best efforts.

The clothes he was wearing when the boys brought him in offered no clue as to his identity. The pockets were empty, all of them — a suspicious circumstance in itself. All labels, makers’ names, laundry marks, and so on had been carefully removed from his suit, shirt, underwear, and even the inside of his shoes. And although somewhat crumpled and soiled from lying in the gutter of Catalpa Street for some time, the clothes were of decent enough quality to be completely average and unremarkable.

I was far from discouraged by our failure to learn his identity from his clothing or possessions, however. I knew that almost invariably, somebody will call up the police very soon after a body is found to report a missing child, lover, parent, or close acquaintance that will help us to establish the identity of any unknown corpses we may happen to have on hand.

But for this homicide victim, nobody telephoned at all. Nobody reported anyone missing, strayed, stolen, or drunk, even. Our Missing Persons had no record of a worried relative wanting us to find someone who remotely resembled the murdered man.

And nobody on the whole police department staff had ever seen the guy before in Riverside, or knew anybody who might have seen him. He was a stranger, all right — a complete outsider in a small city where almost everybody is known to everybody else.

I asked Doc Sanderson, our part-time and informal medical examiner, to look the corpse over for any body marks that might give us a lead we could work on, but that proved useless, too. All he found were a couple of incision scars from very common operations, likely to be found on the bodies of a thousand different people.

Doc did tell me, deadpan, that in his opinion the man had been killed by a strong blow on the back of the head with some heavy object — a diagnosis that I didn’t need a medical degree to figure out for myself.

“You mean like a club, Doc?” I asked him. “Or the bumper of a hit-run car, maybe?”

“Like a club,” Doc answered me. “This fellow may have been pushed out of a car into the gutter after he was killed, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hit by a car. The body isn’t beat up enough for that. No bruises anywhere on him except that crack on the head.”

Meanwhile, I’d sent the fingerprints of the dead man to Washington, and that proved a dead end, too, if you’ll excuse the pun. No prints on file.

I decided then that the only thing I could do was to display the corpse in our morgue and plant some publicity in the Riverside Herald about him, urging as many of our citizens as possible to come to the morgue and see if the guy was anybody they knew or had ever seen a picture of.

I figured that pure morbid curiosity would induce a goodly number of Riversiders to file past the slab in the morgue where our unknown man lay with his head wound concealed, so as not to shock the sensitive.

I certainly turned out to be a good prophet in that respect. Half the people in town came by the morgue during the next twenty-four hours to take a look at the mysterious stranger who had been found brutally murdered out on Catalpa Street.

And that’s how we eventually found out his name.

Joe Cook, the desk clerk over at the Riverside House, our nicest hotel, came down to the morgue when he was off-duty around five o’clock and filed past the slab with the other citizens to take a look. After that, he came into my office upstairs.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve seen that guy you got downstairs. I just had a look at him, and I’d swear I saw him at Riverside House a few days ago.”

“Staying there, was he?” I asked, feeling that at last I had a lead.

“No,” Joe said. “He wasn’t staying there. This guy just came into the lobby about ten in the morning.”

“From where?”

“How do I know? Maybe he just got off the morning train. It was about that time.”

“Did he come up to you at the desk?”

“Nope. But I wasn’t very busy at the time, and I happened to notice him come in.”

“What did he do?”

“Just came into the lobby,” Joe repeated. “Went over to the telephone booth and looked in the phone book for a minute or two. He didn’t make a call, though. Then he wandered over and sat down at one of our writing desks in the writing alcove and wrote something.”

“What happened then?”

“He left, that’s all!”

“Didn’t he mail what he’d written or buy a stamp from you?”

“Nope. He just folded up what he wrote and stuck it in his pocket.”

I got up. “Come on, Joe,” I said. “Show me which desk he was writing at.”

Joe showed me. It was one of the three writing desks in a little writing alcove off the Riverside House lobby, but perfectly visible from the desk where Joe had been standing. I looked it over. There was a ballpoint pen fastened to the desk with a metal chain to keep guests from stealing it. There was a leather-edged blotter, perfectly clean, covering up most of the desk top. And there were a few sheets of hotel stationery with several hotel envelopes in a slot at the back of the desk.

“Did he use this hotel paper to write on?” I asked Joe.

“Yeah. I saw him reach out and take some and start writing on it with that ballpoint pen there.”

“Okay,” I said. I reached out myself and took the sheets of stationery that were left in the desk slot and brought them out and looked at them crossways against the lobby light. “How many people have written at this desk since the man in the morgue?” I asked Joe.

“Nobody I know of,” Joe said. “At least, not while I’ve been on duty. This is the seldomest-used desk of the three, Lieutenant — way over here in the corner like it is.”

I said, “This top sheet of stationery has some marks on it, Joe. Maybe he pulled out more than one sheet by mistake and wrote on the top one, bearing down so heavy with the pen that his writing showed through and marked the next one. I’ve heard about such things happening. I couldn’t be that lucky, though.”