Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

A half-dozen quick steps took me to the table. Sinking my fingers in her blonde hair, I jerked back her head, leaned over and planted a solid kiss on her lips.

“That’s for nothing,” I growled at her. “Scare me like this again and I’ll beat hell out of you.”

She looked up at me from round eyes, for once startled into quietness. Then she touched her lips where mine had bruised them and a wicked expression grew on her face.

“You kissed me,” she said. “In front of witnesses. Mouldy, did you see?”

“Yeah, I saw. Where you been, Sarge?”

“Later,” I said. Rounding the table, I sat across from Fausta. “Let’s have the story, Fausta. All of it, including who the dead man is.”

Warren Day pulled out a chair and wearily sat down also. His face was so drawn with fatigue, he looked as though he just made it before he collapsed to the floor.

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s have it. All I’ve been able to figure out so far is the dead guy is one of the waiters.”

Fausta’s story was brief and not very enlightening. In response to my supposed request, she had arrived at the Sheridan just before ten, dismissed her cab and asked the head waiter for me. The head waiter informed her Mr. Moon had phoned he would be a few minutes late and left instructions for her to take a table for both of them.

At ten in the morning a table was no problem, for the cocktail lounge was built to accommodate two hundred, there were less than thirty customers in the place, and half of these were at the bar. Fausta chose the corner table where we were sitting now.

A few minutes later she was quietly smoking a cigarette while she waited, when a waiter set in front of her what seemed to be a rum and Coke, then moved off to another table before she could speak. She looked at it in surprise, then simply let it stand there until she was able to attract the waiter’s attention.

When she finally managed to signal him over, she said, “You have made a mistake. I ordered no drink.”

“It’s on the gentleman at the bar,” he said. “Mr. Moon.” He turned to point out Mr. Moon, failed to find him and said, “He must have stepped to the men’s room.”

Still more puzzled than annoyed, Fausta sniffed the drink, detected the odor of rum and instructed the waiter to take it away and bring her a plain Coke. While she was not in the least suspicious, and assumed I had actually sent over the drink, then disappeared into the washroom and would be along in a minute, the murderer’s simple plot was foiled by his lack of knowledge of Fausta.

Fausta never touched anything alcoholic before one in the afternoon.

The waiter removed the rum and Coke, but apparently decided not to toss it down the drain. Since it had been paid for, he took it into the liquor storeroom and tossed it down himself.

Fausta of course did not know this at the time. Her story ended with the waiter taking away the drink. When customers at the bar set up an excited clamoring a few minutes later, she had no idea what caused the clamor. She did learn from the general conversation someone had been found dead in the storeroom, apparently of a heart attack, but did not connect it with her rejected drink, or for that matter did not even know the dead man was her waiter until after the police arrived.

“We got here fast,” Day said to me wearily. “We were already on our way because of what you said when you tore out of my office. The guy hadn’t been dead five minutes, and the management hadn’t even gotten around to calling us when we took the joint by storm. We weren’t in time to prevent half the customers from taking a powder the minute they smelled murder though. The poisoner with them, most likely.”

“It was poison, was it?” I asked.

“The medic hazards a guess at potassium cyanide, though he can’t say for sure until after an autopsy. He thinks he got a faint whiff of bitter almonds, though rum and Coke is a pretty good cover for the smell. The taste too, for that matter. The symptoms are hard to tell from an ordinary heart attack: instant death, cyanosis. If we hadn’t rolled in looking for murder, it probably would have passed as a heart attack.” He scratched his long nose and burst out irritably, “The stuff is too easy to buy. Farmers use tons of it to kill pests. Sign your name and you can get enough in any drugstore to kill a regiment.

Sign a fake name, and unless the druggist recalls your description, you’re a successful murderer. Half my men will be tied up the next week checking drugstores.”

Fausta’s narrow escape had not increased my present regard for the inspector. I said without sympathy, “For a week they’ll be earning their salaries anyway.”

Day glared at me.

“What’s the bartender say?” I asked. “Maybe he remembers who ordered Fausta’s rum Coke.”

It developed Day had not yet questioned the bartender. Or anyone else either. He had been in the place only about twenty minutes before I arrived, and only a minute or two before I walked in had gotten the medical examiner’s opinion that it might be a cyanide death.

He called Hannegan over from the other side of the room and told him to bring over the bartender.

The barkeep was a sad-faced man in his late fifties who had looked across the bar at so much human idiocy during his lifetime, nothing could upset him very much, including murder. He had no idea who had ordered the rum and Coke. Vaguely he recalled mixing one a short time before the waiter’s death, but being alone behind the bar, and with over a dozen customers plus two waiters to take care of, he could not remember to whom he gave it.

“I never look at their faces anyway unless they make conversation,” he said sadly. “I think it was one of the customers instead of a waiter, but I’m not even sure of that.”

The dead waiter’s name was Harold Rosenthal, he was forty-four years old and a bachelor, the bartender informed us. As far as he knew, the man had no living relatives.

The surviving waiter knew even less. In fact he knew nothing at all.

Nor did any of the approximately one dozen remaining customers who had not been smart enough to scoot off before the police arrived. No one at all recalled even seeing the bartender mix a rum and Coke, let alone remembering who had received it.

The head waiter was a little help. The phone call from “Mr. Moon” had come to the bar phone, and he had taken it. The voice had not impressed him as particularly distinctive, either high or low, soft or harsh, but he felt he could identify it if he heard it again. Why he felt he could, he did not say, and the inspector did not press him. My own opinion was it gave him a feeling of importance to be a witness, and he could no more identify the voice if he heard it again than he could do a hula on a tightrope.

I suggested to Day that since the murderer had appeared on the scene almost immediately after the phone call, he had probably called from one of the pay phones in the lobby of the hotel. He agreed with me, but this put us no closer to a solution.

On the basis of what confused information was available, we came to the conclusion the killer had probably watched the lounge from the lobby entrance, and as soon as he saw Fausta seat herself, had approached the bar and ordered the rum Coke as though intending to drink it himself. Then he must have slipped in the cyanide, handed the glass to the waiter and told him it was for Fausta with the compliments of Mr. Moon. By the time the drink was delivered, he could have disappeared again through the lobby entrance.

“The invisible man!” the inspector grated disgustedly. “Commits a murder in front of thirty people and nobody even sees him!”

“We know one thing about him anyway,” I offered.