Richard Deming: Tweak the Devil’s Nose

“Who were the investment brokers he met with?” I asked.

“Jones and Knight Investment Company on Broadway. I sent a man over this morning and he talked to one of the partners. Guy named Harlan Jones. According to him, Lancaster left the brokerage office alone at five P.M.. Offhand this looks to me like a political assassination by some fanatic.”

I said, “Remember a while back when a couple of pot shots were taken at Laurie Davis?”

He nodded. “Before he hired that ex-FBI fellow as a bodyguard.”

“There’s a probability Barney Seldon was behind those attempts.”

Day peered at me over his glasses. “How would you know a thing like that?”

“I don’t,” I told him. “It’s only a guess. But it’s a guess founded on pretty sound reasoning. Did you know Laurie Davis ran Seldon’s rackets out of his county?”

“No. I don’t pay much attention to Illinois crime. I’ve got enough troubles of my own.”

“Well, he did,” I said. “And if you read the papers, you’d know Davis literally hand-picked Walter Lancaster for lieutenant governor. Maybe Barney was striking back at Davis by having his protégé knocked off.”

“A little roundabout for a hood like Seldon,” Day said dubiously. “He’d be more likely to have Davis himself bumped. Besides, he has a perfect alibi.”

“So what? He wouldn’t do his own gun work. He probably has a dozen gunnies he could call on.”

The inspector gave his head a shake of disagreement. “We’ll watch for him to come across the river again and go over him some more, but I can’t see Barney Seldon behind this. If he ordered it, he wouldn’t go out of his way to be on the spot. He’d have a perfect alibi a hundred miles from the murder.”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “that’s exactly what he figured the police would think.”

A slightly inebriated associate professor of philosophy I met in a barroom one night explained to me the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. The former is the method employed by that galaxy of fiction sleuths who make their livings solving crimes without ever getting out of their chairs. When fictional homicide chiefs humbly call on a fictional deductive reasoner to lay before him problems they are unable to solve themselves, he leans back, closes his eyes and thinks. And simply by putting in logical order the information the police already have, he pops up with an answer.

The French philosopher Descartes is an example of pure deductive reasoning, the philosophy professor told me in exchange for buying him a boilermaker, and when I only looked at him blankly, he came down to my level by putting C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes in the same category.

The inductive reasoner is not satisfied with merely known facts, he further instructed me. He attempts to dig up all possible facts related to the problem, and when he has them all, he expects certain conclusions to appear as self-evident without having to link his facts together into a logical chain. This, the professor expounded, is both the method of modern science and the method of modern criminology.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover I was so modern, for I was an inductive rather than deductive reasoner even before I met the philosophy professor. No doubt I could use the deductive method if some humble homicide chief would call to feed me facts, but the only homicide chief I know is Warren Day, and while he sometimes calls at my flat, usually it is because he is thirsty. Consequently I depend more on my car and my feet than I do on cold logic.

My routine is simple in a case like Walter Lancaster’s. I simply interview everybody I can think of who might know something about him.

My first move was to see the murdered man’s family in Carson City, which in spite of being only a few miles distant, took most of the afternoon by the time I had fought bridge traffic both coming and going. I did not anticipate the visit would be very fruitful, since Hannegan had already interviewed the widow, and the stocky lieutenant rarely misses a bet. It was just as fruitful as I anticipated.

The widow was a rather plain woman of middle age, dry-eyed and controlled, but obviously grief stricken. The son, a redheaded youngster named Rodney, impressed me as being more angry than sad. He had driven home from the University of Illinois, where he was a sophomore, the moment he heard the news, and was raring to tear somebody apart for shooting his dad.

From neither of them did I learn anything which seemed to me at the time to possess value. I did get verification of Laurie Davis’s statement about Lancaster having been a director of four corporations aside from Illinois Telegraph before he resigned all directorships to run for lieutenant governor. But neither Mrs. Lancaster nor Rodney had more than the vaguest understanding of his business affairs.

From the widow I also learned Lancaster had seemed rather upset his last few days, and she got the impression his pending meeting with Jones and Knight Company was what bothered him. Since he never discussed business matters at home, she had no idea what the meeting was about, but she volunteered the information that one of the partners was an old friend of Lancaster’s. Her husband and Willard Knight had attended the University of Illinois together, she said, and though in recent years they had only rare contact, on the infrequent occasions her husband mentioned Knight’s name, he always referred to him as though he were a close friend. Actually the two men had not been close at all since college days, she added. As a matter of fact they saw each other so rarely, she had never met Knight herself. She had a vague recollection of her husband mentioning only a week or two back that he had encountered Willard Knight somewhere by accident and the two had lunch together.

Aside from that the trip was a waste of time. Neither could suggest any reason whatever why anyone would want to kill Lancaster. And to make the afternoon a complete fiasco, I had to let the last person in the world to whom I cared to be indebted save me from being run over.

The Lancaster home was right on Carson City’s main street, which is also part of a through highway. I had parked across the road, and I started back across to my car just as a couple of kids in a convertible roared through town at what must have been ninety miles an hour.

I always look before crossing streets, just as I was taught in kindergarten, checking first to the left and then to the right. The highway was clear when I glanced left, but in the half second it took me to glance right and take one step into the road, the convertible lifted out of a dip a hundred yards away and bore down at me with its horn screaming.

My reactions are fast, but a false leg is unpredictable. My nerves activated the proper muscles in plenty of time to get me out of the way, but the leg picked that moment to buckle. Slipping to the knee of my good leg, I tried to scramble to the curb on all fours, realized I wasn’t going to make it, then suddenly was jerked clear by a pair of hands which gripped both biceps and nearly tore my arms loose from my shoulders.

Since I couldn’t stand until my leg was refastened, I didn’t bother to look at my rescuer until I had rolled up my trouser leg, readjusted the straps above and below my knee, rolled down the trouser leg again and dusted myself off. Then I climbed to my feet and looked into the bucktoothed face of Farmer Cole.

“Where’d you come from?” I asked sourly, then added reluctantly, “Thanks.”

“I live in this town,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

“Oh. Well, thanks again.” I tried to make this one more enthusiastic, but it still came out sour. Even after the guy had saved my life, I couldn’t shake the feeling of tense watchfulness his nearness induced in me.