Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“I think she looks good,” Mouldy contributed in an admiring tone.

I glanced at my watch, saw it was twenty of nine, and gave up the argument.

“You get stuck with the dishes, chum,” I told Mouldy.

Since El Patio did not open till noon, the bar was deserted. I used the bar phone to call the nearest cab stand, which was five blocks away, and ten minutes later we were on our way to police headquarters. It was exactly nine when I told Danny Blake, the desk sergeant, to inform Warren Day I was there.

Flashing his gold front tooth in a smile, Danny buzzed the inspector’s office without taking his eyes from Fausta’s bare stomach.

“You stay here,” I instructed the two girls. “The sergeant hasn’t completed his inspection yet.”

A uniformed stenographer with an open notebook on his knee sat in one corner of Warren Day’s office. The inspector had his heavy, old-fashioned gold watch in his hand when I entered.

“I said nine!” he snapped at me.

My wrist watch said nine-o-two. The electric wall clock behind him said one minute after. Leaning over his desk to get a view of the watch, I saw it pointed to nine-fifteen.

Without saying anything, I pointed to the wall clock. Day swiveled in his chair, stared over his glasses at the clock, then clicked shut the lid of his watch and dropped it in his pocket.

“All right, Moon,” he said sourly. “Give your story over again for the record.”

Slowly, so as not to get ahead of the stenographer’s racing pencil, I went over the events leading to my discovery of Vance Logan’s body. I started with my conversation with Ann Lawson, at which I first learned of the chauffeur’s existence, explained that the possibility of Donald Lawson Senior’s death having been murder instead of an accident had occurred to me, and this was the reason I had wanted to interview Logan.

When I finished, the inspector nodded without asking further questions, and the stenographer left the room. This I considered a tribute to the thoroughness of my report, for I have seen Day fire questions at a witness for a half hour after the poor guy thought he had unloaded everything he knew.

I broke the ensuing silence by asking, “Don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting my gun back for a while, is there?”

The inspector shook his head. “Not till it’s been presented as evidence at a trial.”

“That means about a year after the guys are caught,” I said glumly. “Get a report on that doped Coke yet?”

“Yeah. Chloral hydrate. Exactly 1.5 grams to the bottle, which the lab says is a pretty heavy dose, but safely under a fatal one.”

I said, “How about your check on the finances of our suspects?”

“Judas Priest!” he said. “I just put a guy on it this morning.”

“Think you’ll have it by tomorrow?”

“I’d better,” he said grimly, “or a certain young college cop is going to get bounced right back in the commissioner’s lap for assignment to another department.”

“While you’re at it,” I suggested, “why don’t you add Vance Logan to the list?”

“What for?”

“Didn’t it strike you a little strange that an ex-chauffeur lived at the Grand Towers?”

Day stared at me thoughtfully as he scratched the fuzz over one ear. “I guess that is a pretty fancy place.”

“Three hundred a month for an apartment like Logan’s. I looked at one once.”

Fishing a blank scrap of paper from the litter on his desk, the inspector made a penciled note.

I asked, “How about that note of introduction you were going to give me?”

Pawing through the litter again, he found a piece of memo paper and tossed it to me. It was addressed both to Dr. Thomas Halleran of City Hospital and Professor Laurence Quisby of the State Teachers’ College. It stated that I was investigating the death of Donald Lawson Jr. in a semiofficial capacity, and asked that I be given co-operation.

“The first is the guy who performed the autopsy,” Day said. “He’s a second-year intern at City Hospital.”

“I know him,” I said.

“The second is the guy we use as our handwriting expert. Teaches educational psychology, whatever that is. Handwriting is his hobby.”

“Any chance of taking along Don’s suicide note?” I asked.

The inspector frowned at me. “And get it lost?”

“I won’t lose it. But there isn’t much point in talking to Professor Quisby unless I have the note for him to examine again.”

“Humph,” he said. Leaning over, he jerked open a desk drawer and removed a cardboard file folder. He opened it, removed a sheet of paper, and tossed it to me. “Lose that and I’ll slap a warrant on you for destroying evidence.”

I grinned at him and folded the note into my breast pocket. Another twenty minutes passed before the police stenographer returned with my statement typed up in triplicate. By the time I had read it over and signed it, it was after ten o’clock.

The city morgue is in the basement of the City Hospital, and that is where I found young Dr. Halleran. I left Fausta and Grace in the anteroom, which had posted about its walls a series of particularly revolting pictures of bodies in various stages of decomposition, and followed a lank, dour-faced morgue attendant back to the laboratory.

Dr. Tom Halleran was a thin, youngish man with slightly stooped shoulders, an eager expression, and ears that flared outward like twin air scoops. His stoop came from a habit of thrusting his head forward inquisitively, and this, combined with his eager expression and cocked ears, created the unnerving impression that he was constantly waiting with bated breath for you to say something.

I had had dealings with him before, and though we were not particularly good friends, we were on a first-name basis. It was not the young doctor’s fault we weren’t better friends, for he practically folded me to his bosom whenever we met. But invariably our conversation turned to the morbid subject of overripe cadavers, which seemed to fascinate him, and about fifteen minutes at a stretch was all I could take.

“Manny Moon!” he said heartily, looking up from a microscope under which he undoubtedly had something gruesome, and advancing across the small room with outstretched hand.

I shook the hand without enthusiasm and showed him the note from Warren Day.

“Donald Lawson,” he said. “I ought to remember him. Homicide dragged me down here at one a.m. to perform the autopsy. A real stinker he was. Been in the sun nearly a week, and all mashed up on top of it. Seven feet of entrails I had laid out on the drainboard before I was through.”

“Makes me hungry. to think about it,” I said. “But what I wanted was your findings. In nontechnical terms, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I can tell you from memory, without even going to the card index. Have a cigar?”

He opened a cabinet drawer and produced one of those black and crooked things imported from Italy that look like gnarled twigs.

“No, thanks.” I declined politely. “Little strong for me.”

“Nothing like them for this business,” he said, lighting up and inhaling with relish. “I’ve tried incense and bathroom antiseptic, but no luck. These are the only way I know to drown out the stink of a rotting cadaver. Anesthetizes the taste buds, I think, so you can’t smell so well. Even helps when we have a floater, though it’s still pretty bad with them. Know what a floater is, don’t you?”

“No,” I said unwisely.

“One we get from the river. They don’t float till they’ve been in a few days, you know. First they sink, but when decomposition starts, up they come. Know why?”

I had to admit I didn’t.