Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

I stopped to examine the inspector’s attentive but glum face. “The part of the puzzle I can’t fit to Ann,” I said, “is the two gunmen. It’s the thing that’s puzzled me most about the case from the beginning. How did she contact them?”

Warren Day merely peered over his glasses at me, waiting.

“How would any of the people in this case contact them, for that matter?” I went on. “They’re all reputable people, at least on the surface. The average person would have no more idea of how to go about meeting a couple of underworld killers than I would have about getting an introduction to Josef Stalin.”

“That’s a minor point we can clear up when we take Garrity and Harry the Horse,” the inspector said. His expression disapproved of me heartily, but his tone was one of begrudging agreement. “I’m afraid your reasoning points in the right direction—” He paused, flushed faintly, and corrected himself. “I mean, I think your reasoning points in the right direction. But we haven’t a nickel’s worth of proof. We can’t very well pull in anyone as influential as Mrs. Lawson and sweat out a confession on the basis of a theory. We’d have a hundred lawyers on our backs in a minute.”

I nodded agreement. “Unless the suicide note Quisby’s working on tells us something, you’ve only got one chance. Take Garrity and Sommerfield alive and beat the name of their employer out of them. Incidentally, you got a file on a parole violator named Janet Whittier?”

“Who’s she? How’s she fit in?”

I told him I didn’t know whether she fitted in at all, but if she did I’d tell him about it after we looked up the record. After giving me a halfhearted argument, he took me back to the record room and we looked up the file.

The picture accompanying the record was that of a seventeen-year-old kid with bleached hair, and Warren Day stared at it without a sign of recognition. I would not have recognized it myself if I had not known whom I was looking for.

Kate Malone had almost told the truth with her last story. She had omitted only one item and changed one other. The part she left out was that she had served eight months of a two-year term in the girls’ corrective home before being paroled. The part she changed was that her offense had not been shoplifting, but acting as lookout for a pair of bank robbers — one of whom was her paramour.

I looked up at Day’s puzzled face.

“I told this kid I wouldn’t turn her in if she told me a straight story,” I said. “But her story was a little bent. Better pick up Kate Malone.”

“The Lawson maid?” Day asked. “Why?”

“Because she’s the link we were talking about. The link with the underworld.” I tossed the picture to him. “Take a closer look at Janet Whittier’s picture.”

In spite of it being more than four hours after the time he was supposed to go off duty, there was no holding the inspector now that he scented a solution. Going into the outer office, he snapped a dozen orders at Desk Sergeant Danny Blake, all of which boiled down to two things-have Kate Malone brought in for questioning, and locate Lieutenant Hannegan, who was also off duty, and have him report in at once.

With the wheels in motion, there was nothing to do but wait.

“We. may as well grab something to eat,” Day suggested. “We got probably a half or three quarters of an hour now, and there’s no telling when we’ll get through questioning this girl.”

But I had dined with Day in restaurants before, and somehow I always ended up with the check.

“You go ahead,” I told him. “I want to run over to El Patio and check on my client. I’ll meet you back here in forty-five minutes.”

We parted in front of police headquarters, Day turning left in the direction of one of the cheapest restaurants in town, and me turning right toward a cab stand on the corner. I went on by the cab stand, however, continued into the next block, and entered a quiet, clean looking restaurant.

The restaurant had a public phone, and I used it to dial El Patio. I got hold of Fausta and satisfied myself that Grace was all right. I told her I probably would be held up all evening and to have Greene sleep across the doorway again.

“I’ll be over in the morning,” I said.

“This makes three days’ rent you owe me,” Fausta said. “When will you come to take me out?”

“Most any night now,” I said noncommittally. “See you in the morning.”

I found an empty booth, ordered dinner, and by the time I had finished a second cup of coffee, my forty-five minutes were nearly up.

As I started to climb the steps at police headquarters, Chief of Police George Chester rushed out, followed by three uniformed cops.

George Chester was a tremendous man. His shoulders were great slabs of beef, he wore size eighteen collars and size fourteen shoes. Conservatively I would have guessed his weight at three hundred, which was probably about eighty pounds more than he had carried when he made all-America left end in college nearly a quarter century before. Even a few years ago, when he was a major in my outfit during the war, most of his weight had been muscle. But in his late forties it was rapidly turning to fat.

Since the war George Chester’s normal color had gradually become an unhealthy red, and in the July heat it approached purple. The last time I had seen him, I had noticed his slightly strained breathing and asked if his heart had been checked lately.

“Don’t believe in doctors,” he had growled.

Now, as he lumbered down the steps, I held up one hand. “Not in this heat, please, Chief. You’ll bust a blood vessel.”

When he failed to slow down, I shifted sidewise to avoid being run over, and it was then I noticed that of the three cops with him, two carried riot guns and the third carried a carbine.

“Can’t stop, Manny!” Chief Chester yelled as he ran across the sidewalk like a charging rhinoceros. When he had squeezed his three hundred pounds into the back seat of a squad car labeled Chief of Police, he called back through the window, “Look me up later.”

The other three cops threw themselves into the car, the motor roared, and it shot away from the curb with its siren beginning to wail.

I shrugged and started up the steps again just in time to be knocked down by another cop with a riot gun, who slammed through the door just as I reached it. Half sprawling and half kneeling, I scrambled out of the way as about a half-dozen uniforms rushed by. None of their wearers bothered to stop and inquire if the fall had broken any bones.

As I climbed to my feet and brushed myself off, six or seven sirens began to scream. From the police-garage entrance a hundred yards away, squad car after squad car rolled, each adding its wail to the others as it reached the street.

This time I approached the door cautiously, stepped aside as I pulled it open, and peered inside before entering. No one was in sight except Desk Sergeant Danny Blake and Lieutenant Hannegan, who was leaning over Blake and shaking his finger under the sergeant’s nose.

“What happened?” I asked. “Somebody steal the jail?”

Neither paid any attention to me. “You find him, and fast!” Hannegan yelled, at which Sergeant Blake, who was old enough to be Hannegan’s father, yelled back, “Yes, sir, Lieutenant! Where the hell am I supposed to look?”

Hannegan swung to me. “Seen Day?” he snapped.

“Not in the last half hour. He’s up the street eating.”

At that moment the front door jerked open and Warren Day shot in like a scared rabbit.

“Hannegan!” he yelled. “Quit dawdling! Grab a walkie-talkie and let’s go!”

Hannegan disappeared down a corridor at a dead run.