Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The thing that had done it was lying under him when they got him up off the ground between them — a wicked-looking iron bar wrapped in a stiffened, blood-brown piece of rag. The wound — it was a deadly fracture — was on the side of the head just over the ear. He hadn’t bled much, outside of the first splash on the padded weapon itself. The little there was after that had clung to the skin, running down behind the jawbone and into the collar of his shirt, hence nothing on the ground around the bench where the attack had occurred.

I examined the ground around the latter place. The two little tracks his heels had made as he was dragged backwards toward the hiding-place were there plain as day under my flashlight’s beam, without the need of any powder or hocus-pocus of any kind. My only wonder was how I’d muffed seeing them when I stooped down to pick up his hat. But of course I hadn’t used my torch then.

“Take him on down the rest of the way,” I said. “No use parking with him here — it’s gotta be done sooner or later anyway.”

They loved the job — yeah they did! They must have lost ten pounds apiece in sweat, getting him down those seventeen stories of narrow, spiral staircase. When they were down at the elevator you could hear their heaving all the way up where I was. When I got down myself — I’d waited on the murder bench until the way was clear, no use dogging their footsteps an inch at a time — Suicide Johnny, with the body tucked into his car and the two guards in a state of collapse alongside of it, was wreathed in smiles. His fondest dream had come true. Something had at last happened. “Gee!” he kept murmuring. “Gee! A moider!”

I had Fatty carried over to the barracks, and an apoplectic-looking guy of Spanish War vintage whose collar was too tight for him came out to see what it was all about.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but there’s just been a crime committed on your jurisdiction — man murdered up in the statue.”

“Who are you, sirrr?” he boomed like a twenty-one gun salute. I felt like I was going to be shot at sunrise for daring to find anything the matter around his diggings.

“Denton, New York Homicide,” I told him.

“Are you sure, sirrrr?” the old rooster crowed. He meant about the murder, not who I was. He wasn’t going to believe me until he saw it with his own eyes, so I took him over and showed it to him.

“Now, just where do I stand?” I said, resting my hand on the stiff’s knee.

“This, sirr,” he orated, “is United States Government property. This is a matter for the Federal inves—”

I’d expected that. “Oh, so I get the air!” I interrupted heatedly. “After I been up and down that blank statue eighty-six times today. O.K., you put who you want on it. I’m going right ahead with it on my own. And we’ll see who comes out ahead!” I got as far as the door, then I turned around and fired at him: “I’ll even give your guy a head-start, just so you can’t accuse me of withholding information. This guy is tagged Colman. He lived until today at the Van Raalte Apartments, Tarrytown, with his wife, who is thin, blond, pretty, blue eyes, about twenty-eight, and very ritzy front. But you won’t find her there any more, so you can tell your guy to save his carfare. She didn’t do it anyway. But if you want to get hold of her, and the guy that actually did it, I’ll tell you where to look for them—”

“Where, sirrr?” he boomed like a great big firecracker.

“Today is Wednesday, isn’t it?” I answered detachedly. “Well, send your guy around to Centre Street, say day after tomorrow, that would be Friday. We’ll be holding ’em both for you down there by that time. No trouble at all, Field Marshal.” He sort of blew up internally, so I got out before he did anything about calling a firing squad.

I ducked into the statue again, for what I hoped was the last time, and decided to make Suicide Johnny useful, since he seemed to be enjoying himself so. “How would you like to help?” I said. “Come on up with me.”

When we got all the way up to the head, I took out my pocket notebook and opened it at the page where all the names were, the names I’d collected from the ten (eight really, excluding the two kids with their father) who had made the trip here and back on the ferry. Excluding Colman himself and his wife (who couldn’t have been an actual participant for reasons I’ve already given) that left six. Excluding two other women who’d been in the group, that boiled it down to four. Now the name, of course, was going to be phony — I mean the name the actual murderer had handed me — that was a pushover. But that didn’t matter. All I wanted was to connect the right guy with any name, phony or otherwise, just so I could remember something about what he’d looked like. Any little thing at all.

“You take a pencil,” I told Suicide, “and each time I call out a name, you cross off the corresponding one written down there in that book. That’s all.”

“Gee!” he said. “I’m helping a real detective!”

“My chief,” I answered drily, “sometimes has grave doubts about that. Ready? Let’s go.” I started going over the window-ledges inch by inch. They were crawling with names and initials, but I finally located one that matched one in the notebook. Johnny promptly crossed it out. Then another. Then a triple initial that matched. “Don’t cross yet,” I warned him, “just put a check next to that.”

Well, when we got through, we had nine of the ten names, women, kids and all. Each and every one of them had scribbled their names as mementoes on the stone work. “Now, which one’s left over?” I asked Suicide.

He screwed up his face and read off: “Vincent Scanlon, 55 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, real estate.”

“On circumstantial alone, that’s my guy.”

“Hully mackerel!” said the enraptured Johnny. “Can y’tell just by hearing his name like that?”

“His name ain’t Scanlon, he don’t live on Amboy Street, and he’s not in real estate,” I tried to explain. “But he’s the only one of the bunch that didn’t come up here and scrawl his John Hancock. Me and the fat guy were the last ones coming up the stairs. When I left him on the bench he was still alive. When I got up here myself even his wife was up here ahead of me, and all the others had finished their signatures and were on their way down again. Therefore, this guy who tags himself Scanlon was the murderer. Don’t you understand, he never went all the way to the top. He either came up the stairs behind me and the fat guy, or else if he was ahead of us switched into the opening that leads up into the arm, let everyone else go by, and then crept down again to where the bench was — and did his dirty work the minute the coast was clear.”

I took a notebook from him, held it open before me, and did my damndest to try and separate the party that had given me that name from the other ten. I tried to remember some feature about him, some detail, anything at all, and couldn’t, no matter how I racked my brains. There had been too many of them at one time, all getting off the ferry at once, all stopping in front of me just for a half-minute or so. He should have been nervous, just coming away from doing a thing like that, should have been pale, tense, jumpy, anything you want to call it — should have given himself away in some way, if not right then, then now that I was thinking back over it. But he either hadn’t, or — what was more likely — I was pretty much of a wash-out at my own business. I couldn’t even get him by elimination, the way I had gotten his phony name. One or two of the others started to come clear — the father of the two kids, the two other women besides Alice Colman — but not him. I might just as well have written down that name out of my own head for all I could remember of the man who had given it to me.