Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

Riding down to the precinct-house on the bus, I said to myself: “I’m going to see she eases up a little on her schoolwork, she’s been working too hard at it. That damn trigger-whatever-it-is would make anyone nervous.”

The desk-sergeant put Holmes through to me at about ten that night. He said. “Cap, we’ve just turned up a homicide out here at Starrett Avenue. Number twenty-five. Guy shot dead in a bungalow. Want to come out and take a look?” The last was just rhetoric, of course.

“Yep,” I said briefly, and hung up.

I got in touch with Prints, Pix, and the examiner, told them where to go, and then I picked up Jordan and we rode out...

It was a cheap little house, the kind that are put up a whole dozen at a time. Each one about ten or twelve yards away from the next. It was the only one in the whole row that was lit up, except one way down at the corner. The whole community must have been out to the movies in a body.

We braked, got out, and went up on the porch. The light over it was lit, and Holmes had the door swung back out of the way, with just a screen-door veiling the lighted room. We went right into the room itself from the porch. The man was there, lying on his face, with an arm thrown up around his head, as though he had tried to ward off the shot.

My instinctive impression of the man, even before I’d even seen the face, was that he had been a no-good.

Holmes and the patrolman from the beat were both there with us. The cop was just waiting to be told what next to do, and Holmes was taking stabs at looking around — which I guessed he had only started after he heard us drive up. There’s really nothing to be done until after the experts have had their innings, but the average second-grader hasn’t the moral courage to sit there with his hands folded when his captain walks in on him. I was a second-grader once myself. And before that, a harness-cop.

“Who is he?” I asked.

The cop said, “Their name is Trinker. His wife is over at her sister’s in Mapledale, who’s been down with the flu or something.”

He had the details all right.

I said, “How do you know?”

“It’s my beat, sir,” he said. “She stopped on the sidewalk and told me about it when she was leaving Wednesday. I saw the door open and the room lit up, like it is now, when I first came on duty. Kind of cold for the door to be open these nights. But I went on past the first time, thinking he might have gone out for something and didn’t have a key. It was still that way the second time I made my rounds, so I went up the walk and called out to him, and then I stuck my head through the door, and there he was. I happened to run into Holmes down at the call-box—”

“You been relieved on your beat?”

“Yes sir, of course.”

“You come on at six, don’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“About what time was it when you walked past here the first time?”

“Ten-after at the most, sir.”

“That places it for us then,” I told Holmes and Jordan. “It wasn’t dark enough for lights much before six. And they were turned on, of course, before it happened, while he was still alive. Between six and six-ten.”

This needed confirmation, of course. Nothing’s ever certain. The lights could have been lit long after he was killed, by a sneak-thief stealing in, or the murderer himself, but it was a very slim possibility. The examiner confirmed it as soon as he got there. “About four hours.” he said, which carried it back to six — and then the office where this Trinker worked reconfirmed it, if you want to call it that. I had Jordan call the office-manager at his home; Trinker had left there about ten to five. He couldn’t have gotten out here in much under thirty minutes, even by bus.

He hadn’t been killed right away after he got in. There were four cigarette butts discarded around the living-room — another twenty minutes even if he’d smoked one after another. The soap upstairs in the bathroom was still moist and the ironed folding-lines in a Turkish towel had been erased by recent use. He’d evidently taken a bath and changed after he came home. So the time was figured about right.

I sent Holmes out to Mapledale to bring back Trinker’s wife. “You don’t know what about, until I talk to her,” I warned him through the screen door. I like fresh material to work on.

I asked the cop whether there’d been lights in any of the other houses when he went by the first time, or just this one.

“Most of them were lit up. I guess they were all home having their suppers,” he said. “The next one beyond is vacant, though.”

I said, “Well then I wonder how it is nobody seems to have heard the shot?”

He said, “Well they were getting coal in down one of these long chutes further down the street, and you know what a racket that makes tumbling down.”

“What company?” I asked him. “If the murderer left by the front door while they were delivering it there’s a chance that truckdriver and his helper got a look at him.”

“I didn’t notice, Captain Endicott,” he said.

“You want to watch those things,” I rebuked mildly. “You want to be a detective some day, don’t you?” But it was easy enough to find out, there were only three companies in town.

“That’s you,” I said to Jordan. “Find out which of them delivered a load to this street late today. Get hold of the men that made the delivery, and if they noticed anybody at all come out of here, or even go by on the street, bring them down.”

The cameramen took all the pictures worth taking, and then went down to Headquarters to develop. The body was taken out, and I asked for as quick a report on the bullet as Ballistics could give me. Then I was left alone in the house, with the cop cooling his heels by the door while I worked.

The front room, where he had been dropped, was entirely undisturbed. The struggle had taken place in the kitchen behind it. The rear door of that was locked on the inside, so the murderer had left by the front and those coalheavers might just come in very handy. It had been no slight struggle either, by the looks of it. The chairs and the table were over on their sides, and dishes and things were smashed wholesale all over the floor. Scattered remnants of food showed he’d been sitting down to a meal by himself when his caller arrive. There were also two highball glasses, one drained, one almost untouched. They hadn’t been destroyed because both had been set down out of the way on a low shelf.

The signs of struggle in one room, the lack of them in the other, told me it had been a woman right away, even a rookie could have figured that out.

Instead of trying to run away from the assailant, he had gone after her, from one room into the next. The bullet hole had been in the front, not the back of his head.

There’d been a complete absence of any bruises or welts on his face. If it had been a man there would have been at least a mark or two showing on him.

Confirmation quickly followed. Even my unaided eye could make out a smudge of red on the rim of the undrained glass.

I went upstairs and looked the rooms over more thoroughly than we had the first time. There was plenty of stuff such as letters, memoranda, and belongings, to fill in his background.

He and his wife had been married four years the previous June. Her picture gave me the impression of an honest, straightforward woman who wouldn’t try to hide anything. It was smiling a little sadly, like she was making the best of a bad bargain. A bank book showed that they hadn’t put away much money. I jotted a reminder down in my notebook to find out what salary he’d been paid.

I went downstairs again. The cop had been sitting down resting his legs but straightened up again when he heard me coming. I was sure of that because I used to do the same thing myself when I was a beat-pounder.