ALM06 Who Killed the Husband? (30 page)
"That will be just too bad," he said, starting down the stairs. But he had a sort of smiling look and I had a hunch to tell him about you and how we were going to be married as soon as I made good. All this while we were trotting downstairs side by side.
"Well!" he said when we got out in the street, "this is a desperate case!" He looked me over and said:
"You appear to be a good young egg though I'm probably mistaken. I don't know whether I'll give you an interview or not, but you may ride uptown with me."
So we got in a taxi. He told the man to drive up Fifth Avenue. I started asking him what I thought were intelligent questions, but he paid no attention. Instead he produced a snuffbox and springing the lid, offered me a pinch. That shut me up. Seems it's a trick of his to offer snuff to strangers just to see them look surprised. Nobody ever takes any. Then he started to talk without any prompting from me.
"It may take half an hour to get to Fifty-sixth Street this way but I wouldn't miss it. I have a passion for this city and this street. I recommend such an impersonal passion, young man, but of course at your age you can't see anything in it. One expects no return consequently there's no heart-break involved neither any possibility of satiety. It will last out one's life. Observe Altman's window-dressing. There is a creative spirit behind it. The most vital art of our day is to be found in window-dressing, but nobody takes it seriously because it's only to sell goods."
And so on all the way up the Avenue; a little lecture on the old library and the gigantic office building towering above it; the landmarks that have disappeared; Maillard's, Sherry's, Delmonico's and those that have survived; the St. Regis and the Gotham. He got off a little prose poem about the R.C.A. tower; "a gigantic sarcophagus raised to the sky." St. Patrick's cathedral he said, was built five hundred years too late. Not a word about my interview until we drew up before the door of his apartment house on the East River. There, while sitting in the cab, he said with his eyes twinkling behind his glasses--you can't be sure whether he's pulling your leg or not:
"I have to protect myself because I am by nature indiscreet. I love to talk off the reservation and I have learned that it does not pay; there are too many ill-natured people in the world. But you look like a generous fellow, not yet corrupted by the town; if I give you your interview will you show me what you write before turning it in and promise not to add anything afterwards."
Of course I agreed to that.
"If you're so keen about the city," I said, "why must it corrupt me?"
"I'm crazy about it," he said, "but I am not kidded by it; it's a bad place for the young because of the furious, bitter struggle to get on in the world. The only thing that saved me was that I inherited a modest fortune."
I said: "I have no fortune, but if you would be my friend perhaps that will save me."
He was tickled. He clapped me on the shoulder saying:
"By God! I never received a prettier compliment! And from one of my own sex, too! Come on in and have a drink!"
I have described his apartment in my newspaper interview so I need not enlarge on it here. He has a cadaverous man-servant called Jermyn who idolizes him. When Mr. Mappin likes anybody he is always poking fun at him, that's how you know when you're making good with him. We sat in front of the fire with the best Scotch and soda I ever tasted and he said:
"Well, start the interview." Whereupon every idea flew out of my head. My first question was banal enough.
"Why have you never married, Mr. Mappin?" His eyes twinkled but he never cracked a smile.
"This is off the record, my boy. My inches are too few and my pounds too many. I recognized in the beginning that I would never make a figure of romance and I put it behind me. Men of my figure are usually attracted to Amazons of six feet or over and they do not respond to our devotion. I have my compensations, though. Men who are forever chasing after some woman or other can have no idea what interesting creatures they are when examined dispassionately."
My next approach was not much more sensible and he was frank to tell me so. I asked him to describe his methods of work and he said:
"How can I do that when each case presents a new set of problems? However, I will lend you a couple of my books and if you read the cases in which I have myself participated, you can see exactly how I proceeded. There is no magic in it. I will give you one piece of information that must be carefully guarded from the public."
"What's that?" I asked eagerly. He said with his grave face and shining glasses:
"I follow my hunches!" I suppose I showed in my face that I felt sold, because he laughed in his silent way, and poured me another drink.
When I asked him about his museum of crime that everybody talks about, he said:
"There's nothing to it. I have of course a file of notes, clippings, photographs and all printed or written matter pertaining to crime. Every one who does research must keep such a file. But material objects have no interest for me after I have finished with them. I am, to misquote Hokusai, the old man mad about psychology. What I am always after is, what makes people behave the way they do? However, I have a few objects that have been saved for one reason or another and I'll show you those."
He opened a cabinet in his living room.
"This odd little wooden barrel contains what is left of the cyanide that killed His Highness the Sultan of Shihkar when he was on his way to pay his respects to the President in Washington. You had better not unscrew the top. It was tossed out of a window of the Sultan's private car and picked up beside the Pennsylvania tracks next day. That was one of the strangest cases I ever confronted. It proved to me that after all the Eastern mind works in much the same fashion as the Western. I have kept the odd little barrel because I have never been able to establish how it came into the hands of the murderer. Every case leaves one or two such loose threads to tantalize the investigator.
"This," he went on, picking up a dainty little arrangement of human hair, "is the false mustache worn by the murderer of Gavin Dordress, the celebrated playwright, who was shot in his penthouse apartment a few years ago. The murderer, you may remember, reversing the usual process, shaved off his mustache to commit the crime and wore a false one afterwards to avoid detection. There is no reason for saving this. My man Jermyn happened to pick it up here in my living-room and stuck it in the cabinet."
The next object Mr. Mappin selected was a smooth gold knob.
"This once formed the head of a heavy ebony walking-stick. With this stick the famous Rene Doria was killed in his love nest in the Lancaster apartments--not killed exactly; he was struck down with the stick and shot through the head. A young man of extraordinary good looks, he masqueraded as an Italian count and cut a wide swath in the nightclubs. He was about to marry one of our greatest heiresses when he was killed. In reality he was the son of a barber in Kansas City or some such place. I saved the knob because I have reason to suspect that it was the instrument of several other murders, and I am hoping that some day I may be able to fit the jig-saw puzzle together."
I asked Mr. Mappin if he had preserved any relics of the Walter Ashley murder which created so much excitement at the time.
"Only the sheaf of letters," he said, "that the murderer wrote to me before and after the crime, challenging me to bring it to light. They have a quite unusual psychological value. That murder would never have been discovered had it not been for the scoundrel's vanity. He had to tell somebody how clever he was."
"Didn't he send you his victim's ear?" I asked.
"He did," said Mr. Mappin, "but I have not preserved that little relic."
Mr. Mappin fetched the letters from his file and allowed me to read them. I had read them before in the newspapers, but it gave me a thrill actually to have the originals in my hands.
You can piece out the rest of our talk from the newspaper interview. I rushed away to my room and wrote the interview. Mr. Mappin revised it and passed it the same night and I was able to turn it in before the paper went to press. Did I enjoy my entrance at the office--and how! The boss at first refused to believe that the stuff was authentic. He called up Mappin to verify it. Then he gave me the raise. I believe we could get along on fifty a week though it would be close going in New York. But the point is that through the kindness of this old gent I have established myself at the office and things seem to be breaking right.
How about setting a date?
. . . . . . . . . .
Yours ever,
Frank
THE END
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