Mourn the Hangman (7 page)

AT THE police station, Lt. Ross Connell said no to everybody and everything. As if by some kind of magic, a crowd formed in the dusty room when Connell came in with Steve Blake, wife slayer. To them all, Connell gave the same curt negative answer. No reporters. No lawyers. No questions. And no pictures.

But of course, they got pictures. Somebody spoke Blake’s name, softly and urgently. It was an old trick, but Blake fell for it. He turned, his haggard eyes hopeful. Lights flashed, shutters clicked and Connell said, “Damn it all to hell, I said no pictures!”

The photographers must have gotten a dozen more shots. WIFE SLAYER BOOKED…. BELT, SHOESTRINGS, KNIFE TAKEN FROM CAPTURED KILLER…. WILL WIFE MURDERER EVER RECLAIM VALUABLES SHOWN BEING CHECKED BY POLICE SERGEANT? … ALLEGED KILLER, CAGED, ON WAY TO CHAIR.

The temporary cell in city jail must have once been a narrow corridor leading nowhere. It was a few feet removed from the tank where the common drunks, vagrants and petty thieves were lodged. There was only room to stand between the cot and the obscenely scrawled walls. Behind the cot was a commode without wooden seat. Before the cot was a straight chair with a wicker bottom.

Blake sat dispiritedly on the cot. His arms and legs were numb with the lassitude that had attacked him when the chase ended so abruptly in the room at the Regal Hotel.

They had him where they wanted him now and there didn’t seem to be a hell of a lot of use to fight any more.

He could hear them arguing and talking in the tank. At least, he thought, they had not put him in there where someone would have tried to talk to him. Murderers always get more attention than first offenders in some petty crime. He shook his head grimly. A kid on a first rap is tossed in a pen with perverts, goons and two-time losers. But a murderer is protected. He doesn’t have to associate with such scum. With an angry shake of his head, Blake dismissed that vagary. Undoubtedly some man had been worrying about that since the first jail became overcrowded for the first time.

Finally, he sank back on the cot and stared at the ceiling. Such ugly ceilings, he thought. He’d been meeting the poorest type ceilings lately.

He let his thoughts move painstakingly back over everything he had seen, discovered and been told since yesterday afternoon at five o’clock. But no matter how he figured it, the thing looked like a murder frame. Arrenhower had gotten to Bricker. Bricker would sell his mother for greenbacks and Bricker had sold out to Arrenhower. Arrenhower had planned a perfect murder frame. Hell, Bricker might even have told Arrenhower of the violent and drunken quarrel between Stella and Steve the Saturday before!

If that were true, Blake thought, he might as well relax. He was going to grow mighty old just staring at ceilings even filthier than this one.

He pressed his fingertips against his eyelids until comets and rockets burst red behind his eyeballs. It was all so hopeless that he might as well sleep. Except for one thing. Stella’s murderer walked free.

Steve sat up again. Whoever had framed him had overlooked one plain truth. When they killed Stella, they had committed the last act that would hurt Blake on earth. He no longer cared what they did to him now. But he did care what happened to Stella’s slayer!

He had respect for Ross Connell. Connell might find the man who had killed Stella, except for one thing. Every resource had been used to capture Steve Blake. As far as the police were concerned, they had all the evidence, circumstantial and actual, they needed to convict him.

Connell might have found a slayer, except that he was looking for Steve Blake.

Steve stood up and began to pad back and forth beside his cot in his stringless shoes. His shirttail was out and his trousers had slipped down on his hips.

A turnkey opened his cell door.

“All right, Blake,” he said. “Come on.”

“Formal?” Blake inquired. “Or can I come like this?”

The jailer just looked at him, stepped aside as Blake moved past him to the corridor. The jailer pointed with his nightstick. “Right that way, guy.”

Steve shuffled down the damp flooring. At a paint-scabbed door with a lettered plaque screwed on its facing, the turnkey said, “Okay, this is it.”

Steve read the plaque:
CONNELL.

The turnkey knocked on the door with his nightstick.

“Come in,” Connell said.

The cop opened the door and nudged Steve ahead of him into the room. Half a dozen men, besides Connell behind his desk, sat in straight chairs on the far side of the room. Two of them Blake recognized as reporters.

There was a chair in the center of the room, directly in front of Connell’s desk.

“Sit down,” Connell said. “We’ve some preliminary questions. You might as well answer them. This is the easy way.”

Blake sat down. Some of the men stirred and coughed.

“What time did you arrive home yesterday, Blake?”

“A little after five o’clock.”

“Tell us what happened,” Connell said.

“When I came in, Stella was on the divan. She was dead. The room had been wrecked — ”

One of the men sat forward on his chair. “She was dead when you got home?”

Steve looked at him. “That’s right.”

The man faced Connell. “The rest of this is useless, Connell. There’s nothing more we can do until the inquest. He’s got his lies fixed — unless you want to try to break them down.”

Connell sat forward and leaned across his desk.

“There are certain facts that are indisputable, Blake,” he said quietly. “And they seem to attest to the fact that your wife was not dead when you arrived home.”

“She was dead,” Steve said.

“Why did you run away then?”

“I didn’t run away. I went out looking for the man who had killed her.”

“Jesus Christ!” the man who had spoken before said. He was stout, with a short bright nose and thin lips.

Connell laughed a little drily. “You just dropped the packages you were carrying inside the door, turned around and ran out of there looking for a killer? Did you see him running? And you followed?”

“No. I couldn’t stand it in that room. I had to think. I had to get away.”

“You had to get away. If your wife were dead when you arrived at home, Blake, why didn’t you call the police? That’s the first thing you should have done. As it is, let’s see what you did. As we see it, of course. You came in. You and your wife continued an argument that evidently had started last week. She started packing her bag — ”

“Her bag was packed. She was unpacking! She was just arriving home.”

“Oh? She’d been away? Your neighbor, Miss Grueter, says no. But we’ll let that go. She was packing. You argued in the bedroom. You fought. You picked up the small lamp from the right side of her vanity dresser. You hit her. She stumbled out into the front room. You kept hitting her as she fought you about the room, wrecking it. You kept hitting her until she was dead.”

Steve looked at him despairingly. “How can I answer that? I weigh a hundred and ninety pounds. I’ve knocked out six foot men with a swinging right. Stella weighed a hundred and ten pounds. How many times would I have had to hit her with the heavy base of that lamp to — to kill her?”

Some of the men leaned their heads together, whispering. “You’re big enough so that she might have eluded you. That would explain the wrecked room,” Connell said. “That would explain the number of times she was hit.”

“Why don’t you explain it another way?” Steve demanded. “Why not somebody who took the time to wrap a towel around that lamp? Why not a man who would have had to fight Stella while he was swinging that lamp?” His voice dropped. “Why don’t you look for the man who killed her?”

Connell smiled thinly. “I’ve looked, Blake. And I’ve kept finding you. Listen, Blake, there is a lot ahead of you today, tonight and tomorrow before you get to that inquest. We won’t let up on you. This is just to give you a chance to save yourself a hell of a lot of grief. You’ve been employed in the Arrenhower plant. That’s twenty-five miles from here, across the bay, in Tampa. And yet, for the past four weeks you’ve been coming into town from Jacksonville on the train, a distance of over two hundred miles. I have the word of the employees of the railroad for that.

“Three times you rode with the same cab driver. You were in a hurry to get home. Yesterday, you were in no hurry — ”

“I was hired as a private detective to work in Tampa. I drove up to Jax every week to be sure I wasn’t followed over here. Three times, I was in a hurry to get home — ”

“But yesterday, you were in no hurry?”

“I didn’t think Stella was home. I thought she was away.”

“And yet you bought her candy and flowers? Were you attempting to patch up a quarrel, Blake? Weren’t you trying to keep your wife from leaving you? Weren’t you trying so hard to keep her from leaving you that you killed her?”

Blake cursed. “That’s a certain way to keep her, Lieutenant.”

Connell smiled at him. “The psychiatrists will look at you tomorrow, Blake. Your reasoning and emotions will be chewed over then.”

“If I wanted her to stay why would I kill her?”

“According to your neighbor, Miss Grueter, your wife had visitors. Is that what you argued about? According to your partner, Bruce Bricker, your wife was planning to leave you after last week’s flare-up.”

Blake laughed shortly. “If they’ve all said it for me, what else is there for me to say?”

“Not much, Blake. I’ll say this for you — a lot of the people we talked to insisted you couldn’t be guilty.”

“Oh, well, you won’t let that influence you,” Blake said ironically.

“No. We won’t,” Connell replied flatly. “Your wife’s friends, Nort and Paula Donaldson, saw you in a beer tavern. You were acting queerly. They went to call on your wife. There was no answer. They only came forward after hearing the report on the radio.”

“Then who called you?” Blake demanded.

“What’s the matter, Blake? Did you think you’d have more time to get away?”

“I didn’t get away. You caught me in town, remember?”

“You’d already been out of town once, Blake. A salesman named Frazer saw your picture in the paper. He remembers you on the bus. Morose. That was the word for you, according to Frazer.”

“He didn’t give me a chance to say anything,” Blake said.

Connell stood up. “Well, Blake, the evidence is all against you. There are no foreign fingerprints in your apartment. Looks like I’m going to have to turn you over to the boys.”

“It’s all thin!” Blake snapped. “I was in love with my wife. We hadn’t been married six months. I had no reason to kill her. You’ve got no evidence against me at all.”

“We’ve evidence, Blake. But there’s one truth that will stand up — you ran. You ran and you kept running. You can sign a statement now, Blake, or you can sit with my boys for a few hours.”

“I’ll sit with the boys,” Blake said tiredly. “I want to see if they’ve learned anything since I worked in this dump.”

Connell pressed a button. The men in the chairs along the wall were whispering together. The jailer opened the door and stepped inside. “Back to his boudoir, Fred,” Connell said tiredly.

“No boys?” Blake inquired.

Connell just looked at him. “We’ll let you know when,” he said.

Blake pulled up his wrinkled trousers and shuffled out of the door after the jailer.

Exhausted, he sat down on the edge of his cot. He thought, when Arrenhower sets a trap for you, it has steel jaws.

It would be bad enough, he thought bitterly, just fighting Connell, the cops and the district attorney’s office. But he had to fight Arrenhower and Arrenhower’s money and influence.

He struck the wall impotently with his fist.

And Stella’s slayer went on walking around free….

If only he could produce an alibi, something or somebody who could swear for him. Anything to get him out of here. All he wanted to do was be alone with the man who had killed Stella.

He shuffled over to the cot and lay down. His eyes burned. He closed them against the light. He could hear the laughter and the talk from the cells along the corridor. The sounds drifted away as smoke drifts on a lazy breeze. Somebody was laughing and then there was silence. And Blake was asleep.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked up. It was the turnkey. “Why, Fred,” Blake said, “are the boys ready for me already?”

He sat up, pushing his hands back through his rumpled, dry hair. His mouth tasted like burnt matches. Silently, the cop handed him his belt and his shoestrings. “Put ’em on,” he said.

Blake stared at him. He frowned. He stood up and slid the belt through the belt straps on his trousers. Then he laced up his shoes. Funny, he thought, you never realize how little things like a belt and shoestrings can make you feel like a human being.

“All right,” Fred said. “Let’s go.”

Puzzled, Blake went along the corridor. He could see that it was night. He looked at the white place on his arm where his wrist watch should be. He wondered what time it was.

“Where to, lover?” he said to the cop.

“Right through there,” Fred answered.

“But that’s where I came in.”

“That’s right.”

They stopped him at a desk. His watch and wallet were returned to him and he receipted a slip for them.

His heart slugging against his ribs, Blake walked across the room to a second desk. The sergeant there just looked at him and shoved a legal document at him. “Don’t read it, fella,” the sergeant said. “Just sign it.”

As he was signing his name, two men in expensively tailored topcoats and suits stepped up behind him. He turned slowly to face them.

“Blake,” the shorter man said. “My name is Alder Harrison. Attorney. Tampa. This is Mr. Arnoldson. Mr. Arnoldson provides bail bonds to any amount. I brought him along in case I met any difficulties.”

Blake just stared at Harrison. He was a dapper, dark haired man of fifty. “You mean I’m free? I can walk out of here?”

Harrison nodded. “Temporarily, you are free, Blake. And you can walk out of here.”

Blake shook his head. “Where’s Connell?”

Harrison smiled. “Lieutenant Connell? Why, I believe he is wearing a restraining jacket at the moment. But he isn’t our consideration just now. If you’ll come with me out to the curb, there is someone I’d like you to meet — the man responsible for your temporary release.”