Murder Your Darlings (16 page)

“A confession is not necessary,” the captain said. “We found Knut Sanderson’s fingerprints on the fountain pen lodged in Mr. Mayflower’s chest. We found Mr. Mayflower’s notebook, albeit with your notes in it, inside Sanderson’s pocket.”

“Then it’s all wrapped up,” Benchley said, rather gleefully. “Let the State of New York put the Sandman to sleep, if it must.”

O’Rannigan leaned back. “Too late. Sanderson took care of that himself.”

“I don’t understand,” Dorothy said.

“He’s dead,” O’Rannigan said.

She nearly gasped, but she held it in.

Captain Church explained, “Sanderson switched residences frequently, so we have had trouble finding exactly where he lives. Finally, earlier today, police officers found his body in a tony Park Avenue apartment, dead of apparent suicide. He had his head in the oven, and the apartment was full of gas.”

“Funny,” she said. “I would have figured him to choose a Smith and Wesson over a Westinghouse.”

“Funny?” O’Rannigan sneered. “What’s so funny about it? It’s nuts—that’s what it is. A raving animal like the Sandman doesn’t up and commit suicide.”

Captain Church, a very patient, methodical man, didn’t directly contradict O’Rannigan. Church didn’t even look at him. “Let us stick to the facts, since they are all we have at this point. The facts indicate that Sanderson committed suicide. This much we believe to be so. Let us test this theory as a scientist tests his theories, by attempting to disprove it.”

Dorothy was thinking of Faulkner. She reasoned that if everyone believed that the Sandman indeed murdered Mayflower, then Faulkner would be free.

“Disprove it?” she said. “What’s the use? Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Dead dogs, too,” Benchley added.

Captain Church’s thin mouth tightened. His pale eyes stared at them. She wondered whether Church was about to throw them in the hoosegow and throw away the key. Then the captain said something odd.

“Detective, in the bottom drawer of my desk is a paper bag. My wife packed me a midnight snack. Please get it for me.”

O’Rannigan left the room without a word.

Church’s glare never wavered. “I know you, you know.”

Out of the sides of their eyes, Dorothy and Benchley glanced at each other.

“You know us? You know
of
us?” she said. “You’ve read the drivel we’ve written in magazines?”

Church shook his head, almost imperceptibly. He stared at Benchley. “I know you from Harvard. I was a year above you.”

Benchley shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Dorothy thought she understood why: Church looked many years older than Benchley, and Benchley certainly hadn’t recognized him.

The police captain continued, “I know your antics from your performances in the Hasty Pudding club, and your writing in the
Harvard Lampoon
. That is where you learned you could make a living out of clowning around. But this is no time for funny business. One cannot cut his way out of a mess like this with a sharp little joke.”

Benchley, a very sensitive man, didn’t answer right away. He thought this through.

“I think you misunderstand,” Dorothy said. “A joke isn’t a sword. It’s a shield.”

“Yes,” Benchley said. “We laugh to keep from crying. It’s a constant battle.”

“Battle?” Church’s taut mouth compressed into a short frown. “I gather you did not fight in the war.”

“I don’t believe in war,” Benchley said simply.

For the first time, Church displayed naked emotion. His face screwed up in disgust.

“You don’t believe in war?” he spat. “War is not Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. You cannot choose to believe in it or not. War is a fact. It happened.”

Now Benchley looked emotional. “I lost my older brother in the Spanish-American War. I was nine.”

“All the more reason to fight,” Church said. “Thousands of boys lost life, limb and sanity in the war. That doesn’t give
you
the option to choose to not believe in war, as though it doesn’t exist.”

Benchley reddened. “Obviously, I know it exists—”

Detective O’Rannigan came bustling through the door. He placed a small brown paper sack on the table in front of the captain. Church unrolled the top of the paper bag, dipped his hand inside and pulled out an egg. This process seemed to have a calming effect on him.

“See this egg?” he said evenly. “Do you think something like this could start a war?”

They didn’t answer.

Church then placed the egg upright on the table and spun it like a top. Dorothy knew the egg must be hard-boiled. (This was her principal meal at the Algonquin, as it was just about all she could typically afford.) An uncooked egg spins wobbly. This egg, like the captain himself, she thought, was hard-boiled.

Church said, “As a boy, did you ever throw an egg at a comic in a bad vaudeville show?”

Benchley admitted a guilty grin.

Church said, “Imagine you threw an egg or two, and it started a war, a war that killed tens of thousands. Things like this happen all the time.”

“An egg that started a war?” Dorothy said. “If that happened even once, I think we might have heard about it.”

Church’s mouth tightened again. He reached for something below the table and laid it on the tabletop with a thump. It was a dull gray metal service revolver. It was extremely large, Dorothy thought. The barrel pointed almost directly at her chest, which made her decidedly uneasy. She tried not to show it.

“Unload a cartridge from the barrel,” Church said to her.

She looked down at the heavy pistol. “No, thank you.”

Captain Church didn’t move. He stared at her.

“I mean, I don’t know how,” she said.

Church picked up the gun and snapped it open. He dug one of the cartridges out of the barrel and then tossed it at her. Benchley jumped like a housewife from a rat, but Dorothy sat frozen as the cartridge landed in her lap.

“Pick it up,” Church said.

She didn’t like being told what to do. But it was pointless to try to assert herself at this moment. She picked up the cartridge. It was less than an inch and a half long, with a dull lead bullet poking out of the shiny brass cartridge jacket. It was heavier than it looked.

“Now hold this.” Church lobbed the egg at her. Instinctively, she caught it.

“Weigh them in your hands,” he said. “What do you conclude?”

She compared the bullet in one hand against the egg in the other. “I suppose they weigh about the same.” She placed them gently on the table.

“The same,” he said, picking them up. “Now maybe you understand my point. Something the weight of an egg can start a war. Look at this bullet. It is small. Much smaller than an egg. But just a few of these little things, shot by a Serbian terrorist into the body of Archduke Ferdinand, set off the spark that ignited the Great War. Every time I load this gun, I think about that.”

As he spoke, he removed the shell from the egg. Then he popped it whole into his mouth. He continued to stare at them with his hard eyes, though his cheeks bulged with the egg. Dorothy found this action to be grotesque, even somehow obscene. It was as though he intended to entirely swallow up every protestation or defense she and Benchley might raise, without acknowledgment or consideration. She realized it was an exhibition intended to disarm her, to make her feel defenseless. She was annoyed that it succeeded in doing just that.

The egg was gone in two gulps, and Church’s long, thin face returned to its tombstone solidity.

“Now,” he said, “shall we continue? I assume you have heard of the bootlegger Michael Finnegan?”

Chapter 20

Dorothy and Benchley shook their heads. No, they had never heard of a bootlegger by the name of Michael Finnegan. Even if they had, they wouldn’t admit it to Captain Church.

Church continued, “Michael Finnegan is a major underworld crime figure. He is a bootlegger, a racketeer and the leader of a large, notorious gang of confidence men, extortionists, thieves, violent criminals and petty swindlers.”

O’Rannigan, still standing, appeared to be growing restless. He shifted from foot to foot.

“Mickey Finn!” O’Rannigan blurted. “Everyone calls him Mickey Finn.”

“Oh ...,” said Dorothy and Benchley together.

They knew about Mickey Finn, of course. They’d never met him or even seen him, but they knew that Finn supplied Tony Soma’s and many other good speakeasies with top-shelf European liquor smuggled down from Canada.

“The Sandman worked for Mickey Finn,” O’Rannigan continued quickly. He was like a bottle uncorked—his words poured out. “Finn used him for muscle and, we think, for the occasional murder. But we’ve never been able to nail Sanderson or Finn for anything. Witnesses keep changing their stories or disappearing, often turning up dead.”

“So, you think the Sandman killed Leland Mayflower on Mickey Finn’s orders?” Dorothy said. “Gambling debts, something like that?”

Church shook his head. “We were able to secure an interview with Finnegan—not an interrogation exactly. Finnegan is too canny for that. He was genuinely surprised when we told him that we believed Sanderson had killed Mayflower, and he was positively shocked when we informed him that Sanderson was dead.”

“Shocked doesn’t cover it,” O’Rannigan said. “He hit the roof. I thought he might explode on the spot.”

“Finnegan is a very volatile individual, definitely,” Church said.

“Let’s see if I have this right,” Benchley said. “Mickey Finn ordered the Sandman to do his dirty work, threatening and even killing snitches and welshers and such.”

The streetwise words sounded silly coming out of Benchley’s mouth, Dorothy thought. The conspicuous way he said
snitches
and
welshers
, he might as well have been talking about pixies and unicorns.

“But,” Benchley continued, “Finn
did not
send Sanderson to kill Mayflower. Didn’t even know about it. So, the question is, who did order the Sandman to murder Mayflower?”

“That,” said Church, “is what we hope you can tell us.”

They stared stupefied at the police captain for a long moment. Apparently, he was serious.

Finally, Dorothy said, “How the hell can we tell you that? We don’t know ourselves.”

“You may help us determine the killer’s motive—the real killer, that is, as Sanderson was apparently only an instrument in this whole affair,” Church said. “Let us approach the question methodically. To perpetrate a crime, a criminal usually possesses three things: means, motive and opportunity. With Sanderson providing both the means and the opportunity, that leaves us with motive. Someone else—the one who hired or otherwise contracted with Sanderson—supplied the motive. Now—”

“How can you be so sure that there was someone else involved?” Dorothy said. “How do you know it wasn’t a personal matter between the Sandman and Mayflower? For all we know, little old Mayflower may have been puttering along Sixth Avenue when he accidentally poked the Sandman with his walking stick. Perhaps the Sandman followed Mayflower into the Algonquin, saw that Mayflower was alone in the dining room and took the opportunity to take revenge the only way he knows how.”

“Indeed,” Church said simply, “that cannot be ruled out. And the crime certainly points to a hurried, improvised execution. Sanderson killed Mayflower by stabbing, yet Sanderson’s implement of choice was usually a handgun. He not only stabbed Mayflower; he used Mayflower’s own fountain pen, and he did it in broad daylight, so to speak, where observation of the crime and subsequent capture were all the more likely, even probable.”

“There you have it,” said Dorothy. “Means, motive and opportunity.”

“Only one problem,” O’Rannigan snorted. “The Sandman suddenly turned up dead. But there’s no way the Sandman would commit suicide, because he didn’t have a conscience. It ain’t likely that all of a sudden he felt so sorry for what he did that he had to go and stick his head in the oven. Naw, somebody else was involved. Somebody who wanted Sanderson to keep his mouth shut, and for good.”

“But who?” said Benchley.

“Again,” said Church, “that is where you may help us.”

“Help how?” said Dorothy.

“Help us understand the motives of the members of your Round Table.”

Dorothy and Benchley both sat up in their chairs. The idea of reporting on their friends to the police was detestable.

“Say that we don’t want to help you?” she said.

O’Rannigan growled, “Then say that we charge you with assaulting an officer, withholding evidence and harboring a fugitive?”

“Go right ahead,” she said. “While you’re at it, charge me with harboring impure thoughts and coveting my neighbor’s oxen.”

They looked to Benchley. By unspoken agreement, it seemed his response would break some tacit deadlock.

“Don’t bother charging me,” he said finally. “My credit rating is lousy.”

Dorothy smirked. O’Rannigan lurched forward as if to throttle them both. Captain Church, like a traffic cop, calmly held up a hand. O’Rannigan stopped in his tracks.

“Shall we look at it this way?” Church said. “By providing an understanding of your associates’ motives and whereabouts, you will be exonerating them from blame and helping to prove their innocence. By doing so, you will bring us closer to the real killer. That is what we all want.”

Dorothy remained silent. Under the shadow of her dark bangs, her eyes were hard and her face was sullen. Benchley sat smiling politely and didn’t say a word.

“Let me add this,” Church continued. “We have already spoken to some of your associates. We have formed opinions and are in possession of certain pertinent facts. Your perspective will certainly do them no harm and could do them a world of good.”

“And if you don’t talk,” O’Rannigan snarled, “we charge you and toss you in the Tombs.”

Church stared at them patiently. This time, he did not contradict O’Rannigan.