Nightmare Town: Stories (28 page)

“I drop in home to pick up a couple of things before I scram and that call of Hammill’s catches me and I fall for it plenty. I figure I’m getting a break. I figure you’re not on yet and are going to send me back to New York as the Detroit hood again to see what dope I can get out of these folks, and I’ll be sitting pretty. Well, you fooled me, brother, or didn’t – Listen, Scott, you didn’t just stumble into that accidentally, did you?”

“No. Furman had to be murdered by a copper. A copper was most likely to know reward circulars well enough to make a good job of forging one. Who printed that for you?”

“Go on with your story,” he said. “I’m not dragging anybody in with me. It was only a poor mug of a printer that needed dough.”

“Okay. Only a copper would be sure enough of the routine to know how things would be handled. Only a copper – one of my coppers – would be able to walk into his cell, bang him across the head, and string him up on the – Those bruises showed.”

“They did? I wrapped the blackjack in a towel, figuring it would knock him out without leaving a mark anybody’d find under the hair. I seem to’ve slipped up a lot.”

“So that narrows it down to my coppers,” I went on, “and – well – you told me you knew the Randall woman, and there it was, only I figured you were working with them. What got you into this?”

He made a sour mouth. “What gets most saps in jams? A yen for easy dough. I’m in New York, see, working on that Dutton job for you, palling around with gamblers, and racketeers, passing for one of them; and I get to figuring that here my work takes as much brains as theirs, and is as tough and dangerous as theirs, but they’re taking in big money and I’m working for coffee and doughnuts. That kind of stuff gets you.

“Then I run into this Ethel and she goes for me like a house afire. I like her, too, so that’s dandy; but one night she tells me about this husband of hers and how much dough he’s got and how nuts he is about her and how he’s still trying to find her, and I get to thinking. I think she’s nuts enough about me to marry me. I still think she’d marry me if she didn’t know I killed him. Divorcing him’s no good, because the chances are she wouldn’t take any money from him and, anyway, it would only be part. So I got to thinking about suppose he died and left her the roll.

“That was more like it. I ran down to Philly a couple of afternoons and looked him up and everything looked fine. He didn’t even have anybody else close enough to leave more than a little of his dough to. So I did it. Not right away; I took my time working out the details, meanwhile writing to her through a fellow in Detroit.

“And then I did it. I sent those circulars out – to a lot of places – not wanting to point too much at this one. And when I was ready I phoned him, telling him if he’d come to the Deerwood Hotel that night, some time between then and the next night, he’d hear from Ethel. And, like I thought, he’d’ve fallen for any trap that was baited with her. You picking him up at the station was a break. If you hadn’t, I’d’ve had to discover he was registered at the hotel that night. Anyway, I’d’ve killed him and pretty soon I’d’ve started drinking or something, and you’d’ve fired me and I’d’ve gone off and married Ethel and her half-million under my Detroit name.” He made the sour mouth again. “Only I guess I’m not as sharp as I thought.”

“Maybe you are,” I said, “but that doesn’t always help. Old man Kamsley, Ben’s father, used to have a saying, To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.’ I’m sorry you did it, Wally. I always liked you.”

He smiled wearily. “I know you did,” he said. “I was counting on that.”

“You are from the Continental Detective Agency?” she asked before I was two steps inside the room.

“Yes.”

“I want you to find my husband’s murderer.” Her voice was shrill, and her dark eyes had wild lights in them. “The police have done nothing. Four days, and they have done nothing. They say it was a robber, but they haven’t found him. They haven’t found anything!”

“But, Mrs. Gilmore,” I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, “you must -“

“I know! I know!” she broke in. “But they have done nothing, I tell you – nothing. I don’t believe they’ve made the slightest effort. I don’t believe they want to find h – him!”

“Him?” I asked, because she had started to say her. “You think it was a man?”

She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly; “it might have -“

Her face spun toward me – a twitching face – and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.

“I’ll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn’t faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn’t the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarrelled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn’t. But if he did, I wouldn’t put it past her – a woman like that would do anything – anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!”

“And you think the police don’t want to arrest her?”

“I didn’t mean exactly that. I’m all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might – I don’t know just what I mean. I’m a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions.” She stretched a thin hand out to me. “Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!”

I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.

“Do you know this Kenbrook woman?” I asked.

“I’ve seen her on the street, and that’s enough to know what sort of person she is!”

“Did you tell the police about her?”

“No-o.” She looked out of the window again, and then, as I waited, she added, defensively:

“The police detectives who came to see me acted as if they thought I might have killed Bernard. I was afraid to tell them that I had cause for jealousy. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept quiet about that woman, but I didn’t think she had done it until afterward, when the police failed to find the murderer. Then I began to think she had done it; but I couldn’t make myself go to the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they’d think. So I – You can twist it around so it’ll look as if I hadn’t known about the woman, can’t you?”

“Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. That right?”

“Yes.”

“Where was he going?”

“Coming home, I suppose; but I don’t know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven’t found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half-past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours.”

“Wasn’t that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?”

“Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight.”

“Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?”

She shook her head with emphasis.

“No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don’t seem to know where he went that night.”

That wasn’t unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company’s work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn’t altogether unheard-of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician-contractor doesn’t always move in the open.

“How about enemies?” I asked.

“I don’t know anybody that hated him enough to kill him.”

“Where does this Kenbrook woman live, do you know?”

“Yes – in the Garford Apartments on Bush Street.”

“Nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me, is there?” I asked, stressing the
me
a little.

“No, I’ve told you everything I know – every single thing.”

Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things – the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year – but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-million-dollar business and a pretty place in politics. ‘A roughneck with a manicure,’ somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.

Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head…

I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives’ assembly-room I found O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who went in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet-head weren’t handicapped by the trick headgear.

“I want some dope on the Gilmore killing,” I told him.

“So do I,” he came back. “But if you’ll come along I’ll tell you what little I know while I’m eating. I ain’t had lunch yet.”

Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn’t much.

“One of the boys, Kelly, was walking his beat early Tuesday morning, coming down the Jones Street hill from California Street to Pine. It was about three o’clock – no fog or nothing – a clear night. Kelly’s within maybe twenty feet of Pine Street when he hears a shot. He whisks around the corner, and there’s a man dying on the north sidewalk of Pine Street, halfway between Jones and Leavenworth. Nobody else is in sight. Kelly runs up to the man and finds it’s Gilmore. Gilmore dies before he can say a word. The doctors say he was knocked down and then shot; because there’s a bruise on his forehead, and the bullet slanted upward in his chest. See what I mean? He was lying on his back when the bullet hit him, with his feet pointing toward the gun it came from. It was a thirty-eight.”

“Any money on him?”

O’Gar fed himself two spoons of chowder and nodded.

“Six hundred smacks, a coupla diamonds, and a watch. Nothing touched.”

“What was he doing on Pine Street at that time in the morning?”

“Damned if I know, brother. Chances are he was going home, but we can’t find out where he’d been. Don’t even know what direction he was walking in when he was knocked over. He was lying across the sidewalk with his feet to the curb; but that don’t mean nothing – he could of turned around three or four times after he was hit.”

“All apartment buildings in that block, aren’t there?”

“Uh-huh. There’s an alley or two running off from the south side; but Kelly says he could see the mouths of both alleys when the shot was fired – before he turned the corner – and nobody got away through them.”

“Reckon somebody who lives in that block did the shooting?” I asked.

O’Gar tilted his bowl, scooped up the last drops of the chowder, put them in his mouth, and grunted.

“Maybe. But we got nothing to show that Gilmore knew anybody in that block.”

“Many people gather around afterward?”

“A few. There’s always people on the street to come running if anything happens. But Kelly says there wasn’t anybody that looked wrong – just the ordinary night crowd. The boys gave the neighbourhood a combing, but didn’t turn up anything.”

“Any cars around?”

“Kelly says there wasn’t, that he didn’t see any, and couldn’t of missed seeing it if there’d been one.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

He got to his feet, glaring at me.

“I don’t think,” he said disagreeably; “I’m a police detective.”

I knew by that that somebody had been panning him for not finding the murderer.

“I have a line on a woman,” I told him. “Want to come along and talk to her with me?”

“I want to,” he growled, “but I can’t. I got to be in court this afternoon.”

In the vestibule of the Garford Apartments, I pressed the button tagged Miss Cara Kenbrook several times before the door clicked open. Then I mounted a flight of stairs and walked down a hall to her door. It was opened presently by a tall girl of twenty-three or -four in a black and white crepe dress.

“Miss Cara Kenbrook?”

“Yes.”

I gave her a card – one of those that tell the truth about me.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions; may I come in?”

“Do.”

Languidly she stepped aside for me to enter, closed the door behind me, and led me back into a living room that was littered with newspapers, cigarettes in all stages of consumption from unlighted freshness to cold ash, and miscellaneous articles of feminine clothing. She made room for me on a chair by dumping off a pair of pink silk stockings and a hat, and herself sat on some magazines that occupied another chair.

“I’m interested in Bernard Gilmore’s death,” I said, watching her face.

It wasn’t a beautiful face, although it should have been. Everything was there – perfect features; smooth, white skin; big, almost enormous, brown eyes – but the eyes were dead-dull, and the face was as empty of expression as a china doorknob, and what I said didn’t change it.

“Bernard Gilmore,” she said without interest. “Oh, yes.”

“You and he were pretty close friends, weren’t you?” I asked, puzzled by her blankness.

“We had been – yes.”

“What do you mean by had been?”

She pushed back a lock of her short-cut brown hair with a lazy hand.

“I gave him the air last week,” she said casually, as if speaking of something that had happened years ago.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Last week-Monday, I think – a week before he was killed.”

“Was that the time when you broke off with him?”

“Yes.”

“Have a row, or part friends?”

“Not exactly either. I just told him that I was through with him.”

“How did he take it?”

“It didn’t break his heart. I guess he’d heard the same thing before.”

“Where were you the night he was killed?”

“At the Coffee Cup, eating and dancing with friends until about one o’clock. Then I came home and went to bed.”

“Why did you split with Gilmore?”

“Couldn’t stand his wife.”

“Huh?”

“She was a nuisance.” This without the faintest glint of either annoyance or humour. “She came here one night and raised a racket; so I told Bernie that if he couldn’t keep her away from me he’d have to find another playmate.”

“Have you any idea who might have killed him?” I asked.

“Not unless it was his wife – these excitable women always do silly things.”

“If you had given her husband up, what reason would she have for killing him, do you think?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she replied with complete indifference. “But I’m not the only girl that Bernie ever looked at.”

“Think there were others, do you? Know anything, or are you just guessing?”

“I don’t know any names,” she said, “but I’m not just guessing.”

I let that go at that and switched back to Mrs. Gilmore, wondering if this girl could be full of dope.

“What happened the night his wife came here?”

“Nothing but that. She followed Bernie here, rang the bell, rushed past me when I opened the door, and began to cry and call Bernie names. Then she started on me, and I told him that if he didn’t take her away I’d hurt her, so he took her home.”

Admitting I was licked for the time, I got up and moved to the door. I couldn’t do anything with this baby just now. I didn’t think she was telling the whole truth, but on the other hand it wasn’t reasonable to believe that anybody would lie so woodenly – with so little effort to be plausible.

“I may be back later,” I said as she let me out.

“All right.”

Her manner didn’t even suggest that she hoped I wouldn’t.