The Philadelphia Murder Story (8 page)

He cocked his head down then and shot me an amused and quite unbelieving glance.

“And what are you doing up here?” I asked.

“I’m trailing some income-tax figures.” He chuckled a little. “A rather well-known New Yorker. He had a fire, rather fortunately, and all his records were burned. Unfortunately, he didn’t know all the banks he uses have had a microfilm recording system for the last fifteen years, so all his checks have had their pictures taken. That’s what I was doing at the Quaker Trust. Odd you should have remembered Toplady’s name. He’s in charge of their records.”

A bright and lovely fight began to dawn in my mind. “Is it Myron’s income tax, by any chance?” I asked. “Myron Kane’s?”

He looked around at me again. “Good Lord, no! It’s somebody you’ve met in Washington. He has no connection with Myron. Why?”

And I suppose I should add that he really hadn’t, and that the job Colonel Primrose was on, furthermore, had nothing whatever to do with any of the Whitneys.

“I just wondered,” I said. “When I said I was coming up, you seemed awfully interested in Myron.”

“I am. Because of that profile of Whitney he’s doing. The daughter and son-in-law are up in arms. I happened to see Ben Hibbs after they’d been in. Then I saw Myron. That was about a week ago. He certainly looked like Mark Twain’s calmly confident Christian with four aces. I’ve been wondering.”

“Do you know Judge Whitney well?” I asked.

We’d got to the Warwick Room. It was already crowded, as Philadelphians eat lunch earlier than any other people in the world.

He nodded. “And I’d hate to see Myron do one of his more malicious jobs on him. Most newspapermen have a sort of ethics, but Myron’s haven’t ever been visible to me.”

It was a meatless day, but when the omelets came, they were very good.

“Myron’s always seemed to me to have a chip on his shoulder, for some reason,” Colonel Primrose said. “Inferiority complex is a more hackneyed way of saying it. I don’t see why he has it. The Press Who’s Who says he was born in Virginia and educated by tutors and in private schools abroad. Universities, London and the Sorbonne. His father was a judge and his mother a Randolph of Virginia. With that background, he oughtn’t to be such a damned snob. He’s made a lot of money and he knows the best people, and yet he delights in sideswiping everybody with any social standing. I wonder what he’s doing to the Whitneys. Do you know?”

I shook my head and went on with my lunch. When I glanced up, he was looking at me with a politely amused smile on his face.

“You know what you remind me of?”

“No,” I said. “And I’d just as soon not.”

“Did you ever see a sooty grouse fluttering around, pretending to have a broken wing, when you get too near her covey?” he asked. “Myron hasn’t been appealing to your better nature, has he? Or is it Mrs. Whitney?” He looked at me then in that oddly appraising way of his. “Who broke into Ben Hibbs’ place last night, Mrs. Latham?” he asked deliberately.

I could feel my cheeks flush warmly. There’s something very irritating about being an open book.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.

He paid his bill and got up. “I think you’d better come over to the
Post
with me. Unless you have some reason for not wanting to.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’d love to.”

That wasn’t true, of course; I didn’t want to go at all, and I wish now I hadn’t.

It was the first time I’d ever been there. The taxi went skidding down Spruce Street. It was almost two o’clock. The gray brick between the car tracks was a shimmering gun-metal ribbon down the center of the old street, with its line of leafless sycamores on either side and its mellow, lovely old houses. We turned into Washington Square, across Walnut into 7th Street and to the right, weaving a perilous way through the enormous trucks unloading prodigious rolls of paper in the narrow alley of Sansom Street alongside the Curtis Building. Independence Square was just ahead of us, and the old State House, the cradle of liberty, where the bell is that rang out to all mankind, was on our left as we turned—so beautiful, and with so much dignity and meaning in its time-stained brick and slender, gleaming cupola, that I never see it without a sudden quickening of my heart. Men and women in uniform hurrying by gave it a sharpened meaning just then and as we turned right into 6th Street in front of the Curtis Building, the sun caught the great service flag hanging in front of the weather-stained double columns of the facade. The number “947” was on the single blue star in its radiant white red-bordered field.

We got out and went up the steps. It didn’t at once seem strange to me that a policeman was standing behind the long plate-glass window at the left of the door or that Sgt. Phineas T. Buck’s large, square and granite form was standing there with him. I’ve seen both Sergeant Buck and policemen in unexpected places everywhere. But Colonel Primrose, I thought, quickened his pace and pushed open the heavy bronze-trimmed door a little hastily. We stepped into the vestibule, and Colonel Primrose opened the plate-glass door at the left.

I knew, when we went in, that something was wrong, knew it the instant Sergeant Buck stepped forward, even before I saw the group of people there in the lobby. I’d seen groups of people look like that before, and heard the same sort of voice say, “Get back there, everybody. Get ’em back. Get ’em out of the way.”

They were across the lobby in front of a raised terrace between square marble columns. Behind the terrace was the great glass mosaic, lustrous, softly glowing, the purple shadows creeping up among opalescent flowers around the brilliant waterfall at the base of a mountain to the glorious glow of the sunset and the dark mystery of gnarled and romantic trees. Then the soft musical trickle of water stopped abruptly. Someone was moving the ornamental shrubs around the front and side of the terrace. I saw a great terracotta oil jar, like Ali Baba’s, being pushed away, and heard the voice again, “Get back. Get ’em back… Here, doctor.”

There was a movement in the tightly packed group. They parted to let a white-coated man through. I saw him then. He was lying, his face wet, at the side of a shallow, oblong pool. His black hair was clinging to his pallid face, and there were bits of green pond scum matted on it like grotesque vine leaves of the grave. It was Myron Kane, and he was quite dead.

“I guess he fainted and drowned,” someone said.

I knew that wasn’t so. Myron Kane had never for an instant fainted and drowned, not in the soft glow of the alabaster lights in front of the opalescent and green-and-gold mural—not anywhere. Myron’s hold on life had been too ruthless and too canny to let it go so easily.

There was a sudden commotion at the side of the pool. A man thrust his hand into it and brought it up again.

“Don’t look like he fainted to me,” he said.

He was holding up a knife. It looked like a butcher knife from some kitchen of cutthroats, sharp-pointed as a poniard, razor-edged. The handle was wrapped in some faintly gleaming gunmetal-gray material.

A tall, stoop-shouldered man spoke.

“That’s a cutting-down knife,” he said. “From Electrotyping, on the ninth floor.”

A quiet, fatherly-looking man in a dark gray suit walked over toward him. He could have been a member of the Rotary Club in good standing, a lawyer or an executive of The Curtis Publishing Company—anything except what I soon learned he was—the captain of the Philadelphia homicide squad.

Colonel Primrose went over, too, and spoke to him.

“I know this man,” he said. He nodded toward the tall, stoop-shouldered man. “This is Erd Brandt. He was a colonel in the Seventh Regiment. He’s one of the editors here.”

“Yes?” the fatherly-looking man said. “He looks to me like a Number One suspect. How does an editor know what kind of a knife it is and where it comes from? I suppose Benjamin Franklin had it in his pocket.”

Colonel Primrose looked at him. “Benjamin-—”

“That’s the story.” He jerked a finger at a man sitting white-faced behind the marble desk at the side of the lobby near the elevator. “He’s been sitting there since one o’clock. He says the last person he saw in here was Benjamin Franklin. My name’s Francis X. Malone, and I’m captain of the homicide squad, and I’m Irish, and I’ve seen a lot of fairies, but Benjamin Franklin’s dead. Maybe he founded this magazine, but he’s still dead.”

I had the grotesque thought that if it was Benjamin Franklin, it wasn’t Monk, it wasn’t anybody in Rittenhouse Square.

Captain Malone beckoned. The man at the desk got up and came over. He was white-faced and his knees were not steady, but he was in deadly earnest.

“I’m not kidding, captain,” he said. “I saw him. I tell you I saw him with my own eyes. I mean, I know him. Look. I look at him all day.” He pointed to the white marble bust of the great gazetteer looking placidly down from his pedestal. “He walked right across here. I saw him. He had on white stockings and a brown coat and short pants with buckles at the knees. I’m not crazy. I tell you I saw him twice.”

A tall young man with blue eyes and glasses, quiet, calm and unhurried, had come over to the table in front of the pool terrace where we were.

“I tell you, Mr. Hibbs, I saw him—I saw Benjamin Franklin,” the man from the desk said. And I had no possible doubt of the conviction of truth in his own mind. “I just tell you I saw him,” he added patiently.

“All right, you saw him,” Captain Malone said. “Just take it easy.” He turned to Ben Hibbs. “Did all the members of your staff know this man Kane, Mr. Hibbs?”

Ben Hibbs nodded. “Yes. We all knew him.”

“Did you like him?”

There was a little hesitation, not long, but a little too long. “Yes. Well enough.” His blue eyes were slightly troubled as they moved over the group of men, some of them in shirt sleeves, some not, who had moved away from the terrace and the goldfish pool. He looked like a shepherd counting his flock.

Captain Malone watched him with a fatherly interest.

“Not all present, Mr. Hibbs?”

“No.”

I looked quickly at Colonel Primrose. It seems incredible that I felt my heart glow a little. Not that I wanted anyone on
The Saturday Evening Post
to hang for the murder of Myron Kane, exactly. It was just that-I was aware suddenly that the benevolent man in the dark gray suit was looking at me intently.

“I don’t think you’ve met Captain Malone, have you, Mrs. Latham?” Colonel Primrose said.

I’d realized already that I’d made a mistake. But he couldn’t connect the Whitneys with it, possibly. I hadn’t said anything.

Just then somebody spoke up abruptly, “What’s this?”

It was one of Captain Malone’s detectives. They’d moved Myron Kane’s body away from the pool. The man was holding up a small yellow oblong slip of paper.

And another man spoke. “That’s a manuscript number. It’s attached to the manuscript up in the composing room. How the hell did it get down here?” It was a tall young beanpole of a man speaking. He was so loosely jointed, it was surprising he stayed together. “I’d better phone up to Composition,” he said. “That’s off of Kane’s profile of Judge Whitney. Where in hell’s the manuscript?”

Where indeed, I thought. I tried to look as if I was as surprised as everybody else. But I knew before Bob Fuoss came back from the telephone that Myron’s profile of Judge Whitney had disappeared.

“All I need now is for somebody to tell me Benjamin Franklin took it,” Captain Malone said gently.

That numbered slip of yellow-colored paper that Captain Malone held in his hand looked very small and innocuous, but in effect it was a streak of chain lightning. In one flash it linked the murdered body of Myron Kane, lying there beside the goldfish pool in the marble lobby of The Curtis Publishing Company in Independence Square, in front of that glass mosaic of a sunset garden, with the manuscript of his profile of Judge Whitney and with the Whitneys themselves, due west in Rittenhouse Square. Or so it seemed to me, with the background of the last twenty-four hours that I had. It apparently wasn’t that simple to the chief of the homicide squad. Captain Malone listened quietly when Bob Fuoss, the managing editor, came back from the telephone at the reception desk.

“I called Composition, on the ninth floor,” he said. “That’s off of the manuscript of Kane’s piece on Judge Whitney. It was sent to the monotype keyboard this morning. The foreman—Alexy—says it was in his basket on his desk when he went out for lunch.”

Captain Malone’s eyes moved slowly toward the pool and to the knife with its razor edge and stiletto point that somebody had put on the refectory table in the center of the lobby. A little green scum from the bottom of the pool was clinging moistly to the gunmetal-colored adhesive tape wrapped around the handle. “Ninth floor,” he said meditatively. He nodded at the knife. “And that came from the ninth floor too?” He was deliberate and quiet-spoken. “I guess somebody knew his way around. I went through the plant once, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it myself.”

He seemed to be listening, and it wasn’t till I noticed that that I became aware of the low rumble of the presses that throbbed and vibrated all around us, like the roar of far-distant but continuous thunder. You didn’t notice it at first, and when you did, it was hard to tell whether you were hearing it with your ears or feeling it through the soles of your feet. I found out later, when I went over there, that the thick, fireproof wall behind the bronze doors of the elevators, extending from Walnut Street clear through the building to Sansom Street and dividing manufacturing from the editorial and business divisions, was what kept it from being completely deafening.

Captain Malone turned to Fuoss. “I’ll start at that end, and I’ll need somebody to show me around. You get your people back where they belong. I’ll be around after a while.”

Four men came through the plate-glass double doors—one of them with a camera, two with a stretcher. Captain Malone motioned the little group of
Post
editors and Colonel Primrose and me toward the elevators. We stood there avoiding one another’s eyes as the four men set to work. They didn’t know Myron Kane. He was nothing now; he could be pushed around and carted off as a part of the job they made their living at. It didn’t seem that that ought to happen quite that way to Myron Kane, with his Homburg and his stick and his London-tailored overcoat, just as it happened to anybody who’d never seen a sultan or told an ambassador what a prime minister had said. All the arrogance and ego and ability that had made Myron a dramatic figure, whether one had any affection for him or not, were gone, and I think we were all a little ashamed that that was the way it was.