Tickets for Death (16 page)

It turned grudgingly in the lock. He glanced around the empty corridor before pushing the door open and sliding into the dark office.

He took time to get the key out of the lock and close the door on the night latch before feeling for a light switch. His nostrils twitched with the lingering acrid odor of gun smoke in them as he found the switch and pressed it. He turned slowly and stared with somber eyes at the dead body of John Hardeman slumped sideways in his swivel chair with a small powder-marked hole in his right temple.

Band music came through the open window mingled with the hopeful shouts of the racing throng.

Chapter Eighteen:
WHILE THE CROWD ROARS

SHAYNE STOOD BACKED AGAINST THE DOOR without moving for a full minute. Then he glanced at the open window and went to it, circling the flat desk and the corpse.

The rear of the office abutted almost against the blankness of a high board wall enclosing the track with barely room for a body to squeeze between wall and window. Shayne stepped back, satisfied that no one could look into the office through the aperture.

He stopped a foot from Hardeman’s body, right thumb and forefinger seizing the lobe of his left ear and kneading it absently while his gray eyes studied every minute detail of the death scene before him.

Hardeman’s chair was swiveled to the left, halfway between the flat-topped desk and typewriter stand behind him. His head rested laxly on his left shoulder slumped low in the chair and his left arm hung down over the chair arm with the tips of his fingers almost touching the office floor.

His right hand rested inside the open top drawer of the desk, barely touching the butt of a Police Positive .38 lying on top of a batch of papers. The forefinger of his right hand still wore the protective rubber covering with which he had been picking out letters on the typewriter when Shayne had entered the office earlier.

A sheet of paper was rolled in the typewriter behind him. It carried the printed letterhead of the race track, with John Hardeman’s name in modest letters in the left-hand corner under the legend
Manager.

The date had been typed beneath the letterhead. That was as far as Hardeman had got with whatever communication he had been on the point of typing.

The single bullet which had killed the manager had not come out the back of his head. There was only the wound, pockmarked with powder burns all around, a little above and halfway between his right ear and eye. Blood had run from the wound and made a path down Hardeman’s cheek to the point of his chin, where it dripped off to the rug.

Blood continued to dribble from the wound as Shayne stood there. Single thick drops, widely spaced as the fluid clotted. It fell with a dull plopping sound into the thickening pool directly beneath.

It was a simple matter to reconstruct the exact manner in which John Hardeman had met his death. He had been turned away from his desk typing with the rubber-covered forefinger when someone entered his office. The door had been unlocked, Shayne recalled, on his previous visit.

Swiveling about to face his visitor, the race-track manager had looked into the muzzle of a gun. His instinctive reaction had been to make a desperate reach for his own pistol, which lay conveniently at hand in the open drawer. He had died before his fingers could grasp the weapon.

Everything else in the office was the same as Shayne had seen it before. Apparently nothing had been tampered with in any way. Hardeman’s killer must have fled furtively as soon as the lethal shot was fired. It was entirely practicable to enter and leave the private office via the hallway unnoticed, as Shayne was fully aware.

After a thorough inspection of the dead man, Shayne stopped rolling his earlobe and stepped back. He hooked one thigh over a corner of Hardeman’s desk and considered the situation carefully, in respect to himself, and as it had a bearing on two other murders and the conclusion he had worked out in his mind for the case.

A queer hot light flickered in his gray eyes. They stared unblinkingly at the dead figure before him. A grim look of questioning came over his face. He got up and approached Hardeman again, turned back his coat, and nodded at sight of a leather wallet in the dead man’s inside breast pocket.

He hesitated, then whisked out a handkerchief and draped it over his fingers, gingerly drew the wallet out and went back to sit on the desk.

Using his handkerchief to prevent his own fingerprints being left behind, he opened the wallet and emptied the inner compartments of a miscellany of cards, receipts, and folded memoranda onto the desk.

Among them was a folded clipping from a newspaper. It was somewhat faded and brittle with age, beginning to crack in the folds. He smoothed it out carefully and his eyes brooded over a blurred halftone and the brief news story beneath.

With the handkerchief still guarding his fingers, he awkwardly gathered the other papers and cards and returned them to Hardeman’s wallet, replaced it in his coat pocket.

Shayne’s step had an elastic, springy quality as he turned back to the desk, as though he stalked a prey now certainly within his power.

The newspaper cut showed a picture of two men standing side by side. On the left was a lean-jawed man similar to the tinted wedding photograph hanging on the wall of Ben Edwards’s home. The man on the right had a dwarfish body with thin intense features and a big head made to appear bigger by bushy uncombed hair. The features were those of Gil Matrix a decade before.

The cut-line beneath the picture read:
From left to right, Claude Bates and Theodore Ross, convicted in District Court today.

The item was dated February 18, 1931. An AP dispatch from Urban, Illinois:

District Judge K. L. Mathis today bitterly castigated Claude Bates in passing sentence upon Bates and his convicted accomplice, Theodore Ross, immediately after a jury brought in a verdict of guilty in a case which has attracted wide attention throughout the state and nation.

Charged more than a month ago with fraud in connection with the printing of fake tickets on the Irish Sweepstakes and their wholesale distribution to unsuspecting buyers, the two men have been in custody here in County jail while awaiting trial on the information sworn to by District Attorney Redford Mullins of Urban.

Claude Bates, confessed ringleader in the conspiracy, was characterized by Judge Mathis today as a menace to the community, and severely reprimanded from the bench for having turned his inventive talent to crime instead of applying it to the solution of worthwhile problems.

Denouncing Bates for putting temptation in the way of Ross, formerly a respected businessman in the neighboring town of Fountain, Judge Mathis imposed a sentence of from twenty to fifty years imprisonment upon the older man.

More lenient toward Theodore Ross, who was shown by evidence submitted at the trial to have had no part in the crime except to weakly allow his printing plant at Fountain to be used for illegal purposes, the judge sentenced him to serve from eight to fifteen years in the State Penitentiary at Joliet.

Deputy Sheriff Elisha Hogan will entrain with the two prisoners tomorrow morning for Joliet where the great steel gates will clang behind them, shutting them off from the outside world for many years and giving them full opportunity to consider the oft-repeated statement: Crime Does Not Pay.

Shayne got a cigarette from his pocket and lit it while his eyes raced over the item. He nodded his head slowly as he finished, inhaled deeply, and lifted his head to stare with abstracted eyes at the dead man.

His fingers slowly refolded the newspaper clipping and slid it into his coat pocket.

As he stared at Hardeman, the brooding look of lost hope faded slowly from his eyes. It was replaced by a gleam of fierce preoccupation, of intent concentration, as though he visualized something else, something entirely different from the scene of murder before his eyes.

His nostrils flared widely, then subsided. His features settled back into placid lines of decision as the silvery blast of a bugle came through the window announcing to patrons of the track that the last race of the evening was about to get under way.

He slid his hip off the desk and went to Hardeman’s side, studying the position of the body and the hand groping toward the pistol it never reached.

He stepped back and tentatively wormed his toe under the corner of the office rug, turned it back to uncover the bare floor between the swivel chair and desk.

Nodding with satisfaction, his eyes took on a hard brightness. He draped his handkerchief over the back of Hardeman’s flaccid right hand, put his own hand over the handkerchief and got a firm grip on the dead man’s fingers, which were stiffening rapidly.

He inched the hand gently forward in the open drawer, using extreme care not to change the natural position of the corpse. He pressed Hardeman’s fingers about the butt of his own .38 and drew it out.

Careful to allow only Hardeman’s fingers to touch the polished steel and corrugated wooden butt, he turned the cylinder and assured himself that the pistol was fully loaded.

He crouched beside the chair, lowered the dead man’s hand and gun toward the floor with muzzle down, aimed at a spot of bare wood from which the rug had been turned back.

He cocked the pistol with his handkerchief over the hammer, maneuvered Hardeman’s unresisting first finger under the trigger, curled it snugly against the steel.

Sweat streamed from the detective’s seamed face as he crouched there at his ghoulish task. He forced himself to wait, his own finger on top of Hardeman’s, holding it against the trigger.

There was a lull in the crowd sounds coming in the window; the band ceased playing. It was as though the thousands in the grandstand had an inexplicable prescience of what awaited in the back office, as though they momently caught their collective breath, stilled the clamor of their voices so that the shot might be clearly heard if Shayne dared to press the trigger.

Into the lull came a faint racketing din familiar to every greyhound fancier. The clatter of wheels on curved rails starting at the far side of the oval track, growing louder as the electrically propelled motor zoomed, forcing the stuffed rabbit to bob around the track in exact simulation of the swift bounds of a fleeing jack rabbit.

The dogs set up a yapping in the starting-boxes as the rabbit rounded the turn and came toward them. The yelping of the hounds increased, rising to a shrill crescendo as the bouncing bit of fur raced by the boxes.

Michael Shayne waited with his finger tense on the dead finger gripping the gun. Sweat streamed from every pore of his body.

Then it came, surging in through the window. A deep roar that drowned the yapping of the hounds and the racketing of the mechanical rabbit. Two words bursting in unison from a thousand throats:

“They’re off!”

Shayne’s finger jerked against Hardeman’s, pressing the trigger hard.

The sound of the exploding cartridge was loud in the confines of the office, but merged soundlessly into the roar of the crowd outside.

The bullet tore into the pine floor beneath, a small round hole in the planking.

Still moving with infinite care, Shayne shifted his foot and let the corner of the rug fall back into place, covering the single bullet hole in the floor.

He released his hold on Hardeman’s hand and the pistol dropped to the rug.

Shayne stood up, mopping his face with the handkerchief which had just assisted him in turning a clear case of murder into a perfect suicide.

He then shook his head slowly. The job wasn’t perfect. Not yet. He bent down and pulled the rubber finger tip cover from Hardeman’s hand, slid it onto his own right forefinger.

Going to the typewriter, he began hitting the keys slowly and carefully, using only the protected forefinger for operation, pressing the shift key and moving the carriage with a handkerchief-covered left hand.

Beneath the date which Hardeman had typed before he was murdered, Shayne wrote:

I can’t go on this way longer. I thought I could get away with it but I was a fool. When Shayne was here this evening I could tell from the way he looked at me, the way he spoke, that he suspects the truth.

I killed Mayme Martin in her apartment. I had planned it that way from the beginning…

Shayne typed on steadily, the clacking of the machine loud in his ears. He ended with the words:

… only thing left for me to do. I am going to shoot myself through the right temple and may God in His all-embracing wisdom pity me, though I deserve no pity.

He stepped back from the typewriter and read what he had written, leaving the sheet of paper in the machine. Nodding approval, he stripped the rubber covering from his finger, replaced it on Hardeman’s after obliterating all prints from the inside with his handkerchief.

Grateful for the clamor outside, to which the noise of starting motors was added from the parking-lot, Shayne took time for another slow and comprehensive survey of the interior of the office. Changing the setup from murder to suicide had, strangely, made no difference in the appearance of the room.

He went to the door and opened it enough to press the button releasing the night latch, carefully polished the knob and the light switch.

Leaving the door slightly ajar, he strode back to the desk and with his elbow pushed the telephone to the floor from its position on the extreme corner where Hardeman’s outflung hand might have struck it as he died.

He went out without a backward glance, leaving the light burning, and as he passed through the door he could hear a metallic voice rasping from the phone on the floor;

“Number, please. Number…?”

No one saw him go swiftly down the hall and out under the grandstand, where an eddying mob of people surged toward the exit gates. He joined them, let himself be shouldered around until he reached his roadster, and waited until he was able to edge out onto the highway.

Bright stars gleamed in the sky, covered here and there by fleecy white and scurrying clouds.