Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (70 page)

He grinned. “I hope I won’t have to let you down.”

She turned and hurried away and he stood in the doorway, watching, until she disappeared in the elevator.

Gray dawn was outside the window when the ringing of the telephone bell roused Donahue. His bedroom was in semi-darkness and, sleepy eyed, he groped around for a while, yawning, before he found the instrument and drew it into bed with him.

He said: “Hello,” on the tail end of a noisy yawn; and then: “Don’t you ever sleep?… Sure you woke me up…. Well, I don’t care about worms…. I’ll bite: what?” He listened and presently he sat upright. “Says who?… All right, go ahead; I’m listening.” He listened for two minutes, motionless. Then he said in a dropped voice, “I’ll be right over,” and hung up.

He washed and dressed in ten minutes, and went out. There was no taxi in sight, so he walked across to a car line and then walked eastward until he heard a car coming. He boarded it and it was cold too and the only other passengers were three laborers with metal lunch boxes. They sat staring dolefully into space. The car made loud, clanging sounds in the empty street.

It was a ride of twenty minutes. Donahue got off in the heart of the business district and walked south. Pretty soon he was out of the business district. He passed some warehouses, an empty parking lot, a row of drab rooming houses, a Greek restaurant. The smell and the feel of the river were near. The light in the east was lifting slowly over the rooftops. In an alley a man was making a lot of noise with ashcans.

Donahue turned a corner and saw, a few yards beyond, a couple of police cars and an ambulance drawn up to the curb. A narrow, three-storied red brick house was sandwiched in between a garage and a pool hall, and in front of the house a uniformed policeman was standing. A weatherbeaten sign hung alongside the door; it said: Furnished Rooms.

“Looking for somebody?” the policeman asked.

“The lieutenant phoned me.”

“Upstairs—all the way.”

Donahue climbed. Some people were standing in the second-floor hallway, gossiping in low voices. Some wore bathrobes in which they huddled. One man wore drooping trousers and a long-sleeved undershirt. The gossiping died down as Donahue drew nearer. They looked aside—or towards him, but covertly. A few electric bulbs lit the way and there was the smell of plaster that had been damp a long time. The banister was black and did not slide smoothly beneath the hand.

When Donahue reached the top-floor hallway, he saw several policemen standing outside an open doorway. One called into the room beyond, “I guess here comes Mr. Donahue.”

Donahue stopped in the doorway of a small, dilapidated room. He saw a uniformed sergeant, a couple of policemen, the ambulance doctor, Kelly McPard and Lankford, and a man named Stratford, from the District Attorney’s office. They made a crowd in the small room.

“Thanks for coming,” McPard said. He beckoned with his finger. “Can you identify him?”

Donahue shouldered his way to the side of a large, lumpy bed. On it lay the man he had known alive as Loftman. Loftman lay quite peacefully, quite naturally, as though he slept. His skin had a peculiar pinkish tinge.

“Loftman?” McPard asked.

Donahue turned and nodded.

McPard tossed a tagged key into the air, caught it deftly. “We thought so, account of the hotel key, but we wanted to make sure.”

“How long’s he been dead?”

“Offhand”—McPard nodded towards the ambulance doctor—“about since the night of the day Bickford was killed. Monoxide.” He moved across the room, wedging his way through the group, and pointed to a small coal stove. “This did it, Donny.” He pointed upward, where the stove pipe careened far to one side, disconnected from that chimney hole. “The coal gas couldn’t get up the chimney.”

“Accident?”

“Ha!” laughed Lankford hoarsely.

McPard toed some crumpled, sooty newspapers that lay on the floor. “These were stuffed in that hole,” he said. He withdrew a torn piece of newspaper from his pocket and extended it towards Donahue. “Take a look at this, Donny.”

Donahue stood beneath the single electric bulb and peered down at an item which was encircled by a pencil marking. The caption said:

Coal Gas Kills Sleeping Youth

The account went on to say that one John Leffler, aged twenty, a houseboy in the employ of Ferdinand Ashmun, of Blue Ridge Road, was found dead in bed of carbon monoxide poisoning. The supposition was that in shaking down the stove before going to bed he had jarred loose the stove pipe. No one else was in the house at the time. The Ashmuns had gone to Phoenix. There was furnace heat throughout the house, except in the room occupied by Leffler. In this room there was a small coal stove. The body was discovered when paperhangers, who arrived next morning to redecorate several rooms, received no response to the doorbell and notified the police.

Donahue turned the piece of paper over, gazed down abstractedly at an advertisement, then handed it back to McPard.

“We found it in his pocket,” McPard said.

Donahue said: “Power of suggestion, huh?”

“That’s all we found,” McPard continued. “No identification. Except the hotel key.”

Lankford boomed good-naturedly, “You sure pick swell clients, Donny! Boy, you sure pick ’em!”

“From what I hear,” the District Attorney’s man said caustically, “you’ve been doing plenty of shadow boxing around town.”

Donahue turned. “Oh, hello, Mr. Stratford.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Donahue looked around the room. “What am I, on the carpet or something?”

“I just thought,” McPard said, in his friendly way, “you’d want to have a look. He came here the other night with a woman. The old man who runs this place said he met them at the front door and the woman hung in the background. Loftman asked for a room for a week and the old man took them up to this one. He’s very near-sighted and he didn’t pay much attention to the woman. The room was all right and they didn’t have any baggage, so Loftman paid a week in advance.

“The old man brought up some kindling and some coal for the stove, and that’s the last he saw of them. He came up next day about ten, to bring some towels and make the bed, but there was no answer. He thought they were out and tried to use his own pass key, but there was a key in the other side of the door. He tried once again, later, in the afternoon, but still no luck. So he gave it up, I guess.

“Then this morning, at five, a drunk wandered in and wanted a room and the old man brought him up to this floor and gave him one, up front. He stopped to listen at this door and then he tried his key again, he was beginning to get curious, but the key was still in the other side. He began to get worried, so he went downstairs, got a screwdriver and went in the next room. He’d screwed shut that connecting door sometime ago. So he took the screws out, opened the door—and there you are.”

Stratford snapped, “Kel says he thinks Loftman was using an alias.”

“That’s what Kel told me,” Donahue nodded.

“Maybe Loftman told you his real name.”

Donahue shook his head.

“The thing is,” Stratford rasped, “find the woman.” He looked sharply at Donahue. “It’s highly possible you’d know her.”

“Maybe—but I don’t.”

“I’d like to be sure of that.”

“Try hard.”

“You talk like a guy with a pretty swell opinion of himself.”

Donahue turned to Kelly McPard and said: “Did you get me down here to take a lot of guff from him?”

“You’ll take it and like it!” Stratford ripped out.

Kelly McPard patted down the troubled air with his plump hands. “Now, Mr. Stratford, please don’t let us get worked up so early in the morning. Donny probably hasn’t had his breakfast yet and it is kind of an imposition to drag a man out of bed at dawn—”

“Have I had my breakfast?” demanded Stratford.

McPard rolled his eyes ceilingward.

“Besides,” Stratford hammered on, “you were the one gave me this long spiel about what Red Phalen thought and what you thought.”

“Sure, sure,” said McPard placatingly. “I like to keep all my cards face up with the D.A.’s office. But it’s just that if you rub Donny the wrong way he goes off the handle.”

Stratford snapped peevishly, “You’re not so considerate of most guys you drag in that favorite back room of yours.”

“Now listen here, now,” Lankford barged in, goggle-eyed. “That ain’t fair. Besides, Mr. Donahue ain’t no mug. And have I had my breakfast yet? No! And did I pound the floor half the night with my new kid? Yes! And am I getting on my high horse? No!” he roared.

“Sh, sh, Gus,” Kelley McPard implored.

Stratford muttered under his breath, turned his face into a corner and folded his arms.

McPard said: “Well, Donny, you can run along now, if you want. I’m having a fingerprint man down, just in case. There’s a chance the woman left some prints around. Meantime, if you happen to recall anything you forgot about, well, wise me, wise me.”

Donahue said he would, and left.

He went to a restaurant in Locust Street and ordered a baked apple, two three-minute eggs, wheatcakes, toast and coffee. He killed an hour eating and reading the morning papers, and when he walked into the street again business was picking up. He went around to the post office and bought a stamped envelope which he addressed, in large block letters, to Police Headquarters. Across a money order blank he printed: Loftman Is Ex-Representative Rathbun. He slipped this into the envelope and dropped the envelope into the mail slot. He left the post office and walked up Olive.

When he entered the agency office, his night man was putting on a tie and Donahue asked:

“Anything new?”

“Nothing.”

“You can go home when you want, Joe.”

Donahue passed on into the inner office and, still in his overcoat, carried a telephone directory to his desk, sat down and turned to the F’s. He wrote down the telephone numbers of the various Flannigans, excluding the female members of the clan. Then he unhooked the receiver and asked for a number; and when the connection was made:

“Is Mr. Flannigan in?… Mr. Flannigan, are you acquainted with a Marcus Rathbun, one-time congressman?… You aren’t. Thank you very much.”

He hung up, waited a minute and then called the second number on his list, putting forth the same question. He repeated this procedure several times, until finally, in response to his question, a man’s voice said:

“Who—who is this?”

Donahue leaned forward and said: “Mr. Flannigan, I’d like to have you drop by my office as soon as possible.”

“But who is this?”

“I can’t talk too much over the telephone.” He gave his office address and room number, and added: “It’s vitally important and I suggest you come down immediately.” He hung up, rose, removed his overcoat and draped it on a wooden hanger.

When Miss Laidlaw arrived, a few minutes later, he said: “Good morning, Miss Laidlaw. I’m expecting a man named Flannigan. When he comes, show him right in.”

A messenger arrived with a telegram and Miss Laidlaw placed it on Donahue’s desk. It was from the home office:

What Are You Into Now Stop Clear It Up or Else.

Hackett.

He muttered, “Nerts,” and tore it into strips, tossed them into the waste-paper basket. But his forehead was wrinkled with concern and his teeth worried his lips.

At a quarter past nine Miss Laidlaw opened the inner-office door and said: “Mr. Donahue, Mr. Flannigan. Go right in, Mr. Flannigan.”

Flannigan was a short man with a torso shaped like a football. He had a chubby chin, chubby cheeks, and thin brass-colored hair, strategically combed, to camouflage a bald spot. His legs and arms were blunt and he looked fiftyish. He was a bit disconcerted, a little winded; his China-blue eyes tried to be friendly but appeared too worried to succeed. A neat, scrubbed-looking little Irishman dressed in dark, inconspicuous clothes.

Donahue sat on his desk, leaning on one braced arm. “You’ve probably been reading the papers, Mr. Flannigan. What’s your idea about it?”

“About—what?”

“We’re talking about Marcus Rathbun: Henry W. Loftman to the police.”

Flannigan swallowed. “How did you get on the track of me?”

“I phoned the Flannigans in the directory. You were the first to show any interest in the name of Marcus Rathbun. He came to this city to see someone and I ran across your name on a memo slip.”

Flannigan’s chubby face looked miserable. “I haven’t got a single idea what happened to him.”

“Could you afford to get mixed up with the police?”

Flannigan started. “Why should I get mixed up with them?”

“The point is, could you afford to?”

Flannigan looked around for a place to sit down. He sat down and ran a harried glance back and forth across the floor.

Donahue said: “Did you know Rathbun arranged to engage the services of this agency?”

“No!” Flannigan shook his head vigorously. “Positively no!”

“Well, he did.” Donahue stood up and jabbed a forefinger towards the floor. “He did. I saw him the day before that house dick was killed and he disappeared. He wanted us to fly a messenger East and bring back some money and obviously that money was intended for someone in this city. Before he could say definitely whether or not the messenger was to leave, the crime happened.” He leaned on the desk, both arms braced straight from the shoulders. “Apparently you’re the only man who knows why he came here.”