The elevator contained the usual Monday-morning crowd returning to the grind of routine office work, men who had gone without hats on the golf course or the beaches and whose foreheads were flaming with sunburn, girls looking a little weary about the eyes trying by intensive make-up to neutralize the telltale marks of not enough sleep — people who found the gloomy confines of an office doubly distasteful after a taste of a day spent in the open.
Elsie Brand was in the office ahead of me.
I could hear the machine-gun clatter of her typewriter as I approached the door marked Cool and Lam, Confidential Investigations.
She looked up as I entered the door. “Hello. Glad you’re back. Have a nice trip?”
She swung around away from the typewriter, flashed a quick look at the clock as though determining how much of the partnership time she could afford to give to one of the partners.
“So-so.”
“Did a good job on that Florida case, didn’t you?”
“It turned out all right.”
“How’s the New Orleans business?”
“Hanging fire. Where’s Bertha?”
“Hasn’t come in yet.”
“Did she make some investigation in that Roxberry Estates matter?”
“Uh huh. There’s a file — quite a few notes.”
She got up from the chair, crossed over to the filing cases, ran her finger down the index, jerked open a drawer in the steel file, stabbed at the pasteboard jackets with the swift certainty of one who knows exactly what she is doing, pulled out a file, and handed it to me.
“You’ll find in there everything we’ve been able to get.”
“Thanks. I’ll take a look at it. How’s the construction business coming along?”
She glanced quickly at the door, lowered her voice, and said, “There’s been a bit of correspondence about the business. It’s all in the file. Some of the other correspondence is in Bertha’s office — locked up. She hasn’t sent it out to the file. I don’t know where it is.”
“What’s that correspondence about?”
“Getting you placed in a deferred classification.”
“Did she make it stick?”
Again Elsie looked at the door. “This would cost me my job if she knew about it.”
“Don’t I have something to say about that?”
“Not about that. She’d ride me so I had to quit.”
“Well, what about it? Did she fix it up?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
“It’s all settled?”
“Yes.”
I said, “Thanks.”
She watched me curiously. A puzzled frown appeared between her arched eyebrows. “Are you going to let her get away with it?”
“Sure.”
“Oh.”
“What did you expect me to do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, without looking up.
I took the file of the Roxberry Estates into my private office, sat down at the desk, and went over it in detail.
It told me nothing.
Silas T. Roxberry had done a lot of financing, putting money in various business activities, some of which he controlled, some of which were simply outlets for funds which he held for business investment. He had died in 1937, leaving two children, a son named Roy aged fifteen, a daughter named Edna aged nineteen. Because his affairs had been considerably complicated and a distribution of the estate might have resulted in a shrinkage of assets, it had been decided to assign the rights of the heirs to a corporation known as Roxberry Estates and a decree of distribution had been made to the corporation, the heirs taking stock in that corporation to the extent of their interests.
Howard C. Craig had been Roxberry’s confidential bookkeeper, had been employed by him for nearly seven years. The Roxberry Estates Corporation employed Craig as its secretary and treasurer. After Craig’s death, a man named Sells had taken Craig’s place. An attorney by the name of Biswill had handled the estate and had become general manager of the corporation. He was carrying on the business in just about the same way that Silas Roxberry had. Because it was a closed corporation, it was impossible to learn anything about the degree of success with which the business was being administered, but Bertha Cool had secured a commercial report to the effect that the business was solvent, prompt in paying its bills, although it was rumored it had, of late, made some poor investments.
It was, of course, possible that Edna Roxberry was Edna Cutler. I picked up the telephone, got the Roxberry Estates on the phone, said I was a friend of the family who had been away for several years, and asked if Edna Roxberry was married. I was told she hadn’t married as yet and I would find her name in the telephone book. The party at the other end of the line wanted to know who was talking, and I hung up.
At ten o’clock Bertha still hadn’t showed up.
I told Elsie I was going out, and went over to the offices of the Roxberry Estates.
It was possible to tell the whole story in the lettering on the doors of the offices. Originally Harman C. Biswill had had a string of offices. Silas Roxberry had been one of his main clients. With Roxberry’s death, Biswill had moved in on the estate. Having sold the heirs on the idea of making distribution to a corporation, he had become the manager of the corporation. Now, the signs on the doors read, Harman C. Biswill, Attorney at Law. Private. Entrance 619, and on 619 appeared Roxberry Estates, Inc. Entrance. Down below in the left-hand corner was Harman C. Biswill, Attorney at Law. Entrance. The lettering on the door of the private office looked rather faded. It had been Biswill’s old private office, and he hadn’t changed the sign. As he’d gradually abandoned the general practice of law for the more profitable gravy of the estate corporation, he’d changed the sign on the entrance room.
It didn’t take a first-class detective to tell that Harman C. Biswill had cut himself a very nice slice of cake.
I opened the entrance door and walked in.
Biswill had gone hog wild on office machinery. There were bookkeeping machines, typewriters, dictating machines, adding machines, billing machines, addressing machines scattered around the office. An elderly woman was punching an adding machine. A girl was pounding out correspondence on a typewriter, the earpieces of a transcribing machine dangling from her ears.
There was a switchboard and a little window marked Information, but no one was at the desk. As I came in, a light came on on the switchboard and a buzzer sounded. The woman at the adding machine came over to the switchboard, plugged in a line, said, “Roxberry Estates, Incorporated... No, he isn’t here... I can’t tell you just when he will be... No, I’m not certain he’ll be here at all today... Was there any message?... Very well, I’ll tell him Thank you.”
She was past fifty, a woman who had evidently been working all of her life. Her eyes were tired but kind, and there was about her the air of a person who knows exactly what she is doing.
I followed a hunch. “You’ve been with the corporation since it was organized?”
“Yes.”
“And were employed by Mr. Roxberry prior to that time?”
“Yes. What is it you wish?”
I said, “I’m trying to find out something about a man by the name of Hale.”
“What did you want to know about him?”
“Something about his credit.”
“May I have your name?”
“Lam. Donald Lam.”
“And what company are you with, Mr. Lam?”
“It’s a partnership,” I said. “Cool and Lam. I’m one of the partners. We’re doing some business with Mr. Hale.”
“Just a moment, and I’ll see what I can find out,”
She went into the back part of the office, opened a card index, ran down through a number of cards, pulled out one, looked at it, and returned to the counter.
“What were the initials?”
“Mr. Hale’s?”
“Yes.”
“Emory G. Hale. He may have been an attorney when he was here.”
She looked at the card again, said, “We have no Emory G. Hale. No record of ever having done business with him.”
I said, “Perhaps you can remember him. He may have been representing someone else, and it’s possible you didn’t have his name, a tall man around six feet. He’s about fifty-seven or fifty-eight years of age, has broad shoulders and very long arms. When he smiles, he has a peculiar habit of holding his front teeth together and pulling back his lips.”
She thought for a minute, shook her head, and said, “I’m afraid I’m not able to help you. We carried on rather a large and varied business. Mr. Roxberry did both personal and business financing.”
“Yes, I know. And you don’t remember Mr. Hale?”
“No.”
“He might even have been going under another name.”
“No. I’m quite certain.”
I started for the door, turned back suddenly, and said, “Did you have business dealings with a Marco Cutler?”
She shook her head.
“Or,” I asked almost as an afterthought, “an Edna Cutler?”
“Edna P. Cutler?” she asked.
“I believe that’s right.”
“Oh, yes, we had quite a large number of dealings with Edna Cutler.”
“Do those dealings continue?”
“No. They were all wound up. Mr. Roxberry did a lot of business for Miss Cutler.”
“Miss or Mrs.?”
She frowned and said, “I don’t know. I only remember the name on the books as Edna P. Cutler.”
“What did you call her when she came in?” I asked. “Miss or Mrs.?”
“I don’t think I ever saw her in my life.”
“Her account isn’t active now?”
“Oh, no. It was some sort of a joint deal she had with Mr. Roxberry. Just a minute. Frances,” she called to the girl at the transcribing machine, “hasn’t all the Edna Cutler business been closed up?”
The girl stopped typing long enough to nod her head, and then went back to the typewriter.
The woman behind the counter gave me a tired smile of dismissal.
I went out and stood in the corridor, thinking.
Edna Cutler. Many business dealings with Silas Roxberry... Yet she never came to the office... Howard Chandler Craig, a bookkeeper... Out riding with Roberta Fenn... A mysterious love pirate, and the bookkeeper of the Roxberry Estates, the one who must have had all the financial transactions of Silas T. Roxberry at his finger tips, murdered.
I rang up the office, found that Bertha Cool hadn’t come in yet, told Elsie Brand I would be in around noon, and if Bertha came in, to tell her to wait.
I went down to police headquarters.
Sergeant Pete Rondler of the Homicide Squad had always got a kick out of me. For one reason, he had had a couple of run-ins with Bertha Cool, and hated the ground she walked on. When I started working for her, he’d predicted I’d be a thoroughly broken-in doormat within three months. The fact that I’d worked up to a partnership and that, on occasion, I stood up to Bertha Cool gave him a great deal of private satisfaction.
“Hello, Sherlock,” he said as I opened the door. “Want something?”
“Maybe.”
“How’s the sleuthing?”
“Only fair.”
“How are you and Bertha getting along?”
“Swell.”
“Don’t see any footprints on your hip pockets.”
“Not yet.”
“She’ll get you in time. You can stall her off for a while, but you’re just living on borrowed time. She’ll earmark you, put her brand on you, kid you along until you’re fattened up, and then send you to the slaughterhouse. After she has your hide nicely tanned and made into leather, she’ll start looking for another victim.”
“That’s where I fool her,” I said. “I won’t get fat.”
He grinned. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nineteen-thirty-seven. Unsolved murder. Man by the name of Howard Chandler Craig.”
He had bushy eyebrows. When he frowned, they came down over his eyes like black thunderclouds piling up behind a mountain. Now I got the full effect of them.
“Aren’t you funny?” he said.
“I didn’t think I was being funny.”
“What do you know about that?”
“Nothing.”
“When were you in New Orleans?”
I hesitated.
“Start lying to me,” he said, “and I’ll bust your damn agenda. You won’t get a bit of co-operation as long as you live.”
“I just got back from there.”
“I thought so.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
He placed his forearm flat’ on the desk, raised the wrist, and slapped the tips of his fingers with an up-and-down drumming motion against the scarred desk top. At length, he said, “The New Orleans police are making inquiries.”
“There may be a New Orleans angle on it.”
“What?”
I looked him straight in the eye, said with wide-eyed candor, “A girl by the name of Roberta Fenn was riding in the car with Craig when he was killed. She’s been mixed up in another murder case in New Orleans. Police aren’t certain what happened, whether she was a victim or whether she pulled the trigger, or whether she’s just got frightened and taken a powder.”
“Two murders in five years is altogether too many murders for a nice young girl.”
“So it would seem.”
“What’s your angle on the case?”
“Just investigating.”
“For whom?”
“A lawyer,” I said, “trying to close up an estate.”
“Nuts!”
“That’s the truth. That’s what he’s told us anyway.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
I grinned.
“What’s the angle?”
“We’re looking for a person who seems to have disappeared.”
“Oh.”
Rondler pulled a cigar from his pocket, puckered his lips as though he were going to whistle, but he didn’t whistle. He simply made little blowing noises as he carefully clipped oft the end of the cigar. Then, as he pulled a match from his pocket, he said, “Okay, here’s the dope. Around the latter part of 1936 we were troubled with a man who stuck up petting-parties. He’d take whatever the man had, and if the girl was good-looking, he’d take her, too. It made quite a stink. We put men out and staged mock petting-parties and did our damnedest to bait a trap he’d walk into. Nothing doing.”
“When it began to get cold and people didn’t sit out in automobiles and neck so much, our bandit suddenly quit. We thought we were rid of him; but in the spring of ’37 when things began to warm up, our petting-party bandit was right back again.”
“Several guys-put up a squawk when he started to take their women. This bird Craig was one of them. There were three altogether. Two of them were killed. One was shot, and recovered. Things got pretty serious. The chief told us to get this bird, or else.”
“We kept baiting traps. He wouldn’t walk into them. Then somebody got the bright idea. A guy who does that sort of stuff doesn’t do it and then lay off, and then do it again. It’s a steady racket with him. So why did he lay off during the cold months? Of course, the pickings were rather slim, but there were pickings just the same, and logically you’d have thought he’d have been easier to trap when he didn’t have so much to choose from.”
“So we got the idea perhaps he’d gone some place else for the winter months. San Diego was all clear. So we looked up Florida. Sure enough, back of Miami there’d been a lot of trouble with a petting-party bandit during the winter of ’36 and ’37. What’s more, they had a couple of clues, some fingerprints, and something we could work on.”
“That gave us an opportunity. We figured this man was driving an automobile that was registered in California. We thought that he was a lone wolf, particularly that he had no woman. It was a tedious job, but we started checking the license numbers of California vehicles that had been registered in Florida, of California vehicles that had crossed through the state quarantine inspection station at Yuma in the two weeks before the first petting-party holdup took place in Los Angeles.”
“That gave us our first clue. We found a car registered to a man named Rixmann had crossed at Yuma just four days before the first of our spring petting-party holdups in ’37. We looked Rixmann up. He was rather good-looking in a dark, sullen sort of way. He’d been out of work for some time. His landlady didn’t know just what he did. He seemed to be moody and morose, but paid his rent on time, had plenty of money, and slept a lot during the day. He drove a Chevrolet coupe and stored it in a garage back of the place where he roomed. Two or three nights a week he’d go to a picture show, but a couple of nights a week he’d take his car and go out. She’d hear him come back quite late. All this was in the late summer of ’37.”
“Of course, on these petting-party holdups where there’s an assault on the girl, it’s only about one out of four or five that makes a complaint to the police. Sometimes the man can’t afford to have his name put on the police records. Sometimes the woman can’t. Sometimes when there’s rape, the woman feels that it’s poor business to make a complaint and have the newspapers publish all the facts.”
“Was it Rixmann?” I asked.
“That was the bird we wanted,” Rondler said. “We started shadowing him, and about the third night he took his car down to one of the lovers’ lanes, parked it, got out and walked about three hundred yards, waited where it was good and dark under a tree. That gave us all we needed. We had a woman police investigator who was willing to go through with it. We caught Rixmann red-handed — and I mean we really caught him. Of course, the boys worked him over some’, and when he arrived here in this office, he was all softened up.”
“He sat right over there in that chair and spilled his guts. He knew it was curtains for him. Right at the time, he didn’t care. Afterward he got a lawyer and tried to plead insanity. He didn’t make it stick. He told us that he had a very fine pair of night binoculars. He picked places where he could wait in the dark, but where there was a little light that would shine on the spot where cars would naturally be parked. He’d look occupants over with his night binoculars, and study them carefully before he went out to make his holdup. Three or four times he’d seen a couple of policemen stage a mock petting-party, and he sat watching them through his binoculars and getting a great kick out of it. With those night glasses, you couldn’t fool him. He knew it was a trap, and simply stayed there in the dark and outwaited them.”
“He told the story. He couldn’t remember all the jobs he’d pulled, but he could remember enough of them. He remembered the shootings, of course. He always did swear he didn’t pull off that Craig job. Some of the other boys didn’t believe him. I did. I couldn’t see why he’d lie about that when he was talking his neck into a noose, anyway.”
“Did they hang him?”
“Gas,” Rondler said. “By the time they got him convicted, he had grown surly. He never would talk after that first night. He got hold of a lawyer, and the lawyer told him to clam up. They pleaded insanity, and they tried to keep that pose right up to the moment of execution, thinking perhaps he’d get a reprieve. I never have felt, though, that the Craig case was closed.”
“What’s your idea?” I asked him.
“I haven’t any. I don’t have enough facts to work on, but I’ll tell you what it could have been.”
“What?”
“That Fenn girl could have been crazy about him. She wanted him to marry her, and he wouldn’t. She tried all the old gags, and they didn’t work. He was in love with somebody else and was going to get married. She took him out for a last petting party, made an excuse to get out of the car, walked around on the driver’s side, pulled the trigger, ditched the gun, and ran down the road screaming. It was that simple.”
I said, “That could have been it all right.”
“Most of the murders that people get away with are just like that,” Sergeant Rondler went on. “They’re so damn simple that they’re foolproof. There’s nothing about them to go haywire. The more people plan, the more elaborately they try to work out something that will cheat the law, the more they leave a lot of loose threads they haven’t thought about and which can’t be tied up. The bird who commits the successful crime is the one who just has one main thread. He ties that in a good, tight square knot, then walks away and leaves it.”
I said, “How about that Craig murder? Any fingerprints or anything to go on?”
“Absolutely nothing except a description given by Roberta Fenn.”
“What was that?”
He opened the drawer of his desk, grinned, and said, “I just had it brought in after we got that wire from New Orleans. She describes the chap as being medium size, wearing a dark suit, an overcoat, a felt hat, and a mask. She says he was not wearing gloves, that when he first appeared on the scene, he limped noticeably, that when he ran away, he didn’t limp. Hell of a description.”
“Could you have done any better if you’d been there?”
He grinned. “Probably not. But if Rixmann didn’t pull that job, she did.”
“What makes you think so?”
“It’s a cinch. That’s the only petting-party job that isn’t accounted for. After Rixmann was arrested, they quit as though you’d sliced them off with a knife. If someone else had been muscling in on Rixmann’s racket, we’d have had more of the same.”
I pushed back my chair, said, “You’d better light that cigar before you chew it to death.”
I saw his eyebrows come together again. “You’re getting a hell of a lot of information without giving much.”
“Perhaps I haven’t much to give.”
“And then again, perhaps you have. Listen, Donald, I’m going to tell you something.”
“What?”
“If you’re playing around with that woman, we’re going to nail you.”
“What woman?”
“Roberta Fenn.”
“What about her?”
“The police in New Orleans want her, and the way things are now, so do we.”
“What’s the next paragraph?”
“If you know where she is and are keeping her under cover, you’re going to get a spanking right where it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to be a nice, hard spanking.”
I said, “Okay, thanks for the tip,” and walked out.
From a booth in the building, I called the office. Bertha Cool had just come in. I told her I’d be there in about two hours. She wanted to know what was doing, and I told her I couldn’t discuss it over the telephone.
I went to the hotel. Roberta Fenn was sleeping late. I sat on the edge of her bed, said, “Let’s talk,”
“Okay.”
“This man Craig. What about him?”
“I was going with him.”
“Did you perhaps want to marry him, and he wouldn’t marry you?”
“No.”
“Were you in trouble?”
“No.”
“You knew the people he was working for?”
“Yes. Roxberry, and after Roxberry died, the Roxberry Estates.”
“Did he ever talk to you about the business affairs of the company?”
“No.”
I held her eyes. “Did he ever mention Edna Cutler?”
“No.”
I said, “You could be lying, you know.”
“Why, Donald?”
“If you and Edna Cutler were teamed up together and if perhaps the two of you framed that deal up on Marco Cutler, you might find yourself facing two murder raps instead of one.”
“Donald, I’ve told you the truth about that,”
“You didn’t have any idea papers were going to be served on you as Edna Cutler?”
“Absolutely not. I didn’t know where Edna was, I tell you. I just went in there and took her name the way we agreed, and—”
“I know,” I told her. “You’ve gone all over that before.”
I got up off the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m working.”
She said, “I’m going to get some breakfast, and then go down and buy a few clothes. I feel awfully naked without a nightgown.”
I said, “You’d better stay off the streets. Have your meals served up here. Get whatever things you want in the department store across the street. Don’t do any telephoning, and no matter what you do, don’t try to communicate with Edna Cutler.”
“Why should I try to communicate with her?”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you not to.”
“I won’t, Donald. I promise. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”
I said, “We’re coming back to that murder case.”
The expression on her face showed how she felt about it.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to take it up again. That masked figure that came walking toward the car wearing an overcoat was limping?”
“Yes.”
“When he ran away, he didn’t limp?”
“That’s right.”
“The figure was medium-sized?”
“Well, yes. Rather — I’ve thought that over a lot since then. I was excited you know at the time — but without the overcoat, I think he’d have been rather slender.”
I said, “Okay, think this one over. Could it have been a woman?”
“A woman! Why, the man tried to make me! He—”
“All right,” I interrupted. “That’s part of the gag. Could it have been a woman?”
She frowned, said, “Of course, the overcoat concealed the figure. He was wearing pants and man’s shoes, but—”
“ Could it have been a woman?”
“Why, yes,” she said, “of course it could. But then he tried to make me go with him. He—”
I said, “That’s all. Forget about it. You’re certain Craig never said anything to you about Edna Cutler?”
“Why, no. I don’t know that he knew her. Did he?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”
“He never said anything.”
I said, “Okay, be good. Be seeing you for dinner. ’By.”