The Wrong Murder Read online

  Jake carried the box over to the corner of the room where there was a little more light and stood turning it over in his hands. It was about the size of an ordinary dispatch box, or petty-cash box.

  Of the few belongings of the late Joshua Gumbril that were in his room, the box was the only item that looked expensive. If Joshua Gumbril had gone so far as to buy an expensive box, obviously the contents must be something really worth investigating.

  There was a handful of miscellaneous keys in his pockets; he tried them all unsuccessfully. Then he experimented a little with a penknife. The box declined to open.

  Oh well, Malone would find a way to open it. The simplest thing to do was to carry it away with him.

  He had tucked it under his arm and started for the door when the knock came. A loud voice called, “Who’s in there?”

  Jake stood perfectly still. The doorknob was rattled violently, he heard a key inserted in the lock, and thanked heaven he’d had the foresight to shove back the bolt.

  There was a brief murmuring, and the voice called again, “Hey, you in there. Open that door!”

  Another period of murmuring followed. Jake caught the words, “Get the janitor,” and the sound of heavy footsteps going hastily down the hall.

  The box was the problem. He could walk his way out with no trouble, he told himself confidently. The box, though, was going to create difficulties. He looked desperately around the room for a hiding place.

  There wasn’t a single place in the room big enough to hide a one-cent stamp.

  He ran silently to the window and threw it open. Perhaps he could drop the box outside, and return for it as soon as the coast was clear.

  A violent pounding began on the door.

  Outside the window Jake discovered an indented ledge, about ten inches wide. Reaching out, he shoved the box along as far as his arm would go, and hastily brushed snow over it. There it would be easy to find again, and there wasn’t the chance that some curious person going up the alley would find and make off with it.

  He closed the window softly and dusted the snow from his sleeve.

  “Hey! Open that door!” The voice was a bellow this time.

  Drawing a long breath, Jake crossed the room, pulled back the bolt, and opened the door.

  There was a little crowd of curious onlookers in the hall. Two policemen stepped into the room and looked Jake over. One of them said, “Well, Joe, I guess we got him.”

  Jake ran a hand through his red hair, rubbed one eye, yawned, and said, “What the hell do you guys want?”

  One of the policemen looked at him blankly and said, “Huh?” The other turned toward the door and barked, “Beat it, all of you.”

  Jake looked in a bewildered manner from one to the other and asked, “What’s the big idea?”

  The larger of the policemen, the one with the red face, stared at Jake and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Taking a nap,” Jake said promptly.

  “And just how,” asked the smaller policeman with nasty politeness, “do you happen to be taking this here nap in this here room?”

  “I’m waiting for Mr. Gumbril. He was out when I got here, and I decided to take a nap while I was waiting for him.”

  “Oh, you’re waiting for Mr. Gumbril, are you?” the red-faced policeman said icily.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Anything wrong with that?” He reached for a cigarette.

  The larger of the two knocked Jake’s hand away from his pocket in one quick move, snapping, “Cut that out!” He pinned Jake’s arms down while the other policeman patted him swiftly and expertly for weapons and found none.

  “What’s the matter with my getting a cigarette?” Jake demanded in an injured tone. No one answered. He got one out, lighted it, flipped his match toward the wastebasket, and said irritably, “What goes on, anyway?”

  “You’re gonna have one hell of a long wait,” the smaller policeman said. “Gumbril’s dead.”

  Jake managed to look surprised.

  “How long you been here?”

  Jake said, “I don’t know. I forgot to punch the time clock when I came in.”

  “Haven’t you seen the afternoon papers?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  The red-faced policeman decided to make the duet a trio. “Where were you all afternoon?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Yeah?” The cop glared at him, then glanced around the room. “Do you always take your naps on the inside of the mattress?”

  Jake looked at the bed as though he were noticing for the first time that the mattress was ripped open.

  “Mice?” he suggested hopefully.

  “I suppose,” the cop said, “you’re gonna stand there and tell us the room was all messed up like this when you got here.” He cast an eloquent eye around him. “Bedclothes all over the floor. Everything pulled outa the dresser drawers. Laundry bag turned inside out. I suppose the mice done that too.”

  Jake shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe Gumbril was looking for something.”

  The cop pointed to the chair, and snarled, “Sit down and shut up.”

  Jake sat down and smoked his cigarette while he watched the two men search the room.

  The red-faced cop finally kicked the closet-door shut, cursed, and said, “If there ever was anything here, this guy has it.”

  “We shoulda searched him before we started on the room,” his companion said, looking at Jake. “Stand up, you.”

  “Got a warrant?” Jake asked pleasantly, getting to his feet.

  “Warrant, hell!”

  Jake agreeably allowed himself to be searched. The policemen found nothing that interested them save the plane reservations.

  “Planning a getaway,” one of them muttered.

  Jake suggested politely that since they had searched him and found nothing even remotely incriminating, he might as well be on his way. His suggestion, as he had expected, was ignored.

  A short time later he was ushered into the presence of Dan Von Flanagan of the Homicide Bureau by the red-faced policeman.

  “We found this blitzkrieg in Gumbril’s room. He’d already tore the place apart. Probably looking for Gumbril’s dough. He didn’t find it, or anything else.”

  Von Flanagan looked up with morose, weary eyes. “Well, well, Jake Justus! Nice to see you again. Did you murder Joshua Gumbril, and if so, why?”

  Chapter Ten

  Daniel Von Flanagan of the Homicide Bureau didn’t like murders. He didn’t like murderers, either.

  In the first place, he’d never wanted to be a policeman. He’d even gone to court and had the “Von” added to his name because just plain Flanagan sounded too much like a policeman. In the second place, he’d never wanted to reach his present position on the homicide squad. Since both things had happened to him anyway, he had a deep personal conviction that every murder in the city of Chicago was committed purely to annoy and harass him, and that murderers attempted to conceal the evidence of their crimes only to make his life a more difficult and disagreeable one.

  Now the big, half-bald man gazed sourly at Jake Justus. “How the hell did you get mixed up in this?”

  Jake looked deeply injured, and said nothing.

  The red-faced policeman answered for him. “He says he was waiting for Gumbril. He says he didn’t know Gumbril was a’ready murdered. He says the room was a’ready all tore up when he got there.” He turned a suspicious glare on Jake. “If nobody was there when you got there, how did you get in the room?”

  “I opened the door and walked in,” Jake said.

  The policeman blinked twice, thinking that over. “Then why did you lock the door after you got in?”

  “To keep from being disturbed by a lot of noisy cops while I was getting my beauty sleep.”

  Von Flanagan interrupted whatever the policeman was about to say with a wave of his hand. “Did you go there to meet Gumbril?”

  Jake lit a cigarette very deliberately, stared at the m
atch for a moment, blew it out, and flicked it in the direction of the wastebasket. “No, I didn’t.” He paused, looked squarely at Von Flanagan, and added, “I’ve never seen Gumbril in my life.”

  Von Flanagan gulped. “Then why did you tell Kluchetsky you were waiting for him?”

  “To keep from being bothered with a lot of dumb questions,” Jake said.

  The policeman’s red face turned cerise, then crimson, and finally purple. “I’ll ask you one more dumb question while I’m about it, wise guy.”

  “Go ahead. Ask two,” Jake said amiably.

  “Where were you at fifteen minutes after two this afternoon?”

  “In a tailor shop on Division Street having my pants pressed,” Jake said. “If I shot Gumbril, I must have gone down to State and Madison in my underwear.”

  Von Flanagan said wearily, “Nobody’s accusing you of anything.”

  “Then make this guy quit badgering me,” Jake said.

  Von Flanagan nodded to the policeman. “Beat it, Kluchetsky. I’ll talk to this guy.”

  Kluchetsky strode to the door, paused there, turned around, and said, “If you should be needing a good mousetrap—”

  “Go on,” Von Flanagan said. “Beat it.”

  The door’s slam was a profane comment.

  Jake selected the most comfortable chair, settled down in it, and stretched out his long legs. He looked at Von Flanagan cheerfully. “Who shot Gumbril?”

  “I wish to God you had,” the officer said savagely.

  Jake sighed. “I guess nobody likes me. Sorry to disappoint you, but I didn’t shoot him.”

  “What were you doing in his room?”

  “I was looking for matches. I was going down State Street and I found I was out of matches, and so—”

  For a few seconds Von Flanagan was almost unnecessarily profane.

  “Well,” Jake said, shrugging his shoulders, “you asked me.”

  The officer decided to try another approach. “Now look here, Jake Justus. I’m willing to be nice about this if you are. Why can’t we just be friendly and talk it over? Certainly you haven’t anything against me.”

  “Not a damn thing,” Jake said, “except keeping Helene in jail all night just after we were married. A hell of a wedding night, with my bride locked up in the hoosegow.”

  “That was nothing but a joke,” Von Flanagan said wearily. “Forget it.”

  “Sure. You forget all about my being in Gumbril’s room tonight, too. That was just another joke. I’ll go on home, we’ll drop the whole thing and call it a day.”

  “Are you going to answer my question or not?”

  “What question?” Jake asked innocently.

  “What were you doing in Gumbril’s room?” Von Flanagan roared at the top of his voice.

  “Oh, that,” Jake said sunnily, as though he had forgotten it. “Well, you see, I’d read about the murder in the afternoon paper, and I thought I’d just gather a little material for a magazine story. I’m a married man now, you know, and I’ve got to start thinking about earning money. You know how those things are.” He knew his voice was not convincing, but he hadn’t expected it to be.

  There was a brief silence. Von Flanagan rose, kicked back his chair, chewed savagely at a cigar for a moment or so. He had the appearance of a man who was counting ten slowly to himself.

  At last he sat down at his desk, with an outward air of calm.

  “I never wanted to be a p’liceman. I never would of been a p’liceman if the alderman hadn’t borrowed money from my uncle to set his brother-in-law up in the restaurant business. If it hadn’t of been for that, I’d of been an undertaker, like I intended to be in the first place. So now here I am whether I want to be or not, and all people do is go around trying to make things hard for me.”

  Jake listened respectfully.

  “One of these days, by God,” Von Flanagan said forcefully, “I’m going to retire and buy me one of those Georgia pecan orchards. That’s the kind of a life—” He paused and realized he was wandering from the subject at hand.

  “This guy Gumbril,” he said suddenly, his voice rising in a slow but steady crescendo, “this guy Gumbril—there must of been a thousand people wanted to kill him. So somebody goes to work and shoots him right on the busiest corner in the city, on the busiest day of the year, when everybody is in too much of a hurry to see what’s going on. And when we finally get this guy identified as Gumbril, what happens? We get over to his office and find somebody’s already been there and carried off everything that might have told us something.”

  Jake drew a long sigh of relief. Malone had gotten there first after all.

  “And now you,” said the police officer wildly. “Why do people have to go to work and make things harder for me than they already are?”

  Jake thought it more tactful to say nothing.

  Von Flanagan drew one long, slow breath. When he spoke again his voice was calm, with a kind of controlled desperation underneath.

  “What—were—you—doing—in—Gumbril’s—room?”

  Jake looked at him with wide, wounded eyes. “I told you.”

  The police officer rose to his feet again, walked to the door, and paused, one hand on the doorknob. “For the last time, will you tell me what you were doing in Gumbril’s room?”

  “I told you,” Jake repeated quietly and stubbornly.

  Von Flanagan stared at him for an angry moment, then opened the door and bellowed, “Kluchetsky!” Heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. “Hold this guy for questioning. Don’t let him talk to nobody.”

  This time it was Jake who rose to his feet. “Oh now, Von Flanagan. Be reasonable.”

  “If I’d been any more reasonable,” Von Flanagan growled, “it would have killed me.” He took his hat and coat from the rack by the door. “You can stay in the can until you want to talk. I don’t care if you rot there.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “There’s nothing that can be done until morning, Helene,” John J. Malone said for the twenty-third time. “Von Flanagan has gone home to bed, and if I bother him now, he’ll only get sore. I can spring Jake tomorrow without any trouble, but in the meantime, just go to bed and curl up with a good book.”

  “I never thought I’d live to see the day when my daughter was married to a jailbird,” George Brand said, stroking his beard meditatively. He gazed into the slender glass in his hand, closed his eyes, braced himself, shuddered, said, “Happy days,” and drank.

  “At least Jake didn’t kick a policeman in the stomach,” Helene observed acidly. “Not but what it’s a neat trick. I never knew you could do it.”

  George Brand’s face brightened. “I’ll show you how it’s done, if Mr. Malone—”

  “Never mind,” Helene said hastily. She looked appealingly at the lawyer. “Listen, Malone. Isn’t there anybody besides Von Flanagan? Couldn’t you call up somebody? How about the mayor? Can’t you do something?”

  For the twenty-fourth time Malone said wearily, “There’s nothing can be done until morning. You just curl up with a good book and—”

  “Do you know any book that’s that good?”

  Partridge, who had been sent for by George Brand (“You never know when you’re going to need him”), came out from the kitchen with a new tray of highballs. He wore the expression of one who has been through a world-shaking experience and anticipated another at any moment.

  Helene strolled over to the table, picked up a glass, and gazed into it as though it were a crystal ball. “If either of you had found anything, I wouldn’t feel so melancholy.”

  “How do you know Jake didn’t?” Malone growled. “I said all I found was Gumbril’s bankbooks.” He scowled. “It’s hard to imagine anybody with all that dough living at the Fairfax Hotel. He certainly had very saving habits. He didn’t collect the main take at the time of the Ogletree kidnaping, either. There were no large deposits around that time. There have been five-hundred-buck deposits at intervals since then, but nothing total
ing the amount paid for the ransom.”

  “Maybe he spent it,” Helene suggested.

  Malone snorted. “Sure. On fat women and low horses. On low women and fat horses.” He paused. “The hell with it.” He paused again. “If he did handle the kidnaping for someone else, he didn’t make much out of it. That’s about the only thing I learned, except that he’d accumulated a lot more dough than anyone is entitled to in a lifetime. Too bad I decided to become a lawyer and make an honest living.” He shook his head sadly.

  This time Helene snorted.

  “I hope this teaches Jake a lesson anyway,” Malone said severely. “Maybe he’ll learn not to cross his conclusions before he jumps at them.”

  “Do you know what you mean?” Helene demanded.

  “I mean that Mona McClane, wanting to attract attention and trying to make clever conversation, thought it would be smart to bet Jake she could commit a murder and get away with it. The chances are she didn’t mean it any more than I mean it when I say I’m sorry Jake’s in jail.”

  Helene swore at him in a polite voice.

  “Meanwhile somebody trails Gumbril to the corner of State and Madison Streets—or else happens to run into him there—and shoots him. Jake reads about it in the newspapers and immediately gets all steamed up. Whereas the whole thing is just a crazy coincidence.

  “As for Mona McClane,” the lawyer went on, draining his glass and setting it down with a magnificent gesture that rolled it off the table, “as for her, she’s probably forgotten the whole conversation. She probably let everything that was said go in one ear and out the other like water off a duck’s back.”

  “Louder, please,” said George Brand.

  Malone blinked once or twice and said, “In one ear and out the other like a duck on the water. Like a duck on the rocks.”

  He took a long breath, tried once more, and declared triumphantly, “Like duck soup.”

  “Malone,” Helene said severely, “you’re drunk.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the lawyer told her solemnly.