Murder on the Blackboard (27 page)

The young man with the mustache stood irresolute. “Officer, is he dead?”

“I’m not the medical examiner,” said Doody shortly. “This is the patrolman’s job, not mine. I got to get back on my corner.”

The stranger bent almost unwillingly for a moment over the body, his ear pressed against the heart. He fumbled a bit with the victim’s coat. “That’s nearer than I’d want to be,” observed somebody in the crowd. The young man bent closer, and then suddenly stood up. “How did this happen?”

“Never mind that” Doody came closer. “You say you know this fellow?”

The stranger stood there, staring at the body.

“Come on, speak up! What’s your name? Friend or relative of the deceased, if he is deceased? What did you say his name was?”

“I—I don’t know, officer.”

“None of that. You said you knew him. Do you know him or don’t you?”

“I don’t know if I know him or not!”

Doody’s homely face wrinkled into a scowl. “Why, you …” He was interrupted by the speedily increasing wail of an approaching siren. The crowd surged toward the door as a Dodge special-built truck came lurching down the Avenue and skidded to a stop at the curb outside. Doody signalled vigorously with waves of his arm.

It wasn’t the white ambulance that Doody had expected, but a black truck with the red initials P D on the side.

There were three men in the front seat. Two of them wore plain blue uniforms and the other had on a Chesterfield with the collar turned up around his ears.

He slid down to the street and pushed through the crowd. “Heard you had a stiff up here,” he said casually. “Where’s it laying?”

“But I didn’t send for you, Doc. I sent for the ambulance!”

“Yeah? Well, the guy who phoned in said there was a stiff up here. I happened to be down at the Morgue and I thought I’d run up and get it over quick.” He touched the body gently with his foot.

“Pretty, very pretty, Doody my boy. Don’t weep because you didn’t get your ambulance. The interne wouldn’t have taken this carcass aboard anyways. It’s cooling off already.” He knelt down. “Well, I’m a son of a gun! As Doc Bloom’s assistant medical examiner, I’ve seen plenty of hangings in this town, particularly since the bottom fell out of Wall Street, but I never saw a guy snap his own neck before. They have to drop ’em twenty feet on a gallows to do that.”

He stood up and dusted off his hands. “Where’d you cut him down from? Hang himself in the elevator shaft?”

Doody told him where they’d found the body. “Hung himself out of the window, I guess.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, if he’d fallen from any window, he’d be bruised up worse than he is.” The Doctor signalled to his two stretcher-bearers. “Take it away,” he yelled.

They came in with a strip of canvas stretched between two poles. The rope was coiled neatly on the dead man’s chest, and they lifted their burden.

Just then an unforeseen interruption occurred.

A rasping voice, a voice that reeked with authority, came from behind them.

“Ixnay, you dopes, ixnay!”

A tall, gaunt man in a loose gray topcoat was pushing through the crowd. His lower lip protruded belligerently, and a dead cigar was clamped in one corner of his mouth.

“Put it down, you. You guys would have to go to night school for years before you’d get to be half-wits!”

The stretcher, gruesome burden and all, was dropped hurriedly to the floor again. A sheepish look came over the stretcher-bearers’ faces, and Officer Doody saluted.

“I didn’t know you were here, Inspector. It’s just another suicide, and I moved him in here so traffic could go on.”

“That’s too bad,” said Inspector Oscar Piper. He lit his cigar methodically. “Don’t you know that you ought to have a couple of plain-clothes men on a mixup like this before you can start carting the body around?” He swung around the crowded lobby. “Where’s the patrolman on this beat?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Doody. “That’s why I was blowing my whistle.”

“You blew it so long that I had to leave a lady sitting over in Whyte’s restaurant and dash out to find what was coming off. I figured it was a Red parade at the least.” Inspector Piper shrugged his shoulders. “I guess it was a lot of fuss over nothing. It’s a hell of a note when the Homicide Squad can’t have a quiet cup of tea without picking up every two-for-a-dime suicide. Sorry I interrupted, Levin. You can cart the stiff off on my authority. Get him out of this mob, anyway. How’d he die?”

“Fracture of the first and second cervical vertebrae,” said Dr. Levin. “A very neat job of hanging, I’ll say. He’s been dead not more than half an hour. I’d say less. Body temperature is—” he took out a little thermometer from the dead man’s mouth—“just a little less than ninety-six.”

“Okay. Doody, who cut him down?”

Doody told what he knew. Inspector Piper frowned. “That doesn’t make sense, man. Well, never mind. Get back to your corner before all New York gets jammed bumper to headlight—hey, wait a minute. Did you find out who he is?”

Doody nodded. “His name is
Stait,
a fellow said. I didn’t look in the pockets.”

“A fellow said? What fellow?” Suddenly the Inspector was really interested.

Doody scratched his chin, and stared around the crowded lobby. The air went out of him like a pricked balloon.

“There was a fellow here, Inspector. But he must of left without waiting to give his name. A tall guy—with a little moustache!”

“Never mind, never mind. Get back on your corner. Blowing a whistle is just your speed, Doody.” Piper turned to the waiting morgue attendants. “Go ahead, take it away. I guess he must have jumped off the first floor window upstairs, though it’s funny nobody saw him commit suicide.” Doody took his departure with obvious relief.

“If this stiff was lying in the middle of the street, he couldn’t have jumped from a window,” pointed out Dr. Levin. “They don’t fall outwards, they fall straight down. Besides, he’s hardly bruised.”

“I guess I’ve seen enough hangings to know suicide when I run across it,” said Oscar Piper testily. He leaned over the body and felt at the inside coat pocket. It was empty of wallet or of anything else. Swiftly his hands went through the other pockets. A ring of keys, a wafer-thin watch set in a transparent case of pure crystal, a linen handkerchief with the initials in blue, “L S,” three crumpled one dollar bills and some silver. That was all.

“Now that’s funny,” observed the Inspector. He was thoughtful. “That’s damned funny. A guy who carries one of those five-hundred dollar watches usually packs a wallet and some dough, not to speak of calling cards and all that.”

“Still think it’s suicide, Oscar?”

The Inspector whirled around at the voice. Standing at his shoulder was a woman of perhaps thirty-nine or so, a woman possessed of a certain unusual determination of character if her chin and the bridge of her nose were to be taken as evidence. She was dressed in the fashion of some years ago if in any fashion at all, and she gripped a well-worn umbrella firmly in one hand. The crowd pushed back discreetly to let her through.

“Hildegarde Withers! I didn’t know you followed me!”

“You didn’t think I was going to sit there in Whyte’s and eat your cinnamon toast as well as my own, did you?” Her voice was pitched low, but it had an edge on it. “The last time you heard a police alarm and walked out on me you left me sitting in a taxi outside City Hall until the Marriage License bureau had closed. I’m not letting you get away from me again that way.”

“This is just a vulgar suicide,” explained the Inspector to his lady friend.

“Yes? Well, if there’s any excitement I’m going to get in on it.” Miss Withers’ nostrils widened a trifle, increasing the resemblance between her face and that of a particularly well-bred horse. Her keen eyes, behind the gold-rimmed glasses, twinkled delightedly. “Notice the coat, Oscar, notice the coat,” she whispered. “You may find out before we’re done that this is the place for the Homicide Squad after all. And perhaps the place for me, too.” The Inspector’s face was blank.

“I don’t get you!”

Miss Withers pointed silently to the cigarette which had burned itself quite thoroughly into the furry softness of the dead man’s coat lapel.

“Did you ever hear of a man’s committing suicide while smoking a cigarette? Not while he was hanging himself, anyway. Hemp and tobacco don’t go well together—although some people like to smoke cigars that are compounded that way.” She sniffed at Piper’s fuming perfecto.

The Inspector nodded slowly. “Maybe, just maybe, you’re right. Well, this is a mess. The Commissioner will raise hell because we didn’t leave the body in the middle of traffic until they’d taken photographs and fingerprinted the whole block and so forth. But there’s nothing for it now …”

He stopped short. Officer Doody, who had made a beginning at sorting out his badly entangled corner, appeared suddenly beside him again. Someone was with him.

“Beg your pardon, sir.” Doody produced the cringing figure of the little cab-driver. “This is Al Leech, Inspector, Hackman’s Badge 4588. It was him I sent to ring in for an ambulance. Instead of doing that he phoned for the Morgue wagon. It was him that saw whatever it was that happened. I just nabbed him as he was trying to untangle his cab from the wreck down there with the car that didn’t have any driver.”

“Good work, Doody,” said the Inspector. He faced the little man.

“So you had a smash, huh? Did that have anything to do with this business up here? Where’s the other driver?”

“The other driver? There wasn’t any other driver!”

“You mean he beat it as soon as there was a crash? Or did he come running up here to rubberneck like the rest of these yawps?”

“Neither one,” insisted Leech. “I’m telling you there wasn’t any driver in that blue Chrysler. That blue open job was running wild when she bumped me—because the driver jumped out away up the street. About here, I’m thinking. That’s him there on the stretcher!”

“You’re drunk, man!”

“I haven’t had enough fares today to buy a glass of beer,” insisted the driver. “I tell you, I saw it all. It wasn’t so clear, on account of the darkness and the thick snow and all. But I saw him. He jumped out of the roadster, as if he was trying to grab the side of a bus that was sailing past I was way over to the left, trying to pass the car in front of me, which is the only reason I saw anything. I saw it all …”

“Go on, man. You saw what all?”

“I saw the guy in the yellow coat. He gave a sort of leap, like a fish going after the bait or a scared frog coming out of a puddle. I saw him rise right up out of the seat, his arms flopping. His car came on towards me, and the headlights were burning dim. But he … he … you’ll say I’m lying …”

“Go on!” Piper’s teeth were clamped into his dead cigar. “What else did you see?”

“As God is my Judge,” said Leech the hackman, “I saw him go up into the air, over the rumble seat and down to the street …
backwards!”

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER, PATROLMAN
Dan Kehoe came striding along the slush of Forty-second Street, his nightstick twirling gaily and a broad smile on his face. He waved cheerfully at Doody through the rush of traffic, and then took advantage of a lull and came up beside the traffic officer.

“It’s a great night for ducks,” he observed, knocking the wet snow from his shoulders.

“Yeah,” said Doody shortly.

“What are you so grumpy about? Sore because you have to stand here in the slush? You ought to get yourself transferred, Doody.”

“Maybe I will,” said the traffic officer shortly. “There ought to be a job open walking pavements on this beat tomorrow or the next day, if I can tell anything from the look on the Inspector’s face when he was here a minute ago.”

“Huh?” Kehoe looked up quickly. “What Inspector?”

Doody stopped the east-west traffic with a determined hand. “Piper, of the Homicide Squad. We been having a three ring circus here while you was wetting your whistle in a speak somewhere. A stiff laying in the street, with a rope around his neck, and everything else. Read about it in the papers. They just took him away to the Morgue, and if you don’t believe me look up there and see if that’s Helen Morgan leaning against the lamp post.”

Kehoe looked, and saw a uniformed cop from his own precinct lounging idly on the sidewalk in front of me Enterprise Trust, guarding the scene of the disturbance.

“I’m a son of a gun,” he remarked. “But say, I ain’t been in no speak. Lookit this eye of mine.”

Doody looked, and saw that the flatfoot had a gorgeous shiner around his left eye, of that deep, rich shade of bluish black which comes from the impact of hard knuckles.

“What did they do, throw you out of Mike’s Place for digging into the bologny dish too heavy?”

“They did not,” Dan Kehoe looked hurt. “I was walking down Forty-fourth Street about three quarters of an hour ago and I see some rough-necks haul a cab-driver out from behind his wheel and sock him a couple of times in the nose.

“So I tear up and I start to pull ’em apart, and what does the biggest of the toughs do but whale away and take a sock at me. So I socks back, and the other one jumps me. I’m going for my gun when a third guy, a little guy, climbs out of the cab and knocks the feet out from under me. He yelled something about teaching me to interfere in a private argument between gentlemen.”

“As if he could teach you anything,” cut in Doody.

“Sure. Well, I was just getting my second wind when out of the hotel comes a big guy in a fancy vest He says his name is Carrigan and he’s the manager of the outfit, which happens to be a travelling Rodeo that’s over to the Garden this week. He explained that the boys ought to be forgiven on account of how they ain’t used to gyp cabs out in Wyoming where they hail from, and if I was to book any of the boys on disorderly conduct charges why the show would have to be called off, so I finally let him talk me into being soft-hearted. We all went into Mike’s and had a beer or two, and he gave me these, for tonight …”

Kehoe pulled a sheaf of pink pasteboards from his service coat. “Box seats, too!”

“Leave me see!” Doody grabbed a couple. “Damned if they ain’t. Well, the Missis and me will enjoy these, thanks to ye. She likes the western movies and she ought to get a kick out of seeing real cowboys in action. By the looks of your eye, they got plenty action, too. You better ring in the station house and explain where you been while all the excitement was going on here, and then go and get your eye painted out.”