Red Harvest (3 page)

At the office of the
Herald,
I hunted up the murdered man’s secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.

She said she hadn’t known anything about my being called to Personville by her employer.

“But then,” she explained, “Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was—I don’t think he trusted anybody here, completely.”

“Not you?”

She flushed and said:

“No. But of course he had been here such a short while and didn’t know any of us very well.”

“There must have been more to it than that.”

“Well,” she bit her lip and made a row of forefinger prints down the polished edge of the dead man’s desk, “his father wasn’t—wasn’t in sympathy with what he was doing. Since his father really owned the papers, I suppose it was natural for Mr. Donald to think some of the employes might be more loyal to Mr. Elihu than to him.”

“The old man wasn’t in favor of the reform campaign? Why did he stand for it, if the papers were his?”

She bent her head to study the finger prints she had made. Her voice was low.

“It’s not easy to understand unless you know—The last time Mr. Elihu was taken sick he sent for Donald—Mr. Donald. Mr. Donald had lived in Europe most of his life, you know. Dr. Pride told Mr. Elihu that he’d have to give up the management of his affairs, so he cabled his son to come home. But when Mr. Donald got here Mr. Elihu couldn’t make up his mind to let go of everything. But he wanted Mr. Donald to stay here, so he gave him the newspapers—that is, made him publisher. Mr. Donald liked that. He had been interested in journalism in Paris. When he found out how terrible everything was here—in civic affairs and so on—he started that reform campaign. He didn’t know—he had been away since he was a boy—he didn’t know—”

“He didn’t know his father was in it as deep as anybody else,” I helped her along.

She squirmed a little over her examination of the finger prints, didn’t contradict me, and went on:

“Mr. Elihu and he had a quarrel. Mr. Elihu told him to stop stirring things up, but he wouldn’t stop. Maybe he would have stopped if he had known—all there was to know. But I don’t suppose it would have occurred to him that his father was really seriously implicated. And his father wouldn’t tell him. I suppose it would be hard for a father to tell a son a thing like that. He threatened to take the papers away from Mr. Donald. I don’t know whether he intended to or not. But he was taken sick again, and everything went along as it did.”

“Donald Willsson didn’t confide in you?” I asked.

“No.” It was almost a whisper.

“Then, you learned all this where?”

“I’m trying—trying to help you learn who murdered him,” she said earnestly. “You’ve no right to—”

“You’ll help me most just now by telling me where you learned all this,” I insisted.

She stared at the desk, chewing her lower lip. I waited. Presently she said:

“My father is Mr. Willsson’s secretary.”

“Thanks.”

“But you mustn’t think that we—”

“It’s nothing to me,” I assured her. “What was Willsson doing in Hurricane Street last night when he had a date with me at his house?”

She said she didn’t know. I asked her if she had heard him tell me, over the phone, to come to his house at ten o’clock. She said she had.

“What did he do after that? Try to remember every least thing that was said and done from then until you left at the end of the day.”

She leaned back in her chair, shut her eyes and wrinkled her forehead.

“You called up—if it was you he told to come to his house—at about two o’clock. After that Mr. Donald dictated some letters, one to a paper mill, one to Senator Keefer about some changes in post office regulations, and—Oh, yes! He went out for about twenty minutes, a little before three. And before he went he wrote out a check.”

“Who for?”

“I don’t know, but I saw him writing it.”

“Where’s his check book? Carry it with him?”

“It’s here.” She jumped up, went around to the front of his desk, and tried the top drawer. “Locked.”

I joined her, straightened out a wire clip, and with that and a blade of my knife fiddled the drawer open.

The girl took out a thin, flat First National Bank check book. The last used stub was marked $5,000. Nothing else. No name. No explanation.

“He went out with this check,” I said, “and was gone twenty minutes? Long enough to get to the bank and back?”

“It wouldn’t have taken him more than five minutes to get there.”

“Didn’t anything else happen before he wrote out the check? Think. Any messages? Letters? Phone calls?”

“Let’s see.” She shut her eyes again. “He was dictating some mail and—Oh, how stupid of me! He did have a phone call. He said: ‘Yes, I can be there at ten, but I shall have to hurry away.’ Then again he said: ‘Very well, at ten.’ That was all he said except, ‘Yes, yes,’ several times.”

“Talking to a man or a woman?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Think. There’d be a difference in his voice.”

She thought and said:

“Then it was a woman.”

“Which of you—you or he—left first in the evening?”

“I did. He—I told you my father is Mr. Elihu’s secretary. He and Mr. Donald had an engagement for the early part of the evening—something about the paper’s finances. Father came in a little after five. They were going to dinner together, I think.”

That was all the Lewis girl could give me. She knew nothing that would explain Willsson’s presence in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, she said. She admitted knowing nothing about Mrs. Willsson.

We frisked the dead man’s desk, and dug up nothing in any way informative. I went up against the girls at the switchboard, and learned nothing. I put in an hour’s work on messengers, city editors, and the like, and my pumping brought up nothing. The dead man, as his secretary said, had been a good hand at keeping his affairs to himself.

At the First National Bank I got hold of an assistant cashier named Albury, a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so.

“I certified the check for Willsson,” he said after I had explained what I was up to. “It was drawn to the order of Dinah Brand—$5,000.”

“Know who she is?”

“Oh, yes! I know her.”

“Mind telling me what you know about her?”

“Not at all. I’d be glad to, but I’m already eight minutes overdue at a meeting with—”

“Can you have dinner with me this evening and give it to me then?”

“That’ll be fine,” he said.

“Seven o’clock at the Great Western?”

“Righto.”

“I’ll run along and let you get to your meeting, but tell me, has she an account here?”

“Yes, and she deposited the check this morning. The police have it.”

“Yeah? And where does she live?”

“1232 Hurricane Street.”

I said: “Well, well!” and, “See you tonight,” and went away.

My next stop was in the office of the chief of police, in the City Hall.

Noonan, the chief, was a fat man with twinkling greenish eyes set in a round jovial face. When I told him what I was doing in his city he seemed glad of it. He gave me a hand-shake, a cigar and a chair.

“Now,” he said when we were settled, “tell me who turned the trick.”

“The secret’s safe with me.”

“You and me both,” he said cheerfully through smoke. “But what do you guess?”

“I’m not good at guessing, especially when I haven’t got the facts.”

“’Twon’t take long to give you all the facts there is,” he said. “Willsson got a five-grand check in Dinah Brand’s name certified yesterday just before bank closing. Last night he was killed by slugs from a .32 less than a block from her house. People that heard the shooting saw a man and a woman bending over the remains. Bright and early this morning the said Dinah Brand deposits the said check in the said bank. Well?”

“Who is this Dinah Brand?”

The chief dumped the ash off his cigar in the center of his desk, flourished the cigar in his fat hand, and said:

“A soiled dove, as the fellow says, a de luxe hustler, a big-league gold-digger.”

“Gone up against her yet?”

“No. There’s a couple of slants to be taken care of first. We’re keeping an eye on her and waiting. This I’ve told you is under the hat.”

“Yeah. Now listen to this,” and I told him what I had seen and heard while waiting in Donald Willsson’s house the previous night.

When I had finished the chief bunched his fat mouth, whistled softly, and exclaimed:

“Man, that’s an interesting thing you’ve been telling me! So it was blood on her slipper? And she said her husband wouldn’t be home?”

“That’s what I took it for,” I said to the first question, and, “Yeah,” to the second.

“Have you done any talking to her since then?” he asked.

“No. I was up that way this morning, but a young fellow named Thaler went into the house ahead of me, so I put off my visit.”

“Grease us twice!” His greenish eyes glittered happily. “Are you telling me the Whisper was there?”

“Yeah.”

He threw his cigar on the floor, stood up, planted his fat hands on the desk top, and leaned over them toward me, oozing delight from every pore.

“Man, you’ve done something,” he purred. “Dinah Brand is this Whisper’s woman. Let’s me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow.”

We climbed out of the chief’s car in front of Mrs. Willsson’s residence. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crêpe hanging over the bell. Then he said, “Well, what’s got to be done has got to be done,” and we went up the steps.

Mrs. Willsson wasn’t anxious to see us, but people usually see the chief of police if he insists. This one did. We were taken upstairs to where Donald Willsson’s widow sat in the library. She was in black. Her blue eyes had frost in them.

Noonan and I took turns mumbling condolences and then he began:

“We just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. For instance, like where’d you go last night?”

She looked disagreeably at me, then back to the chief, frowned, and spoke haughtily:

“May I ask why I am being questioned in this manner?”

I wondered how many times I had heard that question, word for word and tone for tone, while the chief, disregarding it, went on amiably:

“And then there was something about one of your shoes being stained. The right one, or maybe the left. Anyways it was one or the other.”

A muscle began twitching in her upper lip.

“Was that all?” the chief asked me. Before I could answer he made a clucking noise with his tongue and turned his genial face to the woman again. “I almost forgot. There was a matter of how you knew your husband wouldn’t be home.”

She got up, unsteadily, holding the back of her chair with one white hand.

“I’m sure you’ll excuse—”

“’S all right.” The chief made a big-hearted gesture with one beefy paw. “We don’t want to bother you. Just where you went, and about the shoe, and how you knew he wasn’t coming back. And, come to think of it, there’s another—What Thaler wanted here this morning.”

Mrs. Willsson sat down again, very rigidly. The chief looked at her. A smile that tried to be tender made funny lines and humps in his fat face. After a little while her shoulders began to relax, her chin went lower, a curve came in her back.

I put a chair facing her and sat on it.

“You’ll have to tell us, Mrs. Willsson,” I said, making it as sympathetic as I could. “These things have got to be explained.”

“Do you think I have anything to hide?” she asked defiantly, sitting up straight and stiff again, turning each word out very precisely, except that the s’s were a bit slurred. “I did go out. The
stain was blood. I knew my husband was dead. Thaler came to see me about my husbands death. Are your questions answered now?”

“We knew all that,” I said. “We’re asking you to explain them.”

She stood up again, said angrily:

“I dislike your manner. I refuse to submit to—”

Noonan said:

“That’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Willsson, only we’ll have to ask you to go down to the Hall with us.”

She turned her back to him, took a deep breath and threw words at me:

“While we were waiting here for Donald I had a telephone call. It was a man who wouldn’t give his name. He said Donald had gone to the home of a woman named Dinah Brand with a check for five thousand dollars. He gave me her address. Then I drove out there and waited down the street in the car until Donald came out.

“While I was waiting there I saw Max Thaler, whom I knew by sight. He went to the woman’s house, but didn’t go in. He went away. Then Donald came out and walked down the street. He didn’t see me. I didn’t want him to. I intended to drive home—get here before he came. I had just started the engine when I heard the shots, and I saw Donald fall. I got out of the car and ran over to him. He was dead. I was frantic. Then Thaler came. He said if I were found there they would say I had killed him. He made me run back to the car and drive home.”