101 Mystery Stories

94 WHO? Michael Collins

Mrs. Patrick Connors was a tall woman with soft brown eyes and a thin face battered by thirty years of the wrong men.

“My son Boyd died yesterday, Mr. Fortune,” she said in my office. “I want to know who killed him. I have money.”

She held her handbag in both hands as if she expected I might grab it. She worked in the ticket booth of an all-night movie on 42nd Street, and a lost dollar bill was a very real tragedy for her. Boyd had been her only child.

“He was a pretty good boy,” I said, which was a lie, but she was his mother. “How did it happen?”

“He was a wild boy with bad friends,” Mrs. Connor said. “But he was my son, and he was still very young. What happened, I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

“I mean, how was he killed?”

“I don’t know, but he was. It was murder, Mr. Fortune.”

That was when my missing arm began to tingle. It does that when I sense something wrong.

“What do the police say, Mrs. Connors?”

“The medical examiner says that Boyd died of a heart attack. The police won’t even investigate. But I know it was murder.”

My arm had been right, it usually is. There was a lot wrong. Medical examiners in New York don’t make many mistakes, but how do you tell that to a distraught mother?

“Mrs. Connors,” I said, “we’ve got the best medical examiners in the country here. They had to do an autopsy. They didn’t guess.”

“Boyd was twenty years old, Mr. Fortune. He lifted weights, had never been sick a day in his life. A healthy young boy.”

It wasn’t going to be easy. “There was a fourteen-year-old girl in San Francisco who died last year of hardening of the arteries, Mrs. Connors. The autopsy proved it. It happens, I’m sorry.”

“A week ago,” Mrs. Connors said, “Boyd enlisted in the air force. He asked to be flight crew. They examined him for two days. He was in perfect shape, they accepted him for flight training. He was to leave in a month.”

Could I tell her that doctors make mistakes? Which doctors? The air force doctors, or the medical examiner’s doctors? Could I refuse even to look?

“I’ll see what I can find,” I said. “But the M.E. and the police know their work, Mrs. Connors.”

“This time, they’re wrong,” she said, opening her purse.

It took most of the afternoon before I cornered Sergeant Hamm in the precinct squad room. He swore at crazy old ladies, at his work load, and at me, but he took me over to see the M.E. who worked on Boyd Connors.

“Boyd Connors died of a natural heart attack,” the M.E. said. “I’m sorry for the mother, but the autopsy proved it.”

“At twenty? Any signs of previous heart attacks? Any congenital weakness, hidden disease?”

“No. There sometimes isn’t any, and more people die young of heart attacks than most know. It was his first, and his last, coronary.”

“He passed an air force physical for flight training a week ago,” I said.

“A week ago?” The M.E. frowned. “Well, that makes it even more unusual, yes, but unusual or not, he died of a natural coronary attack, period. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve certified more heart attack deaths than most doctors do common colds. All right?”

As we walked to Sergeant Hamm’s car outside the East Side Morgue, Hamm said, “If you still have any crazy ideas about it being murder, like the mother says, I’ll tell you that Boyd Connors was alone in his own room when he died. No way into that room except through the living room, no fire escape, and only Mrs. Connors herself in the living room. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Swell.”

Hamm said, “Don’t take the old woman for too much cash, Danny. Just humor her a little.”

After leaving Hamm, I went to the Connorses’ apartment, a fifth-floor walkup. It was cheap and worn, but it was neat — a home. A pot of tea stood on the table as Mrs. Connors let me in. She poured me a cup. There was no one else there, Mr. Patrick Connors having gone to distant parts long ago.

I sat, drank my tea. “Tell me, just what happened?”

“Last night Boyd came home about eight o’clock,” the mother said. “He looked angry, went into his room. Perhaps five minutes later I heard him cry out, a choked kind of cry. I heard him fall. I ran in, found him on the floor near his bureau. I called the police.”

“He was alone in his room?”

“Yes, but they killed him somehow. His friends!”

“What friends?”

“A street gang — the Night Angels. Thieves and bums!”

“Where did he work, Mrs. Connors?”

“He didn’t have a job. Just the air force, soon.”

“All right.” I finished my tea. “Where’s his room?”

It was a small room at the rear, with a narrow bed, a closet full of gaudy clothes, a set of barbells, and the usual litter of brushes, cologne, hair tonic, and after-shave on the bureau. There was no outside way into the room, and no way to reach it without passing through the living room; no signs of violence, nothing that looked to me like a possible weapon.

All that my searching and crawling got me was an empty box and wrapping paper from some drugstore, in the wastebasket, and an empty men’s cologne bottle under the bureau. That and three matchbooks were under the same bureau, a tube of toothpaste under the bed, and some dirty underwear. Boyd Connors hadn’t been neat.

I went back out to Mrs. Connors. “Where had Boyd been last night?” I asked.

“How do I know?” she said bitterly. “With that gang, probably. In some bars. Perhaps with his girlfriend, Anna Kazco. Maybe they had a fight, that’s why he was angry.”

“When did Boyd decide to join the air force?”

“About two weeks ago. I was surprised.”

“All right,” I said. “Where does this Anna Kazco live?”

She told me.

I left and went to the address Mrs. Connors had given me. An older woman opened the door. A bleached blonde, she eyed me until I told her what I wanted. Then she looked unhappy, but she let me in.

“I’m Grace Kazco,” the blonde said, “Anna’s mother. I’m sorry about Boyd Connors. I wanted better than him for my daughter, but I didn’t know he was sick. Poor Anna feels terrible about it.”

“How do you feel about it?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed at me. “Sorry, like I said, but I’m not at all busted up; Boyd Connors wasn’t going to amount to a hill of beans. Now maybe Anne can—”

The girl came from an inner room. “What can Anne do?”

She was small and dark, a delicate girl whose eyes were puffed with crying.

“You can pay attention to Roger, that’s what!” the mother snapped. “He’ll make something of himself.”

“There wasn’t anything wrong with Boyd!”

“Except he was all talk and dream and do-nothing. A street-corner big shot! Roger works instead of dreaming.”

“Who’s this Roger?” I asked.

“Roger Tatum,” the mother said. “A solid, hard working boy who likes Anna. He won’t run off to any air force.”

“After last night,” Anna said, “maybe he won’t be running here again, either.”

“What happened last night?” I queried.

Anna sat down. “Boyd had a date with me, but Roger had dropped around first. He was here when Boyd came. They got mad at each other, Mother told Boyd to leave. She always sides with Roger. I was Boyd’s date, Roger had no right to break in, but Mother got me so mad I told them both to get out. I was wrong. It made Boyd angry. Maybe that made the heart attack happen. Maybe I—”

“Stop that!” the mother said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Under the bleached hair and the dictatorial manner, she was just a slum mother trying to do the best for her daughter.

“Did they get out when you told them?” I asked.

Anna nodded. “They left together. That was the last time I ever saw poor Boyd.”

“What time was that?”

“About seven o’clock, I think.”

“Where do I find this Roger Tatum? What does he do for a living?”

“He lives over on Greenwich Avenue, Number 110,” Anna told me. “He works for Johnson’s Pharmacy on Fifth Avenue. Cleans up, delivers, like that.”

“It’s only a temporary job,” the mother said. “Roger has good offers he’s considering.”

The name of Johnson’s Pharmacy struck a chord in my mind. Where had I heard the name? Or seen it?

Roger Tatum let me into his room. He was a small, thin youth who wore rimless glasses and had nice manners; the kind of boy mothers like — polite, nose to the grindstone. His single room was bare, except for books everywhere.

“I heard about Boyd,” Tatum said. “Awful thing.”

“You didn’t like him too much, though, did you?”

“I had nothing against him. We just liked the same girl.”

“Which one of you did Anna like?”

“Ask her,” Tatum snapped.

“Not that it matters now, does it?” I said. “Boyd Connors is dead, the mother likes you, an inside track all the way.”

“I suppose so,” he said, watching me.

“What happened after you left the Kazco apartment with Boyd? You left together? Did you fight, maybe?”

“Nothing happened. We argued some on the sidewalk. He went off, I finished my deliveries. I’m not supposed to stop anywhere when I deliver, and I was late, so I had to hurry. When I finished delivering, I went back to the shop, then I came home. I was here all night after that.”

“No fight on the street? Maybe knock Boyd Connors down? He could have been hurt more than you knew.”

“Me knock down Boyd? He was twice my size.”

“You were here alone the rest of the night?”

“Yes. You think I did something to Boyd?”

“I don’t know what you did.”

I left him standing there in his bare room with his plans for the future. Did he have a motive for murder? Not really; people don’t murder over an eighteen-year-old girl that often. Besides, Boyd Connors had died of a heart attack.

I gave out the word in a few proper places that I’d like to talk to the Night Angels — five dollars in it, and no trouble. Maybe I’d reach them, maybe I wouldn’t. There was nothing to do that I could think of, so I stopped for a few Irish whiskies, then went home to bed.

About noon the next day, a small, thin, acne-scarred boy with cold eyes and a hungry face came into my office. He wore the leather jacket and shabby jeans uniform, and the hunger in his face was the perpetual hunger of the lost street kid for a lot more than food. He looked seventeen, had the cool manner of twenty-seven with experience. His name was Carlo.

“Five bucks, you offered,” Carlo said first.

I gave him five dollars. He didn’t sit down.

“Boyd Connors’ mother says Boyd was murdered,” I said. “What do you say?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m working for Mrs. Connors. The police say heart attack.”

“We heard,” Carlo said. He relaxed just a hair. “Boyd was sound as a dollar. It don’t figure. Only what angle the fuzz got? We don’ make it.”

“Was Boyd with you that night?”

“Early ’n late. He goes to see his girl. They had a battle, Boyd come around the candy store a while.”

“What time?”

“Maybe seven thirty. He don’t stay long. Went home.”

“Because he didn’t feel good?”

“No. He feel okay,” Carlo said.

I saw the struggle on his face. His whole life, the experience learned over years when every day taught more than a month taught most kids, had conditioned him never to volunteer an answer without a direct question. But he had something to say, and as hard as he searched his mind for a trap, he couldn’t find one. He decided to talk to me.

“Boyd, he had a package,” Carlo finally said, tore it out of his thin mouth. “He took it on home.”

“Stolen?”

“He said no. He said he found it. He had a big laugh on it. Said he found it on the sidewalk, ’n the guy lost it could rot in trouble.”

That was when I remembered where I had seen the name of Johnson’s Pharmacy.

“A package when he came home?” Mrs. Connors said. “Well, I’m not sure, Mr. Fortune. He could have had.”

I went through the living room into Boyd Connors’ bedroom. The wrapping paper was still in the wastebasket. Mrs. Connors was neglecting her housework, with the grief over Boyd. A Johnson’s Pharmacy label was on the wrapping paper, and a handwritten address: 3 East 11th Street. The small, empty box told me nothing.

I checked all the cologne, after-shave and hair-tonic bottles — the box was about the size for them. They were all at least half full and old. I thought of the empty bottle under the bed, and got it; a good men’s cologne — and empty. It had no top. I searched harder, found the top all the way across the room in a corner, as if it had been thrown. It was a quick-twist top, one sharp turn and it came off. I saw a faint stain on the rug as if something had been spilled, but a cologne is mostly alcohol, dries fast.

I touched the bottle gingerly, studied it. There was something odd about it; not to look at, no, more an impression, the feel of it. It felt different, heavier, than the other bottles, and the cap seemed more solid. Only a shade of difference, something I’d never have thought about if I hadn’t been looking for answers.

I could even be wrong. When you’re ready to find something suspicious, your mind can play tricks, find what it wants to find.

I decided to see Roger Tatum again. He was working over a book, writing notes when I arrived.

“Not working? Fired, maybe?”

“I don’t go to work until one P.M.,” he said. “Why would I be fired?”

“You lost a package you were supposed to deliver last night, didn’t you?”

He stared at me. “Yes, but how did you know? And you think Mr. Johnson would fire me for that? It wasn’t worth five dollars; Mr. Johnson didn’t even make me pay. Just sent me back this morning with another bottle.”

“Bottle of what?”

“Some men’s cologne.”

“When did you miss the package, notice that it was gone?”

“When I got to the address. It was gone. I guess I just dropped it.”

“You dropped it,” I said. “Did anything happen between the drugstore and Anna Kazco’s place? Did you stop anywhere? Have an accident and drop the packages?”

“No. I went straight to Anna’s place. I had all the packages when I left, I counted them.”

“So you know you dropped the package after you left Anna Kazco’s apartment.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

My next stop was the Johnson Pharmacy on Fifth Avenue. Mr. Yvor Johnson was a tall, pale man. He blinked at me from behind his counter.

“The package Roger lost? I don’t understand what your interest in it is, Mr. Fortune. A simple bottle of cologne.”

“Who was it going to?”

“Mr. Chalmers Padgett, a regular customer. He always buys his sundries here.”

“Who is he? What does he do?”

“Mr. Padgett? Well, I believe he’s the president of a large chemical company.”

“Who ordered the cologne?”

“Mr. Padgett himself. He called earlier that day.”

“Who packed the cologne? Wrapped it?”

“I did myself. Just before Roger took it out,” he said slowly.

I showed him the empty bottle and the cap. He took them, looked at them. He looked at me.

“It looks like the bottle. A standard item. We sell hundreds of bottles.”

“Is it the same bottle? You’re sure? Feel it.”

Johnson frowned, studied the bottle and the cap. He bent close over them, hefted the bottle, inspected the cap, hit the bottle lightly on his counter. He looked puzzled.

“That’s strange. I’d almost say this bottle is a special glass, very strong. The cap, too. They seem the same; I’d not have noticed if you hadn’t insisted, but they do seem stronger.”

“After you packed the cologne for Mr. Padgett, how long before Roger Tatum took out his deliveries?”

“Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

“Was anyone else in the store?”

“I think there were a few customers.”

“Did you and Roger ever leave the packages he was to deliver unwatched?”

“No, they are on the shelf back here until Roger takes them, and—” He stopped, blinked. “Yes, wait. Roger took some trash out in back, and the man asked me if he could look at a vaporizer. I keep the bulky stock, like vaporizers, in the back. I went to get it. I was gone perhaps three minutes.”

“The man? What man?”

“A big man, florid-faced. In a gray overcoat and gray hat. He didn’t buy the vaporizer. I had to put it back. I was quite annoyed, I recall.”

“Roger took the packages out right after that?”

“Yes, he did.”

That conversation prompted me to visit Mr. Chalmers Padgett, president of P-S Chemical Corp. Not as large a company as Johnson had thought, and Dun & Bradstreet didn’t list exactly what the company produced.

Padgett met me in his rich office down near Wall Street. He was a calm, pale man in a custom-made suit.

“Yes, Mr. Fortune, I ordered my usual cologne from Johnson a few days ago. Why?”

“Could anyone have known you ordered it?”

“I don’t know, perhaps. I believe I called from the office here.”

“Are you married?”

“I’m a widower. I live alone, if that’s what you mean.”

“What would you do when you got a bottle of cologne?”

“Do? Well, I’d use it, I suppose. I—” Padgett smiled at me. “That’s very odd. I mean, that you would ask that. As a matter of fact I have something of a reflex habit — I smell things. Wines, cheeses, tobacco. I expect I’d have smelled the cologne almost at once. But you couldn’t have known that.”

“Who could have known it? About that habit?”

“Almost anyone who knows me. It’s rather a joke.”

“What does your company make, Mr. Padgett?”

His pale face closed up. “I’m sorry, much of our work is secret, for the government.”

“Maybe Rauwolfia serpentina? Something like it?”

I had stopped at the library to do research. Chalmers Padgett looked at me with alarm and a lot of suspicion.

I said, “Do you have a heart condition, Mr. Padgett? A serious condition? Could you die of a heart attack — easily?”

He watched me. “Have you been investigating me, Mr. Fortune?”

“In away,” I said. “You do have a heart condition?”

“Yes. No danger if I’m careful, calm, but—”

“But if you died of a heart attack, no one would be surprised? No one would question it?”

“There would be no question,” Chalmers Padgett said. He studied me. “One of our subsidiaries, very secret, does make some Rauwolfia serpentina, Mr. Fortune. For government use.”

“Who would want you dead, Mr. Padgett?”

A half hour later, Mr. Padgett and I stopped for the drugstore owner, Mr. Johnson. Padgett rode in the back seat of the car with Sergeant Hamm and me.

“Rauwolfia serpentina,” I said. “Did you ask the M.E.?”

“I asked,” Sergeant Hamm said. “Related to common tranquilizers. Developed as a nerve gas for warfare before we supposedly gave up that line of study. Spray it on the skin, breath it, a man’s dead in seconds. Depresses the central nervous system, stops the heart cold. Yeah, the M.E. told me about it. Says he never saw a case of its use, but he’d heard of cases. Seems it works almost instantly, and the autopsy will show nothing but a plain heart attack. A spy weapon, government assassins. No cop in New York ever heard of a case. Who can get any of it?”

“P-S Chemical has a subsidiary that makes some; very secret,” I said. “Under pressure in a bottle, it spurts in the face of anyone who opens it to sniff. Dead of a heart attack. The bottle drops from the victim’s hand, the pressure empties the bottle. No trace — unless you test the bottle very carefully, expertly.”

“In my case,” Chalmers Padgett said, “who would have tested the bottle? I die of a heart attack, there would be no thought of murder. Expected. I ordered the cologne, the bottle belonged in my apartment. No one would even have noticed the bottle.”

We stopped at a Park Avenue apartment house and all went up to the tenth floor. The man who stood up in the elegant, sunken living room when the houseman led us into the apartment was big and florid-faced. Something happened to his arrogant eyes when he saw Chalmers Padgett.

“Yes,” Mr. Johnson said, “that’s the man who asked me to show him the vaporizer, who was alone in the store with the packages.”

Chalmers Padgett said, “For some years we’ve disagreed on how to run our company. He won’t sell his share to me, and he hasn’t the cash to buy my share. He lives high. If I died, he would have the company, and a large survivor’s insurance. He’s the only one who would gain by my death. My partner, Samuel Seaver. He’s the one.”

I said, “Executive vice-president of P-S Chemical. One of the few people who could get Rouwalfia serpentina.”

The big man, Samuel Seaver, seemed to sway where he stood and stared only at Chalmers Padgett. His eyes showed fear, yes, but confusion, too, and incredulity. He had planned a perfect murder. Chalmers Padgett’s death would have been undetectable, no question of murder. No one would have noticed Seaver’s lethal bottle, it belonged in Padgett’s room.

However, Roger Tatum had dropped the package, Boyd Connors had taken it home and opened the bottle. Boyd Connors had no heart condition. Boyd Connors’ mother did not believe the heart attack. The bottle had not belonged in Boyd’s room.

Sergeant Hamm began to recite, “Samuel Seaver, you’re under arrest for the murder of Boyd Connors. It’s my duty to advise you that—”

“Who?” the big man, Samuel Seaver, said unwittingly. “Murder of who?”