101 Mystery Stories

62 “You Listen!” Norbert Davis and Dwight V. Babcock

He was a small man, not old and not young, either, with a look of shadowy, indefinable vagueness about him. He sat down in the big chair in front of the desk and smiled uncertainly, while his eyes stayed round and worried and a little embarrassed. He took a worn wallet from his hip pocket, extracted three worn dollar bills, and pushed them across the desk with nervous little jerks.

“That... that’s right?”

Chalmers Boone slowly nodded his head. It was a long, aristocratic head that went with his broad shoulders and his straight, tall body. His eyes were a deep, shadowy blue, and they were calculating and knowing and wise in many things.

“Three dollars is right,” he said softly. “That is my fee, and for it you may talk for an hour on whatever subject you wish. Anything you say will be held confidential.”

“About that, I wouldn’t care,” said the small man glumly. “Nobody wants to hear my troubles, even if they could. Otherwise, would I be paying you to listen? No. Everybody else I try to tell my troubles to, and what happens? So as soon as I start, they start telling me their troubles! Do I want to hear about somebody else’s troubles? Ha! They should hear mine once!” He stopped and looked suspiciously at Chalmers Boone. “You ain’t got no troubles you want I should hear, have you?”

Chalmers Boone smiled faintly, and the lines around his mouth became deep, hard semi-circles. “No. None that I want to tell you about.”

“Good!” said the small man. He drew a deep breath, and his voice took on a dolorous, whining note. “So my name is Jacob Watt. I own an apartment building down on the east side, and until you got yourself an apartment building you wouldn’t know nothing about troubles. Them tenants! I tear my hair when I even think about it. Tenants! There should be a law! And if it ain’t them it’s taxes and assessments and street improvements and water pipes leaking and the Fire Department yelling about the fire escapes and the Health Department yelling about air space. And murders!”

“Murders?” Chalmers Boone inquired politely.

“Isn’t it enough troubles I got collecting my rent from a bunch of no-good property-destroying tenants, without they get murdered, too, and give my place a worse name than it’s got now?”

“Someone was murdered in your apartment house?”

“Hah! I should tell you! In the papers, all over the front pages, with pictures! In 205 they live, them two Schaffers. So old you’d think maybe they was a couple of mummies on the loose. And tight like a can of sardines! What screaming they would scream when I collect the rent, and me losing money on the deal. So old man Schaffer, he finally dies as nice and peaceful as pie, and what does he leave his wife?”

“What?” Boone asked.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars worth of insurance is what! And would she invest in some nice stock I got which I would personally guarantee? No! She laughs and slams the door in my face! But that ain’t enough she could do. Oh, no! She won’t put the money in a bank on account she don’t trust them, so she gets murdered and gets it stolen!”

Chalmers Boone moved slightly in his chair. “Have the police found the person who murdered her and stole her money?”

“Hah!” said Jacob Watt eloquently. “Them bums! They couldn’t find who did it was he lit up like a neon sign. No! All they can do is make dirty cracks and push me around. And it ain’t enough that out of all the places in the city she has to pick mine to get murdered in! On top of that, she gets me sued!”

“Sued?” Boone repeated.

“Yup. With papers served on me. Look, across the hall lives a weasel by the name of Pickering. Mrs. Schaffer, she’s so tight that she won’t even buy a paper — her with twenty-five thousand dollars! — and so she sneaks his every morning and reads it and puts it back. Only she don’t always fold it right, and this weasel of a Pickering suspects. So he watches and sees. So he won’t pay for his paper!”

“What has that to do with you getting sued?” Boone asked.

“I’m telling you! I put in his subscription, so now they tell me if he don’t pay, then I got to. They sue me in the Small Claims Court!”

“Pickering is primarily liable, I should think,” Boone said. “How can he prove that Mrs. Schaffer read his paper?”

“He can do that too, the weasel. The morning before she was killed, she takes it and tears a piece out of it before she puts it back. Pickering, he’s got that tom paper, and he says that proves it on account it destroyed the paper’s value to him and on account he will prove it by her fingerprints on it. He won’t pay. Fifteen dollars he owes! A whole year’s subscription!”

Jacob Watt sank back, looking drearily exhausted. He made a discouraged gesture.

“So it’s all said now, and I thought it would maybe give me some relief in the head. But it’s only worse on account it sounds more terrible to me when I’m saying it.”

“Haven’t you got any more troubles?”

Jacob Watt stared, aghast. “More! More! You want I should have more than I already got?”

“No. But you’ve only used a part of your hour.” Boone hesitated, tapping his long, strong fingers on the desk top. “Your story about Pickering and the Schaffers has interested me. Suppose, instead of merely wasting the rest of this fee you paid me, I go down and call on Mr. Pickering. Perhaps a third party, like myself, could make him see reason. After all, although it must have been irritating to have Mrs. Schaffer reading his paper on the sly, it hasn’t hurt him any. He got the use of the paper, too. I’ll talk to him for a few moments this evening.”

“You could talk,” said Jacob Watt gloomily, “but it won’t do no good. That Pickering is nothing but a snake in the weeds.”

There was a light at the top of the stairs — one round yellow dusty globe that looked as old as the walls and as mouldy as the strip of brownish carpet that ran raggedly back into the crawling shadows of the hall Boone’s feet creaked a little on the top step, and his nostrils seemed to pinch themselves together, trying instinctively to shut out the close thickness of the air, heavy with the odors of many years and many people.

He had to lean close to find the numerals on the faded door, and then he tapped lightly with his knuckles. While he waited, he took off his leather gloves and kneaded the long, strong fingers of his right hand, the muscular pad of his palm.

The door opened a cautious inch.

“Mr. Pickering?” Boone said.

“Uh. What d’you want?”

“My name is Boone. I came to speak to you about the paper.”

The door didn’t open further.

“Ain’t no use talkin’. I ain’t gonna pay.”

“If I could come in for a moment I’m sure what I have to say would interest you.”

“Uh.” The voice was unwilling and unconvinced, but the door slid back jerkily. “All right. Come on.”

The one room was indescribably littered and filthy, with the covers on the bed in a grayish-dirty pile and a scummy milk bottle thrown unheedingly in one corner. There was the thickly pungent smell of dirty clothes.

“Well?” said Pickering. “Well?”

He was a thin, bent man, and he had the same grayish look of uncleanliness as the rest of the room. He was wearing a shirt that was opened at its stained collar and at its black trousers. His feet were bare, and his scanty hair stuck up in a tuft on top of his head. Behind steel-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were small and bright and shiftily malicious.

Boone leaned his back against the closed door. “The woman who was murdered — Mrs. Schaffer — lived across the hall?”

Pickering squinted suspiciously. “Yeah. So what?”

“You were here the night she was killed?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t hear anything or see anything suspicious?”

“No! I told the police that.”

Boone nodded slowly and put his gloves in his coat pocket. “I can understand your claim she had been stealing your paper and reading it. Can you prove that?”

“Sure.” Pickering jerked his thumb to indicate a newspaper folded carefully in the midst of the litter on the dresser top. “Right there. It’s got a piece tore out of it, and her fingerprints will be on it. I can prove it all right, if I have to. And I ain’t gonna pay for the paper!”

“No,” said Boone. “You’re not.”

His fist shot up in an incredibly quick, expert arc. The sound of it hitting Pickering’s jaw was a sharp slap. He half turned with his arms sawing out wildly fell sprawling across the bed, and Boone knelt on him, holding him with his knees, pushing his head down into the wadded disorder of the covers. Pickering’s legs threshed wildly and vainly, and the long, smooth fingers of Boone’s right hand slid around the corded scrawniness of his neck and squeezed very slowly.

“That’s all,” said a voice. “Get up, Boone.”

Boone turned his head and saw Jacob Watt standing in the open doorway into the hall. He still was as small as before, but he no longer gave the impression of smallness, nor vagueness, either, and there was a blunt, thick-cylindered police revolver in his right hand.

“Get up,” he said.

Boone got slowly to his feet. His hands were hanging loose at his sides with the fingers moving just a little. Pickering made choking noises, twisting his head painfully.

“Sorry,” Watt said to him. “He moved too fast, even if I was expecting it.”

Boone slid one foot forward. “I don’t know—” he murmured. His fingers were twitching, and he was watching the gun in Jacob Watt’s hand with deadly concentration.

“Quit it,” said Jacob Watt. “You’re quick, but a bullet is a lot quicker. My name is still Jacob Watt but now I’m a detective on the Homicide Squad, and I’m arresting you for the murder of Mrs. Heinrich Schaffer,”

Boone said thickly: “You can’t—”

“Shut up,” Jacob Watt ordered. “This is one time you listen without getting paid for it. Mrs. Schaffer came to you to ask you to listen to her troubles. You heard about the twenty-five thousand and how she was afraid of banks. That was your chance, and you took it. You killed her and got the money. You cleaned up pretty well afterward. You knew how she had come to call on you. She showed you your advertisement, tom out of a newspaper. You took that back when you killed her. But you never thought that she might have tom the ad out of someone else’s paper. When I told you, you knew you had to get the rest of that paper, because the rest gave you away just as much as the ad itself did. You knew the police would be interested if they heard. Well — they heard.”

Boone didn’t say anything.

Jacob Watt watched him closely.

“Yeah. This time, Boone, you ran up against some expert competition. The police were acting as Professional Listeners before anyone else ever thought of doing it.”