Cats Prowl at Night

17 Diabolical and Ingenious

Bertha Cool said to the officer, “Go in and tell Sergeant Sellers that I can’t wait any longer. I’ve got work to do.”

The cop merely grinned.

“I mean it,” Bertha stormed. “I’ve been held here for over two hours while they’re doing all their messing around. Sergeant Sellers knows where to find me when he wants me.”

“He does for a fact,” the officer said.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“It’s what I meant.”

“You go tell Sergeant Sellers what I said.”

“He’s busy. I can’t keep interrupting him with a lot of trivial messages.”

“This isn’t trivial... Damn it, I’m going to walk out.”

“I was told to keep you here.”

“And why should I have to stay here simply because I discovered a body for Sellers?”

“You’ll have to take that up with Sellers.”

“They let Mrs. Goldring go.”

“She was hysterical. They only wanted her to identify the body, anyway.”

“Well, what the hell do they want me for?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Is Sergeant Sellers finished with his investigation in the garage?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, what have they found out about the cause of death?”

“I wouldn’t know that either.”

“There seems to be a hell of a lot you don’t know.”

“There is for a fact.”

“What do you know?”

The officer grinned. “I know I was told to keep you here, and I’m going to keep you here. Right now, Mrs. Cool, I don’t hardly know a single thing outside of that.”

Bertha lapsed into indignant silence.

Abruptly the door opened. Sergeant Sellers walked in, made a slight signal to the officer, and grinned at Bertha Cool. “Hi, Bertha.”

Bertha glowered at him.

“What’s the matter, Bertha, you don’t seem happy?”

“Happy! If you think that I— Oh, hell!”

Sellers settled himself in the chair. “How did you know she was dead?”

Bertha took a deep breath. “I felt her flesh. It was cold. I smelled the odour of decomposition. She didn’t move when I touched her. I called to her. She didn’t answer, didn’t move. I realized she’d been there in that same position for three days. And then it dawned on me, Sergeant, all in a flash — like those brilliant inspirations the police get. I said to myself, ‘My God, she’s dead!’”

“Nice stuff, Bertha. That isn’t what I meant. How did you know she was dead before you went to the garage?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did you go to the garage?”

“I hate to lose anyone I’m shadowing.”

“Naturally.”

“Well, that’s the reason I came here. I wanted to look the place over.”

“I see. When you lose a person on Wednesday noon and decide you really shouldn’t have done it, you go back Friday night to the same place so you can pick her up and begin where you left off. Something like one of those motion pictures in the shooting galleries that comes to a dead stop when you pull the trigger on the gun.”

“No. Not that.”

“Well, what was it then?”

“I was just looking the place over.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Bertha.”

“The hell I will. I lost her here, and I had a right to come and look for her here.”

“How did you know you’d lost her here?”

“She turned this corner and that was the last I saw of her.”

“Then why didn’t you stop here when you were doing the shadowing job?”

“Because I thought she’d gone on to the next corner, and then turned right.”

“And what caused you to change your mind?”

“I drove to the next corner, saw she hadn’t turned right and swung my car to the left.”

“You say you saw she hadn’t turned right?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because when I started to swing my car to the right, the street was vacant. I didn’t think she could have gone to the right and got around the block.”

“So you changed your mind and swung your car to the left?”

“That’s right.”

“But the street on the left was also vacant, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And, by the same reasoning, if she didn’t have time to turn to the right and go a block, she didn’t have time to go to the left.”

“That’s why I came back out here.”

Sellers regarded her with an amiable grin. “That’s swell, Bertha. Sometimes when you’re making sarcastic comments about how long it takes the police to get an idea through their heads, you might remember that even the best of private detectives require two or three days for simple matters like that to percolate through their skulls. Now, how did you happen’ to look in this particular garage?”

“Well, I came out to look the situation over to see where she might have gone — to see what might have happened. I discovered the streets were double blocks on the right and on the left; then I knew she couldn’t have turned the corner and doubled back on me. She must have disappeared before she got to the corner.”

“You didn’t notice that about the double blocks before?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t,” Bertha admitted somewhat shamefacedly. “I thought it was just a routine shadowing job, one of those things that’s particularly unimportant to everyone except the guy who’s paying for it. When a man gets to the point that he’s hiring a stranger to shadow his wife, he might just as well write his marriage off the books, and it doesn’t make much difference whether she’s philandering with Tom, Dick or Harry.”

“Nice philosophy,” Sellers said. “I’m sorry I haven’t time to discuss marital philosophy with you right now, Bertha. Why did you consider the shadowing job unimportant?”

“I thought it was just a routine job.”

“Then why didn’t you notice they were double blocks?”

“I was just too damned mad. I was mad at myself and mad at the woman. She’d stalled along, driving so steadily and leaving herself so wide open for a trailing job that she had me half day-dreaming. I was following along more or less mechanically, and had my thoughts a thousand miles away. Then all of a sudden she pulled this fast one. Well, I was mad, and it just never occurred to me that she might have ducked into a garage somewhere.”

“Until later?”

“Until later,” Bertha said.

“You didn’t double back and look the garages over on Wednesday?”

“No, I didn’t. I looked the driveway over. I thought she might have swung the car into a driveway and gone into one of these houses.”

“And if in the driveway, why not in a garage?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t occur to me at the time.”

“Another idea that took three days to germinate?”

“Yes, if you want to be so damned sarcastic about it.”

“Just giving you a taste of how it feels,” Sellers said.

“Well, it doesn’t feel so good.”

“Too bad. Did you see the paper that was on the floor of the automobile?”

Bertha hesitated.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“Touch it?”

“Yes.”

“Read it?”

“Yes. That is, I just glanced at it — the way one will.”

“The way one will?” Sergeant Sellers repeated.

“What the hell! You didn’t think I was going to find a woman dead and not look around, did you?”

“You know that we don’t like to have people messing around, leaving fingerprints when they come on corpses.”

“Well, I had to find out she was dead, didn’t I?”

“That’s what I’m getting at. You lost her here — let’s see, when was it — Wednesday?”

“Wednesday about noon.”

“I see. You find her just as it’s getting dark Friday night. She’s slumped over in the automobile and, as you expressed it, you could smell the odour of death. You touched her and she was cold. You spoke to her and she didn’t move. And then you-picked up this paper and read it in order to convince yourself she was dead.”

“Well, I—”

“Go on.”

“How the hell did I know what was on it? It might have been something important. Something she wanted done.”

“Something that would have brought her back to life?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“What I’m getting at,” Sergeant Sellers said, “is that there are a couple of very excellent fingerprints on this piece of paper — and I suppose,” he said, his voice suddenly weary, “they’ll turn out to be the fingerprints of Bertha Cool — just when I think I’m really getting somewhere.”

“I’m sorry,” Bertha said.

“So am I, Bertha.”

“Did she die of monoxide poisoning?”

“It looks that way.”

“What do you make of it?”

“A very neat little trap,” Sergeant Sellers said. “Someone writes the woman poison-pen letters until she gets so interested she’s virtually hypnotized. Put yourself in her position. She has every dime there is in the family; perhaps she’d like to keep it. The evidence indicates that as a wife she was useful to her husband more as a depository of property than an object of affection. The chances are, she’d have liked to wash her hands of the whole business. Naturally, she’d like to keep as much of the property as possible. You can’t blame her for that. Her husband has his earning capacity. He can go out and make more money. She’s thrown out on the world. If she can find another husband, who can support her, she can get along. If she can’t, she’s going to be faced with the old routine of a separated wife, men who play around but don’t contemplate matrimony, a slender stock of cash dwindling from day to day — every day finding her that much older, her looks—”

“What are you trying to do,” Bertha interpolated sarcastically, “make me cry?”

“Make you think.”

“I don’t get you.”

“I’m looking at it from her standpoint — as her mind was moulded by her mother.”

“You think her mother was in on it?”

“The records show that Tuesday afternoon she had a long-distance telephone conversation with her mother in San Francisco. Then about six-thirty her mother sent her a telegram saying she was coming down and for her to meet the train.”

“What was the conversation about?”

“I asked Mrs. Goldring and she was evasive, but finally I pinned her down. Mabel had rung up to tell her about having received a letter stating that her husband was having an affair with a woman she’d employed as a maid. Mrs. Goldring told her to wash her hands of the whole business, walk out on Everett, and leave him holding the sack. Mabel wasn’t entirely certain that was the right thing to do. She mentioned over the telephone to Mrs. Goldring that the property really and truly wasn’t hers; it was her husband’s, and she thought there should be some settlement. That made Mrs. Goldring furious. She argued with Mabel for a while on the long-distance telephone, then decided to take the night train down and handle the situation personally. She was going to engineer a family smashup.”

“Mabel got the wire?”

“That’s right. Carlotta was there when the wire was delivered. The records of the telegraph company show it was delivered over the telephone, and that Mrs. Belder asked to have it repeated to be sure she got the train on which her mother was arriving. Then she told Carlotta and they arranged to meet the train. Everett Belder was entirely unconscious of the storm that was brewing. His wife asked him that night to take her car to the service station next morning, have the car filled up with gas, and the tyres checked, and have it back before eleven.”

“Wait a minute,” Bertha said. “She didn’t leave the house until eleven-twenty-two Wednesday morning. Wasn’t the train due before that?”

“It was due at eleven-fifteen, but it was late and didn’t get in until considerably after that.”

“How did it happen Carlotta and Mrs. Belder didn’t go to meet the train together?”

“Carlotta had some things she had to do uptown. Mrs. Belder liked to sleep late in the mornings. Carlotta said she’d do her shopping uptown and meet Mrs. Belder at the depot. We can assume Mrs. Belder telephoned to find out if the train was on time. Now, the point is that the train was first reported as being on time, then as being due at twelve-fifteen. If Mrs. Belder didn’t leave the house until eleven-twenty-two, she must have had the twelve-fifteen report, and she couldn’t have intended to do very much before meeting the train. Actually, the train didn’t get in until one o’clock.”

“Carlotta left the house about nine, did a few errands in town, got down to the depot a little early, right around eleven, and then got the report that the train would be in at twelve-fifteen. She then rang up the Belder house to tell her sister the train was late, and got no answer. She tried to phone twice. Now figure that out. That was around eleven. According to the way we had the case doped out, Mrs. Belder was sitting at the phone, waiting for that call from the writer of the poison-pen letter. You know she was there in the house — yet, when Carlotta rang, she didn’t answer the phone. Why?”

“Good Lord!” Bertha exclaimed, “there’s only one reason.”

“Yes? Let’s see if you figure it the same way I do.”

“At that exact moment she must have been murdering Sally Brentner.”

Sellers nodded. “Exactly.”

“So what did Carlotta do?” Bertha asked.

“She concluded that Mabel had left early before the twelve-fifteen bulletin on the train was released. Carlotta was already there at the depot. There wasn’t time to go back uptown and do anything, so she simply sat around the depot, waiting for Mabel to show up. Then the train didn’t get in until after one o’clock. Mabel didn’t show up and didn’t try, so far as anyone knows, to communicate with Carlotta. Now, you put that together and tell me what the answer is.”

“There isn’t any,” Bertha said. “Only way to dope it out is that murder was being committed there in that house at eleven o’clock.”

“That’s the way it looks to me,” Sellers said moodily. “Mrs. Belder must have rung up and got the report that the train wouldn’t be in until twelve-fifteen. She was anxious to get this eleven-o’clock call from the writer of that letter, yet she didn’t answer the phone at eleven. Carlotta tried to get her. The other party must have tried calling, but didn’t actually get her until around eleven-fifteen.”

“Why do you place it at eleven-fifteen?”

“I can’t place it any earlier than eleven-fifteen. The probabilities are that it was just about eleven-twenty-one, and that it didn’t take over sixty seconds for Mrs. Belder to get out of the house and into the car. Therefore, you’ve got to figure that telephone call between eleven-fifteen and eleven-twenty-one.”

Bertha said curiously, “That’s not giving her much margin for killing Sally Brentner after eleven o’clock and before she got the call.”

Sellers said, “She didn’t need to start her killing at eleven o’clock. She might have been putting on the finishing touches then.”

“But her husband came back at eleven,” Bertha pointed out.

“And didn’t go in, according to your statement, Bertha. He simply pressed the horn button on the car.”

“That’s right. You’re thinking she murdered Sally now — that it wasn’t Everett Belder?”

“It looks that way.”

“Thought you had it all fixed as being a man’s job.”

“I did, but this makes me change my mind. I’m beginning to think Mrs. Belder found out about Sally when she got that letter and went almost crazy with jealous rage. She was so worked up she didn’t even answer the telephone at eleven — and almost saved her own life. She murdered Sally, and then became the victim of a murder trap that had been set for her.”

“Then who murdered her?” Bertha asked.

Sellers scraped a match into flame and held it to the cigar he had been neglecting while talking with Bertha Cool. Then he answered Bertha’s question indirectly.

“Between eleven-fifteen and eleven-twenty-one Wednesday morning the telephone rang. Mrs. Belder was instructed to get in her car, to drive out the boulevard, to go through that last boulevard stop so as to shake off any shadow, and turn abruptly to the left on Harkington Avenue, zip into the garage, close the door and leave the motor running, waiting for a signal. A perfect set-up for a carbon monoxide poisoning. And in order to be certain that it was perfect, the person who planned it went into that garage and sealed up every crack and crevice with oakum.”

Bertha’s face showed her startled surprise. “You mean that?”

“Absolutely.”

Bertha gave a low whistle.

“Technically,” Sergeant Sellers said, “we’ll have a hell of a time proving it was murder. The woman died by her own hand — by her own carelessness, and—”

“Wait a minute,” Bertha interrupted. “There’s one other thing you overlooked. After she got the telephone call she went over to the portable typewriter and wrote out the directions so she wouldn’t forget them.”

Sergeant Sellers’ smile was patronizing. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “She wouldn’t have left the telephone and gone to the typewriter. In the first place, those directions were indelibly seared on her memory. She was working under such an emotional strain that her mind was working at high speed. But in case she had wanted to get the directions straight, she would have had a pencil and paper by the telephone. She’d have scribbled down the directions in her own handwriting, in a scrawl which would have shown the emotional tension under which she was labouring. But the murderer wants us to believe she went over to the typewriter, fed in a small sheet of paper and carefully typed out the directions. Phooey! That stuff is so raw that it smells.”

“You mean the murderer wrote out those directions and planted them with the body?”

“He must have.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you get it? So that it would be perfectly apparent, even to the dumb police the minute they found the body, that she had killed herself by her own carelessness.”

“And that’s the way it actually happened?” Bertha asked.

“That’s the way it actually happened,” Sellers said. “The gasoline tank is bone dry. The ignition switch is still on. The battery is dead. She must have asphyxiated herself within the first few minutes and then the motor went on running until it had used up all the gasoline there was in the tank. We know there were at least four gallons because Belder had put that much in Wednesday morning.”

“Then the murderer must have gone to the garage afterward and left this note.”

“That’s right. That’s why I felt so pleased when I saw there were two perfect fingerprints on it, and that’s why I was so sarcastic when I realized that it was your interference that had started me off on a false lead.”

Bertha said, “I’m sorry.”

“You should be. You’ve been in the business long enough to know that you’re not to touch anything when you come on a body. You’re to keep your hands off everything. It was all right finding your fingerprints on the handle of the door. You had to open the car door to see she was in there, dead, but that was as far as you should have gone.”

Sergeant Sellers’ voice contained patient rebuke. The man was tired, completely weary, dejected and disappointed.

Bertha said once more, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I realize that doesn’t help.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Look here,” Bertha said suddenly, “that murder was planned so the death would seem to be accidental.”

“That’s right.”

“Then the murderer must have gone out to the garage to make certain of what had happened and leave the note.”

“Correct.”

“Then why didn’t the murderer at that time pull the oakum out of the cracks that had been so carefully sealed up? That oakum in the cracks is a dead give-away.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Sellers said, “and it puzzled me for a while, but you can understand it if you put yourself in the shoes of the murderer.”

“How do you mean?”

“He had accomplished his purpose. He’d got the woman out of the way. He sneaked into the garage, probably in the dead of night, long enough to plant this note in the automobile so that the minute her body was discovered the newspapers would list it as death from carelessness rather than murder. The murderer dared to enter the garage long enough to plant that note, but he didn’t dare to stay there. He didn’t dare to be found there. If anything went wrong, and someone had seen him enter the garage and had telephoned the police that there was a prowler on the premises, and a radio car had come rushing out and caught this man in the garage — well, it was just the same as though he had been caught shooting her or sticking a knife into her. It would have been first-degree murder, and he knew it. Therefore, he didn’t dare to wait long enough to remove the caulking from the cracks. He perhaps hoped the police wouldn’t discover it, but even if they did, he felt perfectly safe, just so long as he wasn’t actually caught on the premises.”

“You mean if he wasn’t caught on the premises he couldn’t be convicted?”

“That’s right,” Sellers said. “Unless we can dig up some evidence that will show the whole thing as part of a consistent, carefully-thought-out, premeditated plan of campaign, we can never convict the murderer even if we put our finger on him, because he actually didn’t kill the woman. He could have been, and probably was, a mile away when it happened. It’s diabolical in its ingenuity and in its legal efficiency. A man simply gets a woman’s mind so preoccupied, gets her so emotionally excited, that she omits the precautions she might otherwise have taken, and brings about her own death by carelessness. Prove all those facts to a jury, and then try and get a conviction, or try and get a Supreme Court to uphold a first-degree verdict. The probabilities are, it can’t be done.”

“Have you,” Bertha asked, “some evidence pointing to the murderer?”

“Yes. Everett Belder. Mr. Belder,” Sergeant Sellers went on slowly, “the diabolically clever killer, the inventor, the perverted genius; the man who had his business ruined by economic changes, who had plenty of time to sit in his office and think; who used the imagination he has used in thinking out sales campaigns to think out a way of killing his wife by which he would be legally in the clear. The man who wrote the poison-pen letters accusing himself of affairs with various women, exposing love-affairs which would otherwise never have been discovered; the man who hired a detective so as to be absolutely certain that his wife would be shadowed to this garage. Don’t you get it, Bertha? If it hadn’t been for you tailing her, there might have been some doubt as to what happened, but as it is, we fix the time of death almost to the minute — a time at which Everett Belder was sitting in the barber’s shop having his face massaged, his nails manicured, his hair trimmed. A very pretty picture, isn’t it?”

“In the barber’s shop?” Bertha asked somewhat lamely.

“In the barber’s shop, Bertha, and don’t be surprised about that, because we’ve already checked up on the story. In the barber’s shop, where he was smart enough to walk away and forget his overcoat, so that the barber would be absolutely certain to remember the time. Don’t act innocent, sweetheart, because the barber remembers you coming in and checking up on the coat.”

Bertha for once was at a loss for words.

“Some other woman,” Sellers said, “who came in about twenty minutes after you did, said that Mr. Belder had forgotten his overcoat and had asked her to drop in and pick it up for him.”

Expression struggled all over Bertha’s face.

“Seems to surprise you,” Sellers said. “It shouldn’t. You should have realized by this time that he had a feminine accomplice.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Someone who could run his wife’s typewriter with a professional touch; but above all, someone who could put through the telephone call to his wife and lure her out to the garage. No, Bertha, that’s the one weak link in his entire scheme. He needed a female accomplice. And if I can find that woman — and I’m going to find her and make her talk — I may be able to convict Everett Belder. This is one case where there isn’t any mystery about who committed the murder. The only question is whether I can get the evidence that will prove that it is deliberate murder and send the perpetrator of it to the San Quentin gas chamber.”

Bertha managed to say, “I see.”

“And,” Sellers went on, “I just want to tell you, Bertha, that if you get in my way on this thing, that if you tamper with any more evidence, or ball the thing up for me any more, I’m going to flatten you out as though you’d been run over by a steamroller. That’s all. You may go now.”