Ed McBaines 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine. Volume 1, No. 4. April, 1975

Armchair Detective by Bob Swain

Police Lieutenant Wilson looked from his office window, through which he’d been enviously watching the spring sun bathers in the park across the street, to see a pale, wispy looking guy in a blue serge suit standing in the doorway.

“My name is Ronald Quilt,” the little man said in a weepy contralto. “The sergeant said you’d see me?”

“Yes, sit down Mr Quilt. You reported that you had something to tell me about Jack Dicer.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been following the case in the papers, and I think I know who killed Mr Dicer.”

Crackpot, clicked the categorizer in Wilson’s mental file.

“I see. And just who are you, Mr Quilt?”

“I’m a free-lance public accountant — fully licensed, you understand, and in my spare time I write detective stories.” He giggled. “None of them have been published, but I’m getting close. Naturally, I’m what you might call an armchair detective.”

Wilson smiled grimly. “And what makes you think you know who murdered Jack Dicer?”

“Well, Dicer was a blackmailer, wasn’t he? And the society doctor, Doctor Nader, was the last person to see him alive. Twenty-four hours later Dicer’s body was found in an alley behind the headquarters of the 32nd precinct — this building. Right?”

“So far,” Wilson said, glancing at his watch.

“Jack Dicer had been dead of arsenic poisoning for twenty-four hours, so the time of death might have been established around the time that Dicer visited Dr Nader.”

“So?”

Mr Quilt held up a bony forefinger.

“It is my belief that Dr Nader poisoned Jack Dicer during the latter’s visit.”

“If Dr Nader heard your accusation, he could sue you for slander.”

“Not if I could show how he did it! I happened to have handled some tax business for Dr Nader — last Christmas it was, and I know his secretary, Miss Adams, very well. She told me exactly what happened in his office the last time Jack Dicer was seen alive!”

“Then you should know Dr Nader couldn’t possibly have done it,” Wilson said, standing up. His heavy but not unhand-some face looked slightly congested. “I’m afraid I haven’t time for your theories, Mr Quilt. Perhaps you’d better stick to your writing, and let the police do their own work!”

He escorted the little man to his door amid the latter’s protestations.

“But don’t you understand, lieutenant? Dicer was poisoned. Poisoned, do you hear?”

“Goodbye, Mr Quilt...”

But the little armchair detective had put his finger on a point that had bothered Lieutenant Wilson from the first. There were traces of Scotch in Dicer’s stomach, to which arsenic had obviously been added. And there was that bottle of Haig and Haig in Nader’s office.

He put on his hat and lumbered across town to Queen’s Hill, purposely on foot to enjoy the warm spring sunshine. Nader’s plush office occupied the suite on the second floor of a palatial old home. Downstairs, the doctor lived alone in bachelor splendor.

Miss Adams the receptionist was just putting a plasticine cover on her typewriter, for it was close to lunchtime.

“Dr Nader isn’t seeing any patients today,” she told him. A tall girl, somewhat inclined to sharpness, but with a good figure, Miss Adams obviously hadn’t recognized him.

“I’m Lieutenant Wilson,” he said, “and I wonder if you’d have lunch with me, Miss Adams. There are a few more questions I’d like to ask you.”

“Oh, yes, lieutenant. Forgive me. I’d be happy to.”

They took a taxi to an Italian restaurant near the bay, and the lieutenant waited until they’d toasted with the Chianti.

“You are acquainted with a public accountant by the name of Ronald Quilt?”

Her laugh was condescending.

“Oh, yes, I know Ronald. He did some work for Dr Nader around last Christmas, and he still calls me now and then. He’s a nice little man, and is so interested in his writing.”

“He claims that Dr Nader actually did kill Dicer.”

“But that’s ridiculous, as you know. He couldn’t have!”

“So we believe, Miss Adams.”

“Please call me Connie.”

“Connie, how many times had Dicer called on Dr Nader before the last visit?”

“Oh, perhaps five or six. Since last fall. But he was just — a patient. Doctor Nader is no murderer!”

“I’m sure he appreciates your loyalty. But would you tell me again exactly what happened the last time Dicer called?”

Miss Adams sighed, then smiled apologetically.

“Well, I sent him in to see the doctor. After about ten minutes, he came out again.”

“But wasn’t Dr Thayer in the waiting room with you?”

“Dr Thayer came in about five minutes after Mr Dicer arrived, and we were talking when Mr Dicer came out. Mr Dicer was a very loud man, you know, and he called something back into the doctor’s office.”

“Can you remember his exact words?”

“Something like: ‘You’ll see me again!’ ”

“Did it sound like a threat?”

“I think I told you before it didn’t. I’m not sure, now.”

“How was Dicer dressed?”

“In a yellow slouch hat and checked sports coat.”

“When he went out of the office, did he look at either you or Dr Thayer?”

“No, he didn’t. He had his shoulders kind of hunched, and then he was gone.”

“Now this is important. After Dicer left, did Dr Thayer go immediately into Doctor Nader’s office, or was there a time lapse?”

“Oh, he went right in... No, wait. There was a crash in the hall. I’d forgotten about that. Mr Quilt asked me the same thing. Dr Thayer and I went out to see what it was.”

“What was it?”

“A flower vase had been knocked off a console table at the head of the stairs. Fortunately, the fall merely cracked the edge, and I set the vase back in place and rearranged the flowers. They were artificial.”

“Did Doctor Nader appear while you were doing this?”

“No. We went back and Doctor Thayer knocked on his door, and he told him to come in.”

“So that there was perhaps a gap of one or two minutes while you and Doctor Thayer were out in the hall?”

“Not more than that.”

“There is a means of access to the doctor’s inner office from downstairs, isn’t there?”

“Oh, yes, there’s a staircase from what used to be the kitchen downstairs to an alcove behind the doctor’s desk, but the door is...” She stopped suddenly and looked at Wilson with frightened eyes. “What are you asking that for?”

“I’m afraid out little armchair detective has piqued my curiosity,” he said gloomily. “I shall have to go over the field again, asking some different questions. Now about that door...?”

Doctor Thayer, a stoutish man with an impassive face, was breathing heavily from his exertions on the hand ball court of his athletic club as he sat down beside Wilson in the locker room.

“When you went into Doctor Nader’s office after Dicer had left,” Wilson said after some quick preliminaries, “what was he doing?”

“Doing? He was looking over his file box and making notes. I told you that.”

“But I didn’t press you for how he looked. Was he calm? Pale? Redfaced? Breathing heavily? This is important, Doctor Thayer.”

Thayer glowered at him, and then said with perhaps too much emphasis:

“He was just making entries on his patient cards. Cool as a cucumber.”

“Then you and he left at once for the mountains.”

“My car was waiting. He came right with me, and we drove for the next eight hours up to my cabin at Sierra Butte.”

“Was he out of your sight for any length of time for the remainder of your stay there?”

“Time to go to the john, maybe. No, I stick by what I said, lieutenant. Frank and I were together the whole time. He couldn’t have killed this Dicer fellow, no matter what.”

“Once again; did he ever confide to you what kind of business Dicer had with him?”

“No. So far as I know, Dicer was just a patient. You fellows dug up the fact he was a blackmailer, but I guess blackmailers get sick too. Ask for a look at Frank’s medical records for Dicer.”

“We have. They said Dicer had cancer.”

“Then that’s it.”

Wilson spent that evening alone in his bachelor apartment, turning the pages of a brown-covered address book. It was obviously Dicer’s blackmailing account book, found behind a picture in his apartment, and the only trace, besides Dicer’s fat bank account, that he was engaged in a lucrative, if illegal, business.

But so far it had yielded no light to Wilson, except that Dicer, the little Cockney loner, had a sense of humor. His list of “customers,” nearly fifty, were all coded with phony names, among which were Doctor Lonely Hearts, Doctor Grimm, Miss Chalkdust, and the only set of initials in the book, C.A. The key to the names, Wilson surmised, were locked up in Dicer’s memory, and had died with him.

Next to each name was the amount and date of payments. From Doctor Lonely Hearts, for instance, five thousand dollars had been collected in ten five-hundred-dollar payments.

Doctor Lonely Hearts could be Nader, of course, a fashionable society doctor. Grimm? Either a hatchet face like Thayer, or, if Dicer had been that whimsical, which he doubted, a fairy — a queer. But C.A.? It was interesting to note there were no figures opposite the initials, so perhaps no collection had yet been made.

He’d already searched into both Nader’s and Thayer’s background in the hope of finding, perhaps, an illegal abortion or some other skeleton, but had come up with nothing — which didn’t mean the doctors weren’t guilty of something which could hurt their careers. Most men were, if they’d lived long enough.

Then, just as an idea occurred to Wilson, his phone rang.

“Mr Wilson? This is Ronald Quilt.” The armchair detective sounded scared. “I just had a visit from Doctor Nader. He was very angry to hear I came to you with my story, and threatened me with bodily harm. He even struck me.”

“You want to press charges?” Wilson asked, grinning.

“No, no. He made me feel very wretched, because he had been good to me, you know, giving me accounting work, and getting me more with his colleagues.”

“So?”

“I want you to forget I ever came to you. I’ll stick to my writing for kicks, like you said.”

“It’s too late for that, Mr Quilt,” Wilson said, drawing a heart on his ink blotter. “In your amateur way, you’ve started me on something I’ve got to see through. I want to hear your reconstruction of the crime, for what it’s worth.”

“You’ll give me police protection against Doctor Nader?”

“He won’t bother you again, I promise,” Wilson said, stabbing an arrow through the heart. “You know the Cactus Bar on Broadway? I’ll meet you there in a half an hour!”

The following morning at ten o’clock Lieutenant Wilson sat at his desk in the precinct office, making polite if strained conversation with three of the four people he’d called in — Doctor Thayer, Miss Adams, and Mr Quilt. At five minutes past ten, Doctor Nader entered, a tall, handsome blond man in a suit of shiny synthetic.

Nader looked at his receptionist and his friend with a brief smile, then turned his eyes contemptuously on the little armchair detective.

“I had to cancel my morning’s appointments,” he said.

“It’s regrettable,” the inspector murmured, and when the doctor had sat down, he turned to the accountant.

“I was inclined to pay no attention to Mr Quilt, when he came here yesterday morning, and told me had a theory of how Mr Dicer was killed. But now I’ve heard his story, I would like to see how his reconstruction of Dicer’s murder strikes the rest of you.”

“Ingrate,” Doctor Nader murmured.

Quilt started speaking as if he found it painful, but there was a gleam in his eye that betrayed an inner enjoyment. “I believe Mr Dicer was blackmailing Doctor Nader. After all, I was working on the doctor’s books last Christmas when Mr Dicer first appeared. It was a day when Miss Adams was ill, and there was a replacement. I heard Doctor Nader arguing with Mr Dicer. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

“We had words, yes,” Nader admitted. “I told him he had cancer, and he wouldn’t believe me. Called me a liar, and became abusive.”

Wilson nodded at Mr Quilt, and the latter continued.

“Anyway, when I read in the papers of Jack Dicer’s death, and found he was a blackmailer, I sat at once that Doctor Nader had a motive!”

“But Doctor Nader couldn’t have killed Mr Dicer” Miss Adams said.

“That’s what I thought at first, too. But I figured it out!” Quilt looked proud of himself. “What really happened was this. Doctor Nader decided to kill Dicer. When Dicer came in that last morning, he gave him the poisoned Scotch.”

“Somebody ought to give you some poisoned Scotch,” Doctor Thayer said grimly.

But Quilt was not to be intimidated. “After Dicer died, the doctor put him into his office closet, first removing Dicer’s yellow hat and checked coat. Then putting them on, he stepped outside his office door, and keeping his back to Doctor Thayer and Miss Adams, he called out to an empty office, using Dicer’s gruff voice. Then he went out quickly, knocking over the vase to draw the others out after him. He needed the time, you see, to go downstairs and come back into his office by way of the stairs leading up from the old kitchen! It was only the work of a moment, then, to get rid of the coat and hat, and sit down with his file cards at the desk, where he was when Doctor Thayer entered.”

Nader began to object, but the lieutenant cut him short.

“Then according to your theory, Mr Quilt,” he said, “the body stayed in the closet until after Doctor Nader returned with Doctor Thayer from the trip to the mountains, when he simply bundled Dicer in his car, and left him in the rear of this building to establish his alibi. Now what do you say to that, Doctor Nader?”

“I say it’s preposterous. That door from the kitchen which is behind my desk, has been nailed up for months!”

“That’s true,” Wilson admitted. “I remember the door was nailed, but I got Miss Adams to take me back to your office yesterday to reexamine it. The nails had not been tampered with. But that door was unnailed, wasn’t it, at the time Mr Quilt was working on your books at Christmas time?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Well, how about your theory now, Mr Quilt?” Wilson asked.

Mr Quilt had his mouth open, but nothing was coming out.

“The trouble with armchair detectives, they’re never penalized for being wrong,” Wilson said. “So they tend to be careless. You were careless, Mr Quilt. You assumed the door in Dr Nader’s office was open as usual.”

“Then I guess you have my apology, Doctor Nader,” Mr Quilt stammered.

“Unfortunately,” Wilson went on, “you were careless in other ways, too. You left your fingerprints on the vase when you toppled it the day of Dicer’s last visit. We just found them last evening. Then you hurried downstairs after Dicer — it was really Dicer who left — and invited him to your apartment for a drink, which you spiked with arsenic, taken, I assume, off the doctor’s own shelves. My men went over your apartment last night while we were at the Cactus and found the bottle of arsenic in your medicine cabinet.”

“He did all this just to frame me?” Nader asked incredulously.

“Oh, no. From evidence we found in Mr Quilt’s apartment, Dicer was blackmailing him for helping some of his customers to cheat internal revenue.”

“But how could you have suspected me?” Mr Quilt asked plaintively.

“Dicer listed his victims in a little brown book, coding them according to their profession, or work. He never used a person’s name. Therefore, C.A. which were the only initials in the book, could only stand for Certified Accountant.”