Great American Detective Stories

Black Murder by Anthony Boucher

We are happy to announce that, as the result of many months of pressure on our part, backed up by the protests of Ellery Queen, Vincent Starrett and other aficionados, we have finally prevailed upon Mr Boucher to include in this anthology one of his own detective stories. (Before we turned on the pressure, he was going to include two.)

THE EDITORS OF TOWER BOOKS

In peacetime the whole Shaw case could never have happened. As Officer Mulroon said later: the first attack would have been passed off as natural illness, and besides there never would have been a first attack.

But police work in the spring of 1943 was full of cases that could never have happened in peacetime. Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald (Homicide, L.A.P.D.) was slowly becoming reconciled to the recruiting officer who had dissuaded him from joining the Navy. He was necessary here on his job, even though he sometimes wished that he were back in a patrolman’s uniform. His plain clothes did draw occasional sardonic stares.

Even the stripe and a half of Lieutenant (j.g.) Warren Humphreys made him uniform-conscious and reminded him of his frustrated enlistment. But the slight bitterness was effaced by the knowledge that in this case the Navy had had to turn to him because he was a trained specialist who knew about murderers.

“We don’t believe in coincidence in the Navy,” Lieutenant Humphreys had barked over the phone. “When I’m sent out here to pick up specifications on a sub detector, and find the inventor’s suddenly come down with an attack having all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, I want police action. And quick.”

Lieutenant MacDonald remembered when Warren Humphreys had been his favorite political commentator, and hoped that he diagnosed poisonings more accurately than he had the strength of the Red Army.

Apparently he did. At least the police doctor made the same snap diagnosis after an examination of the comatose inventor, and commended the naval officer for his prompt administration of a mustard emetic followed by milk of magnesia.

“Best I could do with what’s in an ordinary house,” Lieutenant Humphreys said with gruff modesty. “Got to know a thing or two about poison treatment in Naval Intelligence. You never know...”

“You’ve made a good start; he ought to pull through. Keep him quiet and give him lots of milk. I’ll send out a male nurse. You can call the lab about six, MacDonald. I’ll try to have a full report on these specimens by then.”

It was now one forty-five. Humphreys had arrived at one and phoned the police almost immediately. The attack, which the household had taken for ordinary digestive trouble, had struck Harrison Shaw at twelve-thirty, after his usual lunch: a tartar sandwich and a bottle of beer.

“The dietetics boys’d say he had it coming to him,” MacDonald observed.

“But it was what he always ate, Lieutenant,” the blind man said. “And it seemed to sustain his energy admirably — enough at least to interest the Navy, if not to bring in any marked practical rewards.”

The slight note of bitterness toward the — professional habit made him think “deceased” — toward the victim caused MacDonald to look at the blind man more closely. He saw a tall, lean man of fifty, with a marked resemblance to the poisoned inventor save for the sightless stare and the one-sided smile that never left his face. He wore a gray suit of unusually fine tailoring and unusually great age.

The suit was like the house. One of those old family mansions in the West Adams district near U.S.C. You saw it from the outside and expected sumptuous furnishings and a flock of servants. You came in and found a barn, and not a servant in sight.

“Let me get the picture straight,” MacDonald said. “The medical report was the first essential. Now that that’s given us something to sink our teeth into, pending the lab analysis, there’s plenty more to cover. I gather you’re Mr. Shaw’s cousin?”

The blind man went on smiling. “Second cousin, yes. Ira Beaumont, at your service, Lieutenant.”

“You’ve been living with Mr. Shaw for how long?”

“Mr. Shaw has been living with me for some three years. Ever since I inherited this house from a distant relative of ours. He felt, and with some justice, that he had as great a right to the inheritance as I, and I was glad to give him some of the space I could not possibly use up in this white elephant.”

“And the rest of the household?”

“First my cousin’s mother came to look after him. Then his laboratory assistant joined our happy household. I began to feel a trifle like the old woman who is so horribly moved in on in the play Kind Lady.”

“That’s all in the house?”

“There was a couple who cooked and kept house, but we could not compete with Lockheed and Vega in wage scales. Mrs. Shaw now takes their place.” He rose and crossed the room to a humidor. “Do you gentlemen care for cigars?”

“No thanks, not now.” MacDonald noted admiringly the ease with which the blind man moved unaided about his own house. There’s something splendid about the overcoming of handicaps... a splendor, he reflected, that we’ll have many chances to watch in the years to come... “Then Mrs. Shaw prepared your cousin’s lunch today?”

“As usual. I believe you’ll find her in the kitchen now; I know she’ll be thinking that the family must eat tonight, whatever has happened.”

Lieutenant Humphreys tagged along. The prospect of a Watson from Naval Intelligence somewhat awed the police detective.

“There can be only one motive,” the Naval Watson muttered. “Somebody had to keep him from delivering those specifications to me. And if you can find them, officer, I’d almost be willing to write off the murder as unsolved.”

“We don’t even know yet that they’re lost,” MacDonald pointed out. “When Shaw’s himself again, he may hand them straight over.”

But Humphreys shook his head. “They’re good,” he said cryptically. “They wouldn’t slip up on that.”

There was a sudden slam of a door as they entered the kitchen. Mrs. Shaw, MacDonald thought, was almost too good to be true. Aged housedress, apron, white hair and all, she was the casting director’s dream of Somebody’s Mother. But at the moment she was nervous, flustered — almost guilty-looking.

Wordlessly the Lieutenant crossed the kitchen and opened a pantry door. He saw, at a rough count, a good hundred cans of rationed goods. He laughed. “You needn’t worry, Mrs. Shaw. This isn’t my brand of snooping; I shan’t report you for hoarding.”

Mrs. Shaw straightened her apron, poked at her escapist hair, and looked relieved. “It’s really all for the good of the war,” she explained. “My boy’s doing important work that’ll save thousands of lives, and he’s going to get what he wants to eat whether somebody in Washington says so or not. Why, if he was a Russian inventor they’d be making him take it.”

“We didn’t see a thing, did we, Lieutenant?”

Humphreys made a gruff noise. It was obviously hard for him to resist a brief official lecture.

“Now about this attack of your son’s, Mrs. Shaw...”

“I just can’t understand that, Lieutenant. I simply can’t. Harry never was a one to complain about his food. He liked lots of it, but it always set right fine.”

“Mr. Beaumont said he always ate this same lunch?”

“Yes, sir. A white bread sandwich with raw ground round, with a little salt and Worcestershire sauce, and some slices of raw onion. And he drank beer with it. I can’t say I’d cotton to it myself, but it’s what Harry liked.”

“Where was the beer kept?”

“In a little icebox in his laboratory. He always opened it himself. All I did was fix the sandwich.”

“And bring a glass for the beer?”

“No. He liked it out of the bottle, just like his father before him.”

“And where did you keep the meat, Mrs. Shaw?”

“I didn’t. I mean not today. It didn’t get kept anyplace. I didn’t get out to shop till late and I bought it down at the little market on the corner and brought it right back here and made the sandwich.”

“And the onion?”

“I peeled a fresh one, of course.”

“And the salt and the sauce?”

MacDonald impounded the shaker and bottle indicated. “We’ll analyze these, of course. Although no one would take the chance of leaving them here in the kitchen where anybody might... And what did you do with the sandwich after you made it?”

“What should I do, officer? I took it right up to Harry and now he’s... Oh, officer, he is going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“He will be. And you can thank Lieutenant Humphreys here that he will.”

“Oh, I do thank you, Lieutenant. I didn’t know what to think at first with Harry so sick and you running around here and wanting mustard and things, but now I see the good Lord sent you to save my Harry.”

Humphreys looked relieved when MacDonald cut through her embarrassing gratitude. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Shaw. Now do you know where we’d find your son’s assistant?”

As they walked down the long empty hall to a crudely improvised laboratory, MacDonald said, “Did you ever see such deliberate suicide before?”

“Suicide? But great Scott, man, you don’t mean that Shaw—”

“Lord no! I mean Mrs. Shaw. She’s told a specific, detailed story that doesn’t leave a single loophole. Unless analysis turns up something in those seasonings, there’s only one person who could conceivably have poisoned Shaw. And that, by her own admission, is his mother.”

The assistant, so far nameless, introduced himself as John Fire-brook. He was a little man with a thick neck and a round, worried face. “I don’t believe it, Lieutenant,” he began flatly. “Nobody could want to kill a fine man like Mr. Shaw. It must have been something he ate.”

“Sure. It was with Mrs. Crippen too.”

“And there are too many people at large in this world,” the naval officer added, “who think killing fine men is just what the doctor ordered. Especially fine men who invent sub detectors. And how much do you know about that detector, Firebrook?”

“I know the principles, of course, sir. I helped to work them out, though Mr. Shaw didn’t trust even me with the final details. You remember the man recently who made a seventy-nine cent bombsight out of junk? Well, ours is not perhaps quite in that class, but comparable. It consists of

Humphreys nodded happily. “Brilliant, Firebrook. Brilliant. What we need is men like Shaw who can make something out of apparently nothing. If this lives up to expectations, I think the Navy can promise him plenty more jobs.”

“If the Navy will promise us a decent laboratory and materials, we will be happy. It’s fine to make something out of nothing, Lieutenant, but it is nice to work with something too. We have kept hoping that Mr. Shaw would receive a large sum of money from a great-uncle; but the old gentleman has defied all the statistics of life-expectancy. If this detector is a failure... I do not know what will become of us,” he added simply.

“Do you know where these specifications are?” MacDonald asked.

“I do not. We could not afford a safe that would be any real protection. Mr. Shaw had his own plans which even I did not know.”

“It’ll be simple,” said Humphreys. “Call your men, Lieutenant, and we’ll search the whole place, starting with this lab.”

“No!” said Firebrook sharply.

“And why not?”

“You see this laboratory? It is cheap, it is insufficient. But it is in perfect working order. I keep it so. I will not have hordes of police trampling through it and destroying that order.”

“Even with warrants?” MacDonald murmured.

“Even with warrants.” Firebrook’s little eyes flashed. “Gentlemen, you will not search this laboratory.”

The officers stared at him for a moment, but his defiant gaze was steady. “My, my!” Lieutenant Humphreys said at last. “The racial passion for order... Very well. You’ll be seeing me again — Herr Feuerbach.”

And that was the end of the first phase of the Shaw case.

There was nothing more that Lieutenant MacDonald could accomplish at the rundown mansion of Ira Beaumont until he had the report from the laboratory and could talk to the inventor himself. He stationed Mulroon to watch the sickroom pending the arrival of the police nurse, and Shurman and Avila to guard the outside of the house. Lieutenant Humphreys appointed himself part of the guard too.

“I’m not leaving this house till I hear from Shaw’s own lips where the specifications are. And I’m keeping an eye on that German.”

MacDonald drove slowly back to headquarters. He didn’t like this Shaw business. It was too wrongly simple. There was only one possible suspect, and that one was impossible.

Greed can do strange things to people (was there a lead in that legacy expected from the great-uncle?), and perverted political fanaticism can do even stranger; but could a mother kill her son even from such motives? Worse yet, psychologically, could she kill him by means of her own food, while she calmly broke all rationing regulations to provide him with that food?

He didn’t like it. And he found, as he mused, that he had overshot headquarters. He was driving out North Main Street. He was, in fact, just about opposite the Chula Negra Café.

Lieutenant MacDonald grinned at himself. It was that kind of a case, wasn’t it?

The Noble scandal had been long before MacDonald’s time on the force. He’d gathered it piecemeal from the older men: a crooked captain who had connections, and a brilliantly promising detective lieutenant who’d taken the rap for him when things broke, losing his job just when his wife needed money for an operation...

Nick Noble had been devoted to his wife and his profession. When both were gone, there was nothing left. Nothing but cheap sherry that dulled the sharpness of reality enough to make it bearable. Nothing but that and the curious infallible machine that was Nick Noble’s mind.

That couldn’t stop working, even when Noble’s profession no longer needed it. Present it with a problem, and the gears meshed into action behind those pale blue eyes. A few of the oldtimers on the force were wise enough to know how invariably right the answers were. Twice MacDonald himself had seen the Noble mind trace pattern in chaos. And this was just what Noble would like: only one possibility, and that impossible. The screwier the better.

Screwball Division, L.A.P.D., they called him.

He was in the third booth on the left, as usual. So far as MacDonald had ever learned, he lived, ate, and slept there... if indeed he did ever eat or sleep. There was a water glass of sherry in front of him. His hair and his skin were white as things that live in caves. A white hand swatted at the sharp thin nose. Then the pale blue eyes slowly focused on the detective and he smiled a little.

“MacDonald,” he said softly. “Sit down. Trouble?”

“Right up your alley, Mr. Noble. A screwball set-up from way back.”

“They happen to you.” He swallowed some sherry and took another swipe at his nose. “Fly,” he said apologetically.

MacDonald remembered that fly. It wasn’t there. It never had been. He slipped into the seat across the booth and began his story. Once the Mexican waitress came up and was waved away. Once the invisible fly returned to interrupt. The rest of the time Nick Noble listened and drank and listened. When MacDonald had finished, he leaned back and let his eyes glaze over.

“Questions?” MacDonald asked,

“Why?” Nick Noble said.

“The motive, you mean? Humphreys thinks spy work. He must be right, but a mother...”

“Uh uh.” Noble shook his head. “Why questions? All clear. Let Humphreys hocus you. Awed by the gold braid you wanted, MacDonald.”

The detective shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe. But what do you mean? What’s clear?”

Nick Noble turned sideways and slid his pipestem legs from under the table. “Come on,” he said. “Take me out there.”

He didn’t say a word on the drive out Figueroa. His eyes were shut: not glazed over, as they were when he worked on a problem, but simply shut, as though he were done with it. He opened them as they turned off the boulevard. In a moment he said, “Almost there?”

“Yes. We turn again at the next, then were there.”

“Stop here,” Nick Noble said.

MacDonald was beginning to wonder what he’d let himself in for. Conferences at the Chula Negra were one thing, but... He pulled up in front of the small market and said, “What goes?”

“Need some meat,” Noble said. “Supper. Come on in.”

MacDonald followed, frowning. At least this was a clue as to how Noble lived outside the Chula Negra... The butcher’s counter was sparsely filled. Not so bad as before rationing, but still not overflowing.

Nick Noble said, “I wanted about a pound of ground round.”

The butcher had red hair and a redder face. “Don’t know’s I’ve got any left to grind, but I’ll see. Got your red stamps?”

Noble’s face fell as he groped in his pocket. He muttered something about his other suit.

The butcher said, “Sorry, brother.”

Nick Noble said, “It’s what the doctor said the baby ought to have...” He took out a wallet and held it open. It was far from empty.

The butcher said, “Hold on, brother. With a baby...” He went into the refrigerating room.

MacDonald stared at the greenbacks in the wallet. It wasn’t possible that Nick Noble should flash such a roll.

The butcher came back with a package in heavy paper. He didn’t weigh it. He said, “One pound. That’ll be ninety cents.”

Noble’s pale eyes rested on the posted list of ceiling prices. “Kind of high,” he said.

“Take it or leave it, brother.”

Nick Noble took it. As he turned to go, a woman came in with a heavy shopping bag. She said, “Frank, I’d like to ask you about that meat I got in here yesterday. My husband’s been...”

Frank began talking loudly about the meat quota problem. Nick Noble went on out. On his way he stopped at the grocery department and picked up a quart of sherry.

Back in the car he handed the meat to MacDonald. “Lab,” he said. Then he went to work on the seal of the bottle, and broke off to swat at the fly.

MacDonald grinned. “The Noble touch! So you’ve done it again. Black market, huh?”

Noble nodded. “Food poisoning symptoms pretty much like arsenic.” The bottle glurked and its contents diminished. “Mother hoards for son. She’d buy on black market for him too. But she poisoned him. Same like woman’s husband.”

“ ‘All clear,’ ” MacDonald quoted. “I guess it is. Humphrey’s profession gives him a naturally melodramatic outlook, and it sucked in the doctor and me. We expected poisoning, so we saw it. The lab tests’ll be the final check. All clear but one thing: how come you have all that folding money?”

“Oh,” said Nick Noble. “Sorry.” He handed over the wallet.

MacDonald felt in his own empty pocket and swore goodhumoredly. “In a good cause,” he said.

He was still grinning when they drove up to Ira Beaumont’s mansion. Shurman wasn’t in front of the house as he should have been. Instead he answered the door. His broad face fit up. “Jeez, Loot, we been tryna get you everywheres.”

“It’s all O.K., Shurman. All cleared up. There never was an attempt at murder.”

“Maybe there wasn’t no attempt. But somebody sure’s hell did murder Mr. Shaw about fifteen minutes ago.”

It was the first time MacDonald had ever seen Nick Noble surprised.

This was the most daring murder that MacDonald had ever encountered or heard of. The murderer had slipped up behind Mulroon, on guard before the sickroom, and slugged him with a heavy vase. Then he had entered the sickroom and slit the throat of the sleeping invalid, leaving the heavy butcher knife (printless, MacDonald knew even before dusting it) beside the bed.

It was a crime as risky as it was simple, but it had succeeded. Harrison Shaw would contrive no more somethings out of nothing for the Navy.

“The method doesn’t even eliminate anybody,” MacDonald complained. “The knife was sharp enough and the vase heavy enough for even a woman to have succeeded. And that damned wheeze Mulroon has from his cold could’ve guided the blind man. Method means nothing.”

“Motive,” said Nick Noble.

The motive seemed indicated by the scrawl on the plaster near the bed. At first glance it looked like blood. A closer examination showed it was red ink. The bottle and a pastry brush (taken from the same drawer as the butcher knife) lay under the bed. The scrawl read:

Firebrook had translated this as, Thus may all enemies of the Reich perish! The mere fact of his knowing the language had caused Lieutenant Humphreys to glower on him with fresh suspicion.

“And so what?” MacDonald complained when he and Noble were alone again with the body of Harrison Shaw. “So he is a German and his name used to be Feuerbach. That doesn’t convict him.”

Nick Noble said nothing. His pale blue eyes studied the room.

“What have we got?” MacDonald recapitulated. “Nobody in this house alibies anybody else. And it must be one of them. Avila and Shurman swear nobody came in. One of three people is a Nazi agent who took advantage of Shaw’s illness and the confusion to steal his plans and now to kill him so he can’t reproduce them. Mrs. Shaw, the assistant Firebrook, the blind cousin Beaumont: one of these three...”

“Four,” said Nick Noble. He stood teetering on his thin legs. One hand swiped at the fly. Then his eyes fixed on the wall inscription and slowly glazed over.

He rocked back and forth while his last word echoed in MacDonald’s mind. Four... That was true. There was a fourth suspect. And who had planted the notion of murder in the first place? Who had forcibly established himself in this house? Who had created the very confusion by which—

“Lieutenant!” It was Firebrook in the doorway, and his round face was aglow. “Lieutenant...!” And he thrust a set of papers into MacDonald’s hands. “I did not wish your men to search, but myself I can search and respect the order of things. I have searched... and found!”

MacDonald’s eyes lit up. “Then at least the killing was in vain. We’ve got the detector! Humphreys will have to see these,” he decided, his momentary suspicions rejected as absurd. “Come on, Noble.”

Nick Noble took a swig from his bottle before he followed. His eyes had come unglazed now.

“In this room,” Lieutenant MacDonald announced, “is a traitor.”

He looked around the shabby room. The naval officer was happily absorbed in contemplating the recovered plans. Firebrook looked as though his pleasure in the discovery was fading at the realization of the death of the man he had worked with. Mrs. Shaw was crying quietly and paying no heed to anything. It was impossible to read the sightless eyes and permanent half-smile of Ira Beaumont.

But it was Beaumont who spoke. “Isn’t it obvious who the traitor must be, Lieutenant? Mrs. Shaw is a dear sweet woman who knows nothing of the world beyond her kitchen and her family. Lieutenant Humphreys is an officer of Naval Intelligence. I lost my sight in the Argonne; that does not predispose me toward our country’s enemies.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Beaumont, we need some proof beyond what you think obvious. We have a traitor here, and he is a traitor who failed. He killed Shaw, and to that potential extent harmed our war effort. But the plans of Shaw’s detector he has failed to find.”

“Did he?” Beaumont insisted. “Is Lieutenant Humphreys certain that those plans which he holds—?”

“Well, Lieutenant?” MacDonald asked.

Humphreys grunted. “Can’t be positive till they’ve been checked by experts. Seem damned plausible, just the same.”

“Beaumont’s right,” said Nick abruptly.

No one had been paying any attention to him, beyond the first obvious glance of wonder as to why the detective lieutenant should drag along such a companion. Now all the faces turned to him. The blind man’s smile widened with gratification. He said, “Thank you.”

“Beaumont’s right,” Noble went on. “Obvious who’s traitor: Nobody.”

The room gasped. Lieutenant Humphreys snorted.

“Private minder. Clear pattern: Humphreys started spy scare; murderer took advantage.”

“But the scrawl on the plaster...?” It was Firebrook’s question.

“Proves it. Clumsy trick to mislead. Swastika wrong.”

“Ach so...!” Firebrook made a click of belated realization.

“Wrong?” MacDonald asked.

“Pencil,” Nick Noble said.

The officer handed him pencil and notebook. He drew for a minute, then showed the results as he spoke. “Old Indian swastika was straight. So’s swastika on wall. Like so:

Nazi swastika slants. Always slants. See any pictures. If Nazi made wall scribble, it’d have to be:

So fake.”

“You’re right,” Humphreys said grudgingly. “Should’ve seen it myself. They always slant like that.”

Beaumont, unable to see the illustrations, looked puzzled.

“So who’d go wrong?” Nick Noble went on. “Who but man who’s never seen Nazi swastika. Heard about swastika, naturally thought it same as old Indian. Man who hasn’t seen anything since long before there were Nazis... since Argonne.”

Even the half-smile was gone from Ira Beaumont’s face. He said, “Nonsense! My cousin was, I confess, a burden to me, but I was willing to tolerate him for the work he was doing. Why should I kill him?”

“Check,” said Nick Noble to MacDonald. “Great-uncle Shaw was expecting fortune from. See if Beaumont’s next of kin.”

MacDonald knew he wouldn’t have to check. The momentary twist of Beaumont’s lips, the little choking cry of realization from Mrs. Shaw were enough.

“If not spy, who else but Beaumont?” Noble went on. “Only possible pattern. Humphreys total stranger. Mrs. Shaw devoted to son. Firebrook too likely to know right swastika; besides wouldn’t pull German fake pointing straight at him. Who else?”

Ira Beaumont regained his smile. “Lieutenant, your drunken friend is amusing enough, but you surely must realize what pure tosh he is babbling.”

“Must I?” said MacDonald.

“Of course. I defy you to arrest me.”

As MacDonald hesitated, Nick Noble spoke. “O.K. Don’t. Withdraw police. Leave him here.”

MacDonald’s eyes opened in amazement at the advice. Then he looked at the faces in the tense room.

They were all fixed on Beaumont. Humphreys was thinking, He killed a man who could help the Navy. Firebrook was thinking, He killed my friend and tried to frame me for it. Mrs. Shaw was thinking, He killed my son.

Ira Beaumont could not see the faces, but he could feel them. He could think of a blind man left helpless and alone with those faces when the police guard was withdrawn.

He rose slowly to his feet. “Shall we go, Lieutenant?”

As the wagon took away Beaumont, with the aching-headed Mulroon and the rest, MacDonald and Noble climbed into the Lieutenant’s car.

On the seat lay a package wrapped in heavy butcher’s paper. Nick Noble pointed at it. “Another murderer for you.”

MacDonald nodded. “That butcher, plus Humphreys’ suspicions, set the stage for this murder all right. And God knows what else the black market and the racketeers behind it are responsible for. Black market? Black murder...”

He held the butcher’s parcel in his hand and stared at it as though it were a prize exhibit in the Black Museum. “I may not have had the heart to report Mrs. Shaw’s hoarding, but it’ll be a pleasure to turn in that market. And to see that the first part of this case gets enough publicity to cut some ice with the meat-buying public.”

Nick Noble uptilted his bottle. “I’ll stick to this,” he said. “Safer.”

His pale blue eyes closed as MacDonald drove off.