Great American Detective Stories

Too Many Enemies by William Mac Harg

Tough, succinct and memorable — those are the words for the O’MALLEY stories which William MacHarg has been contributing for years to Collier’s. MacHarg shared in the creation of the scientific and intellectual LUTHER TRANT, then went on alone to portray the opposite and equally essential pole of police work, the shrewd solid hardworking copper DAN O’MALLEY. (For OFFICER O’MALLEY’S rarely used first name, see the story “The key man,” in which he tells a child witness to call him “Uncle Dan”) O’MALLEY’S best qualities have rarely come through more clearly than in this story of the man who had “Too many enemies.”

“This is one of them vengeance murders,” said O’Malley, “and in this kind of case plenty people know who done it but they all go blind and dumb. I’ll have no luck with it. This dead guy was named Vanelli, and he was only twenty-three years old but already he had so many enemies it was only a question who would get him first. They got plenty cops working on this case.”

“How was he killed?” I asked.

“He got beat up and then stabbed.”

“Where?”

“Right in his own home. This Vanelli got himself suspected of passing info to the cops about some guys he knew that done a little counterfeiting; and, besides that, a guy that he had went with for a long time but had had trouble with got knocked off and the guy’s family thought Vanelli had a hand in it; and when he already had two outfits trying to shove him over, Vanelli goes to Boston and runs off with a girl that was going to marry somebody else.”

“He sounds like a desperate character,” I said.

“The guy got himself so he couldn’t be nothing but desperate. We’ll go and look at him.”

We went. Vanelli seemed to have been an ordinary-looking young man, but it was not easy to tell much about that now. As O’Malley had said, he had been badly beaten up. His nose was broken and his face battered and he had been stabbed five times and the letter Z had been cut on both his cheeks.

“What was the name of the man whose girl he ran away with?” I inquired.

“Zeglio.”

“Well!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “What more do you want?”

“You’re smart.”

They had Vanelli’s clothes there and we examined them carefully. He had been stabbed twice in the back and three times in front, but his clothes were stabbed twice in front and three times in back.

“I suppose,” I hazarded, “that after the first stabbing there was a struggle and his clothes got twisted around his body so that the holes don’t correspond.”

“You can account for everything, can’t you!” O’Malley commented. “We’ll see what Zeglio says about it.”

They had already arrested Zeglio and had him at the station house, so we went there. The station house looked as though they were holding a convention. Vanelli’s parents were there and had identified the body and now wanted to claim it. Besides Zeglio, they had the girl there, and several members of the family who believed that Vanelli had put their relative on the spot, and a number of the men who were suspected of counterfeiting. They all talked at once and I had never seen such excitable people, and most of them seemed to be congratulating one another that Vanelli was dead.

They had Zeglio and the girl kept separate and we talked with her first. She was a beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, with hair black as night and dark limpid eyes, and she couldn’t make the simplest statement without putting emotion into it. Her name was Josephina.

“For why am I kept here?” she demanded passionately before we had a chance to question her.

“They got to have you for a witness, lady.”

“But I know nothing. I have told all. For how long will I be kept?”

“It might be quite a while, girlie. You tell us over again what it was you told them.”

“I told nothing because I know nothing. I was making dinner and wondering when Peter would come home.” Peter was Vanelli. “Then I heard something — like quarreling. Two people. I look out but see no one. Then I heard something like fighting, but I can see nobody. Again a third time I look out, wondering when Peter will come, and Peter is in front of the door.”

“Was he dead?” O’Malley asked.

“Certainly he was dead.”

“Was one of the voices you heard Peter’s?”

“If I had thought that I would have gone to look.”

“Was one of them Zeglio’s?”

“I don’t know. Now I have told everything, so why do you keep me here?”

I was sorry for her.

“That’s a wonderful girl, O’Malley,” I said, after we had left her, “and I don’t wonder there was trouble over her; it’s a shame to keep her locked up.”

“Yeah, I saw you thought she was a knock-out. You keep on thinking that and you might get a knife pushed into you yourself.”

We questioned Zeglio. He was a small man, dark, quick and muscular.

“You knock Vanelli off?” O’Malley asked him.

“Not me.” Zeglio grinned at us delightedly.

“How long ago did you come from Boston?”

“This time, ten days.”

“You’d been here before, then. When was that?”

“Two months.”

“I see. That was when Vanelli run off with your girl. You came here and looked for them, intending to kill him, but you couldn’t find them. So you went back and ten days ago you came again.”

“Thata right, I keela heem if I geta the chance.”

“And last night you got the chance and stuck a knife in him and left him outside of Josephina’s door.”

“Not me. Some other guy. I looka ten days but I don’t find heem.”

“And this other guy cut your initials in his cheeks?”

Zeglio shrugged. “What a kind guy,” he answered. “He beata me to it.”

We talked with the other people there and they all made the same answer as Zeglio. They admitted that they had intended to kill Vanelli and had been looking for him, but he and the girl had hidden themselves and they had been unable to find him. Now someone else, they said, had killed him, but they didn’t know who. We went to look at the place where it had happened.

It was a rather nice apartment building on the West Side. Vanelli and the girl had had an apartment in the rear. A long hall led through the building and a shorter hall branched off to the door of Vanelli’s apartment. There was blood on the floor of the long hall and more blood in front of Vanelli’s door, and a uniformed cop was on post in the hall and another one in the apartment.

We looked everything over carefully. There were two rooms with a bathroom between them, and someone had spilled a bottle of ink on the floor in front of the bathroom door. Otherwise the place was spotlessly clean. Vanelli’s clothes and the girl’s clothes were hanging in closets, and there was a table set with two places, and the dinner Josephina had been cooking was still on the stove. Some of Josephina’s things had been put into a suitcase. I thought she had been getting them ready to take with her to the police station, and I was indignant that they had hurried her away without them.

“What do you make of it, O’Malley?” I asked.

“I don’t make nothing of it. This case is like I said; everybody we talked to has been lying, and you can’t solve a case where nobody tells the truth.”

“At least one of them is lying,” I agreed, “because one of them killed Vanelli. But the others, in that case, would be telling the truth, and I am quite sure that Josephina told it.”

“Yeah? How do you figure that?”

“The quarreling she heard was in the long hall where she couldn’t see the speakers. Vanelli was killed there. Afterward the murderer carried or dragged him into the short hall and put him in front of the door, and when Josephina looked out she found him.”

“You make it sound pretty good.”

I was pleased at his commendation, so I went on: “I have come to the conclusion, O’Malley, that it was done by Zeglio.”

“All right; let’s hear it.”

“At first I thought the Z’s on Vanelli’s cheeks meant that someone was trying to throw suspicion on Zeglio and meant he really hadn’t done it; but this was a murder of revenge. A man seeking revenge is willing to take a risk if there is someone whom he wants to have know he did it. Zeglio wanted Josephina to know. What do you think of that?”

“I guess it deserves consideration... Who spilled the ink on the floor?” O’Malley asked the officer.

“Search me,” the officer replied. “It was that way when we come here.”

O’Malley scraped up some of the ink and put it in an envelope.

“Anything been taken away from here?” he asked the officer.

“Not a thing except the dead guy. We was told to keep it like it was.”

“What are you looking for?” I asked O’Malley.

“People like this Vanelli and Josephina always have pictures of their folks around, and the first thing a guy like him does if he runs away with a girl is get his picture taken with her. Well, where’s the pictures?”

I myself was surprised a little, now that he spoke of it. There was not a picture in the apartment. There were several photographers in the neighborhood, and after we came out of the apartment we went around to them and O’Malley asked them if any of them had taken a picture of Vanelli and Josephina. None of them had. As we were leaving the last place he noticed several different-sized small pictures of a darkhaired girl and asked the photographer about them.

“You sell any of these?” he questioned.

The photographer said he could not sell them, until O’Malley showed him his badge; then he agreed, and O’Malley picked out two of different sizes and we took them back to the apartment and gave them to the cop in the hall, but I couldn’t hear what O’Malley said to him.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“There wasn’t no pictures in the place, so I told the cop to put some there.”

“That sounds like a silly performance to me.”

“That’s right; it might turn out to be silly.”

“What I like least in this case,” I said, “is your keeping Josephina locked up.”

“You’ll get that knife in you yet if you keep on thinking about her.”

“She hasn’t done anything,” I said, “and it is clear now that she told the truth. I admit that she eloped with Vanelli and was living with him without being married to him, but that was to get away from Zeglio. She and Vanelli undoubtedly meant to get married, and I don’t blame her for what she did under the circumstances. But now you have her locked up, and the way you are going about it there seems no chance of Vanelli’s murder being solved, so there is no telling how long she’ll have to stay there, or what people are going to think about her. You’re putting a stigma on the girl which she doesn’t deserve.”

“I was thinking maybe we’d ought to let her go.”

“If you’re afraid of losing track of her you can have her watched.”

We went back to the police station and O’Malley went into the captain’s office but I stayed outside. I knew he was arranging to have Josephina released, and I would have been glad to have her know that I had had a hand in it, but I didn’t get the chance to tell her.

When he came out we went back to the apartment, but we didn’t go in. Instead we went into a shoe-repair place across the street. The proprietor asked what we wanted done to our shoes, but O’Malley told him “nothing,” and we just sat and waited.

“Are you having her watched?” I asked.

“I guess we know where she’ll go.”

Presently I saw Josephina come along the street and go into the building opposite, and a plainclothesman who had been following her came in and sat down with us.

“Will the cops in there interfere with her?” I asked.

“There ain’t no cops in there. I had ’em taken off.”

In about an hour Josephina came out of the building very hurriedly. She had her suitcase with her and she seemed much excited. She got into a cab, and after she had driven away we got into another cab and followed her. She went to the Bronx. The cab stopped in front of a rooming-house and the cabman carried in her bag for her, and after he had gone away we went in after her.

We could hear Josephina in one of the rooms talking loudly, and we listened for a moment. Then O’Malley and the other plainclothes-man kicked down the door, and a handsome, reckless-looking young man to whom Josephina had been speaking violently jumped up at sight of us. Pieces of the photographs which O’Malley had bought were scattered on the floor.

“Okay, Vanelli,” O’Malley said to the young man. “We want you for murder.”

“This is all a mystery to me, O’Malley,” I said about an hour later. “I can’t see through it.”

“What can’t you see?” he asked. “This Vanelli was on the spot and he knew it. Him and the girl hid out, but he had too many people after him, and he knew wherever he went one of ’em would find him, and they were getting closer to him all the time. He figured if they thought he was dead they’d quit looking. We don’t know yet who the dead guy was and we might never find out. There’s plenty guys right now around the streets that got no jobs and their folks don’t know where they are, and there’s nobody to ask questions if one of ’em disappears. I guess Vanelli picked out one of ’em that looked something like himself and made some excuse to get him to go home with him — it might be he offered him a meal. When they got to the apartment Vanelli knocked him off. Then him and Josephina dressed the guy in Vanelli’s clothes and Vanelli lit out, taking the guy’s clothes with him, and Josephina give the alarm.”

“So Josephina was in it with him?” I asked, depressed.

“I wouldn’t wonder if Vanelli planned it all himself and she didn’t know nothing about it till it had been done; but then she backed him up the same as his parents did. Vanelli’s parents seen it wasn’t their son, but they identified him anyway so that Vanelli could get away, and whatever other people saw him didn’t know him very well and didn’t question it being him because his parents said so. I told you this was a case where you had to figure that everybody was lying. I figure the murder happened inside the apartment in front of the bathroom door. Vanelli stabbed the guy and pushed him into the bathroom where it was all tile and the blood could be washed up. I guess they undressed and dressed him in the bathtub. Some blood got on the floor outside the bathroom door where he was stabbed, and it couldn’t be washed up clean and so they poured ink on it. I got some of the ink off the floor being analyzed now to see if they find blood in it and I’m sure they will.”

“But,” I said, “you seem to have realized from the first that the dead man wasn’t Vanelli. How was that?”

“Why, the guy was wearing his own clothes when he got stabbed, and then they dressed him in Vanelli’s clothes and they had to poke holes in them; but it was a hard job to get the holes exactly where the wounds was, and they didn’t get it right. If he wasn’t wearing Vanelli’s clothes when he got killed, he wasn’t Vanelli. They put blood off the guy’s clothes in two place in the hall to make it look as if the murder happened outside the apartment, and Vanelli cut the Z’s in the guy’s cheeks so we’d think it was done by Zeglio.

“I guess Vanelli and the girl had it planned to meet later in some other city and start over where they wasn’t known. She was altogether too anxious to get released by the police so she could join him; but we couldn’t let her go for fear she’d disappear. Then I and you went to the apartment. They had to leave Vanelli’s clothes there so as not to excite suspicions, and her things were there too. If she was released, she’d have to go there to get her things and when she did that she’d go through Vanelli’s clothes to be sure there wasn’t nothing being left in ’em.

“I didn’t know whether she knew where Vanelli was or not; but I figured she was the kind of girl that, if she found some other girl’s picture in Vanelli’s clothes, would forget about everything else until she had found out about it. So I got a couple of pictures of another girl and had one of the cops put ’em in Vanelli’s pockets. She found ’em, all right; and she went straight to Vanelli to get an explanation about ’em.”

“It was a remarkable case,” I said, “and I’m surprised that you got the answer to it so quickly.”

“Sure. It’s a swell case, but too many other cops was working on it. You watch and see who they say figured this all out. It won’t be me.”