Man-Trap

XV

With almost unbelievable swiftness he was across the room and one bony hand was darting for my left wrist for a judo hold. I got the wrist out of the way by shooting a left jab where his face should have been. It wasn’t.

During the next few minutes I discovered the Farmer had better than an amateur knowledge of boxing, judo and plain wrestling. He made no attempt to hit me, employing his boxing skill only in defense. Apparently his design was to get me in his hands and bend parts of me until I felt like talking. The closest I came to tagging him was a solid right cross meant for his jaw which landed high on his left shoulder.

If he wanted judo, we would fight on his terms awhile and see what happened.

What happened was that he threw me half across the room on my face, flopped on my back before I could roll clear, clamped a scissors around my legs and twisted my right arm up into the middle of my back, where he kept it with a double arm lock.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, the fight is over,” he said.

Gradually he increased the pressure on my arm. When he saw the sweat dripping from my face and knew the pain almost had me screaming, he said, “This goes on until you tell me that firm name.”

You don’t stand pain like that for long without either crying uncle or going unconscious, and he kept it at a point just short of where I could find relief in unconsciousness. He kept it there for five minutes.

“You’re biting your lip,” he said finally. “It’s bleeding.”

I decided to break the hold.

Working my left hand under my chest, I began to draw my knees forward.

“You damn fool!” the Farmer said. “Don’t make me cripple you.”

Slowly, despite the excruciating pain, I forced my knees forward until they were solidly under me. The next step was to push my face off the floor, roll sidewise and dislocate my shoulder.

Farmer Cole knew exactly what I was doing. When I got my face six inches from the floor, he suddenly released me.

When I climbed unsteadily to my feet and began to massage my numb arm, he was standing three feet away eyeing me moodily. “I pass,” he said.

I continued to massage my arm.

“I should waste my time,” he elaborated. “Any idiot stubborn enough to pull what you just tried isn’t going to tell me anything no matter what I do to him.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. Licking my lips, I discovered he had been telling the truth about my biting them. They tasted of blood.

“So it’s a draw,” the Farmer said. “No hard feelings?”

“No hard feelings,” I told him.

Then I moved unexpectedly. Driving forward, I wrapped him in a bear hug and carried him against the wall at a dead run. As the air whooshed out of him, I banged him in the left eye with my forehead.

That dazed him enough so that he stood still while I unwrapped my arms and smashed an elbow into his jaw. I followed it with the other elbow, stepped back and watched him slide to a sitting position on the floor.

His jaw must have been iron, for he wasn’t quite out even after that punishment. After a moment he shook his head and looked at me groggily.

“The element of surprise is half the battle, son,” I told him.

The damned fool grinned at me.

It was another twenty minutes before we bothered to phone Murdoch’s apartment. First we brushed each other off, then washed our hands and faces, then he painted my lip with iodine and I put a cold compress on his left eye.

After that we had a drink.

By the time the Farmer finally got around to phoning, we were on our second drink and had discovered, as Laurie Davis suggested, we had a lot in common. I was mixing a third drink when Laurie and Fausta returned.

Both of them looked from my swollen lip to the Farmer’s swollen eye, but neither said anything.

“It was a draw,” Cole explained briefly.

I mixed drinks for Fausta and Davis.

I have to credit Davis with being a cheerful loser. He simply accepted the situation and asked no questions whatever. His sole reference to the matter was an oblique remark he made just as he and the Farmer were leaving.

“If the Farmer ever leaves me, would you be interested in a job as a bodyguard, Mr. Moon?”

“Let’s take that up when it happens,” I suggested.

When they were gone, Fausta said, “I never in my life heard of such childishness. Two grown men fighting like babies, and then ending up friends. Your lip looks awful.”

I grinned at her.

“Also, it is way after noon, and time for you to feed me.”

Since she wanted to check up on how the club was functioning in her absence, we killed two birds with one stone by lunching at El Patio. It was a casual remark of Fausta’s during lunch which upset the applecart of the assassin of Walter Lancaster and Willard Knight.

She said, “Does it not make you think sometimes, Manny, that a person’s whole life may be changed by some small irrelevant thing which in itself is entirely unrelated to the person?”

Having just finished dessert, I was feeling unsuccessfully for a cigar. As I signalled a nearby cigarette girl, I said, “You mean, for instance, h there been a cigar in my pocket, probably I would never have noticed the shapely brunette approaching. But because of the irrelevant fact that I am out of cigars at this precise instant, perhaps we shall accidently look into each other’s eyes, and ten years from now we’ll be the fond parents of eight children.”

“If you raise your eyes above her tray,” Fausta said firmly, “I will fire her on the spot.”

I disregarded her instructions, but nothing happened. She was just another pretty girl, and I was just another customer to her.

As I lighted my cigar, Fausta said, “What I was thinking of was this morning. Had there been one more chair in the Jones and Knight office, Mrs. Knight would not have been arrested for murder.”

“You’ve got your small, irrelevant things twisted,” I said. “It was an idle remark by Isobel Jones which set us after Mrs. Knight.”

“Yes, but if you had not gone into Knight’s office after a chair you would not have heard Mrs. Knight in the next office, so would not have mentioned her when you came out. Then Mrs. Jones would have had no occasion to make the remark.”

“I suppose so,” I said without much interest. The school of philosophy which holds our lives are conditioned largely by minor and random events has never appealed to me much.

Nevertheless Fausta’s remark started me thinking about the incident, and almost unobtrusively a thought floated into my mind which pointed a finger of suspicion in an entirely new direction. The more I thought about it, and the more I related it to previous minor details which had come up during the investigation, the surer I became that I finally knew the real killer.

Fausta asked, “What is the matter with you, Manny? All at once you look like you are in a daze.”

“I want to make some phone calls from your office,” I said, rising abruptly. “Come along.”

My first call was to the airport, and my second to the office of the Jones and Knight Investment Company. Matilda Graves in-formed me Harlan Jones had never returned to the office after Day drove him from his room. He had called from home to tell her he was taking the day off, and I could probably reach him there.

My third call was to Warren Day at Headquarters. When he heard what I had to say, he didn’t even put up an argument.

“Meet you in front of the house in fifteen minutes,” he said, and hung up.

We timed it just right, swinging in behind the squad car just as it stopped at the curb. As the inspector stepped from the right hand door, Hannegan got out from the driver’s side. Fausta and I trailed them up the walk to the front porch.

In deference to the heat both Isobel and her husband were attired in sport clothes and were enjoying the relative coolness of the front porch. Isobel, as usual, looked better for being largely exposed, but Harlan’s orange shorts and thin T-shirt only succeeded in making him incongruous.

Isobel merely smiled us a languid greeting, but Harlan fought his way out of his nearly horizontal deck chair and flusteredly began trying to figure out where on the porch to seat four more people. Aside from the deck chairs he and his wife were occupying, the porch contained only a swing and one canvas chair.

“Sit down and stop fluttering,” Isobel told him. “They’ll find places to sit.”

Seating herself in the porch swing, Fausta looked at the inspector and patted the place beside her. He favored her with a look of utter astonishment and firmly seated himself on the broad railing. I decided to keep Fausta company, and Hannegan silently lowered himself into the chair.

“Go mix some drinks, Harlan,” Isobel suggested.

The inspector shook his head. “I have to inform you this is an official visit.”

“More questions?” Isobel asked. “I thought after you arrested the widow, it was all over.”

“Something new has come up,” the inspector said heavily. He looked at Jones and bluntly asked, “Where were you the evening Lancaster was killed?”

The little fat man stared at him blankly. “Why, in Kansas City. I told you that.”

Day shook his head. “A little while ago Moon phoned the airport. There was no reservation in your name Monday night.”

Isobel said in a surprised tone. “You just now checked up? I thought the first thing the police did was check alibis.”

Day’s face grew a deep red, which made his nose stand out like a white beacon. When he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out but an unintelligible sputter.

I went to his rescue. “It was a silly oversight on my part as well as on the part of the police. But your husband wasn’t suspected of anything, and after both his secretary and his wife told us he had flown to Kansas City, it just never occurred to anyone to check up. Since we were satisfied Lancaster’s sole connection with the Jones and Knight Company had been his dealings with Knight, and your husband had neither any business nor social connections with the man, there wasn’t any reason to suspect him.”

Isobel turned to her husband. “Where were you, Harlan?” Then an expression of incredulity grew on her face. “Harlan! You couldn’t possibly have another woman!”

Harlan merely looked at her piteously and licked his lips.

“No, he hasn’t another woman,” I told her. “But he knew you had another man. He knew if he let it be known he was flying out of town, the minute his plane was supposed to leave, Knight would be over here.”

Isobel said indignantly, “Manny Moon! You promised me...”

“I’m not telling anything he doesn’t know,” I assured her. “He’s known about you and Knight for at least two months. Mrs. Knight told him. That’s how he knew Knight would be here at the time Lancaster was killed, making Knight a perfect alibi, but one he couldn’t use.”

Isobel looked from me to her husband and back again. “I don’t understand. You can’t possibly mean Harlan is a murderer.”

Her puzzlement was natural, for I have never seen anyone who looked less like a killer than the crushed little man in his ridiculous orange shorts and T-shirt.

“I’m afraid he is,” I said gently. “He had exactly the same motive we attributed to Mrs. Knight. It was there for us all the time, but Harlan’s timorousness made us overlook him as a possibility. Maybe it was that timorousness which sent him over the line. Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of facing ruin, which was what he visualized when he overheard your lover and Lancaster arguing the other side of that thin partition, and realized Knight’s financial loss would bankrupt the firm.

“He knew how his partner would react to Lancaster’s death, knew the moment he learned of it, he would unload the stock and return the money to the company account. He must have planned it all out while listening to Knight and Lancaster argue. In the middle of the argument he went next door, ostensibly to quiet Knight down, and surreptitiously opened the key of Knight’s call box. This allowed Matilda Graves to hear the tail end of the argument, thereby establishing a witness to Knight’s threat.

“Then he went home, established an alibi for himself by phoning back to the office and leaving word he was flying out of town, and at the same time put Knight in a position where he couldn’t explain where he was When Lancaster was shot.”

Isobel looked at her husband with disbelief. When he did nothing but continue to look back at her piteously, she turned her attention back to me.

“But... but,” she stuttered, “why would he then kill Willard? If he put up with Willard and me for two months without even opening his mouth, why suddenly kill him?”

The inspector recovered his voice. “Once you’ve killed, the second time is easy. The penalty for one murder is the same as the penalty for fifty.”

“Also,” I put in, “perhaps Harlan felt stealing his wife was one thing, but when Knight started stealing his money, he was going too far.”

Warren Day stared at the little man until Harlan seemed to shrink into himself. “Why don’t you tell us about it?” he said in a surprisingly gentle voice.

Harlan’s lips moved silently, finally got out, “You seem to know everything.”

“Why did you decide to kill Knight?”

His lips moved again for a moment without sound, then he managed to say in a dejected tone, “I followed Isobel to the Sheridan when she sneaked out to meet Willard, and through a window of the lounge I saw them together. When Willard suddenly entered the lobby, I went around to the hotel’s main entrance and saw him waiting for an elevator. I took the stairs to the second floor and caught the same elevator on the way up. Willard was surprised to see me, but he gave no sign he knew me because he was there under an assumed name, you see, and I suppose he was afraid I would address him by his right name. He made a motion for me to follow, and when we got off the elevator we went to his room together without exchanging a word. After he had closed the door, he demanded to know why I was following him.”

The little man paused while his eyes stared sightlessly in front of him, seeing not a group of people gathered on a cool front porch, but the interior of a hotel room.

“I didn’t know exactly why I was following him, except that it seemed to be time for a showdown about Isobel. I had things to say about his embezzlement, of course, but I had checked with the bank before closing time and knew the money was safely back in our account, so that discussion could have waited until he returned to the office. I told him I wanted him to stay away from Isobel. He said he loved her, both he and she intended to get divorces, and he meant to marry her. And then he laughed at me.”

He stopped speaking, letting us visualize the rest for ourselves. It was not hard to visualize: a round little fat man confronted by a tall, virile rival who had cheated him, stolen his beautiful wife, and now destroyed his dignity with the final insult of laughter. Momentarily I almost found myself sympathizing with him, but then I remembered he was the same killer who had attempted to murder Fausta.

Fausta remembered it at the same moment. Staring at Jones with the same fascination she might have regarded a freak in a side show, she said, “Now I understand why you looked like you were seeing a ghost the first time we met. You thought you had just poisoned me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He also thought you’d immediately recognize him as Lancaster’s killer when you walked into his office with me, not knowing the story that you had seen his face was a deliberate plant.”

At a gesture from Warren Day, Hannegan heaved to his feet and curtly motioned for Jones to arise. Numbly the little man got up, then gazed down at his wife in mute appeal.

But Isobel was already regarding him as though he were something without much interest in her past. Her eyes flicked over him indifferently, then settled thoughtfully on the burly figure of Lieutenant Hannegan. You could almost see her filing him away in her mind as a future possibility to while away an evening of boredom. I had a feeling that if she had him alone for a moment, she would issue an invitation for that evening.

Suddenly she smiled brightly up at Harlan. “I suppose you have it arranged for me to inherit everything, haven’t you, dear?”

Fausta forgot she was a lady. Leaving her seat next to me almost as fast as Farmer Cole could have moved, she planted a beautiful roundhouse square in Isohel’s lovely left eye.