Mink Is for a Minx [1st Annual Edition: The best from Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine]

Murder of an Unknown Man by James Holding

We couldn’t get an id on the corpse for three days. When, through a lucky accident, we finally did learn the man’s name, we refused to believe it. And by the time we figured out the motive for his murder, the dead man himself had to reveal some hidden evidence before we could prove it.

But maybe I’d better start at the beginning.

I’m Randall, Lieutenant of Detectives in Riverside. Riverside is a comparatively small and crimefree community. So when this unknown man was found by a newsboy early one morning, lying in a gutter on Catalpa Street with his skull bashed in, I thought that it was just another hit-and-run killing or, at worst, a simple local bludgeon murder.

That kind of killing we could run down easily enough, because violent death is so rare and essentially unprofessional in Riverside.

I began to realize I was wrong, however, when the unknown man continued to remain unknown for three days, despite my best efforts.

The clothes he was wearing when the boys brought him in offered no clue as to his identity. The pockets were empty, all of them — a suspicious circumstance in itself. All labels, makers’ names, laundry marks, and so on had been carefully removed from his suit, shirt, underwear, and even the inside of his shoes. And although somewhat crumpled and soiled from lying in the gutter of Catalpa Street for some time, the clothes were of decent enough quality to be completely average and unremarkable.

I was far from discouraged by our failure to learn his identity from his clothing or possessions, however. I knew that almost invariably, somebody will call up the police very soon after a body is found to report a missing child, lover, parent, or close acquaintance that will help us to establish the identity of any unknown corpses we may happen to have on hand.

But for this homicide victim, nobody telephoned at all. Nobody reported anyone missing, strayed, stolen, or drunk, even. Our Missing Persons had no record of a worried relative wanting us to find someone who remotely resembled the murdered man.

And nobody on the whole police department staff had ever seen the guy before in Riverside, or knew anybody who might have seen him. He was a stranger, all right — a complete outsider in a small city where almost everybody is known to everybody else.

I asked Doc Sanderson, our part-time and informal medical examiner, to look the corpse over for any body marks that might give us a lead we could work on, but that proved useless, too. All he found were a couple of incision scars from very common operations, likely to be found on the bodies of a thousand different people.

Doc did tell me, deadpan, that in his opinion the man had been killed by a strong blow on the back of the head with some heavy object — a diagnosis that I didn’t need a medical degree to figure out for myself.

“You mean like a club, Doc?” I asked him. “Or the bumper of a hit-run car, maybe?”

“Like a club,” Doc answered me. “This fellow may have been pushed out of a car into the gutter after he was killed, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t hit by a car. The body isn’t beat up enough for that. No bruises anywhere on him except that crack on the head.”

Meanwhile, I’d sent the fingerprints of the dead man to Washington, and that proved a dead end, too, if you’ll excuse the pun. No prints on file.

I decided then that the only thing I could do was to display the corpse in our morgue and plant some publicity in the Riverside Herald about him, urging as many of our citizens as possible to come to the morgue and see if the guy was anybody they knew or had ever seen a picture of.

I figured that pure morbid curiosity would induce a goodly number of Riversiders to file past the slab in the morgue where our unknown man lay with his head wound concealed, so as not to shock the sensitive.

I certainly turned out to be a good prophet in that respect. Half the people in town came by the morgue during the next twenty-four hours to take a look at the mysterious stranger who had been found brutally murdered out on Catalpa Street.

And that’s how we eventually found out his name.

Joe Cook, the desk clerk over at the Riverside House, our nicest hotel, came down to the morgue when he was off-duty around five o’clock and filed past the slab with the other citizens to take a look. After that, he came into my office upstairs.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve seen that guy you got downstairs. I just had a look at him, and I’d swear I saw him at Riverside House a few days ago.”

“Staying there, was he?” I asked, feeling that at last I had a lead.

“No,” Joe said. “He wasn’t staying there. This guy just came into the lobby about ten in the morning.”

“From where?”

“How do I know? Maybe he just got off the morning train. It was about that time.”

“Did he come up to you at the desk?”

“Nope. But I wasn’t very busy at the time, and I happened to notice him come in.”

“What did he do?”

“Just came into the lobby,” Joe repeated. “Went over to the telephone booth and looked in the phone book for a minute or two. He didn’t make a call, though. Then he wandered over and sat down at one of our writing desks in the writing alcove and wrote something.”

“What happened then?”

“He left, that’s all!”

“Didn’t he mail what he’d written or buy a stamp from you?”

“Nope. He just folded up what he wrote and stuck it in his pocket.”

I got up. “Come on, Joe,” I said. “Show me which desk he was writing at.”

Joe showed me. It was one of the three writing desks in a little writing alcove off the Riverside House lobby, but perfectly visible from the desk where Joe had been standing. I looked it over. There was a ballpoint pen fastened to the desk with a metal chain to keep guests from stealing it. There was a leather-edged blotter, perfectly clean, covering up most of the desk top. And there were a few sheets of hotel stationery with several hotel envelopes in a slot at the back of the desk.

“Did he use this hotel paper to write on?” I asked Joe.

“Yeah. I saw him reach out and take some and start writing on it with that ballpoint pen there.”

“Okay,” I said. I reached out myself and took the sheets of stationery that were left in the desk slot and brought them out and looked at them crossways against the lobby light. “How many people have written at this desk since the man in the morgue?” I asked Joe.

“Nobody I know of,” Joe said. “At least, not while I’ve been on duty. This is the seldomest-used desk of the three, Lieutenant — way over here in the corner like it is.”

I said, “This top sheet of stationery has some marks on it, Joe. Maybe he pulled out more than one sheet by mistake and wrote on the top one, bearing down so heavy with the pen that his writing showed through and marked the next one. I’ve heard about such things happening. I couldn’t be that lucky, though.”

But I was.

I went back to the office and turned the sheet of hotel stationery over to Mark Godwin in our little lab, and sure enough, he messed around with graphite or something of the sort and brought up a clear message on that writing paper. He made a copy of it for me and brought it in. Here’s what it said:

I read it down to the signature and then I swore out loud and said to Mark, “John Smith! You’re kidding!”

“No,” Mark said. “That’s what it was signed.”

“There’s a million John Smiths running around loose in this country, Mark. And a fifth of them are using the name as a phoney, at that. You’re a great big help, you are.”

“It ain’t my fault the guy’s name is John Smith,” Mark told me in a hurt voice and left me to my own devices.

My first device was to call Doc Sanderson in, tell him about the note having been found, and show it to him. “You’re a doctor,” I told him, “and this note was written to a doctor. Does it mean anything more to you than it does to me?”

Sanderson shook his head. “I can’t say it does, Lieutenant,” he said. “What’s it mean to you, incidentally?”

“Well,” I said, “First of all, it’s signed with a phoney name. That’s obvious. Second, this so-called John Smith is dunning some Riverside doctor for an old debt — a doctor that John Smith used to work for sixteen years ago. And third, it sounds like Smith isn’t going to be satisfied to collect his legitimate debt of seven hundred and fifty skins and let it go at that. He’s also going to put the bite on the good doctor for sixteen years’ interest on the money.”

“Why do you think this doctor Smith was writing to is here in Riverside?” Doc asked.

“Because John Smith didn’t mail the note when he wrote it. He stuck it in his pocket and carried it away after consulting the telephone book at the hotel for a local address. Obviously, he was going to deliver the note himself. Drop it in the doctor’s mail slot, maybe — right here in town.”

“And you suspect that doctor, whoever he is, killed John Smith when he got in touch with him that night?”

“You bet I do. Plenty of murders have been done for less than seven hundred and fifty dollars, Doc. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Y-e-s,” Doc admitted. “Especially if you read the note a little differently.”

“What do you mean, differently? I can read English. And that’s what the words say, Doc.”

“No, I mean interpret the note differently. Suppose our murdered man downstairs isn’t just dunning this Riverside doctor an old debt and sixteen years’ interest. Suppose the words ‘with interest’ are a threat of blackmail? Because now John Smith has come into possession of something he can use to put pressure on this doctor he used to work for? The whole tone of the note is arrogant, self-assured, even a little threatening, it seems to me. As though John Smith knew the doctor would have to pay that old debt now. What do you think?”

I said, “You could be right, Doc. And the blackmailer is signing his note John Smith just for kicks. Because he’d know the doctor would recognize his true identity from his reference to the old debt.”

Doc Sanderson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’d say blackmail was a definite possibility. Approach it from that angle.”

“Approach it hell,” I said. “How? We’ve got to find out who this doctor is before we can approach anything. You see that, don’t you, Doc?”

He grinned his slow relaxed grin at me. “I can see that, all right,” he said, “and I don’t envy you your job.”

“It’s a cinch,” I said. “I’ve got it all worked out. Look. The note is written by a guy nobody’s ever seen before in Riverside. He’s a stranger from out of town, right? His note practically says so. And we know that he used to work for, or at least knew, this particular doctor sixteen years ago. That means the doctor wasn’t in Riverside either at that time. He was probably in the same town where the bogus John Smith resided. Do you follow me?”

“Perfectly.”

“Okay. So we check out all the doctors in Riverside, to see which ones were not living here sixteen years ago. There aren’t too many doctors in a city this size, especially ones that came here from someplace else.”

Doc Sanderson didn’t say anything.

“Now, when we find out which doctors weren’t living here sixteen years ago, we send photographs of our John Smith to the police in the towns where the doctors were living at that time. And the chances are, we’ll come up with a true identification of John Smith in one of those towns.

“We’ll tie him to the specific doctor who came from that town, and who lives here. You could help me with this, Doc, by getting me the dope on our doctors from the records of the county medical society. You’re a member, aren’t you?”

Doc said, “Sure.” I stood up. But the Doc stayed seated. “But,” he said, “I don’t belong to the dental society, or the veterinary society. And I don’t happen to have a Ph.D. behind my name either.”

I sat down again. “I didn’t think of that,” I said. “Dentists, vets, and Ph.D.’s are all doctors too, aren’t they?”

“I just thought of it myself,” Doc said apologetically. “But it’s got to be considered.”

That increased the difficulty of my checking job about five hundred percent, I estimated. And it reduced my chances of coming up with anything helpful by just as high a percentage.

I sighed. Doc Sanderson sighed in sympathy.

“This blackmail thing,” I said finally, just to be saying something. “Are doctors likely blackmail victims? Or rather, what would they be likely to be blackmailed about?”

“In general, the same indiscretions and sorry sins that laymen get blackmailed about,” Sanderson said. “After all, doctors are human, too.” He grinned at me again. “But to answer you question more specifically, I suppose when it comes to doctors, malpractice is the basis for most lawsuits or blackmail schemes against us.”

“Malpractice? You mean like giving a patient the wrong medicine?”

“Sure. Or a hundred other wrong things that doctors can do — more often than not through accident, carelessness, or ignorance. Sometimes deliberately, however. Most doctors carry insurance against malpractice suits nowadays, so we don’t fear blackmail attempts the way we used to.”

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “Doc, you mentioned the word ‘deliberately.’ Deliberate malpractice. If a doctor had that proved against him, he’d be washed up in any respectable community, wouldn’t he?”

“It wouldn’t help him any, that’s for sure,” Sanderson said. A reminiscent smile curved his lips under the white mustache. “I remember when I was in medical school, we had a case history about a doctor who let his love of money run away with his integrity as a medical man. He practiced down south in a community of fairly uneducated, ignorant people, where he could get away with it. His specialty was performing fake hysterectomies on his lady patients.”

Being a fairly uneducated, ignorant bachelor myself, I was about to ask Doc what a hysterectomy was, when the funniest look came over his face all at once, and without another word, he got up and went out of my office.

I didn’t see him again for half an hour. When he came back, I was looking at the telephone book, trying just for the hell of it, to get a rough idea how many M.D.’s, Ph.D’s, D.D.S.’s and so forth there really were in Riverside. Doc had a big envelope under his arm.

“Randall,” he said to me very softly, his face reflecting some kind of inner shame, “when we check out the doctors who weren’t in Riverside sixteen years ago, we can forget everybody but general practitioners and neurosurgeons.”

“How come?” I asked him. “What’s happened to eliminate all the dentists and vets?”

“I’ll show you,” he said, “if you’ll come to the morgue with me.”

I went, of course. Doc Sanderson led me to the slab where John Smith lay. He pulled on an overhead bulb and drew the white sheet down from the corpse’s shoulders, so that when he turned the body over its back was exposed. He pointed to a white, slightly crinkled scar that ran down the dead man’s spinal column for several inches with suture marks on each side of it.

“See that?” he asked. I nodded. “That’s from an operation of some sort,” Doc Sanderson said. “Spinal fusion, I’d say.”

I asked, “What about it?”

Doc said, “Just look at this.” He took an X-ray negative from the big envelope under his arm and pointed. “That’s what’s under the scar,” he said. “I took this X-ray of his back a few minutes ago. Just thought of it when we were talking about those hysterectomies.”

I looked with a layman’s puzzled eyes at the vertebrae that the X-ray negative showed. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Exactly!” he replied almost exultantly. “There’s nothing to see. That’s just the point! This man, John Smith or whoever he is, has an operation scar on his back, and under the scar there is absolutely no sign at all that the bones have ever been touched by a surgeon!”

“Ah,” I said finally. “Now I get it, Doc. Thanks. This should do it for us.”

And it did.

First, we checked the general surgeons and neurosurgeons in Riverside, the only ones that might have done a back operation. There were only a handful altogether, as it turned out, and only one who had come to Riverside from another city and been practicing here for less than sixteen years.

This was Dr. Jonas Ridley, a distinguished, civic-minded man, head of the surgical staff at Riverside Hospital, and a highly respected member of the American College of Surgeons.

Next, we got John Smith, our man in the morgue, quickly identified from his photograph by two cousins and an aunt, in the southern city from which Dr. Jonas Ridley had moved to Riverside, as — yes — John Smith, their cousin and nephew respectively.

And finally, to cap it all, the hospital to which Dr. Ridley had been attached there, found in its archives a record of a spinal fusion operation performed sixteen years before by Dr. Jonas Ridley on a patient named John Smith.

So John Smith, it seemed pretty certain, had recently discovered, through a casual insurance physical examination perhaps, that he had paid Dr. Ridley seven hundred and fifty hard-earned dollars sixteen years ago to perform on him a back operation that hadn’t been necessary at all. And that Dr. Ridley had never, in fact, undertaken — except to make a surface incision.

When I faced him with all this, Dr. Ridley stoutly maintained that he knew nothing whatever about anybody called John Smith, or about his murder.

But the jury did not agree with him, for four good reasons. Reason one was that I found a flashlight behind the front seat of Dr. Ridley’s car that had demonstrably been used to bash in Smith’s head, since it still bore a few of his hairs and some spots of his blood on it.

Reason two was that I found in the back seat of Dr. Ridley’s car a men’s-store label that had been cut from John Smith’s inside jacket pocket.

Reason three was that Dr. Ridley could not satisfactorily account for his time on the night of the murder.

And reason four was that old Doc Sanderson testified so persuasively about Dr. Ridley’s deliberate malpractice sixteen years before, as revealed by his X-ray of John Smith’s back.

So we managed to convict Dr. Ridley, all right.

But both Doc Sanderson and I were a little ashamed of ourselves for not seeing right away that John Smith’s note had really contained the whole truth of the case in just two simple words: ‘back payment.’