The Case of the Crime King

Chapter 24

There was no sound in the room during the next few minutes. I took up a stance next to the door, on the side of the knob. Frank stood on the other side of the door, his pistol in his hand. Brady faded to a corner with his gun trained on the door.

It grew so silent in the room I could hear the breathing of all three of us.

The downstairs door slammed, and we could hear footsteps ascending the stairs. A key slipped into the lock.

We let him get all the way into the room. He was pushing the door shut behind him when I thrust the muzzle of the riot gun into his stomach.

“Get ’em high, mister,” I said. “Police officers.”

Maury Wey was even handsomer than he appeared in his mugg shot. The picture hadn’t shown his smooth, clear complexion or the long, silken lashes, which any woman would have envied. As an attempt at disguise he had grown a thin mustache, and had bleached it, his hair, and his eyebrows to an ash blond.

Beyond a slight narrowing of his eyes, Wey showed no emotion whatever. Slowly his hands rose to shoulder height. He glanced at Brady as the big sergeant moved forward, flicked another glance over his shoulder at Frank, then returned his gaze to me. There was no fright in his eyes. There wasn’t even surprise. They were as cold and unblinking as a coral snake’s.

I understood what San Quentin’s assistant warden had meant when he said Maury Wey probably wasn’t afraid of any man on earth. Even a brave man is likely to have some reaction if a riot gun is suddenly thrust against his stomach. At the very least you would expect a start of surprise.

Maury Wey didn’t turn a hair. He seemed almost psychotically indifferent to the guns around him.

In a cold voice he said, “You’re in luck. I haven’t got anything to go with.”

In spite of myself I felt a chill touch me at his total lack of fear. His words weren’t meant as a brag. He was simply informing us matter-of-factly that if he had been armed, he would have shot it out despite the odds against him.

It wasn’t normal. A really brave man is one who is able to overcome his natural fear in an emergency. Maury Wey didn’t have any to overcome. His type of courage is common in certain institutions.

In mental hospitals.

Frank moved in and gave the suspect a slower shakedown than he usually does. He did it carefully and thoroughly.

I wasn’t the only one Wey’s reaction had affected. He’d given Frank a chill, too.

Frank said, “He’s clean,” drew the suspect’s hands behind him, and snapped on the cuffs.

8:31 p.m. We took the suspect down to the Police Building. Frank and I interrogated him in the Robbery squad room. It’s probably indicative of the impression he had made on us that we didn’t uncuff him during the questioning period. If he was uncomfortable sitting with his hands shackled behind him, you couldn’t have told it from his attitude. He lolled in his chair with the appearance of perfect ease.

I started the ball rolling by saying, “Guess you know what we want from you, mister.”

“I assume I was wanted for prison break,” he said indifferently.

“That’s just part of it,” I said. “We’ve got you made cold on enough market robberies to put you away forever. With all the evidence we found in your room, you couldn’t beat the rap in a million years.”

He raised his blond eyebrows. “What evidence?”

“The four slacks, jackets, and hats, for instance. The uniform your gang wears on all its jobs. The four false noses and glasses frames.”

“They’re left over from Halloween,” he said. “I threw a masquerade party.”

“Real funny,” I said. “It’ll be even funnier if one of those guns you were storing matches up as the one that killed a police officer. You can laugh all the time the cyanide pill is rolling down the trough into the acid.”

“That would be a joke,” he said. “On me, unfortunately. Because I haven’t killed any police officers.”

Frank said, “Either you or Strife did. On that Grammon’s Supermarket job. Which one would you rather it be? You or Strife?”

Wey gave him a bleak smile. “You know the law better than that, Officer.”

“Huh?” Frank said.

“If I was on the job you mention — understand, I said if — it’s a purely hypothetical supposition — it wouldn’t make any difference who killed the officer. We’d both be guilty of murder. I don’t believe I know anyone named Strife.”

I said, “Come off it, mister. You knew Harry Strife in the Joint.”

“Oh, that Strife. Haven’t seen him since I left Q’s delightful hospitality. Is he out now?”

I said, “Listen, mister, we haven’t got you here to put on an end-man act with you. When it comes to police officers being murdered, we’ve got no sense of humor at all. Now you settle down and start answering our questions straight.”

He gave a slight shrug. “Go ahead and ask them.”

“All right. First we want the names of the other members of your gang.”

“What gang?”

Frank said, “The one Big Julie organized. You know all about it. There’s five of you all together. Right?”

“Big Julie who?”

I gave him an exasperated look. Frank held up a hand to me and said, “Where’s the main hideout, Wey?”

“Main hideout for what?”

“Where the money is. We know it’s not at Big Julie’s flat, or your room. They’re clean. And none of you have been spending the stuff. Where is it?”

Wey said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

In a cold voice I said, “You’re headed straight for the gas chamber, mister. You better grab at every break you can get. The authorities might feel a little better about you if you steer us to the rest of the gang. And to the money.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re offering a deal?”

I said, “You know better than that.”

“So what’s all the double talk? What are you offering?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except we write ‘cooperative’ on the report.”

He snorted. “You can write on your report, ‘Saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing.’ Like the three Chinese monkeys. And you can add, ‘Knows nothing.’”

We continued to question the suspect for another hour, without result. He denied membership in the robbery gang and denied having participated in any robberies since his escape. The sole admission he would make was that he had known Big Julie Martin and Harry Strite in prison.

Eventually we gave up. We took him down to the Felony Section and booked him on prison break, suspicion of armed robbery, and suspicion of homicide.

Meantime the four guns had been turned over to the Crime Lab for ballistics tests to see if they included the murder weapons that took the lives of Officer Ferguson and store clerk Emmet Doyle. A team from Latent Prints had been dispatched to Maury Wey’s room with instructions to lift all prints found there. It was hoped that the two so-far unidentified members of the gang had visited the suspect at some time or other, and might be identified by prints they had left.

As there was nothing more we could do that night, Frank and I knocked off and went home.

The following morning Frank and I visited the Crime Lab immediately after checking in. De Wayne Wolfer had just arrived, too, and hadn’t yet had a chance to check the guns found in Maury Wey’s room.

“We’re just getting ready to fire them,” he told us. “Stick around and I’ll make the comparisons right away.”

We followed him into the ballistics lab to watch the firing. Just inside the door of ballistics is a long, narrow, upright tank that resembles a hot-water tank with no top. A technician was standing on a single step next to the tank with a tagged .45 automatic in his hand.

The opening at the top of the tank was covered with a piece of inner tube that had a slit in its center. The technician thrust the gun muzzle through this slit so that the gun pointed straight downward into the six-foot column of water in the tank.

The technician pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. I knew how the contraption worked, because Wolfer had once explained its principle to me. Water offers a tremendous amount of resistance when a bullet hits it, but cannot exert enough pressure to distort the slug. The column of water slows the bullet’s downward course so rapidly that by the time it reaches the bottom, it settles gently upon the screen grid there, completely undamaged.

The only purpose of the slit piece of inner tube was to prevent gases and smoke from coming back into the room.

The technician withdrew the gun and pulled downward on a slim chain that ran over a pulley attached to the ceiling and then down into the tank. This pulled the screen grid to the surface, where the slug could be picked up by the technician without even getting his hand wet.

It took only a few minutes to fire all four guns. Then we waited while Wolfer put the slugs, one by one, under a comparison microscope and examined them against the bullets recovered from the bodies of Officer Ferguson and Emmet Doyle.

Wolfer grunted, rose, and left the room. In a few moments he returned with Ray Pinker. I knew this meant Wolfer thought he had a make, for it’s customary when a technician thinks he has a make to have it verified by Pinker or one of the other technicians. If it hadn’t been at least a very close match, Wolfer wouldn’t have bothered to get Pinker’s opinion.

Ray Pinker examined the two slugs Wolfer indicated under the comparison microscope.

“Not very smart people,” he commented when he had completed his examinations.

“Get a make?” I asked.

“Both of them.” He tapped his index finger against one of the tagged .38’s. “This killed Ferguson.” Then he touched one of the .45’s. “This one got Emmet Doyle. Not very smart people.”

Frank said, “For not getting rid of the guns?”

“Yeah.”

I said, “If they were smart, they’d never have used them in the first place.”

From the Crime Lab we went to Latent Prints. Sergeant McLaughlin and Bill Tucker were both working on the files.

I said, “Turn anything in Maury Wey’s room?”

McLaughlin looked up and said, “Hi, Joe. Frank. Yeah, maybe.”

Pushing closed the file drawer he had been checking, he went to his desk and picked up a report. Glancing down at it, he said, “Except for Wey’s and the landlady’s, there wasn’t a set of prints in the room good enough for a file check. But we brought out four singles. I ran them against that list of possibles you gave me.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Big Julie’s right index finger was one of them. None of them were Harry Strite’s. One was your thumbprint, and one I couldn’t identify.”

“How about the fourth?” I asked.

“He was on your list of possibles. Fellow named Harvey Daniels.”