The Case of the Killer-Diller

Chapter Two Two Out of Three

A detective named Lindsey was the first one to get there, even before Dusty Detwiller, the band-leader. She’d put in her call direct to headquarters, without bothering to send out for a neighborhood cop. They’d been through this twice before, and she knew by now the policeman was just an intermediate step. Headquarters was always notified in the end anyway.

She was holding the fort alone, down in the jam-session room, when he got there. Armstrong was still stupefied up in his room, Frankie was around the corner trying to steady himself on coffee, Detwiller was getting an alcohol-rub downtown at the Thebes Baths, and she hadn’t been able to locate Kershaw, the fifth member of the Sandmen. Her nerves were calmer now, she didn’t mind going back in there as much as at first. Besides, she wanted to make sure that nothing was touched. They always seemed to attach a lot of importance to that, though of course that was in cases of murder. This was plainly a suicide.

She had had no reason to like Hal Thatcher while he was still alive, so she couldn’t really feel bad about his going. She wondered what had made him do it. She sat with her back to him, on the piano-bench, looking the other way. She kept her face down toward the floor. It was pretty horrible when you looked squarely up at him. It was bad enough just to see his long attenuated shadow on the basement floor, thrown by the light coming in more strongly now through the sidewalk-vent.

The voice of Hoff, the janitor, sounded outside, asking questions, so she knew that her vigil was over at last. “Somebody in the house sent for you? Who? That’s the first I know about anyt’ing being wrong. Them musickaners, I bet. I knew it! I’m only surprised it didn’t happen already before now—”

The door flung open and this detective came in, a uniformed cop behind him. She looked up relievedly, threw down her cigarette.

He wasn’t a particularly handsome individual, but she thought what a relief it was to see a man with healthy brown color in his face for a change, instead of the yeasty night-pallor she was used to. His eyes went up toward the ceiling behind her, came down again. Then they switched over to her.

“You the girl that phoned in?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Pretty cool little number, aren’t you?” he told her. She couldn’t tell whether he meant it admiringly or unfavorably. To tell the truth she didn’t care much.

“The boys’ instruments are all in here, and I thought I’d better keep an eye on them until you people got here,” she explained. “I woke up in here with him, so I didn’t think it would hurt to stay a minute or two more.”

“All right, let me have his name, please.” He took out a little notebook.

“Hal Thatcher.”

He scribbled. “You say you found him like this when you woke up, Mrs. Thatcher?”

A circumflex accent etched the corner of her mouth. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not married to him. We worked together in the same band, that’s all. I’m the canary and he played the slush-pump.” She saw his face redden a little, as if he felt he’d made a social error. “Oh, because I said I woke up— No, we were having a jam-session, and I fell asleep there at the piano, that’s what I meant. We rent this room from the building-owner, come up here after work about two or three in the morning every once in a while and play for our own amusement — you know, improvise. That’s what a jam-session is.”

He nodded almost inattentively, but she had a feeling he’d heard every word. “What went on last night, to the best of your recollection? Better let me have your name too, while we’re about it.”

“Billie Bligh. The formal of that is Wilhelmina. About last night — nothing any different from any other time. The way these sessions come up is, Dusty — he’s our front man, the leader, you know — will say ‘How about having a session tonight?’ and so we all agree and have one. We left the Troc, that’s the club where we work, about three, and piled into a couple of taxis, instruments and all, and came on up. We sat around chinning and smoking for a while, waiting for the spirit to move us—”

He eyed the gin bottles meaningfully, but didn’t say anything.

“Some of the boys had a few nips to warm up,” she agreed deprecatingly. “Then finally somebody uncased his instrument and started tootling around, and one by one everyone else joined in, and first thing you know we were all laying it in the groove. That’s how those things go. In about two hours we were all burned out, they started dropping out again one by one. That’s when I laid my head on the piano and dozed off. The others must have left after that, and Thatcher stayed behind, and the willies got him and—”

“Not the willies,” he assured her.

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t act as though he intended telling her, anyway, but just then the cop who had been left outside the basement door rapped, stuck his head in, and said: “Two of the others just showed up.”

Lindsey motioned at random and Dusty Detwiller came in alone, flaring camel’s hair coat belted to almost wasp-waisted tightness around him. He didn’t look particularly jaunty at the moment, though.

“This is awful,” he said to Billie, shoving his hat far back on his head and holding his hand pressed to it. “What’ll we do about tonight? Who’s this man?”

“Name of Lindsey, headquarters... No, don’t pick up any of those chairs. I want everything left just the way it is. You’ll have to stand up.”

Detwiller started unfastening his coat, then changed his mind, tightened it up again. “Hope I don’t catch cold coming out like this right out of a steam-room,” he mourned.

“Do I have to stay in here any longer?” Billie asked, with her eyes on the elongated shadow on the floor. Then she looked up, glimpsed Frankie standing just outside the door with the cop. “That’s all right,” she corrected herself hastily. “I’d better stay. You may need me, I was the only one who wasn’t drinking.”

Lindsey just looked at her, then at the doorway, but he didn’t say anything. “At what time did you leave here?” he asked Detwiller.

“A little before five. It hadn’t started to get light yet.”

“Who was still here when you left?”

“They all were. I was the first one to break away. Armstrong and Kershaw were still playing, but they couldn’t lay it in the groove much any more. Frankie was here too, but he was high on weed. Billie was already falling asleep over the piano. And Hal... Hal seemed all right. He was leaning back there, on two legs of his chair, against the wall. He had a little gin in him, but he seemed all right. He kept shimmying with his hands in his pockets.”

“You went where?”

“The Thebes Baths. I always go there after a session.”

“That’ll be all for just now. Send the other one in, Dugan.”

Frankie came in. The coffee didn’t seem to have done him much good. He looked nervous and jumpy even before Lindsey had opened his mouth to ask him anything.

“Your name?”

“Frank Bligh.”

Lindsey looked at the girl.

“He’s my brother,” she said, moistening her lips.

“You were under the influence of marihuana, I’m told.”

The pallid youth cringed. “So was everyone else except Billie. We all blazed it a little. We always do,” he said defensively. “I show it more, that’s all.”

“Did you stay on to the end?”

“Y-yeah, I guess so.”

“Just be definite about it, will you?” Lindsey said tonelessly. “Who’d already left this room and who hadn’t?”

“Dusty had left, and Armstrong had gone upstairs to his room already, and Kershaw had stumbled out by that time, too. I don’t know where he went.” His eyes traveled up toward the ceiling, dropped again “He was still here,” he said reluctantly.

“Then you were the last one out, except Miss Bligh and the dead man—” Lindsey broke off short. “How’d you get the black eye? Bump into something while you were high?”

It was one of those verbal traps. Frankie’s head started to go up and down affirmatively.

The girl looked up suddenly from the floor. “No, Frank, don’t,” she forestalled him. “Tell him the straight of it, that’s the wisest way in the end. Thatcher gave it to him,” she said to the detective.

“Why?” the latter asked quietly.

“He’d been making passes at me for a long time. That didn’t bother me, I can handle myself. I didn’t tell Frankie. But he found out about it last night for the first time, and they had a scrap in the taxi coming up here. Thatcher hit him in the eye, but then the rest of us patched it up between them, smoothed it over. Dusty won’t stand for any quarreling in the organization. It’s bad for our work. We even stopped for a minute outside a lunchroom and they got a little piece of raw meat for Frankie’s eye and brought it out to him.” She smiled placatingly at the dick. “Frankie’s been worried about it, though, ever since he heard Hal did that to himself this morning. I told him not to—” Then as there was no answering smile, her own froze. “Why are you looking at the two of us like that?” she faltered.

“What do you want me to do, smile, Miss Bligh? This man never hung himself up there. He was murdered.”

Frankie flinched as though he’d been hit. The girl’s face paled.

“I could see that the minute I stepped into the room!” Lindsey snapped. “Either you people are still groggy from your jam-session, or you’re trying to cover up something — and not being very good at it either!”

Frankie Bligh’s cheeks were hollowing and filling like a fish out of water. He gave a stricken yell at his sister. “Now see what you’ve done! Now see what you’ve done! I told you it wasn’t going to look good for me!” He turned and bolted out the door.

“Grab that young fellow, Dyer!” the dick shouted remorselessly after him. “Hang onto him!”

A blue-sleeved arm shot out, fastened itself to Frankie’s shoulder, twirled him around like a top.

Lindsey walked leisurely out to the two of them. “What’d you do it for, kid?” he asked gruffly.

The terrified Frankie’s eyelids fluttered a couple of times, then he sagged limp as a dishcloth into the cop’s arms.

Lindsey had all the surviving members of Dusty Detwiller and his Sandmen ushered back into the jam-pot again about an hour later.

Frankie Bligh hadn’t been booked for the murder yet and was still with them in a bad state of semi-collapse, his wrists manacled together. Armstrong had been sobered up by now, chiefly by heroic methods that had nothing to do with letting nature take its course. Kershaw, the missing member of the original sextet, had been located by an alarm and brought in from the bar where he had gone in all seriousness to brace up on a lethal mixture compounded of paprika, tomato juice and rye.

“Now, if you people still want to do your chore tonight at the Troc,” Lindsey warned them, “you’ll cooperate with me in this. You’re not getting out of here until I’ve had this reconstructed to suit me.”

And as Detwiller commenced to say something, he cut him off with a curt: “If you try getting in touch with a mouthpiece, we’ll simply adjourn someplace else where he can’t find you right away.”

“You can’t do this to us!” Dusty fumed.

“No, but I’m doing it.”

Billie looked at him hopefully. If he put them all through their paces like this together, instead of just concentrating on Frankie and grilling him alone, maybe it meant he wasn’t altogether convinced of her brother’s guilt yet. But then she glanced at the cuffs on his wrists and her hopes died again.

Lindsey had two other dicks working with him now, but they must have been third-graders. Mostly, she noticed, they just did the errands. Thatcher’s body had been taken down, of course, and removed to the morgue, after both he and the room had been photographed.

An ominous loop still remained in the heavy, insulated wiring where his neck had been. A stepladder against the wall showed how he had been disengaged without bringing the wire down from the ceiling, simply by expanding the loop a little and pulling his head through it. That loop, Billie recalled, had always been there, ever since they’d begun using the room — a long oval hanging down between two of the pipes, just clear of the tops of their heads, to take up slack in the wire. Otherwise the heavy hundred-watt bulb in which the cord ended on the other side of the pipe, would have hung down too low toward the floor, been smashed a dozen-times over in the course of their high-jinks.

“Let’s talk about this contrivance a little,” Lindsey said drily, “before we start getting down to cases. Did a licensed electrician put up such a botched job for a light-extension?”

Several of them shook their heads. “I didn’t think so,” Lindsey concluded.

“Hoff, the janitor, rigged that up for us,” Dusty explained. “You see, there was no wiring for light at all in here when we rented this part of the basement. He tapped the nearest wire, which is outside in the passageway there, clamped on an outlet on the wall by it. Then he had to bore a hole up there over the top of the door, to pass the wire through to us on this side. He got hold of a long length of wire, ran it through, put a plug on one end and a socket for a light-bulb on the other.

“To save himself the trouble of having to clamp it up against the ceiling, he just threaded it over the tops of those two pipes and let them do the work. But he’s a dope. When he got all through, the wire was long enough to lay the bulb on the floor, like an egg. So instead of taking his pliers and cutting it and taping it together again, he just took this big loop he had between the two pipes that supported it, taking up the slack and lifting the bulb about to where it should go. Then to make sure it would stay that way, he made a big knot in the wire just on the outside of the last pipe, too thick to go through the slit between pipe and ceiling.

“Clear enough,” Lindsey complimented him. “In other words that knot held it fast on the outside of the two pipes. But on the inside, toward the door and basement passage, it formed a perfect pulley arrangement. That loop could be drawn tight or relaxed at will by someone standing outside the door there, simply by pulling the plug out of the outlet — thereby plunging this room into darkness — taking a good grip on the wire, and pulling it taut out through that hole above the door. And if someone’s head happened to get caught in that loop as it contracted, and he couldn’t extricate it again quickly enough, it’d be just too bad. He’d probably corkscrew the loop as he threshed around, until his neck broke. A perfect case of garrotting. That’s how it was done.”

“But he was held fast up there between the two pipes, as high as he could go, when I woke up and saw him,” Billie said. “How could he stay up there like that, unless the murderer kept pulling the cord taut out there in the passage, held onto it for hours? And there was no one out there when I—”

“No, he wouldn’t have to do that. He only had to hold it long enough to get a good thick knot bunched in it just past that bunghole over the door, to keep it from slipping through again with the weight of Thatcher’s body. You may have missed seeing that second knot, but I didn’t. It’s out there big as life right now.”

“Well then, that let’s Frankie out, without going any further!” she said decisively. “Thatcher may not have been a heavyweight, but my brother hasn’t got enough strength in his arms to hold a cord tight so a man’s full weight is kept clear of the floor, and at the same time tie a knot into it.”

“That doesn’t let your brother or anyone else out,” Lindsey let her know firmly. “The pipes acted somewhat on the principle of pulleys, took a lot of the direct strain out of it. And another thing, marihuana, like any other narcotic can lend a man abnormal strength temporarily. Overstimulation. We’ve got the method now. That points equally at any one of you, except you yourself, Miss Bligh. We’ve got the motive. And that points only at you, so far, Bligh. No one else had one. All we’ve got to learn now is who had the opportunity. Two out of three rings the bell as far as I’m concerned,” he concluded ominously.

He turned to Frankie. “Now, according to your own admission made to me before you supposedly knew it was a murder that was involved and not just suicide, you were the last one to leave here, except your sister and the dead man. I suppose you want to retract that now.” He didn’t wait to hear whether he did or not. “I don’t need your own testimony on that point. I can get it by elimination, from your yellow-bandsmen. Now tell me who was the first to get up and go out of here?”

Detwiller said, almost reluctantly, as though he felt it was taking an unfair advantage: “I was.”

“Corroboration?” snapped Lindsey.

They all O.K.’d it. “Yeah.”... “That’s right, he was.”

“Then you’re out of it,” Lindsey told him. The band-leader looked apologetically at the others, as though he would have been glad to take the rap if he could have.

“Who was next?”

“Armstrong,” said Kershaw, and the girl nodded.

“I was starting to fall asleep already,” she said, “but I remember the sound of his slamming the door roused me for a minute. I looked up and Kersh and Thatcher and — Frankie — were still here with me.”

“And after him?” He looked at Kershaw. No answer. He looked at Frankie. The latter’s eyes dropped and he stared down at the floor. He looked at the girl finally. “I can’t help you out on that one,” she said almost defiantly. “I was sound asleep by then. That time the door didn’t wake me.”

“I was pretty binged,” Kershaw drawled unwillingly, kneading the back of his neck. “I wouldn’t care to get a pal in Dutch by saying something I ain’t one hundred percent sure of. It seems to me Bligh and Thatcher and Billie were still in here, though. I kind of remember saying ‘Good-night’ three times. That’s the only way I can tell.”

“Don’t be so damn noble on my working-time,” Lindsey squelched him. He turned back to Frankie again. “How about it? You want to use the out your pal here is giving you?”

He looked up and met his sister’s gaze. She stared at him hard without saying a word. “No,” he groaned. “I guess what I told you in the beginning still goes. I was pretty high and hazy, but I remember being alone in here with Thatcher at the very end. Billie, too, of course, but she was asleep.” Then his voice rose, he shook his manacled hands pleadingly toward the dick. “But I know I didn’t do anything like that! I wasn’t in any condition even to figure out that I could snare him by means of the loop in that light cord. It was all I could do to find the stairs and get up them—”

“I’m sorry, Bligh,” said Lindsey, “but the opportunity jibes, too. There’s my two out of three. I’m going to have to hold you. The rest of you can go.”