The Case of the Killer-Diller

Chapter Three Kill Crazy

As they filed out one by one giving him sympathetic looks, Dusty went to him and rested his hand encouragingly on his bowed shoulder for a minute. “Buck up, kid,” he murmured, “we’re with you. We’ll get you out of this. You’ll be back laying it in the groove with us in no time!” Then, all business again, he hurried out, remarking: “I gotta get down to the Mad House[1] in a hurry and see if the Warden[2] can find me someone to take his place. That means a rehearsal too, to break him in—”

The door closed and Lindsey saw that the girl was still sitting there on the piano bench, hadn’t gone with them. “Wouldn’t grasping that wire, pulling it, even though it was heavily insulated, have left bums or marks on the palms of whoever did it? Frankie’s hands are smooth and white.”

“So are everyone else’s. I took a look at them all. That don’t amount to a row of pins anyway. It would have been easy enough to slip on a pair of gloves or even twist a folded handkerchief around them.”

“I want to talk to my brother alone for a few minutes, won’t you let me do that, please?”

He motioned the other two dicks toward the door, and went out after them.

As soon as the door had closed, Billie went over beside Frankie. He was holding his head dejectedly with both hands, even though they were linked. “I’m scared, Sis,” he moaned. “I got a feeling I’ll never be able to get out of this! And I didn’t do it. You gotta believe me!”

“I know you didn’t do it. But that’s why you’ve got to answer me. You’ve got to tell me why you acted so funny this morning, when I caught you behind the bathroom door, hiding up there. You knew about it then, already, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he whispered fearfully. “I came down here again after I left the first time. I was full of weed, but my idea was vaguely to wake you up so we could go back to our own flat together. It must have just happened. I thought I saw a shadow duck behind those empty ashcans, at the end of the passage out there. And then when I opened the door, the light was out in here. He was already up there. I didn’t see him, but I stumbled around and went into him face-first. I could feel his legs hanging limp before me. You know how the weed’ll give you the horrors over anything like that. I got ’em bad. I forgot about you being in here. I forgot about calling for help. I only wanted out. I heat it upstairs and hid in that bathtub. That’s all it was, sis, just bad kicks from the weed. But I can’t tell them that. If I tell them, they’ll be surer than ever I did do it. I can’t prove I didn’t, not even to you, but somehow I know it wasn’t me. You see, I wouldn’t have been so scared if I had done it. The mere fact that I was so scared shows I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t turn on any shower. My hair was that wet from my own cold sweat coming out all over me. What am I going to do?”

“You’re pretty badly sewed up,” she admitted worriedly. “And with every move you’ve made, you’ve only made it look worse for yourself. The way you bolted for that door, when he first said murder, and then fainted dead away in the cop’s arms out there.”

“Nerves,” he said. “You don’t know what that weed does to you the day after. And then, knowing that I was the last one down here, and that I’d had that fight with him over you last night when he gave me the black eye—”

The door opened and Lindsey came in again. “Time enough?” he asked the girl. He motioned his assistants. “Take him with you, boys.”

Frankie stumbled to his feet, pale and terrified, as though he were going to be executed instantly. “Pull yourself together, Frankie,” the girl urged. “The truth’ll come out, it’s got to. It looks bad now, but remember it’s always darkest before the dawn.”

Then as the door closed, she turned back to the dick again. “And now it’s you that I’d like to talk to.”

“Shoot,” he consented, eyeing her curiously.

“I know my brother never did that.”

“I do too,” was the unexpected answer.

It took her a half-minute to get her breath back. “What? Well then, why did you have him taken in for it?”

“There are a couple of good reasons. Officially we’ve got a swell circumstantial case against him that I can’t ignore at this stage of the game. I’d be remiss in my duty if I didn’t have him booked for murder, after what’s been brought out. Secondly, it’ll be a good deal easier to catch whoever did do it, if he thinks he’s fooled us, thinks we aren’t still on the look-out for him. He’ll be off his guard this way.”

“How come you’re giving Frankie the benefit of the doubt?”

“Simply my knowledge of human nature. He acted so damned, flagrantly guilty, that he couldn’t be anything but innocent. That may sound paradoxical but it’s true nevertheless. If he’d been guilty, no matter how frightened he was, he’d at least have tried to cover himself up. He didn’t even try. He’s a nervous wreck, his control all shot. That made him do and say the very things he wanted to avoid most. Now was there anything more you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Yes,” she said. “It may be disloyal to Dusty and the boys, it may wash us up as an organization, attach a jinx to us, but I can’t help it. My brother’s life is at stake. Mr. Lindsey, this thing’s happened twice before.”

“What?” His jaw dropped. Then he clamped it decisively shut again. “Let’s hear about it,” he said.

She sat down on the bench, thrust the point of her elbow back on the keyboard. It gave an eery little plink! “You notice not a word was said about it to you. That’s for business reasons. There’s been an unspoken understanding among all of us to soft-pedal it. There’s nothing I hate worse than a stoolie, but I think the time for keeping it quiet is past. It wasn’t written down as murder the first two times, but now that I look back, I think it was. It must have been. The details were too much like today’s. The dicks that investigated were easier to fool, that was all.”

She drew a deep breath. “There’s a murderer among us in the band, and there has been all along. He only strikes at certain unaccountable times.”

He was leaning toward her intently, devouring every word. “Give me everything you can on those first two times it happened. Every little detail that you can remember. Our whole hope of getting the right man, of clearing your brother, may lie in some little detail — repeated three times.”

She contorted her face remorsefully. “If I’d only realized what it was at the time! I don’t think any of us did — except him, of course, whoever he is. It’s so long ago now—”

“Try, try,” he urged, jack-knifing a finger at her chest. “Don’t give up so easily.”

“We all knew each other in school,” she began slowly. “There was Dusty and Armstrong and Frankie and Kershaw — and the two who have gone now — Lynn Deering and Freeman. They were the charter-members. They’d already formed the band in school, helped pay their way by playing at prom dances and things like that. I wasn’t included yet. That was in the early thirties, when crooners were all the rage. This lad Deering used to whisper huskily through a megaphone, and sweet young things would swoon all over the room.

“We all got out of school and went our separate ways, didn’t see each other for about a year and a half. But the depression had hit its full stride just about then, and you can imagine how tough the going was. Then Dusty got in touch with all of us and suggested re-forming the band — professionally this time. Well, we did. That was a little over two and a half years ago. Nothing happened the first six months. Then the summer before last we were playing a resort hotel in Michigan, and we started to hold these jam-sessions down in the basement, just like here. I still wasn’t a member, but I was there with them on account of Frankie being in the band. I was present at the jam-sessions too.

“There was a society girl there that had been carrying the torch heavily for Lynn Deering all summer, and just two days before it happened her old man showed up and hauled her off by the scruff of the neck. Of course that gave them a ready-made motive to slap on — after it had happened. But here’s the thing. I spoke to Lynn about it only the day before, asked him if he felt bad about it, and he told me he was glad to be rid of her, that she’d been a nuisance. And I could see he was telling the truth.

“Anyway, one morning after a session, he was found down there hanging from the rafters. It wasn’t nearly as much of a give-away as you found this one to be. An inquest was held, they handed down a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, and that was that. The hotel had it hushed up, and the boys took me in to canary in Deering’s place.

“Well, just about a year later, that’s last summer, we were playing the Nautilus Pier at Atlantic City on a season’s contract, and we used to hold our after-work sessions in a little shack across the railroad tracks on Arctic Avenue. One scorching night in August we went over there to hold a session. The heat had gotten Freeman down, he was picking fights with everyone — and there again, you see, they had a plausible motive at hand. There was a rigged-up light-attachment in the shack, just like there is here. I didn’t stay until the end. I got out just before dawn and went over to the Boardwalk to get a breath of air. One by one all the others followed me.”

“Who was the last one to leave?”

“Two of them came away together, luckily for them. Frankie and Armstrong with him. Freeman was left there alone. But none of us ran into each other right away. You know how long the Boardwalk is down there. Any one of us could have slipped back a moment before joining the rest. Freeman never showed up, and when we went back to try to coax him into a good humor, he was hanging there. Again the coroner’s inquest finding was suicide while of unsound mind, due to the heat and too much alcohol. That’s about all. We took Thatcher in to replace him. And now—”

Lindsey said: “All right, you’ve given me the general outline of the thing. Now let’s get down to cases. Were there any grudges between this Deering and the others?”

“No, all the fellows liked him. He was a swell guy, even if he was a crooner.”

“How about Freeman?”

“All of them had trouble with him that night. But nothing serious enough to create any animosity, just grouchiness. Dusty was the only one he was careful not to talk out of turn to, because after all Dusty is the boss.”

“Could there have been some private trouble that you didn’t know anything about?”

“No. I was like that with all of them.” She crossed two fingers. “I knew the very laundry-marks on their shirts by heart. You have about as much privacy as a goldfish, in our racket.”

“How about money?”

“No. We’ll none of us die rich and we don’t give a rap about money.”

“Women?”

“None of them ever stepped on the other boys’ toes in that respect.”

“No offense, but how about you yourself? Thatcher did annoy you lately. You admit that yourself. Either of the other two do that? Because I’ve still got to count your brother in on this, after all is said and done.”

“Lynn Deering didn’t have time enough to tip his hat to anyone while that society deb was around his neck. And Freeman was a man’s man, not much of a chaser. Frankie isn’t the protective sort. It’s the other way around. I’ve had to look after him half the time.”

“Then I’m afraid any rational motive is out, and we’re up against the worst kind of thing — irrational homicidal mania. Doesn’t care who he kills when the kill-mood is on him. But what brings it on? If we only knew that, we could set a trap for him. There’s some link there that we’ve got to get. Something that aroused it last night, and the time before, and the first time. And didn’t operate all the many other times you’ve held jam-sessions. We can’t sit back and wait another six months for it to occur again. He’s smart, they always are. We won’t know then any more than we know now, unless we’re on our guard ahead of time — one up on him.

“I’ll send for a copy of the inquest findings both from Atlantic City and the other place, but I know already they won’t tell me anything. If they were able to tell me anything now, they would have told the officials on the spot something at the time. Did any of them ever show any signs of being not quite right? I mean act unaccountably at times?”

She shook her head. “Not that I could distinguish. Of course, it could be that I’m with them so much. I’ve grown so used to all their traits, that I can’t tell the difference any more. It would take an outsider.”

“Well, were any of them ever in any accidents?”

She looked mournfully down at the floor. “The wrong one was,” she said slowly. “Frankie and I were both in a pretty bad car smash-up about a year after we got out of school. His nervous system’s never been the same since. But his head wasn’t hurt, nothing like that—” She hid her face suddenly behind her hands. “The more that comes out, the more points to him — and yet I’m as sure as I’m sitting here—”

“I can’t be, of course,” he told her gently, “but I’m hoping. Look, let’s not give up yet. I’m afraid he’ll have to start going through the mill. It’s not in my power to stop that, but if we keep at it, we’ll turn up something yet, I’m sure of it. And of course, not a word to any of them that we’ve had this talk, that the case is still wide open as far as I’m concerned. Do you understand? That would be fatal. Whoever the killer is, he must feel that my colleagues and I are definitely off the scent, are satisfied we have the right man.”

“But even so,” she whimpered, “he won’t show his hand again until... until Frankie’s out of the way and it’s too late. Maniac or not, he’ll realize that if it happens again while Frankie’s being held in jail, that’s proof-evident that Frankie didn’t do it, and the whole thing’ll be reopened. He’ll lie low—”

“He’ll try to, you mean, if we let him. But remember this is something he can’t control. If we can find the link, the right impetus that sets him off, he won’t be able to.”

“Suppose there isn’t any?”

“There has to be. There always is, even in the worst cases of this type.”

“There was a knock at the door, and Hoff the janitor stuck his head in. Your boss is on the wire,” he told Billie. “They got a new man, he says, and they’re down at Dryden Hall, ready to begin rehearsing. They want you down there right away.”

“My brother’s in jail accused of murder, and I’ve got to make sweet music.” She smiled bitterly at the dick.

“Keep your eyes open, now,” Lindsey warned her under his breath. “Watch all of them, watch every little thing that goes on, no matter if it seems important to you or not. And keep in touch with me. Give me your address and phone number, in case I want to reach you.”

He took out a pencil stub, jotted down her address and number, stuck the slip in his pocket.