The Corpse in the Crystal

Chapter II

Tim Brogardus was a headquarters dick with more brawn and vociferous lung power than brains. He motioned us to chairs when Murder and I entered his office. Tim had a harried expression on his face, a pile of filing folders on his desk, along with an afternoon paper. He was speaking into the interoffice phone with obvious control.

“Sure, Chief. Of course I’m doing everything I can! You’ve had a call from the mayor, and scared citizens are flooding the switchboard? Yes, sir! Of course — just give me a little time!” He slammed the phone down and passed hi# hand over his brow.

“I see,” Murder said, “that the crystal-gazing Nostra has upset our fair city.”

“That ain’t the word for it,” Brogardus said. “The whole damn town is afraid to go to sleep or sit down in an empty room. Those reporters—” He gritted his teeth audibly, looking at the headlines on the desk before him.

Tim’s jaw dropped as Murder shoved the little square of paper he’d received from Nostra on Tim’s desk. Tim read the note three times. “So you’re going to freeze to death in the middle of August!”

“That’s what the man says,” Murder said. “So if you’ve learned anything about this Nostra, or located him—”

“Located him!” Brogardus howled. “Listen. The guy is back in a cell right now! He walked up to a cop last night and said he wanted to be arrested. The cop laughed it off, told the guy to be on his way. Then this Nostra hauls off and slugs the cop and we tow him in.”

“So he’s been in jail since last night?”

“That’s right,” Tim nodded. “You know what I think? I think he’s trying to alibi himself.”

I expected a cutting bit of sarcasm from Murder at this obvious revelation to which Tim had struggled. But the chief had left his humor back in the office. He said, “Can I see this Nostra?”

Tim looked at the note Murder had received. He shoved bade bis chair. “Come on.”

They’d taken Nostra out of his cell to a little windowless room downstairs. The room was full of smoke when we entered, dark in the corners, with a dozen shadowy men moving like phantoms through the ocean of smoke. They were grouped about the man who sat beneath the glaring, green-shaded light in the middle of the room.

He didn’t look like I’d thought he would. He wasn’t greasy or sinister. Nostra was elderly, grey tinting his hair, with a thin face and a thinner smile. Brogardus, the chief, and I slipped inside the room, listened for a moment to the questions the dozen headquarters men were hammering at the crystal-gazer.

“Who told you to send those notes?”

“No one. I saw it in the crystal.”

“Don’t give us that This crystal business is a phony, a fake.”

Nostra shrugged the remark off.

“How long have you known Loren Cole, Frank Snow, and Gregory Sloan?”

“I’ve told you dozens of times, gentlemen, that I don’t know any of them. Can I have a drink of water?” He half rose; a strong hand pushed him back.

“Listen, you crystal-gazing rat this is murder! You think we’re going to let you go around killing people and get away with it?”

Nostra’s smile was thin. “How could f kill anyone? I was in jail. How could anyone kill those men? From what you have told me, they were all is sealed rooms. It was impossible for them to die.”

“But you said they were going to die!”

Nostra made a weary gesture with his hand. “Precisely. I knew, gentlemen, that I would be branded a fake. I knew I would be under suspicion. I foretold the deaths, and from the generosity of my heart warned the victims. A lesser man, to protect his own skin, would have remained silent. But I knew the risk I was running from the hands of the police when death was an established fact. I accepted it.”

“Bah!” That was Tim. He strode forward, Murder’s note in his hand.

“Did you write this?” Tim bellowed.

Nostra looked at the note. “I wrote it and dropped it in a comer mailbox late last night before I — er — punched the policeman.”

Murder stepped forward. “And you think I’m going to freeze to death in the middle of August?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Very slowly, Nostra looked from the chief’s face down to his feet. Then he raised his eyes once more; his gaze locked with Murder’s. Nostra looked cool and distant even under that hot light, but you could smell sweat in the tight room.

“You’re Abner Murder?”

“I am.”

“Then you will die. Exactly as the note said.”

Somebody shifted his feet. Everybody here, except Nostra, knew the chief, had seen him in action. Murder forced a ghost of a smile. “But suppose I don’t care to die. Suppose I have them lock me in jail until after the time limit tomorrow?”

“You would die anyway,” whispered Nostra. There was a note of finality hanging in his words. There was nothing more to be said.

Back in Brogardus’s office, Tim said, “Murder, we’ve fought and scratched, you and me, and we’ve even worked together on a few cases. Don’t let this get you down. I’ll break Nostra if it’s the last thing I do.”

“I’m afraid you won’t,” Murder said. “He’s got a simple story and he’s the sort of man to stick to it. He was in jail. That’s his alibi and you’re stuck with it. I think you’ve got as much out of him as you’ll get, Tim.”

Brogardus sat down with the air of a man who couldn’t think of anything else to do. He chewed his nails. The chief said, “You might as well give me the low-down, Tim. If I’m going to freeze to death by noon tomorrow...” His smile was wry as he left the sentence unfinished.

“All right,” Tim said, “here it is. Like the paper said, Frank Snow was discovered in his office, drowned. The door was locked, and no water was near him. Ergo, an impossible death.”

Brogardus made a steeple of his fingers. “It may be that somebody had it in for Snow. You Know yourself, Ab, how he was putting his nose in blackmail corners. But if anyone hated him enough to kill him. or feared him that much, it would have been impossible to kill him in the manner that he was.”

“And Loren Cole?”

“About the same,” Brogardus shrugged. “From all appearances, he tripped on a toy automobile on the floor of his office and broke his neck. We’ve talked to his wife and a few business associates. Cole has shown intense worry in the last few days but his wife states that he often had those moods. Several people he had bested in business one way or another hated him. But again, no one was in that office except Cole.”

“That leaves Gregory Sloan, the nightclub owner,” I said. “The paper didn’t have much to say about him.”

“We didn’t give out much,” Tim countered. “Gregory Sloan was a little luckier than the others. His secretary went in his office, found him in a convulsion. She saw the note from Nostra on his desk, mentioning poison.

“She was a quick-thinking gal. She grabbed a glass of lukewarm water and some baking soda from Sloan’s desk, poured it down him. She got an ambulance in a hurry, and they went to work with a stomach pump. Sloan’s in City Hospital now, but we are keeping it under cover that he’s okay. We don’t want another crack taken at Sloan.”

The chief edged forward in his chair. “Then you’ve talked to Sloan!”

Tim cocked an eye at him. “Sure, and that’s the most impossible part of the whole thing. If either Snow or Cole had lived to talk, they might have told us something. Like you, Ab, I was on pins and needles, thinking that in Sloan’s case a slip had been made and we’d get a lead. But he swears that he was absolutely alone from the moment he received the note until his secretary walked in and found him. He touched nothing that might poison him.

“Living, Sloan’s made the puzzle of the administration of the poison bigger than ever. He swears there was no way anyone could have poisoned him — unless he was slipped a capsule late yesterday or early this morning. At breakfast, say. But he’d have noticed a capsule, so that’s out.”

Tim flung up his arms in the attitude of a man much beset. Murder and I got to our feet. The chief asked Tim for the address of Nostra, got it, and we left the office. The old black ball we were behind looked bigger than ever.

Night was pitch black, not a star showing nor a breath of air stirring. As I walked down the grimy sidewalk in a seedy section of town beside the chief, I had the feeling the whole earth was gathered in a hush, watching us, waiting for the next impossible death to happen.

The unpainted cottage that was Nostra’s was directly ahead. We’d come down and scouted the place. Then we had dinner, Murder acting unhurriedly for a man slated to freeze to death sometime during this hot, hushed night. We’d waited for darkness, for the chief wanted to give that place a thorough going over.

We paused a hundred feet up the sidewalk. Except for the bar down on the corner with the lonely sounding, tinny jukebox, the street was deserted. We went on toward the cottage, clinging to shadows. We were at the edge of the yard, when Murder laid his hand on my arm. We dropped behind an unkempt shrub.

A moment later footsteps, quick, nervous, came across the sagging porch, down the walk. The shadowy figure reached the sidewalk, paused a moment. Yellow tongues from the street light touched a face, a neat figure. She was blonde and trim. Dim as it was, the street light told us she was young and lovely. She’d been inside Nostra’s shack, without any lights burning. Prowling, hunting maybe.

She turned left on the sidewalk. When she was fifty feet away, the chief touched my arm. We fell in behind her. She was hurrying along without a backward glance. It wouldn’t be too hard to keep her in sight.

The blonde got a cab at the first hackstand. She wasn’t half a block away when we’d grabbed a taxi and surged into traffic behind her. She went across town, to Cedarwood Forest, the swankiest development in town, a section of wide boulevards lined with stately cedars. We watched the tail light of her cab. It slowed, turned in the white driveway of a hedge-bordered estate.

Murder gave our driver orders to drive on past. Half a block away, the chief paid the cab, and we got out and walked back. As we cut into the edge of the wide, terraced lawn, Murder said:

“This, Luke, is one of the Wendel Hobbs’ houses. His summer place, I believe. Think it over.”

As we moved like deeper shadows against the night across the lawn, I thought it over. Before, this case had been impossible. Now it was also gigantic.

Wendel Hobbs was the controlling hand behind half a dozen huge companies, a chain of paper factories, a chemical works, a major stockholde in a steel mill. He was retired from active business, eighty years old, becoming a bit doddering in his senile years, according to a couple of newspaper columnists who’d spotted him at one or two racy night spots. He had so many millions that he and his heirs couldn’t count his money in their lifetimes.

The chief found a — French door at the side of the house that opened quite easily. He hissed to me, and I inched my way through the dense shrub_I moved up beside him. We were in the Hobbs mansion.

We stood a moment, getting our bearings. This was evidently the library. Faint light filtered in from the hallway. Books, hundreds of them bound in the finest morocco, lined the walk. Here and there was a rather silly bit of bric-a-brac Hobbs had probably paid a fortune for just for amusement in his waning years.

From somewhere we could hear the subdued murmur of voices. The lawnlike carpet deadened our footsteps. We heard a woman’s voice rise and say, “I tell you, Wendel, I did the best I could!”

I was willing to bet it was the blonde talking. It was her kind of voice. Velvet, even with the strained note in it.

Near the library door, Murder drew his flashlight, shaded it, played it over a scroll-legged desk. He whistled softly between his teeth. I looked over his shoulder. He had raised the blotter on the desk. Beneath it was a packet of carbon copies. He thumbed through them. There was a carbon copy of every warning Nostra had sent out. Frank Snow. Loren Cole. Gregory Sloan. Abner Murder.

Quietly, the chief let the blotter fall back on the desk. “Hobbs,” he said. “I suddenly want to talk to old Wendel Hobbs very much.”

The hall was lighted by a brilliant chandelier. Murder inched his head out the library door, scouted the hallway with his gaze. He tugged my sleeve, and we ventured out into the glaring light.

The sound of voices was coming from a room up the hall to our left. We started toward it. At that moment footsteps sounded in the back of the hall. It was probably a servant, but we didn’t want to find out at the expense of being caught in the middle of the hallway.

We lunged silently toward a door at our right, grabbed a knob, eased inside before we were spotted. Murder’s insatiable curiosity caused him to turn on his light to see the sort of room we had ducked into.

It was a den of sorts, a big lounge, some leather easy chairs. A rack on the wall held a few loving cups and guns. There was a huge fireplace. Before the fireplace lay two men clad in the garments of workers. It didn’t take a second stab of Murder’s wan, yellow light to show that both men were dead.

I stood back while Murder bent over the two dead men. I didn’t like their staring eyes or the neat bullet holes in their temples. The chief straightened, snapped his light off. I felt his presence move over near me.

I said, “Who are they?”

“How should I know?” he sounded irked. “Their pockets are as empty as the Jordan brain. However, one little slip was made.”

“Which is?”

“On the inside of the bib of their overalls. A little cloth label. No one would think of looking for it there, except a laundry. The overalls belong to the Apex Window Washing Service.”

“Does that make sense?” I asked, after thinking it over.

“Not yet,” he said. “But it will — if I freeze in the attempt.” I sensed the strain in his voice. I had a hunch he was thinking of his blonde wife, Jo-Ann, and the Murder children. His family was never far from his thoughts when he was working on a case, especially a case as coldly and deliberately executed as this one was. The chief could never quite forget that somebody, someday, might take a grudge out on his family.

We listened for long, thick minutes. The footsteps in the hallway had died. There was no movement, no sound, until we opened the door and again heard the murmur of voices up the hall.

This time we made it to the door which concealed the owners of the voices. Murder palmed the knob. A woman talking; the cracked tones of an old man. The chief opened the door.

There was an enormous fireplace in this room too. Before it, his hands clasped behind him, stood an aged, thin man, slightly stooped, his hair a white mane. I’d seen his picture in the papers, Wendel Hobbs.

A woman sat in a high-backed deep chair near him. At the sound of our entry she jumped to her feet. It was the blonde we’d seen coming from Nostra’s house, all right. Getting a good look at her, I saw that my first assumption had been right. She was a blood-pressure raiser, definitely. A Miami beauty contest would have been a snap for her blonde, green-eyed perfection. But now her face was like chalk.

Wendel Hobbs said, “What’s the meaning of this? I’ll have you—”

“We just want palaver,” the chief said. “Don’t get apoplexy.”

The blonde said, “Who are you?”

“A civil question,” the chief said laconically, “demands a civil answer. We are private detectives. I’m Abner Murder, this is Luke Jordan.”

Wendel Hobbs made a sound that sounded almost like a groan. He drooped loosely in a chair, his faded blue eyes seeming to sink in his head.

The chief said, “I gather from your reaction, Mr. Hobbs, that you don’t exactly welcome a detective on the premises.”

Hobbs gripped the arms of his chair to still the trembling of his hands. He forced harshness into his voice. “I don’t welcome you. Either leave, or I’ll call the police.” His eyes drank in the hard, knowing smile on the chief’s lips, the light in the chief’s eyes, which were still blue but no longer baby-looking.

“It depends entirely on you, Mr. Hobbs,” Murder said. “If you want to call the police, there’s a very expensive ivory telephone on that table.” Hobbs slumped in his chair.

The blonde was still standing. “Introductions haven’t been completed,” Murder said.

“I... I’m Linda.”

“Linda?”

“Yes... just... just Linda.”

“I see,” Murder mused. “Your last name is your own. Keep it quiet if you want to. But I’d like to ask you what you were doing in the house of a crystal-gazer named Nostra tonight.”

She tried to laugh. “I? In what house? I don’t believe—”

“We saw you come out of the place,” Murder said coldly. “We know you were there.”

She took a turn about the chair, her long, red-nailed fingers gripping the back of it. “It’s none of your business, Mr. Murder.”

The chief regarded her for a long moment The fire crackled; the only sound save the rising murmur of the wind outside. “All right,” Murder said, “we’ll play it that way.”

He turned to Hobbs. “Maybe you’ll be more communicative, Mr. Hobbs, and tell us who the two dead men are in the room across the hall.”

The blonde Linda almost fainted, reeled against the chair. Hobbs rose, doddering, slumped. He looked from Murder to me, back to the chief, a very old man. He shuffled to a high secretary beside a huge window, seemed to be gazing out at the night. Then he turned from the secretary, and there was a gun in his hand. He wasn’t trembling now, either. He was cool with a coolness born of desperation. He would use that gun, I knew.

“I don’t know anything about those men, Mr. Murder. I came home tonight and there they were. I was waiting for a chance to get them out of the house. I’m sorry you came along.”

“What do you intend doing now?” I asked.

“Whatever I can do,” he said huskily. “Whatever I have to do. The last few days have been extremely trying ones, gentlemen. May I plead with you not to push me further.” He motioned with the gun, took a step toward us. The chief and I moved under the gun’s bidding.

“Through that door,” Hobbs said. We backed out into the hall, down the hallway to another door, and Hobbs added, “In there.”

I fumbled the door open. It was a large linen closet. “Keep moving, please,” Hobbs requested. Murder and I backed into the closet. The old man slammed the door, shutting us in darkness. There was the faint sound of Hobbs’ footsteps retreating down the hall.

I lunged against the door. Murder caught my arm, pulled me back. “Just take it easy, Luke. Give the old boy a few minutes to get away. We won’t force him to start shooting at us, and get him in any more hot water than he is already.”

“So he’s innocent, huh?” I said sourly. “With two dead men in his den, he’s innocent?”

I felt the chief’s shrug. “He’s making too many mistakes to be guilty, Luke. He’s so scared he isn’t thinking straight, all in a muddle. He intends now to get rid of the pair of dead men, thinking vaguely he’ll tie the police up with the lack of a corpus delicti. But he didn’t take our guns, did he? He’s in such a dither he can’t see the loopholes, such as us getting out of here and going straight to the police.”

“So we wait, huh?”

“Might as well. Anyway, a frightened innocent man is a dangerous thing. You poke your head out of that door, you’ll get a noggin full of lead — which would at least put something in the empty apace.”

I was framing a retort to that one when the faint sound of a car motor, racing, somewhere outside drifted to us.

“Hobbs is on his way,” Murder said. “Let’s get a move on.”

We pounded on the door for perhaps thirty seconds; then a key grated, the door swung wide. A goggle-eyed servant took one look at us stranger: in his linen closet and let out a yell. Murder shoved him to one side and we got out of that hallway, slamming the massive front door behind us, like convicts with hungry bloodhounds on our heels.