The Limping Goose

19

There was a discreet knock on the door. Johnny called, “Come in.”

The door opened and Jess Carmichael entered. “Ouch!” exclaimed Johnny. He shot a quick, accusing look at Lieutenant Madigan.

Carmichael nodded to Johnny. “How are you, Fletcher? I thought I’d run over and talk to you for a minute, but I see you’ve got company.”

“He isn’t company,” Johnny said easily. “He’s a policeman. Lieutenant Madigan, Mr. Carmichael.”

Carmichael nodded acknowledgment but did not offer to shake hands with the lieutenant. “I had a little chat with the deputy commissioner this morning.”

“I know,” said Lieutenant Madigan unhappily. “I, uh, am assigned to the case.”

“Then why aren’t you out working on it?” asked Carmichael curtly. “I want the man — or woman — who killed my son. I told the commissioner this morning that unless...” He stopped, made a gesture. “Never mind. Fletcher, I want a word with you in private.”

“I was just leaving,” said Madigan stiffly.

“Good-bye, sir — and remember what I said.”

Madigan went out.

Carmichael said, “I had a phone call a little while ago. From a... a person who calls herself—”

“Just a moment,” said Johnny.

He whipped open the door and said to Lieutenant Madigan who was standing just outside, “That’s the elevator over there.”

Red-faced, Madigan whirled away. He punched the pearl elevator button. Johnny waited until the elevator came and Madigan was aboard, before he closed the door.

“That man was eavesdropping!” exclaimed Carmichael.

“Cops have big ears.”

Carmichael looked around the meagerly furnished hotel room. “I used to have a room like this once. Paid four dollars a week for it.”

“This crummy hotel charges us twelve.”

“Us?”

“I have a pal, Sam Cragg, the strongest man in the world.” Then, as Carmichael looked at him inquiringly: “I’m a book salesman. I sell a book called Every Man a Samson. Sam helps me. We put a chain around his chest and I give the suckers, I mean, the prospective customers a sales pitch on how I discovered the secrets of health and strength and vigor. They’re all in the little book. Sam breaks the chain by expanding his chest. And then I sell the books.”

“Not bad,” said Carmichael. “Not bad at all. In my first store I had a big glass jar full of beans. Everybody who made a purchase had the privilege of making a guess as to how many beans there were in the jar. If they guessed the right number of beans, they got a prize of a hundred dollars in cash.” He chuckled. “Nobody ever even came close. You’d be surprised though how many people bought jars of the same size and filled them with beans and then counted the beans one by one. They still couldn’t guess the number of beans.”

“Because you put some big stones in the center of the jar where they couldn’t see them?”

“Smart,” said Carmichael. “Only it wasn’t stones — it was blocks of wood. Mind you, I didn’t lie about it. I just didn’t mention that the jar wasn’t filled solidly with beans. I wouldn’t exactly cheat anyone, but, after all, I didn’t make a hundred dollars a week off that store.”

“A man’s got to be sharp to get by,” said Johnny. “ ’Cause if he isn’t, there’s always somebody sharper waiting for him.”

“True, Fletcher, true. I used to tell Jess all the time...” He stopped, his face becoming sober. “That brings me back to the reason I’m here. This woman who telephoned me — Alice Cummings, she calls herself.”

“Ah, yes!”

“She got everything she could out of Jess, but she isn’t satisfied.”

“They weren’t married? Or, were they?”

“Not that I know of. I’m thankful for that, at least. No, she wants to sell me something.” He paused and took a quick turn about the room. “I have no confidence in the police. If I were to tell them about this they’d say I was a sentimental old fool. Oh, they wouldn’t say it to my face, but they’d be thinking it. I’m too rich for anyone to insult me to my face. That’s one of the troubles about being rich.”

“I wouldn’t mind having such troubles.”

Carmichael frowned. “When Jess was a small boy, seven or eight, I gave him a bank—”

“A bronze goose bank?”

“You know about it?” Carmichael asked eagerly. “You’ve seen it?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Perhaps you’d better finish first,” Johnny suggested.

“I had a dozen or more stores by that time,” Carmichael went on. “My wife had died and a governess was taking care of Jess. A governess and a housekeeper. I wasn’t rich, but I was comfortably off. I spent as much time with the boy as I could, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to teach him the value of thrift, so I gave him this little bank. For some reason it became Jess’s favorite toy. I’ve gone into his room at night when he was sleeping and found the bank clutched in his hand.” Carmichael drew a deep breath. “And then he grew up and I don’t believe I ever saw the... the goose bank again. And now this woman tells me that she has the bank and wants to sell it to me.”

“For how much?”

“That’s the fantastic part of it. Fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand...!”

“I hung up on her. She called back. Said she wasn’t just selling me the bank, she was selling me the name of the person who murdered Jess. What do you think of that?”

“Mr. Carmichael,” Johnny said softly, “she might have been telling the truth!”

“Are you crazy too?”

“Since yesterday more people have tried to get that bank from me...”

“You? You mean you have it?”

“I had it. It was stolen from this room this morning.”

Carmichael groaned. “Why didn’t you tell me you had the bank?”

“I didn’t know it was so valuable when I had it.”

“The woman knew. She told me over the phone that Jess had had a premonition of his death and that he’d told her if something happened to him to give the bank to me, because it contained the name of the person who had killed him.”

“The bank,” Johnny said, “was a plain ordinary casting. It couldn’t have cost very much.”

“It didn’t. I bought it for a trifle, possibly a quarter. I saw it in a store along with a dozen others. The bank itself had no value. It was what was in the bank that was important.”

Johnny dug deep into his right trousers pocket and brought out the handful of coins he had taken from the bank the day before. He dumped them on the counterpane of the bed. “They got the bank, this morning, but I had already emptied it. This is what was in the bank.”

Carmichael looked sharply at Johnny, then scooped up most of the coins. He looked at them carefully, then let them trickle through his fingers, back on the bed. “Pennies and dimes and quarters, that’s all. I’ve heard these old coins have some value, but they can’t have so great a value that—”

“They haven’t. I’ve studied them carefully. The face value amounts to six dollars and thirty-eight cents. A coin dealer offered me less than twenty dollars for the lot. He may have understated their value, but I’m positive that shrewd marketing of the coins wouldn’t fetch over forty or fifty dollars.”

“There must have been something else in the bank, something you overlooked.”

“I thought of that. I fished inside, thinking there might be a piece of paper — something with a message. If there was, I missed it.”

“What about the outside? Were there any scratches or anything of that kind?”

“I assure you there weren’t. I even thought that a message had been written on it, then the bank replated to cover it. There wasn’t anything like that, though.”

Carmichael shook his head. “It beats me. The woman sounded so confident, so certain that the bank was worth fifty thousand to me.”

“She said she actually had the bank?”

“Mmm, she intimated that she could deliver it.”

“I wonder if she wasn’t possibly anticipating that? This room was ransacked this morning and the bank taken, no question of that.”

“Why didn’t they take the coins?”

“They weren’t here. I’ve carried them in my pocket ever since I fished them out of the bank.”

Carmichael again picked up some of the coins and scrutinized them closely. “I thought there might be some markings on the coins. There aren’t.”

“My friend, Sam Cragg, was kidnaped this morning after the bank was stolen. A man tried to kidnap me less than an hour ago as I came out of the Harover Club.”

“You’ve been there?”

Johnny nodded.

Carmichael scowled. “Kidnaped? Why...?”

Johnny shrugged. “I can assume, in view of what you’ve told me, that the bank was stolen by someone in the employ of Alice Cummings. I can assume one of two things regarding the kidnaping; that Miss Cummings did not find what she expected in the bank — or that someone not connected with her is also after the bank — rather the message they believe it contains.”

“How a man could get himself so involved!” exclaimed Carmichael. “That boy of mine, I mean. You’ve met this Cummings woman?”

“I have. And it isn’t too difficult to understand how Jess went overboard for her. She’s an extremely good-looking girl.”

“Hard as nails.”

“She wouldn’t be that way with a man she was working. She’d be all soft and cuddly. She’s got the looks to go with it.”

“Jess was engaged to a fine young girl, Hertha Colston.”

“I’ve met her. She’s worth a dozen of Alice Cummings. But Hertha is the kind of girl men marry, Alice is the kind they become infatuated with. The kind they buy mink coats for.”

“Pah! I’m not complaining about the money he gave her, the things he bought her. But that he should give her his boyhood treasure, the goose bank; that he should confide in her... That’s what gets me. If I had it to do all over again...” He stopped and was silent for a moment “but I can’t do it over again. Jess is gone. There’s nothing left.”

In that moment, Johnny felt sorry for the multi-millionaire.

“I know what you mean, sir.”

Carmichael drew himself together. “Got to this woman, Fletcher. I’ve confidence in you; you’re much like I was at your age. Not many people will pull the wool over your eyes.”

“When they try, I wind up with the wool,” Johnny said.

Carmichael nodded approval. “Find out what she knows — get the bank from her. Buy it, if you have to.”

“For fifty thousand?”

Carmichael grimaced. “That’s nonsense. I’ve never been blackmailed in my life and I’m not going to start at this stage of the game. By the way, how are you coming along in your search for Lester Smithson?”

“Quite well, I think. I’ve stirred up some things and I think I’ll get results very shortly.”

“Good. I’m counting on you.”

Carmichael started for the door, but Johnny stopped him. “Do you want these coins, Mr. Carmichael?”

Carmichael hesitated, then shook his head. “No, it was the bank that Jess was interested in, not the coins. I bought him that bank. Keep the coins.”

He nodded again and went out.