The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

Money, Murder, or Love

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1961.

The call came in shortly before I was due to go off duty at 7 A.M.

York stuck his head in the squad room. “We got a job, Nick. A kid just found a stiff in an alley off Kilgo Street.”

We went downstairs to the garage and got in one of the black, unmarked cars. As I drove across the city to Kilgo Street, York kept up a barrage of talk. He’s been a cop almost as long as I have, twelve years, but he’s never got used to the idea of death. He talks to cover his nervousness.

He talked about his wife and kid, as if really interested in selling me on the idea of marriage. He talked about the weather and of Sergeant Delaney’s gall stone operation. He talked of anything except the violation of a human life.

The city was awakening, and for this brief moment it felt vital and clean, qualities that never extended to the street we were headed for.

By the time we reached Kilgo Street, York had run out of extraneous talk. “Well,” he muttered, as I stopped in the mouth of the alley, “I guess he can’t be much. Some bum. Who else would get himself killed in a Kilgo district alley?”

We got out of the car. The beat cop — a heavy, porcine guy intended by birth, reflexes and mentality never to rise far — came forward to meet us.

Hemmed in by scabby brick walls, a Kilgo Street alley is a particularly unpleasant place to die.

The beat cop grimaced. “He’s back there.”

“Touch anything?”

“No, sir.”

“That kid find him?” I asked, pointing toward the skinny youth pressed against the wall.

“Yes, sir. He was short-cutting it through the alley, on his way to work at the produce market.”

I saw York had that pale look about him. So I said, “Take over with the kid.”

“Sure, Nick,” he said quickly.

In our society, few people find their natural place. York should have been an insurance salesman. Instead, he’d needed a job years ago and the civil exams had been open. It’s the little fates that put us where we are.

I walked back to the dead man and stood looking down at him. He was not big. He was slender, wiry, with a narrow, cruel face. I guessed that he had been arrogant and vicious when he hadn’t had his way. He looked to be about thirty-five.

The strangest thing about him was the fact that he didn’t belong in that alley. His clothing — suit, shoes, shirt, tie — had cost about what I draw for working a month.

I kneeled beside him. He’d been shot under the heart. Most of the bleeding had been internal. He hadn’t lived long after the small bore bullet had struck him.

I touched his pockets, turned him slightly. His wallet had been jerked out of the hip pocket of his trousers. The wallet, soft, hand-tooled calfskin, was ripped. It had been cleaned of money. There was a driver’s license, a club membership card, a diner’s card, and a picture remaining in the wallet.

I had to look at the picture first. Even in that pocket-sized image, she was that kind of woman.

I stood up, holding the wallet York had been wrong. This was a big one. The dead man was Willard Ainsley, according to the driver’s license. And Willard Ainsley was a financier and playboy. Worth so much, if you believed the newspapers, that it was a remote, unreal figure to a man like me. Seven or eight million. No one knew for sure. In that category, it seemed to me that a million more or less wasn’t terribly important.

The gun that had killed Willard Ainsley was nowhere around. There were two parallel lines in the cinders of the alley, marks his heels had made. He’d been killed elsewhere and dragged into the alley.

On the sidewalk, the beat cop was breaking up a gathering crowd. A siren growled the approach of the meat wagon and lab boys.

Ainsley had lived with his wife in the penthouse of the Cortez, the sumptuous apartment hotel overlooking the lake.

I was on overtime, but I wasn’t sleepy. The doorman didn’t want to admit me. The desk man endured the shock of having a policeman on the premises. I pocketed my identification, told him I was seeing Mrs. Ainsley, and asked him not to announce me. For York it would have been an ordeal. I didn’t much care.

On the top floor, I crossed the wide, carpeted hall and knocked on Ainsley’s door. It opened as I knocked a second time. I lowered my hand.

“Ramoth Ainsley?”

“Yes,” the woman said.

“Mrs. Willard Ainsley.”

“Yes. What is it?”

I pulled out my wallet and showed her my I.D. She gave me a cool look. “Nicholas Berkmin,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Berkmin.”

I followed her down a short, wide stairway to a large, sunken living room. Tall glass doors across the room opened on a terrace, as green as a landscaped park. The terrace offered a view of the lake, sparkling in the early sunlight Ramoth Ainsley paused near the concert grand and turned toward me. She wore a simple, silken dressing gown over her pajamas. It suggested the lines of a beautiful, supple body. There was strength in her face, and the wallet photo had failed to catch the texture and richness of her black hair.

She was lovely and fashionable, like many rich women. But she had an indefinable quality that money won’t buy. Call it a sensuous vitality. You sense it on rare occasions when a woman, possessing it, enters a room or passes on the street.

“I assume,” she said, “that something rather drastic has happened.”

I nodded, and she said, “To Will?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Has he been hurt?”

“No,” I said.

She continued to look at me. “He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It appears that someone killed him.”

“I see.” Her lips framed the words, but didn’t speak them.

I took her arm and guided her to a chair.

“Do you expect me to faint or have hysterics, Mr. Berkmin?”

“No,” I said. “But I must say you are taking it very well.”

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there isn’t,” she said. “I’d like — would you please hand me a cigarette from that box on the table?”

I opened the ivory box, extended it, and when she had the cigarette between her lips, I picked up the lighter and struck it for her.

“Thank you.” She inhaled deeply. “When did it happen?”

“Last night, I think. We know very little yet. He was found by a boy on Kilgo Street.”

“Not a very nice place to end up, is it, Mr. Berkmin?”

“Do you know what might have contributed to his ending up there?”

“No.”

“It looks as if he was robbed. His wallet had been stripped of money. Did he carry much?”

“He considered five or six hundred dollars pocket change.”

“There are a lot of people who wouldn’t consider it that”

“I suppose.”

“What time did he leave here last night?”

“Right after dinner. Seven-thirty or so.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

She didn’t answer right away. She smoked, then looked at the ash on the tip of her cigarette. “We’d had an argument. He slammed the door on the way out.”

“Did you argue often?” I asked.

The cigarette ash broke and fell to the carpet “You’ll find out everything anyway,” she said.

“We try to.”

“We were on the point of splitting up, Will and I,” she said. “You see, I come from one of those old families with a hallowed name and social connections. And for the last generation, we’ve been worse than on our uppers. How we’ve managed— Anyway, I let myself be talked into marrying Will. I believed that I could — well, develop some feeling for him in time. I didn’t know then how domineering and cruel he could be.” She rose and got herself a second cigarette. “I’m sure you understand these things, Mr. Berkmin.”

“You’ve told me quite a bit” I said. “Do you remember what the fight last night started over?”

“He accused me of an indiscretion.”

“Was he in the habit of storming out?”

“The cruelest thing that he could think of — at the moment — that’s what he did.”

“Did you expect him back later in the evening?”

“I didn’t know. And I was certainly too angry to ask him what his plans were.”

“And you heard nothing more from him?”

She shook her head.

“Did he have many enemies?”

“More than his share.”

“Any who’d think of doing away with him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll need the names of his business associates and his attorney,” I said.

“I can supply those.”

“I’ll also need you downtown.”

“Right now?”

“It would be better to get the identification over with,” I said.

She nodded and started out of the room. Then she paused. “Murders like this — killing and robbing in an alley — are they always solved?”

“Not always.”

She went out of the room, and I stood there with the feeling that her husband’s murderer had a silent cheering section.

I slept for awhile and went back on duty at four-thirty. I wanted this case.

A list of facts was in. Willard Ainsley had been killed with a .32-caliber bullet. It had been removed from his body and turned over to ballistics. Death had occurred at about eleven the night before. Gumshoeing had turned up no one in the Kilgo district who admitted to having seen Ainsley around that time.

I checked the reports on Ainsley’s business associates. None had seen him since late on the afternoon of his death.

His attorney, Bayard Isherwood, was possibly the last of his acquaintances to have seen Ainsley alive. They had met in the elevator of the building, where they both had offices. Each had been on his way home. They had exchanged greetings. Ainsley, Bayard Isherwood had stated, had seemed on the point of bringing up a business matter, but had said that he would see Isherwood the next day. Isherwood had dined alone in his bachelor apartment. He had then attended a concert, alone. And he had retired immediately upon returning to his apartment.

Bayard Isherwood was the senior member of the city’s most sedate and respected law firm. There was no doubting his statement, nor the statements of any of Ainsley’s associates.

I closed the file and went over to the Cortez.

There were several people, a dozen or so, in the Ainsley apartment. I supposed it had started as a sort of wake, people dropping in on a sympathy call. It now had the earmarks of a party, as the memory of good-old-Will was washed clean with drink.

Mrs. Ainsley led the way to a den off the main hallway and closed off the noise in the living room. She stood with her back against the door. “How are you progressing, Mr. Berkmin?”

“We’re punching,” I said. “Bayard Isherwood says your husband was concerned with a business matter, so much so that he made a compulsive mention of it during an elevator ride, without saying what it was. Do you know what it might have been?”

“No.” She moved from the door and rested her hips against the edge of a desk, studying me.

“It probably isn’t important,” I said. “The case looks cut and dried. Robbery and murder. It may break if we pick up a punk spending beyond his means.”

“Really?”

“Or liquor loosens him up and he starts bragging. Or he tells his girl and they have a fight and she makes an anonymous phone call out of spite.”

Suddenly, a shiver crossed her shoulders. “You’re a very good cop, aren’t you?”

“I like promotions,” I said, “and the bigger paychecks.”

“But you don’t like being a policeman?”

“Not particularly.”

“You’re a rather strange man.”

Her words seemed to hang in the room, forming a quick, strange bond between us.

She looked away from me, found a cigarette on the desk, and lighted it.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Why don’t you call me Nick?”

She ventured a look at me. “Okay, Nick. I hope you catch your punk and get a nice promotion.”

The break came twenty-eight hours later. I was again on duty early. Fresh routine reports, masses of detail, were on my desk. Included was the fact that three phone calls had emanated from the Ainsley apartment the night of the murder. One had been to Bayard Isherwood, who’d been out at the time, ten o’clock. The others, between ten and eleven, had been to friends. In both instances, Ramoth Ainsley had asked if the friend had seen her husband that evening.

I pushed the reports back, wondering where we went from there. It was then that York came into my office, his breath short, his face very red.

“We got the gun, Nick!”

“Yeah?”

“Punk kid named Jim Norton hocked it this afternoon. Thirty-two revolver. The pawnbroker reported it. Ballistics checked the gun. It’s the one that killed Willard Ainsley, all right.”

I stood up. “Where’s the kid?”

“That’s the catch. When Simmons and Pickens went over to pick him up, he bolted. He’s teetering on the roof of a six story tenement on Kilgo Street, threatening to jump.”

I’d been through this kind of thing twice before in my years on the force. The youth looked like a skinny doll pinned against the night sky by spotlights. The fire department had roped off the block and unfolded the big net. Uniform-grade police had cleared out the rubberneckers.

I skidded the black car to a stop at the barricade. York hung back, needing all of a sudden to tie his shoe laces.

I knew most of the men on duty. I learned quickly that half a dozen men were inside the building, including a priest. They’d opened the skylight trap and reached the roof. Now they were stymied. Every time they moved a muscle, the kid got ready to jump.

A weeping girl was huddled in the shadows at the base of a building.

“Who’s that?” I asked an assistant fire chief.

“Kilgo Street girl. Her name’s Nancy Creaseman.”

“Norton’s girl?”

“Something like that.”

“Why didn’t you get her out of here?”

“Chief told Norton on the loud speaker she was down here. It may have kept him from going off. She’s made no trouble.”

I walked over to the girl. There are thousands like her in any large city. Thin, malnourished body. Mousy brown hair. Eyes shaded with long-continued anxiety. Wrong colored lipstick, attempting to hide the thinness of the pinched face.

“Nancy,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“My name is Nick Berkmin. I’m the homicide man in charge of the Ainsley case.”

“Jimmy didn’t kill him, Mr. Berkmin.”

“How do you know?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Has he ever been in trouble before?”

“Not with the police. He’s not the kind. I tell you.”

“Willard Ainsley,” I said, “was carrying a lot of money on him.”

“Jimmy wouldn’t, he wouldn’t he wouldn’t!”

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not saying he did it. But we don’t want him doing anything foolish now, do we?”

Her anxious eyes lifted toward the spot of light in the night sky. A sob burst out of her.

“Where did he get the gun, Nancy?”

“He found it.”

“Where?”

“In a gutter, around a corner off Kilgo Street. He didn’t do anything with it at first. Then he went and pawned it.”

“Why didn’t he tell us that? Why did he break and run when the police came?”

“He’s scared of the police, of everyone. He overheard them asking his mother where he was, if she’d seen him with a gun. Then he got scared, lost his head, and ran. Please help him, Mr. Berkmin!”

She grabbed my hand and clung to it with her sweaty, thin, sticky fingers. “I know it looks bad, but Jimmy didn’t do it. You’ve got to help him. You see, he got hurt—”

“Hurt?”

“Weeks ago. He had a job, delivering for a drugstore. Some guys caught him one night, took his money, and beat him up. He’s had these blind spells ever since. It’s why he’s so scared.”

I got my hand loose from hers. “I’ll tell you what, Nancy. You go up there, on the roof, and talk him down. I’ll see that he gets a break.” Now it was her eyes clinging to me. Her weeping stopped. She squared her shoulders and started across the street.

I called Ramoth Ainsley from my office. She agreed to see me. I drove over, brought her down to my car, and we got in.

When she saw the direction I was taking, she said, “I was under the impression we were going to your office.”

“Isn’t this nicer?”

“I’m not at all sure,” she said.

“I wanted a chance to talk to you in private.”

She sat in cautious silence as I drove through the clean luxury of her neighborhood. I drove far down the lake shore to an undeveloped area. There, I picked a side road, turned off and parked. “We might put the case on ice,” I said.

“Really?”

“We’ve got a kid in a cell right now who was in possession of the murder gun. He says he found it, where someone had thrown it after wiping it clean. It isn’t registered, but there are people who will sell unregistered guns — for a premium.”

“Do you think he killed Will?”

“We have a case. We can make a monkey of him in court, with his statement about finding the gun. He had blackouts, and conceivably might not remember mugging somebody. There are ways of wrapping a thing like this up. Fact is, it probably would be best for the kid for me to wrap it up quick. A jury wouldn’t go hard on him. He’d get needed hospitalization and treatment — and I promised his girl the best break for him.”

She moved restlessly in the car seat “You’ve got something on your mind, Nick.”

“Yes, I have. You’re a very beautiful woman.”

“Thank you.”

“One who’d do most anything for enough money.”

“Now wait a—”

“I’m not being critical,” I broke in. “Only analytical. By the way, why did you try to call Isherwood shortly before the time your husband was killed?”

“I didn’t, Nick. Why are you asking me—”

“I thought so,” I said. “You see, a call was placed from your apartment to Isherwood’s residence. Only it was Will calling, wasn’t it? You didn’t know he’d made that call, did you? But now I can wise you up. He was in another room, using the phone a good two hours after the time you said he’d left the apartment. The call places him in the apartment very close to the time of his death. Why’d you want us to think he’d left earlier — unless he was in the apartment up to and including the time of his death?”

Her lips seemed to redden. The shift of color was actually in her face, not her lips. “Nick! What are you saying?”

“That you had motive. He was about to throw you out, separate you from all that nice money, wasn’t he?”

“What makes you think I’d even considered killing—”

“First thing started me wondering was the matter of the car. Kilgo Street is a long way from your neighborhood. If Will had driven to Kilgo and got himself bumped off, why hasn’t his car been found in that vicinity? The kid in jail hocked only an unregistered gun, he didn’t peddle a hot car.

“When you’ve been a cop a long time, you get to wondering how a thing might have happened, if a detail strikes you wrong. You wonder if a beautiful woman gets herself a little gun as a last resort. You wonder if she, finally, feels she has to use it. You wonder if she has sneaked her dead husband down the service elevator from their swank apartment, driven him all the way to a crummy place like Kilgo Street You wonder if she stripped him of money there to make it appear he’d been robbed. You wonder if she then drove herself home, her plan completed, satisfied that nothing could possibly connect her with a dump like Kilgo Street and the death of her husband.”

“Nick, honestly, how could I, a woman—”

“Looked pretty good, didn’t it the whole plan? But you’re strong, athletic, well-kept, and he was a small man. There was a service elevator to help get him downstairs. It was late at night. You envisioned little risk of being seen, and you weren’t. The whole setup looked great and you saw no reason why you couldn’t carry it off.”

She hesitated a long time before she spoke. “Nick, you can’t prove any of this...”

“I’m in charge of the case. I can prove that kid guilty, if I want to. I got the power to close this case, but quick. On the other hand, there’s a limited number of places where you can buy an unregistered gun. I know these places. I know how to make people talk. Believe me, baby, I can make them talk when I want to. If I took you to those places one by one, I’m sure I’d get an identification sooner or later. Of you. As the buyer of an unregistered gun.”

“Nick—”

“Shall we start? Pay a call on one of those places?”

“Nick, please...

“You killed him,” I said.

“No, Nick.”

“Okay. Let’s get started on this detail of a gun.”

“Nick, you can’t do this to me!”

“You killed him,” I repeated.

She slid toward me. “Nick,” she said, “it was self defense. I swear it!”

“Self defense — with the purchase of the gun a prior act?”

She put her arms around me. I felt her shiver. “Nick, will you give me a break?”

“I guess that’ll do it,” I said. I held her away briefly and reached under the seat I clicked off the switch of the compact, portable, battery-powered tape recorder. Her eyes got large as she watched me put the tape carefully in my inside coat pocket

“You tricked me,” she said “You didn’t know—”

“I suspected,” I said. “But I needed proof. Now I’ve got it. It’s the finest insurance I can think of.”

“Insurance, Nick?”

“Sure. I’ll see that that tape’s put in a safe place and fix things so it’ll reach the right people — if anything ever happens to me.”

She began to understand.

“You,” I said, “are a beautiful woman worth six or seven million dollars. What’s my future on the cops compared to that? You’ll mourn, and I’ll work awhile before I resign. For appearances’ sake.” Her eyes showed that her mind made a lightning fast survey of the situation. She saw no way out. And so, recognizing the inevitable, she accepted it.

She linked her arm in mine and rested her head on my shoulder. “You’re right, Nick darling. We must think of appearances, mustn’t we?”