To Keep or Kill

Six

The private detective sat in the open window of his second-story office waiting for the sun to go down.

A cold pipe was clenched between his teeth and his shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows in a futile attempt to evade the heat of the summer evening. Below him Wilsey Street was still closed to automotive traffic but hundreds of curious pedestrians surged the length of the block. The crater was roped off.

Just twenty-four hours ago a svelte redhead had walked down Wilsey Street and destroyed the peace of Boone.

The detective turned from his contemplation of the street to stare at his telephone. Abruptly he walked over to it, removed the earpiece and dialed police headquarters.

“I want to speak to Sergeant Wiedenbeck.”

While he waited for the sergeant to be found he wondered if the wire tapper were listening in. There had been no betraying click but that was a negative proof. The eavesdropper may have cut in while he was still dialing.

The sergeant came on the wire.

“Hello. This is Wiedenbeck.”

“This is Horne. How are you?”

“You asking about my health?”

Horne shrugged. “Well, I had to start with something. I have to send a report to the insurance company tonight. Did you make anything of that file card from Deebie Bridges’ files?”

“No more than you did, hot-shot. Nothing. Lots of suspicions of course, but they don’t add up, not yet.”

“I was afraid of that. How about the dope from the motor vehicle office? You said this afternoon you had wired them.”

There was a brief pause. Horne heard the rustling of paper. Wiedenbeck said, “Here it is. License number D-one million. By request, year after year.”

“D-one million,” Horne repeated laconically. “Delusions of grandeur maybe.”

“Maybe. Channy applied for a driver’s license in 1940, got it, applied for his first one-million a few weeks later, got it, and has held it ever since. He drove a new car, of various makes, each year for the years 1940, 1941, 1942 and 1946. One of the boys found that he’s on the waiting list for a 1947 Kaiser.”

“Money, money, money,” Horne whistled. “That guy is rolling in dough. I had a look at his apartment this afternoon. Nice landlady — very co-operative, that landlady.”

“Yeah,” Wiedenbeck cut in gently. “I was there a little while after you left. Much to my surprise she told me a police officer had just left.”

“Don’t get gentle with me, sergeant. I know you from away back, remember? I didn’t tell the old girl I was a police officer. I just let her look at my badge. I mentioned something about a quiet investigation. She took it from there.”

“You didn’t,” the sergeant pointed out, “correct the misimpression that you were from the police.”

“Sergeant, a long time ago I learned not to attempt to change someone’s mind, once they had made it up. Especially a woman. They’re happier if you let them go along believing what they want to believe. I’ll swap you information.”

“About what, hot-shot?”

“I talked to the ticket agent at the Union Station a little while ago.”

“What kind of a police force do you think we got here, Horne? That landlady told me, too, that Channy dropped out of sight one or two weeks every month. And left his car in the garage.”

“Well, it was a try. Didn’t want you to get the idea that I was always hanging around begging for information. Oh — do you know about the Credit Bureau, it—”

“Horne.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Exactly what are you after?”

“Information.”

“I know,” dryly, “but what particular piece of information?”

“Okay. How about—” He stopped in mid-sentence.

“How about what?” the sergeant asked patiently.

Horne hesitated. He winced, realizing how close he had come to putting his foot in his mouth for the second time that day. All he had to do was mention a man with a Geiger counter and he would quickly lose his liberty — for reasons of self-protection, of course. That’s the way the police blotter would read.

“I’m waiting,” Wiedenbeck reminded him.

“What about this business of blocking off the street this afternoon? I couldn’t get back to my office.”

“Now that’s too bad; that’s just too damned bad. You have my sympathy, Horne. And listen, what’s the big idea, trying to pump the professor in the restaurant?”

“Oh — so he is a professor. Thanks, sergeant.”

“Yes, he is. You ain’t fooling me, hot-shot. You never saw that guy before in your life.”

“That’s right. But when I found him prowling around Wilsey Street, I wanted to know why.”

There was a small, loaded silence from the phone. Wiedenbeck asked quietly, “And do you know why?”

“Nope,” Horne lied. The sergeant’s tone carried ample warning. “That is, not yet.”

“Look here, Horne; I know this is like dangling bait in front of you, but take some advice. Don’t find out. For if you do... well...”

“Well, what?”

“You might need protective custody,” he finished.

“Like that, eh? Thanks for the tip.”

“I think I’ll drop over there and have a talk with you, Horne. A heart-to-heart talk.”

“You’ll have to prove first that you’ve got one. A heart, I mean. I’ll be here for an hour or so.”

“Nope. Not tonight. You won’t get away. Suppose I drop around in the morning?”

“At your service, sergeant. Office hours from nine to sundown, with appropriate time out for wetting my whistle and whatnot. And if I go anywhere I’ll take my faithful shadow with me. He’s across the street having his twentieth cup of coffee now. Bad for the stomach.”

Sergeant Wiedenbeck hung up the phone with a grunt.

Horne turned to the typewriter on his desk and inserted a sheet of stationery provided by the insurance company. In a rich black ink on a light green background the letterhead bore the legend

and below that, in italics, the words, Direct communication, followed by a long blank line.

Horne typed in “Attn: Mr. E. E. Everetts” on the line.

The office was growing dark. He stood up, reached blindly over his head for the light cord and snapped it on. Then he slumped back in his chair to cogitate on the two men he had met so recently in the restaurant. Carefully he visualized the entire scene in his mind’s eye, recalling what each had said, had done.

One of those two men hadn’t said anything. Not a word.

The unmasked professor had carried on the whole conversation with him, surprised into talkiness. That other man at the table — he had been busy scrutinizing Horne while Horne was pumping the professor. One of those two men had carried Horne’s description back to Sergeant Wiedenbeck, a description sufficiently accurate as to enable the police sergeant to identify Horne immediately. The man hadn’t said a word; the man had been quite busy mentally photographing him.

“Government stuff!” Horne said softly, aloud.

The sheet of paper thrust into the typewriter caught his eye. He hitched his chair closer and extended two nimble index fingers.

Horne broke off typing to leaf rapidly through the telephone book, and then continued:

Horne stood up from the typewriter, flexed his fingers and walked around the office. Now came the ticklish business. Should he mention that Channy had been to see him about a divorce? In view of the fact that his later investigation showed pretty conclusively the man had no wife? The visit had no apparent connection with his subsequent murder. On the other hand, further developments might bring just such a connection into the open — and then who would be holding the short end of the stick? Charles Horne.

He sat down again before the typewriter. The typed sheets of paper were piling up.

Horne whipped the last sheet from the typewriter and signed it. Fishing around in a desk drawer, he found the newspaper clipping he had torn from an Indianapolis paper.

Horne clipped the piece to the letter, inserted it in an envelope, and put it in a coat pocket. Slipping in, the envelope struck a wadded bulge of paper.

The two specimens of type of his telephone number.

He spread them on the desk to examine them again. The type characters on the envelope taken from Dr. Lainey’s office were the right size of type but obviously were from a different typewriter. The phone number was 36613. On the original letter the figure 1 wasn’t whole: the upper horizontal bar was dented, as though a heavy object had been dropped into the machine’s bank of keys and had landed a glancing blow near the top of the numeral. The loop in the 6 was dirty, too, but that didn’t amount to much.

On Dr. Lainey’s machine the 6 showed up clear and clean, and the 1 was whole and complete.

Horne suddenly stood up, took a quick turn about the desk and returned to slump down into the swivel chair. He swung far back in it, braced his feet against the desk to hold him there, and clasped his knotted fingers beneath his chin. He spent an unmoving five minutes staring at the two pieces of paper, black fury piling up like storm clouds on his face.

Finally he swore long and not too softly.

His feet crashed down from the desk to the floor. Rapidly inserting the original letter into the typewriter, he pounded out: ‘In re, policy, policy, policy, lux, lamp, lamb, lousy, llllll.’ And then a long string of sixes.

The two type characters perfectly matched those that had come to him in the mysterious letter. They should. They had been written on his own machine.

He held the unsigned letter up to the ceiling light and stared through it, reading the watermark. That was recognizable, too. Of course, other people could buy the same paper, the stationery store on Main Street did a nice business, but he was willing to bet the entire amount of his next check from the insurance company that the sheet of paper had been taken from his desk, inserted in his typewriter, his phone number typed on it, and then mailed to him.

It wouldn’t be the least surprising, he mused bitterly, to find that one of the stamps from his postage box in the desk drawer had been pilfered, too.

“What in the hell,” he muttered aloud, “is going on here?” His wire tapped, his office entered, his stationery used, his own number mailed back to him. “What’s it all about?”

Why all this? Why mail him his own number? That failed to make sense; it certainly was the weakest of weak threats and it succeeded in pointing to exactly nothing. Wait a minute... It wasn’t a threat. Of course not. To have been a threat it would have to point out something, imply something might happen if he did or didn’t do such-and-so. A typed telephone number amounted to none of these.

The message did nothing but call his attention to his telephone.

Someone else knew the wire was tapped.

Someone who, quite naturally, couldn’t call him up and tell him so, someone who preferred not to get in touch with him at all, someone who wanted or was forced to stay in the background. Someone who relied on his intelligence to understand.

But who was that trusting someone?

Dr. Saari could be checked off; her surprise had been genuine and she lacked a good reason for wanting to listen to his conversations.

Likewise Sergeant Wiedenbeck. The sergeant might tap his wire in a moment of desperation if there was reason to believe information was being withheld from him, but then the case hadn’t, as yet, progressed that far. And too, the few people at the City Hall who would know of such tapping would never betray the sergeant by warning Horne.

Which eliminated the major figures and rung in the lesser ones. The sneak-act was of recent development. He’d have known long before this if the wire had been tapped last week or last month. Logic said it had happened since he had become interested in Channy — from yesterday morning, at a guess. Or certainly from the moment Channy was killed and he figured into the murder as an insurance investigator.

Who were the lesser figures?

The red-haired woman was a major one, but not from what little he knew of her at the moment. Was there any reason for her to listen in on him? Definitely, yes. She might want to keep in touch with him, to know what he knew. But she wouldn’t be so dumb as to write him a cryptic letter, telling him what she had done!

That left exactly who? Deebie Bridges? Dr. Lainey? As well suspect Judy, the waitress!

Disgustedly he gave it up and swept the letter and crumpled envelope into a desk drawer. There wasn’t the slightest sense in locking the drawer; someone walked into his office and helped himself to the contents of the drawers whenever he pleased, anyway. He put on his coat and hat, stuck the unlit pipe between his teeth and pulled on the light cord.

Cynically he locked the office door behind him.

Before going down the stairs he walked to the office on his left and rattled the doorknob. It was locked. The office hadn’t been rented for some months, not since that girl had closed her public secretarial service and married. His telephone wires vanished into the baseboard when they left his office; they might or might not emerge into the empty office to the left of his. It was more likely they stayed within the walls and swooped directly to the basement to join the trunk line under Wilsey Street.

Tomorrow, he swore, the janitor was going to conduct him over every inch of telephone line between his desk and the trunk line. And the janitor was going to give up any information he may have on the matter, whether he liked it or not!

Tonight, he decided, tonight he was going home early and play double solitaire with Mother Hubbard. Elizabeth would probably be out until late. He moved down the stairs and out onto the street. It was dark. The two missing amber clusters of light left a dark patch in the block. Along that area there were only one or two neon signs, unhurt by the blast, still ablaze.

The crowd of people on the street was thinning, aware that the rattling of thunder in the west promised an early rain. The night wind from that direction carried a pleasant cool smell, brushing away the clinging heat from the pavements.

Horne filled his lungs with the wind and started homeward walking. He was within two blocks of the house when he suddenly recalled the unmailed insurance report in his pocket. Stopping, he mentally searched for a nearby mailbox. Behind him there were footsteps.

Turning at an angle, he crossed the street and walked back to the corner he had just passed. A small mailbox on a thin upright post was planted next to a telephone pole. He inserted the letter, clanked the lid a couple of times to make sure the missive had fallen inside, and retraced his steps, smiling.

The pride of the City Hall’s plainclothes force, sauntering along opposite him, was having a troublesome time attempting to be just walking along without a care in the world. “You’ll never make a shadow,” Horne advised the man under his breath. “You crowd them too close.”

The heavy-footed shadow followed him the remainder of the way home. Just before he reached the door he felt the first few sprinkling drops of rain and grinned. He hoped the shadow wouldn’t get too wet.

The shadow walked right past him without pause.