To Keep or Kill

Eight

Sergeant Wiedenbeck struggled vainly with the locked door and his midmorning grouchiness deepened.

The painted legend: CHARLES HORNE, CONFIDENTIAL SERVICES, on the frosted glass seemed to taunt him. Savagely he planted a thumping kick against the bottom of the door. The panel only quivered under his thrust.

The sergeant had struggled through a poor night. Of restful sleep there had been none; what sleep he had snatched had been stolen in fitful dozes, broken innumerable times by the ringing telephone (one was the wrong number), and broken twice more by his wife arousing him, complaining that his unconscious swearing was disturbing her slumber. That, he told her the second time she did it, was the last remaining straw: the camel was taking his pillow to finish the night on the davenport in the living room. Davenports aren’t conducive to sound sleeping.

Too, the breakfast coffee had tasted wrong somehow, and the eggs were overdone. She had put salt on his grapefruit again, instead of sugar. Were she and the criminal element conspiring against him, or was it only his perverse outlook on life that morning?

He rattled the locked door hopefully and listened for telltale signs of occupation. There were none.

Before he had left home his wife had almost forcibly separated him from twenty dollars to purchase an encyclopedia set for Junior; the set was contracted for and was to be delivered by the handsome salesman later in the day. Somewhat bitterly he consigned all encyclopedia salesmen to hell, pointing out that as Junior was only eighteen months old, he couldn’t be expected to read a book for a couple of years yet. He lost the twenty dollars nevertheless.

Two stern and righteous faces awaited the sergeant when he reached the City Hall. The faces reminded him that they had promised the papers an important arrest within forty-eight hours and... well, the only new faces in the cells below stairs were two drunks and a disturber of the peace. He had tried to placate the faces of the Mayor and the Chief of Police, tactfully attempting to point out that such rash promises should never be made. His success with the task was comparable with his success in withholding the money from his wife.

And now, blast his dishonest soul to limbo, Charles Horne wasn’t to be found, neither at home nor his office. And all the indications were he had skipped town.

He bit out a pair of scorching words men aren’t supposed to use in the presence of a lady and turned around to find he was in the presence of a lady. Elizabeth Saari stood in her open doorway watching him.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Didn’t know you were there.” He scuffled his feet, embarrassed at his language.

“Obviously,” she said. “Good morning, sergeant. Come on in.” She led the way into her inner office, closing the door behind them. As yet there were no waiting patients in the outer chamber. She indicated a chair and hoisted herself onto the leather examining table.

“Sit down, sergeant. I need no crystal ball to tell me it isn’t a good morning with you. Want to talk about it? It usually helps.”

He sat down mechanically and stared at her legs in automatic reaction. She crossed her knees, the movement breaking into his concentration. He shifted his eyes to the carpet.

“Yeah. I’m mad. That rat has run out on me.”

“What — you don’t mean Chuck?”

“I mean Chuck, if we must call him that. I can think of better names. He’s gone — skedaddled.”

“I don’t believe it. Why should he run away, sergeant? He’s out somewhere, at work.”

The policeman grunted. “He may be at work, and he is out, but he’s disobeyed my orders. He’s skipped.”

She shook her head in loyal disbelief. “Not Chuck. How can you be so positive? I don’t think he would do anything like that; I know him too well.”

The sergeant said, “That’s his quirk.”

“Quirk? I don’t understand you.”

“Know anything about psychology?”

She reminded him, “Naturally.”

“Oh — sure. That was a stupid question. Know more about it than I do. Doctor, I learned mine at police school. It doesn’t amount to a whole lot, but it covers what we need to know in police work. How to trip up a guy by what he usually thinks of, and by the one or two things — or thoughts — he keeps secret. Everybody has a private quirk.”

“Go on.”

“We watch for those quirks; we look into a man’s life and find out what his quirk is, and then we keep after him until he exhibits the quirk — and he’s in the bag.”

She nodded, but he wasn’t ready to talk about the missing detective yet.

“For instance, I knew a prize fighter in Battle Creek. Know what his quirk was? He liked to play with dolls. In a fight one night he hit a man too hard, and the man died. The boob got panicky and ran away. I looked around his house and found these dolls. The family swore they belonged to his kid sister — that was the alibi he always used, see? He was afraid people would make fun of him, and the family was afraid there was something wrong with him — you know — so they used the kid sister to cover it up.

“I saw through it when I found a doll in his closet. He wasn’t too hard to pick up. We found him in a doll store.”

“But what about Chuck?”

“I’ll get to him in a minute. My point is that there is a quirk somewhere in every one of us that makes us act differently — say when nobody is looking, or we get in a jam.”

She smiled confidently at him. “I like to look at pictures of bare-chested men.”

“See there!” He almost crowed. “That’s what I mean. If I was hunting you I’d watch the newsstands where they sell nudist magazines, or maybe keep an eye on the gymnasiums. Sooner or later you’d want to satisfy your quirk and look at a guy’s chest again. Now me...” He paused.

“Yes?” she urged him gently.

He got it out defiantly, “I make baby clothes for my kid!”

She nodded sagely. “Saves money.”

“You bet it does. Take this punk detective: he has two of them. He doesn’t lie any more than does an average man; he wouldn’t lie to me, or you, unless I put him on a tough spot and he just had to wiggle out somehow because it was too tough. I can understand that. So yesterday I warn him not to leave town and he promised me he wouldn’t. But today he’s gone. He left because his character slipped, I figure, because something happened that made unimportant the promise he made. I think he tossed the promise out the window as so much nonsense.

“Ordinarily, he’s not that kind of a man. You know that as well as I do. But just this once he slipped into his quirk and said to hell with me and promises — and he left.”

“Well,” she agreed dubiously, “it’s quite possible.”

“He’s gone,” the sergeant pointed out flatly.

“You said he had two quirks?” she reminded him.

The police officer grinned dryly. “He has. I found the second one this morning when I was searching his room. It may lead us right to him. There’s a cedar chest at the foot of his bed. It was locked, but his keys were on the floor with some other stuff — I’ll come to that in a minute. I opened the chest and found about sixty volumes of snappy poetry.”

“Snappy poetry?”

“And I do mean snappy. Not quite pornographic; there weren’t any dirty words used, only flowery terms with quite plain double-meanings. Can you picture Charles Horne collecting risque poetry?” He pronounced it “risky.”

“No. Risque stories perhaps, but not poetry.”

“That’s the quirk. We know of course that there are only two places in town that sell the stuff: Swede’s drugstore and a gasoline station out on the highway. There are plenty of other places in the state, yes. We’ll circularize the departments to watch them. And you can bet that everyone who buys a book of snappy poetry in this town from now on is going to be investigated. At least until he turns up again. He could send someone else in for it, you know.”

“Grant the point readily enough. But how are you so sure Chuck has skipped out?”

“Now there is where we have more than a quirk to work on! Incidentally, doctor, all this is confidential. I think Horne stumbled onto something — quite possibly our business down in the street yesterday afternoon.”

“He tried to question me,” Elizabeth volunteered.

“He also tried to pump the men we-brought in from Chicago. He found out one was a professor, and undoubtedly knows who the professor is and what he has been doing the last few years. He’s smart enough to tie in the professor’s background with what we were doing in the street and the force of the explosion. Which was one of the reasons why I wanted him under my thumb. If what we fear is true, we certainly can’t have him blabbing it.

“And of course, he’s the only man who can put the finger on the red-haired girl. I only half believe his yarn about the other man on the stairs below him. I don’t think he lied, there; but it might have been something he dreamed up afterwards and in the confusion of the explosion, believed he actually saw such a man.”

“There’s always the possibility he did see him.”

“Certainly. But how could this other man escape the blow of that explosion?”

“He was protected by the stairs. After it happened he could have climbed the stairs, run down the corridor, and escaped by the rear stairs. Chuck wouldn’t have heard him — he was beginning to lose his hearing by then.”

The sergeant pulled out a package of cigarettes and offered one to Dr. Saari. When he had successfully surrounded himself with a cloud of smoke he continued speaking.

“Let’s get back to when this started. Chuck, I mean. I had a hell of a night, last night. Something or somebody was waking me up every five minutes. About three o’clock this morning one of my men phoned in to say he’d woke up.”

Elizabeth frowned at him but kept silent.

He noticed the frown. “Don’t mind me, doctor. It’s my way of being sarcastic. This dumbbell telephoned me to say that he had just awakened — under the bushes of the house across the street from your place. Sure, I was having Horne watched, day and night.

“This man followed him home early in the evening, watched him mail a letter, and walk through the front door of your place. You weren’t in yet; this Mrs. Hubbard was, and Horne sat down in the living room to play cards with her. By that time it was raining rather hard so my man crossed the street and hid himself behind some thick bushes next to a house. This other house had a large bay window that jutted out over the yard, and the man could keep out of the rain by squatting down close to the house under this projection.

“He couldn’t, of course, see in the living room window where Horne and Mrs. Hubbard were playing cards, but he could see the front door and that dinky little stoop that serves your back door. He had the house covered so that Horne couldn’t get out without his knowing it, and that was all that was expected of him.”

“I think I’m ahead of you, sergeant. Chuck did get out — unobserved?”

“He did. You arrived home before midnight; Horne had already gone upstairs and gone to bed — presumably. His lights were out. My man was watching your lights — he won’t admit it but every guy’s something of a Peeping Tom — when wham! something took him across the back of the head. And out he went.”

“But isn’t it safe to assume that the people in the house across the street mistook your man for a prowler and knocked him out?”

“No. If it had been that way, they would have immediately called the station and reported him, either before or after knocking him out. Unless they were a nervy bunch they wouldn’t have touched him at all, would have simply waited for the radio car to get there before he got away. No such call was received at headquarters, so the people in that house never knew he was there.”

“Would Chuck do a thing like that?”

“Ordinarily, no. But the first quirk popped up. My man claims he didn’t betray himself to Horne but I think differently. Horne isn’t that much of a fool; he knew he was being shadowed when he visited the dog and cat hospital. I think he suddenly turned a cog in his head and decided to hell with me. Somehow or other, I still don’t know how, he got out of the house, sneaked around the block and up behind the man under the bushes.

“That, too, is another facet of the quirk. He didn’t have to knock him out — once he escaped from the house he was free to do as he pleased, unobserved. But something in him drove him to conking the shadow first — maybe retribution for spying on him, I’m not sure. The man was out between two and three hours. It was a hefty conking, expertly delivered. There are no serious injuries, but it guaranteed him to be out of circulation for a few hours.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “That I won’t believe.”

The sergeant stubbed out the cigarette and dropped it in an ash tray. “I’m not insisting that you do.”

“You searched the house?”

“Not then; not at three in the morning. I realized he had skipped when the man reported what had happened; there was little sense in rousing you out at that hour just to search an empty room. I went out there the first thing this morning. You had already left—”

Elizabeth Saari chuckled, “Twins. Both boys.”

“Make mine a girl next time. I looked the house over closely and I searched that punk’s room. I still don’t know how he got out. A while ago I mentioned finding his keys on the floor: he didn’t need them any longer for he wasn’t coming back to the office. He has a post-office box, too, but if you forget your keys the man at the general delivery window will hand you your mail, providing he knows you. There were some other things on the floor: his wallet, a pen and pencil, some silver money, and a few papers.”

“But sergeant — that doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh yes it does! He leaves behind everything he won’t really need, in an attempt to plant a false trail. The pile of stuff on the floor was supposed to say to me: ‘Look here, I wouldn’t leave these things here under my own free will. These are the things I always carry in my pockets.’ And it’s phony! Don’t you see why?”

“Frankly, no.” She was frowning again, and becoming alarmed.

“Because in the first place he wouldn’t be allowed to leave his personal possessions in a little pile like that, where they’d be noticed. Might as well write a note telling what was happening. This is assuming someone else abducted him, you understand. And in the second place, he left behind only the things he can do without.

“He didn’t leave those few things he felt he couldn’t do without: a handkerchief and a pocket comb. And those very ordinary but necessary items give his plan away. Consider his wallet: he left that, but he didn’t leave the money that was in it. Phony — see?”

“No, I don’t see, and I’m beginning to think there is something wrong. Sergeant, Chuck didn’t have any money in his wallet. He took me to lunch yesterday and spent his last dollar paying the check. He said there wouldn’t be any more until payday — whenever the insurance company paid him.”

Sergeant Wiedenbeck shrugged. “If he had no money, then there was little sense taking his wallet.”

“But his badge was in it; identification cards...”

“If he’s hiding out, he needs none of them. If he’s working up something out of town, he can get along without them if necessary.”

She slid off the examining table and stamped her foot.

“You refuse to believe there is anything wrong, don’t you?”

“Quirk,” he said by way of reminder.

“Quirk my eye!” She whirled on him. “Did you know his telephone line was tapped? Did you know he received a threatening letter? Did you know—”

He jumped up and grabbed her shoulders roughly.

“Slow down! Repeat that, slowly. Telephone tapped?”

“Yes, it’s tapped. I heard it. I called him on this phone and he took it in his office. We both heard it. Like a click. I recognized it from the movies.”

“And this threatening letter?”

“Someone sent Charles a letter which contained only his phone number. That was all, just his own phone number typed in the middle of the page. Chuck was upset about it.”

Wiedenbeck stood there, hanging onto her shoulders. He was staring past her, staring at the last year’s paint on the office wall. Then he turned to study the telephone.

“That wasn’t a threatening letter,” he said half to himself. “It might have been a warning, or just a friendly tip. Someone was telling him to either stay by his phone for a message, or to beware the phone. If the line is tapped, it was a message to that effect.”

He picked up the doctor’s phone and dialed the number in the detective’s office across the hall. Short seconds after the phone began to ring they both heard the clear and distinct sound of another listener cutting in.

“There it is!” Elizabeth cried, “That’s the sound I heard—”

Quickly the sergeant slapped his hand across the mouthpiece. He was too late. The click came again. He hung up, glowering at her.

“Why can’t you keep your mouth shut?”

“I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“Sometimes women disgust me, and today is one of those times!” Wiedenbeck stalked to the door and yanked it open. “They’ve been warned now; it’s not likely we’ll catch them. Where does the janitor spend his time? I want to get into those offices across the hall.”

“I can let you in. I have the key.”

“You have the key?”

“Yes. One key unlocks every door in that corridor. I have a special lock for this door, but all those outer doors have the same kind of lock.” She handed him a key.

The sergeant unlocked the door to the detective’s office and pushed in, Elizabeth Saari at his heels. She picked up his phone and dialed her own number, but other than the ringing of her phone there was nothing.

The sergeant ignored her. He pulled open each desk drawer in turn.

“There it is,” Elizabeth pointed. “That’s the letter.”

Wiedenbeck studied it.

She pointed out the numerals in the center of the sheet. “That’s the original message. These have been added later. Oh look, he found it! Look at these numbers — they match the original.”

“I see them. And guess which typewriter made them all.”

“H— His?”

“His. He spent some time pecking out all these other things.”

“But you surely don’t believe he mailed the letter to himself?”

“No, not that. Somebody got in here, somebody smart enough to discover the tapped wire, somebody who thought fast and used shortcuts. That’s why the somebody didn’t say ‘your telephone is tapped, be careful.’ That’s the long way around. It’s quicker, easier to type down the number and let it go at that. Whoever the somebody was, he’d understand such a message concerning his own phone and he expected Horne to do likewise.”

“But why mail it to him? Why not leave it propped up on the desk?”

“Supposing the party who tapped his wire wandered in? He might be in the habit of hanging around the office. If he were sufficiently nosy to tap his wire, he wouldn’t hesitate to read a note on his desk.

“But a letter coming in the morning’s mail is different. There are likely to be other letters, and it wouldn’t be noticeable. Too, the nosy party isn’t so likely to be around when the mail arrives, whereas he could come in sometime during the night. It works out right.”

“You make it sound so simple, sergeant. Why couldn’t Chuck see through it?”

“Charles Horne doesn’t think fast until he’s thrown for a loop, then he shines. This letter puzzled him but didn’t scare him. He probably has tumbled to it, by now.” “He must have attempted to do something about it.”

“He did,” the sergeant replied dryly. “He left town.”

Elizabeth whirled on him and grabbed his lapel.

“Sergeant Wiedenbeck, where would the other person be who tapped that phone?”

“Two or three places. In the next office — which isn’t likely, somewhere in the basement where all the wires come down, or in the tunnel under the street where they join the main cable.”

“Why are we standing here? I have a key to the next office.”

He snatched it out of her hand and strode rapidly to the next door opening into the corridor. The key turned and the door was shoved open. The office was empty; the wires for a telephone installation vanished into the baseboard. The sergeant pulled the door shut and made for the back stairway. Elizabeth Saari was right behind him.

The janitor maintained his own one-room “office” in the basement, adjoining a locked room which housed his supplies. The janitor was lying face down in the open doorway of his own room, his head bleeding.