Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 02 (7 page)

Two spaces inside Arthur Tingley’s office, just beyond the edge of the burlap screen at his right, he stopped again. Taking Amy’s story as she told it, it must have been just there that she had been struck. Considering the screen, that was all right. He circled the screen and directed his eyes downward.

A tightening of the muscles around his mouth and a breath intake through his nostrils somewhat quicker and deeper than common were his only visible reactions to what he saw. Though a glance was enough to make it more than probable that Amy had not, in her stunned daze, left her uncle to bleed slowly to death, he stepped around the area of the congealed liquid on the floor to bend over for a brief but conclusive examination. That done, he straightened up for a survey. For three minutes he stood, moving only his head and eyes, filing away a hundred details in the cabinet in his skull. The outstanding items were:

1. A bloody towel on the floor by the wash basin, sixteen inches from the wall.
   

2. Another bloody towel on the rim of the basin, to the right.
   

3. A long thin knife with a black composition handle on the floor between the body and the screen. In the factory that morning he had seen girls with similar knives, sharp as razors, slicing meat loaves.
   

4. Also on the floor, between the two front legs of the wash basin, a metal object nearly as big as his fist, in the form of a truncated cone, with a figure 2 in high relief on its side. That too, or its fellow, he had seen in the factory: a two-pound weight of an old-fashioned scale in the sauce room.
   

5. Farther away, out beyond the edge of the screen, a snakeskin bag—a woman’s handbag.
   

When he moved, it was to kneel for a close inspection of the knife, without touching it; and the same for the metal weight. It was unnecessary to repeat the performance for the handbag: from his height he could see the chromium monogram, AD, at a corner of it. It, too, he left untouched; in fact, he touched nothing, as he toured the room, but he saw that someone else had touched a great many things, during what had apparently been a thorough search. Two drawers of the rolltop desk were standing open. Objects which, when he was there in the morning, had been neatly and compactly stacked on rows of shelves, were now disarranged and anything but neat. A pile of the trade journal,
The National Grocer
, had tumbled to chaos on the floor. The door of the enormous old safe was standing wide open. Arthur Tingley’s hat was still on the little shelf above and to the left of the desk, but his coat, instead of being on the hanger which dangled from a hook beneath the shelf, as it should have been, was in a heap on the floor.

Fox noted these and many other evidences of a search, stood scowling in the middle of the room and
muttered, “It’s too damn bad I can’t make a job of it,” and departed.

It was still raining. Five minutes later, at 11:21 by his watch, he was in a phone booth in a drugstore at 28th and Broadway, speaking in the transmitter:

“All right, if the inspector isn’t there I’ll tell you about it. May I have your name, please? Sergeant Tepper? Thanks. You’d better write this down. Name: Arthur Tingley. Place: His office on the second floor of his place of business at Twenty-sixth Street and Tenth Avenue. He’s there dead, murdered, throat cut. Let me finish, please. My name is Fox, Tecumseh Fox. That’s right. Tell Inspector Damon I’ll see him tomorrow—hold on and get this, will you?—I’ll see him tomorrow and tell him where Amy Duncan is. Amy Duncan!”

He cut off loud remonstrances by hanging up, went out to his car and drove to the Hotel Vandermeer and asked the doorman, who greeted him as an old acquaintance, to have the car garaged. Inside the clerk greeted him similarly, but exhibited no surprise when he wrote “William Sherman” on the registration sheet.

He smiled at the clerk and said, “The police are after me, and they may even canvass the hotels, but I intend to sleep.” He put a fingertip on the “William Sherman.” “You can always trust the written word.”

“Certainly, Mr. Fox.” The clerk smiled back.

In a clean and comfortable room on the twelfth floor, Fox got his notebook from his pocket and flipped to a page, and arranged himself at ease in an upholstered chair next to the telephone. He stayed there half an hour, making a series of seven calls. The sixth was to his home in the country, to tell Mrs. Trimble that there would probably be an inquiry for
him, and that he wasn’t telling her where he was so she wouldn’t know. The seventh was to the East End hospital, to tell Dr. Vail where he was, and to learn, as he did, that Miss Duncan had no serious injury, had been safely transported, and was fairly comfortable.

He undressed and went to bed a nudist.

T
hough the detective bureaus of the New York City police force are by no means staffed exclusively by university graduates—a questionable fate which Scotland Yard in London seems to be headed for—neither does their personnel consist entirely of heavy-handed big-jawed low-brows. Inspector Damon of the Homicide Squad, for instance, while he is rather big-jawed, possesses fine sensitive hands, a wide well-sculptured brow, and eyes which might easily belong to a morose and pessimistic poet. His educated voice is rarely raised but has an extended repertory, as is desirable for a man who deals daily with all kinds from disintegrating dips to bereaved dowagers.

As he sat behind his desk at headquarters at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning, speaking to a man seated opposite—a gray-haired man with the four buttons on his coat all buttoned and his hands folded in his lap in the manner traditional to parsons—his voice was merely businesslike:

“That’s all for now, Mr. Fry, but you will of course keep yourself available. I have told Miss Yates that beginning at noon things can proceed as usual at the
Tingley premises, with the exception of Mr. Tingley’s room. We’ll have two men in there day and night, and nothing is to be touched, and certainly not removed, without their approval. I am aware of your authority, jointly with Miss Yates, as a trustee, and we’ll cooperate all we can, but if there are any documents or records in that room—”

“I told you there’s none I need,” Sol Fry rumbled angrily. “The records of my department are where they belong. But I don’t care a Continental—”

“So you said. That’s all. It will be the way I say for the present—Allen, show Mr. Fry out and bring Fox in.”

A sergeant in uniform stepped forward to open the door, and after another rumble or two Sol Fry gave it up and went. In a moment Tecumseh Fox entered, crossed briskly to the desk, and stood.

“Good morning, Inspector,” he said politely.

Damon grunted. As he sat looking up at the caller his eyes were not only morose but also malign. After a silence he extended a hand.

“All right, Fox, I’ll shake, but by God. Sit down.”

Fox sat. “You’re going to find—” he began, but the other cut him off:

“No, no. Try keeping quiet once. I’m going to make a short speech. Do I ever bluster?”

“I’ve never heard you.”

“You’re not going to. Nor do I get nasty unnecessarily. But here is a statement of the minimum: you and Miss Duncan together held up a murder investigation twelve hours. It’s true you phoned last night, but you concealed the vital witness, the one to start with, and kept her from us until morning. What you do around other parts of the country is none of my business, but I warned you three years ago against
operating in New York City on the theory that when you’re running bases the umpires go out for a drink. Have you seen the district attorney?”

Fox nodded. “I just came from there. He’s as sore as a finger caught in a door.”

“So am I. I think you’re through in Manhattan.”

“I’d call that bluster. Quiet bluster.”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Have you finished your speech? I’d like to make one too.”

“Go ahead, but make it brief.”

“I will. At 8:42 in the evening I get a call from Miss Duncan asking me to come to her apartment. I arrive at 10:10 and find her unconscious with a lump on her skull. I revive her, question her, and phone for a doctor, telling him to take her to a hospital if that’s where she ought to be. Thinking that Tingley may be lying in his office bleeding to death, I get there as quick as I can and find that he is dead and has been for a while. I notify the police at once. I phone the hospital and learn that Miss Duncan got a severe blow, is resting, and should not be disturbed. Early in the morning I go to the hospital, find that she is in good enough shape to talk, inform the police of her whereabouts—”

“And when I get there,” Damon cut in dryly, “I find her surrounded by Nat Collins.”

“Certainly. She had got knocked stiff alongside a murdered man she wasn’t on good terms with. Do you take the position that you object to her having a lawyer? I shouldn’t think so. To finish my speech, I then had a hasty breakfast and arrived at police headquarters at eight
A.M.
, which is bright and early to be running bases. In your absence, I made a complete statement which was taken down by your subordinate,
went by request to the district attorney’s office, got your message to return here at eleven, and here I am. On that performance you can fence me out of New York? Try it.”

“You kept vital information from us for twelve hours. At least eight hours. And maybe something worse. Why all the telephoning?”

“You mean last night?”

“Yes. Half the people we’ve talked to—”

“Five, Inspector. Only five. That couldn’t possibly have done any harm. I merely told them that I wanted to make sure they would be at work at Tingley’s this morning, as I wanted to talk with them again. I thought one of them might betray some interesting reaction.”

“Did they?”

“No.”

“Why did you pick on those five?”

“Because they were the five people who could most easily have put quinine in the mixing vats, and I was exploring the theory that Tingley had discovered the guilty one and got murdered as a result.”

Damon grunted. “Is your theory based on facts?”

“No, sir, only possibilities. All the facts I possess are in that statement you have.”

“You’d like to believe that the motive for murder was in that quinine business.”

“Like to?” Fox’s brows lifted. “It would be nice if a detective could choose a motive the way he does a pair of socks.”

“But you’d like to believe that, because it would let Miss Duncan out.”

“Now, come.” Fox grinned. “She’s already out.”

“Do you think so? Then why Nat Collins? Who paid for the phone calls you made last night? Who are
you working for? And how did a set of her fingerprints, in exactly the right position, get on the handle of the knife that cut Tingley’s throat?”

Fox frowned, leaned forward, focused his gaze, and demanded, “Huh?”

“They’re there,” said Damon succinctly. “We got plenty of hers from that leather bag which you had sense enough to leave where it was. I have asked her about it, in the presence of her lawyer, and she denies having touched the knife. Her explanation, of course, is that while she was unconscious her hand was used to make the impressions. Yours too, I suppose.”

“You’re stringing me, Inspector.”

“No. I’m not. The prints were there.”

“Have you arrested her?”

“No. But if we get a motive that will carry the load—”

Fox continued to gaze, his brows drawing together, then leaned back in his chair. “Well,” he said, in an entirely new tone, “that’s different. I knew you don’t like anyone getting under your feet on a murder case, and I had decided not to annoy you on this one, thinking Nat Collins was all and more than Miss Duncan would need to make it as little unpleasant as possible. I had supposed that she had walked in there at a bad moment, and the murderer had conked her merely to get away. But now—”

“Now?” Damon prompted.

“I’m afraid I’m going to be a nuisance after all. Of all the snide tricks.” Fox abruptly rose to his feet. “Are you through with me?”

“About. For the present. I wanted to ask if you have anything to add to this statement. Anything at all.”

“No. You think I know something, but you’re wrong.”

“Why do you say I think you know something?”

“Because you told me about those prints, thinking you might open a seam. But you’re wrong. I’m starting from scratch. With your squad working on it already twelve hours, you know a devil of a lot more than I do. One of the things you know, I’d appreciate it very much if you’d tell me. Were Miss Duncan’s prints on the two-pound weight?”

“No. Why should they be?”

“Because Tingley had been struck with it on the back of his skull.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I felt the place. The body was the only thing I touched. He was struck harder and in a more vulnerable spot than Miss Duncan, and I think there was a fracture. I doubt if I’m being helpful, but I’ll finish. He was unconscious from the blow when his throat was cut. It would be next to impossible to slit a man’s throat with a single clean deep stroke like that when he was on his feet and had his faculties. So—if you’re nursing the fantasy that Miss Duncan did it—first she used the two-pound weight on him, and then the knife, and then she bopped herself on the side of the head with the weight. When she came to, she carefully wiped the weight clean but ignored the handle of the knife—”