Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (72 page)

Well What About It Wiseguy.

The home office again.

Donahue balled it up and whipped it violently across the room. Miss Laidlaw raised her prim eyebrows.

“Wait,” Donahue muttered. He wrote on a piece of foolscap in a bold broad scrawl. “Wire this back,” he said.

His reply advised:

Do Not Believe All You Read Stop Give Me Time

It took him a minute or two to calm down, and during that interval Fern Chester sat with her eyes dutifully turned the other way.

He shoved things around on his desk and said: “Excuse the blowoff.” And then he went on in a deep, quick voice: “The thing now is, we’re involved and we can’t expect the cops to treat us with any great amount of consideration. It’s a case of our knowing too much and yet not enough. If we knew less, we’d be much better off. But the ‘if’s’ don’t count. Loftman’s true identity will clear up one angle but on the other hand it will magnify the whole thing over and over again.

“I might be able to keep the cops off our neck for a while by coming out with the statement that I think Marcus Rathbun was murdered. There’ve been some balmy ideas floating around in my head for the past several hours and I think I could put up a good front. I’ve no concrete ideas, only theoretical ones, which as a rule I don’t like, but in this instance I’ve got to break a rule. I want to start the investigation up another alley, mainly to draw their attention away from this theoretical blonde.”

“But wouldn’t you have to name someone you thought might be guilty of the murder?”

“I’ve got that in mind too.”

She made a wry face. “All because of me. All my fault. It’s so unfair to you!” She hung her head and twisted her handkerchief round and round.

He stood up and leaned on his braced arms. “Say, do you ever eat dinner out?”

She nodded. “Sometimes.”

“I know a place where they make a filet of sole that’d melt in your mouth.”

“I love filet of sole.”

He laughed with rough good humor. “Well, I can see this thing hasn’t got you down completely. And frankly,” he continued, slightly out of the side of his mouth. “I think the Judge’s son looks a little on the rah-rah side.”

“Do you always mix business with pleasure?”

“I did once in my life and look where I am.”

“You’ll likely regret it,” she said ruefully.

He tossed a coin into the air, slapped it, palmed it. “I was only kidding.”

She sighed. “You’re a funny man. I can never quite make you out.” But she didn’t seem displeased about it.

Donahue strode into Police Headquarters with his long legs swinging purposefully. He went past the elevator, took the stairway up to the second floor, walked to the front of the corridor and entered Kelly McPard’s office.

“Hey, Donny, what’d you think?” Lankford boomed.

“The new kid can say ‘Pop.’ Right?”

“Loftman’s a ex-congressman named Rathbun!”

“What’s this, a joke?”

McPard was sitting comfortably in his chair and drawing thoughtfully on a long panetela. “No joke, Donny. We received an anonymous message a little while ago. I chased over to one of the newspaper offices and found out when he was a congressman. Then I rooted around some more there and finally found a picture of him. They said it was only one of three the news photographers had ever got. And it was him, alright—it was Loftman.”

“Boy, ain’t that a break!” exclaimed Lankford, slapping his thigh. “Boy, that’s a break!”

McPard said: “You mean to tell us, Donny, you never knew who Loftman really was when you interviewed him?”

“Cross my heart, Kel.”

McPard frowned. “The D. A., I think, is going to have you over on the carpet. You got Stratford sore. He’s not satisfied with your position in this case and I think they’re going to put you over the hurdles.”

“Swell.”

“I wouldn’t be too cocky, Don,” Lankford advised sagely.

Donahue laughed. “Maybe I killed Bickford, huh? Maybe I killed Rathbun too?”

“No,” said McPard. “But maybe you’ve got an idea who the woman in the case is. Red swears you meant it when you said you were going up to see a blonde, and now that we find a woman was with Rathbun when he took that room down near the river, why, it looks as if Red might be right. It occurred to me that maybe when the date was made for you and Rathbun, a woman made it.”

“Rathbun himself made it, Kel.”

McPard smoked in troubled silence for a while, then asked absently, “You come here for something, Donny?”

Donahue sat down, bending his brows darkly. “There’s an idea been getting the best of me.”

“I’m glad to see someone’s getting ideas around here.”

“I don’t think Rathbun committed suicide.”

“Oh, phooey,” Lankford said, sour-faced.

“Why, Donny?” McPard asked.

Donahue looked from one to the other intently before continuing. Then he said, “Well, I’ve never heard of a suicide yet who deliberately destroyed all evidence of his identity. Usually they leave notes. Even though Rathbun was traveling under an assumed name, ten to one he carried a wallet; ten to one that wallet contained money and plenty of identification. And the fact that you’ve just told me who he really was makes me more certain that the identification was destroyed by someone else.”

“Why?” McPard asked.

“Because when an unidentified man is found dead, the wheels move slowly and sometimes it takes a long while to identify him. That gives the killer more time to put distance between himself and the scene of the crime. If the deceased’s name was found out right away, you might be able to check up immediately on his acquaintances.”

McPard looked at his cigar. “I was kind of fooling around with a similar idea, but in this police work, you know as well as I do, the unexpected always happens.”

“Tell me this, Kel. Tell me why Bickford crashed the apartment of an ex-congressman and give me some good, logical reason why an ex-congressman should haul off and brain a house detective.”

“I’ve been thinking of that too, all along. But facts are facts. Bickford was killed and then we find Rathbun a suicide.”

Donahue shook his head. “Let’s say that he wasn’t a suicide. I’m going to stick to my contention that a suicide wouldn’t destroy every ounce of identification.”

Lankford asked: “He left his hotel key, didn’t he?”

“That only identified him as Loftman.”

“But then who knocked off Bickford?” Lankford demanded.

Donahue laid a hard fist on the desk. “Let’s go back a bit. Let’s go back to those two guys who occupied 545 before Rathbun did: O’Fallon and Fauls.”

“Whoops! Listen to the man!” Lankford guffawed.

“Razz me,” Donahue said, “but keep your ears open. They were tossed out on the fourth. Rathbun checked in on the morning of the fifth, as Loftman. You know as well as I do that McCartney remained in the apartment while he made O’Fallon and Fauls pack, in fifteen minutes, and then ran them over to the railroad station. Has it ever occurred to you that O’Fallon and Fauls may have buried a lot of dough in that apartment?”

McPard laid his cigar aside, folded his arms. “Go ahead, Donny.”

“All right. Now say a woman came up to Rathbun’s apartment and knocked. Say she pretended she was some kind of welfare worker—I’ve had it happen to me in the best hotels. Or even say that she came into the hotel with a hat and coat on, but over a uniform such as hotel housekeepers wear. Say a man was with her and they went up to the fifth floor by the stairway. She took off her street things when they got there. The man held them and then she knocked and when Rathbun opened the door she said she was the housekeeper and wanted to check up on the linen.

“As he let her in, the man also went in with her. Then the woman held a gun on Rathbun while the man got the money, wherever it was hidden. As they were leaving, Bickford came down the hall, saw them, and they backed into the apartment again but Bickford crashed in too. He chased them to the bedroom, where they struggled, while the woman continued to keep Rathbun covered. In the struggle, the man smacked Bickford on the temple with the butt of his gun and Bickford went down. Then they waited a while, to make sure no attention was drawn in the corridor. Before leaving, they took a look at Bickford and found he was dead. Murder. Rathbun would remember them. So they took Rathbun along with them.”

Lankford was jovial: “Boy, what stories you make up!”

McPard was attentive: “But McCartney swears he saw O’Fallon and Fauls off on a California-bound train.”

“Which means, I suppose, that they’d have to go all the way to California.”

“But it sounds farfetched, Donny. It’s not the kind of angle a man can set his teeth in.”

“If I could think of any other angle, I’d discard this. But the thing sticks in my nut. And the suicide angle sticks in my throat. Especially since you’ve told me who Loftman really was. Listen, let me see that newspaper clipping again—the one you found on Rathbun.”

McPard opened his desk drawer, passed the clipping to Donahue. Once more Donahue scanned the account of how one John Leffler had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“There’s no date line with the item,” McPard offered.

“That usually means it happened in the city where the paper was published. There’s no Blue Ridge Road in this city. Now look at the back of this clip: there’s part of an ad for furniture, and the names of the store is Kinderman Brothers. It advertises a club chair and ottoman: ‘For Sale—Saturday only.’ All right, call a wholesale furniture dealer in this city and ask if they know of a store named Kinderman Brothers, and if they do, where it’s located. Go ahead.”

McPard looked in the classified telephone directory and put through a call. When he hung up, he said: “Kansas City, Missouri.”

“Now call Kinderman Brothers in Kansas City, describe this ad and ask ’em on what date it was published in the newspaper.”

Lankford’s face was dark brown with interest now.

McPard put through the long distance call and in a few minutes was in communication with Kinderman Brothers. He made notes as he listened, and said, presently: “Thank you a great deal, sir,” and hung up. “On the fifth of the month,” he told Donahue. “In all Kansas City papers.”

Donahue got up from the chair and leaned on the desk. “All right, now. It was on the evening of the fourth O’Fallon and Fauls were put on that westbound train. Rathbun arrived in this city on the fifth, from the East. From the East, mind you, not from the West. I will bet this: I will bet that O’Fallon and Fauls got off that westbound train late the night of the fourth, spent the night at a hotel there and came back to this city next day, possibly with the woman. I’ll bet that clip came with them from Kansas City and I’d like to bet it was planted on Rathbun. It was a good idea for the suicide angle.”

The telephone rang and McPard answered it. “For you, Gus,” he said.

Lankford took it. “Yeah?… Yeah, Sophie…. Hah?… No!… Yes?… No, Sophie! You don’t tell me!… Be home for dinner, hon!” He smacked the receiver into the hook and beamed on McPard and Donahue. “My new kid just walked the whole length of the bedroom! Imagine!”

Kelly McPard chuckled.

Donahue grinned. “Chip off the old block, huh, Gus?”

“A man’s man, that kid, Donny!” Lankford puffed.

McPard rose and said: “Suppose, Donny, you and I take another look at 545.”

“I was just about to suggest that myself.”

“You, Gus,” McPard said, “hold down the desk till I get back.”

Donahue and McPard rode out to the Coronet in a police sedan. They got one of the assistant managers, a man named Floom, to take them up to 545. The apartment was unoccupied. Rathbun’s baggage, of course, had been taken to Headquarters. MacPard stood in the center of the living-room, his hands on his hips, his eyes swinging nimbly and curiously about the room.

“Well, Donny, what would be your idea?”

Donahue said: “If they had a lot of money hidden here, and if it had been easily accessible, they could have got it into their bags while Mac and Bickford were waiting. We ought to assume that the money was not easily accessible, that they didn’t have time to get it. It’s highly probable, Kel, that they ran some stiff games here and won a lot of dough. If they did, there was always the chance of being knocked over by some of their guests, especially the sore losers. So they would have bunked it deep.”

“The bed?”

“Never. That’s a cinch. Same with the carpet, or behind the pictures, or in the divans or the chairs. Just think of all the average places the average mug would hide it and then forget those places. Then think of some place where it would be difficult to bunk it and just as difficult to get it out.”

“The wall,” suggested Floom.

“That’s good, Mr. Floom—only the wall’s made of plaster. Let’s look at the doorway frames.”

They spread out and it was Floom who called, “Look at this a minute,” from the pantry doorway.

In the crevice between the outer strip and the base of the doorway frame the paint was slightly chipped.

“Get the house carpenter,” Donahue said.

A Swede appeared in five minutes with a kit of tools, and to him Donahue said: “See this? Have you done any fixing on this very recently?”

“Me? No, sir.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Three years, sir.”

“This chipping looks fresh, doesn’t it?”

“It does, kind of.”

“When was this apartment last decorated?”

Floom put in, “About eight months ago, completely.”

Donahue turned to the carpenter. “Pry that panel out, will you?”

The carpenter took a chisel from his kit and pried the panel out. The space it disclosed was empty. Kelly McPard sighed.

“Did that seem to come off easily?” Donahue asked.

“Yes, sir, it did.”

Donahue looked at McPard. “A great deal of money could have been planted in behind that panel, Kel.”

“But in getting the panel back,” Floom said, “they would have had to hammer it. I don’t see any marks on the paint.”

Donahue went into the bedroom and came back with a pillow. “Let’s borrow that hammer,” he said to the carpenter. He then placed one corner of the pillow against the panel and hammered the pillow until the panel was again secure. The hammering had left no mark.