Give the Girl a Gun Page 5

  Madeline gave Fausta a trusting look and said in a small voice, “All right, Mr. Moon. Can you start right away?”

  “Immediately,” I told her. “But there’s a fee involved. Can you afford it if the investigation runs into a matter of weeks?”

  She looked surprised. “Of course. I have plenty of money.”

  I told her my day rate and accepted a retainer of fifty dollars.

  “I’ll start off with a question to you,” I said. “Can you think of any reason Ed Friday wouldn’t want you to engage me to check up on this murder?”

  Blankly she shook her head. “I barely know the man. And I don’t think Barney or Walter Ford knew him before about a month ago, when he came to Barney with an offer to invest in the Gimmick. Tom doesn’t know him at all. Why do you ask that?”

  “Just an impression I got,” I said. “Quite possibly I misconstrued what he was getting at.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SINCE THE OBVIOUS place to begin my investigation was at police headquarters, my first stop was there. But before starting out, I cleverly instructed the girls to wait at my apartment until I returned so that I could give Madeline a complete report on Tom Henry’s situation. I could just as easily have taken them along and had them wait in the lobby at police headquarters, of course, but I knew Fausta couldn’t bear the condition of my flat very long, and I hoped if I left her in it a sufficient length of time, I would find it clean when I returned.

  I like Warren Day and respect his ability as a cop, but if I may make my understatement for the day, his moods are unpredictable.

  This particular afternoon I found my scrawny friend in a relatively equable frame of mind. He didn’t fawn on me, but neither did he bite off my head for neglecting to knock before I opened his office door.

  He merely gave me a sour look and said, “I didn’t send for you, Moon.”

  “You have a young fellow named Thomas Henry in the pokey down here,” I said. “Entered a charge yet?”

  “Nothing serious,” Day said negligently. “Just first-degree homicide.”

  “Recall the red-haired girl you met last night? Madeline Strong? It seems she bears a deep and romantic love for your murder suspect,” I said, “and believes the police have entered into a conspiracy with the real murderer to pin the killing on her Thomas. Naturally I told her that was ridiculous, that the Homicide Department wasn’t dishonest. It was just inept. She hired me to do what I can for the boy.”

  “That’s nice,” Day said agreeably. “Just offhand the only thing I can think of you can do for him is hold his hand in the gas chamber.”

  “I’m allergic to HCN,” I told him. “I’d rather keep him out of the chamber. What have you got on him?”

  “We went straight from Amhurst’s place to this Thomas Henry’s last night,” Day said. “It’s only two doors from Amhurst. Henry pretended to be in bed, but we pounded until he finally opened the door. The first thing we asked was for him to take a look at the pipe you and Hannegan found on the lawn outside the murder window. He admitted it was his but couldn’t account for it being on the lawn. While I questioned him, Hannegan took a look around. In a drawer in the boy’s workshop he found a twenty-five-caliber automatic like the ones the two women had. Only this one had been fired. We pulled Henry in on suspicion of homicide, and this morning changed the charge to homicide when Ballistics checked the shell casing you and Hannegan found near the pipe and decided the firing pin of Henry’s gun had set it off.”

  “How about the slug?” I asked. “Did that check too?”

  “When we dug it out of the wall, it was smashed all out of shape. A soft-nosed job. But its weight and composition were the same as the bullets remaining in the gun found in Henry’s workshop. That, plus the firing-pin mark on the ejected casing, is enough to cinch it as the murder weapon in any jury’s mind.”

  “What’s the motive supposed to be?”

  “For Ford’s murder? None. But remember the scrap Amhurst said he had with Henry because Henry thought he had stolen his invention? We think he was potting at Amhurst and accidentally hit Ford.”

  “Maybe the gun was planted,” I said without conviction.

  Day’s grin contained the same type of enjoyment I imagine a fox shows when he has a fat rabbit cornered. “That’s what young Henry insists. Claims he never saw it before. But the gold initials on the grip read ‘T.H.’ “

  Dubiously I thought this over. On the surface it sounded like a hopeless case, but I had to do what I could. In a way the case was a little too hopeless, the circumstantial evidence a trifle too complete. And I kept remembering that Ed Friday had tried to bribe me to leave town for ten days, just about the time it would require to get Tom Henry properly indicted by a grand jury.

  “May I see the boy?” I asked.

  The inspector shrugged. “If you want to waste your time.”

  He pressed a buzzer on his desk and after a moment Hannegan stuck his head in.

  “Let Moon see Thomas Henry,” Day said expansively. “He can have ten minutes.”

  Thomas Henry was about twenty-five, long and gangling and with a mass of wiry black hair which stuck straight out from his head like the bristles of a scrub brush. He had a high, broad forehead, gentle and rather dreamy eyes, and a wide mouth which looked as though it was normally accustomed to a good-natured smile. At the moment the corners were drooping.

  He was seated on a drop-down bunk with his hands clasped between his knees when Hannegan unlocked the door, let me in and relocked it again. Walking back down the corridor a few feet, the lieutenant waited impassively.

  I told Henry who I was, why I was there, and when I noted his eyes resting rather wistfully on my cigar, offered him one.

  “Usually I smoke a pipe,” he said, “But in all the confusion of being dragged to jail in the middle of the night, I forgot to bring one.” He accepted a cigar and, when I held a light for him, puffed cautiously, as though suspecting it might explode.

  “To start out,” I said, “I want you to understand you have to tell me the truth or I can’t help you. If you killed Ford, I don’t want a confession, but I want you to tell me to drop the case right now. There isn’t any point in wasting Madeline’s money on a lost cause.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Mr. Moon,” he said earnestly. He regarded me with a thoughtful expression and added, “I don’t much like the idea of Madeline bearing the expense though. Couldn’t I assume the responsibility of paying you?”

  “Got any money?”

  “Well, no. A few dribbles of royalties from a couple of minor inventions. Nothing above living expenses. That is, not at the moment. I didn’t mean I could pay you right away. I have a couple of new patent applications in, and both should bring me a lot of money within the next few years.”

  “I may not live beyond the next few years,” I told him. “Particularly if none of my clients pay me until their ships come in and I have to stop eating until they do. We’ll let Madeline handle the bills, and if you feel indebted to her, pay her back when the bonanza arrives. Now what’s the story on the gun found in your workshop?”

  He claimed he had never seen it before Hannegan pulled it from his workshop drawer.

  “I understand it’s probably one of several Walter Ford gave to various people as presents,” he said. “I believe they’re checking serial numbers to make sure. But Ford never gave me a gun. Why should he have? I‘ve only known him a couple of months, and our acquaintanceship was merely casual.”

  “How casual?”

  “Well, I met him at Madeline’s house one night about three months ago when I dropped in unexpectedly. He and Madeline and Barney Amhurst were having some kind of meeting. About the Huntsafe, I guess, though at the time I didn’t even know Barney was working on the Huntsafe. After that I saw Ford at Madeline’s maybe a half dozen times, but we never said more than a few words to each other. We certainly didn’t know each other well enough to exchange presents.”

  “How do you account
for your initials on the pistol?”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  There was nothing more I could get out of him about his relations with Walter Ford, but I did get his version of the ruckus with Barney Amhurst. According to Tom Henry, he himself had started working on a gadget similar to the Huntsafe while still a student at M.I.T. and had on several occasions discussed his idea with Madeline Strong’s brother Lloyd, who was also a student there. Lloyd had never mentioned that he was working on the same idea himself.

  “Lloyd was closemouthed to the point of secretiveness,” Henry said. “You’d think that after I told him what I was doing, he’d return the compliment inasmuch as he was working on a similar project. Particularly since he was probably my best friend. I‘ve known both Lloyd and Madeline since we were all kids together. But even Madeline didn’t know what Lloyd and Barney were working on until after Lloyd was shot. You see …"

  “Whoa!” I said. “Lloyd was murdered too?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THOMAS HENRY shook his head impatiently. “No, no, Mr. Moon. A hunting accident last November. Up in the New York Catskills when five of us were out after deer.” His voice turned rueful. “Kind of an ironic thing for a fellow who was working on an invention to prevent hunting accidents to die in exactly the kind of accident he was trying to eliminate.” “What happened?” I asked.

  “The usual asinine thing that happens too often every year when amateurs with guns fill the woods. Lloyd got himself in the wrong place at just the right time. He, Madeline, Barney Amhurst and I were out together. A girl named Beatrice Duval was along on the trip too, but …"

  “Beatrice Duval?” I interrupted. “You mean Bubbles?”

  Henry looked surprised. “You know her?”

  “Last night she was the date of the man you’re accused of killing. What was she doing on your hunting trip?”

  “She used to go around with Lloyd,” Henry said. “What a fellow as intelligent as he was could see in such a dumb blonde, I don’t know, but the last few months he was alive he dragged her everywhere. She had no business on a hunting trip. Beatrice is strictly an indoor girl. The first morning she went out with us, but Lloyd spent so much time untangling her from briars, it ruined the whole hunt. After that she stayed at camp when the rest of us went out. Lloyd was killed on the third morning.” “How’d it happen?”

  “I can tell you how, but I don’t know why, because Lloyd was an experienced hunter and was used to hunting with that particular team. For the past three years he, Madeline, Barney and I had made the trip to the Catskills every fall.” He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. “Madeline and Barney were on a stand while Lloyd and I drove through a basin full of cedars. The basin wasn’t large enough to get lost in, but somehow Lloyd got himself in such a position that when a buck broke from the cedars, he was behind it instead of off to the flank. It was nobody’s fault but Lloyd’s, because he knew where the shooters were and it was his business to stay out of the line of fire. Both Madeline and Barney fired at the deer, and both missed. One of the slugs hit Lloyd and killed him instantly.”

  “Which one?”

  Henry shrugged. “They didn’t make a comparison test of the bullet. Because it didn’t really matter, I suppose. The coroner just issued a certificate of accidental death. Barney insisted it was his bullet, but I don’t think he really knew. Madeline was so broken up I think he just shouldered the blame to be gallant. In any event it ended the hunting trip.”

  “I see. Get back to your quarrel with Amhurst.”

  “It wasn’t much of a quarrel,” Henry said. “One evening Madeline told me that Barney had completed work on the Huntsafe and had filed a patent application that day. It was the first I knew that he and Lloyd had been working on such a thing, because Barney had sworn all three of the other members of the proposed corporation to secrecy until the application was in. Madeline didn’t know I was working on the same idea. Not that I deliberately kept it a secret, but Madeline doesn’t understand electronics very well, and I just wasn’t in the habit of discussing my work with her. When she told me about the Huntsafe, I got angry and went over and bawled Barney out for stealing my idea.”

  I asked, “Why do you say it wasn’t much of a quarrel?”

  “Because it wasn’t. When Barney showed me the Huntsafe, I realized it was based on an entirely different principle than my invention and made mine obsolete. Mine used an omnidirectional radio signal pretuned to a specific high frequency. In effect it was a miniature broadcasting station which automatically broadcast an intermittent signal. And its big defect was that, together with the receiver, the equipment weighed nearly twenty pounds. Amhurst’s Huntsafe works on the principle of the radio compass and is powered by a seventy-five-volt battery he developed which is only two inches square and an inch thick. The whole outfit weighs only two pounds. After Amhurst explained it, I realized I was just unlucky not to have thought of the radio-compass principle myself, and my idea hadn’t been stolen after all. So I apologized to Amhurst and went away.”

  As I left headquarters, I mulled over in my mind whether or not I believed in Tom Henry’s innocence. If I did believe in it, I had to assume someone had gone to elaborate lengths in order to frame him, for it was beyond the realm of possibility that mere coincidence could have woven such a tight net of circumstantial evidence. The evidence was so flawless, only one thing prevented me from accepting it at face value and deciding Henry was lying.

  That one thing was Ed Friday’s unsuccessful attempt to get me to leave town.

  My reasoning was that I had been engaged by Madeline Strong to investigate the possibility of Thomas Henry’s innocence, not to solve the crime, and I had no ethical responsibility to carry my investigation beyond that specific point. Logically, then, I had to start with the assumption that Henry was innocent even though I was not at all sure of that in my own mind.

  It followed that if he were innocent, Walter Ford had probably been the killer’s real target, and not Barney Amhurst as the police believed, for it seemed to me unlikely that a killer capable of devising such an elaborate frame would make the mistake of killing the wrong victim.

  I therefore began by looking into Walter Ford’s background.

  This led me to the personnel office of the Maxim Electrical Products Company, where Barney Amhurst had mentioned Ford worked before joining the newly formed Huntsafe Company. It took me a considerable amount of explanation, a cigar for the personnel director and a phone check with Warren Day before I was able to get around the company rule that no information could be given out concerning ex-employees.

  The call to Warren Day finally did it, but before the inspector would give me his blessing, he made me promise to let him in on everything I found out at Maxim.

  “Have I ever held out on you?” I demanded over the phone.

  “Yes,” he said.

  So reluctantly I gave him my promise and handed the phone to the personnel director. Apparently Day was still in a sunny mood, for he told the man he could give me the same co-operation he would give the Homicide Department.

  The results were even more gratifying than I reasonably could have expected, for Walter Ford’s file was full of interesting information. The most interesting item was that he had not quit but had been fired for using his position as purchasing agent in a racket which approached blackmail.

  Ford had been caught accepting kickbacks, both cash and goods of various kinds, on orders he gave in the name of the company, the personnel director told me. An investigation subsequent to his discovery disclosed that he had used his power to approve or reject orders as a bludgeon to demand these kickbacks. He had been caught when he grew overconfident and tried to force tribute from a salesman who worked for one of Maxim’s oldest and most reliable suppliers. Instead of coming across and receiving a plump order, the salesman reported the shakedown attempt to Maxim’s general manager.

  I also learned that Walter Ford had been married, though he was legally separated
from his wife. According to the file the widow was Mrs. Jennifer Ford, 2212 Wright Street, which was not more than a half dozen blocks from the Remley Apartments.

  From Maxim I went to call on Mrs. Jennifer Ford, where I learned more interesting things about the dead man.

  Twenty-two twelve Wright Street was a four-family flat and Mrs. Ford occupied the lower left apartment. She came to the door wearing an ankle-length terry cloth housecoat, an attractive brunette in her late twenties with a sullen cast to her mouth.

  When I had explained myself, she invited me in rather dubiously and offered me a drink.

  “This lad Thomas Henry has been arrested by the police,” I explained to her. “I’ve been engaged to clear him of the murder charge, and I’m starting by trying to find out everything I can about your husband. I thought maybe you could help.”

  “I can tell you in four words,” she said. “He was a rat.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “In any specific way?”

  “In every way.” She drained half her drink, fumbled for a cigarette from a small box on the low cocktail table in front of the sofa and leaned forward to accept a light. Then she leaned back again and her sullen mouth blew a thin stream of smoke at me. “He chased every woman he saw, and he was a liar, a crook and a blackmailer.

  He also didn’t pay his alimony.”

  “Let’s take his vices one at a time,” I suggested. “Chasing women, for instance. Any particular women?”

  She smiled cynically. “No particular woman would have given Walt the time of day. He specialized in tramps. Recently it’s been a blonde dress model named Bubbles Duval and a chorus girl named Evelyn Karnes.”

  I must have looked surprised, for she explained with a dismissing gesture, “I’ve been having him tailed by a private detective. Trying to accumulate divorce evidence.”

  Since the evidence could no longer be of any use to her, Mrs. Ford agreeably furnished me the name of the private detective, a man named Howard Quentin in the Bland Building. She also elaborated in some detail on her charges that her deceased husband had been a liar, crook and blackmailer.