The new development dropped, bomb-like, into the lives of investigators great and small. The small army of detectives employed upon the many angles of the several murders stopped dead in its tracks and whistled softly to itself.
A crazy old cobbler named Johnson!
And the innumerable sleuths, in and out of uniform, private and professional, had been tracking minor actors and actresses from breakfast to evening prayers. They had been trailing innocent salesmen and stenographers of the Bluefield establishment from early grapefruit to late motion pictures.
Well, Dawson was having his inning at last.
“Dawson!” observed Detective Sergeant Kelly to his traveling companion. “Wouldn’t it be Dawson who’d spill this, just about now!”
They sat morosely in the office of the Detective Bureau and cursed the energetic reporter who had found a crazy old cobbler named Johnson. For where, now, was their careful case against Stanley Moore, stage manager for the late lamented Lear?
“It isn’t possible,” said Sheets savagely. “Even if he killed Gaunt and Ellis Greene, why the hell should he want to kill Bluefield and Lear?”
“And how?” asked Kelly. “Never mind the ‘why!’ There’s always reasons.”
“With his awl!” said Sheets bitterly.
They turned again to the extra edition, still damp from the press.
Young Mr. Dawson had been very clever, there was no doubt of that. He had observed a pair of shoes belonging to Greene, during his visit to the morgue, and had observed the exceeding newness of their soles. It had occurred to him that they had just been repaired. But why had they not been walked upon? he had wondered.
Obviously, Green had changed in the cobbler’s shop, climbed back into his car, and driven away.
Where, then, was the second pair of shoes—the shoes that Greene had worn in going after the others? Had he left them with the cobbler? Or were the missing shoes, perhaps, a clue to what had happened to Greene? Had the cobbler—wild idea!—followed Ellis Greene for a purpose of his own?
It had also occurred to young Mr. Dawson that a cobbler’s awl would be an almost perfect weapon for the kind of murder visited upon the several victims. His story was engagingly and modestly told, in the third person, as of a reporter for the Evening Cry, but his full name was at its head : Ernest Crackanthorpe Dawson. He signed up three abreast, as boldly as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, upon whose literary laurel wreath he had designs.
He had gone questing for the missing shoes and had found them where the murderer had thrown them—in a clump of bushes in the park, just across the road from where the victim’s car had stood. The shoes had been curiously gashed. To find the cobbler had been only a little more difficult. His shop was in West Madison Street, hardly a block from the scene of the murder. He had willingly identified the shoes and as willingly had confessed the murder. He had no grudge against Greene, he said. But he had, somehow, felt impelled to kill him. The death notice he had prepared some days before and carried in his pocket.
He had asked Greene to drive him to the park, and Greene—with whom he had often done business before—had good-naturedly assented. At the edge of the park Greene had stopped his car and, sitting at the wheel, bent over to change into the newer shoes. In that particular only had young Mr. Dawson been at fault. The shoes had been changed in the car, not in the shop.
The opportunity was made to order. Johnson, in the rear seat, had leaned over and driven the awl into the bond salesman’s brain as he bent forward over his shoes. The blow had been delivered with the cobbler’s left hand, and Greene was dead before he knew that he was in danger.
Thereafter, the murderer had cleansed his weapon by driving it several times through the leather of the older pair of shoes, and later he had dropped the shoes in the clump of bushes in which they had been found.
Asked by Dawson if he had been moved to the murder by the earlier and similar crimes, Johnson had electrified the reporter by saying calmly: “I killed those other men myself!” He had autographed a confession to that effect, which was now in the possession of the Evening Cry (reproduction on page 3), and he was willing to give himself up to the police whenever they chose to claim him.
Details of the murders of Bluefield, Gaunt, and Lear were not supplied, but it was indicated that this omission might be remedied in later editions of the newspaper.
Detective Sergeant Kelly plucked up some hope.
“Hmph!” he observed. “If it wasn’t for those damned shoes—and the gashes in them—I’d say this Johnson didn’t kill any of them. Well, he’ll be here before long, Billy—if he hasn’t skipped before Tarzan lands on him!”
“Tarzan” was the irreverent name bestowed by certain of his friends upon Captain Michael Frogg, head of the Detective Bureau, who had gone in person to effect the capture of the cobbler.
“He’s crazy as a bug,” said Sheets. “I don’t believe he even killed Greene. He’s been reading about these murders, and when Dawson bounced in on him with a pair of shoes he saw a chance to get his name in the papers. It’s always happening. You know that as well as I do.”
“Well, the shoes were gashed,” demurred Kelly cautiously. “It can be shown whether or not they’re Greene’s.”
“Maybe Dawson gashed’em himself,” suggested Sheets. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Nevertheless, the shoes were Greene’s. Upon comparing them with the pair that Greene was wearing when his body was found—now part of the Detective Bureau’s museum—the fact was undeniable. In this particular, at any rate, Dawson had scored a triumph.
The reason he had not written the details of the cobbler’s murder of Bluefield, Gaunt, et al., was known, at the moment, only to Dawson and the editors of the Evening Cry. It was that he had not heard these details himself. After receiving the murderer’s scrawl of confession it had occurred to Dawson—with the watery blue eye of Axel Johnson staring into his—that the cobbler was meditating another murder. He had left the shop and the vicinity in haste.
He was present, however, at the examination that went forward in the office of Captain Frogg shortly before midnight. Johnson had been taken without a struggle and now sat calmly at his ease in a chair that creaked and swung under a blaze of lights. For the first time in his life, perhaps, the cobbler was a center of interest. For the first time in his life, important persons hung upon his words and urged him to give his message to the world.
The weapon that had gored the bond salesman to death gleamed dully on the captain’s desk, under the captain’s hand—a slender steel instrument ground down until it was barely stouter than a heavy needle.
“Why did you kill Amos Bluefield?” asked the captain harshly.
“Because I did not like him,” said the cobbler. “Once I stopped to look at the man in his window, and a policeman ordered me away.”
“You mean the dummy?”
“I mean the dead man in his window.”
“And a policeman told you to move on?” Frogg was puzzled. “And that’s why you killed the proprietor of the shop?”
“I did not forget that insult,” answered the cobbler serenely, and his watery eyes gleamed for a moment with placid triumph.
The man was obviously as crazy as a loon. Looking at the whiskered, fanatic face, Kelly, planted at the cobbler’s elbow, wondered for a moment if the story might not be true. Certainly, if he always looked as unkempt as upon this occasion, he was the sort of citizen who would be told to move along.
“How did you get into the shop to kill him? How did you know he was inside?”
“I telephoned him to meet me there. We met at midnight and went in together. I asked him to apologize for the insult he had caused me, and he refused. So I killed him and put his body in the window. The other dead man I took out and put in a closet.”
“What did you tell him on the phone? What made him come down to meet you?” Frogg’s voice was as skeptical as his thought.
“I told him I was the man he had insulted and I demanded an apology.”
Mad as it sounded, it was remotely plausible. At least the man’s explanation was not fantastic and impossible.
“How did you know how to kill him?” asked the police captain, more curiously than severely. “Who taught you that trick with the awl?”
The cobbler smiled cunningly. He had anticipated that question.
“In my own country,” he said calmly, “I knew a doctor who once told me it was a clever way to kill a man.” He nodded sagaciously. “He had himself killed many men that way, he said.”
“Whew!” whistled the captain under his breath. After a moment he continued: “Well, what about Gaunt—the man on the statue? Why did you kill him?”
The answer came plausibly and at once. “We had left the door of the shop open. The other man came in—I do not know why. He saw me kill this Bluefield. It was unfortunate, but I had to kill him also—this Gaunt.”
“The same night!” Again Frogg’s doubts rose triumphant over his worry. “Good God, man, what did you do with the body until the next night?”
Apparently it was a question for which the cobbler was unprepared. He hesitated. “I took it away with me,” he replied at length. “I hid it until the next day.”
“Where did you hide it?”
“In the park,” said Axel Johnson.
Frogg’s eyes traveled swiftly over the antique specimen that was confessing to four murders. He continued with some irony:
“Then the next night you dug it out of a bush, threw it over your shoulder, and climbed the statue with it—to put it on the horse! Is that right?”
It was an explanation that satisfied the cobbler. “Yes,” he answered with relief, “that is what I did.”
Frogg smiled genially. His voice became brisk and cheery. He was almost jovial. “And now about Lear,” he said. “The actor, you know! Why did you kill Mr. Lear, Johnson?” He added: “And how?”
The eyes of Axel Johnson became dreamy and introspective.
“That was the hardest of them all,” he said. “I went to the theater, that day, to kill a man named Davis. He was not there, and I walked around in the theater looking for him. After a while I saw a door, and I went inside. Mr. Lear, the actor, was sitting in front of his looking glass. He did not see me. Very suddenly I saw that he was the policeman who had insulted me that day I looked in Amos Bluefield’s window, and I knew that he must die. I killed him before he could turn around. It was very strange meeting him there, like that.”
For a moment they all sat in silence, looking back at Axel Johnson. Then Frogg rose heavily to his feet. He looked significantly at Detective Sergeants Sheets and Kelly and at Ernest Crackanthorpe Dawson.
“Very strange indeed, Johnson,” he remarked, not unkindly. “But, of course, we can’t have you going around killing policemen like that, you know. By the way, why did you want to kill the man called Davis?”
The cobbler’s eyes flashed with a sudden and terrible anger. His mustache bristled. He seemed like a great cat about to spring.
“Because he has my head!” he screamed. “He cut off my head and would not give it back!”
“Ah!” said the captain, without emotion. “So that was it!”
To Sheets and Kelly he said: “Take him away, boys, and keep him by himself. Yes, downstairs, for the time being.”
Then, as the detectives lingered for an instant at the door, the cobbler heard for the last time on earth the voice of Captain Michael Frogg, low-pitched for the benefit of Ernest Crackanthorpe Dawson. Neither of the two words spoken found any familiar echo in Axel Johnson’s brain.
“Psychopathic laboratory.”