Knocking on my apartment door woke me early on the morning after Ivan’s arrest. Eight o’clock would not have been early to pick up a phone, but I had none and had to show a face that was far from ready.
“Can you cook eggs, Ned?” I asked when I saw who it was.
Cruickshank didn’t deny it, so I led the way into my kitchen.
“You cook the eggs; I’ll make the coffee. Or is it urgent?”
“Possibly, sergeant. A woman called Marie Burgess phoned HQ this morning. She claims to have been confidential secretary to Digby and Morris Watt.”
“Yes, I know who you mean. Pince-nez. Looks like Woodrow Wilson.” I pushed butter, pepper and eggs in Cruickshank’s direction. “Scrambled’s fine.”
The frying pan was on top of the electric range. Cruickshank dropped in a frugal lump of butter and turned on the element.
“Well, I didn’t actually see her. She phoned.”
“And said she’d been fired?”
“Resigned, in fact. And also that Morris Watt did not get on well with his father.”
I yawned. As usual, I measured coffee and water with a sleep-bleared eye. I never much liked my own coffee. Too late, I wished I’d divvied up the breakfast preparation the other way.
“Very forthcoming of her,” I said. I guess it didn’t really surprise me that Morris hadn’t had the gumption to give her her walking papers. “Anything else?”
“Yes, sir.” Cruickshank had located a three-day-old half loaf of bread and was using considerable muscle to get it separated into slices. “She said that yesterday she found a pistol in Morris Watt’s desk.”
“What kind? Revolver or automatic?”
“She wasn’t able to say,” Cruickshank replied.
“The gun we want is only four and a half inches. She must have noticed if it was much longer than that.”
“She wasn’t able to say.”
“Think she saw a gun at all?”
“Don’t know, sir. But she claims to have a recording in which Morris Watt threatens some action against his father just two weeks before the murder. The inspector sent a car to bring her and the wax cylinder to HQ.”
“Threatening his father?” I said. “I’ll believe that when I hear it.”
“Not a direct threat. Apparently Morris is in conversation with his wife. Digby Watt was out of the building at the time.”
“Does the Burgess woman explain why, if what sonny boy says is so incriminating, he made a recording of it?”
“She says he didn’t mean to. Unknown to him, the intercom mike from his office to the reception was open. When Miss Burgess heard how he was talking, she flicked the record switch on the attached Dictaphone.”
The open line squared with what Morris had told me. Two weeks before his father’s death, he hadn’t known the switch was defective and might indeed have spoken unguardedly.
“I’ll get dressed,” I said.
I shaved as well. Cruickshank’s eggs were still not rubbery by the time I ate them standing up. I poured a cup of coffee down my throat without having to taste it, and took the stale bread along to make a mess with on the streetcar. The motorcycle had no passenger seat, and Cruickshank had no car.
“Get anything more out of MacAllister, Ned?” I asked on the way downtown.
“He didn’t say anything last night. I guess you’ll want to read his article, though. He must have filed it yesterday afternoon before we picked him up. I brought along a copy of today’s Examiner.”
I wiped my hands on my trousers and reached for the paper. Ivan had written that the Watts were unhappy with police progress on the murder investigation. The flapper daughter Edith was playing private detective. Questions were being raised about Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone’s fitness to handle the case.
“Biting as a toothless mouse,” I remarked. “Milder than what he would send his paper this morning if given the chance.”
Marie Burgess was in Sanderson’s office when we arrived. Her face behind her pince-nez wore a smug, dutiful expression. Every last steel-coloured wisp of her hair was pulled into a tight bun. She wasn’t a woman that went in for perfume. Around her in the close room, there wafted rather a scent of Listerine. If she uses that much, I thought, it’s because she’s a secret drinker. An entertaining thought. I wondered if the inspector, who was courteously not belching pipe smoke for once, had reached the same conclusion. The day was young, but already he looked tired. He sat in his usual place, Marie Burgess in the chair opposite, with a Dictaphone on the desk between them. Ned and I stood.
“Everyone have enough room?” asked the inspector, insisting on his little joke. “Miss Burgess has just been explaining the microphone malfunction that allowed this recording to be made, a defect she says Mr. Morris Watt was unaware of at the time.”
Sanderson had already listened to the cylinder and even had Lindstrom type up a transcript, but played the recording again so I could identify the speaker. It was Morris’s voice all right, raw and emphatic, alternating with the calmer tones of a woman that might have been Lavinia—though she was farther from the mike and none of us could make out what she said. According to the Burgess woman, Mrs. Morris Watt had dropped by the office while downtown shopping.
To my ears, it sounded as if after year on docile year of self-denial, Morris had blown his cork, not angrily but desperately, because there was just nowhere else for the pressure to go.
Morris: I wish he would retire, but he won’t as long as he has breath.
Lavinia inaudible.
Morris: I’ll give Dad another two weeks and see. Till the week of the nineteenth. Then, if there’s no position for me, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, cost what it costs.
Lavinia inaudible.
Morris: It won’t hurt him as much as you think. I’ll make it as painless as I can.
After that, both speakers were too far from the microphone to be understood.
“Inspector Sanderson,” I said, “would you mind if I asked Miss Burgess a question or two?”
“I suggest you do. Miss Burgess, I believe you’ve met Detective Sergeant Shenstone.”
She didn’t say she had or hadn’t, but swivelled in her chair and tilted her long head back to give me a better view of her candid, co-operative face.
“Miss Burgess, did you make a note of the exact date of this conversation?”
“I wrote it on the cylinder box.” The cardboard box was on the desk. She picked it up and read, “Conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Morris Watt, 4:20 p.m., April 4, 1926.”
“So the nineteenth Mr. Morris Watt refers to would have been the nineteenth of this month, last Monday—the eve of his father’s death?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Good. Now did you hear any part of the conversation that isn’t on this cylinder?”
“Well, yes. Before the words that are there, I heard Mr. Morris raise his voice, which was not at all usual for him. He said he wouldn’t stand for the way his father was treating him. It sounded serious, so it seemed to me I’d better record it. That’s when I turned on the machine.”
“Was there anything else you heard, Miss Burgess? Anything that would clarify the it that Morris Watt was going to do, the it he would make as painless as possible?”
“No, sir.”
“After you made this recording, did you seek clarification from Morris Watt as to what this it might be?”
“No, sir, I certainly didn’t.”
“Did you advise Morris Watt that the switch on his console had a tendency to stick and that when it stuck you could hear whatever he said at his desk?”
“No, sir. I thought I’d better wait and see if there were further developments. I mean, further conversations along the same lines.”
“And were there?”
“No.”
“Did you make any other recordings?”
“None.”
“Did you at any time reveal the existence of this recording to either Morris or Digby Watt?”
“I did not. Frankly, once I’d made it, it didn’t seem to amount to much. And I knew Mr. Digby Watt wouldn’t approve of my making it. He had very high moral ideals. Sometimes gentlemen of his quality need someone to watch out for them. But, as I say, I came to think there was nothing in it.”
“You didn’t believe the word it referred to killing Digby Watt?”
“No, not until yesterday when I saw the gun in Mr. Morris Watt’s drawer. Until then I simply couldn’t imagine him connected with any sort of violence. That’s why I didn’t come forward with this wax cylinder any earlier.”
“Thank you, Miss Burgess. You’ve answered all my questions very precisely and forthrightly. Now I’d like you to be just as precise and forthright in describing this gun you saw in Morris Watt’s desk drawer. Was it, for example, longer than that Dictaphone cylinder?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. Guns frighten me, so I closed the drawer before I got a proper look.”
“You don’t strike me, Miss Burgess, as someone that frightens easily—”
But Sanderson cut me off.
“We’ve shown Miss Burgess various guns, sergeant, and she hasn’t been able to narrow the field. For my part, whatever pistol Morris Watt has in his desk, I want it looked into. The sooner the better. Take Acting Detective Cruickshank and get yourselves over to 96 Adelaide Street West.”
I picked up a carbon of the transcript from Lindstrom’s desk on the way out, but once again didn’t bother taking my service revolver. Cruickshank followed me to the door.
“Stay here, Ned,” I told him. “Never mind the inspector. I’ll follow this up, and you go see whether a night in custody has loosened Ivan’s tongue any.”
“Sure you don’t need help?”
“With Morris?” I threw him a sidelong glance.
I greeted the elevator operator at 96 Adelaide West by name and asked for the fourth floor. Instead of being pinned up as before, Harold’s right sleeve hung down full and a glove had been pulled on over an artificial hand. A hand more for show than for use, though, as he still reached across and worked the controls with his left. If he had yielded to Digby Watt’s offers, he would have been given a more useful model. I brooded on that for a bit. Yet I could see that the inexpensive prosthesis was Harold’s independent way of paying tribute to his late employer and friend.
“You’re the detective, aren’t you, sir?” said Harold. “Are you close to making an arrest?”
“Very close.”
There was no one else in the elevator car, but still Harold dropped his voice to a more confidential level.
“Do you think the killer might strike again, sir, the way the paper is saying? I mean, shouldn’t Mr. Morris Watt have some protection?”
“We’ve no reason to think he’s in danger, Harold, but I’ll keep your suggestion in mind.”
On the fourth floor, a new woman sat behind the desk opposite the elevators. She was young and strongly built, with the look of a golfer, and she was typing at a terrifying rate. When I identified myself and asked for Morris Watt, she smiled pleasantly and said he was on the phone, if Mr. Shenstone would be good enough to wait.
“Certainly,” I said. “And after he gets off the phone, you’ll be holding his calls till I’m finished speaking to him.”
Her unplucked eyebrows went up, and her smile acquired the extra twinkle that said she thought I had some nerve.
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
She didn’t have to. Morris had the same idea.
This time I was shown into the other office, the one that had been Digby Watt’s. The premises were only slightly larger than those Morris had previously occupied, and his tenure was doubtless no more than provisional till the board of directors had met to settle on the succession. Still, it must have been satisfying to sit for once in Daddy’s chair.
Morris Watt did not rise. He sat with hands folded on his father’s desk and a look of dignified mistrust on his photogenic face.
“Mr. Watt,” I began, “do you continue to maintain you have no pistol in your possession?”
Without a word, Morris Watt opened a drawer and took out a hefty, blue-grey metal revolver, which he laid—buttend towards me—on the desk.
“No,” I said, “the gun isn’t enough: I’ll need a statement. Is it yours? Did you discover it here? How long have you had it?”
“Two days ago, sergeant, when you last came to Dominion Consolidated Holdings, I had never seen this pistol. I give you my word on that.”
“Tell me more.”
“I suppose you heard about this from Marie Burgess. She resigned her post yesterday, all the time pretending she was being forced out. I guess grief takes us all differently.”
“The gun, Mr. Watt.”
“The two important things about the gun are that I did not lie to you about it and that its calibre is too large for it to have been the gun that killed my father.”
I came to the desk and picked up the revolver, a Webley Mark VI. Virtually identical to the one I had carried during the last year of the war. With a calibre of .455, these rugged darlings discharged with a kick that made them worse than useless in the hands of anyone without long training. The cylinder contained five bullets. I shoved the six-inch barrel into the waistband of my trousers and felt hard-boiled.
“I’ll decide what’s important, sir. You decide whether you want to talk to me here or in an interrogation room at headquarters.”
I was leaning over the desk, and Morris Watt had to tilt his head back to meet my eyes. Even if it had been a better posture for looking down one’s nose, Morris Watt was too fundamentally civil to make an impressive job of it.
“You’re trying to protect someone,” I said. “Needlessly. As you say, this isn’t the murder weapon. I still want to know where it came from.”
“I bought it for self-defence. After father was killed that way, I thought anything could happen.”
“It’s Harold’s, isn’t it? Either he told you he had armed himself for your protection or you saw the bulge under his jacket. Lift jockeys’ rigs are tight-fitting, and this is a bulky gun. Don’t worry. I’m not going to make trouble for him.”
Morris looked down at his folded hands. Seeing, perhaps, what uphill work it would be to make them pass as wielders of such a cannon.
“I was afraid someone would get hurt,” he said. “Actually, I was afraid he would get hurt—so I persuaded him to let me have it. I was going to hand it over to the police for destruction. I never feel safer with firearms around.”
“I’m inclined to believe you. Yesterday evening, when you got a note from Curtis to the effect that I had been brandishing a .25 automatic, you rushed me off your property as fast as you could, and told him to stay out of sight while you were doing it.”
Morris Watt passed his hand over the lower part of his face, remembering the danger he had fancied his family had been in.
“I spoke to your inspector last night,” he said, “and asked, in view of your connection with my father through Peerless Armaments, that another detective investigate his murder. Do you know what he said? He said he could give me another detective or he could have the case wrapped up today, but not both. Will you wrap it up today, sergeant?”
“Possibly. There’s something about the timing that bothers me, though. You found your father dead at a time you estimate to be two fifteen or a little later?”
“Yes.”
“And the journalist Ivan MacAllister was already on the scene?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you saw your father alive as late as two a.m.?”
“As I told you, I didn’t check my watch at the moment I left him, but it must have been between 1:55 and 2:05.”
“The problem with that, Mr. Watt, is that Ivan MacAllister was summoned to the scene by a phone call made around a quarter to two. Presumably by your father’s murderer. Except that, on your account, at a quarter to two your father was still alive. How did the caller know that by the time MacAllister arrived, he would find Digby Watt dead?”
“I don’t know,” said Morris.
“I can think of one explanation,” I said. “And remember it is no more my wish to be assigned to this case than it is yours to have me. That one explanation is that you shot your father before you made that call to MacAllister. Then you could have gone to the garage and tampered with the car and made sure you didn’t return to the scene till MacAllister had found the body.”
I braced myself for Morris’s excited protestations of love for his father and of indignation at my suggestion. Everything I might have heard in the first hours of his bereavement. Today, however, his surprising response was to reason with me.
“Really, sergeant. I don’t know enough about cars to have sabotaged the Gray-Dort. And I didn’t call MacAllister: he would have recognized my voice when I met him on the street.”
“You acted hysterical when you spoke to him on the street. Your voice was completely different from normal.”
“Rot!” Now Morris was getting gratifyingly heated. “Utter nonsense. But let him hear my ‘normal’ voice, if you like. You can bring him here and ask him if I made that call.”
“I just might,” I bluffed. Tinker would be the one who would have to identify the murderer’s voice, and Tinker’s hearing was questionable. I changed my ground. “I’ve always found it odd that when you came home that morning and Miss Watt asked you who’d shot your father, you didn’t say you didn’t know. You said that would be for the police to find out.”
“What I meant was I didn’t think we should be speculating as to the killer’s identity. I wanted the matter handled professionally . . . Well, I certainly didn’t shoot Dad. Why would I?”
“Why?” I said, letting it be heard how little the word impressed me. “The psychologists have plenty to say about sons’ hating fathers—but let’s leave Freud out of it and look at your circumstances in particular. If my dad had kept me down the way yours did you, and I hadn’t felt able to go off on my own, I would have wanted him dead. On April 4, you told your wife you would give your father until this week to find a position for you or else you’d do it, ‘cost what it costs’.”
Morris blinked.
“Oh,” he said at last. “The broken intercom. Marie Burgess again. But I only meant that I would take a job somewhere else, even at considerable financial sacrifice. A job where I’d have something to contribute.”
“Easily said,” I continued, “but I’m not done. Suppose you found out about the bad shells before Edith unearthed Robert Taylor’s letter. You were enough of a soldier to feel the betrayal of those boys your father killed. And, to cap it off, maybe you discovered the real reason that Olive stopped wanting to see Digby Watt. You had motives enough. And all your air of decency and professed dislike of firearms would give you enough protective cover.”
While delivering this speech, I sauntered towards the window, deliberately leaving my back as a target for Morris. The murder weapon had still not been found. Would it not be sweet if, by turning just in time, I found it in Morris’s hand?
The office was quiet.
I gazed down through the window, giving my host a little more time. I gazed down at a phone booth. This was the side street, Sheppard Street. And suddenly I saw it. This was how the murderer had known when to phone MacAllister’s apartment. He had studied Digby Watt’s routine, had identified which window belonged to his office, knew how many minutes would elapse from the time the light in this window went off to the time when Digby Watt would emerge from the brass doors on Adelaide Street West. You could watch for the light to go off from the street or from one of the windows of the building opposite. For example, behind the phone booth was a newsagent’s shop.
I had forgotten all about Morris and jumped when I heard Morris’s voice, no longer heated in the least, mild as milk.
“I wish I had known about the bad shells before yesterday. I’d like to do something about that poor man Horner Ingersoll, sergeant, if you could put me in touch with his family.”
“Now’s not the moment,” I said as I rushed from the room.
I pushed the button for the elevator, didn’t wait, and plunged into the stairwell. On Adelaide Street, the climbing sun was still struggling to peep over the office towers. The sidewalk was not crowded, but seemed so to my impatience. I trotted briskly around the corner, crossed the street, entered the newsagent’s. There was no bell on the door, but the shop was small, and Arthur Ingersoll looked up from making change for a woman buying the latest Screenland. The light was behind me, and I was sure I wasn’t recognized. We hadn’t seen each other since 1919. Seven years. Ingersoll had been ill then. His hair now was even thinner, and his tendons stood out even more, but there was no lethargy about him, no sluggishness. His movements were quick and watchful.
“Help you?” he barked irritably in my direction.
I waited for the customer to leave. This brown and dusty little shop was clearly a step or more down from the concession at the King Edward Hotel. No international newspapers were sold. The cigar case held only domestic brands. A curtained opening behind the counter would lead to a none too generous storage area behind a flimsy partition.
The young office worker with the movie magazine cast me a questioning look from under the low rim of her cloche hat as she passed. The door fell to behind her.
“Yes,” said Arthur Ingersoll. “What do you want?”
“When did you last speak to Ivan MacAllister?”
“MacAllister writes for the Examiner. There’s the stand. It’s two cents.”
I turned the sign on the shop door from OPEN to CLOSED.
“He told you what happened to Horny,” I said, “didn’t he? What really happened.”
“Get out of my shop.” Arthur Ingersoll was plainly itching to come out from behind his counter to take a closer look and maybe a poke at me, but something was holding him back. “Go on, clear out. Now.”
“And you found,” I went on, noticing how the voice of command that had once left me so cowed still had considerable bite, “you found that you’d been blaming Germans all these years for what was really the fault of Canadians. Most particularly, Digby Watt. The same Digby Watt whose big fat office tower you have to look at every day through your grubby little shop front. The same Digby Watt whose enterprises kept prospering as yours were failing.”
“Who are you?”
“Someone you’ve known a long time. Mostly, of course, I had nothing to say—but once I did. If you’d listened then, it might have saved your neck.”
“Paul? I won’t have you shutting down my business.”
“You’re through with business, sir, and you know it. You knew it the night of the twentieth when you plugged Horny’s killer. You wanted to get caught, didn’t you? You dialled MacAllister’s number, even though MacAllister might have recognized your voice. You left the shell casings at the scene.”
Chin raised, Ingersoll tried one of his silencing silences.
“And,” I went on, “you’re keeping the gun behind the counter there, when if you had wanted to commit the perfect murder, you would have thrown it away.”
“I don’t know why Horny ever bothered with you. You showed nothing like his ginger. Horny—why, he had the girls lining up—”
“I carried Horny to the dressing station, Mr. Ingersoll. It was my hand he hung onto when he died.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me about it? Why didn’t you tell me about that shell?”
“Believe me, I tried. But you preferred the officer’s fairy tale. I came to your house seven years ago prepared to tell you all about Peerless Armaments.”
“Then to hell with Digby Watt! What’s Digby Watt to you, Paul—apart from the bastard that blew your friend to kingdom come?”
“So you killed him.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Let me tell it then,” I said. “After phoning MacAllister’s, you waited on the corner till you saw the two Watts come outside. When Morris went for the car, you approached Digby. You didn’t shoot him right away, though. If you had, you would have been facing the building, and the cartridge cases would have been ejected behind you into Adelaide Street. Watt would have fallen with his head the other way. So you must have had words with him, maybe introduced yourself. When he saw the gun in your hand, he backed away towards the street. You fired three times, and he fell. The empty shells bounced back off the building. Then you undid his fly and pulled his privates out, just to let the world know what this killing was about. Too bad you didn’t have more time. You might have got really creative.”
“Digby Watt didn’t deserve to live.”
“Do you?” I pulled Harold’s heavy revolver from my waistband and, without actually aiming at Arthur Ingersoll, made sure he saw it. I held it broadside, with the barrel pointing towards the ceiling.
Ingersoll’s hand—wrapped around a pocket pistol—appeared instantly above the counter. The action was so quick that, ready as I was, I was almost too late. I threw Harold’s gun, all thirty-eight ounces of it, forcefully into Ingersoll’s face. Ingersoll’s arm swung wide of me as the semiautomatic went off and a .25 slug lodged in the panelling.
I leaped and rolled over the counter, scattering displays of cough drops and pipe cleaners. I rolled into Ingersoll before he could recover his aim. Now I had to get that gun. For a chilling instant, I found myself staring into the muzzle’s dark eye. But already I was also grasping the top slide and pushing it back. Before it could be discharged, the cartridge was dragged from the barrel and jammed in the breech; my hand over the aperture meanwhile prevented ejection of the round. This with my right, which meant my back was to Ingersoll. My left hand was kept busy parrying some fiery punches to the kidneys from Ingersoll’s left. The narrow space, however, was not conducive to a display of boxing talent.
With the gun jammed—and useless as anything more than a club—we came to grips in earnest. I spun around to face Ingersoll, twisting his right arm in the process. The strong, silent man’s cry of pain was so loud I couldn’t hear whether any bones cracked. I was just starting to consider the battle won when Ingersoll’s knee slammed up into my crotch. True to form, I thought. Before he could get both feet back on the floor, I overbalanced him and pinned him to the linoleum.
I was all over him now, straddling his chest, gripping his upper arms so tightly his fingers must have tingled. I could hear the jammed pistol slip from his grasp. I had a good look down into eyes I’d known all my life. The angle I saw them from was unfamiliar, but I can’t say the hate that filled them altogether was. I thought how Horny’s dad, he-man champion of artillery and big guns, should have resorted to such a very small one. Perhaps he read my mind. Anger tightened the skin on his forehead till I thought it might rip open. He had no way left of striking me. So he spat. The lump of phlegm lacked the force to reach my face and fell wetly onto his brown shirt front. He didn’t try anything more.
The shop door opened, and presently Ned Cruickshank’s rosy face was peering anxiously over the counter.
“I don’t like to interfere, sergeant, but would a pair of handcuffs be of any use to you?”
“Shouldn’t be necessary, Ned.” I dug out my wallet badge and held it above my captive’s face. “Arthur Ingersoll,” I said, “in the name of the king, I arrest you for the murder of Digby Watt.”
Having started one of his sulks, Arthur Ingersoll said nothing.