CHAPTER 13

The checkup was over. The boys from Lunt’s office were long finished with the fingerprint dusting, the photographs and the incidental routine. A couple of plainclothesmen stood in the corner of the locker room, jawing with Lunt. I heard snatches of their dialogue:

“—you want the doors kept closed to the street, Chief?”

“—the customers are making a big stink out of the deal. People don’t like to be locked in a big dump like this.”

“—we got two men on each door. That makes fourteen.”

“—inside, about a dozen of our boys. Most of them starting at the top and working down, behind the store operators and the watchmen.”

“—every department is being searched.”

“—no, we didn’t go into the executive offices, but I’ll phone up and tell a couple of men to do a job there, too.”

And Lunt wearily answering the questions and barking orders at the men:

“—let them open the street doors, Moran. No point in keeping the crowd bottled up.”

“—I want more men in the store. Not in uniform. Say about ten more, just to be safe. Phone Tomack, at the office.”

“—of course we’ve got to examine the executive floor. They’ve got closets up there, haven’t they? I want this place searched from here to there and in between. That includes the supply rooms, the cellars and the sub-cellars.”

A cop came in from Headquarters, sweating heavily. He handed Lunt a slice of official paper. The dapper lieutenant studied it seriously. The news on the report seemed to make him happy. He stuffed it away and came over to me.

“Good news?” I asked.

“Maybe, Conacher. Fingerprint report that means a hell of a lot. Whose prints do you think the boys found on that corridor door?”

“Arthur Malman’s?”

“Bright lad,” said Lunt. He sat down and grabbed one of the lousy tuna sandwiches sent down from the Cumber cafeteria. He munched the morsel, but he wasn’t tasting it. He was tasting something much more pleasant and satisfying. He was relishing the fingerprint report as if it were caviar and champagne. “Sort of closes the deal, doesn’t it?”

“Not in my book, it doesn’t,” I said.

“You don’t like Malman for the murder?”

“He doesn’t make sense, Lunt. Maybe I know his history a bit better than you do.”

“Enlighten me,” Lunt said testily. No city dick on earth likes to be put in the back seat. Even if he can’t drive. “What do you know that I can’t guess?”

“Just this. Malman has no record as a killer, or even a spoiler. Malman is a quiet little guy with a big fat brain full of robbery. I’ve seen Malman’s record a dozen times down in Safe and Loft. They’ve never caught him with anything heavier than his two skinny fists. He wouldn’t know what to do with a gun. What’s more, Malman would consider it beneath him to use one. He’s the aristocrat of heist men, a character who specializes in making the arrangements for larceny. That’s the beginning and the end of it for Malman.”

“He still might have killed, for a reason.”

“Never. If there was any killing to be done, Pate would get the call from him. If Malman wanted to rub out Wilkinson, you’d find Pate’s prints on that knob. Pate would kill his mother for a small fee.”

“But you didn’t see Pate,” Lunt insisted. “You saw Malman in the aisles. And you saw Malman last night.”

One of his men came in and interrupted. There was another piece of paper to be read. Lunt scratched his head and blew his nose and went through the gestures of inner irritation. He balled the paper in his fist and threw it away.

“You’re right about Malman,” he said grudgingly. “Safe and Loft reports him inactive during the past year or so. Of course that doesn’t mean anything to a big brain like Malman. He was out of town in the woods somewhere. But he could have been active on all kinds of larceny here in the city by using Pate as his representative. Still, I’d like to get my mitts on him.”

“He won’t be easy to locate.”

Lunt swore under his breath. He was the current big wheel from homicide, one of the youngest dicks in city history, an expert. He was a sharp-looking police lieutenant, something out of a Madison Avenue ad agency, smooth and well dressed in the studied way all the bright boys clothe themselves; black silk tie and tweedy coat and an off-shade shirt that made his sunburned kisser look handsome. We got along all right, despite the fact that Lunt considered most private cops characters out of the cheap movies.

Lunt had questioned everybody thoroughly, in sessions that took him into the middle of the afternoon. He got nowhere in a hurry. Who the hell would want to murder Greg Wilkinson among the staff? Now be nursed his temper as he figured the movements of the murderer carefully.

“He came in through the other door,” Lunt said. “He walked through the corridor adjoining the Sporting Goods Department. The way Wilkinson’s body was lying proves it. The killer shot him from about five feet and then scrammed the way he came in. The damned locker room is as soundproof as a vault, which made the killing a setup. You couldn’t hear a blast of dynamite from in there.”

“What about the lights?” I asked.

“There’s a switchbox out in that hall. When you walked in here there was only one light burning, right?”

“That little one in the corner.”

“It figures,” said Lunt. “The murderer turned the others out when he moved in. All of them. He blew the lights in the whole corridor, the bastard.”

“Still think it was Malman?”

“I’ve got two squads out for him, Conacher.”

“You’ll need half your force. Malman is an expert at losing himself. He’s done it before.”

“You could dig him up, I’ll bet,” Lunt said affably. “You’re the best skip-trace lad in town, aren’t you?”

“It’s my business.”

“You could dig him up,” Lunt said again.

“I might, if I had the time.”

“What’s going to hold you up?”

“My work here,” I said. He knew what I meant. He had a good memory for dramatic incidents. He couldn’t possibly forget the way I blew my top down in his office, the day he gave me the news about Chuck, the day he showed me the pictures of my partner, impaled on the spiked fence. “I’m still operating on my own in this store, Lunt. I’m still trying to prove that Chuck Rosen was pushed off that penthouse terrace, remember?”

“You may be playing it stubborn,” Lunt said. “Rosen was loaded with liquor, according to the autopsy. He could have had an accident up there, like I’ve suggested.”

“We’ve been through that routine before. I won’t buy it.”

“I was only trying to get you out in the air where you belong, Conacher.” His smile was friendly and free of any malice.

“I’ll wait until I feel I need Malman for information about Chuck. Until then, I’m working around here, among the assorted drips in the advertising goon squad.”

“You think one of them might have killed Rosen?”

“Any one of them’s dizzy enough for it.” I waited for him to put his tail down for a pause. “Matter of fact, one of them might have bumped off Wilkinson, as I’ve suggested before.”

“It could be,” Lunt said quietly. He would preserve this neutral attitude until he had a real spark of inspiration. But I couldn’t hate him for his calm. His ulcers could be bouncing and bleeding, yet Lunt would never show any great inner panic. It was something that had helped him get to the top and stay there. “I appreciate what you told me about the staff, Conacher. But there wasn’t anything strong enough for us to move in on, now was there? The only one who stands out as a prize nut is Chester Carpenter, because of the street brawl with Wilkinson last night. We’ll watch Carpenter for a spell. But that kind of introvert never gets up enough steam for murder. We’ve got the same kind of possibility with Wilkinson’s secretary, Vivian Debevoise. From the way she broke down, Wilkinson must have been her mattress mate in the recent past. But that kind of dame doesn’t get jealous enough to blow her ex-lover’s brains out.”

“She’s a pretty hard doll.”

“We’ll watch her, too. Any other suggestions?”

“I don’t like any of them, Lunt. All the way from Kutner down. You can put them all on my list: Pettigrew, Kutner, Carpenter, Lila Martin and Vivian Debevoise.”

“You’re skipping the art dame, Helen Sutton.”

“She looks clean to me. But not completely, at that.” He was drawing me out, skillfully. He was playing me on all strings, hoping for some crumb of private information I might be keeping from him. It was true that I hated the whole stinking crew of them. But hate never paid off in a search for murder. I would operate out of my personal suspicions because I couldn’t help myself. The death of Wilkinson only set off a chain reaction of confusion in my addled mind. Sure I felt sorry for Wilkinson. Nobody can look at a corpse and hold back the instinctive shock and terror of a close-up of the grim reaper. But beyond the death of Wilkinson, my mind still burned with the steady flame of a greater challenge. It would take a lot of doing to kill the burning pain inside me, the hot anger about Chuck Rosen’s murder.

Lunt went to the door when he heard the loud knocking from the sporting goods corridor. He stepped back to let Coyle come puffing in.

Coyle said: “By the holy saints, Lunt, I’ve just found another body for you.”

“A body?” Lunt sharpened under the pressure of the news. “Where?”

“Down in the liquor storeroom,” said Coyle. The old man had been running hard, but something greater than physical strain clouded his eyes. He was trembling with his news. “I was down there with one of my boys when we started to check the last supply room in the store. That was when we found him. Dead as a doornail, as they say.”

“Who is he?” Lunt asked.

“The other one,” Coyle said. “The other Santee Claws!”