The fredric brown collec.., p.88
The Fredric Brown Collection, page 88
“But listen, Mack, Slimjim was blackmailing me on those debts. You can’t blame a man for killing a blackmailer. You aren’t —”
“How about Perley?” McCracken interrupted. “You tried to frame it on him, just so you wouldn’t be suspected, just to give the cops an easy victim.”
“He was in with Slimjim on the whole—”
“Nuts! If he had been, he’d have known who killed Jim, and why. That don’t hold water, Jerry.”
“Then let’s try it this way, Mack. I can get two thousand for that ring. I know you’re broke. How about half of that?”
McCracken’s eyes were cold. “Jerry,” he asked, “know what that spot on the floor back of the chair is?”
“I can guess. Why?”
“Then you can guess my answer to that proposition. I’m going to call your bluff, Jerry. You won’t shoot me. You’d have done it already, if you figured you could get away with it. As readily as you killed Lee.”
He turned and walked slowly toward the door, his hands relaxed at his sides.
“Regan out there knows we’re in here alone, Jerry,” he said. “If there’s a bullet hole in my back, there’s no story you could tell that would stand up under investigation. I’m not even armed, so you couldn’t use self-defense. There’d be no out for you at all, Jerry.”
He took a step toward the door, another.
“Stop, Mack!” ordered Bell. “I’ll—”
McCracken kept on walking. It didn’t seem to him that he was breathing at all. He made the hallway, and was half way to the front door before he heard the shot. It had not been aimed at him.
* * *
The contents of the desk and the filing cabinet had been taken from the drawers and were stacked in a cardboard carton with a rope around it.
The carpet was rolled up at one side of the room, and the phone had been disconnected, although it still stood on the desk.
McCracken sat on the desk beside the phone, with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands.
He was whistling softly and mournfully.
He didn’t hear the door open, but he almost fell off the desk when a voice said:
“Excellent whistling, Mr. McCracken. Excellent!”
The shiny pate of the little bird imitator was bobbing across the office toward him.
“Hello, Perley,” McCracken said. He couldn’t muster a smile to go with it.
“I’m leaving vaudeville, Mr. McCracken,” Perley explained. “Or maybe one could say that vaudeville is leaving me, because the Bijou is closing. Anyway, I’m opening a school for whistling and bird imitating. You whistle well. I could make you my star pupil.”
“Thanks,” said McCracken listlessly. “Maybe sometime. But what with moving and all—”
“To better quarters, I hope. And that reminds me. You never sent me a bill. I came to settle up for what you did for me.”
He beamed at McCracken, and for a moment the private detective felt a ray of hope. Then it faded. A few dollars can seem like a lot sometimes, but it doesn’t make much difference when you owe a few hundred and are about to be put on the street. “In fact, Mr. McCracken,” Perley went on, “I have a check already written, which I hope you’ll think adequate. It’s for three thousand dollars. You may have heard that Jim Lee’s will said that I was his only real friend and that he left me all his money, and that it turned out to be more than anybody thought he had. Some bonds, you know, that he thought weren’t worth much.”
Mechanically, McCracken took the little slip of yellow paper that was being held out toward him. His eyes focused on the figures, then blurred, then came into focus again.
“There was thirty thousand net, Mr. McCracken,” Perley Essington was saying, “and if it hadn’t been for you—well, I’d never have been free to spend any of it. So I think a tenth is fair, isn’t it?”
McCracken found his own voice at last.
“More than fair, Perley. I—well you can put me down as your star pupil, all right. And give me that nightingale business first. It’s just how I feel. But not on an empty stomach.” He took the little man’s arm firmly. “First, we’re going down to the Crillon and order a plate apiece of their very best birdseed.”
IT WAS five minutes before five a.m. and the lights in my office at the fourth precinct station were beginning to grow gray with the dawn. To me, that’s always the spookiest, least pleasant time of all. Darkness is better, or daylight. And those last five minutes before my relief are always the slowest.
In five minutes Captain Burke would arrive—on the dot, as always—and I could leave. Meanwhile, the hands of the electric clock just crawled.
The ache in my jaw crawled with them. That tooth had started aching three hours ago, and it had kept getting worse ever since. And I wouldn’t be able to find a dentist in his office until nine, which was four long hours away. But, come five o’clock, I’d go off duty, and I had a pretty good idea how to deaden the pain a bit while I waited.
Four minutes of five, the phone rang.
“Fourth Precinct,” I said, “Sergeant Murray.”
“Oh, it’s you, Sergeant!” The voice sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it; it was a voice that sounded like an eel feels. “Nice morning, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Yeah,” I growled.
“Of course,” said the voice. “Haven’t you looked out the window at the pale gray glory that precedes the rising of—”
“Can it,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Your friend Sibi Barranya, Sergeant.”
I recognized the voice then. It didn’t make me any happier to recognize it, because he’d been lying like a rug when he called himself my friend. He definitely wasn’t. On the blotter, this mug Barranya is listed as a fortune-teller. He doesn’t call himself that; when they play for big dough, the hocus-pocus boys call themselves mystics. That’s what Barranya called himself, a mystic. We hadn’t been able to pin anything on him, yet.
I said, “So what?”
“I wish to report a murder, Sergeant.” His voice sounded slightly bored: you’d have thought I was a waiter and he was ordering lunch. “Your department deals in such matters, I believe.”
I knew it was a gag, but I pressed the button that turned on the little yellow light down at the telephone company’s switchboard.
I’ll explain about that light. A police station gets lots of calls that they have to trace. An excited dame will pick up the phone and say “Help, Police” and bat the receiver back on the hook without bothering to mention who she is or where she lives. Stuff like that. So all calls to any police station in our city go through a special switchboard at the phone station, and the girl who’s on that board has special instructions. She never breaks a connection until the receiver has been hung up at the police end of the call, whether the person calling the station hangs up or not. And there’s that light that flashes on over her switchboard when we press the button. It’s her signal to start tracing a call as quickly as possible.
While I pressed that button, I said, “Nice of you to think of me, Barranya. Who’s been murdered?”
“No one, yet, Sergeant. It’s murder yet to come. Thought I’d let you in on it.”
I grunted. “Picked out who you’re going to murder yet, or are you going to shoot at random?”
“Randall,” he said, “not random. Charlie Randall, Sergeant. Neighbor of mine; I believe you know him.”
Well—on the chance that he was telling the truth and was going to commit a murder—I’d as soon have had him pick Randall as anyone. Randall, like Barranya, was a guy we should have put behind bars, except that we had nothing to go on. Randall ran pinball games, which isn’t illegal, but we knew (and couldn’t prove) some of his methods of squelching opposition. They weren’t nice.
Barranya and Randall lived in the same swank apartment building, and it was rumored that the pinball operator was Barranya’s chief customer.
All that went through my head, and a lot of other things. Telling it this way, it may sound like I’d been talking over the phone a long time, but actually it had been maybe thirty seconds since I picked up the receiver.
Meanwhile, I had the receiver off the hook of the other phone on my desk—the interoffice one—and was punching the button on its base that would give me the squad car dispatcher at the main station.
I asked Barranya, “Where are you?”
“At Charlie Randall’s,” he said, “well, here it goes, Sergeant!”
There was the sound of a shot, and then the click of the phone being hung up.
I kept the receiver of that phone to my ear waiting for Central to finish tracing the call, which she’d do right away now that the call had been terminated at that end. Into the other phone I said, “Are you there, Hank?” and the squad car dispatcher said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Better put on the radio to— Wait a second.”
The other receiver was talking into my other ear now. The gal at Central was saying, “That call came from Woodburn 3480. It’s listed as Charles B. Randall, Apart—”
I didn’t listen to the rest of it. I knew the apartment number and address. And if it was really Charlie Randall’s phone that the call had come over, maybe then Barranya was really telling the truth.
“Hank,” I said, “send the nearest car to Randall’s apartment, number four at the Deauville Arms. It might be murder.”
I clicked the connection to the homicide department, also down at main, and got Captain Holding.
“There might be a murder at number four at the Deauville,” I reported. “Charlie Randall. It might be a gag, too. There’s a call going out to the nearest squad car; you can wait till they report or start over sooner.”
“We’ll start over right away,” he said. “Nothing to do here anyway.”
So that let me out of the game. I stood up and yawned, and by the electric clock on the wall, it was two minutes before five. In two minutes I could leave, and I was going to have three stiff drinks to see if it did my toothache any good. Then I intended going to the Deauville Arms myself. If there was a murder, the homicide boys would want my story about the call. And having something to do would help make the time go faster until nine o’clock when there’d be a dentist available.
If there wasn’t a murder, then I wanted a little talk with Sibi Barranya. He might still be there, or up in his own apartment two floors higher. Maybe “talk” isn’t the right word. I was going to convince him, with gestures, that I didn’t appreciate the gag.
I put on my hat at one minute of five. I looked out the window and saw Captain Burke, who relieves me, getting out of his car across the street.
I opened the door to the waiting room that’s between the hall and my office, and took one step into it. Then I stopped—suddenly.
There was a tall, dark, smooth-looking guy sitting there, looking at one of the picture magazines from the table. He had sharp features and sharp eyes under heavy eyebrows, each of which was fully as large as the small moustache over his thin lips.
There was only one thing wrong with the picture, and that was who the guy happened to be. Sibi Barranya—who’d just been talking to me over the telephone a minute before…from a point two miles away!
I stood there looking at him, with my mouth open as I figured back. It could have been two minutes ago, but no longer. Two minutes, two miles. There’s nothing wrong with traveling two miles in two minutes, except that you can’t do it when the starting point is the fourth floor of one building and the destination the second floor of another. Besides, the time had been nearer one minute than two.
No, either someone had done a marvelous job of imitating Barranya’s voice, or this wasn’t him. But this was Barranya, voice and all.
He said, “Sergeant, are you—psychic?”
“Huh?” That was all I could think of at the moment. On top of being where he couldn’t be, he had to ask me a completely screwy question.
“The look on your face, Sergeant,” he said. “I came here to warn you, and I would swear, from your expression, that you have already received the warning.”
“Warn me about what?” I asked.
His face was very solemn. “Your impending death. But you must have heard it. Your face, Sergeant. You look like—like you’d had a message from beyond.”
Barranya was standing now, facing me, and Captain Burke came in the room from the outer hallway.
“Hello, Murray.” He nodded to me. “Something wrong?”
I straightened out my face from whatever shape it had been and said, “Not a thing, Captain, not a thing.”
He looked at me curiously, but went on into the inner office.
The more I looked at Barranya, the more I didn’t like him, but I decided that whether I liked him or not, he and I had a lot of note-comparing to do. And this wasn’t the place to do it.
I said, “The place across the street is open. I like their kind of spirits better than yours. Shall we move there?”
He shook his head. “Thanks, but I’d really better be getting home. Not that I’d mind a drink, but—”
“Somebody’s trying to frame a murder rap on you,” I told him. “The Deauville Arms is full of cops. Are you still in a hurry?”
It looked as though a kind of film went across his eyes, because they were suddenly quite different from what they had been and yet there had been no movement of eyelid or pupil. It was somehow like the moon going behind a cloud.
He said, “A murder rap means a murder. Whose?”
“Charlie Randall, maybe.”
“I’ll take that drink,” he said. “What do you mean by ‘maybe?’ ”
“Wait a minute and I’ll find out.” I went back into the inner office, but left the door open so I could keep an eye on Barranya. I said, “Cap, can I use the phone?” and when he nodded, I called the Randall number.
Someone who sounded like a policeman trying to sound like a butler said, “Randall residence.”
“This is Bill Murray. Who’s talking?”
“Oh,” said the voice, not sounding like a butler any longer. “This is Kane. We just busted in. I was going to the phone to call main when it rang and I thought I’d try to see who was—”
“What’d you find?”
“There’s a stiff here, all right. I guess it’s Randall; I never saw him, but I’ve seen his pictures in the paper and it looks like him.”
“Okay,” I said. “The homicide squad’s already on the way over. Just hold things down till they gel then’. I’m corning around too, but I got something to do first. Say—how was he killed?”
“Bullet in the forehead. Looks like about a thirty-eight hole. He’s sitting right there; I’m looking at him now. Harry’s going over the apartment. I was just going to the phone to call—”
“Yeah,” I interrupted. “Is he tied up?”
“Tied up, yes. He’s in pajamas, and there’s a bruise on his forehead, but he isn’t gagged. Looks like he was slugged in bed and somebody moved him to the chair and tied him to it, and then took a pop at him with the gun from about where I’m standing now.”
“At the phone?”
“Sure, at the phone. Where else would I be standing?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be around later. Tell Cap Holding when he gets there.”
“Know who done it, Sarge?”
“It’s a secret,” I said, and hung up.
I went back to the inner office. Barranya was standing by the door. I knew he’d heard the conversation so I didn’t need to tell him he could erase the ‘maybe’ about Charlie Randall’s being dead.
We went across the street to Joe’s, which is open twenty-four hours a day. It was five minutes after five when we got there, and I noticed that it took us a few seconds over two minutes just to get from my office to Joe’s, which is half a block.
We took a booth at the back. Barranya took a highball, but I wanted mine straight and double. My tooth was thumping like hell.
I said, “Listen, Barranya, first let’s take this warning business. About me, I mean. What kind of a hook-up did it come over?”
“A voice,” he said. “I’ve heard voices many times, but this was louder and clearer than usual. It said, ‘Sergeant Murray will be killed today.’ ”
“Did it say anything else?”
“No, just that. Over and over. Five or six times.”
“And where were you when you heard this voice?”
“In my car, Sergeant, driving—let’s see—along Clayton Boulevard. About half an hour ago.”
“Who was with you?”
“No one, Sergeant. It was a spirit voice. When one is psychic, one hears them often. Sometimes meaningless things, and sometimes messages for oneself or people one knows.”
I stared at him, wondering whether he really expected me to swallow that. But he had a poker face.
I took a fresh tack. “So, out of the kindness of your heart you came around to warn me. Knowing that for a year now I’ve been trying to get something on you so I could put you—”
His upraised hand stopped me. “That is something else again, Sergeant. I don’t particularly like you personally, but a psychic has obligations which transcend the mundane. If it was not intended that I pass that warning on to you, I should not have received it.”
“Where had you been, before this happened?”
“I went with a party of people to the Anders Farm.”
The Anders Farm isn’t a farm at all; it’s a roadhouse and it’s about fifteen miles out of town. Coming on from there, you take Highway 15, which turns into Clayton Boulevard in town.
“I left the others there around four o’clock,” Barranya said. “We’d been there since midnight and I was getting bored, and—well, feeling queer—as often happens when I am on the verge of a communication from the astral—”
“Wait,” I said, “were you there with someone? A woman?”
“No, Sergeant. It was a mixed party, but there were three couples and two stags and I was one of the stags. I drove slowly coming in, because I’d been drinking and because of that feeling of expectancy. I was on Clayton, out around Fiftieth, when I heard the voice. It said, ‘Sergeant Murray will be killed to—’ ”
