“I never said a word,” Rhoda said indignantly. “Besides, you didn’t have a phone call yesterday morning.”
“Oh, yes, I did. Nell called while you were in town marketing. Anyway, Harold was furious about that. He got up and started to go fire her right then, but finally he decided to send her a letter of dismissal and a final check from the office in the morning. So she crept up behind him and pushed.”
“Why, you lying devil!” she screamed at me. “I wasn’t anywhere near when he fell. I was at the door of my room and that’s a good twenty feet away.”
“Then what’s that in your hair?” I asked, moving closer to her. “It looks like the end of a cigar. Harold’s cigar. If you were so far away, how did it get into your hair?”
She yelped and started to reach up, but the doctor grabbed her arm. “Look at it, chief. It does look like a cigar end.”
Very carefully the chief picked it out of her hair. “Hell, that’s what it is, all right.”
“It isn’t, it can’t be,” she cried. “I wasn’t anywhere near him. You put it there, Tess. You must have.”
“I wasn’t anywhere near you until five minutes ago when you came into this room. Maria can testify to that,” I pointed out coldly.
Maria nodded vigorously. “The señora stay up here. The other one,” there was infinite scorn in her voice, “stay downstairs.”
“Then it must have flown back and hit my hair,” Rhoda insisted desperately.
“The cigar was at the top of the stairs, the cutter a few steps farther down,” Oliver Smith said. “That cigar end wouldn’t have gone very far. Too light.”
“Maybe you’d better check into her bank account,” I went on. “She’s been getting two hundred and fifty dollars a month salary and five hundred a month to run the house on. She bought the cheapest food, fired the gardener, reduced Maria’s pay. Where did the money go?”
Oliver Smith nodded. “Yeah, that’s a point. What’d you do with it, Rhoda?”
She looked around at the doctor, who looked furious, and then at the chief, who looked highly doubtful, and began to whimper. “If you only knew what it is to be poor, really poor, dirt poor. And there she is with all that money and nothing to do but sit around and be waited on. I was only trying to lay up something for my old age. And then Harold was going to fire me and I’d be poor again. I had to kill him, I had to.”
They’ve all gone now. The doctor gave me a shot, and the chief apologized for something — perhaps for believing Rhoda’s innuendos. Maria has gone to make me a cup of tea, and Harold has gone forever. I’m all alone, and the perspiration is beginning to break out on my forehead. Maybe this will be a good one, one from which I’ll never recover.
Fingering a Killer
by Malcolm McClintick
The house was one of those newly restored Victorian things, sort of like in San Francisco, except that it wasn’t San Francisco, much to Allen Ross’s chagrin; it was Indianapolis, in a downtown area called Lockerbie Square. Yuppies and other upwardly mobile people came here, bought homes, and lived in modest luxury amid the surrounding rundown warehouses, bars, loan companies, and storefront law offices. They could walk to work, smile knowingly at one another, and pretend to be the cream of a real city.
The dead man lay on his back on the bathroom floor of his Victorian house. His name was Phil Hendrix, single, late thirties, owner of a small nearby loan company called E-Z-Cash Finance. He was heavy, over six feet, dark hair, wearing blue boxer shorts and a blue terry cloth robe. The left side of his neck and face was still covered with the dried remains of shaving cream; the other side was smooth. The stubble of unshaven beard poked through the cream. He looked physically fit, except for the fact that he was dead.
The blue robe lay open, revealing three ugly bullet wounds: one in the left shoulder, one in the middle of the bulging stomach, and one just to the left of the breastbone.
Allen Ross, of the prosecuting attorney’s office, stood in the bathroom pushing his horn-rims up on his nose and looking down at the dead man. He had been sent by his boss to work with the Indianapolis cops on the homicide investigation because the victim had telephoned the prosecutor the day before with information. Ross shook his head. Obviously, the phone call had led to the man’s death.
It was nine fifteen on a Tuesday morning in mid-January, dry and frigid outside, temperature hovering in the twenties. The victim’s Victorian house was pleasant, maybe even a bit warm, except for here in the bathroom where a small window — too small for anyone to get in or out — was open several inches, letting in the cold.
Shivering, Ross glanced up to see the city detective in charge of the case standing in the bathroom doorway, Sergeant Sam Vincent, a tall, skinny, flftyish guy in a brown wool suit and brown overcoat, narrow face, balding on top.
“How’s it going?” Vincent wanted to know.
“Not bad.” Ross smiled. “You solve it yet, Sam?”
“Oh, sure. I just got out my mail-order detective kit, looked through my magnifying glass, and snapped my fingers.” Sam Vincent grinned wryly. “Actually, it is pretty much open and shut, ain’t it?”
“Sure.” Ross glanced at the corpse. “Did you notice he’s holding a bar of bath soap in his left hand, Sam?”
Vincent nodded. “Yeah, we ain’t exactly dumb in Homicide, whatever you legal eagles think. I noticed the bar of soap.”
“He was shaving,” Ross pointed out. “Half of his face still has shaving cream and whiskers. He was using shaving cream from a can, not bath soap.”
“So? Maybe he liked to wash his hands.”
“In the middle of a shave?” Ross asked, then stepped out into the hall so an Indianapolis Star photographer could get by. The crime lab people had finished already. Basically they were waiting for the coroner’s man to release the body.
“Look,” Sam Vincent said, “it’s simple. He’s been shot three times, see? Doc says one got him right in the heart, one in the gut, one in the shoulder. Big caliber, probably at least a .38. Three exit wounds. Three slugs in the wall behind him, where they came out. No shells on the floor, so probably it was a revolver. Rear door of the house was kicked in, ripped the lock right out of the wood. Bathroom door’s been kicked in, somebody’s foot right under the doorknob. It was locked, but just one of those flimsy things with a push button in the knob. So, here’s the picture. Killer broke in the back door and came here. Hendrix is shaving with the door locked. Killer kicks in the door. Killer lets Hendrix have it three times with a revolver. Hendrix falls on the floor and dies. Killer goes out the back door and makes his getaway. Only thing we don’t know is, who the killer was.”
“Footprints on the door that was kicked in?” Ross asked.
“Just a faint dirty mark, nothing to go on. Nothing outside — all the walks around here are bone dry. No fingerprints, either.”
“I don’t understand why Hendrix was gripping that bar of soap,” Ross said. “I’ll tell you something, though. It was one of four guys.”
Sam Vincent smiled vaguely. “Now we’re getting someplace. I didn’t figure your boss sent you over here just to annoy me and my boys. What four guys?”
“Hendrix telephoned our office yesterday,” Ross said. “Hendrix manages the E-Z-Cash Finance Company, just over in the next block. He’s got four loan officers working under him. It’s a fairly small outfit. Hendrix said yesterday that one of the four had been extorting sex from female clients.”
“Huh?”
Ross nodded. “Yeah. Apparently this guy would tell some young attractive female who was in hock up to her ears that he’d take care of some or all of her indebtedness for her, in return for certain, uh, favors.”