“On the contrary. Right after you killed Winnie you made for the first phone and you had your secretary ring Haenigson and myself immediately on an across-the-board call to establish your alibi. Hearing your secretary’s voice we naturally assumed that you were in your office. You thought—”
“All right.” Howard Garrett’s voice was very tired. “I know when I’m finished. Please don’t lecture me.”
Cellini beckoned Mack. “That’s that. How about a drink at the Greek’s?”
Ira Haenigson waved him back. “I don’t know how you weasel your way out of these things, Smith, but I still want to know where that stuff is that Jimmy Legg stole from here.”
“Certainly,” said Cellini graciously. “Remember the pliers, hammer, and spool of wire hidden in Legg’s icebox?”
“What about it? We looked through the whole place.”
“But you didn’t figure why Legg thought it necessary to hide those items. The stuff is hanging from wire underneath the outside sill of a window in Legg’s apartment — probably the window facing the empty lot.”
What’s Money?
by D. L Champion
About to be blasted by Hymie the Gunsel, Joey was deeply touched by Sackler’s passionate plea that his assistant be spared. Then he remembered he was worth ten grand on the hoof to his nickel-nursing boss—
Chapter One
Check and Double Check
Sackler came into the office, his face as long as a hundred years and his shoulders bowed beneath several tons of invisible sorrow. He ignored my greeting. He hung up a hat which still bore the marks of rain that had fallen at Hoover’s inauguration and sat down with a sigh dragged from the very roots of his being. He was the spirit of gloom.
I watched him with a critical eye and diagnosed the melancholy with facile accuracy.
“Well,” I said pleasantly, “who took you?”
He lifted his dark thin face. He regarded me with suffering black eyes. He ran his long white fingers through his ebony hair. He said inquiringly: “Who took me, Joey?”
I nodded. “A natural question,” I told him. “Of the several million troubles in this world only one ever bothers you. That’s money. When I see you come into the office looking rather like a sentimental collie dog might be expected to look on the day Albert Payson Terhune feels blue, it occurs to me that someone has dealt you a savage blow in the pocketbook.”
He looked at me distastefully as if I were a bad egg he had been served for breakfast. He sighed again and said: “Money? What’s money?”
Considering the fact that money was his life’s blood, his God, his mistress and something for which he would eagerly barter his right eye, I dismissed this question as rhetoric. Sackler withdrew a small sack of tobacco from his pocket, then spying the deck of cigarettes on my desk thought better of it and put the sack away again. He snatched one of my cigarettes before I could move the package out of the danger zone.
“Joey,” he said, “you’re so ethically deficient it’s impossible for you to understand what principle means.”
“Usually,” I said, “it means that someone’s squawking about a buck and pretending they have a much more noble motive.”
“That is cheap and cynical, Joey. I am disturbed this morning over a matter of principle purely. The amount of money involved is negligible. As a matter of fact, two cents. Can you conceive of my worrying over two cents?”
“With no effort whatever,” I told him. “If someone has chiseled you out of two cents it was doubtless done at the point of a howitzer.”
“Very funny,” said Sackler in a tone which indicated it wasn’t. “As I stood on the subway station platform this morning, I dropped a penny into a chewing gum machine. No gum came out. I tried another machine with the same result. The point is that I have been swindled by a large corporation. As a matter of sheer principle, I am annoyed.”
I grinned at him. Sackler prating of principle where money was involved sounded like a press release from the Wilhelmstrasse concerning the nobility of Hitler’s battle to save civilization. Sackler sat on every nickel he made like a hen sitting on its eggs.
His money was not trusted to banks. That, for Sackler, was a trifle too risky. He scattered his earnings about in Postal Savings accounts all over the country. Revolution alone was going to rob him. He rolled his own cigarettes when he wasn’t grubbing mine in order to evade the state tax and he wore a suit of clothes until the threads literally parted.
But now, I thought, he’d reached the apogee of it all. He was actually beating his breast because he was out two cents. His misery brought cheer into my heart.
“Write them a letter,” I suggested. “A stiff letter. They’ll undoubtedly give you a refund.”
He smiled the sad bitter smile of a man resigned philosophically to his fate.
“I thought of that,” he said. “But do you realize it costs two cents for the stamp alone, not to mention the stationery? Moreover it would cost a nickel to telephone them. No matter how I handle it, I don’t break even.” My laughter rocked the room. “I thought it was a matter of principle,” I said. “Purely principle. I notice, however, that you’ve figured out the cost of your protest very neatly.”
“You have a moron’s mind,” said Sackler. “I’m damned if I know why I put up with it.”
He took the makings from his pocket once more. He glanced over at my desk but this time I was too fast for him. I had the deck of cigarettes in the drawer before he could get out of the chair.
We sat in silence for a half-hour. Sackler, apparently, was so upset about his losing struggle with the slot machine that he failed to suggest some form of gambling. It was his custom to leave no effort unexpended in order to win back from me during the week the meager salary he paid me each Wednesday. Usually, he was quite successful, too.
We looked up simultaneously as the outer office door slammed shut. There was a gleam in Sackler’s eye. A polite professional smile spread itself over his face. His nostrils distended as if he were trying to smell the amount of the fee his potential client could afford.
The door of the inner office opened and Sackler’s smile fell from his face. His eyes lost their glitter. A uniformed police officer stood on the threshold, a gold badge gleaming bravely on his broad chest.
Sackler said glumly: “Hello, Wooley. What do you want?”
Inspector Wooley sat down. He greeted Sackler cordially, which was odd. He disliked Sackler only a trifle less than Sackler disliked him. Wooley envied Sackler’s income and his success in a score of cases where Wooley and his men had failed. There was something suspicious about his attitude this morning.
“Well,” he said with all the sincerity of an Axis diplomat signing a nonaggression pact, “and how’s the boy, Rex? How’s business? How’s everything?”
“Terrible,” I said. “He’s ruined. He dropped a fortune this morning in slot machine speculation.”
Sackler shot me a glance more deadly than malignant virus. Wooley, not realizing it was a gag, shook his head and clucked commiseratingly.
“Too bad, old man,” he said. “Too bad.”
He was laying it on so thick by now that Sackler became suspicious.
“Look, Wooley,” he said. “What do you want? Now that you’ve smeared me up nicely for the past few minutes you may come to the point. Though I’ll tell you in advance if it’s a favor I can’t do it. If it’s money I haven’t got it.”