Cellini crawled back to where Ivy sat and they drank until Haenigson, Sprigley, Howard and a plainsclothesman crowded into the room.
“What’s this business of a straitjacket?” demanded the detective-sergeant. “And get off the floor and stop making a fool of yourself.”
“Don’t shove, Haenigson. I’m giving you the story, you stinker, not because I like you but because I want Howard nailed.”
“Nailed for what?” demanded Haenigson.
“Mario, for one thing.” He turned to Howard. “You and Freddy were beating him up while he was in a straitjacket. You’ve no doubt taken him out of it since then. At any rate, there were witnesses to the beating. Weren’t there, Sprigley?”
“I’ll sure testify to that,” stated Sprigley.
“In addition,” Cellini said, “this place is a racket even if you do make a limited attempt to cure people of alcoholism. You keep liquor in the pantry, ostensibly for your patients to taper off on the drink but actually to keep them around here longer so they’ll pay more. You had Mario for a shill — and I don’t know how many more — to steer suckers here who were so drunk they didn’t know what they were signing.”
“Howard will be taken care of,” said Haenigson. “Let’s get back to the beating.”
“Mario pulled a fast one. As Howard’s little helper, he gave him the dope on customers he sent here, so he phoned up Howard last night and told him that I had the crazy idea I was a detective and to humor me. Howard later found out it was true and when Duck-Eye dragged Mario here Howard went to work on him to find out what it was all about because he was afraid of losing this lush racket. Before Mario could squeal he was murdered.”
“Good,” nodded Haenigson. “Let’s get to the murders.”
“I told you Fields’ story about optioning stock from a call broker. What happened was one of two things. Either the call broker decided to bet against Fields and didn’t cover himself by optioning the stock, or he did. The broker then heard of the four-way split in shares and if he hadn’t optioned the stock he stood to lose a lot of money when Fields came for the payoff. If he had optioned the stock the broker had a chance to hold on to it and make a lot of money if only Fields could be kept out of the way till the option date had passed. Isn’t that right, Sprigley?”
“Why ask me?”
“Because you must work for that broker. Because you’re the killer.”
The plainclothesman moved next to Sprigley who said: “You’re disgustingly drunk and you’re not making sense.”
“You’re right on only the first count,” said Cellini. “You knew of Mario’s connection with this place and you had the Kitty Klub send an invitation to Fields. Lots of places do that. Then when Fields went to the Klub, Mario had the relief bartender slip him a mickey. Fields woke up here and found he couldn’t get out because Mario had told Howard that Fields had to be watched.
“In the meantime, you came here yourself to keep an eye on Fields and to make friends with him. That was your first mistake, Sprigley, when you told me you had been here before. Miss Banks told me otherwise.”
Cellini continued: “Of course when you made friends with Fields he couldn’t tell you the whole story — or anybody else — because there would have been a run on the stock that would have been traced back to Fields who was a member of the firm. However, he did tell you he was trying to smuggle out a letter to Cellini Smith and probably asked you to mail it. So you got Mario to pose as me in order to make Fields think a dick was working for him.”
“No one can pose as you, sugar,” said Ivy. “Anyway, I once mailed out a letter for Fields.”
“Fine. That’s the one that got me here. When you heard my name you telephoned Mario to warn Howard about my supposed hallucination. That was that first phone call in your office last night, Howard.
“Later, while I was in the office, Sprigley had time to kill Fields. Still later when we watched Mario’s beating he knew the guy was ready to squeal so he talked out loud to stop it until he had a chance to knife him. It was neat — calling us out to watch the beating and then knifing Mario while we were being chased.
“You’re not very bright, Sprigley. You said Howard told you this afternoon that I was a detective. Howard himself didn’t know that till early this evening when he listened in on the dictaphone — and he wouldn’t have told you.”
Haenigson stood up. “Let’s go. Coming Smith?”
“Not for about a week,” replied Cellini. “I’m going to take Howard’s Cure in reverse.”
“You and me both,” cooed Ivy Collins.
Over My Dead Booty
by Julius Long
Chapter One
Ditson’s Dive
It wasn’t nice to look at, and come to think of it, I don’t really know why I had to look at it. I guess it was just one of those things a cop is supposed to do. I’d been sent all the way from the attorney general’s office at Capital City, to Midtown to investigate the Ed Ditson case, and taking a look at his corpse seemed a routine thing to do.
Not that looking at it told me anything I hadn’t learned from reading the papers. They’d said that Ditson’s body had fallen from the twelfth floor of the Maramoor Hotel, and that meant a messy corpse. The papers had also described how the body had fallen into a parked convertible. A girl, Sheila Brown, had been sitting in the convertible, and that meant that her body wouldn’t be nice to look at, either.
“Was she smashed up as bad as this?” I asked, indicating what was left of Ditson. Doc Barrett, the county coroner, shook his head.
“No, not nearly so much. Ditson struck her a glancing blow. It was his falling across the car door that practically cut him in two like that. Sheila’s family insisted on having the body right away, and I saw no reason to object. A whole undertaking establishment has been working on her trying to fix her up for the funeral.”
“You knew her, did you?”
“Oh, yes. Sheila was a lovely girl. One of the most striking brunettes I’ve ever seen. Fine family. Lots of money. It’s just a damn shame that this thing had to happen. Ditson I have no sympathy for. If he wanted to take his own life, O.K. Why did he have to take Sheila’s too?”
I said I didn’t know why things like that had to happen and gestured to Barrett that he should shove Ditson back into the cooler. He did, and we went on out of the morgue to my car. Maybe you wonder why a suicide rated an investigation from the office of the attorney general. The answer to that one was available in the headlines of not only the local papers but all those in the state. Ditson’s dive from his hotel window had busted wide open the whole gambling racket in the state.
“As near as I can gather from the stuff in the papers,” I told Barrett as I drove away, “Ditson came over from beyond the state line with thirty thousand dollars in his kick that he’d made out of selling his real estate holdings. So his first stop after he gets here is the Silver Dollar. Four hours later the thirty grand was gone. Right?”
“I don’t think those facts are in dispute, Mr. Corbett. Everybody knows about the Silver Dollar, and it’s known that Ditson did have that much money on him when he arrived in town. He certainly didn’t have any on him when he made his dive. And there wasn’t any money left behind in his hotel room.”
“What kind of cretin-brains are running the gambling in this town?” I asked. “If they’d used a couple ounces of sense, Ditson would never have committed suicide, and the fat wouldn’t be in the fire. Ditson’s death has made so much stink that not only is gambling battened down tight in Midtown, but there’s nothing open in the entire state.”