Shamus took a flight of wide stairs two at a time and dove through a set of revolving doors. He flashed his credentials before the eyes of a startled attendant.
“You got a stiff in here from the Paragon,” he said rapidly. “Guy named Beard. He come in this morning. I wanta give him the once over.”
He was conducted at once to a long chamber in which stood a row of oblong objects draped eerily with white sheets. Leading the way to the middle of the row the attendant whisked away a sheet and revealed the mortal remains of J. Wesley Beard, bank president.
Maguire bent forward till his nose was not more than a few inches from that of the deceased. He seemed to be gazing deeply into the corpse’s faded eyes.
He straightened, grunted with satisfaction and charged out of the building.
“Central Station,” he shouted, leaping into the waiting taxi.
The train for Syracuse left at ten o’clock. It was ten minutes to when Shamus pulled up at the station, Flinging a bill to the driver he headed, bull-like, into a hurrying stream of people. He pulled up at an open gateway before which stood a Pullman conductor at a high desk.
Breaking in at the head of a queue of waiting people Shamus again flashed his credentials, stemming the flood of protest the conductor had begun to deliver.
“Got a reservation for a man named Bunt? H. W.? He’s wanted.”
The conductor seemed doubtful.
“Wanted for murder,” Shamus added.
“Oh.” The man ran his eye over a list. “Car three hundred and eight. Lower nine.”
Shamus passed through the gate and started down a long line of Pullmans. He was running heavily and panting. At car three hundred and eight he stopped.
“Where’s the man that’s got lower nine, porter?”
“He’s aboard, sir.”
Clambering up the steps Maguire barged down a narrow, green-curtained aisle. The curtains before lower nine were parted and inside a light burned. On the berth lay a hat, coat and club bag.
Shamus grabbed the hat and coat in one hand and the bag in the other and continued on down the car. He turned into the men’s washroom.
H. W. Bunt, seated on the lounge reading a newspaper, looked up casually. Then, as he recognized the hat, coat and bag, his eyes widened.
“Come on,” Shamus commanded, flinging the hat and coat on the seat. “Make it snappy, now.”
“What,” said Bunt, sounding outraged, “does this mean?”
“It means you’re pinched. Are you comin’ under your own steam or do I have to crack you on the jaw and carry you out?”
“Who are you?”
Shamus drew back his fist menacingly. Mr. Bunt stood up and put on the hat and coat. Maguire seized his arm and yanked him out the door. They went along the aisle on the double, Bunt stumblingly. As they stepped down onto the concrete walk the train shuddered and began to move.
X
The Captain in charge of the night detail at the Detective Bureau looked at Maguire and his prisoner amusedly. Sergeant Detectives Flynn and Schultz stood alertly to one side, ready to lay down a barrage of sneering laughter the moment Shamus began to look foolish.
“Murder?” remarked the Captain. “Murder, you said?”
“I said murder,” Shamus declared coolly, “and I meant murder.” He shifted his grip on Bunt’s arm. “It wasn’t suicide at all.”
“There’s a report in your basket,” put in Flynn. “Me and Schultz was over havin’ a look around.”
The Captain ruffled through a sheaf of reports and settled into the perusal of one in the scratchy hand of Sergeant Detective Schultz.
“You mean to say,” he queried upon concluding, “that this here guy — Bunt you say his name is — killed J. Wesley Beard?”
“No,” said Shamus loftily, “that ain’t what I mean to say.”
“Then what the hell do you mean?”
“Two years ago,” began Shamus rhetorically, “J. Wesley Beard began makin’ trips east from California. He stayed at the Paragon nine times during those two years and got himself fairly well known. Except that nobody ever seen him without his glasses. He used to wear a pair of thick-lensed glasses with a set of gray celluloid covers on them.
“The result is that if you asked anybody around the hotel to describe him they’d tell you that Beard was a medium sized guy with a moustache and that he wore glasses with gray covers. And that’s all they could tell.”
“So what,” sneered Schultz.
“Two years ago,” Maguire continued, “a guy named H. W. Bunt went into Syracuse, rented and furnished a house, opened a bank account, hired a housekeeper and went away again. He’s been back on short visits eight or nine times since. This is H. W. Bunt.”
“My ears are ringin’,” said the Captain skeptically.
“And this,” stated Maguire composedly, “is also J. Wesley Beard.”
Sergeant Detective Schultz burst into a derisive guffaw, but Sergeant Detective Flynn, the keener witted of the two, gave a startled jerk.
“Three weeks ago J. Wesley Beard, glasses and all, checked into the Paragon for the ninth time and proceeded to give an imitation of a dead beat. Charged everything. Even got credit from a bellhop for liquor. This was a build up.
“Four days ago H. W. Bunt, a medium sized guy with a gray moustache, checked into the hotel. He asked for, and got, a room on the eleventh floor. Beard’s room was on the same floor.
“Last night Beard had a visitor. This visitor was a down and out bum that nobody would ever miss. Some time during the last two years Beard had gone to a lot of trouble to make friends with this guy. The bum was medium sized and had a gray moustache.
“The pair of them turned loose on five bottles of bootleg. When the bum passed out Beard undressed him, put him in a pair of pajamas, wound a rope around his neck and strangled him. When the bum was good and dead Beard hoisted him up and hung him onto the closet wall.
“Then he wrote the suicide note, packed the bum’s clothes in a small bag and scrammed down the hall to room eleven-twenty, where, without the glasses, he was H. W. Bunt.”
“Is that right?” the Captain demanded of Beard.
Beard nodded dispiritedly.
“Sure it’s right,” Shamus said, preening himself. “All you need to do to make sure is fingerprint him. I was on to him from the start, but I never figured out this double identity stuff until just a while ago.
“When I brought Bunt’s fingerprints down here and compared them with the unidentified set off the glass I thought for awhile I was up against it. Naturally, the unidentified set were the ones left by the dead guy — the bum — the one we thought was Beard.
“But I went back to the hotel and done a little more hard work. Then when I seen Bunt ask the cashier to read his bill for him I was in the clear. He couldn’t read without the glasses.
“So I beat it down to the morgue to check. When I seen the stiff there had no ridge on his nose that people get from wearin’ glasses, I made the pinch.”
“And you call that cooperation,” said Flynn bitterly.
Maguire turned around slowly, fixed Flynn with a derisive stare and emitted a loud and triumphant snort.
