The following morning at ten o’clock Lieutenant Wilson sat at his desk in the precinct office, making polite if strained conversation with three of the four people he’d called in — Doctor Thayer, Miss Adams, and Mr Quilt. At five minutes past ten, Doctor Nader entered, a tall, handsome blond man in a suit of shiny synthetic.
Nader looked at his receptionist and his friend with a brief smile, then turned his eyes contemptuously on the little armchair detective.
“I had to cancel my morning’s appointments,” he said.
“It’s regrettable,” the inspector murmured, and when the doctor had sat down, he turned to the accountant.
“I was inclined to pay no attention to Mr Quilt, when he came here yesterday morning, and told me had a theory of how Mr Dicer was killed. But now I’ve heard his story, I would like to see how his reconstruction of Dicer’s murder strikes the rest of you.”
“Ingrate,” Doctor Nader murmured.
Quilt started speaking as if he found it painful, but there was a gleam in his eye that betrayed an inner enjoyment. “I believe Mr Dicer was blackmailing Doctor Nader. After all, I was working on the doctor’s books last Christmas when Mr Dicer first appeared. It was a day when Miss Adams was ill, and there was a replacement. I heard Doctor Nader arguing with Mr Dicer. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”
“We had words, yes,” Nader admitted. “I told him he had cancer, and he wouldn’t believe me. Called me a liar, and became abusive.”
Wilson nodded at Mr Quilt, and the latter continued.
“Anyway, when I read in the papers of Jack Dicer’s death, and found he was a blackmailer, I sat at once that Doctor Nader had a motive!”
“But Doctor Nader couldn’t have killed Mr Dicer” Miss Adams said.
“That’s what I thought at first, too. But I figured it out!” Quilt looked proud of himself. “What really happened was this. Doctor Nader decided to kill Dicer. When Dicer came in that last morning, he gave him the poisoned Scotch.”
“Somebody ought to give you some poisoned Scotch,” Doctor Thayer said grimly.
But Quilt was not to be intimidated. “After Dicer died, the doctor put him into his office closet, first removing Dicer’s yellow hat and checked coat. Then putting them on, he stepped outside his office door, and keeping his back to Doctor Thayer and Miss Adams, he called out to an empty office, using Dicer’s gruff voice. Then he went out quickly, knocking over the vase to draw the others out after him. He needed the time, you see, to go downstairs and come back into his office by way of the stairs leading up from the old kitchen! It was only the work of a moment, then, to get rid of the coat and hat, and sit down with his file cards at the desk, where he was when Doctor Thayer entered.”
Nader began to object, but the lieutenant cut him short.
“Then according to your theory, Mr Quilt,” he said, “the body stayed in the closet until after Doctor Nader returned with Doctor Thayer from the trip to the mountains, when he simply bundled Dicer in his car, and left him in the rear of this building to establish his alibi. Now what do you say to that, Doctor Nader?”
“I say it’s preposterous. That door from the kitchen which is behind my desk, has been nailed up for months!”
“That’s true,” Wilson admitted. “I remember the door was nailed, but I got Miss Adams to take me back to your office yesterday to reexamine it. The nails had not been tampered with. But that door was unnailed, wasn’t it, at the time Mr Quilt was working on your books at Christmas time?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Well, how about your theory now, Mr Quilt?” Wilson asked.
Mr Quilt had his mouth open, but nothing was coming out.
“The trouble with armchair detectives, they’re never penalized for being wrong,” Wilson said. “So they tend to be careless. You were careless, Mr Quilt. You assumed the door in Dr Nader’s office was open as usual.”
“Then I guess you have my apology, Doctor Nader,” Mr Quilt stammered.
“Unfortunately,” Wilson went on, “you were careless in other ways, too. You left your fingerprints on the vase when you toppled it the day of Dicer’s last visit. We just found them last evening. Then you hurried downstairs after Dicer — it was really Dicer who left — and invited him to your apartment for a drink, which you spiked with arsenic, taken, I assume, off the doctor’s own shelves. My men went over your apartment last night while we were at the Cactus and found the bottle of arsenic in your medicine cabinet.”
“He did all this just to frame me?” Nader asked incredulously.
“Oh, no. From evidence we found in Mr Quilt’s apartment, Dicer was blackmailing him for helping some of his customers to cheat internal revenue.”
“But how could you have suspected me?” Mr Quilt asked plaintively.
“Dicer listed his victims in a little brown book, coding them according to their profession, or work. He never used a person’s name. Therefore, C.A. which were the only initials in the book, could only stand for Certified Accountant.”
The Bushwhackers
by Richard O. Lewis
It was Saturday night, and the Four Lonely Hearts Bridge Club was in full, uncertain session.
Betty Emmert, hostess for the evening, had just failed to fulfill a contract of five spades. She was a slim brunette with large, dark eyes and a rather retiring disposition. “Sorry, partner,” she said, gathering up the discards.
Although she said she was sorry, she knew deep down that the real fault lay with her partner, Sara Berney. Sara had simply thrown her the wrong clues, and the dummy she had laid down was certainly not what it should have been.
Sara, like her hostess, was also slim and brunette. But from that point on, all resemblance ceased. Where Betty was retiring and sometimes not quite sure of herself, Sara was quite positive concerning her own attributes and was in the habit of condescending from her own high level to give helpful advice, along with a measure of pity, to those about her who were less fortunate than she — generally accompanying the advice and pity with a venomous barb whenever possible.
“If you had ruffed a club instead of a heart on your jack of trump,” she pointed out in her helpful manner, “you could easily have filled your contract.”
Betty could see no point in arguing about it. “I’ll try to do better next time,” she said. “Guess I just wasn’t thinking.” Her long fingers began fluttering the cards together.
“I know it’s hard to concentrate, dear,” said Sara, “when you have so many other things on your mind.” There was the pity — accompanied by the poisonous dart.
Betty knew exactly what Sara meant by “other things.” Sara never let an opportunity pass to imply to Betty — and to whoever else happened to be present — that Betty’s husband, Fred, masculine and handsome as he was, most certainly was stepping out on poor Betty and that poor Betty couldn’t help but know about it and be worried sick about it and that she, Sara, felt so very, very sorry for poor Betty because of the whole unfortunate situation.
During her entire seven years of married life, Betty had never had reason to believe that Fred had ever been unfaithful to her. Saturday nights, he played poker with the boys at the Businessmen’s Club and had a few drinks — or, at least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing.
But Sara had finally succeeded in sowing the seeds of suspicion, and now Betty was beginning to feel unsure of herself, insecure. T. J. Berney, Sara’s husband, always rode to the club with Fred, leaving his own car for Sara’s use. T. J. — tall, dark, and somewhat pious in demeanor — did not indulge in the immoralities of drinking and gambling as Fred did. Instead, he belonged to one of the bowling teams that held forth in the basement of the club. Had T. J. said something to Sara, indicating a possibility of infidelity on Fred’s part? And was Sara, in her own way, trying to get the message across...