“It’s a cop,” said the Farmer, and hastened to establish his innocence. “We were struggling for the gun and it went off by accident.”
“The jury will be interested,” said the Orator, icily.
The murder was a commonplace, vulgar one. Only the profession of the victim gave it a public interest. The Farmer appeared first at the local police court, before a bench of magistrates, then before an Assize Court. £3,000 in the bank gave him the right to the best legal advice, and his case was argued with great eloquence by a brilliant leader of the Bar. The value of such assistance was that it prolonged the trial from one to two days, but the result was inevitable. The reporters sharpened their pencils, the bored ushers leaning against the wall, the morbid sightseers — even the stolid jury knew it was inevitable before the curtain rose on the last act of the drama. Only the judge and the counsel for the defense offered a similitude of conscientious doubt. And when sentence was promulgated, and he was taken to Wandsworth Prison, handcuffs on his wrists and three warders in attendance, there was, felt the Farmer, still hope.
He had not seen his wife since his arrest. She had come up once at his earnest request, but since he was not allowed to interview her except in the presence of a prison official, he could not give her instructions as to certain rather incriminating articles which must be done away with (such as two full boxes of ammunition in the right hand side of the chest of drawers); she wasn’t of much use to him, and the sight of her white, drawn face exasperated him to such an extent that when she came again he declined to see her.
The Court of Appeal dismissed his case summarily. And then it was he bethought him of sending for the Orator. Mr. Rater saw him in his cell, a growth of red beard on his redder face, and the Farmer grinned his greeting.
“You’ve got me to rights, Rater — why did you let ‘Higgy’ off with a three?”
“Higgy” had certainly escaped with three years’ penal servitude.
“And that fellow Smith — he thinks I’ll be leaving that woman of mine a bit of money and that he’ll marry her. Now I’m telling you, Rater, she’s not my wife. I was married before. She’s not entitled to a farthing — she won’t get it either.”
He gave particulars of his early marriage. It was not in a spirit of contrition, but rather, as he explained, with satisfaction, “to put her in her place.”
“My point is that I don’t want that woman to go claiming anything from me. She’s been a curse to me,” he added, but did not explain how. Nor, thought Rater, could a logical explanation be forthcoming.
It was out of sheer malice that he had sent for the Orator, who suggested as much, and the condemned man nodded and grinned.
“She’s not going to marry Smith — not on my money.”
“You needn’t worry about Smith—” began the Orator, but stopped. He was on delicate ground.
“That man’s a crook,” said the Farmer. “I’ve had him ‘taped’ for a long time. He’s always going out at nights, and staying away a couple of days. He lives alone, and I’ll bet if you ‘fanned’ his house you’d find lashings of stuff.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the Orator, who was glad to leave his victim.
The man next door was a sore point with the Farmer. He discussed him with his custodians, the warders who watched him night and day. He did almost all the talking, and they the listening; but they were good listeners.
“I wish I’d knocked his brains out,” he said, amiably. “They can only hang you once, even for fifty thousand murders. I’ll bet he carries that mark I gave him to his grave! I caught him here...” He illustrated the blow, and the warders were only faintly interested.
And then came the morning of mornings, and Mr. J. Giles submitted patiently to being prayed over. He was still red of face, hardly moved by the horror which awaited him in the little cell that opens immediately opposite the one in which he was confined. When the parson had finished, he rose from his knees with a grunt of satisfaction.
“Now let’s see your—”
And then the man next door walked swiftly into the cell, and he had a black strap in his hand. Giles stared at him open-mouthed. There was a livid scar on his forehead. No doubt at all, it was Smith... the man next door!
“Good Gawd!” he gasped. “That’s what you meant, was it? We’d meet again and you’d be the fellow that brought it off!”
Smith, the hangman, did not answer. He never spoke in business hours.
Screwball Division
by Anthony Boucher
Introducing Nick Noble, one of the oddest detectives to grace a modern work of fiction — in a jolting, muscular crime mystery by the author of “The Case of the Balder Street Irregulars,” Anthony Boucher, whose latest mystery novel, “The Case of the Seven Sneezes,” was published by Simon & Schuster in May, 1942... “Screwball Division,” we are happy to inform you, has never before been published in any form, at any time, anywhere.
Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald, L.A.P.D., was newly commissioned and inexperienced. He had never been inside a priest’s study before. For the matter of that, he had never seen a murdered priest.
While he listened to the housekeeper, he tried to keep his eye on the diocesan map of parishes, on the unfinished poster announcing a Baked Ham Dinner with Bingo, on the glaring chromo of the Sacred Heart; but his gaze kept shifting back to the body.
“The poor dear old man all alone in the house,” the woman was saying. “Father Guerrero off on a sick call, and me hurrying out to the Safeway because we was that near out of flour and he did love his coffee-cake of a morning, the saint that he was.”
There was no point in staring at the body. The photographer had taken it from half a dozen angles. The surgeon hadn’t got there yet. The body was their business between them. But a black cassock with a stiff white collar, a thin peaceful old face with a fringe of gray hair — these didn’t go with murder.
“I’ll never forgive myself, that I never will. To leave him alone with the world full of Nazzies and Kingdom People and suchlike!”
MacDonald brought his eyes back to the witness. “And you were gone how long?”
“That I can’t tell you, Officer, not to the minute. That nice young man at the Safeway, the blond one, he was showing me snapshots of his youngest and—”
“But roughly?”
“Well, say ten minutes. Fifteen maybe.”
“And what time was this?”
“I’m not one to look at the clock day in and day out, Officer, like my poor sister’s husband that never held a job six months in his life, God rest his soul, but it was before dinner, that I know, because it was all in the oven and a good half-hour to go yet.”
“And dinner was at what time?”
“Six o’clock sharp, and Father Guerrero gets his sick call five minutes before I left, and he’ll come home without a bite in his stomach, the poor lamb, to find his pastor...”
The woman had wept before, and it had taken ten minutes to bring her back to the questions. MacDonald hastily interposed, “That would make it about five-thirty you left?”
She gulped a little. “Yes, Officer.”
“You got back some time around quarter of six?”
The gulp was stronger. “Yes, Officer.”
“And found Father Halloran...?”
The gulp won. She nodded silently and turned her streaming face away.
MacDonald damned the surgeon’s delay and doubly damned the fascination of that hassocked corpse. The housekeeper was huddled in silent sorrow. MacDonald could catch the dry clicking of her lips as the beads of a rosary slipped through her fingers. He forced himself to stare at the body with what he tried to make an impartial and experienced eye, and lined up the facts.