A uniformed sergeant came in. “Old screwball here insists on seeing you, Lieutenant. Got a minute?”
Barker glared distrustfully at the slight old man behind the sergeant. “All right,” he growled.
Nick Noble came in quietly. When the sergeant was gone, he said his name. “Maybe you’ve heard of me.”
Barker’s expression changed. “Hell, yes. You’re the wino the old-timers tell the tall stories about. What’s on your mind?”
“Tried to see Finch or MacDonald. Out. You had the other case. Talk with you.”
Barker eyed the heel-bruised old face suspiciously. “O.K., friend. What’s the angle?”
“All solved. All the cases at six after seven. No use for me — credit better go to the force.”
“You’ve heard there’s another one?”
“Yes. That, too. Want to hear?”
Barker shifted in his chair. “Why not?”
Nick Noble pulled a bottle from his coat pocket and filled the water glass on the table with sherry. “Drink? Sorry. Forget regulations. Welclass="underline" Look at murders. Pattern. Leave out Padrino now. Just yesterday’s. Three deaths timed mechanically. Fakes. One death timed accidentally. Your case. Time true.”
“So where does that get you, friend?”
Nick Noble made an attempt on the fly. “Look at men. Three represent authority. Priest, authority of church. Judge, authority of law. Dentist, authority of state. Draft Board. Guessed that. Likeliest kind of authority for professional man. Other man, no authority. Your case. People of the Kingdom. Hates authority.”
Barker grinned a lazy grin. “So still what?”
“Look at time. Six after seven. What’s that to six?”
“Huh?”
“What’s five minutes of seven to six?”
“Six fifty-five.”
“And seven sharp?”
“Oh. I get you, friend. Six sixty.”
“And six after seven.”
“Six... sixty-six.”
“Six sixty-six. Number of the Beast. Apocalypse. Tied up in all prophecies. Great number with People of the Kingdom. Beast means State, Church, everything they despise.”
Dan Barker’s heavy body squirmed. The chair creaked. “Smart stuff, friend. What next?”
“Easy. Your man’s the murderer.”
“The jerk I’ve got in the can? Hell, he killed Lige Marsden all right, but he didn’t kill the others.”
“Not him. Lige Marsden. Your corpse. Only motive. Nobody could want to kill him and the others, but he’d want them dead. Other times faked, his real. Crazy gesture in suicide, same time as the phonies.”
“Nuts! How about the gun?”
“Your prisoner. Hid it in his room. Chance for quick money. Worked with a fence. Won’t admit it now; scared of murder rap.”
Lieutenant Barker leaned back and eased open the drawer in front of him. “Pretty good, friend. Damned smooth. And crazier’n hell. How about Padrino? Marsden didn’t crawl out of the morgue to kill him.”
“I know. Why I’m here. No use hounding a dead man. Live murderer now.” There was no flicker in Nick Noble’s pale blue eyes as he added, “What did Padrino have on you, Barker?”
Barker’s hand rested on the open drawer. “You’re drunk.” His voice was cold with contempt.
“Marsden had to be murderer,” Nick Noble went on. “So somebody else killed Padrino. But it fitted the time pattern. Not authority pattern. So pattern faked to shift guilt. Who knew time pattern? Finch, MacDonald, and you.”
Barker’s hand slipped into the drawer. “Nuts. Cops don’t murder, friend. Might as well pin it on MacDonald or Finch.”
“Cops murder crooks who might talk too much. Lieutenant Becker, New York. And it wasn’t Finch or MacDonald I saw coming out of a room on East Fifth Street.”
Barker’s hand came out of the drawer. It wasn’t empty.
Nick Noble sat still. “Keep your head, Barker. You can’t kill me here at headquarters.”
“Nuts,” said Detective Lieutenant Dan Barker levelly. “Everybody knows you’re a dipso. The worst kind: a wino. You’ve been brooding all these years about getting booted off the force. You came in here and raised hell to get revenge. I had to defend myself.” His trigger finger was tense.
“You were afraid of noise last night when I saw you steal the gun. Besides, you thought I was just another bum, and what was my word against a Lieutenant’s? Different now.”
“Everybody’s got his own way of suicide, friend. Yours is being too damn smart. So now you’re through.”
The crackle of glass blended with the two shots. The sherry, glass and all, hit Barker in the face just as he pulled the trigger. The glass splintered on the floor. The first shot went where Noble’s head had been. From the floor Nick Noble saw the second shot burrow into Barker’s right hand. Barker’s gun lit in the fragments of glass.
Lieutenant MacDonald stood planted in the doorway staring at his service automatic. Shooting a Detective Lieutenant was something else he wasn’t experienced at.
A sergeant put the cuffs on Barker and another sergeant handed a notebook full of pothooks to Finch.
“Hot ziggety zag!” said Finch. “That was a sweet trap, Nick. The Screwball Division pulls it off again.”
“Easy. Find the pattern. See what isn’t pattern. That’s all.”
“Horsefeathers! You’re the best blame detective on or off the force, and you know it.”
“Nuts,” snorted Barker. The sergeant cuffed him backhanded across the mouth. The sergeant too had more reasons than vanity for wearing a heavy ring.
“I need a drink,” said Nick Noble. He fished out the half-empty bottle. It was wholly empty by the time Finch had finished booking Detective Lieutenant Dan Barker, L.A.P.D., for murder.
The Compliments of the Chief
by Lincoln Steffens
In this issue we begin our own C.I.D. — Curiosities in Detection. Our researches have turned up numerous discoveries in the field of detection, mystery, and crime literature; but occasionally we make a discovery so astonishing that it requires a separate classification altogether.
Such a discovery is “The Compliments of the Chief,” by Lincoln Steffens, venerated author of “The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens” — newspaper veteran, wit, and man of American letters.
We dug “The Compliments of the Chief” out of Ainslee’s Magazine, issue of July, 1900!
Judged purely on its merits, of course, Mr. Steffens’s 42-year-old tale can scarcely bear comparison with modern detective stories. Yet it has a significance out of all proportion to its value as a story. In it lie buried the tiny seeds of that school of detection literature best exemplified — a whole generation later! — by the work of Dashiell Hammett and other exponents of so-called “modern” realism. Mr. Steffens paints a truly remarkable picture of real-life crime detection in the City of New York — a quaint city it seems! — at the very tail of the 19th Century. His Chief of Police Reilly shows you how policemen of the year 1900 went about solving crimes... in an era in which Sherlock Holmes and his multitudinous imitators of the romantic school dominated detective fiction.
Therefore Mr. Steffens’s yarn is authentic Americana, and as such we pass it on to you to be cherished and preserved.
The Chief of Police lay on the great, leather-covered sofa in his office alone. He wasn’t tired. His barber had shaved him and gone; the mail was attended to; routine business was over for the day. It was pleasant to lie there that way in his shirt sleeves, his collar, cuffs and boots off, and be comfortable. Everything was all right, and for an hour, until noon, the Chief was not to be disturbed.