“Martin Dillon’s the tag. Twenty-six, unmarried, runs an elevator in an office building, been living here five years. How’s that for a quarter-of-an-hour head-start?”
Cleary didn’t say how it was. He got down on the backs of his heels beside the prostrate Dillon, but looked peculiarly at a loss, possibly because he let his arms hang down full length at his sides, like a squatting ape. “So,” he sighed regretfully. “Right in the middle of the tum-tum. Nasty but effective.”
“Effective is right. Permanent. Never mind the calisthenics, we been all through that,” the other dick said with friendly derision.
“One more never hurt yet.” But Cleary straightened up again. A chair scraped up above, and he glanced up at the ceiling. “Funny that in a house full of roomers nobody heard the shot. You been around among them?”
“Yeah, I gave that angle a workout. The room next door happens to be vacant; the one two doors down, they were out; the one three doors down, the guy was taking a bath, and he claims-that when the water hits these old tin tubs they got in this house, you can’t hear anything for miles around.”
A cop stuck his head in from the hall and said, “Here’s a lady from the floor above says she heard someone go racketing down the stairs about nine o’clock.”
Clary stepped outside, so she wouldn’t have to come in and face the remains. “I even called down and asked him to go easy on account of my baby. He was jumping full-weight from stair to stair. I never heard anything like it in my life! And he started down from this floor.”
“Did you hear anything like a shot?”
“No, nothing like that!”
Cleary turned to the other dick and they went back inside the room again. “That shows two of them came here and did it.”
“How so? She only heard one on the stairs, from what she says.”
“Don’t you get what that was for? If she didn’t hear any shot, the shot went off while this guy was trooping down in high. That means one of them stayed up here in the room and gave Dillon the business, while the other one drowned him out, on the stairs. That has the earmarks of a professional job. Now why should professionals bother to go after an elevator-pusher-upper?”
“He found out something he shouldn’t have about their ‘profession.’ ”
“Sure, that’s the only answer,” Cleary nodded. He snapped a kitchen match against his thumbnail, held the flame to a cigarette. “Now let’s go on from there. Close the door. What would a guy like him possibly find out about what profession, that would be important enough to get him in Dutch? Did you quiz the rooming house keeper on his habits?”
“Yeah, I covered that and it don’t add up to a row of pins. He was up at seven every morning to go on the job and he came back from work too tired and hardly ever went out. No one ever came to see him here, and he didn’t even have a girl. His light was always out by eleven at the latest; she could tell by the crack under the door, and she liked that about him because she’s a light-saving dame.”
“That makes it tough. Let’s look around, see if we can turn up anything here.”
They rifled bureau drawers and the shabby contents of the clothes closet in silence, Cleary’s cigarette left burning on the edge of a chair seat. The sight of Dillon still on the floor didn’t affect either one of them. Cleary had purposely refrained from giving permission to have the body taken out yet. He had found by experience that he worked better in the presence of the corpse than in its absence, as though the sight of one helped his thinking powers.
But there was a certain amount of not yet completely dried blood on the threadbare carpet. Dillon hadn’t died immediately but had threshed about for a few minutes; and to keep the stains off his shoes and keep from tracking it around the room, Cleary reached for a newspaper to spread over the carpet. Then he stood still looking at it, and didn’t go ahead.
He said, “Davis.”
The other dick pulled his face out of a bureau drawer and turned around.
“Here’s what he found out. Something in here.”
“Everyone brings papers home with them from work.”
“This is the night before last’s — two nights old. There’s tonight’s, shoved under the bureau mirror over there in the corner. This was right out here on the table.”
“No, I’ve got one for that,” Davis argued. “He was a crossword puzzle addict. The landlady says he’d often look out when she was passing and ask her help on a certain word that had him stumped. He was probably two nights behind on his brain-twisters, that’s all.”
Cleary wouldn’t give in “That won’t account for this. This ain’t open where the puzzle is. The puzzle is” — he thumbed — “exactly twelve pages away from where this was folded over.” He turned back again. “Why do I waste time arguing with you? It’s right here staring me in the face. An item about queer money flooding the town. This rings the bell.”
They read it together, one over the other’s shoulder. Cleary snapped his knuckle at it. “He ran into a ‘passer.’ That could be the only possible contact between, an unimportant little nobody like him and a counterfeiting ring. He found out somebody was a ‘passer’ and this is what it got him.” He pointed at the floor.
“I don’t know just how solid a foundation you’ve got, but you’re sure building up a case,” Davis admitted.
“Now let’s see what we’ve got so far. He ran afoul of a passer. That opens up two possibilities. It was either someone he knew all along and only tumbled to since reading this paper. Or it was someone he didn’t know and got wise to. But how? Them guys don’t stand still on a street corner passing out phoney money like handbills.
“He found out something so definite and damning, all in a flash, that he was put out of the way. And the killers came and called on him here, you notice. He didn’t go out hunting them up.”
“So it looks like it was someone he knew.”
“And yet he never went out.”
“So it won’t wash either way,” sighed Davis gloomily. “There goes your foundations.”
“Naw, just the roof. This item about counterfeit money still holds good as far as I’m concerned. It’s what he found out, and what led to his death. Let’s break it down into three fields of operation: the building where he worked; here, where he lived; and the streets he traveled each day between the two. He made his discovery in the first or the last place. We already know it was up here in the room he read about it, but it was in one of the other two places that he found out whatever it was he did, and hooked it up with what he read when he got home.” Cleary shook his head.
“What’s the matter?” asked Davis.
“I was just thinking. My old mother, rest her soul, used to say that’s bad luck, to put a hat on the bed like that.”
“Well, it sure was this time.”
Cleary moved over and studied the hat, but without touching it. “It looks pretty new, compared to the worn-out condition the rest of his things are in.”
“A guy’s gotta buy a new hat once in a while.”
Cleary looked at him. “But when he does, he doesn’t throw it on the bed from all the way across the room, not caring if it hits the floor or lands on its crown or what happens to it. At least not the first week or two. He hangs it up carefully, so it’ll keep its shape as long as possible. And it didn’t fall off him onto the bed as he was shot, because he’s lying over there by the door.”
“Maybe the killer was one of these cold-blooded sons that like to make a guy flinch; lifted it off Dillon’s head and threw it across the room, sort of to get it out of the way just before he shot him.”