“No, he shot him through the stomach. The sadistic gesture to go with that would be to undo the buttons of Dillon’s shirt, one by one. Not the hat.” He produced a handkerchief, took hold of the hat brim with it, lifted it up and turned it over. “M D. It’s got his initials pasted in it. It’s his all right.” Then he brought it up closer to his face.
Suddenly he’d dropped it back on the bed again and was all the way across the room, crouching down over the top of the dead man’s head.
“What’re you doing?” asked Davis, as Cleary’s face dipped, then rose again.
Cleary straightened and made for the door. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go! I want to make a phone call to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ask ’em something about these queer twenties that have been turning up.”
“What’s the rush all of a sudden?” asked Davis querulously. “One minute you’re standing around making speeches, the next you’re on the lam.”
“I think we’ve got a musical hat — one that’s going to sing,” answered Cleary as he went chasing down the stairs. He called the local headquarters of the F.B.I. from a nearby booth. “This is Cleary of the Homicide Squad. I’m working on the case of a man we’ve just found shot to death, and I could use a little cooperation. Are there any peculiarities about those fake bills that have been turning up the last few days?”
“They’re all twenties.”
“Yeah, I know that already. I mean any distinguishing feature about the bills themselves you can give me? I can’t tell you just what I’m looking for, because I don’t know yet myself. It’s got to come from you.”
“Just a minute until I check on you. I can’t give out any inside information until I’m sure who you are.”
Cleary didn’t resent that. There have been cases in which reporters impersonated detectives in order to get information for their papers. He gave his precinct house number and lieutenant’s name, waited on the line.
The Federal official came back quickly. “Okay, sorry to hold you up. Now this is strictly confidential. Please see that it doesn’t get around. The bills all show sighs of having been folded lengthwise, and a number of them, not all but some, when first detected have had a peculiar tendency to curl slightly. D’you understand what I mean? Sort of tip up from end to end. The best we can make of that, so far, is that they were carried for days in a narrow money belt fastened around the wearer’s body. And yet the awkwardness of having to unfasten the outer clothing to extract one each time would argue against that.”
“Or inside the sweatband of a hat!” said Cleary elatedly — but to himself. He was working for the city, not the government.
He turned to Davis as he hung up. “Now I know that hat’s going to get us somewhere! Let’s go down to the office building where Dillon worked.”
A night watchman was the only one left on the premises at this late hour. He took them down to the employees’ locker room, opened the various lockers for them. Dillon and the other operators — there were two banks of elevators in the building — had of course worn their street clothing home. Their service uniforms were all that the lockers contained, but a small pillbox cap went with each. Cleary only showed interest in these; he took each one out and held it close to his face, upside down.
“Nothing doing down here,” he said finally. “I figured there wouldn’t be anyway. It’s between the two places, here and his room, that he found out too much. Let’s retrace his homeward course.”
“How you going to do that?”
“What’s hard about it? We know where he started out from, we know where he was heading for. He was too tired after standing on his feet all day to do anything but take the shortest, straightest line between the two. Along there somewhere he stopped off to eat. He didn’t eat in his room, so he must have. We want where he stopped in to eat. We’re going to try every place we pass on the way until we hit the right one.”
“What’ll that get us?” queried Davis.
“Watch and see,” promised Cleary mysteriously.
“Don’t tell me anything,” grumbled his teammate, “I just came along for the exercise.”
“Now don’t get touchy. You’ll be able to hear for yourself when we hit the right place.”
Davis pointed to a restaurant on the corner ahead. “There’s the first one he’d pass.”
Cleary shook his head. “Never mind that one. Too high-priced for an elevator operator. Just look for the places without cloths and table service — cafeterias, and such.”
“All right, here’s one now.”
They went in and Cleary asked for the manager. “Was there a guy in here tonight, between six and eight or eight-thirty, slim, medium height, about twenty-six, wearing a pretty old suit of clothes but a brand-new, light-gray hat?”
“We feed hundreds of faces a day,” said the manager. “No, I couldn’t say. Maybe there was, and maybe there wasn’t.”
“I’ll put it another way. Have you been stuck with any queer money lately?”
“Yeah,” said the manager. “We got a lead half-dollar wished on us two months ago.”
“Wrong place,” said Cleary, and he and Davis went outside again. “Keep your chin up: We’ll hit it yet. He had to eat some place.”
“I’d feel a lot better if you’d let me in on what you’re aiming at.”
All Cleary would say was, “The hat, the hat.”
“It was his own, wasn’t it? You saw the initials in it yourself.”
“Yeah, it was his own — by the time we got there. But what I want to know is what it was doing before then. Come on. Here’s another, and it looks like about his speed.” He pointed to a sign on the wall as they went in: Watch your hat and coat. “Now is it beginning to come clear to you what I’m driving at?”
The manager looked blank until Cleary came to the phrase, “—and a brand-new, light-gray hat.” Then his face brightened. “Wait a minute! We had some trouble about a hat in here right tonight. A guy that fits that description walked out with someone else’s hat by mistake. But he didn’t do it purposely. He came back later and told me about it. By that time the other party had left too. So he wrote out his name and address and left it with me, in case the second fellow should show up.”
“And he did,” Cleary told him.
“Yeah, how did you know? He was plenty burned up about it too, swearing and cussing under his breath.”
Cleary gave Davis a look. “Now we’re on the home stretch,” he purred. And to the manager, “Now go slow and think hard. I want as close a description of this second man as you can possibly give me. This is police business, in case you don’t know it yet. In the first place, was he alone in here the first time, or can’t you remember that?”
“Yeah, I can — he was!” said the manager excitedly. “Tell you how I know. When this first young fellow came back, he pointed out to me exactly which seat he’d been in. It was still empty, and there was an empty one next to it by then, but all the others were taken. If there’d been anyone with him, there’da been two vacant scats.”
“Good work,” complimented Cleary. “How about when he came back the second time?”
“He came in alone, but there was a car waiting for him outside with another man in it.”
“Give me his description.”
“He was stocky, sallow-complexioned, with a beak like a hawk — let’s see, what else? — he was well dressed, better than the kind of trade we usually get in here. Looked like he was in the money.”
“He was,” the dick assured him sardonically.
“Was he ever in here before tonight?”
The manager tried to recall, couldn’t be sure.