“There’s still another way they do,” O’Malley said. “If they write two addresses, one gives the right number but the other one gives the street.”
There was no such number as 345 Cathedral Parkway, so we tried 236 Columbus. A good-looking young man about 22 years old opened the door of apartment 3F.
“Who’re you?” O’Malley asked.
“Joe Harrill. How about yourself?”
“A cop don’t have to give a name.” O’Malley showed his shield. “We’d like to look around your place.”
“Well, go ahead.”
We searched the room, and then him, and in his pocket we found three $100 bills with pinholes through them. The holes matched the pinholes in the pattern O’Malley had taken from the dead woman’s slip.
“Well, guy,” O’Malley said, “we got you.”
“For what?”
“For knocking off Miss Dubois and robbing her of her dough.”
“I haven’t killed anybody and I never heard that name before. My aunt gave me that money.”
“Yeah? You’ll get a chance to prove that to the Inspector.”
We took him to the station house.
“This has been extraordinarily fine police work, O’Malley,” I commended him.
“Sure, it’s swell work,” he said, “except I don’t think this is the guy that done the killing.”
I was astonished. “Why, you’ve practically proved it,” I said. “You must be crazy!”
I saw O’Malley next day.
“Well, have you got the proof on Harrill?” I inquired.
“Boy, we ain’t got no proof on nobody. Most cops think Harrill was the one. That Miss Dubois had a police record but it was long ago; some old-time cops remembered her. Collingham ain’t the only guy that give her money. So we got other suspects, but we don’t know who.
“That Collingham ain’t what he looks and talks like; he ain’t rich, he’s broke. The report is he made what dough he once had dealing in counterfeit bonds, but it was never proved on him.
“Guys came to Miss Dubois’ place sometimes to see her, and some kids saw a strange guy around there the afternoon that she got killed. They can’t describe him except he was wearing a checkered suit. I don’t know if anybody could get from that fire escape into the window, so we’re going to try that out.”
We went to Miss Dubois’ apartment. Some plain-clothes cops were there and one was wearing a checkered suit. The man in the checked suit went up to the roof, while we stood in the courtyard watching him, and he came down the fire escape and tried to force the window open from the landing.
He couldn’t do it. Then a younger cop tried it and he did it all right.
“There you have it, O’Malley!” I exclaimed. “It was a young man. That shows it was Harrill.”
“Yeah, fine!” he said. “Only the laboratory says them casts they took of the toolmarks on the window frame show that the window got opened from inside. You try it that way now,” he directed the man in the checked suit.
We went inside. The cop in the checked suit forced the window open with what I thought at first was a jimmy, but I saw later that it was a steel knife sharpener. Apparently he didn’t do it right, for O’Malley made him repeat it several times.
“That’s the right way,” he told him at last.
Then another cop who had waited in the court came in.
“Okay,” he said.
We went to headquarters. After a while a cop came and gave O’Malley an envelope and O’Malley went into the Inspector’s room. He came out again and we waited and Collingham came in with a couple of cops.
“We need your help on that Dubois killing,” O’Malley told him.
“I’ll be glad to do anything I can.”
“We want you to tell us how you knocked her off.”
Collingham got white.
“You’re nutty in the head!” he declared.
“Our heads are all right. You want me to tell you how it was? You’d been paying blackmail to her, but now she tried to shake you for a bigger bunch of dough. You went there to argue with her. We got some kids seen you go in her place.
“She wouldn’t believe you when you told her you was broke and you strangled her to shut her mouth. You got a knife sharpener out of the kitchen and fixed the window to make it look like some guy had broken in, and you scattered her things around so we’d think it was a robbery.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Yeah, sure, we’re crazy. A photographer has a place across that court. What you don’t know is that the guy happened to be trying out a camera.”
He showed Collingham a photograph. Collingham gazed at it and then stared at the floor and his body seemed to be folding up.
“I’ll talk with the Inspector,” he said after a couple of minutes.
They went into the Inspector’s room. Some cops were studying the photograph and I looked at it over their shoulders. It showed the cop in the checked suit pretending to force open the window; the man’s face was in shadow but his clothes showed plainly.
“Collingham was a fool to fall for that fake picture,” I told O’Malley when he came out of the Inspector’s room.
“You can’t tell what no guy will fall for. He recognized his own checked suit.”
“His suit?” I asked. “How was all this?”
“Why, I’d think you’d guess. That Miss Dubois was one time in pictures, like Collingham said, but she was a lot of other things besides. She was a gay kid and she picked up enough on several well-off guys to ruin ’em, and then afterwards she lived on it. She lived in that neighborhood so she wouldn’t meet people that she knew in her old days.
“I guess she could have went on like that until she died, except for this young guy Harrill. She told him she was his aunt, but we can’t find out she ever had a sister or brother, and it’s my idea he is her son. However that was, she didn’t want him to know nothing about what she’d been or how she lived.
“He understood his folks was dead and he was always in school and in summer he was with other kids in camp, and the money for them things was sent through a bank. He says he never seen his aunt but twice, and the name he knew her by wasn’t none she used anywhere else.
“The second time he seen her was the day she got killed. He was through school and he had come to New York and got a room, and she came to see him and she give him some money that she unpinned from inside her clothes. She asked him what business he wanted to get in and said she’d send him the money to get started in it. She expected to get the dough from ColIingham. The rest was the way I told it just now to Collingham.”
“I don’t see yet,” I said, “how you knew Collingham was the one who killed her.”
“I didn’t till the guy admitted it. You’re kind of dumb. I only figured this dead dame was a crook, and Collingham had a reputation as another one. It looked like she had been holding him up, though he wouldn’t tell she was, so I wondered did he kill her?
“Some kids had seen a guy go to the building in a checked suit. Collingham wasn’t wearing no checked suit when we seen him, and I wondered did he own one.
“Some cops went round the neighborhood where he lived and seen all the clothes cleaners, till they found out who cleaned his clothes; and the people there said they’d cleaned and pressed that kind of suit for him. So then we had a guy from the cleaner’s go to Collingham’s and tell his wife that Collingham had telephoned ’em to press his checked suit; she give it to him.
“I didn’t have no idea about the photograph until after we got the suit, but then I figured we might try that piece of business on him. So I found a cop that looked as much like Collingham as I could and had him put on Collingham’s suit. After he’d tried getting into the window from outside, we went inside and I had ’em take that photograph. You know, I ain’t sure even yet if Collingham really fell for that photograph, or if it only made him think we had so much on him he might as well confess.”