“He sounds like a desperate character,” I said.
“The guy got himself so he couldn’t be nothing but desperate. We’ll go and look at him.”
We went. Vanelli seemed to have been an ordinary-looking young man, but it was not easy to tell much about that now. As O’Malley had said, he had been badly beaten up. His nose was broken and his face battered and he had been stabbed five times and the letter Z had been cut on both his cheeks.
“What was the name of the man whose girl he ran away with?” I inquired.
“Zeglio.”
“Well!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “What more do you want?”
“You’re smart.”
They had Vanelli’s clothes there and we examined them carefully. He had been stabbed twice in the back and three times in front, but his clothes were stabbed twice in front and three times in back.
“I suppose,” I hazarded, “that after the first stabbing there was a struggle and his clothes got twisted around his body so that the holes don’t correspond.”
“You can account for everything, can’t you!” O’Malley commented. “We’ll see what Zeglio says about it.”
They had already arrested Zeglio and had him at the station house, so we went there. The station house looked as though they were holding a convention. Vanelli’s parents were there and had identified the body and now wanted to claim it. Besides Zeglio, they had the girl there, and several members of the family who believed that Vanelli had put their relative on the spot, and a number of the men who were suspected of counterfeiting. They all talked at once and I had never seen such excitable people, and most of them seemed to be congratulating one another that Vanelli was dead.
They had Zeglio and the girl kept separate and we talked with her first. She was a beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, with hair black as night and dark limpid eyes, and she couldn’t make the simplest statement without putting emotion into it. Her name was Josephina.
“For why am I kept here?” she demanded passionately before we had a chance to question her.
“They got to have you for a witness, lady.”
“But I know nothing. I have told all. For how long will I be kept?”
“It might be quite a while, girlie. You tell us over again what it was you told them.”
“I told nothing because I know nothing. I was making dinner and wondering when Peter would come home.” Peter was Vanelli. “Then I heard something — like quarreling. Two people. I look out but see no one. Then I heard something like fighting, but I can see nobody. Again a third time I look out, wondering when Peter will come, and Peter is in front of the door.”
“Was he dead?” O’Malley asked.
“Certainly he was dead.”
“Was one of the voices you heard Peter’s?”
“If I had thought that I would have gone to look.”
“Was one of them Zeglio’s?”
“I don’t know. Now I have told everything, so why do you keep me here?”
I was sorry for her.
“That’s a wonderful girl, O’Malley,” I said, after we had left her, “and I don’t wonder there was trouble over her; it’s a shame to keep her locked up.”
“Yeah, I saw you thought she was a knock-out. You keep on thinking that and you might get a knife pushed into you yourself.”
We questioned Zeglio. He was a small man, dark, quick and muscular.
“You knock Vanelli off?” O’Malley asked him.
“Not me.” Zeglio grinned at us delightedly.
“How long ago did you come from Boston?”
“This time, ten days.”
“You’d been here before, then. When was that?”
“Two months.”
“I see. That was when Vanelli run off with your girl. You came here and looked for them, intending to kill him, but you couldn’t find them. So you went back and ten days ago you came again.”
“Thata right, I keela heem if I geta the chance.”
“And last night you got the chance and stuck a knife in him and left him outside of Josephina’s door.”
“Not me. Some other guy. I looka ten days but I don’t find heem.”
“And this other guy cut your initials in his cheeks?”
Zeglio shrugged. “What a kind guy,” he answered. “He beata me to it.”
We talked with the other people there and they all made the same answer as Zeglio. They admitted that they had intended to kill Vanelli and had been looking for him, but he and the girl had hidden themselves and they had been unable to find him. Now someone else, they said, had killed him, but they didn’t know who. We went to look at the place where it had happened.
It was a rather nice apartment building on the West Side. Vanelli and the girl had had an apartment in the rear. A long hall led through the building and a shorter hall branched off to the door of Vanelli’s apartment. There was blood on the floor of the long hall and more blood in front of Vanelli’s door, and a uniformed cop was on post in the hall and another one in the apartment.
We looked everything over carefully. There were two rooms with a bathroom between them, and someone had spilled a bottle of ink on the floor in front of the bathroom door. Otherwise the place was spotlessly clean. Vanelli’s clothes and the girl’s clothes were hanging in closets, and there was a table set with two places, and the dinner Josephina had been cooking was still on the stove. Some of Josephina’s things had been put into a suitcase. I thought she had been getting them ready to take with her to the police station, and I was indignant that they had hurried her away without them.
“What do you make of it, O’Malley?” I asked.
“I don’t make nothing of it. This case is like I said; everybody we talked to has been lying, and you can’t solve a case where nobody tells the truth.”
“At least one of them is lying,” I agreed, “because one of them killed Vanelli. But the others, in that case, would be telling the truth, and I am quite sure that Josephina told it.”
“Yeah? How do you figure that?”
“The quarreling she heard was in the long hall where she couldn’t see the speakers. Vanelli was killed there. Afterward the murderer carried or dragged him into the short hall and put him in front of the door, and when Josephina looked out she found him.”
“You make it sound pretty good.”
I was pleased at his commendation, so I went on: “I have come to the conclusion, O’Malley, that it was done by Zeglio.”
“All right; let’s hear it.”
“At first I thought the Z’s on Vanelli’s cheeks meant that someone was trying to throw suspicion on Zeglio and meant he really hadn’t done it; but this was a murder of revenge. A man seeking revenge is willing to take a risk if there is someone whom he wants to have know he did it. Zeglio wanted Josephina to know. What do you think of that?”
“I guess it deserves consideration... Who spilled the ink on the floor?” O’Malley asked the officer.
“Search me,” the officer replied. “It was that way when we come here.”
O’Malley scraped up some of the ink and put it in an envelope.
“Anything been taken away from here?” he asked the officer.
“Not a thing except the dead guy. We was told to keep it like it was.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked O’Malley.
“People like this Vanelli and Josephina always have pictures of their folks around, and the first thing a guy like him does if he runs away with a girl is get his picture taken with her. Well, where’s the pictures?”