I myself was surprised a little, now that he spoke of it. There was not a picture in the apartment. There were several photographers in the neighborhood, and after we came out of the apartment we went around to them and O’Malley asked them if any of them had taken a picture of Vanelli and Josephina. None of them had. As we were leaving the last place he noticed several different-sized small pictures of a darkhaired girl and asked the photographer about them.
“You sell any of these?” he questioned.
The photographer said he could not sell them, until O’Malley showed him his badge; then he agreed, and O’Malley picked out two of different sizes and we took them back to the apartment and gave them to the cop in the hall, but I couldn’t hear what O’Malley said to him.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“There wasn’t no pictures in the place, so I told the cop to put some there.”
“That sounds like a silly performance to me.”
“That’s right; it might turn out to be silly.”
“What I like least in this case,” I said, “is your keeping Josephina locked up.”
“You’ll get that knife in you yet if you keep on thinking about her.”
“She hasn’t done anything,” I said, “and it is clear now that she told the truth. I admit that she eloped with Vanelli and was living with him without being married to him, but that was to get away from Zeglio. She and Vanelli undoubtedly meant to get married, and I don’t blame her for what she did under the circumstances. But now you have her locked up, and the way you are going about it there seems no chance of Vanelli’s murder being solved, so there is no telling how long she’ll have to stay there, or what people are going to think about her. You’re putting a stigma on the girl which she doesn’t deserve.”
“I was thinking maybe we’d ought to let her go.”
“If you’re afraid of losing track of her you can have her watched.”
We went back to the police station and O’Malley went into the captain’s office but I stayed outside. I knew he was arranging to have Josephina released, and I would have been glad to have her know that I had had a hand in it, but I didn’t get the chance to tell her.
When he came out we went back to the apartment, but we didn’t go in. Instead we went into a shoe-repair place across the street. The proprietor asked what we wanted done to our shoes, but O’Malley told him “nothing,” and we just sat and waited.
“Are you having her watched?” I asked.
“I guess we know where she’ll go.”
Presently I saw Josephina come along the street and go into the building opposite, and a plainclothesman who had been following her came in and sat down with us.
“Will the cops in there interfere with her?” I asked.
“There ain’t no cops in there. I had ’em taken off.”
In about an hour Josephina came out of the building very hurriedly. She had her suitcase with her and she seemed much excited. She got into a cab, and after she had driven away we got into another cab and followed her. She went to the Bronx. The cab stopped in front of a rooming-house and the cabman carried in her bag for her, and after he had gone away we went in after her.
We could hear Josephina in one of the rooms talking loudly, and we listened for a moment. Then O’Malley and the other plainclothes-man kicked down the door, and a handsome, reckless-looking young man to whom Josephina had been speaking violently jumped up at sight of us. Pieces of the photographs which O’Malley had bought were scattered on the floor.
“Okay, Vanelli,” O’Malley said to the young man. “We want you for murder.”
“This is all a mystery to me, O’Malley,” I said about an hour later. “I can’t see through it.”
“What can’t you see?” he asked. “This Vanelli was on the spot and he knew it. Him and the girl hid out, but he had too many people after him, and he knew wherever he went one of ’em would find him, and they were getting closer to him all the time. He figured if they thought he was dead they’d quit looking. We don’t know yet who the dead guy was and we might never find out. There’s plenty guys right now around the streets that got no jobs and their folks don’t know where they are, and there’s nobody to ask questions if one of ’em disappears. I guess Vanelli picked out one of ’em that looked something like himself and made some excuse to get him to go home with him — it might be he offered him a meal. When they got to the apartment Vanelli knocked him off. Then him and Josephina dressed the guy in Vanelli’s clothes and Vanelli lit out, taking the guy’s clothes with him, and Josephina give the alarm.”
“So Josephina was in it with him?” I asked, depressed.
“I wouldn’t wonder if Vanelli planned it all himself and she didn’t know nothing about it till it had been done; but then she backed him up the same as his parents did. Vanelli’s parents seen it wasn’t their son, but they identified him anyway so that Vanelli could get away, and whatever other people saw him didn’t know him very well and didn’t question it being him because his parents said so. I told you this was a case where you had to figure that everybody was lying. I figure the murder happened inside the apartment in front of the bathroom door. Vanelli stabbed the guy and pushed him into the bathroom where it was all tile and the blood could be washed up. I guess they undressed and dressed him in the bathtub. Some blood got on the floor outside the bathroom door where he was stabbed, and it couldn’t be washed up clean and so they poured ink on it. I got some of the ink off the floor being analyzed now to see if they find blood in it and I’m sure they will.”
“But,” I said, “you seem to have realized from the first that the dead man wasn’t Vanelli. How was that?”
“Why, the guy was wearing his own clothes when he got stabbed, and then they dressed him in Vanelli’s clothes and they had to poke holes in them; but it was a hard job to get the holes exactly where the wounds was, and they didn’t get it right. If he wasn’t wearing Vanelli’s clothes when he got killed, he wasn’t Vanelli. They put blood off the guy’s clothes in two place in the hall to make it look as if the murder happened outside the apartment, and Vanelli cut the Z’s in the guy’s cheeks so we’d think it was done by Zeglio.
“I guess Vanelli and the girl had it planned to meet later in some other city and start over where they wasn’t known. She was altogether too anxious to get released by the police so she could join him; but we couldn’t let her go for fear she’d disappear. Then I and you went to the apartment. They had to leave Vanelli’s clothes there so as not to excite suspicions, and her things were there too. If she was released, she’d have to go there to get her things and when she did that she’d go through Vanelli’s clothes to be sure there wasn’t nothing being left in ’em.
“I didn’t know whether she knew where Vanelli was or not; but I figured she was the kind of girl that, if she found some other girl’s picture in Vanelli’s clothes, would forget about everything else until she had found out about it. So I got a couple of pictures of another girl and had one of the cops put ’em in Vanelli’s pockets. She found ’em, all right; and she went straight to Vanelli to get an explanation about ’em.”
“It was a remarkable case,” I said, “and I’m surprised that you got the answer to it so quickly.”
“Sure. It’s a swell case, but too many other cops was working on it. You watch and see who they say figured this all out. It won’t be me.”
No Crime in the Mountains
by Raymond Chandler
There’s a growing school of thought that Raymond Chandler is a capital-W Writer, of significance and importance. I hope, selfishly, that nothing comes of this. Things happen (naming no names) to mystery novelists who are adjudged Writers; for one thing, they stop writing mystery novels, and a cessation of the PHILIP MARLOWE stories is an unbearable thought. But the ugly fact remains that Chandler can write like nobody else in the business, and is one of the great exponents to date of the poetry of violence and justice. You may never have heard of JOHN EVANS; but call him MARLOWE and you won’t know the difference. “No crime in the mountains” is authentic Chandler — a full meaty novelet never before printed in book form.