The well was profitable but not a large producer. Hence, Trumbull was able to buy up a great deal of land in the section at a very reasonable figure. He then drilled the well a few hundred feet deeper, striking an oil sand that produced ten times the quantity of the shallower one. Naturally, his associates and the other landowners of the neighborhood felt that they had been tricked, but there was no legal measure they could take against him. Trumbull formed a stock company, drilled one well after another, and eventually built a refinery on the outskirts of the city. At the time of his death he must have counted his wealth in the millions.
The Parker-Kern Hotel is three miles northwest of the city. It was built in the wake of the oil boom and is patronized mainly by executives in the business and wealthy vacationists. As I parked my car a group of golfers came out of the lobby and headed toward the velvet-smooth links; and I heard cries of merriment coming from the swimming pool in the patio of the building. Apparently, the guests of the hotel had not been told of the murder in their midst.
The room clerk, with whom I had a speaking acquaintance, directed me to Trumbull’s room on the fifth floor, and a minute or two later Sheriff Carter admitted me. He was alone in the room but in the one connecting I could hear his deputy, Joe Todd, talking to someone in a low voice.
“Well, Sheriff?” I greeted him.
He gestured soberly. “Just got here myself, Chet. Look around. There’s not much I can tell you that you can’t see.”
I looked around as I unpacked my camera and other paraphernalia. It was a conventional hotel room of the better class. But with its furnishings all resemblance to the normal and conventional ended.
On the far side of the room William Trumbull sat slumped forward in an easy chair, his fingers almost touching the deep pile of the carpet. A pool of blood spread in front of him, over and around his feet. The top of his head was literally caved in. At his side lay a reading lamp, obviously the murder weapon. Blood and bits of hair still adhered to its heavy copper base.
Whoever killed him had also, apparently, robbed him. Business papers and clothes were scattered from one end of the room to the other. Every drawer of the bureau and dresser had been pulled open. The mattress lay halfway off the bed. The telephone stand, a few feet to the right and in front of the body, had been knocked over, and the telephone with the receiver off the hook lay on the floor. Even the carpet had been turned up in places by the murderer’s search.
“This is just the way you found the room?” I asked.
Sheriff Carter nodded. “I did pull the plug on the radio, but I didn’t touch the dials. It was blaring away so loud I couldn’t hear myself think.”
“That’s all right. What about the phone?”
“That’s the way I found it. I’ve had the operator plug out the connection on this room.”
I “dusted” and examined the reading-lamp but, as I had feared it would be, the effort was wasted. There were any number of fingerprints around the bloodstained base and the shade; but the tubular gooseneck, by which it must have been swung, had been wiped clean.
While I was taking the last of the many photographs necessary in such cases, Dr. E. E. Hutchinson, the autopsy physician, arrived. He expressed a tentative opinion that Trumbull had been dead little more than an hour, and that death had been almost instantaneous. He confirmed our belief that the lamp had been the murder weapon.
Following Dr. Hutchinson’s examination, Sheriff Carter and I inspected the body. Much to our surprise we discovered that the murdered man’s wallet, containing $411, was intact. Moreover, his expensive watch still reposed in his vest pocket.
Carter pushed back his hat. “Doesn’t look like robbery was the motive, does it, Chet?”
“Not for money, anyway,” I agreed. “Who discovered the murder?”
“Mr. Durkin, a business associate of Trumbull’s.” Carter jerked his head toward the connecting door. “Let’s go talk to him. He should be able to answer some questions by now.”
Samuel E. Durkin was lying on the bed in the adjoining room. A handsome, dark-haired man of about forty-five, he was smiling rather weakly at some pleasantry Deputy Sheriff Todd had made in an effort to take his mind from the tragedy.
Upon our entry he sat up and declared he was able and anxious to help us in any way that he could.
“When did you first learn of the murder?” I began.
“At a few minutes past 6 — perhaps 6:15.”
“How do you place the time?”
“I was talking to New York at 6 or a little after — it would be two hours later there, of course. And I must have talked about ten minutes. Almost as soon as I hung up the hotel operator rang back and asked me if I would look in Mr. Trumbull’s room. She said his telephone seemed to have been knocked over, and she was afraid he might have had an accident of some kind. I looked in, and—” He paused, gesturing toward the murder room.
“Was this connecting door unlocked between your rooms?”
“Yes.” Durkin seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “As a matter of fact, Trumbull and I were talking together this morning.”
“At what time?”
“Well — it was a few minutes after we got up. We both had calls for 5:30. We were catching the 6:30 plane for the East.”
“How long did you talk?”
“Not very long. Two or three minutes at the most.”
“Did you hear any commotion in there after you left?”
“I could hear the radio faintly, nothing else. These walls and doors are practically sound-proof, you know.”
Sheriff Carter cleared his throat. “Do you know of anyone who might have murdered Trumbull?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Your own relations were entirely friendly with him?”
“Certainly!” Then, as the sheriff stared at him thoughtfully, Durkin dropped his eyes and a wry smile came to his lips. “All right,” he admitted a little sheepishly, “we weren’t friendly. He’d defrauded me out of almost every cent I had. I tried to get him to square up this morning, and when he refused I called my attorney in New York.”
“Suppose you tell us the whole story,” Sheriff Carter suggested.
Durkin nodded soberly. “I retired from the retail drug business about three years ago because of ill health, but I wasn’t satisfied to sit around the rest of my life with no financial interests. A friend introduced me to Trumbull, and the next thing I knew I’d invested just about all my capital with him. It amounted to $85,000, to be exact. Well, I never received the return that I should, and these last few months I got nothing at all. I had what is known as a divided interest in the Trumbull properties. It was in certain specific wells, not the entire property. Trumbull tried to tell me the wells I was interested in had to be shut down indefinitely. Said they’d been overproduced and unless they got a rest they’d be ruined. That sounded pretty fishy to me, and I insisted on coming down here and looking around.
“I got an entirely new light on Trumbull from the people around here. I found that he’d pulled these shakedowns before, and I told him he wasn’t going to get away with it with me—”
Sheriff Carter held up his hand. “Just what was it he was trying to get away with?”
“Why, he was going to make my investment so unprofitable that I’d be glad to sell at any price!” Durkin’s voice rose indignantly. “He actually had the nerve to offer me $10,000 for it! And he had my hands tied. He’d kept controlling interest in those wells, and had the say-so about their operation.”