“I’m coming to that,” Carter went on, his voice a low, even drone. “Nobody touched Trumbull’s lamp until after he was dead.” The old man left his post by the connecting door and knelt beside the murder weapon, picking up the plug. “This lamp never came out of that base outlet over there. The metal of the plug prongs is soft. They’re scratched by the contacts in the base outlet. If we photograph these scratches and enlarge them, every base outlet in the hotel will be found to leave a different pattern on the prongs of a plug. Now, are you going to make us go to all that trouble of collecting the evidence or are you going to admit that you took your own lamp, from your own room, and beat Trumbull to death with it?”
Joe and I had been so absorbed with Ike’s analysis of the intricate modus operandi that Durkin managed to dash past both of us. In a split second he had vanished into his own room, slammed the door and bolted it.
Sheriff Ike crossed the room with a single bound. His .45 appeared in his gnarled right hand and the air of the bedroom jarred with the concussion as he fired a slug into the lock. His shoulder against the door sent it crashing in and we heard a sharp crack and a howl of pain.
When we got in Durkin was holding his right wrist. A little .25 Colt automatic lay on the floor. Sheriff Carter stood by easily, his right wrist braced against his hip, the muzzle of his revolver covering the cowering man.
“Get that little popgun, Joe, and then put the cuffs on him. Then you might tell the hotel doc to hurry up here. This fellow looks like he’s going to faint.”
Durkin did, indeed, seem on the point of collapse. When he had been handcuffed the sheriff pushed him back onto the bed and spread a blanket over him. “You ought to be glad this is 1939 and not 1879,” he told the trembling prisoner. “In the old days when two fellows had a falling out and settled it with artillery the one that came out alive was pretty sure of getting a square deal. But what our folks never did like was the kind of killer that would snake around and try to pin it on an innocent man. You’ll have your chance in court but I’m telling you that in the old days you’d have worn a rawhide necktie quicker than I can tell you about it.”
Durkin stopped trembling and suddenly sat up, his eyes gleaming. “He deserved killing! He beat me out of every cent I had. And he had millions!”
“Take it easy, son. You don’t, by law, have to say a word from here until they strap you into a chair.”
“I want to talk. I’ve got to. I’m guilty. I killed him. But it wasn’t planned beforehand. If I’d planned to kill him, I’d have used my own gun, wouldn’t I? Well, I didn’t. I went into his room this morning and tried to persuade him to do the right thing by me. I warned him that I was calling my attorneys and was going to start suit. He laughed at me. He admitted he’d swindled me but he’d kept within the law. I tried to plead with him but he turned the radio up and drowned me out. I ran back in here. Then I opened the door to try arguing with him and he was sitting there laughing at the ceiling in triumph. I snatched up my lamp and hit him!” The man’s breath was coming back and a little color returned to his lips.
“Everything else happened just the way you guessed it. I switched the lamps afterward. I tried to switch the rug and the old man with it. I couldn’t quite make it so I tore up the rest of the room and I rigged the telephone with the bureau scarf. The radio was still blasting away and I closed the door and left one corner of the scarf under it. I lay down on the floor while I was talking to New York and could just reach that corner under the door and I pulled it and upset the phone. I... I had to think fast. I didn’t figure anybody would be charged with it; I thought that it would be unsolved. All I wanted was time to get away.”
Taken before County Attorney Radford, Durkin unprotestingly signed a formal confession to the crime. He was lodged in the cell only recently vacated by the bellboy, Jack Sibbons.
On October 18th, 1939, in the District Court of Judge Robert Lee Arrowman, Samuel Durkin was allowed to enter a plea of guilty to a charge of manslaughter in the first degree. After the brief technicality of a trial, he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment in the state penitentiary where he still remains.
Six months ago an ingenious jail-break plot was uncovered in the penitentiary. The details have never been made public but the warden has intimated that the brain of Samuel Durkin was behind it.
Lawrence Treat
Few writers can claim to have sired a genre. Lawrence Treat is among the exceptional few. Before Ed McBain, J. J. Marric, and Dell Shannon, Treat was dazzling readers with his police procedural novels — and he’s continued to do so for nearly forty years. Always taut, always engrossing, he’s focused upon the detailed investigation of a crime told from the standpoint of the police. Whether concentrating on forensics, the mind-set of various detectives, or the painstaking checking and following of leads, Treat’s books have always been starkly realistic in detail. The story you are about to read is also a police procedural, a real one. Not content to present a drab account of a policeman’s heroics, Treat brings us the story of a New York City cop’s first big murder investigation — his sense of doubt, purpose, insecurity. And, sure, the noble cop ultimately triumphs against evil (it wouldn’t have appeared in Master Detective if he didn’t), but it is a harder-fought battle than most, and it is we, the readers, who reap the spoils of his victory.
The Body in Sector R
At 8:07 A.M. on September 10th, 1942, a police car drew up in front of the big apartment house at 252 West 87th Street and parked alongside a pair of radio cars. Detectives Clarence F. Cassidy and Walter Nitkin, of the New York police, got out, followed by two patrolmen.
Cassidy was a veteran officer, twenty-two years on the force and fourteen of them with the rank of detective. Homicides had rarely come his way. He’d worked on several of them in a subordinate capacity, but only once before had he had a real murder case all to himself, and that had been a routine stabbing, with the identity of the criminal as obvious as a red hat.
Cassidy had just passed his forty-seventh birthday, but he looked older. His hair was completely gray; his face was lined and patterned like a piece of ancient leather. His eyes blue-gray and keen, seemed the only vital part of him. You’d have taken him for a sea captain, just off a long, tired stretch on the convoy routes.
He was the first to enter the building. At the foot of the steel fire steps he spotted the insignia of the Air Warden Service tacked over a sign reading “Headquarters, Sector R.” An arrow pointed upwards and Cassidy climbed up the stairs.
A uniformed patrolman from one of the radio cars was guarding the door to a rear apartment. There, too, Cassidy noticed the air wardens’ insignia.
“Where’s the body?” asked Cassidy.
The patrolman motioned inside. “In the back room. This guy found it.”
“It’s Clyde Warner, one of our wardens,” piped up a small, dapper man.
Cassidy studied him. He had good, even features and a neat little black mustache. His face was tanned, as if from a sun lamp or a vacation. Cassidy noted the fact with the same precise observation that took in the room. A plank table with some stationery and a large, black ledger on it. Three charts tacked on the bare walls. A few bridge chairs, a broken down couch. Buckets, stirrup pumps, a shovel. Blackout curtains.