He crossed the room, went through a second room that was bare of all decorations and contained a long bench, a dozen chairs and another makeshift table of boards on which stood a half empty whiskey bottle and glass. Cassidy scowled at it and went on into a smaller room at the back. There he stopped.
Here, too, there was the same barrenness of discarded and insufficient furniture. But on the floor next to a canvas cot lay the body of a man.
He was about thirty-five and powerfully built. He had dark, straight hair and thick, flat lips. The body lay on its face, one arm outstretched. There was blood beneath it, apparently from a chest wound, and the blue eyes stared sightlessly.
For form’s sake, Cassidy bent down and felt for the pulse. There was no beat to it and the wrist felt cool. When he released his hold, the arm dropped with a thud. Rigor mortis hadn’t started yet.
Cassidy touched nothing. The experts would be here soon and he’d have to wait till they did their stuff. His job was to get spot impressions and to start things rolling. He’d do the leg work and then later on he’d have all the headaches. Right now, there was the sunburnt man in the front room. Cassidy turned his back on the corpse and retraced his steps.
He asked his questions in a dry, patient voice that seemed interested in eliciting facts and nothing else. He kept jotting down the endless information in a small notebook with a torn cover.
The dapper man said that he was an air-raid warden, that his name was Arthur Kraus and that he was married and lived at 298 West 86th Street.
“Know Clyde Warner’s address?” asked Cassidy.
“No, but you can look it up. In the file box.” Kraus approached the table and halted suddenly. “That’s funny,” he said.
“What?”
“The file box. The cards with the names and addresses of all the wardens. It’s always there, on the table.”
“Maybe it’s in the next room. What did it look like?”
“A cardboard box, mottled like marble. It was about sixteen inches long and five inches wide. We used four-by-five filing cards. The box has to be there.”
Cassidy turned to one of the precinct patrolmen. “See if you can find it, Jim.” He stared thoughtfully at Kraus. “All right — go ahead.”
The warden explained that sector headquarters, under the reorganization which had taken place a few months previously, had to be manned twenty-four hours a day. The men divided up the night work. Some of them took two four-hour shifts a week; others, like Warner, preferred to put in a single eight-hour stretch and get it over with. At 8 A.M. they went off duty, in time to freshen up and reach their offices on schedule. Since the women who manned headquarters during the day didn’t report until nine, there was a gap of one hour. Kraus, being his own boss, filled in three times a week. If he was late getting to his office, it didn’t matter.
Cassidy frowned. Kraus was full of meaningless details, but the detective didn’t stop him. There might be something of importance, something unusual. Like the missing file box.
The patrolman returned and reported that he couldn’t find it. There were no places in the sparsely furnished apartment where a file box could get lost or be hidden. Why wasn’t it there? Who’d want to take a thing like that? What for?
Kraus kept talking. He liked to report a few minutes ahead of time. It meant nothing to him, but the men who were on duty all night were tired and—
Cassidy interrupted. “Men?”
“Yes. There are always two, except when I’m here from eight to nine.”
“Who was on with Warner?”
Kraus picked up the big black book. There were blanks for names and hours of duty. He pointed to the last item.
“Clyde Warner, David Schirmer. 12:01 A.M. till—” No further entry had been made.
Here was something at last. Two men had signed in at midnight. In the morning only one of them was there, and he was dead.
“Where does Schirmer live?” asked Cassidy.
Kraus shrugged. “His address is in that file box,” he said. “Listen — it must be here.”
Cassidy walked over to one of the charts. On it, he read, “Sector Commander, Herbert Streit, 267 West 87th Street. Trafalgar 7-0800.” The Sector Commander — he might know.
He instructed a patrolman to call Streit from outside. Nobody must touch the phone here. There might be fingerprints.
The next hour or so must have been a nightmare for Cassidy. The Headquarters staff arrived, the Medical Examiner arrived, the inspector of the division, the acting captains of the district and of the detective division arrived. The experts snapped pictures, dusted for fingerprints, examined the corpse. And meantime the Sector Commander and the Zone Commander of the Air Raid Service showed David Schirmer, the missing warden, lived in a furnished room at 323 West 88th Street.
Cassidy transferred himself to the meeting room with the long wooden bench. He asked his questions methodically. The brass hats interrupted and he had to bring all of them up to date, but he kept doggedly to his line of inquiry.
Herbert Streit, the Sector Commander, was a tall, serious man with thin shoulders and a tired face.
“I’m Streit,” he drawled. “Of Streit and Galbraith, Advertising.”
“So? What do you know about these two men? David Schirmer, Clyde Warner.”
Streit sat down. He was too tall to be comfortable in the folding chair and he kept wrestling with it, twisting his long legs around it and sliding gradually toward the edge.
Schirmer, he stated, was waiting for his induction notice and had volunteered to take charge of headquarters whenever necessary. He was on twice a week. Streit hadn’t met him until a few months before, when the air-raid service had started to function, but he had found him exceptionally likable.
Streit shifted to Clyde Warner. The latter was without question the most disliked man in the organization. He was bossy and aggressive and had threatened to resign unless he was made a squad leader. As a jewelry salesman, he was accustomed to carrying valuable merchandise. For that reason he had a pistol permit. When he reported for duty, he always placed his gun ostentatiously on the table, as if he were the real stuff and everyone else an amateur. His manner had made him many enemies. Streit was one of them.
He hesitated, as if he were not sure whether it was wise to proceed. Then, after a short pause, he hooked his leg through the chair rung and went on with his story.
Headquarters had been furnished almost entirely by the wardens and their families, he explained, and it was they who had contributed money for office supplies, phone service and other basic essentials. Despite a specific order to the effect that the Air Warden Service had no right to collect funds, Streit had written to a few residents in the sector suggesting that donations would not be amiss. Warner had heard of this and reported it to the Mayor, who had demanded Streit’s resignation. He had tendered it yesterday. The incident had caused considerable ill-feeling.
“You mean you had an argument with Warner?”
Streit smiled for the first time. “I was more inclined to thank him. The headaches I’ve had over this, the responsibility and the demands on my time and purse — they’re over at last. Do you know that I haven’t had a free evening since the war started?”
It sounded plausible and Cassidy made no comment. He picked up the log book and read off the names of the two men who had been on the eight-to-twelve shift.
“They’d know who came on at midnight,” he said. “See if you can locate them and get them here, without telling them why.”
Streit nodded and, with an expression of relief, got up and went toward the phone. Cassidy headed for the back of the room to examine the small pile of objects taken from the dead man’s pockets.