“Yoakum, Bill Yoakum.”
“I’d like to ask you a question or two, Mr. Yoakum, if you don’t mind. Were you at home on the night of Saturday, April third, the night of the murder?”
“Yep. All evening.”
“Did you hear or see anything unusual?”
Mr. Yoakum grinned, as though at some secret joke. “I sure didn’t,” he replied.
“Nothing whatever?”
“Absolutely nothin’.”
“When did you first know of the murder. What time, I mean.”
“Let’s see, Monday morning,” replied the janitor, still grinning.
“Monday morning!” exclaimed Dan in amazement. “Do you mean you didn’t hear of it till thirty-six hours afterward?”
“I sure didn’t.”
“How was that?”
“Well, you see,” replied Mr. Yoakum slowly, as though regretful that his joke must end, “I didn’t get here till Monday morning.”
“But you said you were at home—”
“Sure, I was home, so I wasn’t here. I was janitor down on Ninety-eighth Street then. You see, I’ve only been here about ten days. I came after the murder was all over, though I had to clean up after it.”
Mr. Yoakum cackled. Dan interrupted him:
“So you weren’t here a week ago Saturday?”
“I sure wasn’t.”
“Do you know who was janitor here before you?”
“Nope. Don’t know a thing about him, only he sure put the hot-water boiler on the bum. He was ignorant, that’s all I know.”
So there was nothing to be learned from Mr. Yoakum, except the name and address of the agent of the apartment house. Dan wrote this down in a memorandum book, refused Mr. Yoakum’s offer of a glass of beer, and left to go above to the ground floor, where he rang the bell of the tenant on the right. By then it was nearly seven o’clock, and quite dark outdoors, but the amateur detective had no thought of halting his investigations for anything so trivial as dinner.
His ring was answered by a woman in a dirty blue kimono, who informed him that she had lived in the house only two months; that she had never seen the murdered woman, and that she didn’t want to talk about so disgusting a subject as murder anyhow. The other flat on the ground floor was vacant.
Dan mounted a flight of stairs and tried again.
Here he had better luck. He was told by a pale young woman in a kitchen apron that she had spoken many times to the murdered woman, who had lived there under the name of Miss Alice Reeves. Miss Reeves had been an old tenant; she had been there when the pale young woman came, and that was over two years ago.
She had been very pretty, with dark eyes and hair, and a beautiful complexion; she was always quiet and reserved, not mixing with anyone; she had sometimes had callers, especially one gentleman, who came quite often. The pale young woman had never got a good look at him, having seen him only on the dark stairs; besides, he had always worn a sort of a muffler over the lower part of his face, so she couldn’t describe him except to say that he was rather tall and very well dressed and distinguished-looking. She wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him.
Yes, said the pale young woman, they had a new janitor. She didn’t know what had become of the old one, who had been a little gray-haired Irishman named Cummings. He had been there Saturday evening to take off the garbage, but at midnight, the time of the murder, he could not be found, nor did he return on Sunday; they had been compelled to go without hot water all day. Monday morning the new man was sent up by the agent. He wasn’t as good as Cummings, who had been very capable and obliging.
It took an hour for the pale young woman to tell Dan all she knew.
At the other flat on that floor he found a new tenant, who could tell him nothing. Another flight up and he was on the floor on which Mrs. Mount, or Alice Reeves, had lived. Here, in the flat across the hall from hers, he met a Tartar in the person of an old music teacher who said that he lived there alone with his wife; that he never poked his nose into other people’s business, and that he expected them to do the same.
Dan retreated in good order.
On the two top floors he had no better luck; he found no one who had known Miss Reeves, though some had seen her often; nor could he get any description of the mysterious caller who, according to the pale young woman, had always worn a muffler across the lower part of his face. He did find the persons who had arrived first at the scene of the murder, a young husband and wife on the floor above.
Their story tallied with Mount’s; they had been attracted by his scream, which they described as piercing and terrible, and, running down to Miss Reeves’s flat, they had found her lying on the floor in a pool of blood, with Mount, the dripping knife in his hand, standing above her. It was the young husband who had summoned the police. According to him, Mount had appeared absolutely dazed — half mad, in fact. He had made no attempt whatever to get away, but had remained kneeling over the dead body of his wife until the arrival of the police.
But Dan’s greatest disappointment was that he was unable to find among the tenants any trace of the man who, according to Mount’s story, was standing in the lower hall with a suitcase in his hand when Mount entered. No one had seen him or knew anything about him.
It was a quarter to nine when Dan found himself again on the street.
A block or two down Broadway he entered a dairy lunchroom for a sandwich and a glass of milk, after which he sought the subway on the downtown side. The train was well filled, though it was too late for the theater crowd, for everybody is always going somewhere in New York. At the Ninety-sixth Street station Dan got out, walked two blocks north on Broadway, and over to West End Avenue, and entered the marble reception hall of an ornate apartment house.
“I want to see Mr. Leg,” he said to the West Indian at the switchboard. “Tell him it’s Dan Culp.”
The negro threw in a plug and presently spoke into the transmitter:
“Thirty-four? Don Koolp to see Mr. Leg. All right, sir.”
He disposed of Dan with a lordly gesture toward the elevator.
Mr. Leg appeared to be surprised, even alarmed, at the unexpected visit from his office boy. Dan, ushered in by the manservant, found his employer entertaining four or five friends in a session of the national game — not baseball.
“What is it, Dan? Something happened?” queried the lawyer, advancing to meet the youth at the door with a pair of kings in his hand.
“No, sir. That is, nothing important. I just wanted to find out if you got a photograph of Mount.”
“Yes, the police let me have a copy of the one taken for the gallery.”
“May I have it, sir? I’m going up to the drugstore to see if they remember seeing him there.”
“By Jove, you are certainly on the job,” smiled the lawyer. “Yes, of course you can have it.” He went to a desk at the other end of the room and returned with a small unmounted photograph. “Here you are. But what’s the hurry? Couldn’t you have gone tomorrow just as well?”
“No, sir. You see, he was there at night, just about this time, so I’m more apt to find somebody who saw him. I didn’t want to wait till tomorrow night.” The youth appeared to hesitate, then continued, “There was something else, sir. May I have your night pass to the office building? I want to go down and look at something.”
The lawyer’s smile became a little impatient. “Well, really now, Dan, isn’t that a little bit unnecessary? It isn’t long till tomorrow morning.”
“All right, sir, if you don’t want—”
“Oh, I don’t care. Wait a minute. I don’t know where the blamed thing is.”
This time Mr. Leg had to search for what he wanted, and it was finally found hidden under some papers in the bottom drawer of his desk.