II
Things in Jones’s office were as Tompkins — who was shaking as if with the ague when we entered the room — had described them. In the outer office the lights were still burning as he had said he had left them. They disclosed to view a safe rather larger than the ordinary, the door of which was standing wide open. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents scattered about the floor.
Giving Dugan, who was a finger-print expert of more than ordinary ability, his instructions, the remainder of us entered the smaller office.
Jones was seated in a high-back, broad-armed, leather-upholstered chair, his right side turned toward the door. His body was slumped backward, his head hanging over the back of the chair in an indescribable — almost grotesque — position. His eyes were wide open, staring glassily at us. Never a handsome man, with his long hooked nose and thin, cadaverous face surmounted by its thatch of unkempt hair, in death he was positively repulsive.
From his left breast protruded the handle of a knife. It had evidently been driven from behind over his shoulder and with tremendous force straight to the heart. That death had been instantaneous there was not a doubt. A thin stream of blood had flown from the wound, staining the shirtfront a dull brownish crimson.
I took one of the old man’s claw-like hands in my own. The body was already beginning to grow cold. I deduced — and Moore and Miles agreed with me — that he had been dead at least an hour.
I turned to Tompkins, who had dropped into the nearest chair and was again sniveling to himself.
“Have you ever seen that knife before?” I asked, pointing to the weapon in the dead man’s breast.
Tompkins nodded.
“God! Yes!” he answered. “It was his. Somebody gave it to him once — always kept it on his desk for a paper weight and letter opener.”
I called Dugan from the other room.
“Look that knife-handle over for prints!” I told him.
The little detective busied himself with his magnifying glass for a brief time. Then he turned to me with a shrug of his thin shoulders.
“Th’ fellow that did this job didn’t even go to the trouble of wearin’ rubber gloves, Chief. He did the same with this handle that he did with the safe — wiped everything off with a cloth. Maybe used alcohol. There isn’t even a chicken track on either one of them!”
I turned to Moore.
“Find the caretaker and have him bring up the janitor who takes care of this floor,” I instructed.
Then I commanded Tompkins to make a hurried inventory of the contents of the safe. He skimmed over the various papers inside of the pigeonholes and on the floor, completing his task inside of five minutes.
“There was over five thousand dollars in there when I quit this afternoon,” he announced. “In addition several securities that I have noticed in one of the drawers — valued probably at ten or fifteen thousand — are gone. I know that they were there when I left the office, because the old man had been checking them over, and I saw him put ’em back. It was past banking hours, then, so that the thief must have taken them.”
I looked at Dugan.
“How was the box cracked?” I asked.
The little detective grinned.
“ ’Twasn’t cracked. Chief,” he answered. “The fellow that got inside that box worked the combination. The only fellow that I know who’s clever enough for such a job is Eddie New.”
The sniveling Tompkins let out a lusty squawk.
“I tell you it can’t be!” he wailed. “Nobody knew the combination except old Jones and myself!”
I turned to the telephone on the desk and called up Headquarters.
“Lenny,” I instructed the sergeant who answered, “look up the records and tell me where Eddie New is right now.”
In less than a minute the answer came back over the wire: “Chief, Eddie’s laid up with a broken leg — result of an automobile smashup — in Greely’s hangout. Got hurt the week after he got out of stir.”
I hung up the receiver with a bang.
Obviously the murderer and thief was not Eddie New, the only crook in the city really competent of opening a strictly modern safe such as that before us without damaging the mechanism. Nor was Eddie New the sort of man to commit a murder; he was of the more modern, “Jimmie Valentine” sort — clever with his fingers, clever with his head, planning his work as carefully as a business man plans his deals, guarding every contingency before taking a step.
There was a bare possibility that Jones had opened the safe himself while entertaining some visitor, and that later the visitor had taken his life and made away with the money and securities. But granting that such was the case, why had the murderer gone to the trouble of carefully wiping the finger prints off from the safe? For in such a case the only prints would be those of the dead man himself. Verily the affair was assuming some angles that gave food for thought.
III
Moore entered with Grady, the head janitor, and a pale, dull-appearing man whom he introduced as Billy Murphy, who, according to Grady, did the cleaning on the fifth floor. Tompkins identified him at once as the man he had seen cleaning the corridor at the time he made his escape from the office after discovering the murder.
Murphy, readily admitting that he had noticed Tompkins leave the office hurriedly about midnight, came forward with a story which complicated matters worse than ever:
He had been working some distance down the hallway between ten and eleven o’clock. At that time, chancing to pass Jones’s office, he had seen a light shining through the ground-glass door. About half an hour later, again passing the door, he had heard the sound of voices — one low and indistinct, the other plainly recognizable as that of the money lender himself.
He imagined that he had heard a cry. Yet he was not certain. At any rate, Jones’s voice had stopped suddenly, but inasmuch as he, Murphy, was moving down the corridor at the time, he had given the matter no more thought.
Later he remembered again passing the office and noticing that the light had been extinguished. That was all that he knew about the affair until he saw Tompkins rush out of the place about midnight.
The man was plainly nervous and ill at ease, as is usually the case of the more ignorant when brought face to face with the law for the first time. Yet something about his manner caused me to do some hurried thinking. When he had completed his story I ordered him searched.
Hidden in his inside coat pocket Moore found a package of bills amounting to nearly one thousand dollars!
IV
Whence came that money? Hundred-dollar-a-month janitors are not apt to be carrying huge amounts of cash about their clothes. Breaking down under our questioning he said that he had found the money in the hallway close to the door at the time he had passed the office a third time and discovered it dark. He was a poor man, he said, with a wife and family to support. He had at first intended turning the money in to Grady, his superior, but later decided to keep it, hiding it until the hue and cry which was certain to follow its loss had blown over, when he would bank it a small amount at a time.
There was nothing for me to do but hold William Murphy for the murder of Levi Jones.
He confessed.
Yet after he had admitted to the killing of Levi Jones I felt that he was a liar even though his confession as I had written it and with his rambling signature at the end lay before me. The pieces refused to dovetail together.