Shortly after the assemblage was dismissed the detectives came downstairs and reported: “Not a damn thing. Not a scrap. Not a single print on anything anywhere.”
Fox grunted, “Gone for the duration.”
“And now,” Damon said bitterly, “the police will investigate. We’ll find taxi drivers who picked her up in front of the Public Library. Fine. After losing a night’s sleep what do I know that I didn’t know before? That Piscus means fish.”
“Oh, I know more than that,” Fox declared. “Lots more. For example, that fish have gills. As in Ted Gill. Or that Dolphie or Dolphin is a common diminutive for men named Adolph, and a dolphin is a fish—”
“Nuts,” Damon said, and stamped out.
Chapter 15
For three days a hundred detectives plodded or darted around, as their various natures impelled them, in a dogged and desperate search for the spoor of Mr. Fish — or rather, of Mrs. Harriet Piscus. They found traces but no trail. A dozen taxi drivers were unearthed who had picked up a person in female clothing, wearing a mourning veil, and driven her to the Bolton Apartments. The pickups had all been in the midtown section, mostly, it appeared, near subway kiosks. All efforts to back-trail had failed. Another trace was discovered at the address on 51st Street where Fox had gone Monday night expecting to occupy a bed and had found that Perry Dunham’s apartment had been visited by a hurricane. On that afternoon, Monday, the elevator had had a passenger meeting the specifications; the operator remembered it because the passenger had alighted at the third floor, where a small salon had a showing of racing prints, and he had thought it odd that a woman in mourning should be out after pictures of race horses. To walk upstairs from the third to the sixth would have been simple, though there would still have remained the detail of getting into the Dunham apartment.
The third and last race, though a dead end like the others, was the most significant of all — at least to Tecumseh Fox, when Inspector Damon told him about it. With stubborn and inexhaustible patience a squad had been assigned to recheck recent sales of potassium cyanide, and had learned that on Monday morning a clerk at Dickson’s, the wholesale chemists on Second Avenue, had sold 500 cubic centimeters of oil of mirbane to a big woman with a squeaky voice wearing a mourning veil.
Damon was half frantic. “It was her,” he declared with gloomy conviction. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t!”
“Him,” Fox corrected.
“Okay, him! And he’s got it and he’s a murderer and he’s going to use it! You know what oil of mirbane is, it’s nitrobenzene, and it’s so deadly that if you just drop a spoonful on your skin...”
Fox pretended to listen to a recital of the properties of nitrobenzene and the apprehensions of the inspector regarding the use Fish-Piscus intended to make of that particular bottle of it. He did not share the apprehensions, for he judged that it had taken all of 500 cubic centimeters to make the splash that had so narrowly missed him when he pushed Diego Zorilla’s door open Monday afternoon. But still he restrained the impulse to relieve the inspector’s mind, knowing that no subtlety or brutality of police technique could loosen Diego’s tongue.
However, it was beginning to look as if Diego was the only hope. Fox had handed Mr. Fish over to the police because it was precisely the sort of thing their methods and equipment can handle vastly better than any private cleverness; and they had failed, which was astonishing. If Fish-Piscus was a man and a murderer, he was either the luckiest or the shrewdest one on the long list Fox had known.
And Inspector Damon, in something approaching a panic at the news that Piscus, presumably in his proper and unknown guise, was freshly armed with a bottle of nitrobenzene, had lost his head. The preceding evening, Friday, he had gone to Garda Tusar and exposed his hand by making a direct attack. Garda had smilingly told him that she got phone calls from many people, but not, as far as she could remember, from anyone named Fish; Frida was always getting names wrong; surely she was not legally or morally obliged to justify her practice of giving her maid an afternoon off now and then; she had never seen or heard of Mrs. Harriet Piscus. She had few contacts with the other tenants.
To Fox, Damon confessed that the frontal assault had been a blunder. In spite of the shadowing of Garda which had been ordered, Fish-Piscus could be, and certainly would be, warned. The vigil being maintained for her-him, inside and outside of the Bolton Apartments, might as well be abandoned. Also useless now were the tailings of Beck, Pomfret, Zorilla, Gill and Koch, in hopeful expectation of a lead to some side-street furnished room and a metamorphosis there into Mrs. Harriet Piscus.
Damon’s confession went further, if not to defeat, at least to stalemate. During the three days’ intensive and relentless hunt for Fish-Piscus, other angles had not been neglected. They had gone the limit with Koch about the vase, Hebe Heath about the violin and the whisky bottle, Dora about the second note Jan Tusar had or hadn’t left, with everyone about everything, including Mrs. Pomfret about the private life of her son. The press was getting sarcastic and the police commissioner outspoken; and Irene Dunham Pomfret had an appointment to see the mayor at ten o’clock in the morning, together with the district attorney.
And Damon was lighting cigarettes and crushing them out not half smoked. That was more significant than any verbal confession whatever. Fox had seen him do that only once before, during the Hatcher case four years ago, and that case was still unsolved.
So, Fox decided as he drove uptown, the only hope was Diego. Either another try at Diego or go on marking time as he had done for the past three days, waiting for the police to flush Fish-Piscus, and he had had enough of that.
But the try at Diego had to be postponed. At the address on 54th Street Fox mounted the two flights of stairs, found that the door had been equipped with a new lock, rang the bell half a dozen times, and got no response. He sat on the top step for an hour, gave it up, returned to his car, drove home, and went to bed. In the morning, Saturday, he arose at six, was headed for the city before seven, and exactly at eight o’clock put his thumb on the bell push at Diego’s flat. He could hear the sound of the bell within, and in a moment a gruff calclass="underline"
“Who is it?”
“Fox.”
A long pause, then: “What do you want?”
“I want to talk with you and I’m going to.”
Another pause, footsteps, and the door opened.
Diego was in pajamas. He had been got out of bed and he assuredly did not reciprocate his visitor’s desire for a talk, but politeness was in his bones, and he opened the door wide for Fox to enter, closed it, and indicated a chair.
“This disorder,” he rumbled apologetically. “I came home late. Drunk. It’s chilly in here.” He went to close a window and came back and sat down. “I’ve been rude to you on the phone. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go on being rude.”
“I don’t mind.” Fox grinned at him. “I’m hoping to talk you out of it. I know who killed Jan Tusar and Perry Dunham.”
Diego, bleary-eyed, hunched in his chair, blinked. He straightened up and blinked again. “The devil you do,” he said quietly.
“Yup. I do. But I can’t prove it.”
“You don’t have to prove it to me.” Obviously Diego did not mean to be stampeded; he intended to remain imperturable and noncommittal; but involuntarily he pronounced a name. “Koch,” he said, barely audible, and was immediately irritated that the sound had escaped him. He clamped his jaw and glared.