“Using the glass cutter, he got in at the window. But, while he was searching the place, the Major and Pauline returned unexpectedly, trapping him there. He picked up the bull-hook and ducked into the wardrobe. When Pauline left, the Major opened the wardrobe to get his slicker. O’Halloran knocked him out with the elephant hook to prevent recognition. He finished his search and found that the reason the Major had always locked his trailer was because he had a bank roll there — the remainder of the Duke’s initial payment after Saturday’s salary payoff. But far worse, he found that the Major’s heart, which he hadn’t known was bad, had stopped.
“He was in a jam. He didn’t want to lam without the money he had committed murder to get. An investigation would endanger his impersonation of Towne and probably scare off Paula and the Duke before he could hijack them. That left only one course. He had to make the murder look like an accident and no questions asked. He refrained from touching the Major’s money so its absence wouldn’t contradict the accident setup. We didn’t find it there later because Pauline had removed it the next morning, and Schafer didn’t find it when he searched Pauline’s trailer because she had it, with the will, in bed with her.
“Then, when he thought his staged auto-smash had gotten by nicely, Harte and myself arrived; and he began to worry. Not knowing why Pauline had visited my shop or what was behind her apparent vanish from it, he couldn’t understand where we fitted into the case and decided we needed some investigation. Then, ironically, although he himself was familiar with pickpocket argot, he wasn’t aware that the real Towne knew any; and he made the mistake of denying such knowledge.[9] He didn’t know this was an error then, but later he got a jolt when, listening at the trailer window, he not only heard us shoot holes in his phony accident but also heard Pauline announce that what she had to say would make headlines. He knew that meant that she suspected Paula and the Duke, and was intending to stool on them. This in itself, later proved to be a clue to the murderer’s identity since it meant that only someone knowing the Headless Lady’s identity could have translated Pauline’s cryptic statement.
“O’Halloran still hadn’t gotten his dukes on the money, and he saw that unless he could quiet Pauline he never would. His flair for the impromptu showed itself here when he quickly concocted one of the year’s better pieces of dirty work. With Pauline engaged in her perilous and dizzy feats aloft, he unplugged the light cable — a murder attempt that left no clues at all, that was simple and direct to the point of genius. The only reason he didn’t plug the cable in again, making the light failure not only clueless but downright mysterious, was that he wanted to prolong the confusion the lack of light caused. Harte incidentally mentioned the point that a circus person wouldn’t have counted on Pauline’s being killed in such a fall. That was the reason I began to suspect that the murderer might not be a circus person — a deduction which made me give O’Halloran some serious consideration.
“You will also notice that he made no serious attempt to dish up any alibis, but instead promptly did something of even more importance. He hotfooted it back to the Major’s trailer. Finding us gone, as he hoped he would, he destroyed or made off with all the evidence in the matter of the auto accident. He wiped away the rubber glove prints and took the hat, the broken lens pieces, and the photo. This effectively staved off any immediate official investigation.
“The important thing after that was speed. I think, like ourselves, he saw the Duke enter Pauline’s trailer and decided against a holdup on the circus lot as being too risky. The Duke was the sort of person who would start shooting, and the battle would bring the whole show down around their ears. So he lay low, thought hard, and during the night his criminally fertile mind hatched the plan of the chalked arrow which early the next morning sidetracked Paula down a little-frequented road. He held her up, handkerchief over his face probably, and knocked her out. This next, I’ll admit, is guesswork based on the finding of a gun among Paula’s effects. Mindful of the fact that the night before he had struck the Major too hard, he now pulled his punch too much; and, while he was in the trailer finding the money, Paula came to and put her head in at the door, gun in hand. O’Halloran managed to fire first — but got her in the head.
“Dilemma. He now had the money, but also another body, a body whose head held a bullet from his gun. He knew only too well that the rifling marks on the slug could be matched with the gun. He couldn’t discard the gun without arousing suspicion, and he couldn’t get a substitute. He had neither time nor instruments to probe for the bullet. Someone might drive down that road at any moment and catch him red-handed. But if he conceals the body and removes Paula’s luggage so that she appears to have decamped, he again conceals the fact of murder. Then he got too fancy.
“He had been the eavesdropper at our hotel-room door and had heard me deduce the use of the rubber gloves. He saw that if he planted the gloves and the torn envelope in the trailer, so that they looked hidden but would be sure to be found, suspicion might be switched to Paula, Harte, and myself; and the official investigators, when they arrived eventually, could be expected to ride off in all directions after a vanished and impossible to find Paula. In addition, since he now had the money, he could dispense with the false whiskers of the Stuart Towne impersonation, disclose himself as a detective, and join the hunt — with the quarry everyone is chasing, reposing secure, but dead, in the trunk compartment of his own car!”
“And,” Gavigan added, “once that happened he’d have all the time he wanted to remove the incriminating bullet and dispose of the body miles away. He could even arrest the Duke to make his intentions look good and collect the reward! I hope I never meet any more murderers like him.”
“No, Inspector,” Merlini contradicted. “He’s the kind you want to hope for. He did make those boners, you know.”
Schafer said, “That sounds like a watertight schedule. Why didn’t he go through with it?”
Merlini said, “He couldn’t start that train of action until someone had found the empty trailer; and he’d rather not do it himself — though if he had, he might have pulled it off. He came back to the hotel and put on his shaving-in-the-bathroom act for my benefit. That was the nearest he came to attempting an alibi, and it was an error.
“Then Fate did him dirt. Because I happen to collect circus posters, I had to be the one to find the arrow on the pole and discover the trailer. I realized that the arrow pointed directly to foul play. If Tex, as Harte wanted to have it, had driven Pauline down that road to her death and a substitution of identities with Paula, there’d have been no necessity for the arrow. The arrow indicated foul play, and the absence of the rug suggested blood, and thus — murder.
9
O’Halloran, once on the force, had been a member of the pickpocket squad. Most dicks or cops, however, are not familiar with the argot since criminals seldom choose them to confide in. You can test the truth of this by trying Farmer’s argot anecdote from Chapter Fourteen on your official friends.