“He was laid out in a manner remarkably similar to the way you left him after beating him up,” I said. “How do you explain that?”
“I don’t have to. Ask his killer when you catch him. Sergeant, I was listening to a radio news report of the murder when the cops arrived to arrest me. It said Walt had three hundred dollars on him. I sure as hell wouldn’t have left that if I’d killed him. I’m practically broke.”
“You have pretty good prospects if you beat this bust,” I said. “I imagine your ex-wife, whom I assume you also plan to make your future wife, will inherit half interest in Schroeder-Moore.”
“But I never left the house last night, Sergeant. Janet verified that.”
“You both lied,” I said flatly. “Let’s not beat about the bush, Clayton. I know you had a nine o’clock appointment with Schroeder last night.”
He blinked. After a moment he said in a depressed voice, “You talked to Walt’s secretary, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Her call surprised the devil out of me. As Jan told you, Walt had phoned her at noon about picking up some stuff he still had at the house, and as usual she bugged him about settling with me. But he hadn’t committed himself to anything, and she said he didn’t sound too encouraging. Then I get a call from his secretary that he wants me to drop by his place to work out the details of the settlement. But he wasn’t home when I got there.”
“No?” I said unbelievingly.
“Honest. I waited around until past ten, ringing the bell periodically, but he never answered.”
“Anybody see you waiting around?”
“A couple of tenants once. But that’s no help to me, because it only proves I was there. I had Jan’s car, and most of the time I waited in it. About every ten minutes I went in to ring the bell, and once a couple got off the elevator and went into an apartment down the hall while I was ringing. That was about quarter to ten.” The admission that he was at the murdered man’s door only a short time before Schroeder probably died cinched it for me. I suspected he had mentioned it only because he had been seen and wanted to get in an advance explanation before I talked to the witnesses.
I took him down to the booking desk, had him booked and put into a holding cell at Central District.
That night when my wife Maggie and I settled in the front room after dinner, we as usual split the evening paper. She always started with Section A, while I got first crack at the sports pages.
We had been silently reading for only a few minutes when she said, “You didn’t tell me you had that awful Forest Park case.”
“I try to forget my work when I get home,” I said.
“The killer certainly had a macabre sense of humor, leaving a flower clasped in the poor man’s hands.”
“Yeah, he sure did.”
“What kind of flower was it?”
“A dandelion.”
“That doesn’t seem very appropriate,” Maggie said.
I lowered my paper to look at her. “Appropriate?”
“In the language of flowers a dandelion stands for coquetry. Whoever heard of a man being guilty of that?”
“I don’t think the killer was using the flower as code,” I said. “I think he picked a dandelion because it was the only kind of flower growing in the immediate area.”
“Oh,” Maggie said. “Perhaps you’re right.”
The next morning I found a preliminary postmortem report on my desk. Five.38 caliber lead slugs had been dug from the corpse of Walter Schroeder, two of them good enough for comparison purposes if we ever turned up the murder weapon. The others had been smashed out of shape by hitting bones. Estimated time of death had been reduced from the original span of six hours to between ten p.m. and midnight.
There was also an envelope on my desk containing the photographs Art Ward had taken. Among them were the two close-ups of the heel-print on the victim’s forehead, blown up to actual size.
I had logged in a few minutes before eight. It was just eight when I finished looking at the photographs. I switched on the transistor radio on my desk for the eight o’clock news.
Murder is too common in any big city to create much stir ordinarily, but the bizarre circumstances of this one had caught the public’s imagination, so that it was the top local news story of the moment. The first item of the newscast concerned the Schroeder case.
The newscaster said: A new development in the grotesque murder of Walter Schroeder was the arrest late yesterday afternoon of Samuel Clayton, thirty-seven, the first husband of the victim’s widow. Police have released no information as to what evidence led to the arrest, but circumstances of the murder were remarkably similar to those of an assault on the murdered man by the suspect two years ago. In that instance Clayton served eighteen months in prison for beating Schroeder unconscious. While in prison, his wife divorced him and married Schroeder. Clayton was released on parole only seventeen days ago, and this station has learned the Schroeders were separated at the time of the murder and Samuel Clayton and his former wife had reconciled. Schroeders dead body was found in Forest Park yesterday morning, both shot and beaten, and with a flower clasped in his hands. Coincidentally, when Clayton left him beaten unconscious two years ago, Schroeder was also found with a flower clasped in his hands.
My conversation with Maggie the previous night popped into my mind. Switching off the radio, I started making phone calls. When I finished, I knew the wrong man was in jail for the murder.
I was driving along Chouteau toward Spring when another brainstorm hit me. It wasn’t exactly a hunch, but merely a passing thought that the motive for the murder might have something to do with company business. Then it occurred to me that the quickest way to find out if there were anything wrong with the business would be from its auditors.
I cut north to Lindell Boulevard, and fifteen minutes later I was talking to Thomas Austin, C.P.A., who had done the audit of Schroeder-Moore’s books.
It was pushing nine-thirty when I finally got to the Schroeder-Moore Electronics Company. The redheaded Marybell greeted me cordially.
“Your boss in?” I asked.
“Yes. You can go right in, Sergeant.”
“I would like you to come along,” I said. “This concerns both of you.”
Her eyebrows went up, but she obediently rose and preceded me to the door of Jacob Moore’s private office. Opening it, she said. “Sergeant Harris is here, honey. He wants to talk to both of us.”
Moore, behind his desk, gave me a welcoming smile. “Come in, Sergeant.”
I went in and closed the door behind me. Marybell took a chair and looked at me expectantly. I remained standing, but moved over nearer the desk.
I said, “Mr. Moore, I’m curious to hear how you knew the flower clasped in the hands of your dead partner was a dandelion.”
His smile became a frown. “I heard it on the air.”
I gave my head a slow shake. “It was reported simply as a flower in both newspapers and by every local radio and TV station, because that was the only information the coroner’s office released. I not only checked with the coroner’s office, but with both newspapers and every local radio and TV station. The latter even checked their tapes of all newscasts since the murder. No one could possibly have known the flower was a dandelion except the person who put it there.”
He paled. “That’s ridiculous, Sergeant. Why would I kill my own partner?”
“Because you had partnership insurance of a hundred thousand dollars on each other, and you figured that was just about enough to save this company from bankruptcy.”
He licked his lips. “What makes you think the company is in financial difficulties?”
“I just came from Austin-Hubbard. Your partner had milked Schroeder-Moore of most of its assets. He just couldn’t resist cheating everybody, could he?”