My reasoning was that I had been engaged by Madeline Strong to investigate the possibility of Thomas Henry’s innocence, not to solve the crime, and I had no ethical responsibility to carry my investigation beyond that specific point. Logically, then, I had to start with the assumption that Henry was innocent even though I was not at all sure of that in my own mind.
It followed that if he were innocent, Walter Ford had probably been the killer’s real target, and not Barney Amhurst as the police believed, for it seemed to me unlikely that a killer capable of devising such an elaborate frame would make the mistake of killing the wrong victim.
I therefore began by looking into Walter Ford’s background.
This led me to the personnel office of the Maxim Electrical Products Company, where Barney Amhurst had mentioned Ford worked before joining the newly formed Huntsafe Company. It took me a considerable amount of explanation, a cigar for the personnel director and a phone check with Warren Day before I was able to get around the company rule that no information could be given out concerning ex-employees.
The call to Warren Day finally did it, but before the inspector would give me his blessing, he made me promise to let him in on everything I found out at Maxim.
“Have I ever held out on you?” I demanded over the phone.
“Yes,” he said.
So reluctantly I gave him my promise and handed the phone to the personnel director. Apparently Day was still in a sunny mood, for he told the man he could give me the same co-operation he would give the Homicide Department.
The results were even more gratifying than I reasonably could have expected, for Walter Ford’s file was full of interesting information. The most interesting item was that he had not quit but had been fired for using his position as purchasing agent in a racket which approached blackmail.
Ford had been caught accepting kickbacks, both cash and goods of various kinds, on orders he gave in the name of the company, the personnel director told me. An investigation subsequent to his discovery disclosed that he had used his power to approve or reject orders as a bludgeon to demand these kickbacks. He had been caught when he grew overconfident and tried to force tribute from a salesman who worked for one of Maxim’s oldest and most reliable suppliers. Instead of coming across and receiving a plump order, the salesman reported the shakedown attempt to Maxim’s general manager.
I also learned that Walter Ford had been married, though he was legally separated from his wife. According to the file the widow was Mrs. Jennifer Ford, 2212 Wright Street, which was not more than a half dozen blocks from the Remley Apartments.
From Maxim I went to call on Mrs. Jennifer Ford, where I learned more interesting things about the dead man.
Twenty-two twelve Wright Street was a four-family flat and Mrs. Ford occupied the lower left apartment. She came to the door wearing an ankle-length terry cloth housecoat, an attractive brunette in her late twenties with a sullen cast to her mouth.
When I had explained myself, she invited me in rather dubiously and offered me a drink.
“This lad Thomas Henry has been arrested by the police,” I explained to her. “I’ve been engaged to clear him of the murder charge, and I’m starting by trying to find out everything I can about your husband. I thought maybe you could help.”
“I can tell you in four words,” she said. “He was a rat.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “In any specific way?”
“In every way.” She drained half her drink, fumbled for a cigarette from a small box on the low cocktail table in front of the sofa and leaned forward to accept a light. Then she leaned back again and her sullen mouth blew a thin stream of smoke at me. “He chased every woman he saw, and he was a liar, a crook and a blackmailer.
He also didn’t pay his alimony.”
“Let’s take his vices one at a time,” I suggested. “Chasing women, for instance. Any particular women?”
She smiled cynically. “No particular woman would have given Walt the time of day. He specialized in tramps. Recently it’s been a blonde dress model named Bubbles Duval and a chorus girl named Evelyn Karnes.”
I must have looked surprised, for she explained with a dismissing gesture, “I’ve been having him tailed by a private detective. Trying to accumulate divorce evidence.”
Since the evidence could no longer be of any use to her, Mrs. Ford agreeably furnished me the name of the private detective, a man named Howard Quentin in the Bland Building. She also elaborated in some detail on her charges that her deceased husband had been a liar, crook and blackmailer.
“He got himself taken into this Huntsafe Company on out-and-out lies,” she said. “He talked Barney Amhurst into believing he had all sorts of influence among state legislators all over the country and wrangled a ten-per-cent interest in the Huntsafe on the promise that he could get legislative action to make it compulsory. Walt was plenty smooth too. He took the only two state legislators he knows, a New York State senator and a guy from Texas, to see Barney and have him explain the Huntsafe to them. Walt, of course, gave Barney the impression they were just two of dozens of contacts he had, and poor Barney fell for it.”
As evidence of his crookedness Mrs. Ford repeated what I had already learned from Maxim’s personnel director about Ford’s shenanigans as a purchasing agent. But what she told me about his blackmailing activities was brand-new material.
He kept a file, the woman told me, containing compromising pictures of numerous women. Where he got them, she did not know, but she had once seen the file while they were still living together. As a matter of fact her discovery of the indecent pictures had been the final factor in her decision to leave him. Mrs. Ford said she assumed at first they were merely bits of pornography he kept to gloat over privately, but when she confronted him with the file, he laughed cynically and told her she would have a lot less money to spend if he didn’t possess the pictures. Then she realized he was using them for blackmail.
She had one other minor bit of information I made a note of. The case of a dozen ivory-handled pistols had been obtained by Walter Ford while his wife still lived with him, and she was able to tell me it came from a salesman named Edward Yancy, who worked for a local wire-manufacturing company.
Before leaving the ungrieving widow, I used her phone to make two calls. One was to private detective Harold Quentin and the other to salesman Edward Yancy. Luckily both happened to be in their offices.
From the former, I learned Walter Ford had surreptitiously visited Evelyn Karnes’s flat on several occasions; and from the latter, I learned nothing except that the case of pistols had contained exactly twelve guns and they had come from another customer of his, the Tulsa Arms Company.
Chapter Ten
The hall door of my flat was open and through it I could hear the drone of my vacuum cleaner. Cautiously I entered just as the sound died away to a final wheeze.
Fausta, winding up the cord, stopped to look at me accusingly. She blew a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and I noted there was a smudge of dust on her straight little nose.
“You did it on purpose,” she impeached. “You knew I could not stand to wait here in all this dirt.”
“You’re even prettier when you’re being domestic than you are in a green formal,” I said, walking over and bending to brush the spot of dust off her nose with a light kiss. “You’d make some lucky man a fine housewife.”
“Hah!” she said, grabbing my ears and kissing me full on the mouth. Then she backed off in simulated outrage, as though I had attempted to attack her, gave me a light slap and said, “That is what you call blarney. No girl in her right mind would be a housewife for you. Who wants to stay home and slave while you gad about with other women?”