“I don’t know,” I said frustratedly. “I guess you and I must have gone to different Sunday schools. Did you also continue to date this Cumberland fellow?”
“Oh, no. Not him.”
I was contemplating that at least she had saved me the mental effort of trying to understand her motives on that score when she burst the bubble by adding, “I phoned him once, but I guess he lost interest in me when Walter told him I didn’t have any money.”
At that point I gave up trying to understand her at all. “Where did this Daniel Cumberland live?”
“He has an apartment at Lincoln and Nebraska. It’s listed in the book.”
Checking her phone book, I discovered that sure enough a Daniel Cumberland was listed at 428 Lincoln Avenue. Dialing the operator, I asked if that phone was still listed under Cumberland’s name.
It was.
Well, well, I thought, the bird hadn’t even flown. And since it was now only a little after seven-thirty, I decided to look up Walter Ford’s blackmail partner before keeping my date with Fausta.
Four-twenty-eight Lincoln Avenue was a three-story apartment house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Two walls of the small foyer were lined with mail slots, and by checking the cards beneath them I learned Daniel Cumberland occupied apartment 1-B. The mail boxes had glass fronts and I noted there was quite an accumulation of mail in Cumberland’s.
No one answered the door apartment 1-B.
Returning to the foyer, I discovered 1-A was listed as the manager’s apartment. When I rang that bell, an elderly man with curling snow-white hair and an equally snow-white mustache came to the door. He admitted he was the apartment-house manager and said his name was Stanley Bush.
“I’m Manville Moon,” I said, showing him my license. “I’m working with the police on a case in which one of your tenants is an important witness. He doesn’t seem to be home and I’d like to take a look at his apartment. I haven’t a search warrant, but I can get one if I have to. It would be simpler all around if you’d let me take a quick look now, though. With you present, of course.”
He chewed thoughtfully at his mustache. “Which tenant?”
I indicated the door across the hall from his own. “Cumberland.”
“Hmm. Say you’re working with the police?”
“Under Inspector Warren Day of Homicide. I can give you his home phone number if you’d like to check me.”
He gave me a careful looking over. “Don’t think that will be necessary, young fellow. Look honest enough to me. Besides, I’ll be right next to you to make sure you don’t lift nothing.”
He disappeared for a moment, returning with a ring of keys. Selecting one, he opened the door of apartment 1-B, The odor hit us the moment the door was open, and we both knew what it was at once. It was not strong, but it was unmistakably the odor of decaying flesh.
“Oh, oh,” Stanley Bush said, pushing the door shut again as soon as we were inside. “Thought it funny I hadn’t seen Cumberland around for a couple of days.”
The apartment was expensively furnished, but at the moment it was a mess. Every drawer in the front room had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, books had been pulled from their shelves and even sofa and chair cushions were strewed around the room. Through an open door we could see a similar cyclone had hit the bedroom.
“Somebody’s been looking mighty hard for something,” old Bush remarked.
He sniffed at the penetrating odor, then followed his nose through the apartment into the kitchen. There we found Walter Ford’s partner in blackmail.
Daniel Cumberland may have been as handsome as Bubbles said when he was alive, but he made an exceedingly ugly corpse. Largely this was because of the temperature, for all the windows were closed.
The man lay on his back on the kitchen floor, a bullet hole between his eyes and a pool of dried blood circling his head. He was dressed in pajamas, robe and slippers; and a half-empty cup of coffee sat on the table in front of the chair in which he had apparently been sitting when he was shot. I noted that another cup and saucer, washed clean, rested on the sink drainboard.
From all appearances the man had been drinking coffee with someone he knew well enough to serve in the kitchen when he was killed. And from his attire, his guest must have been a late and unexpected caller. Apparently after murdering his host, the killer had carefully washed out his own coffee cup, then searched the apartment from one end to the other. He had not even missed the kitchen, for it was as much of a shambles as the rest of the rooms.
Cumberland had been dead well over twenty-four hours, I guessed. Possibly even forty-eight, for the body was already bloated.
The elderly apartment manager said, “Let’s leave some of this stink out,” and started toward the kitchen windows.
“Hold it,” I advised. “We don’t touch a thing before the cops get here.”
Stopping, he scratched his head. “What now, then?”
“Now we lock this place up again, go back to your apartment and phone the police.”
“Suits me,” he said. “I’ve seen everything I want to see here.”
Chapter Twenty
A Sergeant John Kietel of the night Homicide detail showed up in answer to my phone call. In addition to the usual retinue of scientific assistants he brought with him another detective whom he didn’t bother to introduce, but whose first name I gathered was Harry.
Harry was of the Hannegan school. He didn’t open his mouth once during the whole investigation, merely nodding agreeably whenever the sergeant gave him an order, then meticulously carrying out instructions.
I explained to Sergeant Kietel how Cumberland tied in with the Walter Ford case and how I happened to have called on the dead man.
I stayed around long enough to get the preliminary reports. The medical examiner guessed Cumberland had been dead thirty to forty-eight hours, adding he might be able to reduce the span after an autopsy. Since Walter Ford’s murder had taken place only a little less than forty-eight hours before, it seemed likely to me that the two killings had taken place the same night.
Possibly the killer had gone straight from polishing off one victim to murder the other.
No weapon was found in the apartment, nor any fingerprints, aside from the dead man’s, clear enough to be useable for comparison purposes.
The apartment consisted of four rooms and a bath. The front room, kitchen, bedroom and bath had been searched thoroughly by the killer, as evidenced by the mess left behind, but in the dining room the drawers of the sideboard were untouched. The logical conclusion was that either something had frightened the killer into stopping his search, or he had found what he was looking for in the dining room. When the painstaking Harry found a section of baseboard which slid upward to disclose a small secret compartment, we decided the latter was the case.
The compartment was empty.
By then it was nearly nine and I broke away to keep my date with Fausta. Sergeant Kietel, still awed by my supposed influence with his chief, didn’t even give me the customary instruction to stay available as a witness.
Mouldy Greene looked at me in surprise when I walked into El Patio.
“What’s the matter, Sarge?” he asked. “You and Fausta get your wires crossed?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“She said she was going over to your place when she left here a half hour ago.”
“That’s funny,” I said puzzledly. “She knew I was picking her up here at nine.”