Afraid of a Gun and Other Stories

  "With all that to go on, the rest was duck soup. All the stuff Mae Landis gave us— identifying the gun as Whitacre's, and giving Ogburn an alibi by saying she had talked to him on the phone at ten o'clock—only convinced me that she and Ogburn were working together. When the landlady described 'Quirk' for us, I was fairly certain of it. Her description would fit either Whitacre or Ogburn, but there was no sense to Whitacre's having the apartment on Greenwich Street, while if Ogburn and the Landis woman were thick, they'd need a meeting-place of some sort. The rest of the box of cartridges there helped some too.

  "Then tonight I put on a little act in Ogburn's apartment, chasing a nickel along the floor and finding traces of dried mud that had escaped the cleaning-up he no doubt gave the carpet and clothes after he came home from walking through the lot in the rain. We'll let the experts decide whether it could be mud from the lot on which Bob was killed, and the jury can decide whether it is.

  "There are a few more odds and ends—like the gun. The Landis woman said Whitacre had had it for more than a year, but in spite of being muddy it looks fairly new to me. We'll send the serial number to the factory, and find when it was turned out.

  "For motive, just now all I'm sure of is the woman, which should be enough. But I think that when Ogburn and Whitacre's books are audited, and their finances sifted, we'll find something there. What I'm banking on strong is that Whitacre will come in, now that he is cleared of the murder charge."

  And that is exactly what happened.

  Next day Herbert Whitacre walked into Police Headquarters at Sacramento and surrendered.

  Neither Ogburn nor Mae Landis ever told what they knew, but with Whitacre's testimony, supported by what we were able to pick up here and there, we went into court when the time came and convinced the jury that the facts were these:

  Ogburn and Whitacre had opened their farm-development business as a plain swindle. They had options on a lot of land, and they planned to sell as many shares in their enterprise as possible before the time came to exercise their options. Then they intended packing up their bags and disappearing. Whitacre hadn't much nerve, and he had a clear remembrance of the three years he had served in prison for forgery; so to bolster his courage, Ogburn had told his partner that he had a friend in the Post Office Department in Washington, D.C., who would tip him off the instant official suspicion was aroused.

  The two partners made a neat little pile out of their venture, Ogburn taking charge of the money until the time came for the split-up. Meanwhile, Ogburn and Mae Landis—Whitacre's supposed wife—had become intimate, and had rented the apartment on Greenwich Street, meeting there afternoons when Whitacre was busy at the office, and when Ogburn was supposed to be out hunting fresh victims. In this apartment Ogburn and the woman had hatched their little scheme, whereby they were to get rid of Whitacre, keep all the loot, and clear Ogburn of criminal complicity in the affairs of Ogburn & Whitacre.

  Ogburn had come into the Continental office and told his little tale of his partner's dishonesty, engaging Bob Teal to shadow him. Then he had told Whitacre that he had received a tip from his friend in Washington that an investigation was about to be made. The two partners planned to leave town on their separate ways the following week. The next night Mae Landis told Whitacre she had seen a man loitering in the neighborhood, apparently watching the building in which they lived. Whitacre—thinking Bob a Post Office inspector—had gone completely to pieces, and it had taken the combined efforts of the woman and his partner —apparently working separately—to keep him from bolting immediately. They persuaded him to stick it out another few days.

  On the night of the murder, Ogburn, pretending scepticism of Whitacre's story about being followed, had met Whitacre for the purpose of learning if he really was being shadowed. They had walked the streets in the rain for an hour. Then Ogburn, convinced, had announced his intention of going back and talking to the supposed Post Office inspector, to see if he could be bribed. Whitacre had refused to accompany his partner, but had agreed to wait for him in a dark doorway.

  Ogburn had taken Bob Teal over behind the billboards on some pretext, and had murdered him. Then he had hurried back to his partner, cryirig: "My God! He grabbed me and I shot him. We'll have to leave!"

  Whitacre, in blind panic, had left San Francisco without stopping for his bags or even notifying Mae Landis. Ogburn was supposed to leave by another route. They were to meet in Oklahoma City ten days later, where Ogburn—after getting the loot out of the Los Angeles banks where he had deposited it under various names—was to give Whitacre his share, and then they were to part for good.

  In Sacramento next day Whitacre had read the newspapers, and had understood what had been done to him. He had done all the bookkeeping; all the false entries in Ogburn & Whitacre's books were in his writing. Mae Landis had revealed his former criminal record, and had fastened the ownership of the gun—really Ogburn's—upon him. He was framed completely! He hadn't a chance of clearing himself.

  He had known that his story would sound like a far-fetched and flimsy lie; he had a criminal record. For him to have surrendered and told the truth would have been merely to get himself laughed at.

  As it turned out, Ogburn went to the gallows, Mae Landis is now serving a fifteen-year sentence, and Whitacre, in return for his testimony and restitution of the loot, was not prosecuted for his share in the land swindle.

  —End—

  MIKE, ALEC, OR RUFUS

  I don't know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head—naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the colour and texture of Manila paper—propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.

  Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.

  I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company's San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company's hire, so I held back that part.

  "I want a list of the stuff you lost," I told Toplin, "but first—"

  "Stuff?" Toplin's yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, "A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!"

  Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband's head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.

  "Now, Frank, don't get excited," she soothed him.

  Phyllis Toplin's dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.

  The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.

  "Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand."

  "So it adds up to a hundred thousand?" I asked.

  "Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren't insured at all."

  That was very usual. I don't remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt—always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.

  "Suppose you tell me exactly what happened," I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, "I know you've already told the police the whole thing, but I'll have to have it from you."

  "Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers' last night. I brought my wife's and daughter's jewellery—the valuable pieces—home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang."

  "What time was this?"

  "Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda"—nodding at the blond maid— "came walking into the
room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He—"

  "Just a moment." I turned to the maid. "What happened when you answered the bell?"

  "Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my—my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and—"

  "When I saw him and the revolver in his hand"—Toplin took the story away from his servant—"it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again—no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed—he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis's room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn't say a word all the time, not a word—just made motions with his gun and his left hand."

  "How bad did he bang your leg?"

  "Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it's nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it's my leg that's shot, not his!"

  "Did he say anything when you opened the door?" I asked the maid.

  "No, sir."

  "Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?"

  None of them had.

  "What happened after he locked you in the closet?"

  "Nothing that we knew about," Toplin said, "until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out."

  "Who's McBirney?"

  "The janitor."

  "How'd he happen along with a policeman?"

  "He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there—keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver—until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and—and that's all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good."

  "How long were you in the closet?"

  "Ten minutes—maybe fifteen."

  "What sort of looking man was the robber?"

  "Short and thin and—"

  "How short?"

  "About your height, or maybe shorter."

  "About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?"

  "Oh, I don't know—maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny."

  "How old?"

  "Not more than twenty-two or—three."

  "Oh, Papa," Phyllis objected, "he was thirty, or near it!"

  "What do you think?" I asked Mrs. Toplin.

  "Twenty-five, I'd say."

  "And you?" to the maid.

  "I don't know exactly, sir, but he wasn't very old."

  "Light or dark?"

  "He was light," Toplin said. "He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish."

  "More of a light brown," Phyllis amended.

  "Maybe, but it was light."

  "What colour eyes?"

  "I don't know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow."

  "How would you describe the part of his face you could see?"

  "Pale, and kind of weak-looking—small chin. But you couldn't see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down."

  "How was he dressed?"

  "A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves—silk ones."

  "Shabby or neat?"

  "Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled."

  "What sort of gun?"

  Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.

  "Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight."

  "Would you folks know him if you saw him again?"

  "Yes," they agreed.

  I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.

  "I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when." I got the list half an hour later.

  "Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth's apartment?" I asked.

  "702, two floors above."

  I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.

  "Miss Eveleth?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I'm looking for information about the robbery."

  She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.

  "This is some of my information."

  "How did it happen?"

  "A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, 'Inside, kid!'

  "I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.

  "'Where's the fire escape?' he asked.

  "The fire escape doesn't come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn't take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn't find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn't like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But—well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I'm concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn't seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn't find him here."

  "How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?"

  "Oh, it couldn't have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time."

  "What did Mr. Robber look like?"

  "Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days' growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves."

  "How old?"

  "Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face."

  "Notice his eyes?"

  "Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white."

  "What sort of voice?"

  "Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on."

  "Know him if you'd see him again?"

  "Yes, indeed!" She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. "My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!"

  From Miss Eveleth's apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and moustache, good-humoured, shiftless red face, and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.

  He drawled out what he knew of the looting.

  "I was fixin' a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an' just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Toplins' door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an' he aims his gun at me. There's a lot o' things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an' get my head out o' range. I heard him run up
stairs, an' I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.

  "I didn't go after him. I didn't have a gun or nothin', an' I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o' this buildin' to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an' maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an' the Toplins' apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an' watch both the front an' back stairs; an' I rang for the elevator, an' told Ambrose, the elevator boy, to give the alarm an' run outside an' keep his eye on the fire escape until the police came.

  "The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an' told me that Martinez—Ambrose's brother, who takes care of the switchboard an' the front door—was callin' the police. I could see both stairs plain, an' the fella didn't come down them; an' it wasn't more'n a few minutes before the police—a whole pack of 'em—came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Toplins out of the closet where they were, an' started to search the buildin'. An' then Miss Eveleth came runnin' down the stairs, her face an' dress all bloody, an' told about him bein' in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we'd land him. But we didn't. We searched every apartment in the buildin', but didn't find hide nor hair of him."

  "Of course you didn't!" Mrs. McBirney said unpleasantly. "But if you had—"

  "I know," the janitor said with the indulgent air of one who has learned to take his pannings as an ordinary part of married life, "if I'd been a hero an' grabbed him, an' got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain't foolish like old man Toplin, gettin' himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin' her nose busted. I'm a sensible man that knows when he's licked—an' I ain't jumpin' at no guns!"

  "No! You're not doing anything that—"

  This Mr. and Mrs. stuff wasn't getting me anywhere, so I cut in with a question to the woman. "Who is the newest tenant you have?"

  "Mr. and Mrs. Jerald—they came the day before yesterday."

  "What apartment?"

  "704—next door to Miss Eveleth."

  "Who are these Jeralds?"

  "They come from Boston. He told me he came out here to open a branch of a manufacturing company. He's a man of at least fifty, thin and dyspeptic—looking."