“Nobody’s gonna talk to them now.”
“But I do not understand. Perhaps you don’t know who I am—”
“I know you right enough. But they’re dead.”
The police surgeon had to go to work on the old boy with smelling salts then. Everything was in an uproar. Bill got me aside. He said: “This is the dizziest snatch I ever saw. They take the guy right back to his own apartment house. What do you make of it?”
“They might be awful dumb or they might be awful smart, but they’re dead and we’ll never know. Studs Gerber might have been trying to make contact when he was knocked off.”
“Yeah. He might. But do you know, Duke, I got a hunch that Mary Devlin is telling a straight story.”
I grinned at him. “Oh, so you’re beginning to fall too, are you? Did you get any pictures?”
Bill stared at me. “Pictures? I’d forgotten I installed that damned thing! Let’s take a run up there.”
We rode in his car back to the Belvedere Towers. A harness bull was on the steps and a mob was milling around. We created a mild sensation. Somebody yelled: “Look! There’s Duke Brian!” A reporter stuck a flashgun in my face. I can remember when I got a kick out of that sort of thing.
Bill told me the Devlins had been bailed and he’d left orders for the boys to stay away from the apartment. He said Mack Johnson just happened to be in the building checking leads, which was lucky for me. Another five minutes and it would have been Mack’s party, or my funeral.
As we entered the apartment, Bill said: “This outfit is supposed to be foolproof. A selenium cell trips the shutter when the light-ray is broken. In other words, you could be living in the room and walking around, but you’d have to go to that safe to get your picture taken. It’s pretty clever... I hope it works.”
The place looked about the same except that the trunks and bags had been removed. While Bill was walking through the rooms I had another chance to inspect Fenwick Green’s picture. Where it was, on top of the radio, was just about the height from the floor that Studsy’s bullet hole had been. That gave me an idea and I looked at the plaster behind the radio. There was a little dent, like the corner of the picture might have hit it. I began to ask myself what kind of a bullet would have gone clean through Studsy, dented a gold frame and knocked it against the plaster.
From down the hall Bill’s voice hollered: “This is some apartment! Mrs. Devlin even had her own room!”
Mrs. Devlin, my eye, I told myself. “What about the picture?” I called.
Bill was excited when he came back. “We got one,” he yelled. “It worked! As soon as I get to a darkroom, we’ll start to untangle this thing.”
I said: “Wouldn’t I laugh if you had one of your flat-foot understudies on super-pan’?”
I’d told Janet to meet me for lunch at Spider Kelly’s, and Franny showed up too. I stared at Janet. She didn’t look natural to me, the way she walked and held her head. And there was cosmetic, a lot of it, around her eyes.
“I’m to have a screen test,” she said importantly.
“A what?”
“A screen test. Ya-as, they seem to think that I’m the new type they need. Mr. Brown said—”
“When’s this test gonna be, Garbo?”
“Don’t be rude, darling. And don’t get any cute ideas. It’s all perfectly proper. The man is to come to Papa’s tomorrow afternoon. He’s to make one picture of me coming down the staircase, another in the library—”
“You mean some guy is going to make movies of you in your father’s house?”
“Of course, dear. Don’t shout. I can hear perfectly. They wanted a background I’m familiar with, so as to give me confidence. They—”
“What’s the matter with my house?” I yelled but she went on talking.
“You don’t have to be such a horrid grouch. There are oodles of girls I know that have been tested and failed. Peg Paterson, Anne—”
Something clicked in my mind. Gwendolyn Knapp— What a scheme to case layouts! They’d have pictures of the interiors of the best houses. Stairs, furniture, obstacles, entrances, exits—
I ignored Janet. I said to Franny: “What did you get at Green’s office?”
“They was nobody home. So I used the old sleight o’ hand. Just a office, that’s all. There was nothin’ in the safe. This guy Green must be a archyteck. His files was full o’ house plans—”
I went out of Spider Kelly’s like I had been given a hot-foot. I suppose I had been rude to Janet, and Franny probably would have been stuck with the check. She came after me yelling at the top of her lungs, with Franny behind her. I hopped a cab. It’s a funny thing how an otherwise intelligent woman can nurse in her heart the idea of out-Crawfording Crawford.
Bill Kurtz’ office was jammed. Mack Johnson, Johnny Devlin and his wife, some guy that looked like a lawyer, Fenwick Green, a guy that had on plus-fours and looked like a cartoonist’s idea of a movie director. When Janet and Franny burst in the place was a bedlam.
“Shut up!” Bill Kurtz yelled, and everybody shut up but me.
I said: “You’ve had twenty-three robberies of homes of socialites in the past six months. None of ’em solved. The closest you came to a solution was finding Icebox Sam Furman after the watchman shot him. Right?”
Bill yelled: “What’re you trying to do, embarrass me? Shut up!”
I didn’t. I said: “Furman was one of the slickest boxmen in the country, and when he got his, the gang had to have a new one. Right?”
Bill growled something. I didn’t look at him. I was looking at Johnny Devlin and he was looking at me. I said: “One thing about those jobs, they were all perfectly cased. There was a brain running the show. Now the brain needed a new boxmen so he tried to frame Johnny Devlin. He planted a perjured identification in a phony robbery at the Knapp’s Chestnut Hill place. He sent Studsy Gerber with it to make Johnny Devlin come to terms.”
Bill started to listen. Somebody had come in and handed him a photograph that was still wet. He didn’t look at it. He probably knew what it was.
I said: “In the meantime, Fenwick Green gets himself snatched. Now, there are two ways of looking at this thing. Either Dago Frank was running the show and he snatched Green to force Johnny back into crime, or Fenwick Green was running the show and he had himself snatched—”
Fenwick Green began to holler bloody murder. Mack Johnson, who is by no means dumb, slipped over to me and whispered: “What’s the combo to Green’s wall safe?” I told him and he slipped out of the room.
Green had quieted down a bit and I went on. “Or Green got himself snatched to get himself out of the way. If you look at it from that angle, Green had given Johnny a job figuring that he could use him sooner or later. But he hadn’t figured on Mary. Mary was keeping Johnny straight and she thought Fenwick Green was God because he had given them jobs. And because Green knew Mary would go to the cops, or to the chair if necessary, to keep Johnny straight, he had to keep himself out of the picture, because it’s one thing to frame a two-time loser, and it’s another thing to have to deal with his daughter.”
Fenwick Green started to holler that he was being framed, that he had been snatched.
Bill Kurtz stuck the photo in his face. He snapped: “If you were snatched, how come you had time out to get your picture taken, Mr. Green?”
Fenwick Green moaned and went into a faint again. Mack Johnson came back in. He had a hungry look in his eyes. He put his hand in the back pocket where he doesn’t keep his handkerchief and looked at Fenwick Green. He said to Bill Kurtz: “Davidowsky just opened this guy’s wall safe. He found some of the ice from the Sarah Newell job, and a few of the rubies from the Paterson job.”
Bill yelled at Green: “Why’d you kill Studsy Gerber?”