That Kind of a Day
Traynor got the call at a quarter to nine. The girl on the line was named Linda Haber and she was a secretary — the secretary — at Hofert & Jordan. The boss had been shot, she kept saying. It took Traynor close to five minutes to find out who she was and where she was and to tell her to sit down and stay put. She was still babbling hysterically when he hung up on her and pulled Phil Grey away from a cup of coffee. He said, “Homicide, downtown and west. Let’s go.”
Hofert & Jordan had two and a half rooms of office space in a squat redbrick building on Woodlawn near Marsh. There was a No Smoking sign in the elevator. Grey smoked anyway. Traynor kept his hands in his pockets and waited for the car to get to the fourth floor. The doors opened and a white-faced girl rushed up and asked them if they were the police. Grey said they were. The girl looked grateful.
“Right this way,” she said. “Oh, it’s so awful!”
They entered an anteroom, with two offices leading from it. One door was marked David Hofert, another marked James Jordan. They went through the door marked James Jordan. Linda Haber was trembling. Grey took her by an arm and eased her toward a chair. Traynor studied the scene.
There was an old oak desk with papers strewn over it; some papers had spilled down onto the floor. There was a gun on the floor a little to the left of the desk, and somewhat farther to that side of the desk there was a man lying facedown in a pool of partially dried blood, some of which had spattered onto the papers.
Traynor said, “Mr. Jordan?”
“Mr. Hofert,” the Haber girl said. “Is he—” She didn’t finish the question. Her face paled and then she fainted.
Some lab people came and took pictures, noted measurements, and made chalk marks. They had Hofert’s body out of the building in less than half an hour. Grey and Traynor worked as a team, crisp and smooth and efficient. Traynor questioned the secretary when she came to, then had the medical examiner give her a sedative and commissioned a patrolman to drive her home. Grey routed the night elevator operator out of bed and asked him some questions. Traynor called the man who did the legal work for Hofert & Jordan. Grey got a prelim report from the M.E., pending autopsy results. Traynor bought two cups of coffee from a machine in the lobby and brought them upstairs. The coffee tasted of cardboard, from the containers.
“Almost too easy,” Traynor said. “Too simple.”
Grey nodded.
“At six forty-five last night the Haber kid went home. Jordan and Hofert were both here. Jordan stayed until eight. From six at night until eight in the morning nobody can get in or out of the building without signing the register, and the stairs are locked off at the second-floor landing. You have to sign and you have to use the elevator. Jordan signed out at eight. Hofert never signed out; he was dead.”
“What was the time of death?”
“That fits, too. A rough estimate is twelve to fourteen hours. One bullet was in the chest a little below the heart. It took him a little while to die. Say five minutes, not much more than that. Enough time to lose a lot of blood.”
“So if he got shot between seven and eight—”
“That’s about it. No robbery motive. He has a full wallet on him. No suicide. He was standing up when he got shot, standing and facing the desk, Jordan’s desk. The Haber girl couldn’t have killed him. She left better than an hour before Jordan did and the sheet bears her out on that.”
“Motive?”
Traynor put his coffee on the desk. “Maybe they hated each other,” he said. “A little two-man operation jobbing office supplies. The lawyer says they didn’t make much and they didn’t lose much either. Partners for six years. Jordan’s forty-four, Hofert was two years older. The secretary said they argued a lot.”
“Everybody argues.”
“They argued more. Especially yesterday, according to the secretary. There’s a money motive, too. Partnership insurance.”
Grey looked puzzled.
“Twin policies paid for out of partnership funds. Each partner is insured, with the face amount payable to the survivor if one of them dies.”
“Why?”
“That’s what I asked the lawyer. Look, suppose you and I are in business together. Then suppose you die—”
“Thanks.”
“—and your wife inherits your share. She can’t take a hand in the running of the business. After I pay myself a salary there’s not much left in the way of profits for her. What she wants is the cash and what I want is full control of the business. Lots of friction.”
“Maybe I’d better live,” Grey said.
Traynor ignored him. “The insurance smooths things out. If you die, the insurance company pays me whatever the policy is. Then I have to use the money to buy your share of the business from your widow. She has the cash she needs, and I get the whole business without any cost to me. That way everybody’s happy.”
“Except me.”
“Hofert and Jordan had partnership insurance,” Traynor said. “Two policies, each with a face amount of a hundred grand. That’s motive and means and opportunity, so pat it’s hard to believe. I don’t know what we’re waiting around here for.”
They didn’t wait long. Half an hour later they picked up James Jordan at his home on Pattison. They asked him how come he hadn’t gone to his office. He said he’d worked late the night before and wasn’t feeling too well. They asked him why he had killed his partner. He stared at them and told them he didn’t understand what they were talking about. They took him downtown and booked him for murder.
Hofert’s widow lived in a ranch house just across the city line. The two kids were in school when Traynor and Grey got there. Mrs. Hofert was worried when she saw them. They told her as gently as you can tell a wife that someone has murdered her husband. A doctor came from down the block to give her a hypo, and an hour later she said she was ready to talk to them. She wasn’t, really, but they didn’t want to wait. It was a neat case, the kind you wrap up fast.
“That poor, poor man,” she said. “He worked so hard. He worked and he worried and he wanted so very much to get ahead. He put his blood into that business. And now he’s gone and nothing’s left.”
Grey started to light a cigarette, then changed his mind. Mrs. Hofert was crying quietly. Nobody said anything for a few minutes.
“I hardly ever saw him,” she said. “Isn’t that something? I hardly ever got to see him and now he’s gone. So much work. And it wasn’t for himself, nothing was ever for himself. He wanted money for us. For me, for the boys. As if we needed it. All we ever needed was him and now he’s gone—”
Later, calmer, she said, “And he didn’t leave us a thing. He was a gambler, Dave was. Oh, not cards or dice — not that kind of a gambler — stocks, the stock market. He made a decent living but that wasn’t enough because he wanted more, he wanted a lot of money, and he tried to make it fast. He wanted to take risks in the business, to borrow money and expand. He had dreams. He always complained that Jim wouldn’t let him build the business, that Jim was too conservative. So he took chances in the market, and at first he did all right, I think. He told me he did, and then everything fell in for him and... Oh, I don’t understand anything!”
On the way downtown, Grey said, “Try it this way. Hofert went into Jordan’s office last night. They’d been arguing off and on all day. He wanted to draw more money out of the company, or to borrow and expand, or anything. He was in terrible shape financially. The house was mortgaged to the roof. He’d already cashed in his personal insurance policies. He was in trouble, desperate. They argued again. Maybe he even threw a punch. The office was a mess, they could have been fighting a little. Then Jordan took out a gun and shot him. Right?”