He didn’t hear the door open, but he almost fell off the desk when a voice said:
“Excellent whistling, Mr. McCracken. Excellent!”
The shiny pate of the little bird imitator was bobbing across the office toward him.
“Hello, Perley,” McCracken said. He couldn’t muster a smile to go with it.
“I’m leaving vaudeville, Mr. McCracken,” Perley explained. “Or maybe one could say that vaudeville is leaving me, because the Bijou is closing. Anyway, I’m opening a school for whistling and bird imitating. You whistle well. I could make you my star pupil.”
“Thanks,” said McCracken listlessly. “Maybe sometime. But what with moving and all—”
“To better quarters, I hope. And that reminds me. You never sent me a bill. I came to settle up for what you did for me.”
He beamed at McCracken, and for a moment the private detective felt a ray of hope. Then it faded. A few dollars can seem like a lot sometimes, but it doesn’t make much difference when you owe a few hundred and are about to be put on the street. “In fact, Mr. McCracken,” Perley went on, “I have a check already written, which I hope you’ll think adequate. It’s for three thousand dollars. You may have heard that Jim Lee’s will said that I was his only real friend and that he left me all his money, and that it turned out to be more than anybody thought he had. Some bonds, you know, that he thought weren’t worth much.”
Mechanically, McCracken took the little slip of yellow paper that was being held out toward him. His eyes focused on the figures, then blurred, then came into focus again.
“There was thirty thousand net, Mr. McCracken,” Perley Essington was saying, “and if it hadn’t been for you—well, I’d never have been free to spend any of it. So I think a tenth is fair, isn’t it?”
McCracken found his own voice at last.
“More than fair, Perley. I—well you can put me down as your star pupil, all right. And give me that nightingale business first. It’s just how I feel. But not on an empty stomach.” He took the little man’s arm firmly. “First, we’re going down to the Crillon and order a plate apiece of their very best birdseed.”
A Date to Die
IT WAS five minutes before five a.m. and the lights in my office at the fourth precinct station were beginning to grow gray with the dawn. To me, that’s always the spookiest, least pleasant time of all. Darkness is better, or daylight. And those last five minutes before my relief are always the slowest.
In five minutes Captain Burke would arrive—on the dot, as always—and I could leave. Meanwhile, the hands of the electric clock just crawled.
The ache in my jaw crawled with them. That tooth had started aching three hours ago, and it had kept getting worse ever since. And I wouldn’t be able to find a dentist in his office until nine, which was four long hours away. But, come five o’clock, I’d go off duty, and I had a pretty good idea how to deaden the pain a bit while I waited.
Four minutes of five, the phone rang.
“Fourth Precinct,” I said, “Sergeant Murray.”
“Oh, it’s you, Sergeant!” The voice sounded familiar, although I couldn’t place it; it was a voice that sounded like an eel feels. “Nice morning, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Yeah,” I growled.
“Of course,” said the voice. “Haven’t you looked out the window at the pale gray glory that precedes the rising of—”
“Can it,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Your friend Sibi Barranya, Sergeant.”
I recognized the voice then. It didn’t make me any happier to recognize it, because he’d been lying like a rug when he called himself my friend. He definitely wasn’t. On the blotter, this mug Barranya is listed as a fortune-teller. He doesn’t call himself that; when they play for big dough, the hocus-pocus boys call themselves mystics. That’s what Barranya called himself, a mystic. We hadn’t been able to pin anything on him, yet.
I said, “So what?”
“I wish to report a murder, Sergeant.” His voice sounded slightly bored: you’d have thought I was a waiter and he was ordering lunch. “Your department deals in such matters, I believe.”
I knew it was a gag, but I pressed the button that turned on the little yellow light down at the telephone company’s switchboard.
I’ll explain about that light. A police station gets lots of calls that they have to trace. An excited dame will pick up the phone and say “Help, Police” and bat the receiver back on the hook without bothering to mention who she is or where she lives. Stuff like that. So all calls to any police station in our city go through a special switchboard at the phone station, and the girl who’s on that board has special instructions. She never breaks a connection until the receiver has been hung up at the police end of the call, whether the person calling the station hangs up or not. And there’s that light that flashes on over her switchboard when we press the button. It’s her signal to start tracing a call as quickly as possible.
While I pressed that button, I said, “Nice of you to think of me, Barranya. Who’s been murdered?”
“No one, yet, Sergeant. It’s murder yet to come. Thought I’d let you in on it.”
I grunted. “Picked out who you’re going to murder yet, or are you going to shoot at random?”
“Randall,” he said, “not random. Charlie Randall, Sergeant. Neighbor of mine; I believe you know him.”
Well—on the chance that he was telling the truth and was going to commit a murder—I’d as soon have had him pick Randall as anyone. Randall, like Barranya, was a guy we should have put behind bars, except that we had nothing to go on. Randall ran pinball games, which isn’t illegal, but we knew (and couldn’t prove) some of his methods of squelching opposition. They weren’t nice.
Barranya and Randall lived in the same swank apartment building, and it was rumored that the pinball operator was Barranya’s chief customer.
All that went through my head, and a lot of other things. Telling it this way, it may sound like I’d been talking over the phone a long time, but actually it had been maybe thirty seconds since I picked up the receiver.
Meanwhile, I had the receiver off the hook of the other phone on my desk—the interoffice one—and was punching the button on its base that would give me the squad car dispatcher at the main station.
I asked Barranya, “Where are you?”
“At Charlie Randall’s,” he said, “well, here it goes, Sergeant!”
There was the sound of a shot, and then the click of the phone being hung up.
I kept the receiver of that phone to my ear waiting for Central to finish tracing the call, which she’d do right away now that the call had been terminated at that end. Into the other phone I said, “Are you there, Hank?” and the squad car dispatcher said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Better put on the radio to— Wait a second.”
The other receiver was talking into my other ear now. The gal at Central was saying, “That call came from Woodburn 3480. It’s listed as Charles B. Randall, Apart—”
I didn’t listen to the rest of it. I knew the apartment number and address. And if it was really Charlie Randall’s phone that the call had come over, maybe then Barranya was really telling the truth.
“Hank,” I said, “send the nearest car to Randall’s apartment, number four at the Deauville Arms. It might be murder.”
I clicked the connection to the homicide department, also down at main, and got Captain Holding.
“There might be a murder at number four at the Deauville,” I reported. “Charlie Randall. It might be a gag, too. There’s a call going out to the nearest squad car; you can wait till they report or start over sooner.”