Chief Ward Murphy looked up calmly from the fiction magazine he had been reading.
“Howdy,” he said. “Been waiting up for you.”
The little man circled to a chair against one wall, seated himself, thrust the automatic in his coat pocket, but kept it aimed at the chief through the cloth.
“As I remember,” he said tightly, “you told me your town council consisted of seven members.”
The chief nodded, his face expressionless.
“One of them — Harry Short — is tied up in the back seat of a car outside. Get on the phone and call a special meeting of the rest of them for right now. We’ll hold it here.”
“Why?” the fat man asked.
“Two reasons,” Tony told him. “The first is that I don’t trust the police chief and want to break this case to the council. The second is that if you don’t start calling, I’ll blow you apart.”
The fat chief allowed his eyebrows to raise. Then he shrugged, picked up the phone and after a moment said, “Hello, operator. Which one is this?”
After a pause he said, “Oh... Jane. Listen Jane, you know who the council members are, don’t you? I want a special meeting of them in my office right now... Yeah, fast as they can get here... Never mind Harry Short. He’s already here.”
He cradled the phone, looked up at Tony and asked, “Satisfied?”
“Not quite,” the little man said. “Now get hold of the three witnesses to the Missouri Cafe robbery and get them over here.”
The chief looked at him in surprise. “The Missouri’s been closed over an hour,” he objected, “and I don’t think either waitress or Henry, the cook, have phones.”
“Send the cop sleeping in the front office,” Tony said. Then added in a warning tone, “One attempt to signal him you’re covered, and you’ll get a bullet in the stomach. That’s a target I could hardly miss.”
Without taking his eyes from Tony, the chief raised his voice and bellowed, “Johnson!”
There was the sound of feet hitting the floor with a bang, and a moment later the uniformed cop came running into the room. He halted when he saw Tony, and his eyes widened. But he could not see the gun which was hidden from him.
“Sergeant Ransome came back of his own free will,” the chief explained mildly. “Everything’s under control. Run over to Sadie’s Rooming House and bring back Janet and Gert, the two waitresses from the Missouri Cafe. Don’t know their last names. Then pick up Henry, the cook. He sleeps back of the restaurant, I think.”
Johnson repeated the instructions, nodded his head twice and left the room. For nearly a minute after his departure, Tony and Chief Murphy silently examined each other.
Finally the chief spoke. “Mind explaining the reason for the gun while we wait?”
“Not at all. I don’t know how you fit in this, but you fit somewhere, or you wouldn’t have needled me into a jail break so you could kill me and still be able to explain it.”
The fat man nodded his head slowly. “Thought that might be what was eating you. Thought I tried to kill you, huh?”
“What’s your story?” the little man asked coldly.
Leaning back in his swivel chair, the chief clasped hands across his stomach. “Got tired of waiting for you to move. Decided to light a fire under you.” He paused, then added, “Also wanted to show the general public their chief of police was on the ball, even though the town council is too stingy to give us a decent jail.”
“Be a nice story if you hadn’t missed so close,” Tony said, his tone still cold.
The chief’s voice took on a faintly injured tone, “I guess you didn’t know,” he said, “that I’m the state champ pistol shot.”
VIII
For nearly another minute the little man did not say anything. Eventually he said, “That makes the story a little better. I might even believe it if you can explain why you’ve been sitting on the fence in this investigation and letting me do all the work.”
“Figured you were a smart feller and could work it out alone.” The chief’s eyes half closed, and he asked, “You ever live in a small town?”
“No,” Tony admitted.
“If you had, you’d realize a chief of police can’t push prominent citizens around on mere suspicion. Look at the suspects you picked.” One-by-one he ticked them off on his fingers. “The mayor, three members of the town council and the widow of the late chairman of the Citizens’ Committee. Even if one was guilty, the other four would hate my guts before I got through. I knew something was phony about that stick-up, but what could I do?”
The little man frowned at him. “Suppose I hadn’t dropped around? Were you just going to let somebody get away with murder?”
“But you dropped around,” the chief said, undisturbed...
It was a large gathering to be crowded into the small room Chief Murphy called his office. On folding chairs facing the chief’s desk in a semi-circle sat George Erickson, Art Jason and the four other councilmen. Harry Short, handcuffed and with his jaw twice its normal size, sat in one corner under the watchful eye of the policeman Johnson. The two waitresses, Janet and Gert, and the cook, Henry, sat along the opposite wall. Behind the desk the chief comfortably hunched, while Tony sat to the right of the desk, facing the audience.
Chief Murphy said to the councilmen, “Sorry to call you out so late, but Sergeant Ransome here claims he’s got the Missouri Cafe robbery and the mayor’s murder all solved. He don’t quite trust the police department, so wants to present his evidence to the council.” He turned to Tony. “You’re running the performance, Ransome. I’ll cut in if I have anything to say.”
The little man ran his eyes about the circle, but aside from the open-mouthed awe of Janet and Gert, he detected no emotion stronger than rapt attention.
“To start off I better explain that the hobo you knew as Sam Stone was actually a professional magazine article writer named Sam Ransome. He was my kid brother.”
He paused long enough to stare broodingly around the circle again. “Larson’s murderer had a nice plan to knock Larson off and put the blame on a hobo nobody would bother to check up on. Probably would have worked if he’d picked a real hobo, but he had the bad luck to pick a hobo in disguise who had a cop brother.”
Reaching in his pocket, Tony drew out the box of powders. “This I found in Harry Short’s desk drawer. This morning an autopsy was performed on my brother and he was found full of chloral hydrate... In commoner language, he’d been slipped a Mickey Finn. I think an analysis of the contents of this box will show it matches the dope in my brother’s stomach.” He tossed the box to the chief. “Better mark it as evidence.”
“The next bit of evidence is not so definite,” Tony went on. “It’s more a matter of reasoning. Just before he was killed, Mayor Ainslie phoned me that he had discovered something missing from the men’s dressing room at the Bijou, and the missing item put an entirely different construction on the Larson killing. A check of the room by a cleaning woman who knew every item in it, disclosed that absolutely nothing was gone. Our first assumption was that the cleaning woman had forgotten some item, but a better explanation was that when she checked, the item had been returned. As a matter of fact, the murderer was in the act of returning it when he overheard Mayor Ainslie’s phone conversation, realized he had figured out how Larson’s murder was accomplished, and killed the mayor to shut him up.