In the face of the evidence Tony could hardly blame them, except for the chief’s refusal to even consider the lack of motive. Aside from the fact that big, grinning Sam would have been incapable of shooting a man in cold blood, there simply had been no reason for him to commit armed robbery.
“Stone wasn’t a real hobo,” he had tried to explain to Chief Murphy. “He was a professional writer bumming around for magazine article material. He wasn’t rich, but he could write a check up to two-thousand dollars. Why would he knock over a restaurant for two-hundred?”
But against the testimony of three witnesses, the chief had no intention of reopening the case on the say-so of an out-of-state cop. Until the fat man’s odd dissertation on the evils of gossip, Tony had grown increasingly to regard him as a pig-headed fool, but gradually he was beginning to realize the man’s placid exterior concealed a tortuous subtlety. Whether this would prove helpful or dangerous to the little detective sergeant was still an open question.
II
When he finished his drink, Tony left the hotel again and walked two blocks to the town square. From the Western Union office he sent a wire to Buffalo stating arrangements had been made to ship the body home the next day.
Then he crossed the square to the restaurant Sam was supposed to have robbed.
In streamlining, the Missouri Cafe was years ahead of the rest of the town. From its glass brick front to its chrome and bakelite tables, it was strictly modernistic. Apparently its owner’s murder had not driven away business, for even though the hour was 3:30 P.M., a half-dozen patrons were seated at tables.
Tony perched on one of the red leather stools at the glistening black counter and ordered a cup of coffee. He was served by a bright-eyed brunette of about twenty, who seemed to be responsible only for counter trade and the cash register, for in spite of Tony being the only counter customer, she paid no attention to the loud throat-clearing of a table patron wanting service. After placing Tony’s coffee in front of him, she stood watching him idly, and eventually another girl came from the kitchen to investigate the “hurrumphs”.
“You on the night shift?” Tony asked abruptly.
“Three to eleven,” she said, and a wariness jumped into her eyes — the wariness of a girl whom experience has taught to expect, “What are you doing after work?” immediately following questions about her hours.
“What’s your name?”
“Janet,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Work night before last, Janet?”
“The night of the stickup?” The wariness was replaced by interest. “I’ll say I did! I was as close to the bandit as I am to you.”
“You were one of the witnesses, eh?”
“Sure. Me and Gert — she’s the girl just went back in the kitchen — and Henry, the cook, all had to go over to Werlinger’s Funeral Home to identify the bandit’s body. They use Werlinger’s for a morgue, you know, on account of we got no regular morgue.”
Tony asked, “Just the three of you and Mr. Larson were here when it happened?”
“Yeah,” she said eagerly, gratified by his attentiveness. “It was just before closing and there hadn’t been a customer for fifteen minutes, when in walked this fellow with a handkerchief over his face—”
“Handkerchief!” Tony snapped. “Chief Murphy didn’t say anything about a handkerchief.”
Some of her previous wariness returned. “Say, are you a reporter or something?”
“Cop,” said Tony. “Detective Sergeant Ransome.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Then you must be new. I know all the cops.”
“I’m from Buffalo.” He slipped a badge from his vest pocket and held it before her face a moment before returning it. “Down to take back the body. I have no official connection with the case. Just interested.”
“Oh,” she said, obviously impressed by meeting a big-city detective from so far away.
“About the handkerchief,” Tony prodded. “How’d you identify the bandit if his face was covered?”
“Why, he might as well left it off,” she scoffed. “He’d been in here for supper, you see, and I recognized him right away in spite of the mask. He had this white scar through one eyebrow, and his nose had a bump on it, where it had been broken sometime, I guess. The handkerchief didn’t hide that. Then too, I could tell the clothes. He had on a green corduroy jacket with leather elbow guards and leather patch pockets, blue denim pants and a pork-pie hat with a little hole worn where it pinched together in front. I noticed his clothes at supper because they was old and kind of worn like a hobo’s but clean as a pin and even pressed.”
A slow sickness built within the little man. This was no primed witness. She was telling the truth spontaneously, and her testimony left no doubt that the killer had been Sam.
“How’d the shooting happen?” he asked dully.
“That was the terriblest thing of all. No call for it whatever. With his gun the bandit motioned me and Gert and Mr. Larson behind the counter, then pushed open the kitchen door, still keeping his gun on us, and made Henry come out too. We all crowded over there near the coffee urn while he cleaned out the register. Then he backed to the door, and we all thought he was just going to leave. Nobody made a move or said a thing, but all of a sudden he aimed the gun at Mr. Larson and fired. The boss fell dead just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Then the robber ran out the door.”
As one of the table customers approached the counter with his check, Janet moved over to the register. Moodily the little man watched the waitress, Gert, bring a tray of food from the kitchen and return again with a load of dirty dishes. He drained his coffee cup and pushed it away.
The bandit seemed to have been Sam all right, he decided, but he could not have been in his right mind. The wild possibility that Sam had been hypnotized by some master criminal jumped into his mind, to be irritably kicked out as plausible only in comic books. Could Sam somehow have been roped into what he thought was a practical joke? The idea seemed as far-fetched as the first, except the only possible circumstance under which Tony could visualize the good-natured Sam firing a gun at another human, was if he believed it loaded with blanks.
He turned his mind back to Chief Ward Murphy’s remarks about starting gossip, wondering again if it had been meant as a warning or a suggestion. It seemed a sound plan to stir things up a little in either event, since he had no idea where else to start.
When the waitress returned to him, he said, “You know, Janet, it sounds to me as though the bandit’s real purpose was to kill your boss, and robbery was just a cover-up.”
“How you mean?”
Tony examined his fingernails. “Suppose some local Joe wanted Larson out of the way, but was afraid if anything happened to him, everyone in town would know right where to look for the murderer. So he hires an out-of-town hobo to stick up the restaurant and knock off your boss. Everybody takes it for granted it’s a simple case of murder during robbery, so no one even thinks about this local Joe’s grudge.”
He glanced up to see the girl staring at him with widespread eyes, her lips formed into a round “O.”
“Jeepers!” she breathed. “Art Jason or Harry Short!”
“Who?”
“Art Jason, who runs the Blue Goose across the square, or Harry Short, who has the bingo hall and a bookshop. The boss headed the Citizens’ Committee, which was trying to get the mayor impeached so they could run gambling out of town. You see, Mayor Ainslie won’t let the police touch Jason’s or Short’s gambling places, and if the Citizens’ Committee got the mayor kicked out, they’d get the council to appoint an interim mayor who would clamp down on both of them.”