Mum's the Word for Murder Read online

  I couldn’t get it out of my head that he was playing his hunches too strongly. I told him I thought it would be showing good judgment for him to at least whisper to the reporters that he wasn’t satisfied with the solution of the case and was on the track of important clues. That, I argued, would keep them from actually slaying him in the papers.

  “Not a word,” he said with a show of anger. “I’ll play this my own way. I don’t want a better break than to have the real murderer think the case is closed.” His heavy jaw was out-thrust and I began to feel a little ashamed of my fears for him. He was so sure of himself that he inspired my confidence.

  He didn’t bother to go through Gray’s apartment. Downstairs, we found the manager collapsed in his private office. He threw the whole blame for Gray’s suicide on Burke, moaning that the publicity would ruin his apartment house.

  Burke cut him short by telling the condition of Mrs. Ullendorf’s desk. The manager persisted that he didn’t see how anyone could have entered the apartment during her absence. Burke asked him about passkeys, and the housekeeper and head porter were called in. They each had passkeys to all apartments, but both vehemently denied having admitted anyone to No. 52 the preceding evening.

  Burke questioned them separately about Mrs. Ullendorf’s visitors, particularly of the male sex, but could get no specific information from them.

  We went up to No. 52 again, and Burke gathered up the contents of her desk to take to his office and study at his leisure. This time we carefully checked all the windows for possible signs of intrusion, and found none. I was positive that the apartment had been entered through the front door.

  Burke and I had lunch together while we planned the next moves. That is, he made the plans and I acquiesced. He wanted me to go after Devoe. Find people who knew him, learn everything I could about his habits. Find out where he lived, about his business affairs; talk to the man himself if possible.

  While I filled that rather large order, Burke would go through Mrs. Ullendorf’s private papers and learn what he could from the bank.

  The Free Press had an extra out before we had finished lunch. A boy came dashing through the café crying, “Jelcoe Solves Mum Murder Case!”

  Burke bought a copy, as did every man in the restaurant. The story was all Jelcoe’s. His picture was next to Gray’s, his name in larger print. Burke was mentioned in a single line at the end of the articles Mr. Burke has been co-operating with Chief Jelcoe on this baffling case.

  Burke smiled grimly as I pointed it out to him. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket and said, “Let’s go,” and strode out of the café. I followed him to the door, where we parted. He went to his office, and I started out without the least idea how to turn detective.

  Chapter Fourteen

  IT WASN’T AS HARD as I had anticipated. I knew a lot of different sorts of people in El Paso when I sat right down to the job of sorting them out. Mentally casting over the list after I left Burke, I felt it wasn’t improbable that I could establish a personal contact with Devoe through one of them.

  I went into the lobby of the Paso Del Norte Hotel and sat down with a telephone book in my lap, thinking back over all I could remember about Dick Devoe, jotting down the names of friends who might conceivably be a means of approach.

  I had a vague hunch that Devoe was identified more or less with the gambling fraternity about town, and I concentrated on that class of acquaintances. I had a sizable list of names when I finished. Changing a dollar into dimes, I went into the phone booth and started calling the numbers. To each one who answered, I merely identified myself and asked if he knew Dick Devoe.

  The first five numbers drew blanks. The sixth, Gregory Hutton, responded to my question with: “I know too much for my own comfort. I’m holding a five-C I.O.U. of his. What’s up?”

  I stalled by telling Gregory that I was on the trail of material for a new book.

  He chuckled and said that if I could get Devoe to talk, I would have material for a dozen books—of a sort.

  I cut in by asking him if he knew where Devoe hung out, or where I would be likely to find him.

  “Sure,” he came back promptly, naming a disreputable hotel in the downtown section. “He lives there, and he’ll be running a poker game in his room this afternoon. I had halfway planned to drop in a little later and take a few hands. I’ll take you along if you wish.”

  That was a swell break. I told Gregory I was at the Del Norte, and he said he’d meet me in the lobby in fifteen minutes.

  He was there in ten. Gregory Hutton is one of those men whom you can’t help liking even though you know him too well to trust him much farther than you can throw a bull by the tail. A bluff, heavy-voiced fellow, with a hard handclasp and a hail-hail-the-gang’s-all-here manner.

  He and I had played football together in high school and maintained a desultory acquaintance since. We went into a bar to have a drink—because that’s the sort of thing Gregory expected.

  He expansively told me about himself while I waited to ask my questions about Devoe. He was bubbling over with the optimism of the confirmed gambler, and confided that he expected to make a ten-strike any day. I knew the symptoms of a touch, and warded it off by admitting that the writing wasn’t going so well and that I was on the edge of starvation. This gave him the idea that if I would only write the story of his life, I’d clean up, and he started way back, when I switched the conversation to Devoe.

  Gregory was curious about my reasons for picking Devoe out as a source of novel material. I evaded by mumbling that Devoe had been mentioned to me as one of the big shots in local gambling, and that I intended using a gambling scene in my next Western.

  Gregory scoffed at that, implying that Devoe was a tinhorn, and that he could really give me more information than Devoe. I pacified him by agreeing to come out to his place some evening and get the real low-down—and switched the talk back to Devoe.

  He was slipping, Gregory told me. Six or eight years ago he had plunged heavily in the establishment of an exclusive gambling-house just outside the city limits. It hadn’t done well financially, and finally closed under pressure of reports that the equipment was crooked.

  Devoe had gone down steadily since then, Gregory said. Sporadically flush, he had his periods of gambling for high stakes and losing. A curious thing about him, Gregory said, was that no matter how down and out he was one day, he was likely to turn up smiling with another roll the next day—and with no explanation of where he got it.

  I kept the excitement out of my face the best I could while Gregory was telling it. The whole thing fitted in too beautifully to be coincidental. A bunch of money six or eight years ago—the time of the Devoe divorce and Ullendorf marriage. Wads of money popping up when he needed it desperately—it began to look as though his former wife might have been paying a little hush money.

  After I had squeezed all the dope I could get out of Gregory, I suggested that we drop in at Devoe’s place. It was only a few blocks from the Del Norte. A dingy lobby, none too clean. Up three floors in a creaky elevator run by a Negro boy whose face wore a knowing grin when Gregory told him the third floor.

  “Ain’t many thar yet,” the boy told us as he let us out. “Sorta early in the day.”

  I followed Gregory down a musty hall to a room where he knocked twice and then once. A buzz of conversation in the room quieted as steps approached the door and I heard the rattle of a chain inside.

  Gregory stepped in when it opened, and I followed him. A ceiling fan roiled the smoke-laden atmosphere. Three men were seated around a blanket-covered table with poker chips and cards in front of them.

  Gregory said, “Hello, Devoe,” to the man re-chaining the door. And added carelessly, loud enough for all to hear, “This is Asa Baker, a book writer. He’s looking for local color for a new book and he’s okay.”

  Devoe was about forty. He held out a soft hand to me. I didn’t like him and didn’t like to shake hands with him. He was pasty-faced a
nd thin; the complexion and figure of a man who stays indoors too much and gets too little exercise. His eyes were shifty, and he had a slack jaw.

  He let his hand rest in mine and said, “I’ve done a little writing myself. Perhaps you’d like to look over my stuff sometime.”

  I told him I’d be delighted, trying to make it sound as though I would. Gregory had strolled over to the table and was taking off his coat. The other men were coatless and perspiring.

  Gregory motioned toward a chair and asked me if I’d like to sit in for a few hands. I begged off with the statement that writers couldn’t afford to play poker. Devoe told me to make myself comfortable, and sat down behind a box of chips. Gregory bought a stack from him: a dollar, five, ten, and twenty for whites, reds, blues, and yellows. A fairly stiff game. Gregory paid for the chips with Devoe’s I.O.U. Devoe raised his eyebrows and said, unemotionally, “I’ll be paying off such piker stuff in a few days.”

  My hopes rose unaccountably, and I drew up a chair as he began dealing a round of stud. He dealt a hole-card and one up to each of the players except himself. It was a house game, with Devoe running it on a straight percentage of the money bet. He kept the pot straight, dealing in a bored, monotonous manner.

  The man at his left laughed harshly in response to Devoe’s assertion that he would soon pay off such piker stuff. “You going to inherit your ex-wife’s pile?”

  “Why not?” Devoe’s expression didn’t change. His words were cold, and I had a feeling he didn’t have a drop of human blood in him.

  They were too busy betting their cards to do much talking. One of the three players was dark; half Mexican, I guessed. He lost steadily and didn’t like it. The man on Gregory’s left was called Joe. He had brutal features, and big features, and big fingers that were surprisingly deft in manipulating cards and chips. The other player was a dapper little man with the most expressionless map I’ve ever seen on a human being. They called him Green, and he didn’t speak except when it was strictly necessary.

  I watched the play for a little, then relaxed and studied the room. It had been designed for a regular hotel bedroom, but the furniture had been removed to make it into a cardroom. From where I sat I could look through a bathroom into a bedroom. I figured that was where Devoe lived, and I tried to plan how to get in there. There wasn’t any hurry. With the introduction Gregory had given me, I figured I could stick around a lot without arousing any suspicion.

  Devoe’s writing looked like the best chance to get close to him. There’s hardly anything an amateur writer won’t do to get a professional to look at his stuff. I amused myself for a time by watching Devoe and trying to dope out what sort of junk a man like him would have written. High-society stories, I bet myself, with heavy sex interest and stolen jewels.

  Another rapped signal sounded on the outside door. Devoe got up to let in a fat man, well-groomed, with a gold tooth and a dimpled chin. He had a folded newspaper in his hand. He slapped Devoe on the shoulder with it, and spread out the Free Press extra for everyone to see.

  “They’ve caught the Mum murderer all right enough. Boy, what a story! Does the Free Press go down the line on the details! Here you are, Dick! Get the lowdown on your former wife’s love-life!”

  Devoe took the paper with a shaking hand. His face was colorless. The other players got up and crowded around him. It was something of a shock to me to realize that none of these men knew about the events of the morning. Being in the midst of them, it hadn’t occurred to me that everyone else didn’t know as much about them as I did.

  Devoe began reading the account in a mumble. The fat man took the paper from him and regaled the listeners with the more damnable and sordid aspects of the story. Devoe sat down and lit a cigarette while the others listened openmouthed. I watched Devoe.

  Perhaps it was my imagination—intensified and directed by the suspicions Burke had implanted in my mind—that made me feel Devoe’s sense of satisfaction or of pleasure as he listened. There was nothing tangible on which to base my belief. He was too good a gambler to betray his emotions outwardly. I thought I sensed a lessening of tension in his attitude. An inaudible and hardly-to-be-recognized sigh of relief.

  As I have said, it may have been my imagination working overtime. He took it quietly enough. Even summoning a scornful smile to his lips when the others began throwing jibes at him about the revelation of the former Mrs. Devoe’s illicit relations with Anthony Gray.

  “You’re not telling me anything new about her,” he snarled. “What do you think I divorced her for?”

  “I heard she started while she was still married to you,” Gregory leered.

  “You hear a lot of things, don’t you?” Devoe looked at him coldly.

  “Well, I’ve always had a hunch you feathered your nest out of the Ullendorf deal,” Gregory shot back at him.

  I held my breath. There it was again. The thing Burke had put his finger on intuitively.

  “Maybe I would have been a damned fool not to,” retorted Devoe. “This shows what she was.” He waved his hand at the newspaper. “When you get stuck with a woman like that, you get out of it the best you can.”

  “On the level, Dick,” the man called Joe protested, “are you gonna cash in on whatever she left out of the jack Ullendorf handed her?”

  A thin smile formed on Devoe’s lips while all of them looked at him expectantly. “I’m not saying. But no one’s got a better right to it—if there’s anything left.”

  There was a lot more talk about the startling revelations in the paper before the men again settled down to poker. The fat man joined them.

  Chief Jelcoe got a lot of praise, and they all agreed that Burke was just about washed-up in El Paso. The Mum case was rehashed from beginning to end, and it was curious to discover that all of them had held the correct theory from the very beginning.

  I watched Devoe as much as I could without seeming to, and noticed that he had less to say than any of the others. Some of the grimness seemed to have gone out of him. He hadn’t been nervous before, but now he was less nervous. The change was indefinable, but I grew increasingly positive that it wasn’t an imagination-provoked hallucination.

  The game went on steadily until five o’clock. Gregory won several hundred dollars, and the fat man won a little. Devoe had been raking in his percentage from every pot all afternoon, and when they cashed in their chips and adjourned until evening, he was able to tear up the I.O.U. Gregory had given him and pay off in cash.

  I hung around until the others started to leave, and Gregory asked me if I was going with him.

  I hesitated and looked at Devoe, saying, “I thought I might stick around and take a look at those stories Mr. Devoe mentioned—if he cares to show them to me.”

  His face lighted up. I knew the symptom because I had had it so often. “I don’t want to bother you, but—”

  “Glad to do it,” I assured him. “Lots of times an old hand can put his finger on the one little thing that’s wrong.”

  He was almost pathetically glad to have me stay. The rest of the gang went out, Joe and Green promising to be back at seven to renew their assault upon lady fortune.

  Devoe went timid when we were alone. Timidity is an ailment that invariably afflicts an amateur writer in the presence of a professional author. I’ve seen corporation executives turn bluish-white about the mouth as they dragged out their brain-children for inspection.

  Devoe said, “They’re probably not worth reading. But I’ve got a couple of stories that I think—”

  He went through the bathroom into his bedroom without finishing. I followed him, assuring him it was one of the greatest delights to read a beginning writer’s efforts.

  It was a slovenly room. An unmade bed along the wall. An old-fashioned highboy with cracked mirror. Dust on everything and clothes strewn about the room. An office-model typewriter in one corner, covered with a rubberized hood coated with dust.

  With a mixture of reluctance and bravado, Devoe opened t
he bottom drawer of the highboy and lovingly brought out two typed, bound manuscripts.

  “I’ve been writing in my spare time for years,” he confided. “But I burned up everything a couple of months ago. I’ve written these two since.”

  He laid them on the center table and rummaged in the drawer again. “I got a letter from Collier’s about this top one, ‘Disinherited Bride.’ Here it is.” He showed me a much-thumbed letter triumphantly. “He says my work has great promise, and asks for something else.”

  “Did you send him anything else?”

  “Yes.” A little sadly. “I got busy and wrote ‘The Haunted Bracelet.’ This is it.” He lifted the second story. “I think it’s by far the best thing I’ve done—but it came back with a printed slip.”

  “Suppose I take them home and read them tonight?”

  “Don’t spend too much time on them. They’re probably not worth anything.”

  I saw something else as I started to leave the room. Two mounted deer heads on the wall, close enough together for the antlers to form a rifle and rod rack. A .22-caliber rifle and an automatic shotgun hung there, with a jointed fly-rod in a case.

  Devoe followed my gaze and laughed mirthlessly. “A relic of my younger days. I don’t get out in the woods much now.”

  “None of us get out as much as we should,” I agreed.

  Then I went out, promising to give him an opinion on the stories as soon as I had read them.

  I noted the numbers on the adjoining doors, and hurried to the elevator. My mind was in a turmoil of conjecture and suspicion. The typing of the stories could be checked against the Mum advertisements and death cards.