Clues for Dr. Coffee, page 9
“The study’s locked,” Ritter went on. “She don’t have the key, she says, because hubby has a special lock put on just a few days ago. So we bust in and we find him like this. You think it’s a Dr. Fell case, Doc?”
“It’s a Dr. Coffee case, Max,” said Dr. Coffee, who had been examining the body, “if you can persuade the coroner to let me do an autopsy.”
“Easy. The coroner is very busy these days. He’s up for re-election next month. You want to talk to the widow Waverly now?”
“I do indeed. And to the man who was ringing the doorbell. Isn’t he the musician you say tried to kill Waverly a week ago?”
“Yeah, Paul Monson. And Orville Kent thinks Monson is the guy who slugged Waverly when he was getting out of his car in Kent’s driveway last Friday night. Waverly thinks so, too. Only neither one gets a good look at the guy. When Waverly falls and bangs his head against the fender, Kent comes running, but he says the guy drops his blunt instrument and disappears in the dark.”
The “blunt instrument” was a nylon stocking filled with sand and weighted with a heavy wrench. The nylon was Size 8½—Mrs. Waverly’s size; she had small feet. The sand was a special type used to pour some of the castings at Kent Airframe and Instrument Co., where Paul Monson had been working. And the wrench was a model used at Kent Airframe.
Then why hadn’t Waverly sworn to a complaint charging Monson with deadly assault? Dr. Coffee wanted to know.
“Juries don’t go for circumstantial evidence,” Ritter said. “Besides, I think Waverly wants to give Monson plenty of rope so he can hang himself—around Brenda’s neck. If Waverly can sue for divorce instead of Brenda, he saves moola.”
Brenda and Paul Monson were sitting stiffly in the baronial living room flanked by a squad of policemen. Brenda, Dr. Coffee thought, might pass for a poor man’s Mona Lisa. Her black hair, parted in the middle, dropped straight almost to her shoulders, curling only slightly at the ends. Her cheeks were free of make-up; but her lips, which smiled almost as enigmatically as La Gioconda herself, were scarlet. As for Paul Monson, he might have been any good-looking young American who had managed to get through an overseas stint with the Air Force without losing too much of his sensitivity, too many of his illusions, or any of his confusion over what civilian life in the atomic age might be all about.
What was Monson doing at the front door when the police arrived? “I had come over to see Waverly,” he said. “I didn’t know he wasn’t home. I wanted to have it out with him—about me and Brenda, about his cock-and-bull story of my attacking him last week. As I reached the driveway, Waverly passed me in his Jaguar and drove into his garage. While he was closing the garage doors, I called to him. He saw me and started to run. Suddenly he stumbled, and when he fell, his wallet slid out of his pocket.”
“Did he stumble over a curb or some obstruction?” Dr. Coffee interrupted.
“No. I picked up the wallet on a perfectly smooth stretch of path. I called to him again. He got up immediately and ran all the faster. I ran after him, trying to speak to him, but he slammed the door in my face. I was still ringing the bell when the police arrived.”
“And you slept through all of this, Mrs. Waverly?”
“Yes.”
Max Ritter made a noise like a hen laying an egg. “Now, Brenda baby,” he said, “don’t you really have a key to that study? Didn’t you open the front door for Paul darling, and the study door too. And, afterward, didn’t you plant him outside to ring the bell till the cops arrive?”
“No,” said Brenda.
“But you are in love with Monson?”
“I think it’s quite obvious that we’re both in love with one another,” Monson volunteered, “if it’s any of your business.”
“It sure is my business,” Ritter said, “since you already tried to crack Waverly’s skull once before.”
“Paul did nothing of the kind!” Brenda objected. “He couldn’t have. He didn’t know that Michael was going to see Orville Kent that night. Nobody did—except me. And even if I’d told Paul, he couldn’t have been there—because he was here with me that evening.”
“Why don’t we hear about this before, Brenda baby?”
Mona Lisa shook her head so hard her long black hair whipped her cheeks. “Because I had an idea nobody attacked Michael. I was sure he was making it all up, so that Paul would be arrested and I would come forward with an alibi, to admit officially that Paul had been with me that night. It’s an open secret that I asked Michael Waverly for my freedom, and that he had been stalling. He wanted something on me so that he could file suit and get out of making a settlement—as if I cared about his money. He could never understand that I didn’t.”
“Maybe your fiddler friend cared a little,” Ritter suggested. “Maybe Paul darling would rather have you inherit a million or so instead of getting divorced with no setdement.”
Brenda stared at him in silence.
“Where was your husband last night, Mrs. Waverly,” Dr. Coffee asked.
“Home. Locked in his study, watching television and eating aspirin. He’s been acting strangely all week, staying home and complaining of headaches. I think he’s been just plain scared, locking himself in, refusing to give me a key, jumping every time the phone would ring.”
“Who or what was he afraid of, Mrs. Waverly?”
“I don’t know. A week ago, I would have said it was Orville Kent, but Kent has been in Washington all week.”
“You can rule out Kent,” Ritter said to Dr. Coffee. “I talk with him long distance just before you arrive. He’s at the Willard in Washington. When I tell him about Waverly, he offers to help. He’s flying home tomorrow on the eleven A.M. plane.”
“Help!” Brenda echoed bitterly. “Kent had every reason to hate Michael Waverly. Kent’s firm was in deep trouble. He had just lost six million dollars’ worth of Government contracts and he needed capital desperately. My husband was going to help him—by taking his company away from him. That’s what they were going to talk about the night Michael was slugged in Kent’s driveway. Michael was not exactly generous in business, as you probably know…. What are you going to do about Paul, lieutenant?”
“I’m holding him as a material witness,” said Ritter.
Dr. Coffee stood up. “Max, I can’t do anything more tonight. I’ll see you in the morning—if the coroner agrees.”
Ritter was waiting for the pathologist in his laboratory after the autopsy next morning.
“Waverly was killed by a subdural hemorrhage,” Dr. Coffee announced, “caused by contrecoup lacerations of the frontal lobe.”
“Okay, Doc, I’m impressed. Now translate.”
“Waverly was hit on the back of the head. The impact drove the brain against the front of the skull. This type of rebound damage without skull fracture is fairly common in brain injury. Torn vessels bleed between or under the membranes around the brain, forming a kind of blood blister that spreads until the pressine chokes off vital brain functions and causes death.”
“You mean nobody got in the study and socked him?” Ritter asked.
Dr. Coffee shook his head. “The size and organization of the hemorrhage area indicate that Waverly’s original injury dates back about a week. Testimony by Monson and Mrs. Waverly last night—Waverly’s headaches and the fact that he stumbled when there was nothing to trip him—indicate that the pressure was building up. It became fatal while he was phoning you. That noise you heard was the telephone falling off his desk. The door was already locked.
“If you believe Mrs. Waverly when she says she was the only other party to Waverly’s secret meeting with Kent, you must admit that Kent is the most likely person to have sandbagged Waverly as he stepped out of his car. Kent had opportunity, access to the clues which were supposed to point to Monson, and he certainly had a motive, if Waverly was about to steal his firm. You may have to settle for a manslaughter rap, Max, but it was murder all right, even if it was murder behind schedule. Can you take it from there?”
“Sure, Doc, if you’ll talk to the jury the way you talk to me.” The detective glanced at his watch. “Come to the airport with me? Kent’s plane is due in about an hour.”
The pathologist nodded. “Don’t you think we’d better stop off on the way,” he asked, “and turn Paul Monson loose?”
“Murder Behind Schedule” appeared in This Week Magazine as “Young Wife.”
The Square on the Hypotenuse
Things looked very dim indeed for Ellen Dark. Circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony seemed to say that she had killed her husband. She denied it, of course, but her own story was so naive that no jury in the world would believe a word of it. Max Ritter did, but he admitted to himself that her explanation was not very convincing.
Ritter, a lanky, sad-eyed, big-eared lieutenant of detectives, may have been one of the least decorative gumshoes on the Northbank police force, but he was far from the most gullible. He was not quite sure why, against all logic and plausibility, he thought that Ellen Dark was telling the truth. Perhaps he was swayed by the artless honesty he thought he saw in the woman s tear-stained face. Perhaps he was just a sucker for blueeyed blondes.
Whatever it was, he wanted outside corroboration, hard facts instead of hunches, evidence that went beyond the obvious, the kind of evidence with which Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee was always delighted to confound the coroner. Dr. Coffee was an old friend of Ritter’s. Pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, he never missed a chance to prove the superiority of forensic medicine over the antiquated and politically-conscious coroner system with which Northbank was still saddled. So, although it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, Ritter dialed the pathologist’s number.
Dan Coffee awoke instantly, groped for the phone and caught the instrument halfway through the first ring. He uttered several sotto voce grunts; then, so as not to wake his wife, started dressing in the dark. He pulled on his trousers successfully, but fumbled his second shoe. Julia Coffee switched on the bedside light.
“Emergency, Dan?” she mumbled sleepily.
“Yes”
“Biopsy?”
“Autopsy, more probably.”
Mrs. Coffee produced a series of indistinct little bird noises which terminated with “Max Ritter?”
“Yes. Go back to sleep. I’ll be home for breakfast.” He kissed his wife and made a somnambulous exit.
The technical crew had just about finished dusting for prints and photographing the scene of the crime when Dr. Coffee arrived at the Riverview Apartments, still blinking the sleep from his humorous gray eyes. The big pathologist was hatless and his straw-colored hair stood in unruly protest against untimely combing. One point of his collar was caught beneath his hastily tied cravat. He was perspiring gently; it was a hot night.
“Hi, Doc!” The detective greeted him at the door of Apartment 4-A. “Luckily you arrive before the coroner gets here to screw up the evidence.”
“What’s the problem, Max?” Dr. Coffee asked.
“The problem is that I got an open-and-shut case, only I don’t think it is. According to the book, Mrs. Dark shot her husband. But she says she didn’t, and I believe her.… And don’t smile like that, Doc. I ain’t getting sentimental, even if she is a good-looking babe. Come in and view the remains.”
The late Joseph Dark lay on the living-room floor, sprawled face down across an open, half-packed suitcase. Several articles of clothing not yet packed were neatly piled beside the corpse. The dead man was in his shirtsleeves and had obviously been shot in the small of the back. There was a damp red stain the size of a soup plate on the back of his white shirt. His seersucker jacket hung on the back of a chair.
Dan Coffee knelt to examine the body. The entrance wound was quite extensive; there was no exit wound visible. The man’s head was twisted to one side and the pathologist studied the waxen features. The deceased was about thirty; his hair was thinning a little. He had a weak, rather handsome face. Dr. Coffee thought he recognized the type: the second-string athlete; more energy than intellect. He seemed to be smiling wistfully, as though remembering small moments of collegiate triumph and regretting that the post-graduate world had not echoed the cheers of Saturday afternoon crowds.
The pathologist stood up. He looked at the open suitcase, then nodded toward the seersucker jacket. “No railway tickets in his wallet, Max?”
“No nothing,” the detective said. “Land, sea, or air. Think he was killed instantly, Doc?”
“Can’t say without an autopsy. Find a gun, Max?”
“Sure. Right on top of that stack of T-shirts on the floor. A German Walther. Belonged to Dark. Souvenir of the ETO. No prints on it, of course. Never are, on a well-oiled gun. Or a corrugated surface.”
“Begin at the beginning, Max.”
Ritter told of getting three telephone calls in quick succession, shortly before midnight. The superintendent of the building called first. He’d heard a shot and was going to investigate, but he wanted to report at once. The second call was from Frank Mollison, tenant of 4-B, just across the court. He, too, had heard the shot and furthermore had noted some suspicious goings-on in 4-A while looking out the window. Then the super had called back to say he had entered 4-A—the door was unlocked so he didn’t need his passkey—and found Mr. Dark lying on the floor, apparently dead.
“I got all the folks in the next room, Doc,” the detective said. “They already tell their stories two-three times, but I want you to listen.”
“I’d like to look around the apartment first,” Dr. Coffee said.
He sauntered from room to room, opening closets, peering into the icebox and pantry shelves, pulling out drawers, and doing many things which seemed to have little connection with his profession—until he reached the bathroom. Here he spent several minutes taking mental inventory of the contents of the medicine cabinet above the washstand. Then, “Okay, Max, let’s have a look at the material witnesses. Is Mrs. Dark in there?”
“And Mrs. Mollison. Plenty of glamour, Doc.”
Four persons were assembled in the bedroom: Ellen Dark; Frank Mollison, the tenant of 4-B; Veronica Mollison, his wife; and the superintendent of the building, an elderly man named Pete.
The Widow Dark was propped up in one of the twin beds, the picture of misery framed in a modest pink cotton kimono. She was a pretty blue-eyed blonde with a wistful, motherly smile and a willful, fatherly jaw. She answered questions in a soft, girlish voice, and blushed easily and winsomely. She fitted exactly the picture Dr. Coffee had formed of her from having looked through the apartment: a first-class housekeeper who never left a dirty dish in the sink, exceeded her household budget, or threw anything away. Dr. Coffee had noted the neatly folded paper bags and the little coils of saved string in the kitchen drawers. Ellen Dark had obviously been crying, but there was something about her eyes which could hardly be ascribed to tears: the pupil of her right eye was slightly larger than her left.
Frank Mollison, the man from 4-B, was lolling on the second twin bed, wearing bedroom slippers and a pongee dressing gown over his pajamas—only for the sake of the conventions, certainly, because there was a dark spot of perspiration between his shoulder blades. He smoked a pipe with a placid, well-fed, well-adjusted contentment.
His wife Veronica sat at the foot of the bed, but she was not placid; she was taciturn. She was a well-turned brunette with smoky green eyes and boyishly cropped hair that waved slightly. She was wearing no make-up except lipstick, and the flat pallor of her cheeks gave sharp emphasis to the fullness of her carmine mouth. She wore a severely tailored Shantung suit and a defiant sulk.
Pete, the super, paced the floor with puzzled steps, alternately sucking on a dead cigar butt and scratching his woolly white poll.
“Folks,” Max Ritter said, “this is Doc Coffee, an old friend of mine with new angles. Scientific angles. He thinks the microscope is mightier than the lie detector, and he’s proved it plenty for my money. So remember that when you tell him your stories, because he wants to hear ’em all over again. Let’s start with you, Mollison. When did you hear that shot?”
“Shortly before midnight,” Mollison said. “I had the television on, and I was waiting for the midnight news. I got up to open the window wider because the wind had shifted and it was very hot in the apartment. I happened to look across the court and I saw Joe Dark standing at his own window. He was just starting to pull down his shade when I heard the shot. Joe spun around—”
“Just a minute,” Ritter interrupted. “You call him Joe. You two were palsy-walsy, like that?”
“We were good friends and neighbors,” Mollison said. “Veronica and I used to go over once or twice a week to play bridge with Joe and Ellen. Or they’d come over to our place.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I heard the shot, and at the same time I saw Joe Dark sort of sag a little. Then he whirled and walked back into the room. He walked to the right, out of my line of vision. That’s the last I saw of him. A few seconds later a woman in a red dress came to the window. I think she had a pistol in her hand, but it all happened so quickly that I couldn’t swear to that. She closed the window and finished pulling down the shade. That’s when I called police.”
“Did you recognize this woman in red?” Dr. Coffee asked.
“I couldn’t see her face, because Joe had already started to pull down the shade,” Mollison said. “But I—I—” He stopped, looked at Ellen Dark. He removed his pipe and moistened his lips.
“Go on,” Ritter said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” Mollison went on, “but Ellen was wearing a red dress when I saw her earlier in the evening. Joe and Ellen came over for a drink before dinner.”
