Unhappy Hooligan (2 page)

Rook took the chair and declined the cigars, being a pipe man at heart. “Are all your prisoners getting this plush treatment these days, Chief?”

“Nothing like that, Howie.” Chief Parkman, as Rook knew well from his days as a newspaperman, could turn on the camaraderie when the situation indicated it. “Nice of you to come down.”

“You mean I had a
choice?”

Parkman smiled. “Er—well, I’ll be brief and come to the point. You pretty busy these days, Howie?”

“About as busy as any other old newspaperman turned out to pasture. I’m writing a book.”

“What’s going to be the title?
Fifty Thousand Policemen Can Be Wrong?”

“Thanks,” said Rook. “That’s not bad; I’ll remember it.”

“You’ve also been writing more letters to the newspapers, I see. Taking the police department to pieces. Probably a healthy thing for us to have a little good honest criticism.” The man fiddled with a letter opener.

“Well,” said Rook dryly, “I imagine that you didn’t have me hauled down here just to tell me that you’ve become one of my fans.”

“No, not exactly. I don’t quite know how to put it to you, but since your retirement from the paper you’ve sort of set yourself up as an unofficial crime analyst; at least in your letters to the press you’ve once or twice put your finger on something our boys have missed. You’ve been talking big. Now, how about declaring a temporary truce and helping us on something?”

“What?” Rook very nearly dropped his favorite pipe.

“You’ve needled us plenty—”

“And haven’t I been needled plenty too? How about the time I almost had to spend a night in Washington Heights Jail on suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor because I had Tootsie in my room—Tootsie being a parakeet I was keeping for a friend. No, Chief. I’m no sleuth, just an objective observer. And besides, I don’t think I’d care to give your boys in the Detective Bureau the correct time if they begged for it on bended knee.”

“Nobody’s begging, Howie. The idea of calling you in didn’t originate in the Bureau, and I myself—” The Chief stopped short. “If you must know, the suggestion came down from the Commissioner’s office, obviously planted there by somebody with a drag. But, Howie, we’ve got a queer death on our hands.”

Rook blinked. “But who got the business? There haven’t been any murders in the past week, which is a record for our fair city.”

“James McFarley was the guy.”

“But—but that one was supposed to be suicide!”

“It
was
suicide. I know it was suicide. But in some ways it’s a damned queer one. You knew the man, Howie?”

“Not socially, no. There’s a certain gap between the Jonathan Club and Joe’s Bar and Grill, you know. But like any other prominent citizen he had a file in the city-room library, and I may remember something.” Rook closed his eyes. “Age about fifty-five, give or take a few years either way. Retired lawyer, one-time deputy assistant D.A., but he’d made his real pile speculating in Valley real estate during the postwar boom out there. His hobby was writing stuff on psychology—I seem to remember that he even did a book on it, which he probably paid to get printed. Wife Mavis, legally separated from him about nine months ago, divorce supposed to be still pending. She’s an ex-chorus girl, and dancer and model and whatnot, the sort of type who—”

“Pssst!” warned Parkman hastily. “That’s her in the outer office. I’ll have her in here to talk with us in a few more minutes, as soon as I give you a fast fill-in. It was she that worked on the Commish to keep the case open, and incidentally to bring you into it.”

“I would much rather have had my beauty sleep,” said Howie Rook. “But naturally I appreciate the compliment. I still don’t see what I can do that your men haven’t already done; all kidding aside, I know that they’re as good as the police force in any American city of comparable size even if they work by the book too much. So—?”

“Listen to the rest of it, Howie. This is up your alley.”

Rook shrugged. “Well, I could start off by asking what about any known enemies for McFarley?”

“None that we know of.”

“Apart of course from the wife or ex-wife, who according to your police dogma is always automatically suspect.”

Parkman shook his head. “She has an alibi, and she had nothing to gain from his death. And besides, if she’d killed him for any reason she’d hardly be raising hell and high water to get his death investigated more fully, would she? It’s suicide, sure enough.”

“Well, then, who does benefit by his death?
Cui bono?”

“The estate, which is tied up in real property, is estimated at somewhere between two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and four hundred thousand. It is left outright to a daughter by a former marriage, who has not been living at home for some months; she left to live her own life, or something.”

“Alibi?”

“None whatever, which is sometimes the best alibi of all, as you well know. Crafty criminals always have one; the innocent rarely do. Where were you last Wednesday evening?”

“Home, reading—I think,” admitted Rook. “But I can’t prove it.”

“Exactly. But I promised you the fill-in. Yesterday morning about nine o’clock the part-time housekeeper couldn’t get into McFarley’s apartment to straighten it up. She smelled that something was wrong—she knew that he was home because she’d already seen his Cadillac parked outside on the boulevard. She called the janitor handy man, who’d also noticed the car with an all-night parking ticket under the windshield wiper. The building—which McFarley owned, by the way—had its own basement garage and McFarley always kept his car there when he came in for the night.”

“So he wasn’t in for the night!”

“Or else he had something else on his mind, and didn’t care about tickets. The housekeeper and the handy man broke in the door—and they found him on the floor of the living room, like
this!”

Parkman took a photograph from the folder on his desk, and silently held it out. Howie Rook took it, looked, and gasped. “Is this a
gag?”

“I only wish it was, Howie. I hate these bizarre things. The reporters and the true-crime writers always go to town on them.”

“The boys are only trying to make a living,” Rook defensively reminded him.

“We’ve kept this part of it from the papers, at least so far. But it will have to break sooner or later. Yet these things just don’t happen!”

“Not every day,” murmured Howie Rook. The photograph, enlarged from a Rolleiflex flash close-up taken straight down at the subject, was brutally, crisply clear. It showed a heavyish man in black tie and dinner jacket lying supine on the rug; there was a tiny, blackened hole in the starched shirt front and a trickle of what must have been blood. But Rook was at the moment not interested in the wound, because the dead man wore a tousled fright-wig and beneath it his face was completely unrecognizable; it was daubed from forehead to collar with thick white grease paint overlaid with the foolish frozen dark grin, the bulbous rubber nose, and the ridiculous arched eyebrows of the hooligan, the circus clown! It was the traditional face of all clowns since circuses began!

“You mean that’s McFarley?” Howie Rook was mildly incredulous. “But
why?”

Parkman shrugged. “Okay, you like puzzles so well, you got yourself one. The man seems to have died by gunshot in his apartment sometime around eleven o’clock Wednesday evening, which was night before last. The wound is compatible with suicide according to the coroner’s physician. The windows were all closed and locked except one, presumably left slightly open for the convenience of the cat. There’s a six-inch ledge or cornice or whatever you want to call it that absolutely nobody but a cat or a human fly could have traversed; the apartment is on the top floor with a five-story drop to a cement driveway. No chance for much of any shenanigans; anybody driving by on that busy boulevard would have seen anything unusual that was going on outside that window. There’s a narrow transom over the hall door—it’s a real old-fashioned place—but it only opens up to ten or eleven inches and nothing but a monkey could have wormed itself in or out. Doors, front and rear, locked and bolted on the inside!”

Howie Rook pricked up his ears. “Locked-room mysteries are usually for fiction and the pen of John Dickson Carr. But I could show you clippings—”

“I’m sure you could,” cut in Chief Parkman hastily. “The gun was lying there right beside the body; it’s one of those nasty little Italian Beretta belly guns. Not registered to McFarley nor, as far as we can find out, to anybody else. Probably a war souvenir. But there was, I admit, no suicide note—and no known motive. That’s the catch.”

Rook almost snorted. “There are plenty of recorded cases,” he said, “where suicides didn’t bother to leave a note. I think it’s around 45 per cent. And for a suicide motive, what about the wreck of his marriage?”

“The marriage doesn’t seem to have been as completely wrecked as all that, if we can believe Mavis McFarley. As she will gladly tell you when I let her come in. Here, you might have a look at this.” The Chief held out another photograph, a wide-angle shot that took in most of the room where the dead man had lain.

Rook studied it carefully. Beside the sprawled corpse in the foreground, there was a large portable cocktail bar bearing a container for ice cubes, numerous bottles and siphons, and so on and so forth. There were half a dozen highball glasses, painted with designs of fish and game birds, and fancy plates piled high with hors d’oeuvres and sandwiches. “From the look of all that,” Parkman said, “McFarley was expecting guests when he died. No sign of a struggle anywhere, except maybe that one flimsy occasional chair tipped over, and he could have bumped against that as he fell in his death throes—”

“You say he was expecting guests?” interrupted Rook quietly. “In that grotesque make-up?”

“It has been suggested that the man wanted to dramatize his suicide, a sort of Pagliacci complex. Maybe he chose to die as a clown, and a clown has to have an audience. So he invited in his friends, with the drinks all ready so they could drink a farewell toast to him. Only he forgot to leave the door unlocked before he shot himself.”

“You don’t believe that yourself,” said Howie Rook firmly. “Anybody who would go to all that trouble wouldn’t forget to unlock the door, and while I’ll concede that a man might set up the drinks at a time like that, he’d hardly go to the trouble of making with the hors d’oeuvres.”

“But what else? Anyway, if we’re right about the time of death, the man must have been lying there when his guests came and rang the bell and then went away.”

“Guesswork?”

“No. We know who they are—they came forward at once. People quite beyond suspicion. They were the Joe Martins and Dr. and Mrs. Bowen. Martin was McFarley’s former law partner and Bowen his M.D., all old friends. The two couples tell a straight story, that we’ve of course thoroughly checked; they say that they’d been invited to stop in after the opera for a drink and a surprise, but that they came and rang the bell and hammered on the door and even tried the knob and then went away. They alibi each other rather thoroughly; they were all seen at the opera and it didn’t let out until almost eleven. What do you make of it, Howie?”

“Nothing much, as yet. The lights—were they still burning when the body was discovered next morning?”

“No, they were off. Why?”

“Because nobody likes to die in the dark. It was either murder, or it was suicide tricked up to look like murder. Only why the locked and bolted doors? And suicides who use a gun or knife almost invariably open the clothing first; I can’t tell you why. If it was murder, the killer we have to look for was somebody McFarley knew—or he wouldn’t have let him in at that late hour. They weren’t on intimate or friendly terms, or he’d have offered the caller a drink, with the bar so handy. None of the glasses had been used, had they?”

Parkman shook his head.

“Did anybody hear the shot?”

“One couple in the apartment directly underneath thought that they may have heard something just before eleven, but they had their TV set turned to a crime-buster program so they’re not absolutely sure. The apartments across the hall were empty and being redecorated; nothing above but the roof.”

“Any strangers seen coming in or out of the building about that time?”

“Not that we know of. Nobody is at the desk in the lobby after 10
P.M.
and the place has automatic elevators so that anybody could go up or down as they willed. There is the record of somebody in the building passing a woman in the lower hall who carried a paper bag full of tinkling glassware, presumably liquor—but we doubt that it had anything to do with McFarley, since he had a plentiful stock. The boys in one of our traffic-control cars report that they saw a man and a boy walking a dog along Cheshire Boulevard about that time; the man and boy might have seen something or noticed somebody but we haven’t been able to locate them as yet. Out in the Village almost everybody has a dog. But most certainly, as I told you, any human-fly stuff, or the use of a ladder or rope outside that open window, would have been noticed and reported. No, Howie. It all comes back to the fact that McFarley died alone inside a locked and bolted room, with the gun beside him. You can’t get around that.”

Rook held up his hand. “I can show you clippings mentioning at least three different ways to fasten an inside bolt from the outside, though I admit that most of them require time and considerable mechanical ingenuity; they also leave noticeable pin-pricks on the wood of the door. Which your efficient young men would have noticed.”

“There weren’t any,” said Parkman.

“Well, are there any other tangible clues that we can guess about?”

Parkman nodded, and opened his desk drawer. “There’s the gun, fired once. No obvious prints; there rarely are on a gun with a pebbled grip. Then there was this in his wallet, along with some eighty dollars in currency.” The Chief showed a paper napkin printed with a comic penguin and the name Polar Club, and bearing the perfect imprint of a woman’s mouth in bright geranium. “And last but not least, there was this on the floor near the door.” He took out an envelope and carefully dumped a thimbleful of something mottled and brownish onto a sheet of paper. “Recognize it, Howie?”