The Burned Man Read online

  “Who’s handling it for Homicide?” I asked.

  “Marks.”

  I knew Marks so I’d be able to work with him. “Cops,” I said in pretended disgust. “They get under foot. Arson

  Squad, Homicide. I suppose they’ll be putting Burglary on it next because the guy broke into the factory.”

  Murko knew I was kidding, but he was partly serious when he pretended not to like it. “Let me tell you something, buster,” he said. “The guy that set this fire wasn’t just some creep who gets his kicks watching a blaze. He’s a mean one. If you ever manage to stumble on to him you may be glad there are so many cops around.”

  “They’ll all be out to the corner for a beer when it happens,” I told him. I grinned so he wouldn’t forget that I was kidding. “I’ll read your report later, Bob. See you around.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said glumly and went back to watching his boys poke around in the charred remains.

  I waved and left. I had intended to stick around, but the picture was a little different now. I took a cab over to Homicide. I told the desk sergeant who I was, he checked by phone and then told me to go on back.

  Larry Marks was a dapper little guy who looked more like a bookkeeper than a cop. But he was a good one. He’d been a lieutenant in Homicide for two years and an acting lieutenant for five years before that. He’d fallen down on a few of them, but I knew that his record of completed cases was damn good. We’d worked together four or five times when the victims had been covered by Excelsior. We had a healthy respect for each other.

  “Come in,” he yelled when I knocked on the door of his office.

  I shoved the door open and went in. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. .

  “Picture of a hard-working cop with his feet in the public trough,” I said.

  “This is the first ten minutes of my lunch hour,” he said. “I’m giving you the second ten minutes of it and then the hour is over.”

  “That’s the trouble with Daylight Saving Time.”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d be around, Brian. In fact, I was expecting you sooner.”

  “How come?”

  “I talked to McCluskey. He told me you were nosing around last night. Got the case all solved for us?”

  “Hell,” I admitted, “I don’t even know what the case is. Did you get an identification from the M. E. yet?”

  He nodded. “Sort of. There wasn’t a hell of a lot left to identify those two, but we got it. One was the night watchman all right. The other was Colin Dane. President of the Dane Corporation.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Got him insured, too?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember it. He took out the policy just about a year ago. For a half million dollars. And we’re covering the building for two million.”

  “Looks to me like you might pay it,” Lietenant Marks said.

  “If we do, I know a vice-president who’ll have a new ulcer for every dollar of it. You’re sure about the identification?” -

  “As sure as we can be. Like I said, there wasn’t very much to go on. The watchman had an old steel-case watch that was identified by his son. The other body didn’t have anything that stayed intact, but we checked both of them out with their dentists and that’s the core of our identification.”

  “The teeth checked, huh?”

  “Down to the last filling. Oh, we checked out the other things. The length and the size of the skeleton fits Dane’s size. Dane had no broken bones. Neither did the skeleton. But the teeth were the main thing. Dane had a lot of dental work. His dentist was down with Dane’s X-rays and everything matched.”

  “I guess that’s good enough,” I admitted reluctantly. “Got anything on it yet?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “This is going to be a long one, Brian, and even then maybe we don’t come up with anything. About the only thing I can see to do right now is to dig up all the enemies Dane might have made and go through them with a fine-tooth comb. Our only other immediate hope is that somebody saw something and will get public-spirited enough to come in with it. You know the odds on that.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like the way this one felt. After you’ve worked on these cases long enough you begin to get a feeling about them. This one is easy, that one is tough. And usually you’re right. I was already feeling that this was going to be a real bloody one.

  “From what I already hear,” Larry Marks said, “Dane made plenty of enemies. He was a ruthless businessman and didn’t care how he made his money. I asked one of his business associates about enemies. The guy laughed and said that narrowed the possibilities down to ten thousand.” “Great,” I said. “Well, I’ll see you around, Larry.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said. “After all, I haven’t got much to do. I’ll wait around until you come in to tell me who did it.”

  I thumbed my nose at him and left.

  I stopped off for a quick sandwich and coffee and then went on to the Excelsior building on Madison Avenue. I never made it as far as my own office. The receptionist, a pretty little brunette who looked as if all her assets were banked beneath her dress, stopped me the minute I was inside.

  “Mr. Rogers,” she said, “left word that you were to come right to his office the minute you arrived, Mr. Brett.” “The trouble with Mr. Rogers,” I said, “is that he’s afraid I’ll waste company time in dalliance with you.” I turned away from the working end of the floor and headed for the executive end. I stopped and looked back at her. “You do dally, don’t you?”

  “Oh, Mr. Brett,” she said seriously, which will give you a rough idea of her I.Q. Not that she needed brains, equipped the way she was, but on my bad days I liked to prove to myself that I wasn’t the only idiot working for Excelsior.

  Warren Rogers occupied an office that was only large enough to have made a home for a small family. To reach his desk you had to make a safari across a carpet with a nap so thick it always seemed to me that I’d need a machete to make it.

  Rogers was a lean, cadaverous man who looked like an undertaker who had hit it rich and was trying to conceal his past. I’d always thought they had put him in the right spot; as V.P. in charge of adjustments, part of his job was to haggle about money over the freshly turned corpses of policy holders. I had also always thought that there was something basically crooked about him, but maybe that was just my prejudice showing. As you may have gathered, I didn’t care for our Mr. Rogers.

  Rogers was obviously waiting for me. So were the other two Excelsior vice-presidents who were with him. The fact that they were there emphasized the importance of the Dane case. They were big men in Excelsior. I knew them both.

  Morton Edwards and James Weston did not really resemble each other, yet they looked alike. Both were a little on the stout side and normally jolly. They both bought their suits from Brooks Brothers, lived in Westchester County, played golf and had blue-blooded wives. That about summed them up, except that they always managed to look sad when Excelsior lost a policy holder.

  “Where have you been, Brett?” Rogers asked crisply.

  “Here and there,” I said and dropped into the fourth chair. I lit a cigarette and let its plebeian smoke mingle with that from their Havanas.

  “I expected you earlier,” he said.

  “I know,” I said and let it lie there. I was good enough in my job to afford a little insolence. In fact, it was even expected of me. Investigators are supposed to be tough boys and insolence in them is on a par with temperament in artists.

  “What about the Dane case?” Rogers asked. The fact that he was calling it that told me that he knew about the identification.

  “As of the moment,” I admitted, “you probably know as much about it as do. The fire was set all right. A candle mechanism was used to start it after the building had been soaked with gasoline. The candle was probably lit about ten-thirty, the fire starting at about eleven-thirty
, give or take a few minutes. The inside of the building is gutted. The two bodies found in the building have been identified as the night watchman and Colin Dane. They were both murdered before the fire started. That’s it at the moment. I just came from seeing Lieutenant Marks, who’s in charge for Homicide.”

  They digested the information slowly.

  “The identification of Dane is positive?” Edwards asked. “As positive as they can make it now,” I said. “It rests on his dentist identifying his teeth. There wasn’t much else left of him.”

  “Poor devil,” Weston said. “Dane and I belonged to the same club.”

  “You knew him well?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Weston said hurriedly. “Just to recognize him. That was all.” He looked as if he were about to blush. “I dislike speaking ill of the dead, but Dane was known as a pretty ruthless fellow. Didn’t really belong in the club, you know—but he was a member.”

  I got that part of it. Translated into ordinary English, it meant that Dane lacked a Harvard or Princeton or Yale polish to his ruthlessness.

  “That’s all you know?” Rogers asked me.

  I nodded. “And all the police know.”

  “Excelsior,” Rogers said, “expects its investigators to know a little more than the police do.”

  “By this evening I probably will,” I said.

  Rogers nodded, his face getting a couple of degrees warmer. “I’ve ordered the Dane file put on your desk, Brett. Let us know what you think.”

  I looked at the three of them. “You want to get out of paying the two and a half million?” It was a silly question.

  They all three looked shocked, but it was Edwards who answered me, leaning forward in his chair in an attitude which he thought was man to man. “Naturally,” he said, “we wish to pay in full if everything is in order. We would like you to examine all the information and perhaps make a few inquiries and we’ll be guided by your opinion. Particularly—ah—in reference to the manner of Dane’s death.”

  “Yes,” Weston said. He frowned. “Dane married a woman twenty-five years younger than himself. Three years ago. I believe she was a chorus girl.”

  “Blows the wind that way?” I said. “Bearing Chanel Number Five?”

  “As I recall,” Edwards said, “his wife is not the beneficiary of the life insurance policy. I suppose, however, that she does come in for at least one-third of his estate. I imagine that this might be a sizable—ah—temptation.” “A chorus girl, huh?” I said. I gave them my best leer. “You sure one of you wouldn’t rather question the toothsome widow?”

  They all looked shocked. Upon that note I left and went back to my own office. The files were on my desk. I sat down and started to go through them.

  Colin Dane had been a self-made man. According to our reports, he’d never been too careful about what methods he used in the making. But he’d always managed to stay out of jail. He was now fifty-three years old—or had been— and was considered a wealthy man although most of it was on paper. He was the president and major stockholder in the Dane Corporation. Major stockholder by virtue of 51 per cent of the shares. The corporation manufactured plastic products, ranging from toys through kitchen gadgets to plastic paneling for the home. The corporation was very successful. In addition to that, he was Chairman of the Board of Directors of Wilkins, Frankson, Dane and Mullet, Inc., builders and architects with a multimillion dollar business. Dane was considered the most important man in the company.

  The report was a year old and seemed to be pretty complete up to that time. Dane had been accused of a lot of things, but apparently none of them had ever been proved. Most of the accusations had been made by businessmen who had come off second best in dealings with him. One charge was different. It had involved the court-martial of a Captain Frank Jenner, a dentist in the U. S. Army, and two army noncoms named Farini and Wade. It had been charged that the three army men had stolen large quantities of jewelry and art objects in occupied countries in Europe and that they’d sold them to Colin Dane and an unnamed partner. The court-martial had finally acquitted the men for lack of evidence so nothing had ever been done about Dane.

  For a minute I had a wild idea and I checked quickly through the papers. But my hunch was wrong. Dane’s dentist was listed as a Dr. Herman Lemmon, not Dr. Jenner. Just to make sure, I phoned Lieutenant Marks. He said it was Lemmon who had made the identification. So I went back to my reading.

  There wasn’t much information on Dane’s early years. He’d been a bookkeeper for a New York firm that had gone bankrupt in 1930. Shortly after that Dane had started his own business. That offered some interesting thoughts even though a lot of firms were going bankrupt in 1930. I made a note of it, although I was sure there wasn’t anything to be turned up or it would have been in the report. From 1930 on, Dane had made money, but he’d only gotten into the big time during and after the war. At the time of the report, his salary from the two companies was listed as a hundred thousand a year. That didn’t include his dividends.

  Two years before the report was made, Colin Dane had gotten married. It was his first marriage. He was fifty at the time. The girl was twenty-five. Her name had been Kitty Kelo and she’d been a dancer on Broadway for several years. According to the report, the marriage was apparently successful. But the funny thing was that she was not the beneficiary on his policy.

  The five hundred thousand dollars was to go to something called The Franco-American Cultural Association, with offices in Paris, France. The director was somebody named Jean Farelle. It was a nonprofit making corporation whose stated purpose was to further the cultural ties between France and America.

  That struck a sour note to me. Dane sounded like a guy whose cultural activities had been limited to the smoker or stag show. I couldn’t see him giving a half million to such an outfit even if they weren’t going to promote anything more high-brow than Mickey Spillane. I flipped the pages to see who’d done the report. It had been Hennesey. He wasn’t with us any more, but he’d been a good man. And the report had been initialed by Rogers, so I guessed they must have been convinced that the beneficiary was legitimate. Maybe I was just the suspicious type. Or maybe Dane had really flipped for this culture bit.

  I went back to the report. There wasn’t much else. Dane was solvent. So were the two companies he headed. Dane was in good health. He’d been checked over by one of the doctors who occasionally did work for us. I made a note of his name. Cortland. .

  Dane lived high, but not too high for a man of his wealth. He smoked cigars, good ones. He drank very little and the investigator had included the information that he ordered a Scotch mist or Scotch and soda when he did. He had no known bad habits—except the suggestions about the way he made his money. He didn’t even tell dirty jokes. He’d never been mixed up in any sex scandals and hadn’t seemed even to be interested in any one girl before he married. He hadn’t been interested in boys either.

  I still had my feelings about this case, but if there was anything I was going to have to dig it up myself. The obvious place to start was the young widow. But instead of rushing off to see her, I sat and let my mind jump around among the facts I already knew. It kept coming back to one thing. Dane’s near brush with the federal government. That and the fact that one of the other men had been a dentist—and the identification of Dane was a dental one.

  I don’t like coincidences: Maybe they happen, but nobody’s ever proved to me that they just drop out of the blue sky. The identification of Dane’s body was strictly on a dental basis and Dane had once been suspected of some profitable hanky-panky with a dentist. Two and one-half million dollars could be called profitable, too.

  I reached out and grabbed a phone book. There was no Dr. Frank Jenner in the Manhattan book. I tried the Bronx. No luck. Beginning to feel a little foolish about my hunch, I tried the Brooklyn book. My luck changed. There it was Frank Jenner, D.D.S. On Eastern Parkway. I grabbed my hat and left without even bothering to close the telephone book.
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  One of the advantages of an expense account is that you can take taxis. I took one to Brooklyn.

  The address turned out to be a large apartment house. Frank Jenner, D.D.S., had an office on the ground floor. The sign on the window said Office Hours—9 to 5. But the door was locked and there was no answer when I rang the bell.

  There weren’t any attendants around in the building. Across the lobby was the apartment-office of a medical doctor. I went over and saw his nurse. She didn’t know Dr. Jenner very well, but she did know that he lived in the apartment as well as practicing there. She was surprised that he wasn’t in. She thought he had a pretty big practice. After she prodded her memory a little, she remembered she had seen the dentist some time early on the morning of the day before. She was sympathetic—I’d pretended I was an indignant patient—but that was all she could remember.

  I began to get hot about my hunch. If the dentist hadn’t been around since some time the day before, maybe he had skipped. If he had picked that day to skip, it brought up another coincidence—and I didn’t believe in them. I began to have a real itch to see inside the good dentist’s office.

  I hung around in the lobby for a few minutes. There wasn’t much traffic. It was a family-type apartment house and most of the mamas were still outdoors with their children. I decided I could take a chance.

  I always carry a few skeleton keys, plus a number of little strips of metal that can perform miracles. Not that I make a habit of letting myself into strange houses, but there are times when it comes in handy.

  One of the strips of steel did the trick. I slipped inside and closed the door. I was standing in what was obviously the reception room. There were a number of worn but comfortable chairs scattered around and the usual stacks of magazines. I stood there for a minute, listening. There wasn’t a sound in the place.

  There were two doors out of the reception room. I guessed that the one to the side led into the living quarters. It was partly blocked by one of the chairs. I went over and pushed open the other door. .

  I’d guessed right. I saw the dental chair and a cabinet full of tools. I stepped inside and looked around.