The Straw Hat Murders Read online

  Cambourne turned away from No. 633, which was not even a recognizable number—went south on the block till he got back to the entrance of the Newspaper for the Blind. Out at the curb, in front of it, the blind and deaf man had seemingly not moved since he, Cambourne, had been there last. Cambourne went up the splintered stairway. At the head of it, the foreman with the ink-stained forearms and the blue apron was waiting. A greyish oblong of cardboard in his hand.

  “Ah, there, Inspector,” he said, extending the piece of cardboard to Cambourne coming up. “Here’s your ticket—to start conversation, anyway, atween you and one deaf and blind man. Hope you can take it from there—or can you?”

  CHAPTER IV

  In Which Two Go A-Banking!

  Cambourne accepted the cardboard oblong with its raised and cryptic Braille figures. The foreman spoke.

  “Nothing wrong, I hope?”

  “No, nothing. Just—what’s your name?”

  “Banbruck, Inspector.”

  “Thank you so much for your help in this instance. Getting through with a single pertinent question, to a man who’s both blind and deaf, is quite a problem. Thank you so much.”

  “Don’t mention it, Inspector. Glad to be of assistance. Come again, if you have to.”

  Cambourne went back down to the sidewalk. Now he had an ingress into the locked brain of a man who was both blind and deaf.

  Striding out to the curb, he came to a stop in front of the beggar. Who did not hear, or even know, of his approach. Cambourne leaned forward. Took up the other’s hand from the up-ended box where it lay supinely. Withdrew from his sidecoat pocket where he’d dropped it, his badge. Put the other’s finger upon it. Fortunately, nobody was in the vicinity at this moment.

  “Ah,” commented the blind and deaf man instantly, “policeman? Good morning, sir. A crisp fall day, is it not?”

  Now Cambourne, withdrawing his badge, put the piece of cardboard in the other’s hands.

  The blind man’s fingers went eagerly over it.

  He looked up. Startled, even in his orbless eyes.

  “Oh-ho!” he said. “I know—I think I know—what’s wrong. He’s struck—again?”

  Since there was no way of getting an answer, he spoke on without one.

  “I’ll go with you, sir, at once, around the corner, to the bank. Right away.”

  With a key he unlocked the chain that wound about his great steel piggy-bank, and held it to the box. Reaching under somewhere, abstracting a white cane, and rising.

  Now the two proceeded along Depot Street eastward, and around the corner at Wabash Avenue, to where a busy bank stood with stone pillars in front, and copper-barred windows.

  “The first teller, sir, always takes it,” said the blind man.

  Cambourne therefore led the way to this teller’s window.

  The blind man, coming along too, though not so surely, spoke. To the teller.

  “I’m a little early today, sir. This gentleman, from the police department, wants to see, I guess, what’s been dropped in there, and—”

  “Since yesterday—when he came last?” laughed the teller. Though towards Cambourne. He took the bank. “This is something new, sir, for me. I’m from New York. A beggar that brings our standard home-savings bank in every day, has it unlocked, takes half the money, and leaves half in a savings account—”

  He was unlocking the bank. Tumbling out the money.

  Cambourne, peering forward at it, shook his head gravely.

  It was there!

  The $20 goldpiece that always got left with Piggy-Bank Pete—after every killing by the Straw Hat Murderer!

  CHAPTER V

  The Homesick One

  “Don’t touch that goldpiece,” immediately warned Cambourne, to the teller. “No, don’t touch it.”

  “Don’t touch—”

  “No! Here!” Cambourne produced a toothpick. And a small cotton lined pillbox. “Slide it in here. Into this little cotton lined box. Yes.”

  “Oh, oh? Something criminal, eh?” the teller was commenting.

  He followed instructions, however. For he slid the goldpiece deftly into the box, without touching it. And seeing that Piggy-Bank Pete had apparently given permission for all this to Cambourne, slid the box over to Cambourne. The latter put it, with lid fully on it now, down into his inner breast pocket. Though if it were anything like the previous goldpieces, it wouldn’t contain much. Nothing, likely, in fact. But this time the murderer, en route to the depot, may have bungled—taken off his gloves—who knew?—you never can tell!

  The teller was shoving back to the blind man half the remaining money. Banking half. Entering it in a book the blind man was now extending.

  Cambourne took the chin of the other man gently. Nodded his head, back and forth.

  “I get it, sir,” the latter said. “’Twas there, eh? All right. You may have it—I know you do have it. And just bring it—or the equivalent in bills—back to me when all is over.”

  And the two, in a trice, were going out of the bank.

  Outside, Cambourne patted the blind man on the shoulder. To signify that he was done. And leaving.

  And as the blind man turned and started trudging his way wearily back to his box, on the next street west, feeling about in front of him with his white cane, Cambourne stepped into a cigar store lying off the bank. Into a telephone booth off the doorway.

  Put in his coin and dialed a number.

  A girl’s voice answered. He could see the girl—her name was Daphne—and Daphne was his wife. Blond of hair, blue of eye, her delicate oval face sad from the homesickness, from the loneliness that was eating her heart out.

  “Huntoon, Daphne,” he said tenderly.

  “Yes, Huntoon?”

  “Lord,” he commented, to himself, for her tones were really today those of a homesick girl.

  He spoke.

  “Daphne, honey,” he said, “you may as well—yes, you may as—start packing our things. For London!”

  “A trip back already—Huntoon? Why, you just brought me over.”

  “Yes, I know. But I always told you that if things blew up for me here, I’d go back to London, start over in the department there, thanks to that fine letter from Sir Ivor Kenrisborough—and we’d finish our lives in the city where you lived, and I was born.”

  “Yes, Huntoon. But things haven’t blown up—for you. So—”

  “Well,” he said grimly, “the thing that has knocked four men now out of the homicide investigation department—and back to walking beats!—has happened. The Straw Hat Murderer—has struck again!”

  CHAPTER VI

  The Straw Hat Murders

  The girl on the other end was plainly puzzled.

  “The Straw Hat Murderer?” she echoed. “What a—but what do you mean, Huntoon?”

  “Honey,” he said, “I didn’t intend, after fetching you here from England—after falling in love with you on a trip home to see the country of my own birth—to bring you back to a mess of crime and blood such as this Chicago is. I intended to give you six months with nothing grisly—ever discussed. And that’s why I’ve never told you about—the Straw Hat Murders. But now—well, I’ve got to—if it’s to mean that I’m to lose my official head, just as four men in the Homicide Department already have.

  “You know,” he explained, “after each killing—unsolved—one head must fall—to satisfy the Public?”

  “It isn’t that way in England,” she told him, longingly.

  “Right you are, honey! Right you are. But all right. Well, darling, to make it brief, the Straw Hat Murders are the work of one and the same man. We know plenty about him. But—not enough! For one thing, we know the general path he takes—that is, from the commence­ment of crime to flight—because of ineluctable conditions inherent in the affair—and also because he leaves invariably certain traces. For one thing, he leaps across seven feet of space, lying full three stories up in the air, to gain access to a roof he has to gain. He comes down
a ladder lying underneath a roof trapdoor whose owner won’t—dare not—lock it or nail it be­cause of court-orders, suspended sentence against himself for fire-laws violation, Fire Department inexorable rules, and whatnot. He—the murderer—oh, we know also that he comes into Chicago from outside—and leaves town immediately after his murder is completed or before next morning is well under way, because he marks his own path up the alley by which he has to attain egress, around and into Depot Street, thence west to the depots, by a goldpiece dropped into the piggy-bank of an old blind and deaf beggar who sits at Depot and South Streets—”

  “Huntoon!—are you sure you’re not up against in all of these—a false trail?”

  “Honey, you take the chair—the deductive chair—and let me stay home—and do the knitting. For you may be right. Anyway, he does drop it into the bank of a beggar whose friendly sign says ‘Have a Pleasant Journey’ which in some slight way seems to suggest that he, the murderer, hopes to. Or—but all right.”

  He paused.

  “Well, the Straw Hat Murders really start with old Emmanuel Goldfarb, one of the kindliest and finest old Jews on Down-at-Heel Row here. He had studied piano in his own youth, and could play that instrument to some extent. After his wife died, he became a little bit—well—twisted, I guess. He missed her so. For he reconstructed the old building across the street from his second-hand office furniture store to be a sort of—well, the building in question he’d inherited from his father; it was separated from the buildings, each side of it, by gangways—had continuous and perpetual steam-heat service, incidentally, at absurdly low rates, due to some old contract drawn up with some central heating service around there in First World War days—it was being used for storage of overflow pieces of his stock, and—well anyway, he reconstructed it to be, at least certainly on its top floor, a ‘hideaway music studio’ where he could withdraw himself from the world, stroll about up there, and, in particular, play the songs that ‘mama used to love’. Yes, he moved in a $3000 grand piano into the top unfinished story of the building—he had to cut holes in the carpeting that he’d had laid over the entire floor, and screw it to the floor above pillars he put in on the floor below—a regular engineering job, no less—he created a special stairway, boxed in, at least in one of its stretches, from a rear entrance up, and bricked up all the windows looking out and down, front, side, and back—”

  “Bricked up—all the windows? Why?”

  “Well, for three reasons, honey, so nearly as I can get it at this late date. One, the instinct to cut the world out entirely. He wanted to be alone I guess—with ‘mama’. Also perhaps, to shut out the noise of the city.”

  “Oh yes. I—I hear it all the time, Huntoon. The roar of the—how dreadful. Particularly here in Chicago, where—but what might have been—could have been—the third reason?”

  “Coolness, honey! In summer. A brick building whose glassed-in apertures—i.e. windows—are bricked up will remain cool on the hottest days. Those are the points where all the suffocating heat comes in. He wanted his ‘sacred studio’ to be as livable in summer as ’twas in winter, thanks to that certain heat he always had, due to his old contract.”

  “Well, all that bricking up of windows suddenly does begin to make sense, Huntoon, when you cite all the reasons. But do go on?”

  “Well, he used to go there—having bricked up even the front door to keep out busybodies and so-called ‘bums’ and what—he used to go there, via his rear door, then up by way of his private stairway, and play the songs ‘that mama loved’ on the grand piano—all by himself. And eventually—he died. And lo, when his will was read, it turned out that he’d put in it a steeltight proviso that the studio was not to be demolished, dismantled, nor even to be used for storage for 20 years, nor the piano moved, nor anything. His son, Max, so I’ve been told, tried in court, to prove his father was touched—Max could have inherited anyway, you know—but failed. The courts ruled that a man had a right to have metaphysical theories if he wanted them, and even said that if the old man believed he himself might be coming back there off and on, in some sort of spiritual form, to carry on with his songs—and which seemed to be the old man’s idea as expressed in his will—there was nothing to confute his beliefs. And that—”

  “And so Max Goldfarb,” she half giggled, “was stuck with a top floor—he couldn’t rent—nor use?”

  “Aye, but he got a musical studio—he could rent! And rent it he did. Easy! To a musical student called Robert Hordon. Who—

  “But this was five years ago, darling. I was just an underling in the Department. Well, they found Hordon, seated at the piano, a huge, keenly sharpened knife driven full into his back. The one door downstairs, leading out to the short back yard or alley which were nearly the same, was open. The fire escape stairs on the fire escape of the adjoining building had been pulled down to near ground-level—by a hooked wire. Showing the full course of the murderer.

  “He’d pulled the ’scape down—had gone up and onto the roof of the adjoining building—a warehouse, of course—had leaped across, full seven feet, raised a rooftrap in the Goldfarb building—come down a wall ladder inside, and secreted himself under the stairway coming up to that floor. Yes, they found a handkerchief under there he’d accidentally dropped. After the victim had come in, was playing lustily and long on the piano, the killer-to-be had come up the stairs, stood in the doorway with a malevolent grimace on his face—”

  “Oh, Huntoon, you’re embellishing—”

  “Maybe I am—a bit. For nobody knows exactly what was in his mind, even on his face, as he saw his man at the piano, 22 or so feet away. But he crossed the intervening distance, and plunged his knife into his victim-to-be’s heart, by way of the latter’s back. The musician—fell forward, dead. The murderer apparently—for this was summer—left behind him a straw hat—a sailor hat, to be precise—he wore. And believe me, the police did a lot of tracing of that hat—and got nowhere.”

  “Well, what was that about a goldpiece? What—”

  “Well, that wasn’t attached to the crime—at that time. That first murder. By pure chance, an old blind and deaf beggar at the corner, turning in his money at a bank around the block, had a $20 goldpiece in his repository. One of these home-savings steel piggy banks where the bank keeps the key. A reporter, in there at the time, wrote a piece on it, to the effect that people still had tender hearts. And there was apparently no connection. But—”

  “But Goldfarb—Max Goldfarb—rented the studio—again?”

  “Yes, the murder having been figured to have been a case of some private revenge, on the part of some personal enemy of Robert Hordon’s. Not even the police deemed, or sensed, otherwise. Well, Max rented the studio then to a Charles Amodie. Who took over.”

  “And it happened—again?”

  “Yes. It was fall, this time. Not straw hat weather at all. Amodie wasn’t killed by the blow. But staggered clear across the room. From the piano, obviously, since the overturned bench showed his struggle to get out from it—to anywhere. He fell against a further wall, with hands out against it. And died. But again—the straw hat was found. And—but I’d better tell you how the police were sent to the studio in this case. The teller at the bank, in counting the old blind man’s change, found a $20 goldpiece in it. Put two and two together. Remembering the other incidents had happened the same day. Called in a policeman. Who called his station. The police went—and found—the dead man.

  “Now the police knew something about the killer. Knew that he went south after he came out. Rounding the alley corner. Presumably went straight to the depot—one of two depots—lying to the west. If it was early in the evening yet. He either left the coin in triumph—or to show the police the utter uselessness of looking for him in Chicago.”

  “And using a blind man made no possibility—of tracing his likeness?”

  “Right! Well, there was now a cessation of the murders. For the studio was too accessible to a possible killer. Max Goldfarb
, you see, was under warning of a $1000 fine if he nailed up that roof-trap door. By action of the Fire Department. He was under a suspended sentence of one year in jail for having hooked it shut for a while—and having been discovered to have done so by the Fire Department. The judge who gave him the sentence—but suspended it providing he never repeated the violation—well, his wife had burned to death once, in such a place. He was really tough—on that point. And since Max Goldfarb dared not nail it up—claimed he didn’t—he couldn’t use the studio—and—

  “Well, he held out—about a year. Then covertly put in an ad in a Berlin paper. Caught a German who wanted to come here. And never had heard of the murder cases. The German came. Looked at the place. Rented it delightedly. And there it was, being secretly used.”

  “And how long—before he was murdered?”

  “Two months, honey! They found him shot. Leaning forward over the piano keys. And with a straw hat lying nearby, yes. Shot, yes. With the powder marks against the very nape or back of his neck. Showing the gun muzzle was put right against it. End of—Gustav Einhorn.

  “Now the police begged Goldfarb not to ever rent the place again. He faithfully promised. And the next—the next was a woman student—from our own country.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes. Louise Wanstreet. She wasn’t afraid to go into an alley—under an Elevated Road—and go into a building by the back way. An odd woman, in some respects, for she wore men’s clothing. Anyway, she wanted the studio. Took it. And when they found her–”