The Straw Hat Murders Read online

  “Yes?”

  “She was strangled. Right at the piano. Even the usual straw hat lay atop the piano, on rim as tossed there. As shown by a slight dent in it. Yes, the usual straw sailor hat—perhaps I forgot to mention that all of the hats found, though differing in many respects as to size and weave and so forth—were sailors. You know? Those hard crowned things that take one back to—In fact, it was yours truly who, around that time, hypothesized, from that one factor, that the killer was an Englishman—carried fond memories, don’t you know, of the Regatta at—”

  “Oh, Huntoon. The Regatta! Do you think we will ever see it together—with all the schoolboys wearing their sailor hats and—”

  “I know we will,” he said sepulchrally. “If my head don’t roll in this new development it will be a sheer miracle. But while still on the sailor hat subject, another member of the Department actually hypothesized that the hats always were a pun on ‘sailor’—that the killer impudently announced his calling—sailor, say, on the Great Lakes here, and—Another chap in the Department was quite and assuredly certain that the killer was a man of all of 40 who came up out of that age—delightful to him, perhaps, because he was then a teen-ager or something—when all straw hats were sailors—before all the later monstrosities flooded in like Panama-shaped, and wiggle-brims and—but back to Louise Wanstreet. There she was, when found, strangled by some kind of a cord noose. And left right on her neck. And—”

  “This—this is getting kind of dreadful, Huntoon. It’s worse—worse than our Jack the Ripper. Listen, didn’t anybody ever glimpse, from down below, some man seen jumping across the roof gap—or coming covertly out downstairs by the rear door?”

  “No, honey. The killer was too smart to get his description recorded by anyone—even in the eyes of a man with short-distance vision, or even a ‘wino’ in the alley. Wino? Bums, so called, from the lodging houses who go back in an alley to get drunk on a 40-cent bottle of sweet wine. He—the roof-jumper—evidently did his roof-jumping—and his downstairs exiting—always between the hours of dusk and dawn. When the piano practisers in there did their stuff in the early night—as the present one who has been having the place now has been doing, the killer came, killed, and went, all probably in the early evening. If they were day-time practisers, Mr. Killer had to get into the place before dawn—do his job that day—and stick around there till dusk at least had come, and then get out. He must have operated that way. Because nobody—not even any alley winos and bums hanging around there, ever came forward to vouchsafe having seen a man coming out of the place—much less any description of such.”

  “He—he must be cunning,” was all she could say. “I—I suppose that, to prevent crushing the straw hat that he always brought—you say he always left it, so he must have brought it—to avoid crushing it, in that jump, when he must have landed sometimes on his knees, or face, or on all fours, he—”

  “Oh, honey, there would have been nothing to that little problem for him. A hat, encased in a large paper bag, with a piece of brick or stone placed in the bag, can easily be tossed across a 7-foot gap. No air resistance in that case to speak of.”

  “No, I suppose not, Huntoon. Getting himself across safely was his only real problem, evidently. And—”

  “Well, with the fourth murder,” Cambourne proceeded, “there was really a howl! The police tried to enjoin Max Goldfarb from renting the studio again. The injunction was found to be defective. He did promise, however, not to use the place again—for renting purposes. And—but I find today—well, you now have the story. I got a note—a telephoned message—a while ago, from a patrol officer I know covers Down-at-Heel Row, headed ‘S.O.T.’. Meaning—‘Same Old Thing’. The studio, I find, moreover, Max has rented again. To a Greek youth, this time. The goldpiece is—was—in the blind and deaf beggar’s piggy-bank. And that means—”

  “Yes?”

  “That means that if we—the Police Department, I mean—is not more successful this time in finding the man who brings to his killings, and leaves behind, a straw hat—that my head will drop. And I won’t stay here—to have it dropped. Or at least to see it—dropped. We’ll go home!”

  She was silent.

  “Much as I want to go home, Huntoon,” she said, “I don’t want you to be demoted—dropped—whatever it would be. You’ve put in long and earnest work in that department. It may be—may be that this time the kill­er—the killer, you say, stands under the stairs?—waits till the player is playing?—then comes up the rest of the way?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll pray, Huntoon, that this time, if he has struck, he has left something under the stairs as he waited—that will identify him.”

  “Here’s hoping,” he said gruffly. “And now I’ll go on to the studio from here. Here’s hoping!”

  CHAPTER VII

  Token Bonus

  Emerging from the Wabash Avenue cigar store, Huntoon Cambourne walked north, instead of the way he’d come, till he got to President Street, the next one on beyond Depot Street, turned the corner here westward, and again attained South Street—or Down-at-Heel Row of same!—at its other corner. At this end of Down-at-Heel Row the old smoke-greyed brick buildings were neither poverty-stricken newspaper offices, nor storage establishments, but flop-houses, so called. Flop-houses with most regal names! For the one on the corner was, according to a black-painted sign with red letters on it, crossing its whole width, The Queen’s Delight. The one next, according to its over-front sign, was The King’s Lounging Place. And the one beyond, as lettered on its store-front base, The Longchamps of Paris. Unshaven, tired, even discouraged looking men stood about in front like stone pillars or yogis, and between cracks in the painted groundlevel store windows on the sidewalk level could be seen the usual long stark furnitureless main floor, where men, minus the wherewithal, could, for 10 cents, sleep on newspapers spread on the floor, providing they brought their own with them.

  He turned up the splintered stairs of the “Longchamps”. A battered desk at the top, with a hanging tin reflector acting as a sort of halo to a flyspecked electric bulb, and an unshaven clerk, pronounced, through a sign on the wall back of it, “No money—no sleep.”

  The clerk surveyed his customer.

  “Listen, Bo,” he said, “you ain’t ready for this block yet. Try the Conrad-Hilton for a few weeks, on Boul Mich to the east—then you will be stripped, and ready for this.”

  Cambourne laughed. Drew out his wallet.

  “I only want to pay up a little advance room-rent for Piggy-Bank Pete, whose place of business is one block up the street. He just did me a favor—of sorts. But does he still live here?”

  “Hell, he’s our star roomer. For years. And when I say ‘star’—I mean star! Gets in every night before midnight—that is, unless it’s a rainy night and his curbstone pitch is n.g.—gets in sober, Capital S. And—oh, did I hear you scornfully accent the word ‘here’, when you said ‘Does he still live here?’ Hell, a blind deaf man’s got to live near where he labors.”

  “I haven’t seen him laboring much,” said Cambourne. “Sitting at an upended box—all day and part of the evening—maybe reading his Braille paper, maybe not—and just waiting for coins. However—well, what does he pay?”

  “He pays by the week. Because he gets in before midnight, and sober to boot, we give him a 40-cent cubicle for 35 cents. But because he pays by the week, we charge him $1.50 only per week.”

  Cambourne, fishing in his wallet, withdrew a $5 bill. Extended it to the other.

  “Mark him paid up, then, for 3 weeks in advance of wherever he stands now, and keep the 50 cents change.”

  “Now you’re cooking on all burners, my friend. First tip I ever got in this dump in all my time with it and at it!” The clerk wrote out a penciled receipt. Extended it.

  Cambourne took it, and left.

  Went down the steps. Musing regretfully.

  “It isn’t really enough,” he said, “for him—only $4.50—but after
all, my department doesn’t allow me money for tips or bonuses. Perhaps if that gold coin we found today in Pete’s bank bears an identifiable fingerprint—and Number 633 of this block contains the usual dead man—maybe then I can afford to pay up Piggy-Bank Pete’s quarters for a full year to come. We’ll see. So now for Number 633—by its one and only entrance!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  “Not For Me!”

  He went back the way he had come. To President Street. Then east, but only so far as the under-L-Road alley where he was parked today at its other end. A dismal gloomy “ribbon” of land lay under the L-Road pillars, stretching as far as the eye could see—a land where anything could happen, and anyone could walk, without even being seen—and this pillar-studded area was separated from the backs of the west-facing buildings on Down-at-Heel Row only by a narrow alley with highly cracked pavement. Various men, looking exactly like the denizens of the lodging houses out in front, came swayingly out from under the overhanging L-Road structure, wiping their mouths. “Winos”, almost certainly, tipping a bottle of 40-cent muscatel, port, or sherry, where police in the squad car out on the street couldn’t pull them in. As Cambourne turned into the alley proper, a ragpicker, with huge wobbling cart filled with dirty cartons, was coming along toward the street, the ragpicker himself between the thills like a beast of burden. Now a sleepy-eyed newsboy who evidently had a mid-afternoon rest shack somewhere in between the L-Road pillars was coming out, rubbing his eyes—now came frolicking out two yellow dogs minus collars or dog-tags, living on borrowed time till the dog-catchers got them—now, further in, he saw two cats browsing in an empty garbage can, their moth-eaten backsides obscenely up to full vision, their tails moving joyously left to right to show their jaws were crunching on something eatable.

  There were no numbers back here anywhere, to show which was the place put up in Post-Chicago-Fire days by Abraham Goldfarb. But none were needed, at least, to find Number 633. For those artificial gangways Abraham had created in the long ago, masking themselves only in front, though only, at that, up to one-story level, made his place stand out, in the rear, in considerable distinction to the solidly jammed-together structures all along. Moreover, the various fences, low, high, rickety, and some practically boardless, that, by law, had to rim in the small back yards, were, at Abraham’s place, an old iron fence, with spiles, something like one sees in old etchings. Most of the spiles, of course, were gone today. Abraham Goldfarb, plainly, had wanted his place pretty in back as well as in front. In the long ago, before even the L-Road had come here, there must have been a garden where No. 633 was, well-flowered and green with grass—a garden in which now and then a call to dinner had come for “Mannie”—Max’s father-to-be.

  The gate in this fence was long since gone. Had been gone for many years, plainly. So Cambourne just went in.

  No garden today! Only a dismal short back yard of verdureless hard dirt was visible with a broad cement path, in good condition, however, going straight from the gap in the iron-spiled fence to a heavy black-painted wooden door, wide enough to permit the moving in or out of any kind of a piece of furniture, including even a grand piano, side up.

  The door seemed like an oasis in a mausoleum-like façade of solid brick, though the later-bricked-in windows were visible as areas of differently hued “smoke-grey”. Now became evident a feature that had, in the past, puzzled Cambourne who’d puzzled much in that same past about the Straw Hat Killings—namely, how on earth the air in this completely “solidified” shell of a building ever got renewed when it did get too thick, or too warmed in a heat-wave. A small heavy-iron-barred circular opening, about 10 inches in diameter, near the top, yet far from anything, and showing in back of the bars the three wide blades of an electric fan, now at rest, established how air could be drawn out of the place by some distant switch, and become renewed by more air drawn through the innumerable invisible chinks and crannies that exist in all old brick buildings—if not perhaps the edges of the great store-window with expanded-steel grating and opaquely painted-over glass out in front.

  On the left side of the building, connected to the short back yard cement walk by a fringe-walk of cement, was a cement-paved gangway full seven feet wide, separating it from a “warehouse” to its left which may, or may not, have had a fire-escape out in front. Another cement-paved gangway, also seven feet in width, lay to the right, similarly connected to the rear walk with a cement-paved fringe-walk, and on the building forming the further side of it hung a red-painted fire-escape with swinging steps at bottom.

  The fire-escape by which the murderer always reached the roof trap!

  Cambourne, still off from the rear door some distance, drew to a stop—surveyed the fire-escape.

  It was down!

  And not only that, but the bright, gleamingly bright hooked wire which had reached up in the night, and brought the staircase down, so that the murderer could go up it, was hanging from it.

  Any doubts Cambourne had had up to now that “S.O.T.” meant “Same Old Thing”—and “633” meant “633 South Street”—were about gone, now. Because the fire-escape set-up was as it always was—when “same old thing” occurred before.

  Well, he told himself, clues were more important than gawking at a fait accompli consisting of one dead man!

  So he strode down to the building. Turned off at its base, and onto the ribbon of cement that fringed it. Thus to and then into the gangway to his right, and to the swinging staircase of the fire-escape on opposite side.

  Went lurchingly up it—lurchingly because the odd depth of the steps did odd things to his feet.

  A ragpicker, going down the alley with only a huge basket atop his shoulders, paid no attention to him, as he could see as he rounded floor one, and looked down. He was, he reflected, to the outside world, just a “roofing estimator” going up to figure on a job. So carried on with his climb, climb, climb. Now finally at the topmost “station” of the fire-escape, he saw he would have to do the final ascension by way of iron rungs driven into the building side for a distance of seven or eight feet upward. He didn’t like climbing ladders affixed to buildings—specially three stories up in the air!—but needs must, he realized, when the devil drives policemen, and clues have to be looked for. So up the rungs he went, taking care not to look down. He reached the roof at last. Walking, by all fours, a short distance from the top of the rungs, and then rearing himself to verticality. Now puffing a bit from the effort of shoving his 160 pounds upward by alternate motions of his leg muscles, he turned about and walked diagonally over to the roof edge to a point where, looking across the seven-foot gap to the other roof, he could see, lying close to the still further roof edge, the square roof-trap door which, if Max Goldfarb were ever to nail it up, or even hook it down, he was supposed to get a $1000 fine plus a deferred jail sentence from an irate judge.

  Standing there he shook his head.

  Not at the suspended sentence and overhead-hanging fine for Max Goldfarb, nor at the petty viewpoint of a petty police court judge. But at the belly-sickening gap between where he stood, and the firm, comfortable edge of that farther roof. He wouldn’t have attempted that jump himself, he knew, for all the money in the tills of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Nor, standing where he was right now, would anybody else—in Christendom. But, for such a man as was willing to make such a jump, that man could proceed backward away from the point by any number of feet—even yards—desired—then lope forward, head and shoulders down like a track runner—and leap! Specially could one do so under the pink-tinged sky that was always in this part of the city from countless neon signs in the Loop business district just to the north—if not the great Steel Mills, to the south. Such a “mountain goat” could even make it to safety if he fell short of his spring—slightly short, that is—for, falling a little short, he could clutch with his fingers on that roof edge—pull himself, elbow himself, knee himself safely up, and—

  “Godfrey!” Cambourne said helplessly, shaking h
is head. “I wouldn’t take that leap to kill my worst enemy. Nor—enemy? Now how could a man who leaped this gap between the roofs here be an enemy to Robert Hordon, Charles Amodie, Gustave Einhorn, Louise Wanstreet—and Elftherios Paleogus? Assuming that Paleogus is a corpse at this moment?”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said to himself, “the ‘enemy’ the Straw Hat Murderer is after—is not—the people he kills. That’s the riddle. That’s the riddle. So get going now, Huntoon. Before deGelder get discouraged, and calls the whole department. Get going!”

  CHAPTER IX

  Cerberus on Guard!

  Clues on roof or fire-escape there had been none. But none particularly had been needed. The swinging stairs at base being down—and the bright long hooked wire hanging from the staircase structure—were clues enough. Except that they were both but S.O.T. “Same Old Thing!”

  Now Cambourne was coming down again. First by the stretch of building-affixed iron rungs which he hoped would hold, and which did hold. Then by the more convenient fire-escape structure itself. Then by the pivoted weighted staircase. He let the hooked wire hang where it was, for the time being. The police already had four such put away. The fifth could wait!

  He was around now to the solid black door in the back of the building. Rapping loudly on it. Noting the broad silvered disc of its powerful modern lock designed to keep out anyone who had no business here.

  He heard footsteps inside. Coming down, doubtlessly, by the stairway he knew to be inside. He expected to see a certain bluecoated patrolman, with stocky head, when the door should open. Though, when it did, there was just a squarishly-blocky-headed blondish woman of about 45, clad in scrubwoman’s blue denim scrub clothing.