The Essential Noir Bundle, page 106
“Who’s this Miss Dexter?” O’Gar took up the inquiry.
“She’s, well—” Charles Gantvoort hesitated. “Well, Father was on very friendly terms with her and her brother. He usually called on them—on her several evenings a week. In fact, I suspected that he intended marrying her.”
“Who and what is she?”
“Father became acquainted with them six or seven months ago. I’ve met them several times, but don’t know them very well. Miss Dexter—Creda is her given name—is about twenty-three years old, I should judge, and her brother Madden is four or five years older. He is in New York now, or on his way there, to transact some business for Father.”
“Did your father tell you he was going to marry her?” O’Gar hammered away at the woman angle.
“No; but it was pretty obvious that he was very much—ah—infatuated. We had some words over it a few days ago—last week. Not a quarrel, you understand, but words. From the way he talked I feared that he meant to marry her.”
“What do you mean ‘feared’?” O’Gar snapped at that word.
Charles Gantvoort’s pale face flushed a little, and he cleared his throat embarrassedly.
“I don’t want to put the Dexters in a bad light to you. I don’t think—I’m sure they had nothing to do with Father’s—with this. But I didn’t care especially for them—didn’t like them. I thought they were—well—fortune hunters, perhaps. Father wasn’t fabulously wealthy, but he had considerable means. And, while he wasn’t feeble, still he was past fifty-seven, old enough for me to feel that Creda Dexter was more interested in his money than in him.”
“How about your father’s will?”
“The last one of which I have any knowledge—drawn up two or three years ago—left everything to my wife and me, jointly. Father’s attorney, Mr. Murray Abernathy, could tell you if there was a later will, but I hardly think there was.”
“Your father had retired from business, hadn’t he?”
“Yes; he turned his import and export business over to me about a year ago. He had quite a few investments scattered around, but he wasn’t actively engaged in the management of any concern.”
O’Gar tilted his village constable hat back and scratched his bullet head reflectively for a moment. Then he looked at me.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
“Yes. Mr. Gantvoort, do you know or did you ever hear your father or anyone else speak of an Emil Bonfils?”
“No.”
“Did your father ever tell you that he had received a threatening letter? Or that he had been shot at on the street?”
“No.”
“Was your father in Paris in 1902?”
“Very likely. He used to go abroad every year up until the time of his retirement from business.”
O’Gar and I took Gantvoort around to the morgue to see his father, then. The dead man wasn’t pleasant to look at, even to O’Gar and me, who hadn’t known him except by sight. I remembered him as a small wiry man, always smartly tailored, and with a brisk springiness that was far younger than his years.
He lay now with the top of his head beaten into a red and pulpy mess.
We left Gantvoort at the morgue and set out afoot for the Hall of Justice.
“What’s this deep stuff you’re pulling about Emil Bonfils and Paris in 1902?” the detective-sergeant asked as soon as we were out in the street.
“This: the dead man phoned the Agency this afternoon and said he had received a threatening letter from an Emil Bonfils with whom he had had trouble in Paris in 1902. He also said that Bonfils had shot at him the previous evening, in the street. He wanted somebody to come around and see him about it tonight. And he said that under no circumstances were the police to be let in on it—that he’d rather have Bonfils get him than have the trouble made public. That’s all he would say over the phone; and that’s how I happened to be on hand when Charles Gantvoort was notified of his father’s death.”
O’Gar stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and whistled softly.
“That’s something!” he exclaimed. “Wait till we get back to headquarters—I’ll show you something.”
Whipple was waiting in the assembly room when we arrived at headquarters. His face at first glance was as smooth and mask-like as when he had admitted me to the house on Russian Hill earlier in the evening. But beneath his perfect servant’s manner he was twitching and trembling.
We took him into the little office where we had questioned Charles Gantvoort.
Whipple verified all that the dead man’s son had told us. He was positive that neither the typewriter, the jewel case, the two cartridges, or the newer wallet had belonged to Gantvoort.
We couldn’t get him to put his opinion of the Dexters in words, but that he disapproved of them was easily seen. Miss Dexter, he said, had called up on the telephone three times this night at about eight o’clock, at nine, and at nine-thirty. She had asked for Mr. Leopold Gantvoort each time, but she had left no message. Whipple was of the opinion that she was expecting Gantvoort, and he had not arrived.
He knew nothing, he said, of Emil Bonfils or of any threatening letters. Gantvoort had been out the previous night from eight until midnight. Whipple had not seen him closely enough when he came home to say whether he seemed excited or not. Gantvoort usually carried about a hundred dollars in his pockets.
“Is there anything that you know of that Gantvoort had on his person tonight which isn’t among these things on the desk?” O’Gar asked.
“No, sir. Everything seems to be here—watch and chain, money, memorandum book, wallet, keys, handkerchiefs, fountain pen—everything that I know of.”
“Did Charles Gantvoort go out tonight?”
“No, sir. He and Mrs. Gantvoort were at home all evening.”
“Positive?”
Whipple thought a moment.
“Yes, sir, I’m fairly certain. But I know Mrs. Gantvoort wasn’t out. To tell the truth, I didn’t see Mr. Charles from about eight o’clock until he came downstairs with this gentleman”—pointing to me—“at eleven. But I’m fairly certain he was home all evening. I think Mrs. Gantvoort said he was.”
Then O’Gar put another question—one that puzzled me at the time.
“What kind of collar buttons did Mr. Gantvoort wear?”
“You mean Mr. Leopold?”
“Yes.”
“Plain gold ones, made all in one piece. They had a London jeweler’s mark on them.”
“Would you know them if you saw them?”
“Yes, sir.”
We let Whipple go home then.
“Don’t you think,” I suggested when O’Gar and I were alone with this desk-load of evidence that didn’t mean anything at all to me yet, “it’s time you were loosening up and telling me what’s what?”
“I guess so—listen! A man named Lagerquist, a grocer, was driving through Golden Gate Park tonight, and passed a machine standing on a dark road, with its lights out. He thought there was something funny about the way the man in it was sitting at the wheel, so he told the first patrolman he met about it.
“The patrolman investigated and found Gantvoort sitting at the wheel—dead—with his head smashed in and this dingus”—putting one hand on the bloody typewriter—“on the seat beside him. That was at a quarter of ten. The doc says Gantvoort was killed—his skull crushed—with this typewriter.
“The dead man’s pockets, we found, had all been turned inside out; and all this stuff on the desk, except this new wallet, was scattered about in the car—some of it on the floor and some on the seats. This money was there too—nearly a hundred dollars of it. Among the papers was this.”
He handed me a sheet of white paper upon which the following had been typewritten:
L. F. G.—
I want what is mine. 6,000 miles and 21 years are not enough to hide you from the victim of your treachery. I mean to have what you stole.
E. B.
“L. F. G. could be Leopold F. Gantvoort,” I said. “And E. B. could be Emil Bonfils. Twenty-one years is the time from 1902 to 1923, and 6,000 miles is, roughly, the distance between Paris and San Francisco.”
I laid the letter down and picked up the jewel case. It was a black imitation leather one, lined with white satin, and unmarked in any way.
Then I examined the cartridges. There were two of them, S. W. .45-caliber, and deep crosses had been cut in their soft noses—an old trick that makes the bullet spread out like a saucer when it hits.
“These in the car, too?”
“Yep—and this.”
From a vest pocket O’Gar produced a short tuft of blond hair—hairs between an inch and two inches in length. They had been cut off, not pulled out by the roots.
“Any more?”
There seemed to be an endless stream of things.
He picked up the new wallet from the desk—the one that both Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had said did not belong to the dead man—and slid it over to me.
“That was found in the road, three or four feet from the car.”
It was of a cheap quality, and had neither manufacturer’s name nor owner’s initials on it. In it were two ten-dollar bills, three small newspaper clippings, and a typewritten list of six names and addresses, headed by Gantvoort’s.
The three clippings were apparently from the Personal columns of three different newspapers—the type wasn’t the same—and they read:
GEORGE—Everything is fixed. Don’t wait too long.
D. D. D.
R. H. T.—They do not answer.
FLO
CAPPY—Twelve on the dot and look sharp.
BINGO
The names and addresses on the typewritten list, under Gantvoort’s, were:
Quincy Heathcote, 1223 S. Jason Street, Denver; B. D. Thornton, 96 Hughes Circle, Dallas; Luther G. Randall, 615 Columbia Street, Portsmouth; J. H. Boyd Willis, 5444 Harvard Street, Boston; Hannah Hindmarsh, 218 E. 79th Street, Cleveland.
“What else?” I asked when I had studied these.
The detective-sergeant’s supply hadn’t been exhausted yet.
“The dead man’s collar buttons—both front and back—had been taken out, though his collar and tie were still in place. And his left shoe was gone. We hunted high and low all around, but didn’t find either shoe or collar buttons.”
“Is that all?”
I was prepared for anything now.
“What the hell do you want?” he growled. “Ain’t that enough?”
“How about fingerprints?”
“Nothing stirring! All we found belonged to the dead man.”
“How about the machine he was found in?”
“A coupe belonging to a Dr. Wallace Girargo. He phoned in at six this evening that it had been stolen from near the corner of McAllister and Polk streets. We’re checking up on him—but I think he’s all right.”
The things that Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had identified as belonging to the dead man told us nothing. We went over them carefully, but to no advantage. The memorandum book contained many entries, but they all seemed totally foreign to the murder. The letters were quite as irrelevant.
The serial number of the typewriter with which the murder had been committed had been removed, we found—apparently filed out of the frame.
“Well, what do you think?” O’Gar asked when we had given up our examination of our clews and sat back burning tobacco.
“I think we want to find Monsieur Emil Bonfils.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to do that,” he grunted. “I guess our best bet is to get in touch with these five people on the list with Gantvoort’s name. Suppose that’s a murder list? That this Bonfils is out to get all of them?”
“Maybe. We’ll get hold of them anyway. Maybe we’ll find that some of them have already been killed. But whether they have been killed or are to be killed or not, it’s a cinch they have some connection with this affair. I’ll get off a batch of telegrams to the Agency’s branches, having the names on the list taken care of. I’ll try to have the three clippings traced, too.”
O’Gar looked at his watch and yawned.
“It’s after four. What say we knock off and get some sleep? I’ll leave word for the department’s expert to compare the typewriter with that letter signed E. B. and with that list to see if they were written on it. I guess they were, but we’ll make sure. I’ll have the park searched all around where we found Gantvoort as soon as it gets light enough to see, and maybe the missing shoe and the collar buttons will be found. And I’ll have a couple of the boys out calling on all the typewriter shops in the city to see if they can get a line on this one.”
I stopped at the nearest telegraph office and got off a wad of messages. Then I went home to dream of nothing even remotely connected with crime or the detecting business.
At eleven o’clock that same morning, when, brisk and fresh with five hours’ sleep under my belt, I arrived at the police detective bureau, I found O’Gar slumped down at his desk, staring dazedly at a black shoe, half a dozen collar buttons, a rusty flat key, and a rumpled newspaper—all lined up before him.
“What’s all this? Souvenir of your wedding?”
“Might as well be.” His voice was heavy with disgust. “Listen to this: one of the porters of the Seamen’s National Bank found a package in the vestibule when he started cleaning up this morning. It was this shoe—Gantvoort’s missing one—wrapped in this sheet of a five-day-old Philadelphia Record, and with these collar buttons and this old key in it. The heel of the shoe, you’ll notice, has been pried off, and is still missing. Whipple identifies it all right, as well as two of the collar buttons, but he never saw the key before. These other four collar buttons are new, and common gold-rolled ones. The key don’t look like it had had much use for a long time. What do you make of all that?”
I couldn’t make anything out of it.
“How did the porter happen to turn the stuff in?”
“Oh, the whole story was in the morning papers—all about the missing shoe and collar buttons and all.”
“What did you learn about the typewriter?” I asked.
“The letter and the list were written with it, right enough; but we haven’t been able to find where it came from yet. We checked up the doc who owns the coupe, and he’s in the clear. We accounted for all his time last night. Lagerquist, the grocer who found Gantvoort, seems to be all right, too. What did you do?”
“Haven’t had any answers to the wires I sent last night. I dropped in at the Agency on my way down this morning, and got four operatives out covering the hotels and looking up all the people named Bonfils they can find—there are two or three families by that name listed in the directory. Also I sent our New York branch a wire to have the steamship records searched to see if an Emil Bonfils had arrived recently; and I put a cable through to our Paris correspondent to see what he could dig up over there.”
“I guess we ought to see Gantvoort’s lawyer—Abernathy—and that Dexter woman before we do anything else,” the detective-sergeant said.
“I guess so,” I agreed, “let’s tackle the lawyer first. He’s the most important one, the way things now stand.”
Murray Abernathy, attorney-at-law, was a long, stringy, slow-spoken old gentleman who still clung to starched-bosom shirts. He was too full of what he thought were professional ethics to give us as much help as we had expected; but by letting him talk—letting him ramble along in his own way—we did get a little information from him. What we got amounted to this:
The dead man and Creda Dexter had intended being married the coming Wednesday. His son and her brother were both opposed to the marriage, it seemed, so Gantvoort and the woman had planned to be married secretly in Oakland, and catch a boat for the Orient that same afternoon; figuring that by the time their lengthy honeymoon was over they could return to a son and brother who had become resigned to the marriage.
A new will had been drawn up, leaving half of Gantvoort’s estate to his new wife and half to his son and daughter-in-law. But the new will had not been signed yet, and Creda Dexter knew it had not been signed. She knew—and this was one of the few points upon which Abernathy would make a positive statement—that under the old will, still in force, everything went to Charles Gantvoort and his wife.
The Gantvoort estate, we estimated from Abernathy’s roundabout statements and allusions, amounted to about a million and a half in cash value. The attorney had never heard of Emil Bonfils, he said, and had never heard of any threats or attempts at murder directed toward the dead man. He knew nothing—or would tell us nothing—that threw any light upon the nature of the thing that the threatening letter had accused the dead man of stealing.
From Abernathy’s office we went to Creda Dexter’s apartment, in a new and expensively elegant building only a few minutes’ walk from the Gantvoort residence.
Creda Dexter was a small woman in her early twenties. The first thing you noticed about her were her eyes. They were large and deep and the color of amber, and their pupils were never at rest. Continuously they changed size, expanded and contracted—slowly at times, suddenly at others—ranging incessantly from the size of pinheads to an extent that threatened to blot out the amber irises.
With the eyes for a guide, you discovered that she was pronouncedly feline throughout. Her every movement was the slow, smooth, sure one of a cat; and the contours of her rather pretty face, the shape of her mouth, her small nose, the set of her eyes, the swelling of her brows, were all cat-like. And the effect was heightened by the way she wore her hair, which was thick and tawny.
“Mr. Gantvoort and I,” she told us after the preliminary explanations had been disposed of, “were to have been married the day after tomorrow. His son and daughter-in-law were both opposed to the marriage, as was my brother Madden. They all seemed to think that the difference between our ages was too great. So to avoid any unpleasantness, we had planned to be married quietly and then go abroad for a year or more, feeling sure that they would all have forgotten their grievances by the time we returned.
