The Man in the Middle Read online

  The Man in the Middle

  Ferguson Findley

  CHAPTER 1

  The big town can be a creepy place. Sometimes, of course, it can be bright and warm and comfortable, but just after the last saloon has closed it can be pretty grim, especially when a drizzling fog is rolling in from the old river. That’s when all strangers look sinister to each other, when all the ordinary sounds become noises that you don’t like to hear. Only police cars prowl on honest business.

  On this particular morning the big town was as creepy as it ever would be, God grant. Through it three men were moving along a crosstown street, away from Times Square and its undaunted neon, headed for the deep glooms west of Eighth Avenue. They seemed to be drunk, stumbling and shuffling as they walked. Their progress was slow. The two on the outside had their arms around the man in the middle.

  The man in the middle was dead.

  Of the other two, the man nearest the street was quite sure the man in the middle was dead. And because he was glad—because this particular death pleased him immensely—he was softly singing, in a whisky baritone, “O-o-oh, I will take you home, Kathleen, to where your heart will feel no—”

  “Shut up,” the man on the other side growled. “Shut up!”

  The singer stopped and flashed a suspicious glance at the other, and wondered if his partner knew that the man in the middle was a corpse. He doubted it. And then, as he, too, heard the footsteps coming toward them through the fog, he dropped his eyes and took a firmer grip on the load he shared.

  Big Vince MacLowerie saw the three men as soon as they saw him, and moved a little closer to the line of buildings so they could pass well clear. A man with troubles of his own, with a plastic gadget for a hand and a pension instead of honest work, he was in no mood to be bumped by drunks. But as they passed he suddenly stopped, looked back, and reversed his steps.

  “Hey, Jackson,” he greeted, touching the nearest man on the shoulder with his good left hand, “what the hell are you doing out at this time of the morning?”

  The one he called Jackson ignored him, turned his face away, and moved on.

  “What’s eating you, Jackson? It’s Vince MacLowerie.” He bent over for a better look at the averted features. “Aren’t you Eddie Jackson, of the old Fifth?”

  “Naw,” the man growled. “I ain’t Eddie Jackson of the old Fifth.” He shuffled on with his load.

  “Sorry, pal,” Vince said. “You’re a dead ringer for him.” He lifted his hand. “You three guys better take it easy crossing streets, before one of you gets clipped by a truck.” He turned back and walked toward the center of town, to his hotel.

  Things look different in the fog, he mused. And yet that guy sure looked like Eddie—except there was something a little too creepy about him.

  He lit a cigarette, mostly for the cheerfulness of its glow, and dangled it from his wide mouth.

  Behind him, lost now in the thick darkness, the man who had been singing asked, “Who was that guy?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “Hell of a note, having somebody spot us now.”

  “What difference does it make? Has anybody committed a crime? I never saw the jerk before. Shut up and help me carry this bum. I’ve got the whole load.”

  “You’ve got a load of lead in your head.” The man who had been singing smiled at what he had learned. “How far are we going to take him—Hoboken?”

  “I told you to shut up,” the man who had been called Jackson said. They moved silently across Tenth Avenue. Halfway down the block they stopped, by unspoken consent. “Let’s dump him here. Easy now. Prop him up against the wall, don’t let him lie with his face in the puddles. You want him to drown?”

  “I don’t give a damn if he drowns or floats out to sea. He’s your friend, not mine. This is strictly your idea—Jackson.”

  “My name isn’t Jackson.” Together they placed the limp form in a sitting position. “That’s good. Nobody in sight. He’ll sober up in a couple of hours. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Who you kidding?” the other whispered to himself as they straightened up. “I’m going back and catch a subway. You coming along?” He was strictly sober now.

  “I’m going up Tenth, if I can catch a taxi.” They walked east together to the corner, neither drunk, neither staggering. “None in sight. Never a hack on a night like this. I’ll start hoofing.” He turned north. “So long.” A few steps later he disappeared in the fog.

  “So long—Jackson,” the other said. He crossed Tenth Avenue, walked maybe a hundred yards, crossed the street and came back to the corner. He stood there, in the dark shadows, almost a shadow himself, until he saw the man who had been mistaken for Jackson—whoever Jackson was—come back down Tenth Avenue and turn toward the man who had been in the middle.

  So, he said to himself, you couldn’t find it either. All right, take another look, and I’ll be waiting for you when you walk back this way, Jackson. Maybe you’ll save me a lot of trouble, after all!

  He lingered impatiently in the darkness, waiting for his partner to return. A taxi passed him, and its tail light dwindled away in the fog. He heard it stop somewhere near the middle of the block, its door slammed, and then it started up again. “God damn it!” the man in the shadows near the corner cursed. “You got a break that time, Jackson. Now you’re going to be a sorry man—and a dead one.”

  Half an hour later he walked up two flights of steps in a building on East Fourth Street, and unlocked the door to his apartment. He stepped inside and snapped the light switch. The door closed behind him, and the fog pushed futilely against it.

  “Tomorrow—or the next day, or the day after that,” he muttered, taking an ice pick from his inside coat pocket and placing it in the drawer of a desk.

  Further uptown, on West Twentieth Street, Lieutenant Hank Tepper, of the New York Police Department, sat with his feet on his desk at Homicide West, and read the earliest morning paper. It was the second time he had read it, but there wasn’t anything else to do, except maybe play poker with the other detectives in the next room, and he didn’t feel like that. He was broke, and he was bored, and poker games were for kids. Tepper was all of thirty-two, a tight, steel-muscled man who looked older than he was—and knew more about murder than most crooks ever gave him credit for, until they found themselves in the Death House, in Sing Sing.

  And then the telephone rang. “Homicide—Tepper,” he answered, contorting himself to pick up the phone without lowering his feet. “Yeah, I got it.” The feet went down as he grabbed for pencil and pad. “Five-seven-nine West Four-three. Keep it clean and cool, I’m coming up!” The telephone slammed back on its stand.

  “Hey, Rabelli!” he called, as he started out the door. “Grab your book and let’s go. We got one uptown.”

  “I had three great big beautiful kings—and two other guys were drawing three cards each,” the police stenographer complained as they hurried down the stairs together, “and now some dumb cluck has to get himself killed, I guess. That’s a hell of a way to run a police force. Where is it?”

  “West Forty-Third.”

  “You sure it’s murder?” Rabelli asked hopefully. “Maybe we should go back and check it again. There must have been three bucks in that pot.”

  “The report says there’s a couple of dozen holes in the body.”

  “Maybe it had the itch, and scratched itself open.” Rabelli had been around a long time. “I’ve seen stranger things.” He opened the door of Tepper’s waiting car, jumped in behind the Lieutenant.

  “Five-seven-nine West Four-three,” Tepper ordered the dri
ver. “And let’s see if we can get there before the body gets cold.”

  “It’s probably been dead for a month already,” the driver complained, leaving about five hundred miles of good tire rubber beside the curb as he gunned the car into the street. “But if you want to go fast, why then we’ll go fast.” He leaned on the ear-splitting spark-plug whistle and screamed up town.

  It had been 5:32 when Patrolman Patrick Burke, of the 16th Precinct, had rapped the shoes of what he thought was a drunk slopped over on the sidewalk. “Git up, ya bum,” he growled, accenting his command with his nightstick. “Git up before ya catch a cold, or I’ll burn your feet off.”

  Preserve the peace. Protect life and property. Maybe he’s sick.

  “Rum sick,” Patrolman Burke acknowledged. He bent over, shook the man’s shoulder. “Git up, ya bum, and go home. You got a hell of a load on, don’t you? Jesus, maybe you’re dead!”

  The horrible thought of forms to be filled out and time spent in investigation rolled over Burke like a heavy tide, but he transferred his stick to his left hand and with his right hand felt for a heartbeat.

  There wasn’t any. He tried to raise an eyelid, but the eyelid was stiff.

  “Aw nuts,” he said, as he hurried to the nearest call box. “Damned inconsiderate, to get croaked on my beat. I should have retired long ago.” The phone was in his hand. “This is Pat Burke, honey chile. I got a stiff on the sidewalk at Five-seven-nine West Four-three. Send somebody around with a DEAD ON ARRIVAL tag to tie on it, will you?”

  “Are you sure the man is dead?” the official voice of the Desk Sergeant answered. “Have you rendered all possible aid and assistance? If death is obvious, cover the body with a waterproof paper covering, and guard it until help arrives.”

  “Don’t give me that police manual drill, honey chile,” Burke said. “Get the meat wagon.”

  “Don’t give me that honey chile stuff,” the Desk growled, “or you’ll get an official kick in your fat pants.”

  The patrol car got its Signal Thirty—Investigate reported Shooting, Stabbing, Assault or other Felony—and arrived at Five-seven-nine West Four-three almost as soon as Patrolman Burke got back to the body. “What’s your trouble, Flatfoot?” the driver asked, swinging out of the car. “Somebody need a cup of coffee?”

  “You take charge and I’ll go get one,” Burke suggested. “I got a dead man here, and I want to get rid of him. Will you take him, or must I call the Department of Sanitation?”

  Seconds later the driver straightened up, turned to his partner in the patrol car and to Burke. “This man’s been stabbed in the chest. I’d say he had been murdered. Do you know who did it, Pat?”

  “It must be wonderful to be so God damned smart so early in the morning,” Burke jeered. “Sure, I know who did it. I sent them around to get booked already. They said they was sorry they done it.”

  The patrol car driver went on his radio, and here and there, all over Manhattan, the people who should know learned the first details of the latest homicide.

  Detective Lieutenant Tepper, for example, heard about it at ten minutes before six. He saw the body for the first time exactly eight minutes later. “He asked for it fast, didn’t he?” the driver whispered to Rabelli. Rabelli shuddered, then stepped out of the car and opened his notebook and wrote “0558” and the date at the top of the page.

  “I’m Lieutenant Tepper of Homicide West,” the Detective Lieutenant introduced himself. “Where’s the body?” A curious crowd pointed to the shape under the waterproof covering that Burke had received from his headquarters. “Has a doctor been here?” As if in answer to his question, an ambulance raced around the corner and came to a stop beside his car. “Take a look at it, will you, Doc?” the Lieutenant said. “It’s dead, of course, but just for the record.”

  The intern knelt briefly beside the body, tossed back the covering, applied a stethoscope to the chest, felt the pulse. “Dead as a stale fish,” he announced.

  “Who found the body?” Tepper asked. “You, Patrolman?” Burke nodded grimly. “Then proceed with your search,” Tepper ordered. Burke went down on one knee.

  Rabelli’s notes included:

  Knife wound in chest, probably to heart.

  Seventeen smaller wounds same area. Ice pick?

  Strong smell alcohol.

  Pockets empty. No papers. No identification.

  No laundry marks. No tattoo.

  Well-dressed.

  Dead two or three hours by eyelids and jaw muscles.

  5-10: blue, brown. 575: white, 50.

  Off to Bellevue 6:47.

  Off to the morgue at 6:47 …

  Only a dampish spot remained where the man in the middle had been, and the struggling sun would soon erase that.

  “No, I don’t have any idea who it was,” Tepper told the reporters and idlers who stood in a tight ring at 579 West Forty-Third. “If we knew, we’d tell you. Yes, I suspect the man was killed, although whether it was murder or accidental death I can’t say until we make a more thorough examination. Tepper’s the name, you can get in touch with me at Homicide West, and I’ll tell you all I can. That’s as much as I can say now, gentlemen.” The crowd began to drift away.

  “Bong,” said Rabelli, softly. “Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp, Lieutenant. Here comes the Inspector.”

  Tepper turned to salute Inspector Sanford, of Homicide West. “Good morning, Chief.”

  “Hello, Hank,” the affable Sanford replied. “What you got here?”

  “I got a stabbing. I got an unidentified foreigner with nothing except eighteen holes of different sizes in his chest. Any one or all may have killed him, except maybe the biggest. Furthermore, I’m hungry, and I was just going to step down to the restaurant on the corner and have a cup of coffee—with your permission, sir.”

  “Permission granted,” Sanford laughed, “providing you don’t object to your boss for company. I haven’t had any breakfast either.” They walked toward the corner and swung into the restaurant, took stools at the counter. “Coffee. Two eggs over. Ham on the side,” he ordered. “What’s yours, Hank?”

  “Same, with orange juice.” The detective offered a pack of cigarettes, which Sanford declined, struck a match to his own, and exhaled a long stream of smoke from his nose. “Unless I miss my guess, Inspector,” he began, “this could be one hell of a case to solve. Yes sir, it could be a real son of a bitch.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’ll give you the highlights. In the first place, we got no idea who the dead man is. There wasn’t a tag or paper on the body. And then, like I said, I figure it’s a foreigner of some kind, so nine chances out often nobody in the world will be able to spot him from photographs.”

  “How do you figure him for a foreigner?”

  “He’s got mouth full of gold teeth.” Tepper swallowed his orange juice. “As if that wasn’t enough, somebody stabbed him with a knife, right spang-bang into his heart.”

  “Nothing too unusual about that.”

  “Sure. But this wound didn’t bleed. So I think that he must have been stabbed when he was already dead—after he was dead from seventeen other holes—little holes, like with a hatpin or an icepick. So you tell me, Chief, what the hell kind of a murder do we have here? This guy, who nobody knows, is so unpopular he gets murdered twice in one night!”

  CHAPTER 2

  “And so, Inspector,” Lieutenant Tepper said, swallowing the last drop of his third cup of coffee, “there you have my report. Now I guess I’ll have to get myself over to the morgue and see what they know.”

  The Inspector nodded, frowning. “Go on over and see what they say, and then get the rest of the machinery moving if you have to, and I suspect that you will. Let me know what’s going on and how you’re making out.” He paid for the breakfasts, and left the restaurant, with Tepper behind him. “See you when you g
et back to the shop,” he said, and got into his car.

  The detective found his own car parked nearby.

  “You want to go fast, Lieutenant?” the driver asked.

  “I want to take it easy. I’ve got lots of things to think about. Rabelli, you’ve seen several thousand stiffs in your day, what do you think about this one?”

  “This is a funny one,” Rabelli said seriously. “For a guy who got stabbed he didn’t look right. This guy looks almost peaceful. An’ yet, you take the average guy what gets stabbed, he don’t look peaceful unless he’s been stabbed in his sleep. The average guy what gets stabbed ain’t stabbed willy-nilly, you might say. He sees it coming and he goes out looking either mad or surprised. This one, like I said, looked peaceful. I don’t get it, Lieutenant.”

  The car pulled into the parking space and Rabelli followed Tepper through the doors of the morgue, and into a small office. A young man in a white gown was sitting at a desk, making pencil notes on some paper forms. He looked up and smiled as they entered.

  “Hi, Doc,” the Lieutenant said. “You know Rabelli, my stenographer. We sent a body over here, about forty-five minutes ago. You have any time to check it yet? Middle-sized man with a mouthful of gold teeth and a chest full of holes.”

  “We gave him the once-over, alright,” the medical examiner answered. “Sent his clothes to the laboratory. Took his pretty picture, both profile and full face. Took his fingerprints. Manicured his nails to see where he’d been scratching. Typed his blood. Found out one very important thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He sure as hell is dead.”

  “I knew that, Doc,” Tepper said. “I can also figure that maybe he got stabbed. Maybe he even got stabbed twice, and the second time he was already dead.”

  “Now you’re going too far, Hank,” the doctor complained. “Entirely too far. You are almost practicing medicine without a license. I’ll get you a license, however, and you can come here and take over my job, while I go out and get myself some breakfast.” He paused. “You know, of course, that this little problem was undoubtedly stabbed by someone who was at least eight feet tall? That ought to make your job easy for you—even Rabelli here ought to be able to find somebody that big!”