The Fatal Foursome Read online

  Johnny Liddell looked thoughtful. “Then you really think it was Randolph who killed Maurer, eh Doc?”

  “I’m positive of it, Johnny. It’s the only explanation that fits all the pieces. It even ties the Varden, Goodman and Moreno murders together logically.”

  Devlin ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s getting more complicated all the time. Suppose it was Randolph who killed Maurer. The reason he killed him after the operation was performed was so that nobody would know what he’d look like after the operation was completed. Right?”

  Liddell and the coroner nodded.

  “Okay,” Devlin grunted. “Then where the hell are we? We’d know who the killer was, but we wouldn’t know what he looked like. There’s no way in the world we can nab him now.” He got up, stamped up and down the room. “Why the hell didn’t I take my old man’s advice and become a fireman?”

  Johnny Liddell frowned. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. First let’s see whether we can fix Randolph at Maurer’s that night. Once we’ve got that, we can go on from there.”

  Doc Morrissey nodded. “I’ve got all the records on the case right here.” He got up, unlocked the cabinet, came back with the manila file on the Maurer killing, and dumped the pile of pictures and reports on the desk.

  “These the pictures the police photog took of Maurer’s office when he got there?” Liddell asked, studying an 8 × 10 glossy.

  Morrissey got up, looked at the picture over Johnny’s shoulder, and nodded. “There’s Maurer just as he was found. You can see that the killer let him have it just after the operation was performed.” He pointed to the picture, indicating a pail at the foot of the operating table. “That pail was filled with freshly used gauze squares, and right here on the instrument stand was a hypo with some empty ampules of novocaine.”

  Johnny Liddell grunted. “That means a local, eh? Guess the patient wanted to keep his senses, and insisted on that. Maybe so he could keep a gun on the doc.”

  Devlin shook his head. “Okay, you guys. I’ll go crazy with you.” He picked up the phone, dialed headquarters. “This is Inspector Devlin. Put me through to Fogarty. Yeah.” He waited for a moment. “You know I’ll be the laughing stock of the Bureau if this is a wild goose chase,” he growled at Liddell. “I’ll— Hello! Fogarty? Inspector Devlin. Look, Fogarty. Get the slugs that were dug out of Dr. Maurer and turn them over to Ballistics. I want them compared with the slugs taken out of Sal Moreno and Julian Goodman. Tell Ballistics to be damn careful. A lot depends on this.” He nodded twice. “Good. I’m at the coroner’s office now. Call me here.” He slammed the receiver back on the hook. “That ought to prove something.”

  “You say there was no other clue as to who was being operated on, or what was done. Nothing we can go on?” Johnny asked.

  The coroner started to nod, then stopped suddenly. “Of course there was.” He began to dig through the pile of papers on the desk, came up with a much-folded piece of paper. On it were a series of penciled notations. “We found this on Doc Maurer’s desk,” he said.

  Johnny read the notations. “N43 to N39h; F72 to F86.” He looked up. “Any idea what they mean?”

  “I think they were notes Doc Maurer was making at the time of the operation. Some surgeons do keep a record, you know.”

  The phone rang. It was Miss McLennan, the redheaded receptionist. A Miss Belden was calling to see Dr. Morrissey.

  The coroner put his hand across the mouthpiece. “Good God, Johnny, we forgot all about Toni. She’s downstairs now and wants to see me.”

  “What?” bellowed Devlin. “You mean that newshound knows about the switch in bodies?”

  “She’s been in on this since the beginning, Devlin,” Johnny said. “She’ll play along and keep her mouth shut.”

  Devlin was close to exploding. “I never knew a woman who could keep her mouth shut and I’ve never met a reporter who could do it. God help us, she’s a combination of both.”

  Johnny Liddell shrugged helplessly. “Let her come up, Doc.”

  Toni Belden was fuming as she strode in the door. She took in the resigned droop of Devlin’s shoulders, Liddell’s newly awakened interest and the coroner’s offer of a chair with one disdainful glare.

  “A fine stunt that was, parking me at home while you two went traipsing around last night. You promised to call me if anything broke.”

  Devlin growled. “Nothing broke.”

  Toni turned to Morrissey. “Well, Doc? What happened?”

  “Nothing much, Toni. We’ve had to revise our ideas since we last saw you. There was nothing we could tell you because we don’t know what’s happening yet ourselves, and …”

  “Was it Randolph or wasn’t it Randolph?”

  “It wasn’t Randolph,” Johnny Liddell broke in.

  Devlin glared. “Why, you double crosser. Now she’ll splash it all over the papers and put the guy on his guard.” He turned to Toni. “That is not for publication. It is an unofficial opinion of a private investigator and in no way reflects the attitude or the opinion of the Department.”

  The girl reporter winked at him. “It’s news no matter whose opinion it is, Inspector. Front-page news.”

  “Wait a minute, Toni,” Johnny broke in. “I know it’s news and I know that you have a perfect right to print it. But I’m going to ask you to flag it until we give the go-ahead.”

  “But somebody else might get it first and I’ll be holding the bag, Johnny. That’s not fair. You haven’t any right to ask me to hold back on a story like this.”

  Doc Morrissey interceded. “We understand that, Toni. But look at it this way. You’ve only got this story because Johnny was good enough to keep you on the inside right along. Now he’s attaching a string to the favor he’s done you. I don’t think you’d want to refuse.”

  The girl pouted. “All right. I’ll do it. But on one condition. I want Inspector Devlin’s word of honor that he won’t give out a statement on it until I can file my story.”

  “Nothing doing,” Devlin shook his head. “If you think I’m going to have the rest of those vultures on my neck just to protect an exclusive for you, you’re nuts.”

  “He’ll promise, Toni,” Johnny Liddell assured her. “If he doesn’t, I’ll give you the details before he gets them and he can read about it in the Dispatch.”

  “That’s good enough for me, Johnny.” She looked around. “Any ideas?”

  Morrissey looked to Liddell. “I haven’t any, have you, Johnny?” He signaled with his eyes.

  Johnny pulled himself out of his chair, ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. “Not right now, Doc,” he grunted, “except that maybe I’d better get a shave and get to looking human again.” He turned to Toni. “If you’re real nice, I’ll let you walk with me.”

  The girl got up, started to leave with him when the phone rang. Doc Morrissey grabbed it, handed it to Devlin.

  “For you, Inspector.”

  Devlin grunted into the phone three times, thanked the man on the other end and hung up. He looked at Johnny with new respect.

  “That was Fogarty. He says it was the same gun, all right. It looks like instead of solving three murders at one time we’re going to solve four at once.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE BLONDE was still working in Goodman’s outer office when Johnny Liddell walked in that afternoon. Now she didn’t even make the pretense of jabbing at the typewriter keys. She sat behind her desk, her torso for once de-emphasized by a mannish suit jacket. She looked up from the book she was reading as Johnny ambled in.

  “Well, well. Holding down the fort, eh?” he greeted her.

  She pursed her lips humorously. “I couldn’t wait at home forever for you to get back. I suppose I should have said please. I’ll know better next time.”

  Johnny Liddell reached over the railing near her desk, and speared a cigarette. “I dropped by to apologize, honey,” he said. “I really got myself caught in a swindle. Been busier than a peeping
Tom at a nudist picnic.”

  The blonde laughed. “I forgive you for ruining what might have been a glorious evening.” Her eyes went down to the pages of her book, then up again to his face. “There’ll be other evenings. Tonight, for example.”

  Liddell lit the cigarette, leaned over and tossed the spent match into the wastebasket. “Sorry, but this case has busted so wide open that I’ll be jammed up tonight, too.” He exhaled a lungful of smoke. “But it shouldn’t be long before I’ll have a lot of evenings all free.”

  A flicker of interest lighted the girl’s face. “You mean you’ve got the case solved? You know who killed Goodman?”

  Johnny shrugged. “I know who killed him, all right. I think we’ll be able to prove it in a couple of days.”

  “Wonderful.” The girl looked enthusiastic. “Are the police making the arrest?”

  “Police?” Johnny growled. “They don’t even know what time it is. I’ve got this case all wrapped up by my lonesome—and I’m keeping it to myself until I bust it wide open. After I’ve got the killer on ice, they can scramble for whatever scraps of credit are left.”

  “You’re a hard man, Johnny. Can you give a girl an idea who the big bad killer is if she promises to keep her mouth shut?”

  Liddell rolled his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, took another drag. “Suppose I told you that Harvey Randolph was still alive, that it wasn’t his body they dragged out of that car the other night?”

  The girl’s face drained of all color. Her book hit the floor with a thud. “I’d say you were nuts. How could he be alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Liddell admitted frankly. “That’s what I’m working on now. I’ve got an idea that he’s right around this town some place, that we’ve seen him, and that people in this building and the apartment house where Mona Varden lived all have seen him, but didn’t realize it.”

  “How could they? He was so well known.”

  Liddell shrugged. “He could have changed his appearance. Maybe looks just the opposite of how we’d expect him to look.” He returned the cigarette to his mouth, let it dangle there.

  “Can you prove it?” the girl asked.

  “Not right now, but I will in a day or so. When I do, I’ll be around. Keep that bottle of bourbon corked.”

  The girl smiled. “It’s a deal. But don’t keep it waiting too long. You know bourbon can evaporate—and that ain’t all.”

  After Johnny Liddell left Goodman’s office, he put in a series of telephone calls. One, long-distance to New York, started the Acme home office checking its district offices throughout the country. The second made an appointment for Inspector Devlin, Doc Morrissey and Johnny Liddell to meet later that evening.

  As soon as he left the telephone booth, he hailed a cab and was driven to the studios where Goodman Productions had been shooting the now permanently delayed Harvey Randolph film.

  The girl at the desk in the projection department had already received her instructions from Mr. Goodman’s office that Mr. Liddell was to see all the rushes on the Randolph picture. She led him into a miniature theater of about twenty seats and told him it wouldn’t take a minute.

  Less than fifty seconds later the lights went out, the projector started to whir softly in the rear, and on the screen Harvey Randolph’s familiar face started registering the full-range of emotions from frustrated fascination to full-blooded determination, Johnny Liddell could remember how hard he had laughed when a New York columnist in a review had stated that Randolph could run the range of emotions from A to B. However, like the reviewer, he could not discount the very obvious appeal of the dark-haired figure on the screen.

  When the picture was over, he thanked the young lady at the desk, made his way down the elevator to the street. He left the building with the peculiar feeling that he had seen something which should be invaluable in solving the puzzle at hand, but it continued to be elusive.

  His watch told him that it was a quarter to four and that Toni Belden had already been waiting fifteen minutes at Nick’s Preview Bar where he had promised faithfully to meet her. A cab got him there in something less than twenty minutes and as he walked in the door he could see that the girl reporter was still waiting. He wandered through the man-made fog of the bar, found an empty stool next to the girl, slid onto it.

  “You’re late again,” she reminded him.

  “Sorry, Toni,” he apologized, “but this thing is beginning to get me down. The damn case gets cloudier and cloudier the farther we go into it.”

  Toni Belden watched him with an amused expression. “Look, darling. If that act’s for my benefit, can it. You’re on to something and you’re holding out,” she accused. “Don’t forget our bargain, Johnny. I get the story.”

  Johnny Liddell nodded. “You get the story, all right. All I’m likely to get out of it is the works.”

  He ordered cognac. Toni accepted his invitation to a refill of her glass, and waited until the bartender had withdrawn. “You think Randolph killed Doc Maurer and had his face lifted, don’t you?” she asked ingenuously.

  Liddell nodded. “I might have known you’d have stooges right in Devlin’s office. Well, he did the job all right. Devlin checked the bullets in Maurer and found they were fired by the same gun that did the other two killings.”

  Toni Belden sipped on her rye. “You’re not trying to tell me that was Devlin’s idea. If he ever had one of his own it would shrivel up and die of loneliness. It was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” Johnny insisted. “It was Devlin’s idea. You know, Toni, Devlin’s an easy guy to underestimate. He knows more about what’s going on than he lets on.” He played with his glass. “He made believe that he was surprised when the commissioner asked me to act in a semi-official capacity. But I think he was in on it from the beginning.”

  “Okay, okay. So Devlin’s a genius in disguise. Now what happens?”

  “I wish I knew,” Johnny admitted. “We’re in a funny position. We know who the murderer is but we don’t know what he looks like.”

  The girl reporter leaned her elbow on the bar. “You make it sound very easy. How about fingerprints?”

  “No can do,” Liddell growled.

  Somewhere along the bar a telephone pealed. The call was for Johnny. He ambled down the bar, picked up the phone.

  It was Doc Morrissey. “Devlin just called, Johnny. He can’t make it tonight. Something important broke on that stiff they fished out of the bay this morning and he’ll be tied up.”

  “Hell,” Johnny muttered.

  “Why don’t you come anyhow?” Morrissey suggested. “We can have a skull session and maybe we’ll get the case all tied up in pink ribbons for Devlin.”

  “That’s one way he’d be sure of solving it,” Liddell muttered. “What time you free?”

  “Any time after six. Why not get over here around seven. That’ll give us the whole evening.”

  “Will do, Doc. See you then.” He hung the receiver on its hook, walked back to the girl.

  “Trouble?” she asked.

  Liddell shook his head. “Nope. I had a tentative date with Devlin and Morrissey for later this evening. Devlin can’t make it, so I’m going over to Doc’s and chin.” He looked up at the clock on the wall. It was a little after five. “I think I’ll get back to the hotel and freshen up a bit.”

  “Right,” Toni nodded. “I’ve got to get back to the office, too. Am I going to be seeing you tonight?”

  Johnny shrugged his shoulders. “I’d like to, honey. Only I don’t have much of an idea what time this session’s likely to break.” He swallowed what was left in his glass, scooped up his change from the bar.

  Toni slid off her stool, accompanied him to the door. “I wish we had a picture of Randolph with his new face. That sure would sell papers.” She sighed. “Remember how the old Graphic in New York used to scoop the town with those composographs?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know how you’d expla
in it. Sort of an artist’s conception of what the guy looked like. Like for instance a shipwreck. Some survivor would give the artist notes and he’d follow the notes and draw a picture of what it must have looked like.”

  Johnny Liddell stopped dead. “Darling, if you promise not to put on any more weight, you’re worth your weight in gold.”

  “What did I do?” the girl asked.

  “Just gave me the idea of the century. If it pays off, you’ll really have a story for that rag of yours!”

  The day clerk was on when Johnny reached his hotel. As Johnny strolled past the desk, the clerk looked up.

  “A couple of friends of yours dropped by almost an hour ago, Mr. Liddell.”

  Johnny Liddell’s expression didn’t change. “I haven’t got any friends. What did they want?”

  The clerk was concerned. “They didn’t say. Merely asked what time you were expected back. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “That depends,” Johnny growled. He walked back to the desk, flipped through the pages of the register, seemed satisfied to learn that the two adjoining rooms and the room across the hall had been rented by their present occupants before he’d checked in.

  He took the elevator to his floor, keeping his eye peeled for something out of the way. The keyhole of his door showed no signs of tampering, but Johnny was enough of a locksmith to recognize that this particular lock wasn’t capable of putting up a struggle with a bent pin.

  He inserted the key softly, turned it. Then, easing the .45 from its shoulder holster, he kicked the door open and stepped to one side. For fully a minute he stood motionless in the hall waiting for some sound to betray the presence of one of his “friends.” Then, feeling silly, he entered and switched on the room’s only light.

  The room was empty, but there were plenty of signs that it had been carefully searched. Drawers were open, pockets turned out. The leather sides of his suitcase had been slashed, and the lining was torn out. Whoever had searched the room had done an excellent job.