MURDER
AT
LARGE
I
Ordway Belknap, ex-Judge of the Magistrate’s Courts, and for the present
a detective of amateur standing, and a semi-professional criminologist,
on call at the Homicide Department, leaned comfortably back in an
arm-chair in the den of his spacious penthouse apartment on the East
River—in Gracie Square to be exact. James, the perfect ‘man’ that
confirmed bachelors dream of one day possessing, entered soundlessly on
the deep-napped carpet, and, in a cotton-wool voice, announced Judge
Whittaker on the wire.
“Thank you, James,” murmured Belknap in a tone modulated to the
atmosphere of the room; while James, with the smooth precision of the
Roxy Orchestra being lowered, sank from view, the den being a floor to
itself.
Belknap slowly ground out a freshly lit cigarette and meditatively
examined the telephone at his elbow. His face gathered seriousness as a
window gathers steam. He recalled Whittaker’s remark of a week ago, made
as they passed at the Club: “I will give you a ring soon on a matter of
life and death. No, I can’t go into it now—I’m running.” And though in
the meanwhile the matter had slipped his mind he now unaccountably, even
to himself, hesitated to remove the receiver.
Belknap was a man of fifty-odd, but didn’t look it; tall, handsome, with
a firm mouth, burning brown eyes, and thick, lustrous black hair. His
muscles were steel-hard; and his skin always deeply bronzed, winter and
summer alike, for he was one of those elusive and self-styled members of
the Long Beach nature club. He enjoyed motoring down on brilliant days
even in January to nurse a driftwood fire in the shelter of a shallow
dune, basking himself in fire heat and violet ray.
Sun-bathing is the habit of a solitary; but then, Belknap _was_ a
solitary in more ways than one. He loved the slow, indolent afternoons,
apparently wasted, and with no words spoken. He relished the mingled
smell of olive oil, wood smoke and salt; and the sight, through more
than half-shut eyes, of gulls, and a ship moving up the horizon like the
large hand of a clock, invisibly moving yet seen to have moved. Rodney
Drake would periodically rise like an elongated Pict out of the waste of
sand and gesticulate against the sky. On the open beach the hardy little
Egyptian, name unknown, would squat motionless on his heels over a tin
firebox.
So it may well have been these lonely watches that fostered the thing in
Belknap that his acquaintances, even friends, called ‘queer.’ The world
in general certainly considered him puzzling, enigmatic. It found him
definitely uncommunicative, or, when communicative, ironic, which is a
turn of speech that leaves the hearer not much the wiser. His friends
claimed for him a sensitive, reserved nature that shed humankind with
reluctant cynicism for lack of a better method, a cynicism sharpened and
brought to a point through years of close association with the evils and
corruption, hypocrisy and injustice of the courts. He had a way of never
overlooking an opportunity to be bitter at the expense of law and order
as practiced in this enlightened twentieth century.
And it was the hopelessness of the struggle to keep a modicum of honesty
in the legal system that, Belknap said, had driven him out to play a
lone wolf game tracking the criminal. Too frequently, he claimed, the
innocent paid, or no one paid, while the guilty sat in full view of the
Bench. He was at least determined to give the eager public a few real
captures, if not convictions. In his two most famous cases he had
managed the convictions as well.
His first, that of Maria Monroe, strangled in her closed Riverside Drive
apartment when it was supposed she herself was in Honolulu, followed
immediately on his resignation from office. In fact what he considered
the bungling of this case had been the last straw that made him yield to
a temptation of long standing. And he was miraculously successful. With
every investigating agency in the City against him, and with an
apparently impregnable alibi to break down, he saw his man through to
the chair.
But it was the Stanton-Mowbray affair the next winter that saw Belknap’s
amazing and unreasonable technique developed to its greatest power.
Stanton was shot at the Villa Bella Night Club in Forty-eighth Street,
West, toward the daybreak closing of an exceptionally wild night. No gun
was found, although the few remaining guests were searched within a few
moments by the police; and even the general direction from which the
shot was fired could not be determined. Some said it had come through a
window, others from close range. The case had lain dormant for months
when Belknap took an interest in it. The chief suspect had been a
certain Colonel Blake, a man of great personal magnetism, strong
political associations and influential friends. The feeling had become
current that he was guilty and that it was being ‘hushed up,’ that the
law was once more proving inadequate. But in this instance Belknap was
able to give the law a clean slate. Jumping to insane conclusions in the
intuitive manner that was his strongest claim to distinction, he put his
finger on little Violet Mowbray, a musical comedy dancer, who had had a
last-minute invitation as an ‘extra’ for Stanton’s party. Although it
was believed that she and Stanton had thereby met for the first time,
Belknap discovered a weird series of events that put Stanton in the most
blasting light and gave poor Violet a dozen motives for murder. Violet
took her sentence of from ten to twenty years with a quiet protestation
of innocence that moved the courtroom to tears and hysteria. No one
seeing her frail figure led away that dull December day would have said
she could live to see a year of it served.
Since the weeks when he had kept his name and face headlined, together
with Stanton’s and Violet Mowbray’s, Belknap had had several months of
comparative quiet. He had given the police some assistance in a few
minor matters, but had really fastened his teeth into nothing worth the
candle. And at the moment he felt particularly in need of violent
distraction. He was surfeited with a week of burning sun; weary of
women; stale with an overdose of detective fiction; and disturbed by a
tendency on the part of his thoughts to take a gloomier turn than usual.
Yet for some odd reason Whittaker’s ring, following the words of their
last meeting, gave him pause. He knew Whittaker as a dangerous person,
_friend_ or enemy, often even more dangerous as the former. Their
relationship had of late been strained. Belknap had all but come to the
conclusion that any intercourse between them, kindly or unkindly, had
been dropped. Then why this matter of life and death? Oh well, curiosity
had killed more than cats. He reached for the receiver.
“Yes? Oh, Whittaker? Good to hear your voice.” (a little overdone that.
Rang false) “Of course, old boy.” (Now why was he calling him ‘old
boy’?) “I’d be delighted, more than delighted.” (Good God, I don’t even
mean delighted) “Something thrilling for me to do? You’re going to put
me wise? Oh, I see: give me an opportunity to _get_ wise. Of course. Any
old thing for a change.... No, I don’t exactly catch your meaning.
You’re pleasantly mysterious as usual.” (Diabolically so, is what I want
to say, and I will say it one of these days.) “A house full of
criminals? Since when have you been on week-end terms with Sing Sing?
They’ve never been in Sing Sing? You want me to help you put them there,
is that it? You bet your sweet life. Anything to do with what you let
fall to my ear last week? It has? When do you want me? Dinner tonight.
Thanks most awfully. I’ll be there.”
He hung up; but failed to return to the Audubon which lay open on his
knees, an original Folio, given him with relief and gratitude by Colonel
Blake. Instead he relapsed into a brown study and considered a rather
sinister possibility from several angles and in varied lights.