The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK Read online

  “That’s right,” I confirmed.

  I gave the ring to him and he took a roll of money from his pocket.

  “I don’t want anything,” I told him.

  “You’re a square bird, but if you live to be a thousand years old you’ll never have a nickel.”

  He went out and I went to the window to look down and watch. He got into a car across the street and drove away. So I called up O’Malley.

  “Are you asleep?” I asked him. “Why weren’t you on the job here? A man came and claimed the ring and I gave it to him and he’s gone away.”

  “What are you trying to do now?” he asked—“be a detective?”

  The next day he called me.

  I met him and we drove to Brooklyn. It was a dismal street of once fine houses. There were men in citizens’ clothes about, but anyone who didn’t know they were cops would better go and live somewhere else. Four of them went up with us to the second floor and there they broke down a door. There were three men inside, and one of them was the man who had claimed the ring. They didn’t fight because the cops had the drop on them.

  * * * *

  “Now maybe you’ll tell me what all this means,” I said to O’Malley, after they had departed in the wagon. “Of course you had the man who came for the ring followed, and he led you to the others.”

  “Sure. It was the way I guessed all along. The dead guy met these three guys and they saw his roll and got friendly with him and got him to go along with them.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean the ring.”

  “Oh, the ring was under the dead guy’s armpit. When one of ’em dragged him out of the car with his hands under the guy’s arms, his ring come off and stayed there. The ring had been stolen a year ago in a jewel robbery. I figured it was worth enough so that, if he knew where he lost it, he’d have taken the chance of going back to look for it. So he didn’t know where he’d lost it and, if they’d been to the picture theater and he saw the ad, he’d think he lost it there. I couldn’t tell you that because when he come to see you he was looking for a plant. If things looked suspicious he’d say it wasn’t the ring he’d lost; or it might be even that he’d bump you off.”

  “Much obliged,” I said sarcastically, “for permitting me to take that risk.”

  “There wasn’t no real risk,” he said, “the way you’d do it.”

  “It was smart police work, O’Malley. You’ve the right to feel proud of it! And I’m pleased you realized that I would do it as it ought to be done.”

  “Sure,” he answered. “The guy wouldn’t suspect nothing as long as you looked dumb, and I figured you’d do that.”

  THE SLEEPTALKER

  Originally published in Collier’s, April 18, 1931.

  “What we got now,” O’Malley said, “is a gunman-killing. The guy that got the lead handed him was named Roscoe. He was alone in his apartment and two guys called on him. He let ’em in and they talked for a while and then they pushed him full of bullets. He lived for a few hours but he wouldn’t tell who done it. The trouble with this kind of case is that if somebody even saw it done you haven’t got any witnesses, and you can’t blame people for not talking. If they tell anything, they get locked up and bothered by the cops, and later on they probably get shoved off by the other parties.”

  “What have they done about the case?” I asked.

  “What do they always do? They had about twenty guys that they thought might have done it in the station-house and worked all the old gags on ’em, telling each one his pal had confessed and he’d better come clean and make it easier for himself. But these babies only laughed at ’em. They know there ain’t nobody going to confess. So they had to let ’em go. They held one guy.”

  We stopped in front of the apartment. It was in a good building and was well furnished. The gunman had died in his living-room and there were a couple of bullet holes in the wall to show where they had missed. There were women’s things about and an officer was on guard there.

  “It was done like this,” the officer informed us: “Two birds came here and didn’t take the elevator but walked upstairs, so the elevator boy didn’t see ’em. He heard the shots and went and got the janitor, and while him and the janitor were coming up in the elevator the two birds walked down again. We know there were two because there were two kinds of bullets in him. Besides, a woman across the street heard the shots and looked out her window and saw ’em walk away. But she was too far off to tell what they looked like.”

  I looked around the apartment. “This Roscoe and his wife lived pretty well,” I commented.

  “She wasn’t his wife,” O’Malley stated. “He’s got another place that his wife lives in. These birds have to do their living fast because they don’t know how much time they got left for doing it. The girl wasn’t here when he got killed.”

  There was a doll on the girl’s dresser.

  “It’s funny,” I said, “how girls that live this way like dolls.”

  “Sure, they do; but this ain’t her doll,” O’Malley decided. “They like dolls but they don’t play with ’em, but this is a kid’s doll because it’s been played with until it got wore out and had to be mended.”

  He was right; the doll had a new foot and a new hand. It was neatly dressed in a carefully made checkered dress and it had red hair.

  “How about this doll?” O’Malley asked the officer. “Was it just here like this?”

  “No; it was wrapped in paper. The plainclothes guys that were here ahead of you unwrapped it to see what it was. The paper and string are in the wastebasket.”

  * * * *

  We went and looked at them. It was ordinary wrapping paper without marks, and ordinary string; it would not be possible to identify them.

  “Everything in this place,” O’Malley decided, “is the way you’d expect it to be except the doll. You wouldn’t expect to find that kind of doll here, so that’s what we’d better think about.”

  “Where are you going?” I inquired of him.

  “Over to the station-house and see which of the guys that they’ve been questioning have families.”

  We went to the station-house and looked over the list of those who had been questioned and O’Malley checked off the family men. Then we went around to all their homes. At each of them O’Malley asked the women the same rather pointless questions as to where their husbands had been on the afternoon Roscoe was killed; and the women either did not know or gave the same alibis that their husbands had already given. The sixth place we went was the home of Eddie Sunday. His wife, a rather pretty woman with unreadable eyes, said her husband had been home all that afternoon.

  “Well,” O’Malley said, after we had come out again, “we got a lead now, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “She told the same story that her husband had already told the officers. I didn’t hear anything that would give us a lead.”

  “Or you didn’t see anything?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re as dumb as that, I might as well not tell you. We’ll go and get the doll.”

  We went and got the doll and came back to the corner near where Sunday lived. The street was full of children. O’Malley took the doll from its wrapping and held it in his hand, and we walked all along the block but nothing happened. We walked back but still there was nothing; but the third time we did it, a little girl about five years old ran after us.

  “You got Mildred,” she said accusingly. It was evident that Mildred was the doll.

  “Sure,” O’Malley answered, “we got your doll and she’s got a new hand and a new foot. I’ll see you get her back but not right now. Who took her to get her fixed for you? Your papa?”

  She shook her head violently. “Uncle Joe.”

  “That would be Joe Klebo,” O’Malley observed to me. “This is Eddie Sunday’s ki
d. Klebo ain’t her uncle but she calls him that like kids do a friend of the family. Well, that cheeks up. The guy they’re holding is Mike Marla and all they got on him is that Roscoe owed him money that he couldn’t collect; but Mike and Joe Klebo are as close together as two fingers on one hand.”

  “I see how you figure it,” I said. “You think that Klebo went and got the doll to take back to the little girl before he and Marla went to see Roscoe. After the shooting, he forgot the package and left it there. But I don’t see that that proves anything. He might have been to see Roscoe and left the doll there any time before the shooting happened.”

  “No; it don’t prove nothing,” O’Malley assented, “but it all helps. We’ll go and talk to Marla.”

  We went back to the station-house. The gunman was asleep and was talking in his sleep but he did not say anything intelligible. O’Malley awoke him and accused him of committing the killing in company with Klebo, but Marla merely grinned at him.

  “I didn’t think you’d wake him up, O’Malley,” I said, after we had left him. “I thought you’d listen to see if he didn’t say something about the shooting.”

  “A guy don’t generally tell anything in his sleep that he wouldn’t be willing to tell if he was awake.”

  “Don’t he?” I said surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “If you didn’t know it, maybe Mike and Joe don’t know it either. You had an idea there, even if you didn’t know it.”

  We went into the captain’s office and the captain sent two men out to bring in Joe Klebo, and O’Malley went to the captain’s desk and began to write something. After he finished he read it over and then handed it to me.

  “Does that read like Mike might have said it?” he asked. “You know more about that sort of thing than me.”

  I read it over.

  “I understand,” I said. “This is supposed to be something that Mike was saying in his sleep before we woke him up, when we went in there just now. It sounds authentic enough to me; as though he might have said it.”

  “That’s a good word—authentic.”

  We waited an hour and the two officers brought in Joe Klebo.

  “We got the goods on you, Joe,” O’Malley told him. “You and Mike Marla done that Roscoe killing and Mike spilt on you.”

  Joe Klebo grinned at us derisively.

  “That’s old stuff,” he commented. “You dumb cops are always trying them games on us poor boys; but Mike didn’t tell nothing on me because he ain’t got nothing to tell, and if he did have he wouldn’t tell it.”

  “He told it, all right,” O’Malley countered, “but he don’t yet know he done it. You’d ought to have more sense, Joe, than to take a sleeptalker along with you when you pull a job.”

  “Better have Mike in too,” the captain suggested.

  An officer went and got Mike Marla and Mike grinned at Joe but Joe did not return the grin. His nostrils were white.

  “You did some talking just now, Mike,” O’Malley told him, “that you don’t know about. I’ll read it to you.”

  He went to the captain’s desk and got what he had written.

  “ ‘Come on, Joe,’ ” he read, “ ‘we’ll get this money or else this guy won’t ever have a chance to hold out on us again. . . . Better go up the stairs. . . . Hello, Roscoe, we come to get that jack. . . . What if you ain’t got it? You can telephone and get it, can’t you? We’ll wait till you do. . . . We waited about long enough, Roscoe. How about it? . . . Let him have it, Joe. . . . Well, we both hit him. I guess nobody seen us come out either.’ ”

  Mike Marla was white. It was plain he did not know whether he had said this in his sleep or not. Joe Klebo made a rush toward him but the officers grabbed him.

  “I’d knock you off, you rat,” Joe yelled at Mike, “if I had anything to do it with!”

  “Honest, Joe,” Mike whined, “I didn’t know I said it. I didn’t go to tell anything.”

  * * * *

  “That was sharp police work, O’Malley,” I congratulated him after we had left the station-house. “But there’s one thing I don’t yet understand: When we went to see Mrs. Sunday she didn’t tell us anything and yet you said she’d given you a lead. How did she do that?”

  “You ain’t exactly dumb,” O’Malley decided. “It’s just that you ain’t observing. You didn’t notice, when we saw Mrs. Sunday, that the dress she had on was made of the same stuff as the doll was dressed in. She’d made the doll clothes out of the pieces that were left when she made her dress.”

  FINGERPRINTS

  Originally published in Collier’s, May 9, 1932.

  “This is a case,” said O’Malley, “where they thought a girl had been hit by an automobile, but when they come to look her over a few times they found that she’d been shot. They don’t know who she is or where she come from, and there’s some good men working on the case but they ain’t found out nothing. Now there’ll be one more good man, because I got to go and look at her, but I don’t expect to find out any more than they have.”

  We went and looked at her. She was a very pretty girl and she had been shot twice in the back of the head. They had her clothes at the station house and we looked them over carefully. There were no marks of any kind on any of them. The manufacturer’s name in her shoes could not be read and the makers’ labels had been carefully cut out of her hat and the fur coat she wore.

  “These people that get knocked off,” O’Malley stated, “seem to try to make it hard for us. It looks like she cut those labels out herself.”

  “We got another thing,” the desk sergeant offered. “We got a traveling-bag full of clothes that got picked up out of a ditch about a half-mile from where they found this lady. It might not be hers.”

  “But then again it might,” O’Malley answered. “People don’t generally throw away full traveling bags without” some reason.”

  We examined that too. There were no initials on the bag or on the toilet articles it contained and there was no marking on the clothes. We took the clothes out of the bag and compared them with the ones she had had on and it seemed that they ought to fit the same person.

  “All this ain’t natural,” O’Malley concluded. “A woman carries more things than this in a suitcase. She carries letters and most always photographs. Where’s her other glove?”

  “She didn’t have but one,” the sergeant answered.

  “A woman wears two gloves.”

  “This one didn’t.”

  “That’s a man’s glove, O’Malley,” I objected, “not a woman’s.”

  “Sure, it’s a man’s glove and one time it was cleaned, but she might wear man’s gloves if she was driving. She have it on?” he asked the sergeant.

  “No; it was found near her.”

  We went back into the outer office of the station.

  “So you got nothing more than that?” O’Malley asked.

  “Well, we might have one more thing,” the sergeant answered. “A guy was driving along the road last night where she was found and he saw a parked car and heard a man and woman quarreling; so this rubberneck stopped his car to listen. When they seen him the quarreling stopped. He couldn’t see ’em; it was dark. So he drove on; but before he done that he wrote down the number of the car. He was the kind of guy that would. He called us up just now and gave us the number and they’re looking up who the car belongs to. It might not have anything to do with this.”

  “Probably not,” O’Malley decided.

  We went out and got back into our car and drove out to where the woman was found, and then on farther to where they found the suitcase, and we looked everywhere along the road to find the other glove, but didn’t find it. So O’Malley went into a house and called the station.

  “They found who owned that car yet?” he inquired.

  “Sure,” the sergeant answered. “The name�
�s Norman.” He gave us the address. “They’ve gone over there now,” he added.

  We were in the Bronx, but now we drove back to Manhattan. It was one of a row of apartment houses very much alike, which had garages behind them. There were police officers all over the place. “They got anything new on this?” O’Malley asked one of the officers.

  “Certainly. We got it all solved. This Norman, he’s her husband, done it. We found him in bed asleep in the middle of the afternoon and his car has been parked since morning in front of his garage and there’s blood in it.”

  We went behind the house to where they were working on the car. They were powdering it for fingerprints.

  “Getting anything?” O’Malley asked them.

  “You bet. Two kinds, on the doors and on the windshield—hers and another kind that must be her husband’s. Nobody else’s.”

  “Anything on the steering wheel?” O’Malley asked.

  “Nothing on the wheel. Those are smeared so they can’t be read.”

  We looked into the car.

  “She wasn’t driving,” O’Malley decided. “There’s blood on the right-hand seat but none on the driving seat.”

  “That was a man’s right-hand glove, O’Malley,” I insisted.

  “Sure. And a man takes off his glove before he pulls a trigger.”

  We searched the car thoroughly for the other glove, but didn’t find it, and then we went up to the apartment. The police had finished questioning Norman but had not taken him to the station house. He was a good-looking young man who sat staring straight before him, paying no attention to anything that went on.

  “What’s his story?” O’Malley asked the officer in charge of him.

  “Says he was in Boston and got home this morning. His wife wasn’t here but he didn’t think nothing about that because it was morning. Don’t know if the car was here then or not, because he was tired and went right to bed.”

  “Say,” O’Malley said to Norman, “you got a pair of brown gloves with yellow stitching?”

  “Sure. In the dresser drawer.”