Headed for a Hearse Read online

  While Westland waited for Finklestein, Connors had a visitor. He was a priest, an elderly man with pink jowls and an impressive manner. His skirts swished against his legs as he halted in front of Connors’ cell.

  “David Connors?” he asked in a mellow voice.

  Connors advanced to the bars. “Yeah,” he said. “What do you want?” The priest’s face was solemn. He said, “David Connors, do you know you are to die in five days’ time?”

  Connors said, “You’re not telling me anything.”

  “I have come to prepare you to die,” said the priest. His left hand held a silver crucifix.

  Connors said, “You have like hell.” He thrust his square muscular face against the bars. “Get out of here.”

  The priest was startled. “Come, my boy,” he said, “you don’t know what you are saying.”

  “Get out of here,” Connors repeated.

  The priest said, “David Connors, you’d be breaking your mother’s heart if she could be hearing you.”

  “I never had a mother,” said Connors. His voice was defiant and frightened.

  “What! You deny your mother?” The priest’s voice rang with horror. “The mother that bore you and suffered pain for you?” His fingers tightened around the crucifix. “What kind of a son are you?”

  Haze had obscured the sun, and the light in the corridor was like watered milk. The priest’s face was red; he breathed noisily.

  “Get out of here,” said Connors.

  The priest raised the crucifix, his brows met over his nose. He opened his mouth, paused, closed it; his anger died. He turned his back on Connors, walked towards Robert Westland. “Are you a Catholic, my son?” he asked.

  Westland said, “No, Father.”

  The rhythmic swish of the priest’s garments became indistinct as he neared the far end of the corridor.

  Charles Finklestein looked like a small but fierce chicken hawk. With a silk handkerchief, he fanned dust from a chair in the small musty office marked, on the glass door, Assistant Matron. Finally he sat down opposite Robert Westland, handed back the letter from the mysterious “M. G.” His ash-colored eyes were alert.

  “You see,” Robert Westland said, “there might be a chance.”

  Finklestein spoke slowly. “You mean you ain’t guilty?” he asked. Light glinted from the thin gold rims of his spectacles.

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  “Hmm.” The attorney was doubtful. “Isn’t it kinda late to start a job like this?”

  “It’s my only chance. I didn’t care before, but I have decided I don’t want to die after all.”

  Finklestein said, “A lot of people feel that way.” His smile exposed strong, uneven teeth. “I don’t know. It’s certainly a million-to-one shot. You better tell me about the evidence against you first, then I’ll be able to decide——”

  “You might as well believe I am innocent right now,” Westland said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t.”

  Finklestein said, “I don’t know.” It was quite dark in the room, and he walked over to the wall switch and snapped on the light. He was a trim, dapper man, and he wore a diamond the size of a dime on the third finger of his left hand. Returning to his chair he said, “You better tell me about the case, anyway.”

  “You know the general story—the papers gave it enough space.” Westland’s head throbbed. He put his hand against his temples, leaned his elbows on his knees. “My wife, Joan, was found shot to death on April 28th in her apartment at 191 East Delaware Place. She and I were living apart. They broke the door down and found her.”

  Finklestein asked, “Who’s they?” He took out a pencil, a notebook.

  “Well, according to the testimony at the trial, my wife’s maid, June Dea, tried to get into the apartment around nine-thirty in the morning. The door was locked, so she called the manager, Gregory Wayne, to find out if Mrs. Westland had gone out and left a message for her. Wayne discovered from Tony, the elevator boy, that my wife hadn’t gone out, so he came upstairs and pounded on the door, too.”

  “Didn’t he have a passkey?”

  Westland said impatiently, “I’ll tell you about the key later.” He rubbed the back of his head. “After Wayne had pounded for a while, Mike Sullivan, the house detective, and Theodore Pulsinski, the janitor, came up. They were standing around, trying to decide what to do, when Bolston arrived on the scene.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Dick Bolston? He’s one of my partners in the brokerage business. He took over my wife’s stock account after she and I separated two years ago. I thought it would be best for me not to handle her money, so I asked him to take care of it. He’d had a business appointment with her for ten o’clock.” Finklestein scrawled on the tiny pad of paper as Westland continued: “Dick told the others of his appointment, and they decided to break in.” Westland’s voice faded into a whisper. “She was lying on the living-room rug, a bullet through the back of her head.”

  Finklestein asked, “Who broke down the door?”

  “Sullivan, the house detective. He was the first one in the room.”

  Finklestein’s pencil tapped the paper five times. “There were four others behind him?” he tapped the paper again. “I figure those present included your partner, the janitor, the manager, the maid, and Tony, the elevator boy?”

  “That’s right,” said Westland.

  The pencil scraped against the paper. “Go on.”

  “Sullivan wouldn’t let anyone touch the body, and the manager called the police.”

  Finklestein said, “You might just as well call a herd of elephants.”

  “I don’t know exactly what the police did after they got there, but anyway they arrested me at the athletic club while I was playing squash. It seemed that Joan has been killed with my gun, a Webley automatic which I’d used when I was in the British army.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the lawyer. “How’d she get shot with your pistol?”

  “I don’t know. They never found the damn thing.”

  “This is getting interesting.” Finklestein jerked his chair to the table. “You mean this jane—pardon me, I mean your wife—was found in a locked apartment, shot to death, and there was no pistol there?”

  “Something like that. The police came to me and asked me if I had lost my Webley. I said I had it in a drawer in a cabinet in my apartment. But when they looked, it was gone. That’s when they booked me for murder.”

  “How’d they know you had a Webley in the first place?”

  “My other partner, Ronald Woodbury, told them. He didn’t even know Joan was dead at the time.”

  Finklestein asked, “How many partners have you got?”

  “Just Woodbury and Bolston. The firm name is Westland, Bolston and Woodbury.”

  “How’d this Woodbury know you had a Webley?”

  “We served together in France. He had one, too.”

  “How’d they know it wasn’t his gun that shot her?” Finklestein shoved his glasses up his hooked nose. His voice came in barks.

  “They didn’t have to know.” Westland looked indignantly at the attorney. “He wouldn’t have any reason to kill my wife; none in the world.”

  “How’d they know it was a Webley at all?”

  “Ballistics experts. They proved the bullet came out of a war-time Webley.”

  “And they got you because you couldn’t produce yours?”

  “The prosecutor said it was obvious I had concealed my gun to escape detection.”

  Finklestein shook his head. “What else did they have?”

  “They had plenty. Probably the worst thing was the key. When I lived with Joan we had a special lock put on the apartment door, one of the kind that doesn’t snap but has to be turned with the key. We had only two keys made. I had one, she had the other. When we separated, I didn’t give her back my key.”

  Finklestein asked, “That’s why they had to break down the door, because the special lock was fastened
?”

  “That’s right. And I had one of the keys, and hers was found with some of her other keys on a table beside the body. Since the door had been locked from the outside, it was obvious that my key had locked it—after she had been shot.”

  The lawyer’s teeth gleamed. “That’s easy. Somebody had a duplicate made.”

  “No.” Westland shook his head. “That’s the big puzzle. There weren’t any duplicates. The maid, June, had been trying for a year to get Mrs. Westland to have a duplicate made for her, but Joan wouldn’t do it. She kept jewelry and bonds in a safe in the apartment. She said she wouldn’t have any duplicate keys floating around; she wanted to be able to sleep securely at night. Only about a month before the murder she spoke to me about my key. She said she was worried about the bonds and jewels and wanted to know if I had had a duplicate made. If I had, she said, she’d change the lock. I told her I hadn’t.”

  Outside, blue street lights appeared. The room’s two narrow windows were streaked with a gray substance. Over the right one hung a cobweb, its ends twisted and sooty.

  “How about your key?” asked Finklestein. “Couldn’t someone have pinched it and had a duplicate made?”

  Westland shook his head. “Not a chance. I keep it in a leather case with three other keys, and the bunch is never out of my sight.”

  “You had the key after the murder?”

  “Yes, I had it.”

  “Her apartment then … aren’t there any other doors, or some windows…?”

  “That’s the only door. There is a small package entrance in the kitchen, but it isn’t big enough for a man to get through. I know, because we had it measured. The windows are just twenty-three floors from the ground.”

  “Maybe the guy lowered himself into the apartment below with a rope?”

  “The windows were all locked from the inside.”

  “The hell you say!” Finklestein rubbed the bridge of his nose with a finger tip, pushed his spectacles in place. “This sounds like a story by that fella—what’s his name—Van Dyke? You got a woman dead from a pistol wound. The gun’s missing, the keys are all accounted for, the door and the windows are locked from the inside, and there ain’t any other way to get out.” His rubbing finger made a white line where the bone ran on his nose.

  Westland said, “Sometimes I think I really must have done it.” He drew a cigarette from the breast pocket of his shirt, lit it with a kitchen match. He flipped the match into a dusty brass spittoon.

  “Go on,” said Finklestein. “What else did they have on you?”

  “You knew that I was in her apartment just before she was murdered?”

  “I read it in the papers, but you better tell me about it, anyway. I want you to act as if I didn’t know anything.”

  “It’s pretty funny why I was there.”

  “Funny?”

  “I mean strange.” Westland crossed his legs and clasped his left knee with his two hands, his fingers interlocked. “I told you my wife and I were separated. I had been trying to get her to divorce me, but we couldn’t get together on a property settlement. We were on fairly good terms, but I was anxious to get free so I could marry a girl named Emily Lou Martin. The marriage was all arranged; it was only a matter of my getting free.”

  Finklestein said, “Sure, but how about that visit?”

  “On the night of the murder, that was Sunday, Emily Lou, at least I thought it was Emily Lou, telephoned me and said my wife had talked to her that afternoon and had warned her to stay away from me. She said my wife had called her a ‘scheming slut.’ Emily Lou was quite upset, so I decided to go over and have it out with Joan.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About eleven-thirty. I was reading in bed when Emily Lou telephoned.”

  “And you went over to your wife’s apartment that night?”

  Westland squashed his cigarette butt against the table and dropped it in the spittoon. “It took me about twenty-five minutes to get over there.” He automatically lit another cigarette. “I took the elevator up to her apartment, and we had a terrible quarrel. She denied having spoken to Emily Lou, and I called her a liar. I got pretty excited and made a damn fool of myself.”

  “And the elevator boy heard you?”

  “Yes.” Westland’s eyes rounded. “How’d you know?”

  “They always do,” Finklestein said. “Go on.”

  “I stayed about forty minutes and then I calmed down and apologized—I think I would have killed myself if I hadn’t apologized in view of what happened later—and we parted on a friendly basis. I ran the elevator down…”

  Finklestein interrupted him. “You ran the elevator?”

  Westland explained, “The boy quits at midnight, and the elevator works automatically after that.” He continued, “I ran the elevator down to the lobby and went home.”

  Finklestein rubbed his hands on his silk handkerchief. “Did anybody see you on your way home?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “It must have been close to one.”

  “They found the body about ten the next morning?”

  “That’s right,” Westland said. “And at the trial, the coroner’s——”

  The diamond glistened on Finklestein’s upheld hand. “I know, I know. The coroner’s physician testified that the body had been dead just nine hours. Those boys are magicians.” He adjusted his glasses violently. “They can tell you just when a guy died, while an ordinary specialist don’t even know whether he is dead half the time.”

  “There wasn’t any doubt about her being dead.”

  The attorney asked, “That all they had on you?”

  “No. They found a letter from me in her purse. In the letter I said: ‘If you don’t divorce me, I’ll have to get rid of you.’ By that I meant, I’d divorce her if she didn’t divorce me, and it sounded pretty bad when the prosecutor read it to the jury.”

  Finklestein groaned. “I’ll say it must have.”

  “Then they found her will, leaving all her money to me.”

  “Oy!”

  Westland spoke apologetically. “I guess she hadn’t bothered to change it after we were separated.”

  “How much did she leave?”

  “It wasn’t much, only thirty thousand dollars.”

  Finklestein was dusting off his hands again. “Thirty thousand dollars looks like a million to a three-dollar-a-day juror.” He stuffed the handkerchief in his coat pocket and wrote on his pad. “Is that all?”

  “There was that telephone call from Emily Lou,” Westland said. “I told the police about it, but they found she hadn’t called me at all that evening.”

  “She hadn’t called you at all!” The lawyer pressed his hands to the sides of his head. “Say, this thing is going to drive me goofy.”

  “If you’re puzzled, think how I felt,” said Westland. “The State puts Emily Lou’s uncle and aunt, with whom she lives, on the stand, and they testified that she hadn’t used the phone all that evening. The only phone in the house is by the living room, and they would have heard her.”

  “Maybe she went out?”

  “No. She stayed in all evening. They testified that they played cards and listened to the radio and that Emily Lou was with them.” Westland smiled at the attorney’s wry face. It was his first smile in months. “But there is something even more bizarre than that. During the trial I suddenly recalled that the Emily Lou of the telephone had used bad grammar in talking to me. I attributed it to excitement at the time, but later I realized that it couldn’t have been Emily Lou talking after all. I remembered that her voice had sounded a little queer.”

  “So I suppose you told all this on the stand?”

  “Of course.”

  Finklestein groaned again. “So the prosecutor got a chance to say that you had hoped your girl would lie for you, and when she wouldn’t, you had been forced to change your story.” He shook his head sadly. “I don’t ever talk about othe
r lawyers, but if I did, I would have to say yours were lousy.” He made a note on the pad. “That’s all?”

  “I think so.…” Westland scowled. “No, I guess there is one more thing. The man in the apartment below testified he had heard a noise like a shot as he and his wife were having a cup of tea before going to bed. They both said it was around twelve-twenty. Their name is Shuttle.”

  “And you had admitted you were in the apartment with her from a little after twelve until almost one?”

  “Certainly. Why should I have lied about it?”

  “You must have been just about the best witness the prosecution had.” Finklestein pushed up his glasses. “You’d think a guy with a hooked nose like mine could keep his glasses up, wouldn’t you?” He put his elbows on the table and peered at Westland. “Who would want to see you put out of the way?”

  “As far as I know—nobody.”

  “How about your money? Who gets it?”

  “Part of it goes to Emily Lou—two thirds—and the rest to my cousin, Lawrence Wharton. You mustn’t tell Miss Martin, she doesn’t know.” Westland lit a cigarette. “Then there is ten thousand to my man, Simmons.”

  “How much are you worth?”

  “I think about three hundred and fifty thousand now. I have spent almost a hundred thousand defending myself.” He rubbed his forehead. “Of course, that doesn’t include personal property and some real estate.”

  Finklestein’s fingers, pushing against a cheek, almost closed his right eye. “Any reason for either of your partners to get you out of the way?”

  “No. It might even hurt the business.” Westland blew smoke out of his nose. “Although, God knows, it’s been bad enough for the last five years. If I didn’t have a private income, it would have been damn tough. I’d have had to root instead of taking it easy.”