The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37 by Frederick Nebel

Author:Frederick Nebel [Nebel, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Detective/Hard-Boiled
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2013-08-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

The Dead Visitor

THE phone in George Hammerhorn’s private office rang at half-past one that afternoon. Hammerhorn was the head of the Cosmos Agency. He was a broad, blond man, well groomed in dark gray. His movements were slow, deliberate. He reached out slowly, deliberately for the phone with his right hand, removed a half-smoked cigar from his mouth with his left.

“Yes?” He watched the smoke rise from his cigar. “O.K. Hang around though.” He slid the receiver into the prongs and said across the office to Cardigan: “That was Floom, watching the Bourke place. She hasn’t turned up yet.”

Cardigan was standing with one foot on the floor, the other on the radiator by the window, and leaning cross-armed on his knee. He scowled down at the traffic on Madison Avenue, his big face brown and saturnine, his wide mouth drawn down at one corner.

George Hammerhorn leaned back in his leather-upholstered chair. “She did it, I guess.”

“And why the hell shouldn’t she have?” Cardigan growled, his black eyes stirring, not seeing the traffic. “That guy Bourke stank. A handsome, glib, fast-fingered guy-about-town.”

“That has nothing to do with the law, Jack. She should have stayed there, held her ground—called it self-defense or something. When they find her, they’ll be tough.”

Cardigan swung his foot off the radiator and spaded his hands into his pockets, facing Hammerhorn. “Don’t read me the law, George, for cripes’ sake. I know she should have held her ground. But the poor kid was scared, she didn’t know what to do—”

“She knew enough to come over to your place and borrow five bucks.”

Cardigan dropped into a chair and knuckled his chin.

Hammerhorn said: “I think you should have told the cops about that call, Jack. It would have cleared up one angle—the fact that she couldn’t have made that phone call at one five because she was at your place.”

“That’s not the main angle. The main angle is that Bourke’s watch was smashed at twelve twenty. I can prove, if I have to, later, that she was at my place at five past one. It’s going to make a stink. The scandal-mongers are going to link her to me in a nasty way. The main reason I didn’t tell Block that she was there was because I wanted to be free to move around. He hasn’t got her, so he’d have held me as a material witness or something—maybe even an accessory after the fact. All right—I can prove she was at my place when the phone call was made, but I can’t prove where she was at the time Bourke’s watch was smashed.”

“Who did make the phone call, then?”

Cardigan got up and took a caged walk around the office. “There’s a fluke somewhere. I knew there was something wrong when she came into my apartment last night—I could tell it. Maybe she did sock him, say, at twelve twenty, and broke the watch. Then maybe she left. Maybe Bourke tried to get me and fainted before the connection was made—or changed his mind and hung up.

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