Dead Man Inside by Vincent Starrett

Author:Vincent Starrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

In other parts of the city other newsboys were similarly advertising their profession. Out of the jumble of sounds thus broadcast there emerged a name, upon hearing which interested persons purchased copies of the extra edition.

“Arrest of Adrian Bluefield” was the legend across the top half of one of them. It was followed by half a column of type chronicling the event.

Bluefield, it appeared, had been found in lodgings so close to a north side police station that he might have put his head out of a window and watched the squad-room patrolmen at their pinochle. A very jolly dodge indeed—to hide next door to a police station. The public laughed heartily.

Howard Saxon, who, as an employee of a newspaper, received the several editions of his own journal in advance of the man in the street, also was cynically amused.

“Another fairy story exploded,” he commented to an assistant, when the extra edition had been dropped upon his desk. “It is a popular notion among writers of detective fiction that the safest place for a criminal to hide is under the police chief’s bed—the last place anybody would think of looking for him, eh? Like the story of the Jew who wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery so the devil couldn’t find him. Or was it the other way round?”

He continued to read the account of the capture.

There was little else of interest, however. Bluefield was not actually under arrest, in spite of the headlines. He was in custody—a distinction with a slight difference in law and no difference whatever to Adrian Bluefield. He was being held, unbooked and incommunicado, at the station near which he had established his headquarters.

His assertions were profane and added nothing to the solution of the mystery. He was himself, Adrian Bluefield, he insisted; he had done no wrong, and, what was more, the police had better have a care what they were doing.

He had been apprehended the night before. A detective, leaving the north side station on an assignment, had seen him entering the lodging house and had recognized him from photographs published in the newspapers the day of his arrival.

But had there been an arrival? It seemed to the police more likely that the man called Bluefield was a Chicago product who had been stricken with a great idea. Yet surely he had known a great deal about Amos Bluefield. Had he been an associate?

He might even, it was privately conceded, have been the murderer of the haberdasher.

Groups of experienced detectives passed through the room in which the suspect was being interrogated the morning after his capture. None of them ever had seen the man before. His photograph was not in the “gallery.” He had all the known facts of Amos Bluefield’s life at his finger tips. It was admitted that there was even a slight resemblance between the dead man and the living claimant.

“Still,” as Rainfall observed to Saxon, when the latter had called him on the telephone to report the latest news, “all fat men look alike.

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