Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 105, No. 5, October 10, 1936
- Автор: Вулрич Корнелл, Tinsley Theodore
- Год: 1936
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 105, No. 5, October 10, 1936». Краткое содержание книги:
He returned to the car. “Go to Egan’s house.”
Dullea was received by Mrs. Egan, a charming, regal-looking woman. She was pale and worried.
“Mrs. Egan,” Dullea began, dispensing with formalities, “it is essential that we locate your husband at once. Do you know what has become of him?”
“Oh, I wish I did. He drove away from this house last night. He... he’s been acting rather strangely lately, almost as though he were afraid of something. Then a few hours ago I got a call from some man I don’t know. He said: ‘We’ve just taken Frank for a ride.’ And hung up. I’m terrified, Captain Dullea, terrified. They’ll do the same thing to him they did to poor Mrs. Hughes.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Egan?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“I don’t think you have to worry. I think your husband is alive.”
“I hope so.”
“Is that all you wish to tell me, Mrs. Egan?”
“That is all I know, Captain.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Egan. Good night.”
With Egan, Tinnin and Doran all missing, Dullea was not prepared for the surprise which awaited him back at headquarters. Verne Doran had been traced to a downtown speakeasy and arrested. A lieutenant greeted Dullea with the news.
“Chief,” he cried, “we’ve got Doran and, boy, has he got a story to tell!”
“Been using pressure?”
“A little.”
“He’s told you that the real murderer of Jessie Hughes is Frank Egan.”
“Judas, Chief, how did you know that?”
“I’ve known it for a long time.”
Verne Doran squatted before Dullea’s desk, his stiff hair matted with sweat, his face pasty and drawn. Around him the detectives formed a semi-circle, grim and silent, piercing him with their, eyes. He was talking in a dull monotone.
“Egan had told us that he had been our friend and that it was a case of his life or Mrs. Hughes’s. He told me that I owed him plenty, that he had got me out of jail and kept me out of it and that if I didn’t do as he asked it would be easy for me to go back again.
“He said he was hard pressed for money and that he could get money if Mrs. Hughes died.
“He ’phoned to Mrs. Hughes and told her he was coming out with friends in a short time and that she was to have the garage door open as she had in the past. He told us that Tinnin was to knock her unconscious by striking her in the stomach and that my job was to run over her body. It was agreed that we were to make it look like a hit-run accident.
“We went over to her house and drove in the garage. We were in there for about an hour, talking to Mrs. Hughes. Finally, when she got restless, Tinnin gave me the sign and said for me to back in the car. As I got in he struck her in the stomach with his fist, then in the eye and a second time in the stomach. She fell without a sound.
“He dragged her under the right front wheel. Tinnin stood nearby and gave instructions to go forward and back, forward and back. I obeyed. We then drove around the neighborhood looking for a place to leave her and every time we’d stop either a car or a pedestrian would pass. Finally, we found a dark spot and Tinnin dumped the body out.
We turned out the lights, drove furiously for a few blocks, then put the car away.
“Egan called me Monday and told me to get away, that the police were on the trail. The one big slip we made was about the house key. Egan forgot to tell us that she should have a key on her so it would look as if she had gone out walking.”
But Doran was wrong. There had been many slips. Egan had a secretary, a Miss Marion Lambert. This girl now offered the information that Egan had been in trouble about personal finances and clients’ money and that Mrs. Hughes herself had stormed into his office a few days before her death, demanding a showdown. Furthermore, Egan was not at the prizefights, as he had let various officials understand, but was seen pacing up and down before Mrs. Hughes’s house at 9:30 on the evening of April 29! Incidentally, Egan was named sole heir in Mrs. Hughes’s will.
Further inquiries into Egan’s personal finances revealed that he had been gambling with the moneys of various clients and was in debt to the tune of. $19,000. He was also about to lose his home, which was heavily mortgaged.
Dullea was not the sort of detective to send his case before a grand jury without substantiation of every detail. In this complex task he was brilliantly assisted by Police Chemist Frank Latulipe. The tire-tracks in Mrs. Hughes’s garage were carefully photographed and impressions were taken in plaster. They showed the right tire was smoother than the left and that its thread left peculiar marks from the vacuum cups — marks like tiny horseshoes. They were unlucky for Egan, those horse-shoes. Similar impressions were taken from Mrs. Hughes’s clothes.
The most damning clues were the eight white hairs found by Dullea. Other hairs were found caught in the fender of the suspected death-car and under a microscope these hairs matched exactly with those found in the garage and with the hair of Mrs. Hughes!
It was the icy presentation of these facts which brought Verne. Doran to a complete confession. Albert Tinnin, too, was found and grilled by Dullea for 108 hours in a room at the Hotel Whitcomb.
But Frank Egan was still missing.
IV
It was a tribute to the role which Egan had been, acting for twelve years that half the population of San. Francisco refused to believe in his guilt. To them it appeared incredible that this kindly, humanitarian worker, who had done so much for the down-trodden and the defenseless, should be capable of so monstrous a hypocrisy. As for the cold-blooded murder of a feeble, old woman, their imagination balked at it.
The controversy assumed a political color. It centered about the whole public defender system and the antagonism which naturally exists between the police-seeking a conviction and officials on the defense side.
The parole system, too, was violently attacked.
Dullea had called forth a storm upon his head when he denounced Frank Egan as a murderer.
On June 7, more than a month after the death of Mrs. Hughes, Egan was still missing, Mayor Angelo Rossi, flustered, under the stinging charges flung against the police department, lashed. Dullea verbally for not finding him. He warned him to do so immediately or risk his job.
At that moment Dullea’s men were hot oh Egan’s trail and by nightfall had traced him to a private sanitarium operated by a Mrs. Bronescoe. He had been brought there by his lawyer, Vincent. Hallinan, pale and haggard and starving. Mrs. Bronescoe told the police that his mind was affected. He had suffered horribly from malnutrition and exposure.
“Very well,” said Dullea, “we’ll give him time to recover.”
It was the one serious mistake Duller made throughout the case. The moment the guard’s vigilance relaxed Egan skipped again. This time he was trailed to Emerald Lake Hallman admitted that he had gone to his cottage there, but when the police arrived Egan was gone. Ten officers searched the district all night.
Meanwhile a county grand jury had seen things Dullea’s way. They returned murder indictments against Egan, Tinnin and Doran, conceding that the Public Defender had been the master mind of the unholy trio.
Hallinan pleaded ineffectually with the District Attorney that Doran alone had committed the crime for a wretched fifty dollars!
On June 9 Egan surprised everybody by calmly giving himself up. He was a broken man. There was no more fight in him. He went to trial a few weeks later.
The trial lasted one month. It was the rawest melodrama from opening to finish. Marion Lambert, Egan’s secretary who testified against him, was threatened with gang vengeance and had to be protected.