Silent Are the Dead Read online

  There was an enormous break front opposite the fireplace and he went to it, examining the desk part and finding it locked. He got out the two bunches of keys, tried four of them before he got one that would work; then he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  He did not know what he was looking for, hadn’t the faintest idea, in fact. All he wanted to do was look around awhile and see if he could find anything at all that might show a connection between Dixon and Perry Austin, or Harry Nye, or even Stanford Endicott. It would only take one murder to convict Dixon—assuming that he was guilty—and Casey didn’t care which it was. If he could find something that might help Logan, okay; if not, he at least had tried.

  He started looking through the desk, not always conscious of just what he was handling since always in the back of his mind was the thought of Perry Austin. He did not know now whether the photographer had been killed as he had first thought—because of the film holder Casey had entrusted to him, or whether he had died because he had found something in Endicott’s office and had then tried to blackmail the killer. Either way, Casey wanted to do something about it. Not that he felt he was any good as a detective but simply because, in this case, he happened to have a few facts that he had been unable to tell Logan. The important thing was that no one find out that Austin was a blackmailer; by helping out now, he might get co-operation later if Logan learned the truth.

  He found nothing of interest in the desk part of the break front and tried the drawers beneath it. Presently he came across some used checkbooks. He took one out—it was of the three-checks-to-a-page variety—and leafed through it, glancing at the stubs until he came upon a name that stopped him.

  The name was Adele Dixon. He said it over a couple of times as he turned the sheets and then, a little farther on, he saw the name again. The amount written on the stub was $1200. He looked back at the other stub and found the same figure.

  Going through the book quickly he found that the name appeared five times in all, always for the same amount and with the dates approximately a month apart. He opened another drawer, pawed through it, opened a third. Here he found some envelopes containing canceled checks and said, “Hah!” softly and fingered through them until he found one made out to Adele Dixon. He turned it over, saw the stamp of the Traders’ Trust Company, a New York City bank.

  His dark eyes were remote and sleepy-looking as he put the check in his pocket. He didn’t know what it meant, but it could mean something; it could mean a lot of things. He replaced the envelope and closed and locked the desk. He let himself out of the apartment cautiously and walked briskly down the street.

  Logan and Manahan were just coming out of the Club Berkely when Casey got out of the taxi, and he could tell by the grim twist on the lieutenant’s mouth that he had not accomplished very much in the past half-hour. They climbed in the police car without a word and not until Manahan had shifted into high did Casey speak.

  “No dice?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We didn’t expect to bust this thing by just talking to him. All I wanted was a line on him last night. We’ll be back, maybe, when we find out when Nye got it. If we get a little more we’ll get a warrant and start tearing into some of those files of his.”

  Casey handed him the check. Logan looked at it, swiveled his eyes at Casey, turned the check over and back again. “Who’s Adele Dixon?”

  “That’s for you to find out.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I care plenty.”

  “Look,” Casey said patiently. “I don’t want to argue with you. If you want it, say so. If you don’t, give it back. I happen to know Bernie Dixon’s been writing one of those a month for a long time. I thought maybe you’d want to find out why.”

  Logan leaned back and gazed out the window at the midday traffic. After a half-minute of sightless inspection he said, “What good is it?”

  Casey sighed and leaned back. “Night before last,” he said wearily, “I give you two hoods from Jersey. Yesterday I give you Nat Garrison. Not because I’m smart, you understand, but because they won’t leave me alone. Okay, you get ’em anyway. Now do I have to do all the thinking for the Bureau too?”

  “Don’t be so damn smart,” Logan said, but he wasn’t sore. He was thinking. After a while he said, “She could be his mother.”

  “Or his sister. Or his grandmother. She could be his wife, too. Or a New York girl friend.” Casey crossed his legs, continued idly. “If you called New York or got on the teletype, and if a New York dick went to the Traders’ Trust, maybe they’d tell the dick where Adele lived, and maybe if the dick went to see—”

  “Shut up,” Logan said. “Let me be the detective for a while, will you?”

  Manahan ran the car in behind headquarters. Logan made no move to get out, but watched Casey with narrow-lidded speculation. Presently a suggestion of a grin came and with it a look of grudging respect. “Maybe Dixon wasn’t with Louise Endicott the other night between eight and ten. That what you’re getting at?”

  “It was just a thought,” Casey said.

  “You cased his apartment while we were at the Berkely.”

  “And that’s against the law,” Manahan said.

  “Maybe you’d better give it back then,” Casey said. “You’re receiving stolen property.”

  Logan chuckled briefly but his voice was sober when he spoke. “We’ll find out. If he’s been paying regular it could be to the kind of a dame that might do us some good. If Mrs. Endicott’s kind of sweet on Dixon, and if she don’t know about this dame, and if Dixon wasn’t with her—hell, what am I sitting around here talking to you lugs for?” He got out of the car and entered the building, walking fast.

  Chapter Eighteen: MOMENT WITH THE LADIES

  THERE WAS AN ASSIGNMENT waiting for Casey when he got back to the studio, and it was late afternoon before he could return to his apartment and finish making prints of the negatives he had taken from Perry Austin’s steel box.

  When he had taken them from the drier, he made himself a drink and then went into the living-room. He built a small fire in the fireplace, sat down in front of it, and began to throw prints and negatives in the flames, watching the paper curl and blacken, hearing the negatives hiss at him. From the entire collection he saved but one negative and three prints.

  The negative was a copy of an original and the subject was a man in uniform—a very befuddled young man by the looks of him—holding a negligee-clad girl on his lap, Nancy Jamison had stolen the original negative and print of her brother from Austin’s desk, but a copy had been made beforehand and now Casey put the negative in an envelope, added the folded print, and pocketed it so that he could return it to the girl when he had time.

  There remained now but two prints. He had noticed, while making the others, that the girl who appeared on Jamison’s lap also appeared in another picture, in a similar pose, but on another man’s lap. He had noticed that of the remaining pictures, only two were of this same general type. In each of these the same girl appeared, not the one who had posed with Jamison, but another. And since Casey guessed that it was these two women who had worked with Harry Nye and Austin, he had taken the negatives, masked off everything but the girls’ heads and enlarged them so that what remained were grainy but sizable photographs of two faces.

  Casey studied them as he finished his drink, brooding, knowing what he wanted to do. The important thing to him now was to wipe out completely all trace of this thing Perry Austin had been doing. Austin and Nye had known the truth and they were dead; the people whose pictures Casey had just destroyed might know but they wouldn’t be telling; the killer probably knew, but Casey couldn’t do anything about that just now. That left only the two women, and about them he thought he might be able to do something. He rolled the two photographs carefully and got his coat.

  Jackie King was a softly rounded brunette in her middle twenties. She had big eyes and a small, oval face, and when she opened th
e door of her apartment and saw Casey standing there her eyes got bigger and her teeth flashed in a smile. “Why, Mr. Casey,” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  “You certainly can.” She stood away from the door and closed it after him. “Well, how did you ever find out where I lived?”

  Casey grinned at her. He glanced over the snug little apartment and decided it might be a nice place to spend an evening now and then—if a guy could get in.

  “You know the Club Berkely?” he said.

  Jackie smiled again because it was a gag question. She was the cigarette girl at the Berkely.

  “Well,” Casey said, “I went in there and asked Joe, the second bartender, if he knew where you lived. He said he didn’t but maybe Bert did. ‘Know where Jackie lives, Bert?’ he said. ‘No,’ Bert said. ‘Hey, Mike. You know where Jackie lives?’”

  “All right,” Jackie King laughed, “I get the general idea.”

  Casey smiled back at her a moment and then the smile went away and he took the two photographs from his pocket and unrolled them.

  “I’m trying to check up on a couple of girls. I thought maybe you could help me, Jackie.”

  “I will if I can.”

  He glanced down at the pictures. One showed a blonde, the other a brunette. They hadn’t posed or made up for a portrait and these enlargements didn’t flatter them much. One, the blonde, was flashily pretty; both looked cheap and common.

  Jackie King took them from him and he watched her face, seeing the quick recognition, the tightening of her mouth before she looked back at him.

  “You—you’re not mixed up with them are you, Mr. Casey?” she asked earnestly.

  “You know them?”

  She nodded. “I know who they are. Clippers. Both of them.”

  “I’m not mixed up with them,” Casey said. “You know how they work?”

  She said she didn’t. “In any way they can, I guess.”

  “Where could I find them?”

  “They used to work on Huntington.” She mentioned a third rate night spot. “I don’t know if they’re still there.”

  “Could you find out? If you could get a line on where they lived—”

  She rose, handing him the photographs. “You sit there,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She went to the telephone and gave a number. Casey watched her, listening hopefully and then anxiously as she hung up and tried another call. Altogether she made four calls before she wrote something on a slip of paper and turned to him.

  “I know where one of them lives,” she said. “The blonde. Her name is Fay Borden.” She named an address and he saw that she had it written down. “The other one is Aileen Rogers, but it looks as if she’d left town. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Casey rose and put the pictures away. “You’re my pal.” He took her arm as he went to the door. “The next time I get to the Club I’m going to buy you some wine—if you’ll drink it with me.”

  “I might,” Jackie King said. She stood in the door as he went out and her eyes were bright and smiling and said they liked him. “I might if it’s late enough.”

  Fay Borden had rooms on the top floor of a remodeled brick house not far from Charles Street. When she opened the door and saw Casey standing there she tried to shut it in his face, but he saw it coming and put his shoulder in the crack and gently but steadily widened it. For a moment or two she fought that pressure, leaning her weight against the panel, but in the end she had to fall back. That made her mad.

  “Listen, you!” she shrilled. “Who do you think you are? What do you want?”

  He closed the door and leaned against it. His crooked grin was not amused now; neither were the eyes that studied her. She was dressed for the street and wore a thin silk dress and four-inch spikes and a fox cape. Her hair was very yellow, except near the roots, and needed a rinse. Her skin was yellowish, where it wasn’t caked with make-up, and her greenish eyes were hard and suspicious and just a little scared.

  “You can’t push in here,” she said. “I don’t care who you are. I’ve got friends. You needn’t think—”

  “Okay,” Casey said, and looked over the room. It was messy and smelled of cheap perfume and cigarettes. What a dump, he thought. And then, I hope she rents it furnished. “Okay,” he said again. “I’m only here to do you a favor, sister. Recognize these?”

  He offered the photographs but she couldn’t pry her gaze from him right away, and accepted them automatically. She backed up. When he didn’t attempt to follow, she glanced at the top picture. It was the one of Aileen Rogers.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “Look at the other.”

  She did. And then back at him, her sticky-looking lashes flicking wide.

  “Know where that was taken?”

  “No.”

  “Think hard. You had a soldier boy. A lieutenant. You were sitting on his lap.”

  For a second or two she made a show of defiance. “If you’re one of those vice-squad chiselers.—” She couldn’t finish it. “Where’d you get it?” she asked hollowly. “Where—where’s the rest of it?”

  “You got any money?”

  That started her again. She was scared but she wasn’t quitting. “What if I have?” she demanded. “Suppose I do go out with a soldier? What’s wrong with that?”

  Casey kept giving her that crooked humorless smile and it began to wear her down. “Harry Nye was in on that frame,” he said. “And a guy named Perry Austin took the picture. Did you read about Perry Austin in the papers?”

  A sudden pallor showed through the make-up and he saw her wet her lips. When she made no answer he continued. “Do you know what happened to Harry Nye last night? I’ll tell you. They found him in an alley around noon.”

  “What do you want?” she asked finally.

  “Where’s Aileen?”

  “In Philadelphia.”

  “For good?”

  “I don’t know. She went out on the road with a unit.”

  “You rent this place furnished?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much money have you got?”

  “A couple of hundred.”

  “That should be enough,” Casey said. He went over to the door, opened it. Her wide, greenish eyes were puzzled and uncertain. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” Casey added.

  “That I should—”

  “Two guys who were mixed up in that picture business have been knocked off in the last two days. Aileen’s gone, so she’s okay. That leaves you.” He walked back and took the pictures from her limp fingers. He gave her a final glance and walked out.

  He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the door open. She called down to him.

  “But—who are you?”

  He stopped and looked up. “Just a guy who dropped around to give you a tip and some advice: beat it while you can.”

  A colored maid opened the dressing-room door and Casey saw Lyda Hoyt at the table and went in. Her face lit up at once and she held out her hand, bringing him to her. “I’m so glad you came,” she said.

  “I thought I might not get another chance,” Casey said, feeling again her warmth and personal magnetism. “You close tomorrow, don’t you?”

  She said they did. That she was going to Hollywood for a picture. There was a chessboard on the table and he could see that a game was in progress, but apparently not for very long, since only four players had been removed—three pawns and a miter-headed bishop.

  “I didn’t mean to break up your game,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I try to get a game in before a performance. It—helps me to relax.” She smiled. “But tonight I can relax with you. Sit down.” She waved him to a chaise longue. “Over there.”

  “All right, Anna,” she said. Anna went out and Lyda got up for cigarettes, holding a light for him. “Now,” she said. “I want you to know how grateful I am for what you did.”

  Casey looked uncomfortable. “It wasn�
��t much,” he said. “Only for a while you had me in a spot. You called Forrester that night, and he came around for the picture and I couldn’t tell him—”

  “I know. It was stupid of me. But I was terrified. I really was.”

  “Sure,” Casey said. “I chased you out of Endicott’s office.” He grinned. “You put that chair in front of me and I fell on my face.”

  “Did you?” Her eyes flashed their smile again. “I’m sorry.”

  Casey blew smoke at the ceiling. “I stopped in to see Jim last night,” he said. “I wanted to be sure he knew how Logan got that extra print.”

  Her face sobered and she examined the tip of her cigarette. “I wonder,” she said slowly. “I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. Trying to keep it all a secret.”

  Casey studied her. “You mean about your uncle?”

  “My uncle?” She hesitated and returned to her regard of the cigarette. “Yes. I wonder what would have happened if Grant had found out.”

  “Jim wouldn’t like it, would he?”

  “No. When I told him I was going to announce my engagement he made me promise never to let Grant know. He—he said he’d kill himself rather than have it come out that—we were related—that there was a jailbird, that’s what he said, in the family.”

  Her eyes were deeply troubled now and Casey couldn’t think of much to say.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I think I’d let it ride if I were you. Jim’s happy. Why not let well enough alone? If he knows you’re happy he’s glad because he can know he hasn’t spoiled anything for you. If you fool around, if something should happen he’d be sure to think it was his fault—”

  “I’m sorry.” Lyda Hoyt rose and smiled wistfully. “I didn’t mean to get so involved.”