Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 8

Walker kept two dog-eared magazines in a pigeonhole of his desk, with a story marked in each. He kept them, he said, to reduce enthusiasm, as a doctor keeps a drug to reduce a fever. They were handed, with the regularity of a habit, to two types of visitors who annoyed him: those persons who volubly admired the professional detective; and that other class who assured him that the inspired amateur, as, for example, some local prosecutor in a criminal case, could outwit the acutest counselors of darkness.

I include the two stories in their instructive order.

The State had completed its case.

The conviction of the prisoners seemed beyond question.

Incident by incident, the expert detective, Barkman, had coupled up the circumstantial evidence until it seemed to link the prisoners inevitably to the crime. He was a big man, with eyes blue like a piece of crockery, a wide face and a cruel, irregular jaw. One felt that no sentiment restrained him; that he would carry out any under taking to its desperate end.

He sat now in the witness chair. He was the last witness for the State, and, now that the case was complete, he had been turned over for cross-examination.

It was afternoon. A sheet of sunlight entering through open windows lay on the court room. It was a court room of a little city in the South; a city but newly awakened to industrial activities, and the conduct of its administration of justice still adhered to older and more deliberate forms.

The court room was crowded with people down to the very railing that separated the attorneys’ tables from the crowd.

The judge, a tall man, with a long, mild, unhealthy face, sat on the bench. To the right of him and a step below was the clerk. The jury were in chairs along the wall to the left of the bench. And between the bench and jurors sat the witness.

The prosecuting attorney was before his table, a little to the right of the first step to the bench. There were law books on his table, and two polka-dot handkerchiefs lying loosely on some papers. The man was no longer concerned with these articles. He sat back from the table, his fingers linked together, his face lifted as in some reflection.

Farther to the right, in two chairs against the railing, were the prisoners. One, a big old man with a splotched, dissipated face and his hair cropped close to his skull. Folds of fat lay along the base of his neck, partly concealed by a white silk handkerchief held in place under his chin by a long old-fashioned garnet pin. His companion was a little, thin, fox-faced man who moved nervously in his chair.

The most striking figure in the court room was the attorney for the prisoners.

He sat between them, a chair’s width in advance, before his table. There was nothing whatever on this table except an ink pot, two pens and a big blotting sheet. There was also a thick pad of foolscap paper provided for the convenience of the attorney in taking any note of the testimony, but there was no word written on it.

The lawyer was a huge bulk of a man. He sat relaxed in his chair. His thick, black hair was brushed smoothly. It was of an oily, glossy blackness. His big, thick features were putty-colored, as though the man’s skin had no vitality. His eyes were very nearly closed; his mouth sagged open, the thick lips holding a cigar that was not lighted.

Every detail of his dress was immaculate and arranged with extreme care.

The man was perhaps sixty, but, in the big relaxed body and heavy face, age was indefinite. He now took the cigar out of his mouth and laid it down on the table. He moved like one coming out of a dream.

He had not immediately taken charge of the witness when the prosecutor had released him for examination. But now, finally, at the judge’s words, “Proceed, Colonel,” he at last looked up.

“You are an expert detective, Mr. Barkman.”

The voice had a strange dwindling whine as though it came from some cavernous depth in the man’s immense body.

The witness looked about with a vague smile. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I have had some experience.”

“You have had a great deal of experience. You were Chief of Police, then you set up a detective agency. You have had a lot of experience in criminal investigation. And you have usually been right.”

This was generous treatment when the reverse was indicated.

The detective was not conspicuous for the confidence of the community in a profession too often subject to cloud. His employment in the bank affairs had followed from his intimate association with Halloway, an association, as all knew, resulting from the handling of a questionable matter in the banker’s private life.

The bank did not require a retained detective.

Was this man’s sinecure gratitude in the banker, or a sort of blackmail? Here was material with which a reflection on the witness could have been assembled. But the attorney chose rather to admit the man’s superior mental acumen in criminal affairs.

The witness moved in his chair. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I try to be right.”

“And you have nearly always been right,” continued the attorney. “In the Deal case you maintained that the decedent had not been killed by a bullet fired from a cellar grating at a hundred yards along the street east of the man’s window, and it was afterward shown that the trajectory of a bullet fired from that point would have crashed into an electric light midway of the distance. And in the Littlewood case, you said the evidences of a struggle were manufactured, because the slant of wood fibers in the broken window sash showed that the pressure had been exerted from within the room and not from without.”

The voice ascended into a lighter drawl with a facetious note in it.

“You have had a lot of experience, and you have had a lot of work, but you have not got rich at it. You would like to be rich, wouldn’t you?”

The witness laughed. “I suppose everybody would like to be rich, Colonel.”

The attorney smiled, a big, loose, vacuous sort of smile.

“Old Bill,” he said, “here behind me, and Lyin’ Louie would like to be rich, but they are more likely to be hanged.” He laughed again. “You are not afraid of being hanged, Mr. Barkman?”

Everybody laughed. The eccentricities of this attorney were one of the attractions of the court room. They were good-naturedly overlooked by the officers of the court, who had been associated with the man for a lifetime in an old-fashioned civilization, leisurely and considerate.

The attorney made a gesture as of one putting by a pleasantry of the moment.

“This was a very ingeniously constructed crime?”

The witness was now in an excellent humor. “I’d say it was, Colonel,” he replied. “It was slick enough to fool me.”

“Ah!” The attorney continued. “I had forgotten that. It was your theory in the beginning that the president of the Trader’s Bank, Mr. Halloway, had accomplished the robbery himself, and, afterward, dropped dead in his own house. He lay on the floor, when the body was discovered, by the side of the library table. It was thought that in falling his head had struck the heavy carved foot of the table, causing the injury to the skull that resulted in death. The physicians first called in were inclined to agree with that theory. The immense strain of a criminal adventure might have caused the accident after the man had returned to his house. Emotional cataclysms have been known to bring on attacks of acute indigestion or the rupture of a defective heart.”

“Sure, Colonel,” the witness assented, “that’s what the thing looked like; and I was fooled about it; I admit it. There was no evidence of a struggle in the room. It was only after Doctor North said the man had been killed by a blow, probably with the poker, that I got onto the right track.”

The attorney made a drawling assent.

“Yes,” he said, “that was a bad find.”

His voice went again into a strange laugh.

“It was mighty near a hangin’ find for Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie! You got on better then, Mr. Barkman. You found two polka-dot handkerchiefs that had been stuffed down into a vase in the library, and then you found Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie. Now you are goin’ to hang ’em, I reckon.”

There was a suppressed giggle in the court room. It was not shared by the prisoners.

The big, old man of the close-cropped skull plucked the attorney by the sleeve and spoke in an audible whisper.

“Looka here, Colonel,” he said, “I thought you was defendin’ us.”

The attorney replied, a higher note in his deep drawl.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I am doing. But you’ve got no sense, Bill! You never had any sense. If you had had any sense you would not have been in the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house. There was no reason for you going to the pen-i-ten-tia-ry. Old Lansky tried to make a bank-cracker out of you—I was in the cell with him on the night he was hanged—he said you had no sense. He said you would never make anything but a fence, and a damned poor fence … that’s what he said, Bill.”

He interrupted the long narrative by getting ponderously on his feet. He reached out and took the two handkerchiefs from the table of the prosecuting attorney and laid them down on his own.

Then he addressed the witness.

“Now, Mr. Barkman,” he said, “I’d like you to tell us precisely what you think happened on the night of the twenty-seventh. I want you to reconstruct this crime for us. I want you to show us just how Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie went about this thing.”

The witness moved as though rearranging himself in his chair. He shifted his shoulder a little to one side and he looked around toward the jury.

“Well, Colonel,” he said, “I think I can tell you just exactly what happened.”

He was not expecting to be interrupted. But he was interrupted by a sort of explosive assent.

The big attorney was looking at him, resting his huge body on both hands, on the table. The witness was for a moment disconcerted, then he went on:

“It was like this,” he said, “as I figure it out. Everybody knows that Old Bill was a bank-cracker.”

Again there was a sort of booming interruption.

“He was never a good bank-cracker,” the lawyer exploded; “he was a poor bank-cracker. He was such a damn poor bank-cracker that he got into the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house!”

The witness laughed.

“Anyway, Colonel,” he said, “when Louie drifted in here, the two of them fixed up this game and they carried it out slick.”

Again the lawyer introduced an interruption.

“Now, that is just what I am anxious to know, Mr. Barkman. I am anxious to know precisely what they did and how they did it. I want to know, in detail, everything that happened that night.”

“Well,” replied the witness, “this is the way I figure it out, Colonel, and I think it’s straight dope: these men fixed up their plan and Louie hung around until he found that the bank president was alone in his house. That was the night his family went to the Springs. It was in the newspapers. Everybody knew it. Then about midnight they went up to Mr. Halloway’s house.”

“And how did they get into the house?” inquired the lawyer.

“That was no trouble,” said the witness. “They rang the bell. They wanted Mr. Halloway to come down just as he did come down, with his dressing gown on, like he was found dead in the library.”

The attorney had changed his posture. He was idly fingering the two polka-dot handkerchiefs.

The witness went on:

“When Mr. Halloway opened the door, one of these crooks jammed a pistol against him. They shut the door and marched him into the library. And there they told him what they were going to do. They held him up, right there in the library, and forced him to give them the combination to the bank safe.”

“And how were they to know,” inquired the attorney, “that the combination which the banker gave them was the correct one? Would not his impulse be—would not any one’s impulse be—to give an incorrect combination of figures?”

The witness laughed.

“Old Bill would know the trick,” he said. “They would ask the banker to give the combination. They would write it down as he gave it; then they would wait a little while and ask him again, and if he had made it up, he would not be able to remember. That’s an old trick. It was done in the North Hampton bank robbery, where they burned the cashier’s feet for lying.”

The big attorney swung around toward his clients.

“Did you ever hear of that, Bill?”

“No,” said the prisoner, “I never did.”

Again the attorney laughed that vague, futile laugh.

“I believe you, Bill,” he said, “although nobody else does—I’m paid to believe you.”

He turned back to the witness.

“What happened then?”

The big prisoner with the folded white handkerchief for a cravat was mumbling incoherently.

The attorney paid no attention.

He looked at the witness. “Go on, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did they do next?”

“Well,” said the witness, “when they had got the correct combination written down, they put a gun against Mr. Halloway and made him go over to the telephone. They made him call up the watchman at the bank and tell him just what he has sworn here Mr. Halloway told him that night: that his child was sick and the doctor wanted him to come right home. Mr. Halloway had to say just what they told him to say, because there they stood with a gun against him. They could hear every word he said. The bank watchman asked him what he could do about leaving the bank, and they made Mr. Halloway say to him over the telephone, to go ahead out to his house at once and that he himself would drive over in his car and stay in the bank until the watchman got back; then they hung up the receiver.”

The lawyer put a query:

“How do you suppose they were standing while Mr. Halloway was calling the bank?”

The witness got up.

“Mr. Halloway was of course facing the telephone and the man with the gun was standing behind him with the muzzle jammed against his back. That would be the way they would be standing.”

He was about to sit down, but the lawyer interrupted him:

“Just a minute.”

He turned to the prisoner sitting on his left.

“Louie,” he said, “I want you to go over to Mr. Barkman and show us just how you were holding that pistol against the banker’s back while he was talking over the telephone. We’ll say Mr. Barkman’s the banker.”

Everybody in the court room was astonished at this slip of the attorney.

It would appear that he, like every one else, was convinced of the guilt of the prisoners, and that this conviction had thus unconsciously appeared in his words.

The man seemed not to realize what he had said. But the prisoner saw it at once.

“Colonel,” he objected, “how can I show him how it was done when I didn’t do it?”

The attorney made an exasperated gesture.

“Oh, Louie,” he said, “you are such a liar that nobody believes anything you say. Do what I tell you.”

Then he stooped over the prisoner.

“Just a moment, Judge,” he explained; “I have got to encourage my client.”

He whispered something in the man’s ear.

The prisoner rose and went over to the witness; he took him by the shoulders and turned him around toward the judge, so that his back was to the jury. He moved him until he got him in precisely the position which he wished and then he thrust his long forefinger in the man’s back, with the other fingers doubled up.

“How’s that, Colonel?” he said.

“Well,” said the attorney, “what do you think about it, Louie? Do you think it’s O.K.?”

“Sure,” said the prisoner.

Then he came back and sat down in the chair.

The whole court room was amused and astonished. It was as good as a theater.

The attorney returned to his examination of the witness.

“Proceed, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did they do next? Did they make Mr. Halloway go over to the bank? His car was seen there and he was, himself, seen going in, by some persons passing at the end of the street. He was alone. How did they make him go over there alone, accomplish the robbery, and come back to his house?”

Again the witness smiled shrewdly.

“They didn’t make him do it,” he said. “Old Bill there, he’s about the size of Mr. Halloway.”

He turned about to the jurors.

“Mr. Halloway was a man, as you all know, about as big as I am. Old Bill put on the banker’s hat and his long light overcoat. The runabout stood under the porte-cochère outside. He went out, got in this car and drove it over to the bank. He had the banker’s key to the door and he had the combination to the safe, so he went in, opened the safe, picked out the money and brought it back with him.”

The attorney suddenly interrupted.

“Now, there,” he said, “right there. Why did they take only big bills and not smaller currency? There were twenty thousand dollars taken in big bills—five-hundred and one-thousand-dollar bills. Why did they take that and not the smaller currency?”

“I can explain that,” said the witness. “You see they had to hide this money after they got it—they had to look out for that; they might have to move pretty quickly. They could not trust anybody to keep it for them and they were afraid to conceal it, so they would have to carry it around with them. That’s the reason they took big bills.”

“Ah,” said the attorney, “I understand it now. It puzzled me a lot. I could not see what they meant by taking big bills and leaving the rest of the money; but it’s clear now.”

He swung suddenly around to the prisoners. “Louie,” he said, “you never told me that.”

The creature grinned, his face broken into a queer extended smile.

But the big prisoner to the right showed evidence of no such conciliatory mood.

He got up.

“Judge,” he said, “we’re bein’ double crossed. I paid the Colonel, here, a hundred dollars in honest money to defend us, and just look what he’s doin’ to us.”

Everybody laughed.

The lawyer turned about and spoke to the man as he might have spoken to an impertinent child.

“Sit down, Bill,” he said. “Louie knows that I am making a proper defense, don’t you, Louie?”

The little fox-faced man continued to grin. But he said nothing.

“Now, Bill,” the lawyer went on gently as to a child, “Louie’s got some sense; not much. He learned how to open registered envelopes, when he started in to be a mail clerk, by watching the post-office inspectors rolling a pen handle under the flap; and he learned to feel for money in the envelope before he opened it. The post-office inspectors taught him that. Louie had sense enough to learn it. He learned it well. He can tell the feel of a bill through the thickest envelope that was ever mailed. But you are a fool, Bill; Lansky told me that. Nobody but a fool, after he robbed the Norristown bank, would have hidden the money in the loft of an abandoned schoolhouse, with a trail of cinders leading from the window up to the trap in the ceiling. Anybody but a fool would have wiped his feet off before he climbed in the window.”

The whole court room was convulsed with laughter; even the judge smiled.

Nothing could have been more of the essence of comedy than these passages between the attorney and his client.

The big lawyer turned again to the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,” he said, “what did they do when Bill got back with the money?”

“They finished the job,” replied the witness.

“Well,” said the attorney, “what did they do?”

“It is clear what they did,” replied the detective; “they killed Mr. Halloway with the fire poker, then they hid the two handkerchiefs they had over their faces when they came in, and then they got out of town.”

The witness sat back in his chair as though he had finished with his testimony.

The big attorney stood up. The whole aspect of the man, as by the snap of a switch, had undergone a transformation. The huge bulk of him was vital. His heavy slack face was firm.

“Mr. Barkman,” he said, “why did the men who killed Hiram Halloway wear no masks on their faces?”

“They did wear masks on their faces—they’re on the table before you.”

The lawyer did not look down at the articles before him. His voice was now hard and accurate like the point of a steel tool.

“Take it as a hypothetical question then. Suppose they wore no masks. What would that fact indicate?”

The attorney for the State rose.

“I object,” he said. “There must be evidence in the case tending to support the assumed facts in a hypothetical question.”

“The evidence shall be presently indicated,” replied the lawyer.

The judge passed on the objection at once.

“The Colonel promises to point out the evidence later. He may go on; the witness has been introduced as an expert.”

The lawyer again faced the man in the chair. He repeated his question.

The witness seemed doubtful.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know! Reflect, Mr. Barkman. Would it not mean that the person or persons who accomplished this criminal act felt that they were so well known to Hiram Halloway that no ordinary disguise could conceal their identity?”

The witness did not immediately reply, and the lawyer went on:

“And is not this the reason why Hiram Halloway was killed?”

“Why he was killed!” repeated the man in the chair.

“Yes, precisely the reason. One must credit even a common thief with some intelligence. No one uselessly adds the crime of murder to a lesser crime. Masked assassins wholly unknown to the decedent would have gagged and bound him. It would have answered their purpose as well. But not the purpose of a known, unmasked assassin. Safety for him lay only in the banker’s death.”

The attorney added:

“That death was so unavoidably necessary—to cover the identity of the assassin—that the evidences of an accidental death were arranged with elaborate care. Is it not true?”

The witness had been twisting his feet about; his face uncertain. Now it took on a dogged look.

“It’s true that the thing was a slick job.”

The attorney took one step toward the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,” he said, “can you tell me why assassins who had so carefully staged this tragedy to appear accidental should leave behind them two handkerchiefs, with eye-holes cut in them, thrust carelessly into a vase on a table? They might be found, and that discovery would, at once, negative the theory of accidental death.”

“They wanted to get rid of the masks.”

“But if they wore no masks? Is it not inconceivable that they would have placed them there to jeopardize all that they had so carefully planned?”

The witness was watching the attorney, the dogged look deepening in his face.

“If they didn’t wear masks, of course they wouldn’t have put them there—it would have been a fool thing.”

The attorney moved out closer to the witness. The point, as one might say, of his voice seemed to sharpen.

“Now, Mr. Barkman, if these masks were not put into the vase on the table by the assassins, then they were put there by somebody else; and if they were not put there on the night of the robbery, they were put there later; and if they were put there by some one later, it was one who had access to the house later; and if they were put there by one having access to the house after it was established the banker did not die from a natural cause, then they were put there to deceive.”

He paused, and his final sentence descended like a hammer:

“And the deception in presenting false evidence of two men would consist in the fact that but one man had, in fact, accomplished the crime.”

The prosecuting attorney was on his feet.

“Your honor,” he said, “this is all built up on the theory that the assassins did not wear masks. There is no evidence to support such a theory. The handkerchiefs that the assassins took off of their faces and hid in the vase are here in the case for everybody to see.”

The attorney for the prisoners put out his hand and took up the two polka-dot handkerchiefs which were lying on the table before him.

“It is the cleverest criminal,” he said, “who always makes the most striking blunder. The accomplished assassin of Lord William Russell carried away the knife with which his victim was supposed to have cut his own throat. When the human intelligence, set on murder, undertakes to falsify the order of events, the absurdity of its error increases with its cunning.”

He shook the two handkerchiefs out and stretched them in his fingers.

“They are here for everybody to see,” he echoed, “and if everybody will look, he will see that these two handkerchiefs were never tied around the faces of assassins; he will see—everybody—that, while these handkerchiefs have eye holes cut in them, the corners of them are as smooth and uncreased as though they had been ironed; if they had been tied around the faces of assassins, they would show the strain and the fold of the knot!”

He turned now toward the judge.

“Your Honor,” he said, “the elaborate ingenuity of this whole criminal plan is utterly beyond the feeble intelligence of these prisoners. It is the work of some competent person; some person well known to the decedent; some person who knew a disguise to be useless; some one who had access to the house and was able to set up the evidence of a second theory after the first had failed—such an one was the assassin of Hiram Halloway.”

There was absolute silence in the court room. The witness sat gripping the arms of his chair, his face distended as with some physical pressure.

The big. attorney, at the end of his significant pause, added a final sentence:

“And now, that we have found the money, we can name the man!”

The prosecuting attorney, utterly astonished, put the question, the answer to which the whole court room awaited:

“Found the money! Where?”

The big lawyer sat down in his chair; his huge body relaxed; his face assumed its vague placidity and his voice descended into its old, deep-seated, dwindling whine:

“It’s sewed up in the lining of Mr. Barkman’s coat. Lyin’ Louie felt it when he posed him for the jury.”