Murder of a Missing Man

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

MURDER OF A MISSING MAN

By

ARTHUR M. CHASE

Murder of a Missing Man was originally published in 1934 as a Red Badge Book by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Publisher’s Note 6

PART I — Cause 7

I. MURDER NUMBER ONE 7

II. BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE ME A DIME? 11

PART II — Effect 17

I. MISS TOWNSEND’S INSOMNIA 17

II. TRAGEDY ON A PULLMAN 21

III. —AND ROBBERY 27

IV. A HOLLYWOOD STAR SHUNS PUBLICITY 32

V. MISSING PERSON 36

VI. UNWANTED PAJAMAS 40

VII. OFF THE TRACK 46

VIII. FILLING IN THE PICTURE 53

IX. CALL FOR THE POLICE 58

X. A SCREEN ACTRESS IS UNSCREENED 67

XI. CALL FOR MR. LELAND 76

XII. FITTING THE PUZZLE TOGETHER 84

XIII. MISS LE GRAND RECONSIDERS 90

XIV. PLIGHT OF A BLACKMAILER 95

XV. GOLDSTEIN CHASES A THIEF 102

XVI. A TRAPPED WOLF 107

XVII. WHO KILLED THE PASSENGER IN THE PULLMAN? 113

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 122

DEDICATION

To KITTY and TED

Publisher’s Note

The Dodd, Mead imprint has long been a pretty good hallmark in detective and mystery stories. When you see one with that publisher’s name on the back, you can usually depend on it. Somewhere in the editorial offices of that firm is some hard-faced Legree who understands the rather exacting requirements. —Saturday Review of Literature.

Each year thousands of detective-story manuscripts are submitted to American publishers. Only by the most careful selection can a standard such as Dodd, Mead has set be maintained. Now in order to aid the reader in choosing a mystery of whose merit he may be certain in advance, the hard-faced editors are placing a red badge on those detective stories which they are willing to recommend unreservedly to the most discriminating reader.

PART I — Cause

I. MURDER NUMBER ONE

From the moment Barclay Leland entered his brother’s apartment, he knew that something was going to happen. It was an idea which, swooping into his mind apparently from nowhere, beset, haunted and obsessed him.

God, how he hated this brother of his! How, all his life, from the days when they were boys together, he had suffered through him, had feared him, and, behind the mask with which he had concealed his suffering and his fear, had hated him.

Pierre, big, dark, hairy, beetle-browed, sprawled in an easy chair idly drinking. Pierre drank morning, noon and night, yet he was never drunk. Barclay, ill at ease, sat facing him, and listened to the jarring, jeering voice that had the power to sting him like the flick of a whip. Watched, too, the heavy jaws and chin that were always blue-black, no matter how clean-shaven, and the eyes that were cold and unwinking like a snake’s.

As Pierre lazily flicked the ashes from a cigarette, a gleam of lamplight fell on the rings of his left hand. What sardonic caprice, Barclay wondered, impelled him to wear two heavy gold wedding rings, souvenirs of two wives, one dead, one divorced, both jeered at and browbeaten and bullied out of matrimony with Pierre. One of them, the girl who had died, had been Barclay’s playmate when they were children. There had never been an engagement, but an understanding began to establish itself. Then came Pierre, overbearing, tempestuous, who pushed his brother out of his path and carried off the prize. And Barclay had endured the misery of seeing her eyes gradually opened, and her realization of the mistake she had made. Sometimes he would wake up at night thinking of Pierre and her until red flashes would shoot before his eyes. It was of this first wife they were speaking.

As I’ve been saying, Pierre rumbled, I’m broke; flat, stony broke. Like all the world I’ve got on the wrong side of the market, and this time I’m in for a smash. Brokers will sell me out, what I’ve got left, in the morning; so I’ve got to have some cash, my dear brother.

Yes, said Barclay, wetting his lips.

Not a lot, but a sizable amount, Pierre continued heavily. Sixty thousand will keep me going.

Well, said Barclay uneasily, can you get it?

Pierre poured himself a drink, drained it, and paused.

I can, he said at last, from you.

Barclay shook his head. You know, he protested, I haven’t got that much—available.

Pierre fixed him with a cold stare.

I know you have, he said shortly. When my first wife died, Marie of always lamented memory, a very peculiar thing came to light. In her will she left to her dear friend and brother-in-law—that’s you—something over a hundred thousand dollars in gilt-edged bonds. Well, the joke was on me, for you got the best part of her little estate. I’ve never complained though, never even mentioned it. But now that I’m in trouble, I think under the circumstances, a request for help from brother to brother is not unreasonable.

Barclay shook his head. Not that money, he muttered.

I know you’ve got it, said Pierre mockingly. You’re a modest, saving soul. Even allowing for depreciation the stuff’s worth a good sixty thousand.

Again Barclay shook his head. Then there came into Pierre’s face an expression Barclay remembered from the time they were boys and his brother was preparing to twist his arm until he cried.

I’ve always felt, said Pierre, with a mocking smile, that Marie’s peculiar preference for you, in her will, put me somewhat in the role of the injured husband. To what extent I was injured—well, about that I’ve kept my mouth shut.

Be careful what you say, cried Barclay suddenly. Don’t you throw any slurs on her memory.

People know you were sweeties before I married her. As to what you were afterward—

Don’t go on, exclaimed Barclay, his lips twitching. There was a hammering in his temples, and those flashes began to dart before his eyes.

Of course I’ll go on, replied Pierre with a sneer. I’ve got to have money. What’s a dead woman’s reputation to me! You come across, or I’ll spread stories that will tumble your white idol off her perch.

Suddenly Barclay felt welling up from his very inmost roots an impulse that swept aside all fears, inhibitions and restraint like straws in a flood.

The impact of those hours at night when he had raged or cried over Marie struck him like an electric shock. With one leap he was on his feet and towering over his brother. And in the flash while their eyes met, he saw in Pierre’s eyes something he had never seen there before—fear. and walking down the corridor to Pierre’s rooms without meeting a soul. He rarely came to this place; perhaps no one had noticed him, or would remember just one stranger where hundreds were going to and fro.

He felt driven to get away, secretly and at once. But first, what possible precautions could he take to conceal any traces of his presence in this room? Prompted by some hazy ideas gathered from detective stories, he put on a pair of gloves, and walked about on tiptoe, trying to identify the things he might have touched during the course of the evening. Cigarette butts he threw into the open fire. The glass from which he had drunk, he washed, and then, with a vague notion that he was obliterating his finger-prints, rubbed it with vaseline. And wherever he thought his fingers might have rested, he applied vaseline. The playing cards he pocketed. The candlestick he wrapped in paper, to be carried away with him.

Then, with the hope of still further throwing the police off the scent, he tried to leave evidence that the motive for the murder had been robbery. "With this idea in mind he ransacked Pierre’s closets, his bureau, his desk, tumbling things about, and scattering clothing and papers on the floor. In a drawer of the desk he discovered a leather wallet stuffed with bills—tens, twenties and a few fifties. This he slipped into his pocket with the hasty thought that perhaps he was Pierre’s heir anyway, or if not, that robbery was a lesser crime than murder.

At last he was ready to leave, and putting on his overcoat and hat, picking up his stick, and hiding the candlestick under his coat, he took one last frightened glance around—a glance, however, which avoided that supine figure in the center of the room. Then he opened the door, peered out, slipped through the doorway, and closed the door noiselessly behind him. Down the long, empty, brightly lighted corridor, which reminded him somehow of a ship’s passage-way, he stole on tiptoe, his heart in his mouth for fear that one of the doors he was passing might open suddenly, or that he might encounter a night watchman on his rounds.

From the fourteenth floor, one hundred and fifty feet above the ground, how should he reach the street undetected? Certainly not by the elevator, where any passenger at this hour would be marked; but by the stairs which, inside fireproof walls, led downward. Breathlessly, noiselessly, turning, peering, listening, he descended twenty-four half-flights. Then his heart sank when he found his way barred by a gate. But it was there to prevent people from coming up, not to keep them from going down. The catch slipped back; he passed through the barrier, and went on to the ground floor.

At last the lobby—now for it. But there was no one about except a clerk, with his back turned, at the hotel desk toward the far end of the room. Trying to walk and not to rim, Barclay crossed to the revolving door, pushed through, and felt the air of out of doors as if it were a cool hand laid on his forehead.

In the gray light of early dawn he hurried along through streets which, empty of the movement and noise of crowded traffic to which he was accustomed, looked unfamiliar, strangely wide and tremendously long. Sometimes a lone taxicab whirred past, or a milk cart came clop-clopping by. When an occasional policeman sauntered toward him, Barclay felt his heart race with sickening speed.

Without knowing what route he had followed, and with no definite goal in sight, he came at last to Central Park. He entered one of the winding paths, and soon the breathless haste and choking terror that had been driving him on abated in some measure. It was peaceful here, under the trees; it was quiet; and he felt remote and away from people. That was what he wanted most, to get away from people. Along the drives traffic lights changed from red to green and from green to red with ghostly precision, as if troops of phantom, invisible cars were stopping or speeding along the empty roads. Not a footfall sounded on the walks. The Park was so quiet, the noises of the city were so hushed that he could hear the puffing of a locomotive away across the river in New Jersey.

Crossing a rustic bridge he paused, glanced warily around, and dropped the candlestick into the dark water below. Then on he went, until at last he came to a rocky mound where he sat down, and drew breath. The sky to the East steadily brightened, and against the light the silhouettes of buildings stood out flat as if cut from cardboard. To the westward the long line of gigantic apartment houses, with turrets, towers, pinnacles and peaks like a fantastic architectural dream, grew clearer and brighter, until at last windows here and there began to sparkle like molten gold, and it was day.

II. BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE ME A DIME?

A few hours later Barclay Leland was sitting under a wide-spreading arbor which was covered partly by the branches and leaves of an enormous grapevine, and partly by an old and equally enormous wistaria. Far above appeared the sky, cloudless, immeasurably distant, incredibly blue. Warm sunshine streamed through the leafy roof, dappling benches and the floor of the arbor, and quivering on half a dozen recumbent figures near him. Sprawled on their backs, huddled on their sides, in shabby, faded overcoats and clumsy, worn-out shoes, they slept away the idle hours like the wild animals in the menagerie not far away.

While his thoughts were focused most of the time on himself and his plight, Barclay was occasionally aware of his surroundings, and now and then cast a glance at the recumbent figures. It must be terrible, he thought, to be without food or shelter, and above all without money in the midst of a city where something to eat, to wear, a shelter at night are denied to those who possess no money. But worse than hunger and cold for these unemployed, now become the discarded rubbish of a civilization that not so long ago boasted of them and the millions of workers like them, must be the endless, weary hours with nothing to do. Walking one dreary mile after another with no goal in view; standing idly