“What do you want?” Hacken asked.
“I want the low-down on the Main doings—if any.”
“You going to work on it?”
“Yes,” I said, “for Main’s boss—Gungen.”
“Then you can tell us something. Why’d he have the twenty thou in cash?”
“Tell you in the morning,” I promised. “I haven’t seen Gungen yet. Got a date with him tonight.”
While we talked we had gone into the assembly room, with its schoolroom arrangement of desks and benches. Half a dozen police detectives were scattered among them, doing reports. We three sat around Hacken’s desk and the lanky detective-sergeant talked:
“Main got home from Los Angeles at eight, Sunday night, with twenty thousand in his wallet. He’d gone down there to sell something for Gungen. You find out why he had that much in cash. He told his wife he had driven up from L.A. with a friend—no name. She went to bed around ten-thirty, leaving him reading. He had the money—two hundred hundred-dollar bills—in a brown wallet.
“So far, so good. He’s in the living-room reading. She’s in the bedroom sleeping. Just the two of them in the apartment. A racket wakes her. She jumps out of bed, runs into the living-room. There’s Main wrestling with a couple of men. One’s tall and husky. The other’s little—kind of girlish built. Both have got black handkerchiefs over their mugs and caps pulled down.
“When Mrs. Main shows, the little one breaks away from Main and sticks her up. Puts a gun in Mrs. Main’s face and tells her to behave. Main and the other guy are still scuffling. Main has got his gun in his hand, but the thug has him by the wrist, trying to twist it. He makes it pretty soon—Main drops the rod. The thug flashes his own, holding Main off while he bends down to pick up the one that fell.
“When the man stoops, Main piles on him. He manages to knock the fellow’s gun out of his hand, but by that time the fellow had got the one on the floor—the one Main had dropped. They’re heaped up there for a couple of seconds. Mrs. Main can’t see what’s happening. Then bang! Main’s falling away, his vest burning where the shot had set fire to it, a bullet in his heart, his gun smoking in the masked guy’s fist. Mrs. Main passes out.
“When she comes to there’s nobody in the apartment but herself and her dead husband. His wallet’s gone, and so is his gun. She was unconscious for about half an hour. We know that, because other people heard the shot and could give us the time—even if they didn’t know where it come from.
“The Mains’ apartment is on the sixth floor. It’s an eight-story building. Next door to it, on the corner of Eighteenth Avenue, is a two-story building—grocery downstairs, grocer’s flat upstairs. Behind these buildings runs a narrow back street—an alley. All right.
“Kinney—the patrolman on that beat—was walking down Eighteenth Avenue. He heard the shot. It was clear to him, because the Mains’ apartment is on that side of the building—the side overlooking the grocer’s—but Kinney couldn’t place it right away. He wasted time scouting around up the street. By the time he got down as far as the alley in his hunting, the birds had flown. Kinney found signs of ’em though—they had dropped a gun in the alley—the gun they’d taken from Main and shot him with. But Kinney didn’t see ’em—didn’t see anybody who might have been them.
“Now, from a hall window of the apartment house’s third floor to the roof of the grocer’s building is easy going. Anybody but a cripple could make it—in or out—and the window’s never locked. From the grocer’s roof to the back street is almost as easy. There’s a cast iron pipe, a deep window, a door with heavy hinges sticking out—a regular ladder up and down that back wall. Begg and I did it without working up a sweat. The pair could have gone in that way. We know they left that way. On the grocer’s roof we found Main’s wallet—empty, of course—and a handkerchief. The wallet had metal corners. The handkerchief had caught on one of ’em, and went with it when the crooks tossed it away.”
“Main’s handkerchief?”
“A woman’s—with an E in one corner.”
“Mrs. Main’s?”
“Her name is Agnes,” Hacken said. “We showed her the wallet, the gun, and the handkerchief. She identified the first two as her husband’s, but the handkerchief was a new one on her. However, she could give us the name of the perfume on it—Dèsir du Cœur. And—with it for a guide—she said the smaller of the masked pair could have been a woman. She had already described him as kind of girlish built.”
“Any fingerprints, or the like?” I asked.
“No. Phels went over the apartment, the window, the roof, the wallet and the gun. Not a smear.”
“Mrs. Main identify ’em?”
“She says she’d know the little one. Maybe she would.”
“Got anything on the who?”
“Not yet,” the lanky detective-sergeant said as we moved toward the door.
In the street I left the police sleuths and set out for Bruno Gungen’s home in Westwood Park.
The dealer in rare and antique jewelry was a little bit of a man and a fancy one. His dinner jacket was corset-tight around his waist, padded high and sharp at the shoulders. Hair, mustache and spade-shaped goatee were dyed black and greased until they were as shiny as his pointed pink fingernails. I wouldn’t bet a cent that the color in his fifty-year-old cheeks wasn’t rouge.
He came out of the depths of a leather library chair to give me a soft, warm hand that was no larger than a child’s, bowing and smiling at me with his head tilted to one side.
Then he introduced me to his wife, who bowed without getting up from her seat at the table. Apparently she was a little more than a third of his age.
