Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

Orrin had been looking about him with interest, speculating on the identity of the several actors and studying the setting. The room was half library and half office, sumptuously furnished, with a door — that by which they had entered — leading into the garage, and another, a double one, connecting perhaps with the main hall giving on the porte-cochère. Across this latter door stood a camp cot with a pillow and some tumbled blankets.

Captain O’Down glared at Orrin, biting at one corner of his ragged white mustache as though about to burst into a torrent of words. He growled at the stenographer, “Get me the caretaker.”

The stenographer went to the door and called out into the garage, “Send in Mike Laffy.”

In a moment the fellow stood impudently before the desk and the captain began with withering scorn: “Mike, you’re not only a liar but a dumb-bell! You can’t remember your story long enough to tell it twice alike. How long have you been caretaker here?”

“About six weeks — since the 1st of November,” answered Mike readily.

“Whose house is this?”

“Squires’, or Squares’, or something; I don’t know.”

“Huh! You don’t know! You’re a bird of a caretaker.”

“It belongs to a rich young fella that lives in Europe and spends his time with dukes and earls and shooting pheasants. I ain’t a caretaker, anyhow; I’m a kinda watchman. I don’t know nothing about the house.

“I was hired by the agents, Judson Brothers, and all I have to do is sleep here every night — something about insurance and not being occupied. They gimme the keys to the garage, and a part of the basement, and this room; that’s my bed over there.”

The captain’s ill temper increased. He was not succeeding in shaking the man’s nerve as he had expected, and he was evidently a poor loser.

“Sure it’s your bed. And you was sound asleep and didn’t hear a word of this jamboree.”

“I wasn’t asleep — I wasn’t here at all. I got here a little late this evening, and when I was coming up the drive all of a sudden this here truck come tearing down and nearly run over me, and there was a lot of shooting and yelling and when I ran in to see what it was all about the bulls grabbed me, There ain’t any other story because that’s what happened.”

“Ya-a-a!” Captain O’Down’s scorn redoubled. “But we’ve got your pal and he don’t tell the same story at all.” The captain pointed dramatically at Orrin.

Mike spun around with blanched face, but after one look he leered cunningly and retorted, “Cap, I never saw this guy before.”

The captain’s red face darkened to purple.

“Get out of here!” he roared. “Get out! Take him away, and send in Swarts — on the jump! Now, you,” whirling on Orrin with a great show of ferocity, “come here and sit down in that chair where I can see you.”

Orrin sat as directed, an electric lantern shining painfully in his eyes, his hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets. “This will be the genuine third degree,” he said to himself.

“It’s your turn; speak your piece,” the captain barked as Swarts came in with alacrity.

The detective recounted tersely the circumstances of the raid and his subsequent investigations.

Acting on information which had come to the department that a valuable truckload of bootleg was being dispersed from the old place on the corner of Ten Eyck Avenue and Boswell Street, and under instructions issued directly from the prosecutor’s office, he had arrived in company with three other men in plain clothes from headquarters and six uniformed officers from the Ten Eyck Street station just after dark.

They had approached the house quietly through the trees, and had found a truck standing in the garage, with engine running, but before they had even begun to examine its cargo had been startled by cries and the sound of a scuffle in the basement of the house.

As they turned in the direction of the disturbance, somebody in the truck whose presence they had not suspected sent it down the drive into the street at a speed that made pursuit on foot hopeless.

Inside the basement they had found no one but an unidentified dead man in a chauffeur’s uniform. There was conflicting opinion about the number of persons in the house at the moment the police rushed the entrance of the basement; it was even said that a woman’s voice had been heard, screaming, “But you will not hurry!” or perhaps, “But you are not sorry!”

The only captures were Mike Laffy, caretaker, and Gus Ginsberg, well-known character — outside, not inside the house — both of whom claimed to have arrived at the moment. The officers pursuing the truck had found it abandoned two blocks up the street.

He, Swarts, had discovered on the garage floor a hat with the name “Orrin Quire” on the sweatband, and after some gumshoe work, whose ingenuity he emphasized, had located his man at the home of Judge Van Dyl. The prisoner, so far had refused to tell the story of the killing or reveal the motive or the identity of the victim.