Free The Dishonest Murderer by Frances Lockridge Page B

man had been eating well, for a bum from the Bowery. Then the doctor had noticed the man’s hands, looked at them more closely and let out his puzzlement in a statement that he would be damned.
    â€œHe’d had a manicure,” Weigand said. “Probably yesterday.”
    It was enough to start things moving. Once they began to look, almost nothing fitted the obvious picture. Even the clothes, which at first seemed part of the picture, did not really fit in.
    The overcoat was worn, but had been recently cleaned. It did not fit the man; he had picked it up, presumably, in a second-hand clothing store. He had, at a guess, worn it only a day or so, if even for a day or so.
    The suit under the overcoat was even more at variance with the picture. It was a very cheap suit, it fitted very badly. But it appeared to be almost new. But, although almost new, it was noticeably, almost flagrantly, unpressed. It almost seemed, the medical examiner’s laboratory reported, that someone had deliberately stretched the shoddy material out of shape, pulling it, crumpling it, possibly using an iron on it to remove the original creases. Both cuffs of the trousers were frayed, although most of the suit showed no signs of wear. Somebody could have frayed the material with a file, even scraped at it with a knife. “Phoney,” a lab man said, briefly, unofficially.
    The shoes were worn and scuffed—and were too large for the feet. But the socks were silk, and new. The underwear was of medium weight wool and had cost money. It had been washed several times, but there were no laundry marks. The shirt had been worn a long time, washed often and it, too, had no laundry marks. But it fitted perfectly, as if it had been made for the wearer.
    The body was that of a large man, weighing a little over two hundred pounds; the man had been an inch over six feet tall; he had eaten well, taken care of himself, once might have been an athlete. When he slumped down in the doorway of the cheap restaurant and began to die, he had been in his middle forties.
    It was strange; it required looking into. Appearances apparently had been created which were at variance with facts. So the police machine started; a report of suspicious death went to the Homicide Squad; fingerprints, measurements and description went to the Missing Persons Bureau. A coded description of the fingerprints went on the wires to various cities, including Washington. A check of the prints was made in the department’s own records.
    An autopsy was begun at once. There were no injuries discernible. The man had been drinking before he died; he had eaten some hours before. And he had died, not of exposure, but of an overdose of chloral hydrate.
    â€œKnockout drops,” Weigand said. “Very tricky stuff. They use it sometimes to put a man out while they rob him. It’s too uncertain to be used often in homicides; I don’t know that I remember a case. But—if a man has a weak heart, even a normal dose may kill him.”
    â€œThat happened this time?” Jerry said.
    Bill Weigand nodded. He said the doctors thought so. The heart was impaired. Not seriously; with normal care, the man need not have died of the impairment. He would merely have had to be careful.
    â€œOf course,” Bill said, “on a night like this, there was a good chance he’d die anyway. If you could get him out of doors, follow him, maybe, to see that he didn’t find shelter—he’d have been dazed and sleepy within a short time; probably out within half an hour—the cold would finish your job for you.”
    A preliminary report of the post mortem was ready by a little after one o’clock that morning. “Three and a half hours ago,” Jerry said, rather morosely, looking at his watch. Bill said he knew; said that he wouldn’t be long. At almost the same time, identification had come through from Washington.
    The man about whom PD, NY was enquiring