The Case of the Missing Corpse Read online

  THE CASE OF THE

  MISSING

  CORPSE

  BY JOAN SANGER

  M. EVANS

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  M. Evans

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

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  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1936 by Lee Furman, Inc.

  First Rowman & Littlefield paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including infonnation storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59077-481-6 (pbk: alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To

  BERT

  MY BEST OLD “PARTNER IN CRIME”

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: NEW YORK

  I.

  EXIT—A SPORTSMAN

  II.

  AN ECCENTRIC OLD LADY TALKS

  III.

  THE OFFICIAL REPORT IS ALTERED.

  IV.

  “THE DEAD MAN’S CHEST”

  V.

  A CURIOUS WITNESS

  VI.

  A NOTE OF WARNING

  VII.

  THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 13TH

  VIII.

  A PACT IS SEALED

  IX.

  THE CHECK-UP

  X.

  AN IRATE CALLER

  PART TWO: HAVANA

  XI.

  “X MARKS THE SPOT”

  XII.

  MIGUEL DOES SOME TALKING

  XIII.

  “STRANGE INTERLUDE”

  XIV.

  LOLITA CAROS

  XV.

  AN UNEXPECTED VISIT

  XVI.

  THE MAN IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

  XVII.

  AN IMPORTANT BIT OF EVIDENCE

  XVIII.

  THEORY, PLUS A FEW STRANGE FACTS

  XIX.

  THE FIRST ARREST

  XX.

  A VERY IRATE YOUNG MAN

  XXI.

  THE LADY IN THE CASE

  XXII.

  A VERY UNUSUAL APPOINTMENT

  XXIII.

  A SHOT IN THE NIGHT

  PART THREE: POINTS UNKNOWN

  XXIV.

  THE ROUND-UP

  XXV.

  THE CHARGE

  XXVI.

  GUILTY?

  XXVII.

  THE REAL BLOW

  XXVIII.

  EXIT—A SLEUTH

  XXIX.

  AN OVERDUE EXPLANATION

  PART ONENew York

  Chapter I EXIT—A SPORTSMAN!

  DISTINCT in the recollection of every reader of New York dailies is the sensation caused early last Winter by the disappearance of Stephen P. Wyndham, internationally known sportsman and last in line of one of the oldest and wealthiest of Manhattan families.

  Of course, you recall the case. For days, every newspaper ran columns on the Wyndham mystery, conspicuously spreading the latest news of his extraordinary disappearance directly on the front page, in the very midst of international dispatches, of news of the then-momentous Supreme Court decisions or the latest outbreaks among gangsters and racketeers.

  The headlines stared at you over your coffee each morning.

  INTERNATIONAL SPORTSMAN MISSING FOR MONTHS

  MILLIONAIRE DISAPPEARS FROM HAVANA HOTEL

  POLICE SUSPECT KIDNAPPING IN WYNDHAM CASE

  CUBAN MYSTERY DEEPENS

  The case deserved the importance given to it. It was arresting! It was challenging! It was as weirdly mysterious as the tropical night during which it had happened. But there it was, an absurd threat to one’s own sense of security—that in this day and age a man of international reputation and established position, seemingly too easy-going for an enemy, an ambition, or even a modern complex, had apparently made his exit and without a clue.

  The public interest in the case was cataclysmic. Every clubroom in New York was rife with gossip.

  “Peculiar thing—this Wyndham disappearance.”

  “Damned queer. My boy used to know him at Yale.”

  “What was he like?”

  “H’m . . . the best of the Wyndhams, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, that doesn’t say so much. Always were a funny lot despite their wealth. But this young Stephen?”

  “Oh, some woman, no doubt. Strange that so long a time has been allowed to elapse without anything being said. . . . It’s nearly ten months since his actual disappearance you know!”

  “Why, I was told that he . . .”

  During those days every strap-hanger in the subway still had his theory. At rush hour, Wyndham enjoyed a sort of retroactive celebrity, never achieved in all the days of his brilliant polo at Meadowbrook, or his yachting glory at Newport.

  “Ten to one the guy wanted to blow out!”

  “G’wan. With all that dough. Naw!”

  “Er . . . my wife was saying at breakfast he may have been taken for ransom, you know.”

  “Perhaps, and done away with later for safety. There’s enough of that sort of thing these days.”

  “Moider, dats wat I says, and we ain’t goin’ ’ter know why.”

  Looking back now on the grim and puzzling array of facts as one by one they came to light, facts that were to lead their mocking trail all the way from a sedate Murray Hill mansion to a lonely, tropical waterfront, facts that were to touch a depth of human treachery, a pitch of human passion, an extreme of human necessity undreamed of, you realize how futile any advance theory of young Wyndham’s disappearance inevitably must have proven.

  However, those first weeks were weeks of optimism. During that time tens of thousands of police circulars, bearing Wyndham’s good-looking, clean-shaven likeness, were broadcast to every headquarters in the United States and every foreign capital as well.

  MISSING SINCE FEBRUARY 13TH

  STEPHEN PRENTISS WYNDHAM

  Born in the United States. Age, 34 years, height 5 feet 11 inches, athletic build; hair, dark brown; complexion, ruddy and considerably tanned; grey-blue eyes, regular teeth, excellent physical and mental condition. Scar on right forearm from recent polo fracture. Last seen at the Hotel Sevilla Biltmore, Havana, Cuba, on the night of February 13th. Communicate with Chief Inspector Police Department, 18th Division (Missing Persons Bureau), New York City. Spring 1-3100.

  The police, to do them justice, made superb efforts in the matter. They raced hither and thither after every available clue. They interviewed each acquaintance who had evolved a hypothesis, each crank who claimed to have information (and there were legions of these!), each chorus girl who dreamed, because of orchids once sent by the young millionaire, that here, at last, lay a chance for publicity.

  For once, at headquarters, they were tireless. They were indefatigable. But after turbulent weeks of excitement, where were they? Except for some superficial information as to the history and habits of the departed, all duly published in the Sunday supplements during that time (God knows I should remember these, having edited no less than three myself!), young Wyndham’s disappearance remained as
baffling and inexplicable as on that memorable December day when Miss Isabella Wyndham had first called headquarters and solicited public help in trying to discover what had happened to her brother.

  This particular phase of affairs is imprinted with peculiar vividness on my mind for about this time came an abrupt unexpected development in the case which stumped us completely around the office, and left me so savagely out of humor that even Peter Alcott commented on it at lunch.

  I say even Peter Alcott, as a sort of measure. Alcott had been running a daily sports column for some time on the Globe, and his unvarying nonchalance had become a byword with all the men on the staff. Nothing ever fazed Pete Alcott, and, likewise, nothing ever seemed to evoke from him more than the most ephemeral flicker of interest. All this on the surface, of course! I’d watched him a dozen times, in sheer amazement. At the ringside at prize fights, at football clashes, at final show-downs in golf and tennis tourneys. In every case Alcott had hazarded an advance opinion in print as to the final outcome of the match. His professional judgment was at stake. But throughout the event, no matter which way the tide was running, there was always that same unruffled cabbage-like calm that nothing apparently could disturb. To tell the truth, at such times, I was never fully convinced that Pete really saw what was happening at all. But at the end, when he stretched his long legs and shoved his fedora down a little tighter on his head, he would laconically show me the error of my ways.

  “Thought you’d lost your fifty when the Kid landed that upper right?” . . . or . . .

  “When Taylor tied that score . . .” or whatever it happened to be.

  “Bet your life, I did!”

  Then he’d smile his lazy, good-humored smile and the next day his column would prove beyond question that not only had he been aware of every passing play that I and the gallery had taken in, but of a score of other details, that all the rest of the crowd had missed. There was no chance signal, no contestant’s quickened breathing, no shift in the direction of a breeze, be it ever so slight, that escaped his Argus-eyed attention. His sporting sense was uncanny—but that’s beside the point! The point is I was out of humor at the new development in the Wyndham case, and Pete had commented on it.

  It happened we were snatching our usual cornflakes and coffee at a nearby lunch room, known to every man on the staff for its creeping indigestions and its galloping ptomaines. We’d taken to dropping in at the place together for months now—in fact, ever since Alcott had first come to the Globe. In glum silence I sat munching away at my cereal and at last I drew my coffee closer.

  “Say, can’t you bring this dishwater hot for once?” I snapped at the little blonde waitress who was fixing her hair nearby.

  Good-naturedly Alcott pushed his cup across the table toward me.

  “Try mine. It’s scalding.”

  “No, let her get it!”

  We relapsed into silence. In due time the waitress brought me hot coffee, gave the sugar bowl a friendly shove in my direction and departed. I glanced down at my spoon, remarking acidly, “Jesus, some time a clean spoon is rather to be chosen than . . . er . . . a clean name. Just an old proverb from the Portuguese! Did you ever see the like?”

  Viciously I rubbed my spoon on my paper napkin while Alcott grinned across at me. “What’s the matter with you today? Good God! You’re insufferable!”

  With the morose air of a man forced to be generous, I began to explain.

  “I’m up a tree you almighty sporting writers don’t have to climb. Jesus! Get this! Space all saved for the latest on this Wyndham case. Half an hour ago Billy Farrel ’phones over from Police Headquarters that they’ve clamped the lid down. Absolute instructions to give no more information out. Not one damned word more! Why? God knows! I can’t make head or tail of it. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  “Sounds lousy. What are you going to do?”

  “Damned if I know. The public’s all het up and panting for Wyndham news. There’s been nothing like it in years. Now, this new jam at Headquarters.”

  “Funny.” Alcott took a few drags on his cigarette in silence. “Of course, there must be a private agency working on the case!”

  “Hell, suppose there is!”

  “Why not get at them!”

  “Oh, you colossus of inspiration you brain trust, you. . . .” I was overcome for words. “What do you think I did when Billy Farrel called us up? Sit down on my goddamned spine? We’ve been in touch with every agency in town. We’ve tried every known ruse and a few original ones. Nothing doing! We’re deadlocked . . . deadlocked . . . get that!”

  Alcott blew three perfect rings of smoke ceiling-ward, while I sat there glowering across at his battered, worn countenance, at the eternal disorder of his great shock of prematurely grey hair, at the unvarying complacence of his deep grey-blue eyes, and wondered inwardly what it was that I always liked so immeasurably about the fellow anyhow. Suddenly, he leaned forward.

  “You know, I’ve got a crazy sort of an idea!” He stamped his cigarette out before proceeding. “Yep, it might work, but it won’t help your next edition!”

  “Oh, I can take care of that! What’s your hunch?”

  For answer, he dug into his vest pocket and exhumed an old python skin cigarette case—a rather remarkable case as I look back on it now, and certainly one that was to act as our passport far beyond the bounds of conventional experience.

  “That’s the hunch,” he said, as he laid it quietly on the table.

  “Aw, can the comedy!”

  “I’m serious. That case once belonged to Stephen Prentiss Wyndham!”

  I picked it up and examined it with new interest. Alcott enjoyed my surprise.

  “Intrinsic value, zero, I’d say. Ordinary type, made from the skin of a python or some other little jungle pet that Wyndham picked up on one of his African hunts. But regardless of the raw material, that case might be worth a hell of a lot to the New York Globe right now!”

  I turned the case over critically.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake! If you can tell me how we can spin two columns a day out of the fact that a dead or missing millionaire happened to give the Globe sporting writer a leather cigarette case, which, if I know my young Wyndham, he might just as well have given to anyone of a dozen lousy reporters, after any one of a dozen events . . .” I paused for breath.

  Alcott smiled in good humor. “Keep your shirt on. You’re absolutely correct about every fact but one. I’m really not after my picture in the paper, old man. It only struck me that this little souvenir, if handled properly, might possibly get us a private look-in on Miss Isabella Wyndham.” He paused. “Anyhow, if you wait while I ’phone the office, I’ll help you try!”

  I was on my feet in a flash. “Say, you old stiff, where you been all my life? I’ll ’phone the office. You settle the check. God, who’d have thought you had it in you?”

  Twenty-eight minutes later we had hurdled through the traffic to Madison Avenue and 34th Street and were mounting the brownstone steps of the dignified old Wyndham mansion.

  Chapter II AN ECCENTRIC OLD LADY TALKS

  I FREELY confess that as I stood in the vestibule of the gaunt four-storied Wyndham residence, and listened to the peal of the doorbell as it reverberated through the vast solitude of the great place, I was conscious of a lurking excitement in my blood that I had not known in all the days since I had traded the adventurous lot of a cub reporter for the none-too-certain dignity of an office chair.

  Even Alcott looked a trifle flushed with expectancy, though, of course, being Alcott, he made no comment. Nor did our sense of adventure derive wholly from the fact that here we stood—two young newspaper men, bent on forcing our way straight to the center of the most sensational mystery in years! After all, for that we had worked out a careful strategy in the taxi, en route, and we were content to take our chances.

  No, something of my feeling was ascribable to the venerable Wyndham manor itself and to the curiously formidable atmosphere that enshrouded th
e place. I studied the brownstone pile before me, trying to analyze what it was in the combination of ordinary stone and mortar that thus had the power of affecting me. Around the mansion New York surged and pulsed, beating its way to its sedate doors, clanging and roaring past! Haughty, unheeding, defiant, the old house drew its dark blinds and let Manhattan whirl on its way, determined to stand just as it had in all the eighty-odd years since old Prentiss Wyndham, first puffed with his stupendous coup in northwestern railroads, had decided to build himself a dwelling that would be at once the outward sign and symbol of his achievement. Dark and forbidding, the Madison Avenue house had risen. Dark and forbidding, it stood its ground, a strange, incongruous gesture against the perpetual chance and mutability of the great metropolis. The thought flashed through my mind that the ancients erred very understandably in attributing to certain inanimate objects a spirit of their own. This house now—but Alcott was cutting in.

  “Don’t look so blooming sober, or we’ll never get by!”

  I gave a chuckle of amusement and in an instant the hard-boiled newspaper man once more was uppermost. That is, on the surface, of course! (And there, incidentally, stands a popular delusion that should be laid before I die. Hard-boiled gentlemen of the press! Of all the romantically minded, credulous hearted, empty handed saps that I’ve encountered in the years I’ve been gathering no moss—you! But I can’t deal adequately with you now! The mood of this incredible case is too much upon me.)

  I took out a cigarette!

  “Y’know, there’s a story around the office that this plot alone is assessed for three million dollars and the old lady won’t sell because her cat takes the sun on the side terrace.”