Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Counselor, you and I will get along a lot chummier if you cut out the mullarkey and start recollecting your sins. Miss Sherwood, is this the man you saw pull up behind the Humffrey limousine on a deserted back road near Pelham on Friday morning, June 3rd, behind the wheel of a Chewy, and hand over to Mr. Alton K. Humffrey of Nair Island, Connecticut, a blue blanket wrapped around a week-old baby?”

“That’s the man, Inspector Queen!” Jessie said shakily. She wondered if she ought to point at the fat lawyer, the way they did in movie courtrooms, but she decided against it.

“The lady is mistaken.” Finner beamed, and cleared his throat. “She never saw me in any such place at any such time doing any such thing.”

“How can you lie like that?” Jessie cried indignantly. “I saw you with my own two eyes, and you’re not exactly an ordinary-looking man!”

“I’ve built a whole career, miss,” the fat man remarked, “on being just that. However, my memory could be failing. Got anything else to give it a jab, Inspector? Like, say, a corroborating witness?”

“Three, Finner,” Inspector Queen said, as if he were enjoying himself. “Mr. and Mrs. Humffrey are two, and their chauffeur — white-haired party with rosy cheeks — he’s the third.”

“The chauffeur driving the Humffrey car that morning, you mean?” Finner said reflectively.

“That’s right.”

“But how do you know he’d corroborate this lady’s identification, Inspector? I don’t see him here.”

“Well, we can soon find out. Mind if I use your phone?”

Finner said, “Skip it.” He sucked his rubbery lower lip, frowning, then swiveled to clasp his hands behind his overlapping folds of neck and stare out the window. “Supposing I was weak-skulled enough to admit having been there that day,” he asked the window, “then what, Inspector?”

Jessie glanced at Richard Queen. But he shook his head.

“You mean, Finner, what do I have?”

“Put it any way you want.”

“Well, it’s like this. You work deals with an angle. You specialize in unmarried mothers. You shop around for a buyer, you arrange for the girl to give birth in a hospital under a false name, with a phony background, you pay the girl — with the buyer’s money — and you take possession of the baby when the mother is discharged from the hospital. Then you turn the baby over to your buyer, collect the balance of your fee, probably furnish a forged birth certificate, and you’re ready for the next client. It’s a sweet racket, Finner, and the sweetest part of it is that everybody involved has a vested interest in protecting you. You see, I’ve been looking you up.”

“I haven’t heard a thing,” Finner said, still to the window, “and I’m listening with both pink ears.”

“I’m not passing judgment on the dirty way you earn those fins you scatter around the night spots, Finner,” Richard Queen said. “Some day the boys are going to prove it on you. But if it’s the black-market baby rap you’re worrying about, right now I’m not interested in you at all. I’m after other game.”

“What do you mean?” Finner spun about so suddenly the spring under his chair squealed.

“You’re going to tell me who the Humffrey baby’s real parents are.”

Finner stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Tell me, Finner,” the old man said.

Jessie held her breath.

The fat man laughed. “Even supposing this junkie jive you been popping around the premises were the McCoy, Inspector — and I’m not admitting a goddam thing — why should I tell? An operator in a racket like that — I’m told — works on a confidential basis. Run off at the tonsils and you’re out of business. You know that.”

“I know you’re in this up to your top chin, Finner,” Richard Queen smiled. “Of course you know the baby’s dead.”

“Dead, uh?” Finner squinted along the top of his desk and hunched down to blow some dust off. With fascination, Jessie watched his fat lips working. “Seem to recall reading about some baby named Humffrey up in Connecticut being found suffocated in his crib. Was that the same baby you’re trying to hook me up to, Inspector?”

“That’s the one.”

“Tough. I got a soft spot for kids. Got three of my own. But so what? It was an accident, wasn’t it?”

“It was a murder, Finner.”

Finner’s bulk came up like a whale surfacing. “The hell you say. I read the papers, too. Coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental death. The case is closed. What you trying to pull on me, Inspector?”

“It was a murder, Finner.”

Finner swallowed. He picked up a steel letter-knife from his desk, made as if to clean his fingernails, put the knife down again.

“New evidence?”

Richard Queen said nothing. He merely kept looking at the fat man’s fat hands.

Finner’s hands vanished below the level of the desk.

“Look, Inspector,” he said rapidly. “You got me on something of a spot here. Without incriminating myself in any degree, you understand, maybe I can get some information for you. About the kid’s real parents, I mean. One of my contacts might...”

“I don’t care what you call yourself, Counselor. I want those names.”