American Sherlocks by Nick Rennison (reading like a writer .TXT) 📕

right on the job when there’s crime being done, ain’t you? You’ll find Merkel and Brill and Jokosky and the rest of Wiggins’s crew in the main building, and I guess they’ll tell you just what they told the police. They hate it, but what else can they say? It’s the truth.’

‘What is the truth?’ asked Mr Gubb.

‘That Wiggins was dead sore at Hen Smitz,’ said the watchman. ‘That Wiggins told Hen he’d do for him if he lost them their jobs like he said he would. That’s the truth.’

Mr Gubb – his admiring followers were halted at the gate by the watchman – entered the large building and inquired his way to Mr Wiggins’s department. He found it on the side of the building toward the river and on the ground floor. On one side the vast room led into the refrigerating room of the company; on the other it opened upon a long but narrow dock that ran the width of the building.

Along the outer edge of the dock were tied two barges, and into these barges some of Wiggins’s crew were dumping mutton – not legs of mutton but entire sheep, neatly sewed in burlap. The large room was the packing and shipping room, and the work of Wiggins’s crew was that of sewing the slaughtered and refrigerated sheep carcasses in burlap for shipment. Bales of burlap stood against one wall; strands of hemp twine ready for the needle hung from pegs in the wall and the posts that supported the floor above. The contiguity of the refrigerating room gave the room a pleasantly cool atmosphere.

Mr Gubb glanced sharply around. Here was the burlap, here were needles, here was twine. Yonder was the river into which Hen Smitz had been thrown. He glanced across the narrow dock at the blue river. As his eye returned he noticed one of the men carefully sweeping the dock with a broom – sweeping fragments of glass into the river. As the men in the room watched him curiously, Mr Gubb picked up a piece of burlap and put it in his pocket, wrapped a strand of twine around his finger and pocketed the twine, examined the needles stuck in improvised needle-holders made by boring gimlet holes in the wall, and then walked to the dock and picked up one of the pieces of glass.

‘Clues,’ he remarked, and gave his attention to the work of questioning the men.

Although manifestly reluctant, they honestly admitted that Wiggins had more than once threatened Hen Smitz – that he hated Hen Smitz with the hatred of a man who has been threatened with the loss of his job. Mr Gubb learned that Hen Smitz had been the foreman for the entire building – a sort of autocrat with, as Wiggins’s crew informed him, an easy job. He had only to see that the crews in the building turned out more work this year than they did last year. ‘’Ficiency’ had been his motto, they said, and they hated ‘’Ficiency’.

Mr Gubb’s gallery was awaiting him at the gate, and its members were in a heated discussion as to what Mr Gubb had been doing. They ceased at once when he appeared and fell in behind him as he walked away from the packing house and toward the undertaking establishment of Mr Holworthy Bartman, on the main street. Here, joining the curious group already assembled, the gallery was forced to wait while Mr Gubb entered. His task was an unpleasant but necessary one. He must visit the little ‘morgue’ at the back of Mr Bartman’s establishment.

The body of poor Hen Smitz had not yet been removed from the bag in which it had been found, and it was to the bag Mr Gubb gave his closest attention. The bag – in order that the body might be identified – had not been ripped, but had been cut, and not a stitch had been severed. It did not take Mr Gubb a moment to see that Hen Smitz had not been sewed in a bag at all. He had been sewed in burlap – burlap ‘yard goods,’ to use a shopkeeper’s term – and it was burlap identical with that used by Mr Wiggins and his crew. It was no loose bag of burlap – but a close-fitting wrapping of burlap; a cocoon of burlap that had been drawn tight around the body, as burlap is drawn tight around the carcass of sheep for shipment, like a mummy’s wrappings.

It would have been utterly impossible for Hen Smitz to have sewed himself into the casing, not only because it bound his arms tight to his sides, but because the burlap was lapped over and sewed from the outside. This, once and for all, ended the suicide theory. The question was: Who was the murderer?

As Philo Gubb turned away from the bier, Undertaker Bartman entered the morgue.

‘The crowd outside is getting impatient, Mr Gubb,’ he said in his soft, undertakery voice. ‘It is getting on toward their lunch hour, and they want to crowd into my front office to find out what you’ve learned. I’m afraid they’ll break my plate glass windows, they’re pushing so hard against them. I don’t want to hurry you, but if you would go out and tell them Wiggins is the murderer they’ll go away. Of course there’s no doubt about Wiggins being the murderer, since he has admitted he asked the stock-keeper for the electric-light bulb.’

‘What bulb?’ asked Philo Gubb.

‘The electric-light bulb we found sewed inside this burlap when we sliced it open,’ said Bartman. ‘Matter of fact, we found it in Hen’s hand. O’Toole took it for a clue and I guess it fixes the murder on Wiggins beyond all doubt. The stock-keeper says Wiggins got it from him.’

‘And what does Wiggins remark on that subject?’ asked Mr Gubb.

‘Not a word,’ said Bartman. ‘His lawyer told him not to open his mouth, and he won’t. Listen to that crowd out there!’

‘I will attend