Gun in Cheek (10 page)

The action centers around a showdown match between two undefeated teams, University and State, whose campuses are twenty-five miles apart in an unnamed but presumably small state. A twenty-two-page radio broadcast opens the novel, most of it play-by-play of the first half of the game, with color commentary, a half-time "analysis" by a sports writer, and station breaks included, all for verisimilitude. Here are two examples of this stirring reportage:

"The University band is coming out now. They are a snappy-looking bunch of boys and they can play too. Hear them? They are playing 'University Forever.' University's mascot is an old goat lovingly called 'American Can' but I don't see him. It is just possible that the University boys were afraid State would get their goat."

"The timekeeper is ready, the gun is in the air. There it goes. Did you hear it? The game is on. Oh my! Butch Schupe's toe has driven the pigskin deep into University's territory. What a kick! For a moment it looked as if it had taken off permanently. It's down now. Number twenty-nine, that's Jorgenson, has taken the oval and has cut in following his interference which has begun to function quickly and efficiently. Look at him go. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty-five. They've got him. He's down but it was a good run back. The referee has dived into that swirling mass of legs and arms and is pulling them off. I might say I've never seen a referee go at a pile of men the way Collins gets into them."

So much for Verisimilitude.

At the start of the second half, State's star player, an all-American boy named Walter Demuth, takes a single-wing snap and breaks through the line on a long run down the sidelines. There is no one near him as he approaches the goal line; but then he staggers and slows down as if suddenly exhausted, stumbles on the five-yard stripe, and collapses just after he crosses into the end zone for a touchdown.

The narrative switches to the third person at this point, and we learn that Demuth is dead of what may or may not be a heart attack. Both coaches decide that the game must go on in spite of the tragedy, because, as one of them says, "If we call the game, we will have to make some explanation. We can't say that he was killed, that might start a panic and a panic out there would be pretty terrible. You never know what 70,000 people will do under such circumstances. They have had a very exciting afternoon with a great play of emotion. They are curious now and upset. They are wondering what has happened and pretty soon they will begin to churn. They might go loco. It wouldn't need more than three or four screaming, fainting women to start something pretty bad."

So much for logic.

The game continues, and University wins, 27-13. And the following day, the coroner determines that Demuth died of an "explosion of the brain," in which all the small blood vessels were destroyed in the manner of apoplexy. But he suspects foul play nonetheless and calls in the homicide boys. Enter Kethridge.

Kethridge is the quintessential thirties detective: taciturn, hard-boiled, prone to the wisecrack and the sharp retort. He is also about as realistically portrayed as Fleming Stone and not half as intelligent.

He questions Demuth's sister Dorothy and Demuth's best friend Ranny, who is in love with Dorothy, and manages to find out that Demuth died on his twenty-first birthday, after having inherited a rather large fortune; Kethridge also finds out that Demuth willed half of this fortune to Ranny, because the two of them were such close chums. (The reader has known all this for some time before Kethridge learns it; Fitzsimmons was fond of imparting relevant information to the reader first, perhaps as a courtesy. It may also be through courtesy that the reader is allowed to guess the identity of the murderer on page 15, despite there being twenty-one other suspects. But that is of little import; the real joy of
70,000 Witnesses
is in trying to figure out how Demuth was killed—and in watching Kethridge make a fool of himself.) He also questions Harry Collins, the referee in the big game, who was once Demuth's tutor and who, like Ranny, is in love with Dorothy. And he questions various members of the State team, some of whom have minor motives for wanting Demuth out of the way, as well as selected members of the University team.

But does he have the State locker room searched for possible poisonous or otherwise deadly agents? He does not. Does he have the field searched for similar agents, or question grounds keepers, ushers, or the other officials? He does not. Does he think to investigate the uniform Demuth was wearing at the time of his demise? Yes, but only after the youth's clothes are stolen and, we later learn, destroyed by the murderer.

While Kethridge continues his bumbling investigation, Dorothy is forced to choose between Ranny and Harry when Ran-fly impulsively proposes to her.

"What about these women you get in messes with? Walter isn't here now to protect you or me."

A fleeting smile passed across Ranny's-face. "You dear, adorable, wonderful girl, that was over a year ago and was just a mad thing that I got into and wanted to get out of and didn't know how. . . . It didn't mean anything and there has been no girl and never will be any other girl but you. You must believe me. Don't you?" he teased. "Say you love me," he went on. "Please say it. Repeat after me, 'Ranny, I love you."

Her head dropped down on his shoulder and she started to cry broken-heartedly.

"Oh, my darling, please. There, there, sweetheart. I didn't want to make you cry." He crooned over her and his own eyes glistened.

"I—I—" she snuggled closer, burrowing her face into his neck so that her words were smothered. "I do, Ranny, I do and I am happy but I don't feel happy."

"I know, dear, and I feel the same way."

Ranny feels even less happy when O'Brien, a uniform cop assigned to the State campus beat and Kethridge's nominal partner in the murder investigation, finds part of Demuth's missing uniform—a torn stocking—among Ranny's effects. Kethridge asks Ranny some more questions, after first advising him of his rights. (" 'You need not speak if you prefer to keep still as I must warn you that anything you say can and will be used against you.' Kethridge smiled as he repeated the trite phrase so common in criminal circles.") But he doesn't learn much; Ranny claims not to know how the stocking came to be among his belongings.

Dorothy is then recruited to pretend to believe Ranny is guilty, a ploy which Kethridge tells her might prove the boy's guilt or innocence. It does neither; all it does is upset Dorothy and Ranny both. So Kethridge then takes Ranny to a showing of newsreel footage of Demuth's fatal touchdown run. Neither he nor the reader learns much from that, either. Nevertheless, Kethridge decides he has enough of a case against Ranny to confine him to jail for the night, and this is done. Ranny takes his incarceration manfully. Of course, he does lie awake most of the night, tossing and turning, asking himself rhetorical questions; but then "because sleep had been a habit with him for so many years he finally slept and forgot."

The next morning Ranny is released, reunited with Dorothy, and subsequently taken to the football stadium. The reason for this is that Kethridge has had another brainstorm: he has ordered that Demuth's fatal run be restaged, along with several of the plays leading up to it, by the teams from State and University. By doing this, he says with dubious logic, maybe a new clue will come to light.

Before the re-creation begins, we are privy to several exchanges of dialogue among State's players in their locker room. It becomes obvious that two players, Cannero and Greenwood, have been withholding information from the police for reasons of their own. Greenwood is asked to play the part of Demuth in the restaging, but he refuses on the grounds that the same thing will happen to him that happened to Demuth. Cannero is given the role instead.

And to everyone's surprise (except the reader's), the same thing happens to him that happened to Demuth when the fateful touchdown run is re-created.

There is a good deal of anguish and confusion after that.

Greenwood, who is not your typical football player, swoons. The team doctor pronounces Cannero dead. Kethridge, baffled, asks several ineffectual questions and finally orders the corpse taken back to the State locker room. The doctor and the State coach do the honors; but once inside, they accidentally drop Cannero on the table instead of setting him down in a gentler fashion. The result is a tremendous explosion: "the blanket-covered body rose abruptly from the table and seemed to hang in mid air for a moment." Then there is a second explosion, which turns everyone topsy-turvy and topples the long row of lockers. No one is seriously hurt in these blowups except for Greenwood, who is found pinned and near death underneath the lockers. But he hasn't been crushed or injured by flying objects; he is near death because the same thing that happened to Demuth and Cannero has happened to him, after all.

Blamed by both his chief and the newspapers for this latest carnage (rightfully so), Kethridge at last begins to ask the right questions. He learns from Ranny that Greenwood was a chemistry nut, always trying experiments, and that an explosion the previous year had almost wrecked a laboratory he had set up in a rented shack. Kethridge then goes to Greenwood's chemistry professor, from whom the answer to the puzzle is forthcoming.

It seems that one of Greenwood's experiments was the manufacture of nitroglycerin. And nitroglycerin, as the professor tells him, "in small doses has a powerful heart reaction. Men, particularly when they are new at making it, often have severe reactions. They are seized with terrific headaches and often keel over." People get it on their hands and clothes, we then learn, and take it into their systems by absorption.

As for the explosion—well, everyone knows that nitroglycerin is a volatile substance and can explode at any time. When the body of Cannero was dropped on the locker-room table . . . boom! The second explosion was of a vial of nitro hidden away in one of the lockers, touched off by the concussion of the first blast.

How did the nitro get inside the uniforms of Demuth, Cannero, and Greenwood? Kethridge deduces that none of the football players could have carried it onto the field in a hidden vial, because football is a contact sport and the first time a vial-carrying player smacked into the line - . . boom! Who else was on the field?
 
Why, the officials, of course.
 
And which official was not only in love with Dorothy but had made a ten thousand-dollar bet against State and regularly dived into pileups and pulled the players apart? Why, the referee, Harry Collins, of course. He had the vial of nitro inside his shirt, having gotten it from Greenwood, who turns out to have been his nephew. (The cowardly Greenwood knew too much, which is why he had to die. Cannero had seen Collins destroying Demuth's uniform; that was why he had to die.) And even though twenty-two football players and five other officials were in close proximity, not to mention seventy thousand other witnesses during the big game and eagle-eye Kethridge at the re-creation, Collins managed somehow to pull out the vial surreptitiously and empty the contents down each of the murdered players' backs. He did this, it is inferred, during the play before the long touchdown runs—though how he knew beforehand that Demuth was going to break away for a long touchdown run is never explained. For if Demuth had been piled up at the line of scrimmage . . . boom! No more line of scrimmage.

So much for plausibility, the great Kethridge, and
70,000 Witnesses
.

A
nother fictional cop whose talents, if not personality, parallel Kethridge's is Lieutenant Price Price of the San Francisco Homicide Squad, narrator and hero of Knight Rhoades's She Died on the Stairway (1947). Price may also be a bumbler, but he's neither taciturn nor a loner; he has a beautiful wife named Nikky (who taps out "SOS" in Morse code with her fingertips when she's thinking hard), is an expert on rabbit culture, enjoys listening to himself talk, and, like Race Williams, is fond of confiding his thoughts and opinions to the reader. He also has another unusual talent.

Oswald [was] a symbol of battle and murder and sudden death. If a dwarf white rabbit with a pink nose and pink ears can be said to be a harbinger of crime, Oswald is it.

Maybe you don't get the idea.

You see, I put myself through U.C. by doing magic tricks. I always did them well, even as a kid. I had to do some choosing when it came right down to it, as to whether I'd go on with the crime-solving, or take up the legerdemain professionally. The crime stuff won by a hair.

One day, when I was a rookie and trying to break down a tough suspect, unconsciously I started doing magic stuff. Making my handkerchief disappear. Changing a dollar into a dime. Elementary junk like that. The suspect got jittery and lost his nerve. I cracked him—and the case. That gave me an idea. I'm known as the Sleight-Of-Hand Cop, and Oswald is my trump card.

Price Price, as may be surmised, is as unique among cops as his name. He professes to be tough and hard-boiled, but we know that this is only a pose; the author (who internal evidence suggests was a woman hiding behind a masculine pseudonym) allows him to slip from time to time and reveal a somewhat more delicate nature. What truly tough homicide cop, after all, would say, "Oh, dear me, yes," to himself, and refer to a vicious three-time killer as "Mr. Murderer"?