Jonathan Craig

The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter One

ACCORDING to the classification the desk officer had entered on the UF 61 form that had brought us to this one-room basement apartment on Bleecker Street, the squeal was an “apparent suicide.”

The classification was wrong.

This was no “suicide,” apparent or otherwise.

This was murder.

Even by Greenwich Village standards, the apartment was a small one. There were a few vivid water colors on the white brick walls, a pair of almost man-size oriental dragons embroidered in orange on the black wall-to-wall drapes opposite the hall door, and, scattered about the slate floor, a half-dozen straw mats decorated with Aztec masks and symbols in black and red. There was very little furniture. Ranged in front of the drapes were a Hollywood bed with a quilted black spread, a nightstand supporting a telephone and an ash tray, and an old-fashioned dresser with claw feet and a large oval mirror. In the middle of the room were two black leather club chairs and a red hassock grouped about a cocktail table fashioned from a cobbler's bench. That was all.

My detective partner, Stan Rayder, was down the hall, trying to calm the girl who had discovered the body and run screaming into the street in search of a patrolman. Colleen Kelly, the young policewoman who had been sent to search the body, sat on the far side of the bed, her face pale and her hands clasped tightly in her lap, trying hard not to show what she felt at the sight of the dead girl hanging from the steam pipe overhead. She was new on the job, and it was tough that her first real introduction to it had to be such a rugged one.

I took out my pencil, changed the classification on the UF 61 from apparent suicide to homicide, and then stepped close to take another look at the body.

It twisted a slow inch to the right, hung motionless for a moment, and then, just as slowly, moved back again. The girl's feet cleared the floor by about six inches, which put her face on a level with my own.

As best I could judge, she had been somewhere between twenty and twenty-three, a fairly tall girl with shimmering black hair, a full-blown, narrow-waisted body and very long, very beautiful legs. She wore sheer nylons, rolled high on her thighs, and small black pumps with unusually high heels.

That was all. Above the taut round garters at the tops of her almost hip-length stockings, she was stark naked.

“Why don't you cut her down?” the policewoman said suddenly, not looking at me. “It's just terrible, leaving her hanging there like that.”

“We have to wait for the Medical Examiner, Colleen,” I said. “Until he gets here and gives us the green light, we can't even touch her.”

Her eyes held a sheen close to tears. “It's awful, just the same,” she said. “I just can't understand it.”

“The M.E. is supposed to see the body exactly the way it was found,” I said. “It's very important.”

“I didn't mean that,” she said. “I meant I can't understand why such a pretty girl should want to kill herself.” She shook her head. “Why, she's hardly out of her teens.”

“She didn't,” I said.

Collen glanced at me sharply. “What?”

“She didn't kill herself,” I said. “She was murdered.”

Colleen's lips formed the word silently, then said it aloud. “Murdered?”

I nodded. “Somebody rigged it to look like suicide,” I said. “The girl was dead before she was strung up.”

She stared up at the swaying body incredulously. “But — but how do you know?”

“It's just a matter of seeing enough of them,” I said. “Come on over a little closer and I'll show you.”

She got to her feet, hesitated for a moment, then set her chin and walked over to me, her face more pale than ever.

“I'm trying,” she said. “Honestly I am.”

“You're doing fine,” I said. “It takes a little getting used to, that's all.”

“I guess I just never realized…”

“I know how it is,” I said. “Now the first thing wrong in this setup is her face. If she'd died on the end of that piece of clothesline, she'd be a damn sight less pretty than she is now. Her face would be swollen, and it'd be any color from pink to purple. In any case, it'd be something you wouldn't want to look at any more than you had to.”

Colleen was up on her toes, peering at the girl's face intently. “She looks almost — natural,” she said.

“Take a close look at her throat,” I said. “Notice how white the skin is?”

“Yes.”

“'Well, it wouldn't be if she'd been alive. A rope almost always ruptures a lot of small blood vessels, and they show up as little black and blue marks along either side of the noose. But the blood had already drained out of this girl's face and throat, so there was nothing to show.” I paused. “But that doesn't always happen. If a person is choked to death with, say, a towel, or something else that's pretty wide and soft and hasn't any hard edges, the black and blue marks might not be there at all.”

Colleen leaned back to look up at the end of the rope tied to the steam pipe. “How about the fibers?” she asked. “In training, they told us that if fibers were scuffed in the direction of the body, it meant someone else had pulled the body up there.”

“They weren't,” I said. “The fibers were scuffed away from the body, the way they should be.”

“Oh?”

“There's about a foot and a half of slack rope up there,” I said. “But whoever killed her knew about fibers too. He must have done one of two things. Either he held her body in his arms and climbed up on something while he tied the rope to the pipe, or he hauled her up there with one rope, tied her to the pipe with the rope that's there now, and then untied the other rope and took it with him.”

She stepped a little closer to the dead girl, and then walked all the way around her, searching the naked body carefully with her eyes.

“There isn't a single mark on her anywhere,” she said. “How was she killed?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Can you tell when it happened?”

I shrugged. “That's up to the M.E.,” I said. “My guess is that she was killed somewhere between six and eight hours ago.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“I'm going by the extent of the rigor mortis,” I said. “In hot weather like this it usually begins within three to five hours, starting in the jaws and working steadily down the body. It takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to become complete, depending on how healthy she was, how much alcohol she may have taken aboard, how emotionally wrought-up she was at the time of death and so on.”

“How far has it reached?”

“It's down to her hips,” I said. “That's why, as a very rough guess, I'd say she's been dead for about six or eight hours.”

“Rough guess is right, Pete,” a man's voice said from the doorway. “Rigor mortis is tricky stuff, any way you hunch it.” It was my partner, Stan Rayder.

“You got any better guesses, Stan?” I asked. “If you have, Colleen and I will be mighty pleased to hear them.”

“I'm the kind of man likes to keep things to myself,” he said, walking over to us. “And besides, Detective Selby, this is your squeal. You're carrying it all the way, rigor mortis and all.”

Stan and I, like most other precinct detective teams, divide our shifts so that one of us acts as detective-in-charge for the first half of the tour, and the other for the second. And since our simulated suicide had hit the squad room at a few minutes past eleven, during my half of the shift, I would be in charge of the investigation and responsible for all the attendant paper work, while Stan would act as my assistant. Both of us would, of course, be taken off the regular duty roster and assigned to the case full time.

“Damned shame,” Stan said, gazing at the dead girl with as much surprise as if he'd just that instant discovered she was there. “They don't come much prettier than this one, Pete — that's for sure.”

Stan's appearance and facial expressions are misleading — as many a sorry but wiser criminal can attest. While most cops look like cops and nothing else, Stan does not. He's a lanky, soft-spoken, bookish-looking man with gray eyes, a sprinkling of premature gray at his temples, and a habitual expression of mild and polite surprise. The truth is that he is one of the least easily surprised men I ever met; and his thinness is of the steel-spring kind. Stan can disarm and flatten another man before he has any clear idea of just what is happening to him.

He glanced at his watch and frowned. “I think maybe we'll be able to get something out of the Bowman girl now,” he said.

Judy Bowman, the girl who had found the body, had at first been too hysterical to tell us anything more than her name. Her apartment at the far end of the hall was the only other apartment in the building, a rickety, two-story frame structure that housed what appeared to have been a specialty store on the second floor.

“Good,” I said. “I'll see what she has to say.”

“Better take this with you,” Stan said, removing a small deckle-edged photograph from his pocket and handing it to me. “This was stuck in the frame of her mirror; I figured I'd better filch it before the reporters got here and beat me to it.”

I studied it. It was a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 snapshot of the murdered girl and a good-looking, ruggedly built young man in a short-sleeved sport shirt. They were seated on a bench that reminded me of the ones in Central Park. The man had his arm around the girl, and they both looked very happy.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll see if Miss Bowman knows the guy.”

“You want me to give the place a toss?”

“Yes,” I said. “Start with the dresser, and watch out for prints.”

“A good thing you reminded me,” Stan said seriously. “I'd never have thought of that.”

The Policewoman had been standing quietly by, glancing from one to the other of us reprovingly, as if she resented the way we were talking. “May I go now?” she asked, a little cooly. “After all, the girl isn't wearing any clothes. What is there for me to search?”

“You look in her shoes?” I asked.

“No, I didn't. But—”

“Take a look,” I said. “Stan and I can't go even that far.” I turned toward the door. “If there's nothing there, put down on your search form that the body was nude except for shoes and stockings, and that your search turned up no money or jewelry.”

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but make sure you put that down about money and jewelry. Relatives have been known to accuse the police of appropriating such things.”

“They wouldn't!” she said.

“Wouldn't they?” Stan said wryly, bending down to start work on the dresser. “People will do anything, Colleen. That's why when we take, say, a platinum ring with a diamond off a DOA, we're always careful to describe it on the search form as a 'white stone in a white metal setting.' That way, we buy a little insurance. Not much, maybe, but it's the best we can do. The ring might not actually be what it looks like, you see; but if we wrote it up that way, the relatives would be able to put in a claim and make the city come up with the difference.”

“Even if you could show them the ring you took off the body?” Colleen asked.

“Even so,” I said. “What counts is what you put down on the search form — not what you say later.”

Colleen leaned over to remove the dead girl's shoes, and I went down the hall to talk to Judy Bowman.

Chapter Two

THE BOWMAN GIRL'S apartment was not much larger than the one I had just left. It contained a frayed studio couch, a rattan chair with a sagging bottom, an ancient spindle-backed rocking chair with gargoyle hand rests, a three-tier bookcase filled with ceramics, and a professional-looking potter's wheel in the exact center of the floor. At the rear of the room, partly hidden by a Chinese screen plastered with bullfight posters, were a small refrigerator, a sink not much larger than the average wash basin, and a square metal table with a two-burner hot plate at one end and a cut-glass vase of yellow roses at the other. Aside from a faded afghan above the studio couch and an oval throw rug midway between the couch and the rocking chair, the walls and floor were bare.

Judy sat at one end of the couch, high heels close together on the floor, a tiny, very pretty girl with shoulder-length light-brown hair and enormous dark-brown eyes. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that seemed a little tight for her and a short pink skirt with a high snug waist topped by a wide leather belt. She kept tugging absently at the hem of the skirt, trying to keep it down over her knees, but she wasn't having much luck. When I'd come into the room, she had glanced at me expressionlessly, and then looked away again, as if I hadn't registered at all.

I drew the rocking chair a little closer to the couch and sat down. “My partner tells me you're feeling a little better now,” I said.

She fixed her eyes on a point about two feet to the left of my head and nodded vaguely. “I–I guess so,” she said. “You probably think I made a fool of myself.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“It's just that it was the first time anything like that ever happened to me,” she said. “I mean, it's the first time I ever saw anything like that.”

There was a young-girl breathlessness in her voice that made me wonder whether she might not be even younger than I'd thought. “How old are you, Miss Bowman?” I asked.

“It's Mrs. Bowman,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

Just sort of trying to break the ice a little,” I said, making it friendly.

“I'm eighteen,” she said. “Did you think I was younger?”

“I hadn't really thought about it,” I said.

“Just because I acted the way I did when I found her hanging there, you think I'm a child.” She seemed suddenly on the point of tears. “Well, I'm no child, Mr… What did you say your name was?”

“Selby.”

“I'm no child, Mr. Selby. I finished two years of college by the time I was sixteen. If I hadn't been such an idiot to get married when I did, I'd have a college degree at an age when most girls are just graduating from high school.” Her full lips paled a little, and I realized for the first time that she wore no makeup of any kind. “Just because I'm small, why does everyone have to treat me like a baby?”

I'd seen too many cases of hysteria not to recognize the symptoms. She'd been hysterical once, and now she was on the thin edge again. It could go either way, and the trouble was that I could do nothing about it.

I did all I could do; I sat and waited. It was touch and go for about thirty seconds; then, slowly, the color came back to her lips and her eyes lost their unnatural brightness. There was a thin film of perspiration on her forehead now, and she looked away from me embarrassedly.

“Okay now?” I said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Your husband at work, Mrs. Bowman?” I asked.

She frowned. “We don't live together any more.”

“You live alone, then? No roommate?”

“No.”

“You know the girl down the hall pretty well, did you?”

“I knew her. I really didn't know her well.”

“What was her name?”

“Nadine. Nadine Ellison.”

“She married?”

“I don't think so.”

“But you're not sure?”

“If she was married, she never said anything about it.”

“She live with anyone?”

“No.”

I got out my notebook, wrote the dead girl's name at the top of a fresh page, and tried to find a more comfortable position in the rocker. “We'll want to notify her next-of-kin,” I said. “Can you give me the names of any relatives?”

Her forehead lined thoughtfully for a moment. “I don't remember her ever having mentioned any—”

“How long has she lived here?”

“Oh… let's see… about six months, I guess.”

“And you?”

“You mean how long have I been here? Almost a year.”

“You know where Nadine worked?”

“She didn't work anywhere, so far as I know.”

“How about standard of living?” I said. “She live well? Nice clothes and so on?”

“She dressed very well,” Judy said. “I don't know about the rest of it.”

I was relieved to see that talking to me seemed to be helping her get control of herself. I'd feared that it might be the other way around. “I know you've had a very rough experience, Mrs. Bowman,” I said. “I'll make this as fast as I can.”

She tugged the skirt down again, rested a hand on her knee to keep it there, and said nothing.

“Let's get the worst part of it out of the way first,” I said. “Then you won't have to dread it.” I took a cigar from my breast pocket and twisted it around in my fingers without lighting it. “Maybe you'd like to tell me just how you came to find the body.”

She moistened her lips, gazing fixedly at the potter's wheel. “I was on my way out,” she said. “I was going to the grocery store, and when I passed Nadine's door I started to call and ask if she wanted anything from there.” She paused. “We always did that. If one of us was going to the grocery store or the drugstore, we'd see whether the other wanted anything.”

I nodded. “You started to call to her. And then?”

“Then I noticed her door was open,” she said. “About six inches. I called her name, and when she didn't answer, I rapped on the door That made it swing in a little more. And then…” She broke off for a moment. “Then I saw her. For about half a second I thought she was standing on something on the other side of the bed. But then I saw that she…”

“You didn't go inside the apartment?”

“No, I certainly did not,” she said. “The next thing I knew, I was running out to the street to find a policeman.” She raised both hands in a small gesture and the too-short skirt quickly inched up above her knees again. “I couldn't have gone in there, Mr. Selby. I've never been so panic-stricken in my life.”

“That's easy to understand,” I said, listening to the sound of steps and voices at the other end of the hall. There seemed to be half a dozen men arriving, which would indicate that the tech crew was here; and a moment later, I heard the outside door open and close again and the voice of Dr. Vincent Baretti, one of the Assistant Medical Examiners.

Judy had been listening too, picking nervously at the worn welt on the cushion beneath her. “This will be all over the papers, won't it?” she said.

“Not much question about that,” I said. “Girl murders take priority over just about everything.”

“Will they write anything about me?”

“They might.”

“And take my picture?”

“Probably — if they get a chance.”

“I won't let them in!”

“I wish you luck,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Those newspaper cameramen are pretty resourceful.”

“I won't let them in,” she repeated. “Oh, how awful!”

“You know anything about the people in the specialty shop upstairs?” I said, hoping to get her back on the track.

“It went out of business,” she said, glancing apprehensively toward the door. “There hasn't been anyone up there for better than two months now.”

“That so? I thought I saw some things in the window. Leotards and opera hose and ballet slippers — things like that.”

“Maybe they decided they'd been in the sun too long to bother with. Too faded, I mean.”

“I didn't notice any inside stairway. Is there one?”

“No.”

“You say you and Nadine got along pretty well?” I asked.

She stared at me unblinkingly for a long moment, and when she spoke again there had been a subtle change in her voice. “Yes,” she said. “We got along very well.”

“But you wouldn't say you were close friends?”

“We got along very well,” she said again.

“Well enough for her to have told you if she was in trouble of any kind?”

“She never seemed to have any troubles at all. She was always laughing. I never knew a happier girl in my life.”

“She ever mention any threats?”

Judy compressed her lips, shaking her head slowly, almost imperceptibly. “I think I must have known ever since you first started talking,” she said.

“Must have known what, Mrs. Bowman?”

“That Nadine didn't kill herself.”

“Do you know that?”

“Yes,” she said, meeting my eyes directly. “It's not so much your questions as it is the way you ask them.” She took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “She was murdered, wasn't she?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Someone tried to make it look like suicide.”

She smiled, so bitterly that for an instant her face was something less than pretty, almost ugly. “Do you think I did it?”

“No,” I said. “At this stage of the game, we don't think anything at all.”

“Then why didn't you come right out and say she was murdered? Is a girl's being murdered any more horrible than a girl killing herself?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's pretty rough, either way.”

She glanced worriedly at the door again. “Can you keep them from putting my picture in the papers?” she asked. “They just can't that's all!”

“I'll see what I can do,” I said. “And speaking of pictures, I'd like you to take a look at this one.” I handed her the snapshot Stan had taken from Nadine's mirror. “You know the man sitting beside her?”

“His name is Marty.”

“Marty what?”

“I don't know. I met him only once. He and Nadine were coming in one night just as I was going out. She introduced him to me as Marty.”

I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “He a special friend of hers?”

“I guess you might say he was her boy friend. At least I saw them together quite a lot.”

“Any other boy friends, so far as you know?”

She shook her head. “I never saw her with anyone else.”

“You know where he lives?”

“I don't know a thing about him.”

“Did Nadine entertain very much?”

Judy crossed her legs, but her skirt rode up so high that she quickly uncrossed them again. “Yes and no,” she said. “It was very odd. People came to her apartment at all hours of the day and night. But Nadine was never there when they were.”

“I don't think I quite follow you, Mrs. Bowman.”

“I mean she'd go out and not come back until after they'd left.” she said. “There were an awful lot of them.”

“You know any of these people personally?”

“No; I'd just see or hear them in the hall. Nadine had her own bathroom, but mine is out in the hall, and I'd see them coming or going.”

“And you say she always left them alone in her place?”

“Yes. I'd hear or see people come in; then, just a few minutes later, I'd hear Nadine go out. I knew her walk.” She paused. “They were always in couples. I mean, there was always a man and a woman in there together. Sometimes they'd come in together, and sometimes they'd come in a few minutes apart.”

“And this went on all the time?”

“Yes — day and night. Sometimes one couple would hardly be out the door before Nadine came back and another couple came in.” “Was there ever any commotion in there? Any loud talk?”

“No. Once they were inside, I never heard a sound.”

“Have you ever seen any of these people anywhere else?”

“Only one. A woman. I don't know her name, but she works in the antique shop down at the corner. Pedrick's.”

I ran out a fresh point on my pencil. “What's she look like?”

“Well, she's kind of tall — almost as tall as Nadine. And she has red hair. Her hair isn't a real bright red, though; it's closer to auburn.”

“You have any idea what was going on in there?” I asked as I wrote down the description.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No idea at all.”

“Still, isn't it only natural you'd be curious about it?”

“I was — but it wasn't any of my affair. I — well, I got so I just didn't think very much about it.”

“When was the last time you saw this woman? The one from Pedrick's.”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Late?”

“No, it was about two o'clock.”

“How about this morning?” I said. “Say, between one and eight. Did you hear anything?”

“No. I went to bed early and slept late. I hadn't been up more than an hour or so when I started down to the grocery.” She crossed her legs again, and this time she let the skirt go where it would. “I'd like to help you, Mr. Selby,” she said. “But I really don't know much more about Nadine's personal life than you do. She never talked about people at all. She only talked about things. You know — dresses, music, movies — things like that. All she ever told me about herself was that she used to sing with dance bands.”

“Here in New York?”

“No. I got the impression it was mostly out on the West Coast.”

“She ever say which bands they were?”

“No, she was always a little vague about it. But she did know an awful lot about music and musicians. I didn't know what she was talking about half the time.”

“How'd you first meet her, Mrs. Bowman?”

“In the hall. She'd dropped an earring, and I helped her look for it. It was a little sapphire pendant, and when I found it and handed it to her, I told her how pretty I thought it was. She said the stones were real and that they'd been in her family for years. Then we got to talking about earrings, and I asked her if it had hurt when she had her ears pierced. She said no. and that if I wanted her to, she'd pierce mine for me. I'd been thinking about having it done for a long time, so I said all right, and she sent me down to the drug store for a bottle of peroxide.”

She reached up to touch one of the small gold hoops in her ears. “When I got back, she pierced them for me with a needle and a cork, and then she gave me these little earrings to put in them right away, to keep them from closing up. She said someone had given her the hoops a long time ago, but that she never wore anything but the sapphires and never would. The sapphires matched her eyes, she said, and she didn't care whether they matched all her clothes or not.”

“You mean she wore them all the time?”

“Yes, always. She told me she even wore them to bed. And that's very unusual. I'd never heard of a girl doing that before.”

I put the unlighted cigar in my mouth and sat chewing on the end of it for a while. “Are you sure you've nothing else to tell me, Mrs. Bowman?” I asked. “Something that might seem pretty trivial to you might not seem that way to the police at all.”

She started to say something, then changed her mind and sat completely motionless for fully half a minute, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as she apparently tried to search her memory for anything she had forgotten. Finally she made the same small gesture with her hands and shook her head. “I can't think of anything, Mr. Selby,” she said. “I only wish I could.”

I slipped the notebook back into my pocket and got to my feet. “Maybe something will come to you later,” I said as I walked to the door. “Meanwhile—”

“Wait!” she said, straightening up abruptly. “There is something.”

I waited.

“I overheard her talking to someone on the phone,” she said excitedly. “It was the only time I ever heard her raise her voice loud enough for me to hear, and I could tell she was very angry about something. I don't know how long she had been talking, but all at once she raised her voice and started cursing someone. It was just one terrible name after another.” And then she said, “To hell with you, Clifford! I'll make you the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived!” She paused. “Pardon me; I just wanted you to know exactly what she said.”

“She say anything more?”

“Yes, but that's all I could make out. She was practically shouting when she said it. When she got through she banged the phone down so hard it sounded like someone slamming a screen door.”

“Clifford could be either a first name or a last one,” I said. “You sure she didn't put a 'Mr.' in front of it?”

“I'm almost positive she didn't. I'll never forget how she sounded. The way she said 'Clifford!' you'd have thought it was something nasty she was trying to spit out of her mouth.”

“When did this conversation take place?”

“Day before yesterday, about the middle of the morning.”

I stood with hand on the door knob, not saying anything, while Judy Bowman's expression changed slowly from excitement to perplexity.

“How stupid of me,” she said at last, her voice uncertain. “I can't understand why I didn't think of that right away.”

Neither could I; it was something that, under the circumstances, most people would have recalled immediately.

“We'll see what we can do with it,” I said as I opened the door. “Thanks again, Mrs. Bowman.”

She had been searching my face carefully; now she looked away from me, her dark eyes suddenly troubled.

“Poor Nadine,” she said softly, more to herself than to me. “She was the happiest girl I ever knew.”

There didn't seem to be very much I could say to that. I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me.

Chapter Three

STAN RAYDER came out of the dead girl's apartment just as I reached her door. Draped loosely over his forearm he was carrying what appeared to be a woman's white petticoat; and, as usual, he seemed to be mildy surprised about something.

“What's that you're carrying?” I asked.

“When you get a little older, you'll recognize such things right off, Pete. It's a petticoat.”

“And?”

“I found it in her dresser,” he said, handing it to me. “Take a look at those creases.”

I shook the petticoat out, and it almost immediately bunched itself together again in a number of lengthwise creases.

“I see what you mean,” I said.

He nodded. “I think maybe we've got our murder weapon, Pete. A guy could grab both ends, loop it around a girl's neck, and have himself the sweetest little garrote he could want.”

“And it would be too wide to leave any ruptured blood vessels,” I said.

“That's the clever part.”

“You say you found this in her dresser?”

“It was in a drawer with a bunch of other underclothes. Right on top. None of the other stuff had so much as a wrinkle. That's why I noticed it.”

“Was it bunched up when you found it?”

“No, but I saw the creases. The guy'd spread it out real neat and nice, but when I picked it up it jumped right back into the shape it was in when he had hold of both ends of it.”

“You ask the M.E. what he thought?”

“Sure. He says it could be.”

“You mean he has doubts about it?”

Stan shrugged. “You know how Vince Baretti is. Until he finishes an autopsy, he won't even say whether a DOA is male or female.”

“Well, what does he think was the cause of death?”

“He isn't talking. He was mumbling something about a possible fractured larynx, but that's as far as he'd go.”

In New York City a homicide is never officially a homicide until the Medical Examiner says it is, and the apparent cause of death is never officially so until the Medical Examiner has performed an autopsy and written his report. The reason for this is that even the most obvious cause of death is sometimes not the cause at all. A man thought to have been run over by a car, for instance, may, upon being autopsied, be found to have died of a heart attack just before he was struck. Again, a child thought to have died in a fall down a stairway may have been thrown down the stairs after a fatal beating by a parent. The possibilities are endless, and the Medical Examiner's Office makes no commitments until it has established the actual cause of death beyond any conceivable doubt.

“He say anything about the time limits?” I asked.

“Any time between two and six A.M., he says.”

“That narrows it down a little. I'd figured on an hour or so longer, at both ends.”

“We came pretty close, for cops,” Stan said, reaching out to take the petticoat. “I think we've caught ourselves a tough one, Pete.”

“Why so?”

“I tossed the place real good. This petticoat is just about all I came up with.”

“You mean you didn't find any letters? No address book?”

“No nothing,” Stan said. “She either stashed her stuff somewhere else, or she got herself robbed.”

“Any signs of forcible entry?”

“No, but the M.E. found little tears on the inner lobes of both her ears, just beneath where she'd had them pierced for earrings.”

“She wore earrings all the time,” I said. “The Bowman girl just told me so.”

“Well, she isn't wearing them now. Somebody probably yanked them out of her ears, and none too gently, either.”

“Maybe she walked in and surprised a loid-worker,” I said “It wouldn't be the first time someone walked in on one of those guys and got themselves killed.”

A loid-worker is a thief who enters apartments by positioning a strip of celluloid against the bevel of the bolt, twisting the knob as far he can, and pressing his hip against the door until the celluloid forces the bolt back far enough to clear the hasp. They usually work in the day-time, and almost always make certain the tenant is out, either by phoning his apartment or by loitering around the building until they see him leave.

“There's been a lot of it in the neighborhood, all right,” Stan said. “But why should he go to all the trouble of stringing her up? A guy like that would kill and run; he wouldn't hang around to make a production out of it.”

“Why not?” I said. “If he was stupid enough to think he could pass it off as a suicide, why wouldn't he?”

“All right,” Stan said. “So he was stupid. But that doesn't explain there not being any marks on her. If she'd surprised this guy, and he jumped her, she'd have shown the wear and tear. Nobody'd just stand there and let a man choke her to death.” He paused. “And then again, maybe she didn't come in. Maybe she was already here, dead drunk, and all naked that way. The guy could of come in, seen her like that, and all at once got the idea that he'd quiet her down permanently and then have himself a time.”

I nodded. “Or he might have been helping himself in here, heard her key in the door, and grabbed the petticoat in time to jump behind the door and garrote her the second she stepped inside.”

Stan took out his handkerchief to mop at the sweat on his forehead. “I never saw it fail,” he said. “The more you think about a deal like this, the more ways you see how it might have happened. But what bothers me is that there weren't any letters or papers or anything like that. Hell, there wasn't even so much as a phone bill or a post card from her Aunt Hattie.”

“You look under the paper liners in the drawers?”

“I looked everywhere, Pete; I didn't miss a trick.”

“How about that bathroom out in the hall?”

“From top to bottom, flushbox and all.” He grinned. “And in between times, while I was resting. I took a look at that empty store upstairs. And that's what it is, too: empty. Couple pieces of ballet stuff in the display window and that's all. There's no way anybody could have got in, and no way they could have got to here from there, if they did.”

“You think a woman could have hoisted her up on that pipe, Stan?” I asked.

“A woman? You kidding? A tall girl like that would weigh about a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Another woman might be able to lift her, but hoisting her up to that pipe and holding her there while she tied the rope would be something else. She'd have to hold all that weight with one arm while she tied a knot in the rope with her other hand.” He shook his head. “Uh-uh, Pete.”

I glanced at the end of my cigar, decided I hadn't chewed it too much to be smokable, and struck a match to it.

“How'd you make out with your girl friend down the hail?” Stan asked.

I gave him the gist of my talk with Judy Bowman and then went back to make certain I hadn't missed anything.

When I finished, Stan said, “You think she might know more than she's letting on, Pete?”

“I don't know. That's just one of the little items we'll have to straighten out.”

“What do you figure Nadine was running in there? It doesn't sound like a whorehouse, and it sure doesn't look like any shooting gallery. How do you hunch it, Pete?”

“I don't,” I said. “If she'd stayed in her apartment while her company was there, it'd be different. But she didn't.”

“Well, that's one problem we haven't got,” he said. “All we have to do is talk to that redhead in the antique shop. The one your girl friend saw in the hall.”

“Unless, of course, she was simply making a perfectly normal call of some kind,” I said. “People sometimes do that, you know.”

“That leaves us with Marty and Clifford,” Stan said. “And only one name for each.”

“I'm going to take a walk down to the antique shop,” I said. “While I'm gone, see if the techs have finished with the phone, and then call the squad commander and tell him what we've got. He'll want to take us off the duty roster and so on. And then call the phone company and ask for a list of all the toll calls made on Nadine's phone during the last three months. We're almost certain to get a line on somebody that way; maybe we'll even get a lead to Clifford or Marty.”

“I never saw it otherwise,” Stan said. “You talk to all the women and I do all the dirty work. It just doesn't seem right.”

“That's funny — it seems right to me,” I said. “The techs come up with anything?”

“Not much. They lifted a couple of pretty fair prints off that bottle of whisky Nadine had on her dresser, but they don't hold out much hope for them.”

“Why not?”

“The finger span's too narrow. They figure they're probably Nadine's.”

“And that's all they've got?”

“That's it. Two pretty good fingerprints and about two thousand smears. You know how it is.”

“Well, I'd better head for that antique shop,” I said. “Hold on to the hangrope and petticoat, Stan; we'll want to book them as evidence.”

“Yes, sir, Detective Selby. Was there anything else?”

“Not that I can think of offhand,” I said, turning to leave. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“Sure you will,” Stan said. “You and all those women.”

Chapter Four

THE PEDRICK ANTIQUE SHOP on the corner contained a few large pieces and an almost incredible number of smaller ones. Every wall was festooned with brackets and shelves, and the ceiling was completely obscured by lamps and lanterns of every conceivable kind and weathervanes in every form, from mermaids to the angel Gabriel blowing his horn.

I made my way down a narrow aisle, turned right, and came out at a surprisingly modern-looking desk in the middle of a small clearing.

The woman working at the desk was somewhere in her late thirties, a redhead with very white skin, widely set green eyes, and a mouth that looked as if it could grow hard with no trouble at all. She was holding a small artist's brush, dusting carefully around the raised figures on what appeared to be some kind of urn.

I cleared my throat.

She glanced up at me and smiled. “I'm sorry,” she said, starting to rise. “I didn't realize anyone had come in.”

“Don't bother to get up,” I said.

She sank back down and her smile widened a little.” What can I do for you?”

I gestured toward the urn. “Very pretty,” I said.

She nodded proudly. “Yes, isn't it? Jasperware like this is all too rare. This is late eighteenth century.”

“Are you the proprietor?”

“Yes. I'm Mrs. Pedrick.”

“I'd like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Pedrick.”

“About antiques? Why, of course.”

“About Nadine Ellison,” I said. “I understand you're acquainted with her.” I showed her my badge.

The smile stayed on her lips a full five seconds after it had left her eves. “You're a detective?”

“Detective Selby, Sixth Precinct.”

“But why in the world… What's happened?”

“We're not quite sure,” I said.

“Is Nadine in some kind of trouble?”

“No.”

I hadn't been wrong about her mouth; it grew hard with no difficulty whatever.

“Then just what is all this?” she demanded. “If Nadine's not in any trouble, then why—”

“It's generally best to leave most of the questions to the police,” I said. “When was the last time you saw Nadine, Mrs. Pedrick?”

She glared at me. “Not in ages,” she said, starting to get up again.

“Keep your seat, please, Mrs. Pedrick,” I said. “You saw her yesterday afternoon. It was somewhere around two o'clock.”

She sat down heavily, and suddenly her face seemed a great deal older. “That little dark-eyed witch down the hall!” she said, almost inaudibly. “She's the one; she has to be.”

“Maybe I'd better lock the door,” I said. “That way we won't be interrupted.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, perhaps you'd better.”

I walked back to the street door, threw the latch, pulled down the shade over the glass, and came back to the desk.

“Nadine a friend of yours?” I asked, sitting down on the edge of the desk.

She nodded. “In a way — yes.”

“You seem reluctant to talk about her. Why so?”

“It's so… well, so personal.”

“What's your first name, Mrs. Pedrick?” I asked.

“Iris.”

“And your husband's?”

“George.” She said the name firmly enough, but there was something about the way her eyes darted away from mine for an instant that made me decide to change the direction of my interrogation.

“George approve of Nadine, does he?” I asked.

“He — he doesn't know her.”

“In fact,” I said, throwing it away, “George doesn't even know about her.”

She glanced at me sharply, then looked away again and shook her head. “Of course he doesn't know about her,” she said. “There's no need to play cat and mouse with me, Mr. Selby.”

It was going much better than I'd had any right to expect. “There'll be no cat and mouse,” I said. “There'll be no trick questions and no fancy fencing technique. I'll ask some straight questions, and I'll expect some straight answers.” I paused. “Do we understand each other, Mrs. Pedrick?”

Her eyes were stricken. “Is there any way I can keep this from my husband?”

“You should have thought of that before,” I said.

“People are human,” she said. “They do human things.”

“Everything will depend entirely on how straight you talk.” I said. “We know a lot about Nadine Ellison, but we want to know more. We want to know everything you can tell us.”

“It's not myself I'm worried about,” she said dismally. “It's George. If he found out that I… “ She suddenly raised her hands to the top of the desk and clenched them together so tightly that the knuckles grew bone-white. “I'm not overstating it, Mr. Selby. If my husband found out about me, it would kill him.”

I didn't say anything.

“What — what do you want to know?” she asked.

“Everything,” I said. “You might begin with how you met her, and then give me sort of a freehand sketch of what happened, from then on up till now.”

“Can you promise me that George won't…?”

“The promises will depend,” I said. “I've already told you that.

“She bit at her lower lip for a few moments, then sighed resignedly and unclenched her hands. “I met her right here in the shop. I needed a girl to help out for a few days, and she was the first to answer my ad.”

“How long ago was this?”

“About six months ago.”

“You got along well, did you?”

“Yes. She's a very lovely and charming girl.” She hesitated.

“All right, Mrs. Pedrick, go ahead.”

“Well, we became friends — confidantes, really — almost right away. One thing led to another, and when she learned that I had a friend, she suggested that I might like to borrow her apartment.”

I nodded, as if she were merely confirming something I already knew.

“My husband has been ill for a long time,” she went on. “For several years. I… well, otherwise, I would have had no friend.”

“I'm only a cop, Mrs. Pedrick,” I said. “Not a judge.”

“To make it brief, I called my friend, and we went over to Nadine's apartment that same afternoon. From then on, we went there often — at least two or three times a week.”

“Right up till yesterday afternoon?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And always with the same friend?”

“Yes, always.”

“What's his name?”

“Do you absolutely have to know?”

“Yes.”

“Dycer,” she said. “Eddie Dycer.”

“Where can I find him?”

Her eyes strayed to the front of the shop and back again. “He tends bar across the street. In the Hi-Lo.”

I got out my notebook. “Miss Ellison seems to have been a very generous girl,” I said. “And not only with you.”

“You mean the way she loaned out her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“I paid her,” she said. “After the first two or three times we went over there, she began hinting around a bit.” She shrugged. “It was an inconvenience, of course-and I did appreciate it.”

“How much did she charge you?”

“The first few times it was five dollars. Then she raised it to ten.”

“For how much time?”

“An hour or two, usually. Sometimes it was even less. It all depended on how soon someone else wanted it.”

“Is that just about what she was charging the others?”

“I really don't know. She never told me.”

“Has she worked anywhere else, Mrs. Pedrick?”

“I don't think so.”

“Isn't ten dollars for an hour or two's privacy pretty steep? For only a little more than half of that, you and your friend could have rented a hotel room for twenty-four hours.”

“It's not a question of money,” she said. “It's simply that I couldn't take a chance on anyone seeing me at a hotel. My husband has friends all over town, and so do I. At Nadine's, I was safe.”

“What this boils down to,” I said, “is that Nadine makes a business of renting her apartment out for assignations.”

She nodded silently.

“And a very good business, too,” I said. “She must be raking it in hand over fist.”

“I suppose so.”

“How much has she told you about herself?” I asked.

“Very little.”

“I thought you said you were confidantes.”

“Yes, I know. But I'm afraid I confided a great deal more in her than she ever did in me.”

“She ever tell you about singing with dance bands out on the West Coast?”

“Why, no.”

“She ever mention anything about music or musicians?”

“I don't think so.” She looked at me puzzledly. “You know, that's very strange. I recall distinctly her telling me that she'd always wanted to make a trip to California some time. She said she was one of these people who have never been west of Jersey, and that she'd often wondered what the rest of the country was really like.”

“You know where she's from?”

“She always talks as if she had been born right here in New York.”

“You acquainted with her husband?”

“I wasn't aware she had one.”

“When Nadine rented you her apartment, did she just leave her door open for you, or give you her key, or what?”'

“Well, first I'd call her to see whether it was all right to come over. When I got there, she'd give me her key and leave.”

“You and your friend go there together?”

“No. We'd go separately.”

“And when you left, what then?”

“One or the other of us would have a certain place and a certain time to meet Nadine and return her key.”

“Where was this?”

“I didn't mean there was a specific place. It could be almost anywhere. What we'd do was agree on the place and time.”

“I see. Did you ever meet any of her other customers?”

“No.”

“All this is very important, Mrs. Pedrick.”

“I realize that.”

“You have any idea who any of these other people might be?”

“No.”

“How about Nadine's other friends or relatives? She ever mention them?”

“No.”

“That's not very likely,” I said. “Do you mean to tell me that, in all the time you knew her, she never once—”

“I'm telling you the truth,” she broke in. “I know how improbable that sounds. But that's the way it is.”

“You know a man named Marty? He's a friend of Nadine's.”

She pursed her lips. “Marty? No, I don't believe I do.”

“How about a man named Clifford?”

She thought about it for a while, then shook her head.

I glanced at my watch. So far, I'd learned why Nadine Ellison had had so-much company. But that was about all. I was getting nowhere, and getting there very slowly. It seemed to me that the time had come for a completely different approach.

“Nadine is dead, Mrs. Pedrick,” I said. “She's been murdered.”

It was as if I'd just called her the most insulting name I could think of. She cringed back from me, face working with shock, her eyes probing mine almost beseechingly; it was as if she half expected me to tell her I was sorry, that I hadn't really meant what I'd said at all.

“Nadine?” she whispered. “Nadine murdered?”

I didn't say anything. Somewhere across the city a siren suddenly keened into life, and I sat listening to it as it rose and fell, wondering vaguely what kind of squeal it was, what kind of trouble.

“Who—” Mrs. Pedrick began. Then she shook her head incredulously. “It just doesn't seem possible. Who killed her?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out,” I said. “But don't be too upset, Mrs. Pedrick. This particular talk is just routine.”

She sat very rigid, her palms pressed flat on the top of the desk. “It just doesn't seem possible,” she said again.

“I don't like to keep pushing the question,” I said, “but it has to be done. Do you have any ideas about who might have wanted her dead?”

Her shoulders seemed to have slumped a little. “No,” she said. “It's hard to imagine anyone even disliking her.”

“She ever say she was in any kind of trouble?”

“No, never.”

“She ever mention any threats on her life?”

“Good heavens, no. Why should anyone threaten a girl like Nadine?”

“I wish I knew. If I did, I might have a lot longer lead on who killed her.” I paused. “Think back very carefully now, Mrs. Pedrick. Can you recall anything at all that might have some connection with this homicide? Something you saw or overheard, for instance. Or maybe just something you had a feeling about. Anything.”

She didn't answer for such a long time that I felt it necessary to prompt her.

“Well?” I said.

“No — not unless you'd consider a prowler—”

“Prowler?”

“But this has been some time ago,” she said. “Do you think it's important?”

“I certainly do.”

“Well, it happened when I stayed all night at Nadine's. My friend—”

“You spent the entire night there?”

“Yes. Nadine was going off somewhere for the week end, and she said that, if my friend and I wanted to, we could stay all night.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “When was this?”

“About three weeks ago. No; it was about a month.”

“All right, go on.”

“Well, Eddie had to leave about three o'clock, but I stayed in bed. I don't know just how long it was after he left, but suddenly I woke up and saw this man. At first I thought it was Eddie. It was dark and I started to turn on the light and say something to him. But then I realized he had a flashlight and that he was much too broad-shouldered to be Eddie. I–I was so terrified I couldn't even scream.”

“What'd this man look like?”

“I couldn't see his face. All I could see was his outline. I guess I did make some kind of noise, though, because he suddenly whirled around and started toward the bed. He kept the flashlight right in my face, and from then on I couldn't see anything at all. The flashlight blinded me.”

“So what happened?”

“He kept the flashlight in my face and came right up to the bed. He had some kind of knife in his other hand, be-cause the flashlight glittered on it. And then he raised it up over his head and I realized he was going to—”

“What stopped him?”

“I don't know. I was just simply paralyzed. I kept hearing the scream somewhere down inside of me, but I couldn't get it out. It was horrible.”

“You mean he just raised this knife, or whatever it was, and then lowered it again and went away?”

“He must have stood there for about half a minute. He was — well, sort of talking to himself.”

“What did he say?”

“I don't know; he wasn't talking in English.”

“You know what language it was?”

“As best I could make out, I'd say it was Slavic.”

“Couldn't you narrow that down a little? Slavic covers a lot of territory.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “That's as close as I can come. I'm no authority on languages, Mr. Selby. And even if I had been, I wasn't exactly in the right frame of mind to do very much about sorting them out.” She paused. “I did get the impression that he was surprised and — I don't know how else to put it — disappointed about something. I kept wishing I could find my voice, so that I could tell him to go ahead and rob the apartment and let me alone.”

“Did it occur to you that the reason he was surprised and disappointed was that he had expected to find Nadine in that bed, and found you there instead?”

She stared at me blankly.

“He wasn't necessarily after loot,” I said. “He might have been there after Nadine.”

“You mean he might actually have come there to kill her?”

“It's possible.”

“My God! Think what would have happened if he hadn't put that flashlight on me!”

“It's something to think about, all right,” I said. “What'd he do after he stood there for a while? Just up and walk out?”

“Yes — and it was a good five minutes afterward before I could stop trembling enough to get up and put a chair under the door knob.”

“I assume you didn't call the police because you were afraid something might come out about you and Eddie Dycer.”

“Yes. Naturally.”

“Wasn't the light burning in the hall?”

“Yes.”

“Then how does it happen you couldn't see him when he opened the hall door? He would have been directly in the light.”

“I was facing the other way. I was so paralyzed with fear that I couldn't have turned my head if my life had depended on it.”

“What'd Nadine say about all this?”

“She didn't believe it had happened. There was nothing missing from the apartment, nothing disturbed, and no signs of anyone tampering with the lock — so she thought I must have been dreaming. I do have perfectly horrible nightmares sometimes, and I'd told her about them. That's what she thought it was — a nightmare. The more I tried to convince her otherwise, the more I amused her. Finally I decided to say no more about it.”

“No chance she could have been right about it being a nightmare, is there?”

“Definitely not, Mr. Selby,” she said testily. “None whatsoever.”

“Nadine had a pair of sapphire earrings,” I said. “You ever see them?”

“She wore them constantly.”

“You know whether they were the genuine article?”

“Yes. It happens I am an authority on stones, Mr. Selby. Nadine's earrings were genuine sapphires.”

“Valuable?”

“Very. I never examined them too closely, but I'd judge they were worth about two thousand.” She picked up the paint brush, and then dropped it and began drumming her fingertips soundlessly on the top of the desk. “I remember that when she came in asking for work, I wondered why a girl with such an expensive pair of earrings preferred not to sell them, even if it meant going to work for the pittance I could pay her.” Her voice was even enough, but her eyes were frightened, as if she were reflecting on the close call she'd had in Nadine's apartment.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about that man with the flashlight?” I asked. “You saw only his outline. That's all?”

“Yes, that's all. He was broad-shouldered, as I told you, and very tall. He must have been as tall as you are.”

“You're certain there's nothing else?”

“Quite certain, Mr. Selby.”

“You think Nadine may have been blackmailing anyone?”

“Blackmail? Nadine? Why, of course not. She wasn't that kind of person.”

“I don't think either of us can be too sure just what kind of person she was,” I said.

She shook her head emphatically. “Not Nadine. It's inconceivable.”

“Still, she was in a pretty good business for it. Almost every one of her customers would have been vulnerable. If they hadn't been, they wouldn't have been willing to pay her so much for so little.”

“I can't help thinking you'll find you're mistaken, Mr. Selby,” she said. “I realize what she did can't be defended morally or ethically, any more than what I did can be. But Nadine had a kind of — call it a rationale. She merely understood that people are often all too human. All she did was provide a place where they could be human safely.”

“In other words, if she didn't accommodate them, someone else would,” I said. “Was that the rationale?”

“I suppose you might put it something like that, yes,” she said. “But there was certainly nothing vicious about her, Mr. Selby. No matter what else can be said of her, she had no meanness in her.”

I took out the snapshot of Nadine and Marty and placed it on the desk before her. “You ever see this before?” I asked.

“Isn't it the one from her mirror?”

“Yes. How about the man? You recognize him?”

“Yes. At least I think it's the same man.”

“You know his name?”

“No, that I can't tell you. But I think it's the same man that…” She broke off; and once again her eyes made the same involuntary trip to the front of the shop and back again.

“The same man that what, Mrs. Pedrick?” I said.

“I think I've seen him come in the Hi-Lo,” she said reluctantly. “Mr. Selby?”

“Yes.”

“Must you talk to Eddie?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you didn't.”

“Why not?”

“He — Well he has an unbelievable temper.”

“I'll bear that in mind.”

“He'll be very angry with me, if you cause him any annoyance.”

My cigar had gone out again. I relighted it, put the snapshot of Nadine and Marty back in my pocket, and started for the door.

“I won't even mention your name,” I said.

Chapter Five

THERE ARE, it seems to me, more different kinds of people, places and things in Greenwich Village than there are in any other part of the city. The Village, as a whole, is like no other place anywhere. It is all things to all people, and yet it is not always the same thing to any of them.

There are, for example, the saloons.

The Hi-Lo was a workingman's bar, a small, narrow place with black paint halfway up the plate-glass front and, above the paint, a couple of hundred playing cards stuck to the glass in fan-shaped groups of five, mostly straights and flushes. To the left of the Hi-Lo was a posh drinkery called The Academy, complete with gold-and-blue canopy and liveried doorman. To the right was The Ultimate Ecstasy, a shabby-looking dike joint that usually had more lesbians cruising the sidewalk outside it than it had paying customers within.

I walked into the Hi-Lo's air-cooled dimness and took the stool nearest the street end of the bar. Aside from the barkeep and a middle-aged lady loner, it was empty.

The bartender was about forty, a powerfully built man with a square, heavy-featured face, thick black hair combed straight back to the nape of his neck, and gray eyes with tiny hoods at their outer corners. He finished totalling up a handful of bar tabs, stacked them neatly beside the cash register, and walked up to my end of the bar.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “What'll it be?”

“Glass of water,” I said.

“Characters,” he said softly. “Straight?”

“With an ice cube,” I said, and showed him my potsy.

He sighed, drew a glass of water, dropped an ice cube into it, and sat it down before me. “So?” he said.

“You Eddie Dycer?”

“Maybe.”

“It's a hot day,” I said. “Too hot to fool around.”

He shrugged. “So I'm Eddie Dycer. So?”

I showed him the snapshot of Nadine and Marty. “You know these people?” I asked.

He glanced at the picture disinterestedly, then made a pass at the bar with his towel. “I think maybe I've seen them around,” he said. “The guy, anyway.”

“You've seen the girl, too,” I said. “You've seen her two or three times a week for the last six months.”

“What a fink,” he said. “She's got a big mouth, that one.”

“How much do you know about her?”

“What's to know? She's a friend of a friend of mine. All I know is she's too good-looking a piece to have such a big mouth.” He put both elbows on the bar and leaned forward. “What's the beef?”

“Nothing that'll be any skin off yours,” I said, “Just answer my questions.”

“So ask one.”

“I did. I asked you what you knew about her.”

“Look friend. I used her place a few times. That's all. If she tells you different, she's even a bigger liar than I thought she was.”

“She come in often?”

“No. Call it half a dozen times, maybe. No more.”

“But you've seen her quite a bit.”

“Like you say — two or three times a week. But I never took to her so much. The only times I ever really talked to her was when she came in here — and that hasn't been for quite a while.”

“What makes you think she's a liar?”

“You kidding? That girl can outlie anybody I ever heard. There used to be a couple of old-time con men come in here and lie to each other, just for practice. But hell, they weren't even in her league.”

“For instance?”

“Well, for instance, there was this stuff about a tapeworm. She's got this terrific shape on her, and so when I say something about it — you know, just kind of kidding her along a little — she says the way she keeps it is that she's got a tapeworm. That's the way she keeps from getting fat, see? She had this tapeworm put inside her by a doc in Europe. She says, over there, it's legal; all the women do it. But not over here. Here, it's against the law.”

“Bar talk, maybe,” I said.

“Nope, it isn't that. She doesn't drink much. It's just that she just plain can't help lying. Why, once she told me she was a Canadian. She went on and on about how her folks had this big stash up there and how she'd grown up speaking French and English at the same time. And then, about two weeks later, she sat right there where you're sitting now and gave me a long story about how she was brought up on this big-assed ranch down in Texas.” He lit a cigarette and let the smoke dribble slowly through his nostrils. “I could go on for the rest of the day,” he said. “One wild story after another. It was like she knew goddam well you knew she was lying, but she had to do it anyway. She just couldn't help herself.”

“All right,” I said. “Apart from the lying, what can you tell—”

“You've got it all,” he said. “Why should I stiff you? The only other thing I can tell you about her is that she never wore anything under her dress. No brassiere, I mean. She'd sit there and drive the boys nuts. If she wasn't sitting there swinging those knockers around, she was all the time yanking up her skirt and fooling with her garters. Between one thing and the other, she had the boys in a bad way.”

“And that's the story?” I said.

“That's it,” he said. “I don't know one damn thing about her, except what I told you. Lies, legs, and knockers — that's all I know.”

“How about the man in the picture?” I asked. “She ever come in here with him?”

“Every time. I never saw her with anybody else.”

“You know who he is?”

“His name's Marty something; I don't know what.”

“You know where I can find him?”

“Why don't you ask Nadine?”

“I'm asking you.”

“How should I know? He never says much. In fact, he never says anything. All he does is sit there and drink beer and look down the front of Nadine's dress.”

“You know what he does for a living?”

“No. But if you ask me, he's some kind of hustler. He's got it written all over him.”

“Any theories, Eddie?”

“Pimp, maybe. He's got the look-but then, so do half the characters that come in here. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Anything special about him?”

“If there is, it sure don't stick out. He talks kind of Southern. Real soft and lazylike. One night there was this dock walloper came in. A big bruiser-type guy with a real mean eye, and juiced up just enough to be nasty. He was sitting next to Marty, and I guess he must have been tuning in on his conversation with Nadine, because pretty soon he starts making out he's got a Southern accent.”

The lady loner down the bar banged her glass down hard enough to shatter it. “Service!” she yelled. “What'n hell kind of bartender are you, Eddie?”

“You're cut off, Mildred,” he said. “Go pass out some place else.” He shook his head. “What a way to make a buck,” he said to me. “Anyhow, this big guy is pretty pitiful. You know, like maybe he hasn't got all his agates. And so Marty is just sitting there, getting redder and redder, and all of a sudden he comes up off his stool and grabs this big guy by the front of his coat and lifts him clean off the floor. You never saw anything like it. He didn't say one word, Marty didn't; he just holds this guy up off the floor and looks him in the eye. My God, what a look he gives him! It'd chill your blood.”

“This Marty's a pretty good size, is he?”

“Yeah, he's pretty big. But this other guy is a damn sight bigger. He'd shade Marty fifty pounds, at least.”

“What happened?”

“Well, like I say, Marty isn't saying one word. He's just standing there holding this guy up by his coat and giving him the eye. The guy's like he's frozen stiff. And all at once his coat starts to come apart at the seams and he just sort of oozes down through it, real slow like, all the way to the floor. Must have taken him damn near a minute to get there, and all the time there's not a sound in this whole bar. Nobody can believe what they're looking at. And then the guy's feet finally touch the floor, and Marty just politely turns him around so he's facing the door and gives him a little push. Just a little tap on the shoulder, you know. But that was all, brother, that was all. The bruiser takes off. Hell, he didn't even look back once.”

I took a sip of my ice water.

“Marty and Nadine get along together?” I asked.

“Like mother and son,” he said. “Man, you should see them. She babies him like he was about nine years old.”

“How old is he, by the way?”

“About thirty — give or take a couple years.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“They get along beautiful. Nadine does all the paying, too. She won't let Marty spend a dime. All friend Marty does is slop up beer and look down her dress. It's like she had a magnet hanging down there.”

“How long's Marty been around?”

“Couple months, I guess. That's the first I ever saw of him, anyhow.”

“You think any of your other customers could give me a line on him?”

“I doubt it. He only talks to Nadine. I'll, bet that guy hasn't said more than ten words to anybody else in all the times he's been in here.”

“A little service down here, God damn it,” the lady loner said to nobody in particular.

“Anything else you can tell me, Eddie?” I asked.

“Nothing that'd do you any good, chief.”

“All right,” I said, getting off the stool. “If you think of anything else, give me a call at the station house. My name's Selby.”

“Sure thing, chief. I'll do that.”

“And ditto if Marty should happen to drop in. If I'm not there, ask for Detective Rayder. If he isn't there either, leave a message.”

I walked outside, turned back in the direction of the specialty store above the dead girl's apartment, then paused.

The store was on the other side of Bleecker, little more than half a block away, and I was surprised at the size of the crowd that had already obstructed the sidewalk and was beginning to spill over into the street. The reporters and photographers would be there by now, I knew, as well as two or three D.A.'s men, a cop or so from Homicide West, and a growing number of brass hats from Headquarters and the other precincts.

It was an old story. The brass swarms in, mills around, makes statements to the press, and then swarms off again, leaving the squeal to the men who'll do the actual work: the precinct detective team.

I felt a little sorry for Stan, sweltering down there in that one-room apartment. What with bowing to the visiting royalty and answering the same questions over and over again with each new arrival, he'd have his hands full for some time to come. Still, if I went back to the apartment, I'd have to go through exactly the same routine — which would mean that both of us would be hung up indefinitely while there was urgent work waiting to be done, that ought to be begun at once.

I walked back into the bar, looked up Nadine Ellison's number in the directory on the shelf outside the phone booth, and called it.

Stan Rayder's voice was very pleasant, very polite.

“Sorry, Stan,” I said. “It's only me.”

“Just my luck,” he said.

“You mind holding the fort alone?” I asked. “I'd like to head back to the squad room and get things rolling.”

“Good idea. We've got wall-to-wall brass here, and brass on top of brass.”

“Any new developments?”

“No. How about you?”

I filled him in on my sessions with Iris Pedrick and Eddie Dycer.

“So that's what our girl was doing,” he said when I'd finished. “Making a damn good living just renting out her workbench!”

“The body still there?”

“Yeah, but the M.E. is about to ship it to Bellevue.”

“Well, I guess that's just about it, Stan.”

“Say hello to the gang at the precinct,” he said wryly.

I hung up, left the bar, and walked down to the unmarked Plymouth sedan in which Stan and I had arrived.

On my way back to the station house I kept seeing Nadine Ellison's naked body twisting slowly on the steam pipe. Her killer could be in Miami by now, I reflected. Or in Los Angeles. Or he might be out over the Atlantic, halfway to Europe.

And then again, he might be quietly drinking beer in a Village bar just like the one I'd walked out of a few moments ago.

Chapter Six

BY THE TIME I reached the detective squad room on the second floor of the station house, the clock over the speaker on the wall said twenty minutes of two. There were no reports in my In basket and no telephone messages on my call spike. Aside from a teen-age blonde girl handcuffed to a chair near the door, I was the only one in the room.

“You, too,” the girl said. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, skin-tight blue jeans, and cream-colored moccasins with yellow lacings. “You, too, Buster.”

“What?” I said.

“The same thing I told the other cops they could do. You can do it, too.”

“They giving you a bad time?”

“They're trying. They've got me in on a possession.”

“Tea?”

“No, damn it; 'H.' They think I was holding two decks of the stuff.”

“Well, were you?”

“Hell, no. It's nothing but powdered sugar.”

“Been doing a little cutting, have you?”

“I was going to bake a cake.” She shook her head contemptuously. “Possession! What a gas. All they can do to me is apologize.”

I went out to report to Acting Lieutenant Barney Fells, the Commander of the Sixth Detective Squad, but the little cubbyhole he calls an office was empty.

Back at my desk again, I sat down, lit a fresh cigar, and went to work.

My first call was to the Bureau of Criminal Information, to ask for checks on Nadine Ellison, Judy Bowman, Iris Pedrick, and Eddie Dycer. Then, while I waited for BCI to call me back I phoned the officer who had been in charge of that morning's line-up to ask whether he'd shown any loid-workers or sex offenders. It seemed to me that there were enough unusual factors in the homicide to suggest the possibility of a sex angle, and I wanted to touch all the bases.

The line-up officer told me he had shown no loid-workers, and that although he had shown a sex offender, the man had been jailed yesterday afternoon and kept there ever since.

Still waiting for BCI, I went through the arrest flimsies and the D.D. 104's — the Reports of Unusual Occurrences by Detectives. I didn't find anything. There'd been the usual number of arrests and unusual occurrences, but none of them seemed to tie in with the homicide.

Checking the flimsies and D.D. 104's was standard routine, of course, because sometimes a person will commit one crime, and then commit one or more other crimes in an effort to cover up the first. A man who has knifed another may have gotten blood on his clothing and steal other clothing to replace it. Or a man who has killed someone may try to get out of town in a stolen car, or mug someone in the subway to get money for train fare. If the second crime is committed in the immediate vicinity of the first, and can be related to it in some other way, the arrest flimsies and D.D. 104's can prove helpful indeed.

But this, apparently, was not one of those times.

“You got a cigarette?” the blonde girl said

“Sorry,” I said. “I use cigars.”

“You would,” she said, rubbing her wrist where the handcuff had chafed it. “Why'n hell don't you send up a smoke signal for your buddy-boys? I'm getting tired of waiting. And besides, this particular type chair is hard on a girl's ass.”

“Quiet down,” I said.

“You know what you can do,” she said.

The more I mulled it over, the better the possibility of a sex angle began to seem. People do weird things for sexual enjoyment; strangling themselves and others is only one of them. The idea, of course, is to stop just the other side of climax and just this side of death; but by the time that point is reached, the victim is often in such a state of excitement that he know longer recognizes it. In our years together, Stan and I had cut down a lot of them: men dressed in women's clothing, girls with their bodies covered with obscene words written in lipstick, men and women with stomachs bristling with needles or forearms livid with cigarette burns.

But if Nadine Ellison had died in a similar way, it had been someone else who had handled the petticoat and the rope.

I didn't want to tie up my own phone again, in case BCI should try to get through to me, so I went back out to Barney Fell's office to use his.

I called Ted Norton, a modus operandi expert in another department of BCI.

“It looks like you've caught yourself a dilly, Pete,” Ted said after I'd told him how we'd found Nadine's body. “Maybe some guy was playing along with that petticoat, just for kicks, and went too damn far.”

“It's just an outside chance,” I said. “But if it did happen that way, the most logical thing for him to do would be to simulate a suicide.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time. You get an alky count of her yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “She had a bottle in the room, though.”

“Smell any on her?”

“No.”

“Sounds pretty good, Pete. If she wasn't dead drunk when the guy worked on her with that chemise—”

“Petticoat.”

“Petticoat, chemise — who cares? The point is, if she wasn't completely jugged when he was working on her, and if she hasn't got a single scratch or bruise on her to show she tried to stop him — well, what else could it be but that she was letting him do it, just for jollies?”

“We don't even know the cause of death yet, Ted.”

“Yeah. Well, even so, it looks pretty good.”

“How long'll it take to sift out the likely M.O.'s?”

“Not too long, Pete. Couple hours, at the outside. Now get off the phone so I can go to work.”

I hung up and walked out to my desk again. The arresting officers had taken the blonde narcotics suspect away, and in her place was Louis Lozeck.

“Hello, Mr. Lozeck,” I said.

“Mr. Detective Selby,” he said, and then sat smiling at me, bobbing his head happily, a harmless, pitiable old man with soft, gentle eyes, an enormous white mustache, and a yellowed, leathery face so completely and deeply corrugated with wrinkles that more than one press photographer took his picture almost every time he saw him.

Lozeck lived in terror of his sister-in-law, a woman who he was certain possessed the evil eye and bewitched him regularly. On the days when he found his sister-in-law's evil eye unbearable, he came to the squad room and sat there, smiling and nodding, until her sorcery lost some of its potency.

“Coffee, Mr. Detective Selby?” Louis asked.

“A quart, Louis,” I said, and put a bill on my desk.

He picked up the bill and went away, still smiling and nodding, but glancing about furtively, alert to anything his sister-in-law might send to bedevil him.

I sat in the empty squad room for a while; and then, tired of waiting for BCI to call me back with the results of their checks on the people I'd talked to, I phoned Lost Property and asked for a watch-and-check on Nadine Ellison's sapphire earrings.

The Lost Property Bureau maintains records of everything, from automobiles to billfolds, that has been reported as lost, found or stolen. If anyone tried to sell or hock the earrings at any of the city's hundreds of pawn shops, the transaction would, I hoped, appear on one of the Bureau's D.B. 60 cards — the form-cards which the city provides all pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, and which they in turn are required by law to submit daily for every article pledged or purchased.

In the event of a promising listing, the Bureau would check it out immediately; and if, as sometimes happens, the name and address of the seller proved to be phony, a detective would be sent to the shop to get a physical description of the seller, as well as to obtain as much additional information about him as the proprietor could provide. Later, Stan and I might come up with a suspect answering the seller's description; and if that happened, the chances were fairly good that we would also have come up with our murderer.

I'd no sooner returned the phone to its cradle than it began to ring. It was Milt Farrel, the detective who'd been running the checks for me at BCI.

“Just finished up, Pete,” he said. “Sorry to take so long, but I had to do a little phoning around.”

“That's all right. What've you got for me, Milt?”

“Well, first I'll tell you what I haven't. What I haven't got is anything on Judy Bowman, Iris Pedrick, and Eddie Dycer. What I have got is quite a bundle on Nadine Ellison.”

I picked up a pencil. “Let's have it,” I said.

“You should have told me the girl was married, Pete. It would've helped.”

“I didn't know she was.”

“Well, she is, boy. And if you want my two bits' worth, you'd better get out a pickup on her husband right away.”

“Why so?”

“Mostly because he's tried to kill her a couple of times. Maybe, this time, he got lucky.”

“When was this?”

“Little over a year ago.”

“Here, in New York?”

“No. In St. Louis. That's where they're from. I came across a hold order from St. Louis. They were after him for beating somebody to death in a brawl. They thought he might hit out for New York because his wife was here.”

“This brawl have anything to do with Nadine?”

“No. It was a long time after she left town. The guy just naturally likes to beat hell out of people, it looks like.”

“What about these tries on Nadine's life?”

“Well, they couldn't quite prove he tried to kill her; but that's what he did. He beat her up twice, and both times passers-by pulled him off her just in time.”

“Maybe you'd better back up and give me this from the beginning,” I said.

“Sure, Pete. I just finished talking with the St. Louis police a couple of minutes ago. They said Nadine and her husband were both orphans, and that they met each other at some kind of reunion at the orphanage. Anyhow, they got married, and everything was jake until Nadine had a baby. That damn near flipped both of them. Especially the husband. He went right off his rocker.”

“How come?”

“Hold on a minute and I'll tell you. They were at this little fishing shack out in the country somewhere, and all at once Nadine knows it's time to have her baby, and they jump in the car to start back to the city. But the car won't start, and the baby won't wait, and Nadine has it right then and there. Nobody else around for miles; just her husband.”

“That's pretty bad, I'll admit,” I said. “But it happens all the time, Milt. You mean it was enough to—”

“Jesus, will you wait a minute? It wasn't just having it that way; it was what the kid was when he finally got born.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn't a regular baby, Pete. It was a Mongolian idiot. My God, imagine how it must have been. Here they're out there in the middle of nowhere, and she goes through a thing like having a baby; and then it turns out she hasn't had a baby at all. Not a real baby. She looks at it and sees the poor little bugger's a monster.”

I didn't say anything.

“That's what flipped them,” Milt went on. “Hell, it would flip almost anybody. Her husband went right off his head, right then and there. He's pretty stupid, according to St. Louis, and he thought Nadine must have been making it with somebody that looked just like the kid. She told the cops she thought he was going to kill her on the spot.”

“Hell of a thing,” I said. “What happened?”

“I just told you. Her husband went off his head. He ran around in circles for a while, and then he took off down the road and left her lying there. She was there all night. By the time somebody drove along and picked her up, the baby was dead.”

“What's the husband's full name, Milt?”

“Burton C. Ellison. Goes by the name of Burt.”

“And you say Nadine took it pretty hard, too?”

“She took it hard, all right. She spent about a month in the hospital, trying to get over it. Some kind of trauma, St. Louis says. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't talk to anybody, wouldn't open her eyes. You know.”

“What happened to Burt?”

“He disappeared. The first anybody saw of him again was when he caught Nadine on the street outside her house one night and tried to beat her to death with his fists. This was about a month after she got out of the hospital.”

“He go to jail?”

“Not him. He got away from these passers-by who'd finally pulled him off her, and disappeared again.”

“How about the second time?”

“Practically the same thing all over again, Pete. This time he was waiting for her outside a movie.”

“And St. Louis thinks he might still be after her?”

“They don't think; they're positive. They say that's all the guy ever had on his mind. He's gone psycho as hell.”

“What's he look like?”

“It says here he's twenty-six, five-eleven, a hundred and sixty, brown eyes, brown hair, V-shaped scar on right inner wrist, and four-inch tattoo of dancing girl on upper right shoulder.”

“Is that all?” I said. “Hell, Milt, there must be at least half a million men in New York that would—”

“I know,” he said, “but that's all St. Louis had. They couldn't even find a picture of him, except for a couple of kid pictures from the orphanage.”

“How about the F.B.I.?”

“No luck. The guy'd never been in the service, never been arrested, and never been fingerprinted anywhere.” He paused. “That scar and tattoo ought to help, though.”

“Sure,” I said, “provided he happens to be walking around town with his shirt off and his right wrist turned up so everyone can see it.”

“Don't be bitter, boy. A little's better than nothing.”

“You got anything else on him, Milt?”

“No, that's all,” he said. “Got a little more on Nadine, though. She was in a small-size fracas a couple of days ago.”

“What kind?”

“Seems she and a friend of hers got in a hassle with a cab driver. Some kind of argument over the fare. The driver yelled for a cop, and the cop straightened everything out without having to haul anybody in. But he took their names and made a report, just in case.”

“What was her friend's name?”

“Hold on a minute while I find that damn sheet again… Yeah, here it is. The friend's name was Martin Hutchins.”

Martin, I thought; “Marty” for short.

“You got his address, Milt?” I asked.

“That's the only other thing I have got. It's nine twenty-three Bethune Street.”

I wrote the name and address in my book. “Anything else, Milt?”

“No, but you'd better get out that pickup on Burt Ellison. Ten to one, he's your boy.”

“I will,” I said. “Many thanks, Milt.”

“No trouble,” he said, and hung up.

Once again the phone started ringing almost instantly. But it was only Pickled Lil, a lonely old alcoholic who called the squad room at least twice a week to demand that we arrest her letter carrier because he never brought her any mail. I told her we'd arrest him that same afternoon, and then called Communications, gave them Burt Ellison's description, and asked that they broadcast a city-wide pickup on him. Then I reconsidered, and asked that they put the pickup on the teletype network that covers thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Communications fussed a little about the meagerness of the description; but there was nothing to be done about it.

When I had finished with Communications, I called the Chief of Detectives' office and requested the assignment of fifty detectives to full-time duty in and around Nadine Ellison's neighborhood for the purpose of learning as much as possible about her friends and associates, with particular emphasis on anyone thought to have used her apartment for assignations. The detectives were to be placed under the direction of Frank Voyce, an experienced man who would be responsible for the deployment of the other detectives and the evaluation of their reports, and who would be the only one of the special group with whom I would have direct contact. The group's primary objective was the collection of personal information about a specific individual, and not the investigation of a homicide. Each man would be furnished a copy of Nadine's picture, blown up from the snapshot Stan Rayder had taken from her dresser, and would be asked to watch very closely for reaction when he showed it to the people he questioned about her.

When I had completed working out the details, I hung up, took a blank folder from the supply cabinet, typed “Ellison, Nadine-Homicide” on the tab, placed the original UF 61 form inside it, and put the folder in the file drawer reserved for active homicides.

Next, after I had separated the picture of Nadine and Marty with a pair of scissors, I placed Nadine's half in an envelope, wrote both her and my names on it, and slipped Marty's half into my billfold.

Then I made one last call, to tell Stan Rayder about the arrangements I'd made for the fifty detectives under Frank Voyce, and that we now had, not only a line on Nadine's boy friend, Marty Hutchins, but also a brand-new, white-hot suspect in the person of her husband.

As I said so long to Stan, old Louis Lozeck came in with my quart container of coffee. He placed it on the corner of my desk and stood smiling down at me, the ends of his long white mustache looking a little frayed and his lined forehead a bit moist from his round trip.

“Never mind the change, Louis,” I said.

“The coins I will give to some small child, Mr. Detective Selby,” he said, smiling his beatific smile.

It was just a little fiction we indulged in. Louis' pride was too great to permit him to accept tips, even though he never had even so much as tobacco money; and so we had somehow fallen into this routine about his giving the tips to the little ones. A half-hour from now, Louis would make another trip to the corner, to return with some of the most incredibly vicious pipe tobacco I had ever smelled.

Louis Lozeck was the only citizen ever allowed to remain in the squad room alone; and I think the reason we'd made the exception was that the sight of the harmless old man enjoying his poisonous pipe in the chair by the door was the sole touch of gentleness in a place where, without him, it would have been unknown.

The coffee was too hot to drink. I took a few small sips of it in deference to Louis, picked up the envelope containing Nadine Ellison's picture, and went downstairs to leave the envelope at the desk and pay a call on Nadine's boy friend, Marty Hutchins.

Chapter Seven

NINE TWENTY-THREE Bethune Street turned out to be a rooming house, one of those once-elegant, high-stooped buildings that were originally residences of the rich and which, in New York, are almost always referred to as brownstones, despite the kind of building material used in their construction. In this case, the “brownstone” was actually a four-story whitestone, soot-darkened to within a shade or two of black.

I knocked on the door of the third-floor front, which, according to the list of roomers beside the mailbox in the tiny foyer downstairs, belonged to Martin Hutchins.

There was no answer. I knocked again, and was just starting to knock a third time when I heard the creak of bedsprings and the sound of heavy steps moving toward me across a bare wood floor.

The man who opened the door was bulky-shouldered and narrow-waisted, a wedge-shaped man with practically no hips at all. His dark hair was uncombed, his eyes were bloodshot, and his drawn, beard-stained face was sheened with sweat. He wore a slightly soiled white T-shirt, new-looking green chino pants and dark brown loafers with a very high shine.

He looked at me, grimaced, and started to close the door. “No,” he said. “Whatever it is, I don't want any.”

I caught the door with my hand and showed him my potsy. “Police officer, Mr. Hutchins,” I said. “I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

“So soon?” he said, standing back to let me pass inside.

“I was kind of hoping you'd wait a while.”

The room was small and hot and almost completely airless, and there was the kind of sweet-sour smell that comes from someone sweating out a protracted hangover. There was a narrow day bed, a straight chair with a stack of magazines on it, a cigarette-scarred dresser covered with mounds of odds and ends at either side of a clock-radio, and a bed table with a huge, butt-filled ash tray, a nearly-empty fifth of whisky, two scummy glasses and a dented, black-enamel carafe.

Hutchins took the magazines off the straight chair, dropped them on the floor and then sank down heavily on the bed. “Have a seat,” he said. “I didn't quite catch your name.”

I closed the door and sat down. “Selby,” I said. “Sixth Detective Squad.”

He tried to fashion a grin, but it didn't quite come off. “I was kind of hoping you'd let me die in peace,” he said. “Lord, what a head.” His voice had the soft, lazylike quality the bartender at the Hi-Lo had remarked upon, but it was far from a drawl; it was, in fact, one of the richest, most mellifluous male voices I'd ever heard.

“You were expecting me?” I said.

“Why, sure,” he said, reaching for the bottle. “Time for some more medicine. You want some?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Why were you expecting the police, Mr. Hutchins?”

He took a long drag straight from the bottle, shuddered, took another, even longer one, and put the bottle down on the floor between his feet. “I heard it on the radio,” he said, nodding toward the one on the dresser. “Just about half an hour ago.”

I try always not to make assumptions in such cases, even when the reasons for making them are almost overwhelming.

“Heard about what?” I asked.

“Why, about Nadine,” he said, frowning puzzledly.

“What'd the radio say about her, Mr. Hutchins?” I asked.

“Not much. Just that she was dead, that's all.”

“No more than that?”

“Well, it said she'd been killed.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“Not so good.”

“Is that all? Just 'not so good'?”

“I sure hate that it happened. I feel real bad about it.”

“But you're not exactly all broken up about it, are you?”

He sighed and reached for the bottle again.

“Lay off the booze until we finish here, Hutchins,” I said.

“A man can take a drink in his own room, I guess.”

“He can also do his talking at the station house,” I said. “Lay off the jug.”

He shrugged. “You're the boss-man,” he said. “A fella can't afford to mess with cops in this town.”

I studied him for a moment. The bartender at the Hi-Lo had thought he was about thirty; to me, he looked much more like twenty — five but a twenty-five with a lot of fairly hard living behind it.

“You know anyone with either the first or last name of Clifford?” I asked. “And if you don't, do you know whether Nadine did?”

“Clifford?… No, I sure don't. I can't say about Nadine.”

“I'm told you were Mrs. Ellison's boy friend,” I said.

“Mrs. Ellison?”

“You didn't know she was married?”

“I sure'n hell didn't,” he said. “Well, I'll be damned”

“You never even suspected it?”

“No, sir, I sure didn't.”

“How long had you known her?”

“Not too long.”

“How long is that?”

“About two months. That's all the time I've been in New York.”

“Where are you from?”

“Florida.” He shook his head. “So that gal was married all the time. Well, what do you know.”

“You see quite a bit of her, did you?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“It was along about ten o'clock yesterday morning.”

“You sure of that?”

“Just as sure as I'm sitting here wishing I had a drink.”

“All right,” I said. “Take it, and then get your mind off it for a while. This is a pretty serious business, Hutchins.”

“Man, I know it,” he said, reaching for the bottle again.

“I know it better'n almost anybody. That's why I need a little extra medicine.”

“You didn't see her after ten o'clock A.M. yesterday?”

“I didn't even think of her after that. I ran into this little old girl over on Waverly, and from then on I didn't waste time thinking about anything else at all. I reckon you might say I just more or less had my hands full, if you know what I mean.” He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, fished around in another pocket for a lighter, and glanced at me questioningly. “Smoke?”

I shook my head, thinking about the way the bartender at the Hi-Lo had described Hutchins' treatment of the long-shoreman who had tried to mimic Hutchins' accent.

Hutchins started to thumb the lighter, dropped it, then picked it up, tried again, and dropped it a second time. “Aw, to hell with it,” he said, flicking the cigarette beneath a chair and dropping the lighter down beside him on the bed. “It'd probably taste awful, anyway.”

“Little nervous, Mr. Hutchins?” I asked.

“A little,” he said. “Hangover jitters, I guess. I get them every time.”

“Where do you work?”

“Nowhere, right at the moment. I had me a little money saved up before I came North.” He shook his head. “But it's running out pretty fast. I didn't have any idea it cost so much to live up here.”

“Did you know Nadine was in the assignation business?”

“What?”

“Don't stall me, Hutchins. She rented out her apartment to couples who wanted to bed down for an hour or two. You knew all about it.”

He shook his head. “No, I didn't, either. It's a complete surprise to me.”

“Come off it, Hutchins.”

“I'm telling you the God's truth. I didn't know one thing about any carrying-on like that, and that's a fact.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I don't expect you to believe anything. I'm just telling you, that's all.”

“How'd you meet Nadine?”

“In a tavern.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don't know whether it's exactly right or not, seeing as she's dead now.” He paused. “Down where I come from, we—”

“Never mind all that,” I said. “What about this meeting?”

“Like I said — you're the boss-man. If you make me tell it, I will.”

I didn't say anything.

“She was sitting on the next stool,” he said. “I noticed she was kind of showing her legs, and all, and so I started up a conversation. She was wearing these round garters, and I said a person didn't see them much any more, and then — well, you know how one thing leads to another. We talked up a storm, and what with buying each other drinks and all, it wasn't too long before we both got pretty polluted.”

“And you took her home?”

“She asked me to. I kind of had the same thing in mind myself, of course. But when she came right out and asked me that way, I got a little leary. You know. I figured she might be looking to charge me a little something, or that maybe she might take me some place where she had a fella waiting to hit me on the head and rob me. I'd read about how much of that went on up here, and I guess I got a little jumpy.”

“But you took her home, just the same?”

“It was the way she kept showing her legs and all. After a couple hours of that, I figured I just had to take the chance.”

“And then you and Nadine started going around together?”

“Yeah. We started hitting it off pretty good. Right at first, there, I still figured she might be fixing to ease me out of some money. But she never did. She wouldn't let me spend any money on her at all.”

“She have dates with anyone else?”

“Not that I know of. She said she didn't, anyhow.”

“She didn't work anywhere, Hutchins, and yet she always had money. How did you think she got it?”

“I didn't know where she got it. I still don't. That business about her renting her apartment to people is news to me.”

“Were you pretty fond of her?”

“I was for a while. Lately, though, she'd been getting me down a little.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, hell, I don't know. It was her lying, more than anything else. She couldn't say two things in a row without one of them being a lie. I don't like to talk about dead people, but that girl could outlie anybody I ever heard of in all my born days. I mean it. She'd break off right in the middle of one lie to start another. And when she'd get through with the second one, she'd come back and finish up the first one.”

“I see.”

“It got so bad that I had to tune her out half the time. I'd just sit there and nod my head now and then and not hear a word she said.” He paused. “And then there was the way she kept carrying on about babies.”

“Babies?”

“Yeah — and it didn't make any difference whose or what kind, either. If we saw one in a movie or on television, I knew the minute the show was over she'd be off again. I used to think she was hinting around about us getting married or something, but she wasn't.” He shook his head. “The worst was when we'd pass one on the street. Nadine, she'd stop and goo-goo-goo around and make funny noises until it was enough to turn your stomach.”

“Funny you'd go with her so long,” I said.

“Nothing funny about it,” he said. “That Nadine Ellison was the one best-looking woman I ever got next to. She had a body on her would drive you crazy. And besides, she wasn't costing me a dime. I figured, hell, she's beautiful, and she's free, and where's a guy ever going to do any better?”

“Was she wearing her sapphire earrings when you saw her yesterday morning?”

“Her earrings?” Hutchins said. “Jeez, I don't remember.”

“When's the last time you did see them?”

“You got me,” he said. “I never paid much attention.”

“They may have been stolen.”

Hutchins' bloodshot eyes hardened a little. “Not by me, by God,” he said. “I never stole anything off anybody in my life.”

“You hear me accuse you of anything, Hutchins?”

“That's the way it sounds, by God. If you aren't hinting around that I did it, then what are you doing?”

“What I'm trying to do is get a few answers. Her earrings are missing. If she was wearing them as recently as yesterday morning, it would probably mean—”

“Hold on a minute! You mean somebody stole them off her after she was dead?”

“We think that's possible, yes.”

He stared at me with what I would have been willing to swear was genuine astonishment. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly.

“You spend much time in her apartment?” I asked.

“Tell me something straight out,” he said. “Do you think I'm the guy that killed her?”

“Answer the question,” I said. “You spend much time in her apartment, or didn't you?”

“Some,” he said. “Most of the time, she'd come over here.”

“She have an address book?”

“Sure. I guess everybody does, don't they?”

“We didn't find one.”

“You look in her fish-tackle box?” he said.

“Her what?”

“Fish-tackle box. She used it for — well, like a strongbox, It's got a big padlock on it.”

“Where'd she keep it?”

“In the bottom dresser drawer. You mean you didn't find it?”

“No.”

“Well, that's where she kept her address book, anyway.”

“Why would she have kept something like an address book in a strongbox?”

“Search me, fella. She just did, that's all.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw her haul it out enough times, for God's sake. She was always putting something in or taking something out.”

“She keep it locked?”

“She never missed.”

“What all did she keep in it, beside the address book?”

“Everything. Bills, letters, money, junk jewelry — everything.”

I could understand now why Stan Rayder's search of Nadine's apartment hadn't turned up even so much as a rent receipt. Whoever had taken the dead girl's earrings had obviously taken along her strongbox at the same time.

“How do you know the jewelry was junk?” I asked.

“I'm just going by what she said. She told me the only real jewelry she had was her earrings.” He shrugged. “As for me, I never much more than caught a fast glimpse of it.”

“What'd this box look like?” I asked.

“Like any other fish-tackle box.”

“How big was it?”

“About one by three — maybe even a little bigger.”

“Pretty big for a girl to be using as a strongbox. What color was it?”

“Gray crackle, I guess you'd call it.”

“She ever tell you there was anything of value in it?”

“No, she never did. I started to josh her a little about the size of it once, but I could tell she was getting kind of peed-off, so I changed the subject.”

“She tell you much about herself, Hutchins?”

“No. She said anything that had happened more than five minutes ago didn't count.” He paused. “Oh, of course she'd tell me one night about having done this particular thing, and the next night turn right around and tell me something else. Like maybe she'd been in South America digging around in some old ruins with a couple of scientists. Or maybe it would be that she'd been an airline hostess. It could have been anything, and the truth is that it was almost everything. She told them one right after another, right around the clock. Hell, once she even told me she used to be a stunt girl out in Hollywood.” He spread his hands. “You name it. To hear her talk, she'd done everything there is to do.”

“She ever indicate she was in fear of her life?”

“You mean, did she think somebody was after her?”

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “She never seemed to have a worry in the world.”

“You say you can prove where you were last night?” I said.

“I didn't say it, but I can.” He paused, looking at me levelly. “But I'm not going to unless I have to.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's a lady involved.”

“You're saying you spent the night with a woman?”

“That's right — but I'm not saying which woman.”

“Has this got something to do with gallantry, Hutchins?”

“You can call it anything you want.”

“This the same girl you met over on Waverly yesterday morning?”

“I'm not saying.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “It means I'll have to take you over to the station house and ask you all over again.”

“And get out the rubber hose, I suppose?”

I didn't say anything. There are times when a statement such as Hutchins' gets a rise out of me and times when it does not. This time it didn't.

“You going to arrest me?” he said.

“Better than that,” I said, bluffing. “I'll book you as a material witness.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means no bail, no lawyer, no anything.”

“For how long?”

“Until the case comes up for trial. Say about six months.”

“You couldn't do that.”

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “There's a wall phone in the hall downstairs. On our way out to the police car you can stop and look up the number of any lawyer you pick out of the directory. You can call him and ask him what it means to be booked as a material witness. It's a pretty nasty business, Hutchins; I hope you'll spare us both the trouble.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then made a soft, contemptuous sound in his throat.

“You'd do it, too,” he said. “You haven't got any more respect for women than I've got for a dog.”

“Or for Nadine Ellison,” I said.

He reached down for the bottle again, muttering something about my ancestry.

“What did you say, Hutchins?” I asked.

“I said her name's Elaine Walton,” he told me. “She's got a room at the Leighton Hotel, over on West Fourth.”

“And you were with her all night?”

“Yes, damn it. All night.”

“Until how late?”

“About noon.”

“Fine,” I said. “But you'd better put a shirt on, Hutchins. Those hotels can be a little fussy.”

“You mean you're going to take me over there with you?”

“I don't know how else to keep you off the phone,” I said. “Hurry up with the shirt.”

“Listen, copper!”

“The shirt, Hutchins,” I said, getting to my feet. “And the name is Selby.”

Chapter Eight

FORTY MINUTES later I braked the Plymouth in front of Marty Hutchins' rooming house and let him out at the curb.

“I sure hope you're satisfied,” he said angrily as he slammed the door and bent down to peer in at me through the open window “You loused me up with that girl forever, I guess you know. From here on in my name will be crap.”

“Sorry, Hutchins,” I said as I put the car back in gear. “It was just something that had to be done.”

“Not that way, it didn't,” he said. “Hell, it was the first time she'd ever slept with anybody in her life! How do you think she felt?” He turned away from the car abruptly. “Cops!” he said, and spit on the sidewalk.

I eased the car out into the traffic, turned right at the next corner, and headed back toward the station house. I couldn't sympathize too much with Hutchins, but I did feel a little sorry for the young girl with whom he'd spent the night. She had been one of the few women I'd ever talked to who seemed completely incapable of sustaining more than one emotion at the same time. Elaine Walton had been terrified, and nothing else. She had been so terrified that she had found it all she could do to hang on to her reason, much less lie or dissemble, and for the first several minutes of our talk I'd thought I might have another hysterical woman on my hands. Once she had realized that she was in no danger of arrest, however, and that I had no intention of informing her family, she had been able to collect herself sufficiently to convince me that she and Hutchins had gone to bed together shortly before midnight and had stayed there until almost noon.

As I left the Plymouth and crossed the street to the station house, I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter after four.

I nodded to the sergeant on the switchboard and the lieutenant on the desk and walked over to the teletype machine to see whether the tape showed anything that might have some bearing on Stan's and my investigation. It was still a little too early to hope for any action on the alarm Communications had put out for the dead girl's husband, of course; but the station house teletype — or “gossip box” as it is sometimes called — is seldom still, and there is always a possibility that the next item to chatter its way across the yellow paper will be the one that breaks your case.

It was, all in all, an average tape:

A jumper was poised on the George Washington Bridge and one of the emergency units was trying to throw a net between the man and the river.

An ether addict had taken too much of the drug in the women's lounge at the Arcana Theater and had been pronounced DOA at Roosevelt Hospital.

A stolen Buick had been recovered at 73rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

A man had been swindled in a handkerchief switch in one of the bus terminals.

A teen-age gang rumble had been broken up in Washington Heights.

A cab driver had been slugged and robbed by two female passengers on Riverside Drive.

A man had been decapitated by a freight elevator in a building at 37th Street and Sixth Avenue.

There were others, many of them, but none of them of any interest to me. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, had a drink of water from the cooler in the hall, and walked into the squad room.

Old Louis Lozeck was still on his chair beside the door, asleep now, his white mustache stirring a little in the faint breeze from the electric fan mounted on one of the file cabinets. Two detectives were at the far end of the room, talking to a ragged, nervous-looking man with a bruised cheek and a heavily bandaged forehead; and another detective was standing by the window, one foot on the sill and a note pad on his knee, writing down something being told to him by a very thin Puerto Rican girl in slow and halting English.

Stan Rayder was at his desk, hammering furiously at his No. 5 Underwood, staring at the paper with mingled surprise and dislike. The surprise was always there, of course, and the dislike was for paper work of any kind.

“Hello, Pete,” he said, nodding to me as I pulled out my chair. “How's everything?”

“A little slow,” I said. “Any further developments after I talked to you on the phone?”

“No, damn it, we didn't come up with a thing.” He took the report form from his typewriter, folded it, and pushed it beneath a corner of his desk blotter. “What'd you find out from Nadine's boy friend?”

“He's in the clear,” I said, and told him the result of my talks with Marty Hutchins and Elaine Walton.

“This Hutchins sounds like a real wheel,” Stan said. “Here he's got a beautiful girl like Nadine picking up his bar tabs for him, and another beautiful girl stashed out in a hotel room, just to help him pass the time on his nights off from Nadine.” He paused. “Hey, I wonder how Frank Voyce is making out with his fifty detectives and their pictures of Nadine. No word yet, I guess?”

“Too early. Getting that many men under way takes time.”

“Barney Fells in his office?”

“No,” Stan said. “What could we tell him, anyhow?” He leaned back and put his feet up on his wastebasket. “You know something, Pete?”

“What?”

“I'll bet if we had a little more dope on Nadine's husband, we could wrap this squeal up in nothing flat.”

“You pretty sure Burt Ellison's our boy, are you?”

“I'd hate to be any surer. If I was, I wouldn't bother to check out another lead, unless it had his name on it.”

“We've got out an alarm,” I said. “That's all we can do.”

“Tough. If we knew a little about his ways and habits and what he does for kicks, we could really do a job on him.”

“If we knew, yes,” I said, reaching into the middle drawer of my desk for a fresh supply of cigars. “Funny that Nadine wouldn't bother to change her name, isn't it? With a guy like Burt Ellison on her trail, you'd think she would.”

“Who knows about people?” Stan said. “The things they should do, they don't — and the things they shouldn't do, they do first of all.”

“That's very profound, Stan.”

“Of course,” he said. “But here's something that isn't. You remember you told me to ask the phone company for a list of Nadine's toll calls?”

“They come up with one?”

He nodded. “About five minutes before you walked in,” he said. “Just four toll calls, Pete — all of them to the same place.”

“Where?”

“If I weren't so hot on Burt Ellison, I'd be a lot hotter on this Dr. Clifford Campbell, whose number she called.”

“Let's hope it's the same Clifford she threatened over the phone,” I said.

“I never saw such a guy,” Stan said. “Here I was figuring to perk you up a little.”

“There are lots of Cliffords,” I said.

“Not in any one person's life, though, Pete.”

“Where's he live?”

“Scarsdale.” He took the folded report form from beneath the corner of his desk blotter. “I ran a little check on him, while I was waiting for you to get in from the Coast. This guy's a neurosurgeon, Pete, a real big noise.” He glanced at the report form. “He's on the staff at Buchanan Memorial — if you want to know how big a noise.”

“Where's he have his office?”

“Warrison Building. You know where it is?”

I nodded. “Just off Lex on Fifty-first.”

“When I said he lived in Scarsdale, I meant that's where he has his home. He has an apartment behind his office, too, according to the dope I got from BCI.”

“What time were these toll calls made to Scarsdale?”

“That's another reason to think this is the same Clifford, Pete. The phone company can't say what time of day, but they were all made day before yesterday.”

“That's when Nadine's neighbor, Judy Bowman, said she heard Nadine tell somebody named Clifford that he was going to be the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived.”

“Hell, it's the same guy, Pete. Why make things any tougher than they are?”

“Just thinking out loud,” I said. “You say this Dr. Campbell's pretty well thought of?”

“I asked a couple of the does in the M.E.'s office about him. They both said he was one of the best.” He lit a cigarette and leaned forward to drop the match in the wastebasket. “And besides, Pete, Buchanan Memorial is the place where the doctors go. Everybody knows that.”

“I hate to think of tearing you away from that typewriter.”

“I'll live,” Stan said. “You want me to phone him first?”

“No,” I said as I pushed back my chair. “It's always better when you hit them cold.”

Chapter Nine

EVERYTHING in Dr. Clifford Campbell's air-conditioned outer office — the unframed abstractions on the walls, the softly playing hi-fi console opposite the row of gold-brocaded chairs, and the carefully groomed brunette receptionist — told you the moment you stepped through the door that this was no place to bring either a minor ailment or a minor bankroll.

“Well, it sure ain't no rabbit hutch,” Stan said as we crossed to the desk. “It looks like brain surgery pays off.”

The receptionist had hair like fresh-washed coal and a tiny, almost perfectly round face with almost no chin at all. She started to smile, then took a closer look at us and apparently decided we weren't worth it.

“Yes?” she said.

I took out my folder and showed her my badge. “Police officers,” I said. “We'd like to talk to Dr. Campbell.”

She looked at the badge as if it were an old tennis shoe “What do you wish to see him about?”

“We'll tell him all about it,” I said.

She glanced uncertainly at the door behind her, and then at the intercom on her desk. “Doctor Campbell is quite busy,” she said. “I'm really not sure he has the time to—”

Stan moved toward the door. “In here, Miss?” he said.

“Just a moment,” she said hurriedly, depressing a key on the intercom. “Doctor, there are two police officers here. Shall I — Yes, sir.” She glanced up at me disdainfully. “Doctor Campbell says you may go in.”

“Nice of him,” Stan said holding the door for me. “After you, Pete.”

The inner office was smaller, warmer, and contained only a low blond-wood desk, three matching chairs, and an examining table. There was nothing on top of the desk but a pen set, an intercom, a huge brass ash tray, and a glass jar filled with some kind of colorless fluid and containing a small, curious object that looked a little like a dried apricot.

The man who came from behind the desk to shake hands with us was a bit younger than I had expected — about forty, I judged — a stocky, barrel-chested man with prematurely white hair, a ruddy, strong-featured face, and very white, very even teeth.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said pleasantly, smiling first at Stan and then at me. “I'm Dr. Campbell.”

“Detective Selby,” I said. “This is my partner, Detective Rayder.”

“A pleasure,” Campbell said. “Please sit down.”

Stan and I took chairs, and Campbell went back to sit behind his desk.

“A very warm day,” he said. “I understand it's over ninety.”

“About ninety-three,” Stan said. “Nice and cool in here, though.”

“Yes,” Campbell said, still smiling. “Yes, it is.”

The three of us sat looking at one another. There was a long silence. Outside, the receptionist was pecking away at something on her typewriter.

“Well,” Campbell said, smiling a little more broadly, “what can I do for you?”

“You know a Nadine Ellison, Doctor Campbell?” I asked.

He started to shake his head, then pressed his lower lip between thumb and forefinger and tugged at it thoughtfully. “Nadine Ellison,” he said.

“Hmmm. No, I can't say that I do.”

I glanced at Stan to see whether he had noticed what seemed to me to be one of the least skilled fragments of acting I'd seen in some time.

It was hard to tell about Stan; he just sat there, looking a little surprised, staring at the small, apricotlike object in the glass jar on Campbell's desk.

Campbell saw the direction of his gaze, and jumped in fast. “Rather intriguing, isn't it?” he said.

“It looks like somebody's cauliflower ear,” Stan said. “Whose is it? That painter that got hard up and sent off his ear to somebody?”

Campbell laughed. “No, I'm afraid poor Van Gogh's celebrated ear is yet to be located.”

“What is it, then?” Stan said. “A little brain of some kind?”

“Part of one, yes,” Campbell said. “It's known as a pineal body.” He glanced at the jar fondly. “Actually, it's not so much a part of the brain as an appendage to it, it's all that's left of what, among our ancestors, must have been a very important sense organ.”

“Pineal body,” Stan said musingly. “What'd it do?”

“No one knows,” Campbell said happily, smiling at me to involve me in the discussion. “It's just another of the body's many mysteries.”

“Has everybody got one?” Stan asked.

“Yes,” Campbell said. “All craniate vertebrates have pineal bodies, Mr. Rayder.” He leaned back in his chair, beaming at both of us — a clear case of a man with an almost compulsive determination to delay the inevitable, and having a pretty pathetic time of it.

“I suppose it's been the subject of more speculation and controversy than almost anything else about the body,” he went on. “Take Descartes, for instance. As you know, he was interested in a great many things besides philosophy.”

“Yes,” Stan said, nodding solemnly. “That's very true.”

“Among other things,” Campbell said, “he studied the nervous system, trying to find the seat of the human soul. When he arrived at the pineal body, he was convinced his search for the soul had ended.”

“Why don't you want to talk to us, Doctor Campbell?” I asked.

He glanced at me, his smile fading. “But I am talking to you,” he said. “What do you mean?”

“All this business about pineal bodies,” I said. “What are you trying to put off?”

He looked at me, a little hurt. “I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Aren't you gentlemen here in connection with a police benefit of some kind?”

As an actor, he was a wonderful surgeon.

“Another thing that pineal body looks like,” Stan said, “is a great big wart.”

Campbell didn't even glance at him. “You asked me about someone named Nadine Ellison. I know no such person, and never have. What would you have me say?”

“Perhaps you know her under another name,” I said.

“That's possible. What does she look like?”

I described Nadine as graphically as I could.

He shook his head. “I'm reasonably certain I know no one of that description,” he said. “I may have met her casually at a party, or in a group somewhere, of course, but I really don't know anyone like that.”

“This wouldn't be a case of meeting someone casually,” I said.

“May I ask what this is all about? I think there must be limits of some kind, Mr. Selby, even in police work.”

“There are,” I said. “And I'm very much aware of them.”

“I'm delighted to hear it,” he said. “In that case, perhaps you'll make me a party to your secret.”

“This is a homicide investigation, Dr. Campbell,” Stan said. “Miss Ellison has been murdered.”

Campbell lowered his eyes, aparently without willing it. “Yes?” he said. “Well, in what way does that concern me?”

“We're interested in a conversation you had with her,” I said.

“I thought I made myself quite clear, Mr. Selby. I don't know this girl. How could I have had a conversation with her?”

“On the phone,” Stan said.

“No,” Campbell said. “Neither on the phone nor in any other way. I tell you I simply do not know anyone named Nadine Ellison.”

“Day before yesterday,” Stan said. “In the middle of the morning.”

Some of Campbell's smile came back, but it was not the same kind of smile it had been before. “You're certain about the time, are you?”

“Yes,” Stan said.

“Then let me be the first to disillusion you, Mr. Rayder,” Campbell said. “Apparently you are not quite so infallible as you seem to think.”

“I'm waiting to be disillusioned,” Stan said.

“Yes, and I'm only too happy to accommodate you. It happens that I wasn't here, Mr. Rayder. I wasn't in the office that day until well into the afternoon. If my memory serves me, I didn't get here till some time after three.”

“Where were you?” Stan asked.

“Home,” Campbell said. “Does that satisfy you, Mr. Rayder?”

“Yes, it does,” Stan said. “Because that's where you did your talking — from your place in Scarsdale.”

“I talked to no one, Mr. Rayder,” Campbell said. “And I'll tell you frankly that I'm getting more than a little tired of—” He paused abruptly, then nodded, as if something had just occurred to him. “I–I did get a phone call that morning.”

“Attaboy,” Stan said. “That's more like it.”

“When I said I didn't talk to anyone, I meant I didn't really hold a conversation with anyone,” Campbell said. “But I did receive a call. In fact, I received four of them.”

“And all of them from Nadine,” Stan said.

“No,” Campbell said, “At least that isn't the name she gave me.”

“What name did she use?” I asked.

“Norma… uh… Edwards. That's it. Norma Edwards.”

I nodded. “Same initials,” I said.

Campbell was trying hard for the smile he'd lost a few moments ago. “It would seem your Miss Ellison did use a different name, after all.”

“You say she called you, but you didn't hold a conversation with her?” I said. “Why not?”

“For one thing, I didn't know her. And besides, it was a crank call. I've never received anything quite like it.”

“My partner and I are old hands at crank calls,” I said. “Tell us about it.”

“There's really very little to tell. When I picked up the phone, she asked if I were Doctor Clifford Campbell. When I said yes, she began to curse me. I tried to break in, but it was impossible. Finally, when she'd run out of breath, I told her she obviously had the wrong number, or that she'd confused me with some other Doctor Campbell.”

“And that was the extent of the call?” I asked.

“Not quite. She said I was the Doctor Campbell she'd meant to call, and that her name was Norma Edwards. Then she began to curse me again, and I hung up. She called back three times within the next five or ten minutes. I finally had to take the phone off the hook.”

“She threaten you in any way, Doctor Campbell?” I asked.

“Yes, she did,” he said. “And quite vehemently, too.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“She threatened me with all sorts of dire things. She included just about everything from a broken nose to the Eternal Fire.”

“Did she by any chance say you were going to be the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived?”

“I believe she did make me some such promise, yes. It would be hard to think of something she didn't say.”

“You think she may have been drinking?”

“No. In my opinion, the woman was demented.”

“What was the general subject matter of the call?” I asked.

“I've just told you,” Campbell said. “Curses and threats.”

“My partner means, what did they apply to?” Stan said.

“I know what he means,” Campbell said. “But this was simply some kind of insane purging.” He spread his hands. “That's a purely legal term, of course, 'insane' — not a medical one. But nevertheless, it'll serve as a handy label.”

“Put it this way,” I said. “If we had a recording of that conversation, and went over it word by word, do you think we could find even so much as one tiny phrase other than threats and curses?”

“Do you have such a recording, Mr. Selby?”

“It wouldn't be unheard of,” I said.

“You do have one,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn't have been able to repeat what she said about my being the sorriest son of a bitch alive.”

“Please answer the question, Doctor,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I mean, no, there was absolutely nothing other than threats and curses, except for her asking my name and telling me her own. Her assumed name, I realize now.”

“Have you any idea why she should have picked you for such a call?” I asked.

“None whatsoever.”

“Did she ever call you here at your office?” Stan asked.

“No.”

“There were just those four calls you told us about?” I asked.

“Yes. She never called again.”

“Is there anything in your personal life that might have prompted someone else to put her up to it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“If you were having some kind of trouble with anyone, it's possible he or she might have gotten Nadine to call you.”

“You mean, a spite call?”

“Yes. It happens quite often, Doctor Campbell.”

“Yes, I suppose it does. But I don't think that was the case. My personal and professional life are both quite tranquil, Mr. Selby. And even so, my colleagues and acquaintances are hardly the kind who would even consider such a thing.”

“Wrong,” Stan put it. “People will do anything, Doctor, and you damn well know it.”

“You commute every day between here and Scarsdale?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I have living quarters here. Whenever I want to stay in the city, I—”

His intercom buzzed and he leaned forward to press down the key. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Campbell is here, sir,” the receptionist's voice said.

Campbell frowned, then looked at me questioningly. “My wife is here,” he said. “We're going out to dinner.”

I didn't say anything.

“Will this take much longer?”

“I don't know,” I said.

He hesitated, then said, “Miss Hardesty, please tell my wife I'll be with her as soon as I can.”

“We'd like to ask her a few questions,” I said. “Why not ask her to come in?”

“Questions? What on earth about?”

“About your phone calls front Nadine Ellison.”

“This is ridiculous! My wife knows nothing about them.”

“We'll keep it brief, Doctor,” I said. “Ask her to step

He pressed the intercom key again. “Ask my wife to come in, Miss Hardesty,” he said. “Mr. Selby, I must tell you I consider this very much uncalled for. I'm not at all sure I won't find it necessary to write a letter to the Commissioner.”

“Be sure you make a copy for the American Medical Association,” Stan said.

A young girl stepped into the office, and I found myself glancing past her, expecting her to be followed by an older woman, who would be Mrs. Campbell. But there was no one behind her, and as she closed the door and approached us, I started getting used to the idea that this could actually be Mrs. Clifford Campbell. Middle-aged men married to teen-age girls may be no novelty in other parts of the country; but in New York City, at least on Campbell's social level, they are.

Mrs. Campbell was a honey-blonde, with deep-blue eyes beneath almost incredibly long lashes, a heart-shaped face that most people would call pretty rather than beautiful, and a firmly-rounded, provocative body molded by a strapless sheathlike dress of exactly the same deep-blue as her eyes. She was, I felt certain, no more than eighteen, and perhaps not quite that.

Campbell, Stan, and I had all come to our feet, of course, and now Mrs. Campbell walked to her husband, went up on her toes to kiss him on the mouth, and then turned to smile at us, her arm around his waist.

“Susan, these men are police officers,” Campbell said. “My wife, gentlemen.”

“Selby,” I said.. “This is my partner, Detective Rayder.”

She was not a very large girl, and, standing so lose to her husband, she seemed almost dwarfed.

“What's wrong, Clifford?” she asked, tilting her head to one side in order to smile up at him. “Has one of your patients been bad?”

“Somebody's patient has been up to something,” he said sourly. “Somebody's mental patient, I should say.”

She nodded, in that way women do when they don't really understand something said to them, and yet don't care enough about it to ask for an explanation. “It's getting late, darling,” she said, glancing at a wrist watch built into a wide gold bracelet. “if we expect to meet Bob and Peg in time for cocktails…”

Campbell cleared his throat, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “We'll have time,” he said, scowling at me. “Susan, Mr. Selby here would like to ask you a question or two.”

She turned back to face me. “Really?” she said. “Me? What in heaven's name about?”

“About that ridiculous phone call I got the other day,” Campbell said. “Why they should think it necessary to talk to either of us, I do not know.”

“We have to follow a certain routine, Mrs. Campbell,” I said. “You realize that, of course.”

She nodded. “We! yes, I suppose you do. But what can I tell you about a silly thing like that telephone call?”

“Did you overhear the call, Mrs. Campbell?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” she said. “That is, I heard my husband's end of it. Why? What's so important about it?”

“How many times did she call back?”

“Now just a moment, Selby,” Campbell said. “I won't have you—”

“Clifford!” she said, her eyes widening. “What's happened?”

“Nothing for you to concern yourself about,” he said.

“But something must have,” she said. “Why are these men—”

“Nothing has happened, Susan,” he said. “It's just that I resent such a high-handed way of going about things.”

She took her arm from around Campbel's waist and stood looking at me quizzically. “Will you be good enough to tell me what this is all about, Mr. Selby?”

“I'd appreciate an answer to my question, Mrs. Campbell.” I said. “How many times did this girl call back?”

She bit at her lip for a moment. “Three or four,” she said tightly. “Three, I think.”

“You know a Nadine Ellison?” Stan asked,

She shook her head. “No.”

“How about Norma Edwards?” I said.

“No, I don't know any girl named Norma Edwards, either,” she said, her face flushing angrily. “Will you please tell me what's going on?”

“One more question, Doctor Campbell,” I said. “Where were you between two and six this morning?”

“Clifford, I want to know what they're talking about!” Mrs. Campbell demanded. “Why won't you tell me?”

“I was here,” Campbell said. “In our apartment at the rear of this office. My wife and I went to the theater, came straight home, and went to bed.”

“That right, Mrs. Campbell?” Stan asked.

The angry flush on her cheeks was dangerously high now and her blue eyes seemed almost black. “Of course it is!” she said, her voice beginning to rise. “Why do you—” She turned suddenly and reached up to put both hands on Campbell's shoulders. “Darling, something terrible has happened. I just know it!”

I caught Stan's eye again, then turned toward the door. “That's about all, I guess,” I said. “Thanks very much, Doctor Campbell.”

He wasn't looking at me; he was patting his wife's shoulder in exactly the same way a father might pat that of a very small daughter.

On our way through the outer office, I heard the click of the intercom key and looked back at the brunette receptionist. Her face was even more flushed than Mrs. Campbell's had been, and it occurred to me that she had very probably been eavesdropping on the entire conversation.

“Well,” Stan said as he followed me into the self-service elevator and pressed the button for the street floor, “what do you think?”

“I think they make a very handsome couple,” I said.

“You and I should be so lucky,” he said. “I could have looked at that Susan Campbell the rest of the night.”

“About eighteen, would you say?”

“If that. When they're all dressed up that way, it's hard to tell.”

“But no older?”

“Hell, no,” he said as we stepped out into the lobby. “But you still haven't told me what you thought.”

“I think Campbell is lying like a rug,” I said.

“Ditto,” Stan said. “Make that double.”

“He was expecting us, Stan. All that talk about pineal bodies with a couple of cops was just a stall.”

“I know,” Stan said. “The guy was sweating plenty.”

“The question is, what does he have to sweat about?”

“Like they say, it's a good question.” He shook his head. “You wouldn't think a guy with a wife like that Susan would bother bedding down with anybody else, would you?”

“Who is it that keeps saying people will do anything, Stan?”

“Knock it off. You think Campbell might have been renting bedroom time from Nadine?”

“He knew her,” I said. “Whether it was from renting her bed for quickies with some other woman is something else again.”

“With stuff like that at home, the guy would be nuts.”

“We'll find out,” I said, pausing in front of the phone booth just inside the street door. “And the sooner the better. I'm going to call BCI and ask them to put a couple of their men on him.”

“A tail?”

“Not necessarily. All I want is a rundown on everything that guy's done and thought in the last six months,”

“Man, will BCI love you for that.”

“It has to be done.”

“You're really hyped up on him, aren't you?”

“Not as hyped up as I'd be if Nadine didn't have a psycho husband loose somewhere. But I do have a feeling about him, Stan. I think the least he's done is pay rent on Nadine's mattress. If she'd been working in a little blackmail or something, he could be the one we're looking for.”

“If she was in the blackmail business, there's no telling how many candidates we've got. Only trouble is, we don't know who they are.”

“We know who Campbell is,” I said. “And we know Nadine threatened him.”

“I was kind of surprised when he admitted that,” Stan said. “My hopes went way down.”

“He thought he'd better admit what he realized we already knew, and hope we didn't know any more.”

I went into the phone booth, dialed BCI, and asked for the check through on Clifford Campbell. Then I decided to go all the way, and asked for one on his wife.

“Better call the squad room,” Stan said as I hung up. “Maybe there's been a little action.”

I'd run out of coins, so I borrowed one from Stan, called the squad room, and asked the detective who answered whether there were any messages for Stan or me.

“There's just one,” he said. “But it ought to make you mighty happy.”

“What is it?”

“Benny Bucket's back in town.”

Benny's last name was Buckner, but I'd never heard him called anything but Benny Bucket since the night, now almost ten years ago, when he had very nearly succeeded in braining a hotel porter with a fire bucket. He was a petty thief, a conscienceless, friendless, ferret-faced little man who had, in the past, been one of my most valued stools.

“You mighty happy, like I said?”

“Mighty happy.”

“That's what I figured.”

“I thought Benny was out in San Francisco,” I said. “Somebody told me he saw him hanging around the North Beach section somewhere.”

“Not any more, Pete. The guy wants you to call him. He says it's the biggest thing you'll ever hear.”

“Small doubt,” I said. “He leave a number?”

“He said you could reach him at the old one.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll give him a buzz.”

I hung up and glanced at Stan. “You got any more change?”

He fished in his pocket. “Here, for God's sake. Why don't you just give the operator your badge number, like everybody else?”

“Bad memory. Benny Bucket's back, Stan.”

“That who you're calling?” He shook his head. “Your pineal body must be acting up, Pete. That's the only answer.”

“Hello?” It was Benny's voice, soft and whispery from his having been struck on the windpipe by the same hotel porter whom Benny had flattened with the bucket

“Pete Selby, Benny,” I said.

“Pete! Lord, ain't it good to hear your voice again! I was saying to some of the boys just the other day. Boys, I said—”

“Never mind the grease,” I said. “You got something for me?”

“Have got something for you! Just wait'll you hear I” He paused, then went on guardedly. “You're not calling from the squad room, are you, Pete? All them phones are bugged.”

“I'm pretty busy, Benny,” I said. “If you've got something to say to me, say it.”

“Well, I just wanted to ask you about that Ellison hit, Pete. You're on it, aren't you?”

I motioned for Stan to lean closer to the phone. “You know I am, Benny,” I said. “Talk a little.”

“This is for points,” he said. “Right, Pete?”

He meant that, by giving me a lead of some kind, he would be banking good will against some future time when he might very well need all the good will he could muster.

“Everybody loves you already, Benny,” I said. “The only trouble is, you're so quiet.”

“Jesus, Pete, you're a wonderful guy. You know that

“Talk,” I said

“Yeah, I was just going to ask if anybody scored some jewelry off the Ellison girl. If they did, you and me's in business.”

“What kind of jewelry, Benny?”

“I wouldn't whistle this for nobody but you, Pete. I mean it. Nobody in this world.”

“Benny—”

“Sapphires,” he said, as if the word awed him. “Big, gorgeous sapphire earrings.”

Chapter Ten

I'D before heard whispered words sound as if they'd been shouted, But Benny Bucket's did. They seemed to explode in the phone booth and echo all the way through the lobby. I felt my hand tighten on the receiver, and when I looked at Stan, his eyes were narrowed a little and his lips were set in a thin, hard line.

Both Stan and I were thinking the same thing, I knew. This might be the beginning of the end for Nadine's killer.

I took a deep breath. “Where can we meet you, Benny?” I said.

“Christ, I knew I was on to something! You mean we're in business, Pete?

Just like old times, huh, boy “We're in business,” I said. “Where do you want Stan and me to meet you?”

“I can't get out for a while, Pete. I'm on the hook to a shylock, and he's got a couple of his boys on the peep for me. If I make the street, they'll—”

“All right,” I said. “Tell me who they are and we'll get them off your back.”

“Nix, Pete. Who can tell when I'll need him again?”

“You don't want to make a meet?”

“I want to, but I can't. I guess we gotta do it on the phone.”

“It's up to you, Benny,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. You know a character named Johnny Farmer?”

“He have any other tags?”

“I don't know. All I know him by is Johnny Farmer. He ain't been around so long.”

“I never heard of him,” I said, glancing at Stan. Stan shook his head.

“He's the one, Pete,” Benny said. “Johnny Farmer. He's the guy with the sapphires. He propositioned Flossie with them.”

“Who's Flossie?”

“My wife. I brought her back from Frisco with me. A little doll, Pete; you'd love her.”

“Go ahead, Benny.”

“Well, like I say, he propositioned her with them. He picked her up in this bar and gave her a look at the earrings and said if she'd climb under the sheets with him he'd give them to her.”

“This is your wife, you say?”

“Sure. We got married in Oakland. Anyhow, she figures the stones must be paste. But even so, they're beauties, so she says okay.” He paused. “We have what they call an understanding, like. Flossie and me, we're not narrow-minded.”

“What about the earrings?”

“They're these real gorgeous blue stones, see. So Flossie figures, what the hell, it's only going to cost her an hour or two, and she ain't doing nothing at the time anyway, so okay. But this Johnny Farmer's very light in the head. In fact, he's nothing but a moron. He can't even read or write. Can't even read the menu in this joint when he buys Flossie a dinner. And so Flossie, she keeps thinking and thinking, and she sees how free this moron is with a buck, and she starts trying to figure a way to get the earrings and a little cash loot besides. Naturally, her being genteel and all, she can't just—”

“But how do you connect the earrings with the Ellison hit?” I asked.

“I'm coming to that, Pete. Like I was telling you, Flossie is setting there in the bar with this guy fooling around with her leg and telling her how good he is in bed, and all, and drinking double slugs of Scotch like it was beer. And then he starts telling her about this girl he's been trying to get next to, this Mary C., and how sorry she's going to be when she finds out how big he's scored”

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, Flossie's sitting there trying to figure an angle and at the same time trying to keep the other customers from seeing how this moron's got his hand up under her skirt, and then all of a sudden the guy yanks out a fin and tells her to go down to the corner and buy all the papers. So she does, only she forgets to give him his change, and he makes her read everything there is about this Ellison girl getting hit, Every word. The guy can't read even big print, see? He just sits there taking it all in, and when Flossie get through reading everything there is in all the papers, he grins like hell and says is she sure there wasn't anything about jewelry in the papers, and she says no, and then he says he'll give her one of the earrings if she'll go home with him right away, because he's really ready, and that he'll give her the other earring in the morning.” He paused. “Okay, so far?”

“With you all the way, Benny,” I said. “Keep going.”

“You're a sweetheart, Pete. The best. But to get back, this moron don't have much farther to go before he gets the job done right there in the booth, and the bartender is starting to look under the table and give him and Flossie the hard eye, and so Flossie starts to get a little peed. She says she thought she was going to get the earrings for Just a fast jump, and that she'd have to have a little something extra if she was going to stay all night. The guy says it's all night or nothing, and just about then in comes this Mary C., this babe he's had the hots for, and damn if he don't jump the hell up and follow her across the floor — which it leaves Flossie high and dry and mad.”

“Then, pow! I t hits her. All of a sudden she sees what the score is. Here this moron has showed her a pair of earrings, and made her read him everything about the hit in the papers, and asked her if there was anything said about jewelry, and all, but she's been so occupied she just never had a chance to connect it all up. But, then, wham! There it is, plain as hell. She was out of the joint like a big bird, and she didn't stop till she made it home.”

I waited for a moment. Then, “You finished, Benny?”

“Pretty near. But answer me something yes or no, Pete.

Is that the biggest thing I ever helped you with or is it?”

“It's big, Benny,” I said. “Very big.”

“The biggest, Pete. How could it be any bigger?”

'When did this take place?”

“Less'n an hour ago. But he ain't there now, Pete. Flossie seen him come out right after she took off.”

“Is your wife with you now, Benny?”

“Yeah, but she wouldn't talk with you, Pete. The kid's shy that way. She has a thing about cops. You know?”

“Then will you ask her what this Johnny Farmer looks like?”

“She's already told me. She says he's the tallest joker she ever saw off a basketball court. Tall and skinny as hell and got an Adam's apple on him the size of your fist. And listen — when Flossie says somebody's tall, she means tall.

She ain't no midget herself, you know. She's bigger'n me by damn near a foot.”

“What else did she say about him?”

“She says he's got these kind of crazy gray eyes and this dirty-blond hair, which grows down low in front almost to his eyes.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Jesus, hold on a minute, Pete.”

I grinned at Stan. “Wonder of wonders,” I said, covering my phone. “And still people always mumble in their beards over the way cops work with stools.”

“We'd be dead without them,” he said. “It's symbiotic.”

“It's what?”

“Symbiotic. My God, how ignorant can you get?”

“What'd you do, just look it up

“As a matter of fact, did. You like it?”

“I'm not sure. Give me a moment to think about it.”

“You sort of have to let it grow on you. Like with avocados.”

Benny's voice came back on the wire. “Pete?”

“Yes?”

“Flossie says to tell you he was rigged out in a real jazzy red cowboy shirt with lots of buttons and stitching and stuff all over it, and real tight overall pants. And she says he had on these jerky half-boots, You know, like they flop around the ankles and they've got like dog chains crisscrossed over the insteps so you clank like hell every time you take a step.”

I got out my notebook and wrote rapidly. “How old is he, Benny?”

“Flossie says about thirty.”

“And Flossie has no idea at all where we could pick him up?” I said. “If he happened to mention any place he hung out, Or—”

“He didn't,” Benny said. “Me and Flossie beat that all out before I tried to get you at the squad room,”

“What was the name of this bar?”

“Corchetti's.”

“That's the place on Greenwich Avenue, just off Twelfth?”

“That's the one. You gonna try to grab this Mary C.

“If we can.”

“I don't know how much of a thing they had going, Pete. Maybe nothing. Flossie says, from the way he talked, he hadn't scored with her.”

“You know her, Benny?”

“No, and neither does Flossie. We've just seen her around. But they'll know her in Corchetti's. She hangs out there all the time.”

“Whore?”

“Who ain't? But a junky, for sure. Even has to wear long-sleeved dresses in the summertime. You'd think a girl would have enough sense to shoot herself in the leg.”

“What's the rest of her name, Benny? Do you know?”

“That's all they ever call her,” he said. “Mary C. It's like it was one of these double names. Mary Ann. Like that.”

“We'll be going right down there,” I said.

“I know you won't be forgetting this, Pete. You got a real wonderful memory.”

“We'll have to break this up, Benny,” I said. “There's even a chance this Johnny Farmer changed his mind and went back to Corchetti's.”

“Sure, Pete. And give my love to Stan Rayder, will you? There's another wonderful guy. Wonderful.”

“So long, Benny.”

I hung up and stepped out of the booth.

“That Benny's not only a hell of a stool,” Stan said, “He's also a hell of a comedian.”

“Why so?”

“You hear what he said about your wonderful memory? Boy, that's very funny. Here you are, a guy that can't even remember to give the operator his badge number to save himself a dime.”

“You'd do better worrying about Mary C.”

“Yes, but half the time it isn't even your own dime. It's mine.”

I looked at my watch. “It's six thirty-five,” I said. “How long do you think we should keep Mary C. waiting, Stan?”

“No more than twenty minutes,” Stan said. “I've a hunch she's a very impatient girl.”

Chapter Eleven

EVEN with Stan's expert jockeying, it still took us more than twenty minutes to reach the Village. By the time we'd parked the Plymouth half a block beyond Corchetti's and walked back, my watch said seven twenty-three.

It was, for most of the Village's residents, a favorite time of day — a time when the Village is, perhaps, more nearly characteristic of itself than at any other. The tourists don't swarm in until later, nor do the uptown New Yorkers who tour the bars and observe the natives.

“You ever been in this place before?” Stan asked as we stepped into Corchetti's.

“Not unless they've changed the name since then,” I said.

“Then you haven't,” he said. “Nobody's changed anything in this dive since the day before the world began.”

There was a long bar with a sprinkling of after-work drinkers, a larger number of round-the-clock drinkers, and two very young girls who didn't look as if they were old enough to be drinking there at all. Against the wall opposite the bar was a row of narrow booths with very high backs, and, midway between the booths and the bar, a half dozen tables about the size of a breadboard.

“Yesterday's tablecloths and last week's sawdust,” Stan said as we approached the bar. “And if you're wondering what that slush is you're wading in, it's liquor. There's more of the stuff on the floor than there is in the glasses.”

“No Johnny Farmers here,” I said, glancing about.

“And no Mary C., either,” Stan said. “No femme junkies at all, so far as I can see.”

“Take a look in the can,” I said. “I'll brace the bartender.”

While Stan walked out to the men's room, I found a space at the bar and beckoned to the bartender.

Unlike Stan, I look like a cop. I look so much like one that I'm rarely or never taken for anything else. Whether this is a curse or a blessing, I've never decided. Perhaps it averages out pretty close to fifty-fifty.

The bartender came over immediately. “Yes, Officer?”

“Seen Johnny Farmer around lately?” I asked.

He was a pink-faced, balding man with a few long strands of graying hair brushed across the middle of his skull from left to right. “I don't know a Johnny Farmer, Officer,” he said.

I gave him a fast description, and he nodded.

“There couldn't be more than one man that unlucky, could there?” he said, grinning. “He was in, Officer.”

“He been in here before?”

“Not when I've been on duty. A man with that much height and that kind of a face would be hard to forget.”

“How about Mary C.?” I said. “She been in today?”

“She practically lives here, Officer. Today she was in about the same time as this Johnny Farmer.”

“But they didn't leave together?”

“No. Mary left a little while after.”

“You know where I can find her?”

“I know where you could try. She goes for this Italian coffee. Told me she drinks eight or ten cups of espresso a day.” He picked up a couple of empty beer glasses and dropped them in the tank behind the bar. “Try around the corner. Nero's Coffee House. She practically runs a shuttle between here and there.”

Stan had come up behind me. “No Johnny Farmers in the can,” he said.

“Let's drop around the corner,” I said. “I hear Mary C. drinks a lot of coffee.”

Nero's Coffee House was like most of the other coffee shops in the Village — a place no larger than the average shoe-repair parlor, with huge, gloomy, time-blackened paintings on all the walls, banquettes along three sides of the room, and, at the rear, a short counter with an enormous espresso machine glittering with nickel plate, surmounted with eagles and cupids, and festooned with a dozen or more spigots jutting out from all sides and at almost all possible angles.

There was a tired-looking old man dozing behind the machine and a thin, hollow-eyed blonde girl sitting at the far end of the banquette to the left of the door. There was no one else.

“I'm buying,” Stan said. “What'll it be?”

“ Capuccino,” I said.

“Espresso for me,” he said. “It may not show, Pete, but mine is starting to drag.”

The old man opened one eye long enough to manipulate the machine; then we carried our coffee back to the banquette and sat down near the girl in a way that hemmed her into the corner. She was watching us sullenly, sniffing softly now and then, her thin shoulders outlined sharply through the thin material of her grimy, long-sleeved blouse.

“The kid's on it, Pete,” Stan whispered, leaning close to me as he raised his cup. “She's hooked, right through the middle.”

“So I see,” I said.

“So you see what?” the girl said. Her voice was as thin as her body. “What makes you think you've ever been able to see anything? What do you think you are, a universal genius?”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

“People like you can only look,” she said. “They never really see. They haven't the equipment.”

“You the girl they call Mary C.?” Stan asked.

“There used to be a girl like that, But she's been dead a long, long time.”

“We're police officers, miss,” I said.

“No! You can't be serious. Why, I would never have believed it.”

“Are you Mary C., or aren't you?” I said.

“You know I am,” she said. “Just as I knew you were a cop.” She glanced at Stan. “I'm not so sure about your friend, here. Maybe he's even worse.”

“You acquainted with a man named Johnny Farmer?” I asked.

“I'm acquainted with a lot of Johnnys,” she said. “I even know a few farmers.”

“Would you rather be funny at the station house?” Stan asked mildly.

“I'd rather you dropped dead,” she said. “I know a lot of Johnnys, yes. But no Johnny Farmer.”

“Maybe you'll recognize his description,” I said, and sketched it for her,

“Oh, God,” she said, grimacing. “That one.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“Enough to stay away from.”

“Meaning?”

“The man's insane. I mean really.”

“You with him this afternoon?”

“I'm not with him any afternoon. I saw him in a place around the corner, but that wasn't being with him. I told him to stay the hell away from me.”

“Why so?”

“He makes me sick to my stomach; that's why. I wish to I'd never seen him.”

“He ever give you any presents?”

“Like what, for instance ”

“Earrings, for instance.”

“He never gave me anything.” She paused. “Except a couple of dollars one day.”

“For what?”

She looked at me knowingly. “Nobody's kidding anybody. Let's say I needed a drink.”

“How bad?” Stan asked.

“How bad can it get? That's how bad it was. Bad enough for me to go home with him.”

“Where's that?” I asked.

“I said 'home.' I should have said his pigsty. God, I thought I'd be sick before he even got down to business.”

“What's the address?” I asked.

“I don't know. It's on Barrow Street; I don't know what number.” She coughed her soft, dry addict's cough. “In the basement.”

“Could you pick out the place if we drove you down Barrow in a squad car?”

“How could I forget it?” She paused. “You going to take me in?”

“What for?”

“Since when did cops need 'what fors'?” She coughed again. “I'll tell you the God's truth. If they send me down to Lexington again, it'll kill me. It damn near did the last time.”

“I'm going to assume you mean you're allergic to bluegrass and horses,” I said. “Now—”

“God,” she said, almost fervently. “I thought for sure you were rounding us up again. One more cure would finish me.”

“We're working another street, Mary,” I said. “All we want from you is to show us where Johnny Farmer lives. You feel like a little ride?”

“Just past his house and that's all?”

“That's all.”

“Let's go,” she said, getting to her feet. “I need the air.”

Stan drove and I rode in the back seat with Mary C.

“You said Johnny Farmer was insane,” I reminded her. “How did you mean that?”

“I meant it all the way,” she said. “He's crazy every way there is to be crazy.”

“Maybe not so much crazy as feeble-minded?”

“Both. He's a feeb, for sure, but he's crazy too. I don't know just how to say it. He — he'll do everything. Especially with girls.”

“He a violent man, Mary?”

“He could be. God knows he's big enough. It's just that when he gets near a girl he goes nutso. All he has to do is touch one and he busts his top.”

I found myself wondering whether the M.O. expert at BCI had come up with any promising sex violators.

“He try to choke you, Mary?” I asked. “Anything like that?”

“No.”

“Then what did he do?”

“It isn't what he did. He just did what everybody else does. It's the way he went about it.”

“We understand he has it for you pretty bad.”

“He must have. God knows why. I'm nothing.”

“Apparently he doesn't agree with you.”

“Maybe it's because he's crazy,” she said. “Look at me. I've got no more bust than you have, and my legs are like a couple of broom handles. You see anything about me that'd set off any explosions?”

“This is Barrow,” Stan said, slowing the car. “Is this the block, Mary?”

She turned to peer out the window. “It's farther down,” she said. “There. That little one with the boards over the windows.”

The house she had pointed out was a two-story frame structure, faced with cracking once-yellow stucco. It had obviously been untenanted for some time.

At the corner, Stan turned right and pulled in at the curb about three quarters of the way down the block.

“This far enough away, Mary?” he asked. “If you're worried about somebody seeing you get out, we can drive you somewhere else.”

“What's the difference?” she said. “People see girls like me in police cars all the time.”

“We appreciate this, Mary,” I said as I got out and held the door for her. “I don't think Johnny'll ever give you any more trouble.”

“Will he find out who told him?” she asked. “Not that it makes a hell of a lot of difference, I guess.”

“It makes a difference, all right,” I said. “But he won't find out. Neither my partner nor I will ever remember.”

“Did he do something pretty bad?”

“Bad enough.”

“He'll go to prison?”

“Very probably. If not for one thing, then for another.”

She looked both ways along the darkening street, as if undecided which direction to take.

“Well,” she said, “at least he'll know.” She coughed. “That's more than most of us do.”

“You've kind of lost me, Mary,” I said.

She smiled faintly and turned away in the direction of the river. “Anyone who knows where he's going is lucky,” she said over her shoulder. “He's one in a million.”

Stan Rayder came around the back of the car and stepped up on the sidewalk.

“Well, Pete,” he said, “you ready to take him? Or do you figure we ought to go by the book and ask for some reinforcements?”

“All I ask for is that we're not too late,” I said. “Let's take him now, Stan, and get it over with.”

Chapter Twelve

THE BOARDED-UP little house on Barrow Street looked old enough to have been standing there ever since the yellow fever epidemic of 1791, when Greenwich Village, then an outlying section of the city, had been settled almost overnight by families fleeing the terror at the lower tip of the island. There was no space between the house and the buildings on either side of it, no basement entrance, and nothing to indicate that there had ever been any attempt to pry off the planks nailed across the windows and front door.

“No alley behind these houses,” I said. “We'll have to go through the place next door.”

It was a small stationery store. The proprietor let us in, showed us through the store, and let us out the back door into a small, weed-grown court.

“Thanks,” Stan told him. “We'll take it from here.”

“I hope there's no shooting,” the proprietor said. He was a very old man; old enough to mean what he said.

“Neither do we,” Stan said. “Better stay inside.”

The proprietor closed the door and Stan and I walked across the court and paused before the steps that led down to the basement.

“He must have come in through a space between the houses on the next street,” Stan said. “Damn, it's dark enough for a flashlight.”

“Not so loud,” I said, and went down the steps to the door. It was made of wood, and when I pulled it toward me, it gave an inch and then held.

“Hook and eye on the inside,” I whispered to Stan who had just stepped down beside me.

“You've got more muscles than I have,” he said. “After you.”

I worked my fingers between the door and the jam and pried back as slowly and steadily as I could. There was a soft, tearing sound; then the hook ripped free from the rotting wood and the door swung outward.

We paused, listening. But there was no sound from inside, and a moment later we stepped into a dank, moldering hallway littered with debris and almost completely dark.

But not quite. Midway down the hallway an orange sliver of light measured the width of a door on the crumbling concrete floor just outside it.

I felt Stan's hand on my shoulder. “You see it?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“How do we do it?”

“You mean, are we polite?”

“Yeah.”

“No. The door gets the treatment. You hug the wall, just in case.” I went forward quietly, taking out my gun.

When I reached the door, I braced my shoulders against the wall opposite it, waited till Stan was in position beside it, and then drew back my foot and booted the wood as hard as I could.

My foot went all the way through it.

I drew it back again, booted the door a little closer to the jamb, and stepped inside as the door ripped open and whipped around to slam against the wall. Stan was just behind me.

The room was swelteringly hot and stank like a garbage heap in the noonday sun. There were two filthy mattresses side by side in one corner, newspapers spread on the concrete floor in lieu of a carpet, a brown-scummed toilet and sink with an overflowing refuse can between them, scraps of food and cigarette butts everywhere, and a good-sized cardboard carton near the door heaped to the top with empty liquor bottles and beer cans. The walls held a few items of clothing suspended from nails and a considerable number of pornographic drawings, the latter apparently photostated blowups of the kind of illustrations found in privately published “cartoon books.”

The light had come from a kerosene lantern sitting on an upended soap box near the mattresses.

There was a man lying on the mattresses, but it had taken only a casual glance to know he would be no problem. He lay with his mouth open, his chest moving slowly, his body half on one mattress and half on the other, and his face moist and yellow in the flickering light of the lantern.

Benny Bucket's wife had said that Johnny Farmer was the tallest man she'd ever seen off a basketball court, and now I realized she hadn't been exaggerating. From the top of his ash-blond head to the soles of the half-boots with their crisscrossed chains, Farmer was easily six foot seven

“He must have grown up instead of out,” Stan said as we stood looking down at him. “I'll bet he doesn't weigh much more than I do.”

“He isn't much better-looking, either,” I said. “Let's get some cuffs on him and wake him up.”

I bent down, handcuffed Farmer's wrists behind him, and shook him roughly by the shoulder. He groaned, muttered something unintelligible, and turned his head the other way.

“Alky stupor,” Stan said. “Probably be out for hours.”

My eyes were slowly adjusting themselves to the dim lantern light, and now I saw something I had missed before. It was a good-sized metal box wedged between the edge of one of the mattresses and the wall. I stepped over Farmer's body, lifted the box, and took it closer to the lantern.

The box was, I felt certain, the same gray-enameled fish-tackle box that Marty Hutchins had described for me as the one which the dead girl had kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. There were sturdy hasps for a padlock, but the lock itself was missing.

Farmer moaned again and moved one leg a little.

“Better search him while he's still so peaceable, Stan,” I said. “But leave all his personal stuff in his pockets. No use giving him grounds for any squawks later on.”

While Stan went through Farmer's pockets I looked in the metal box.

There was nothing in the box but a long, narrow, very expensive-looking alligator handbag and, sticking to the bottom of the box, a buff-colored piece of paper just a little larger than a post card.

I looked first at the piece of paper. It was a billhead, imprinted at the top with the name and address of the Joyner Translation Bureau and addressed to Miss Nadine Ellison at her address on Bleecker Street. It was dated some five months ago, marked paid, and bore the typed notation:

1 translation approx. 400 wds. printed matter. (Minimum fee) $15

1 certified copy of above 1

Total $16

At the bottom of the billhead was a statement to the effect that the Joyner Translation Bureau specialized in the translation of foreign medical and legal journals, and that copies of all work were retained permanently.

There was Nothing whatever to indicate the nature of the printed matter Nadine had had translated.

I folded the billhead, tucked it in my breast pocket, and examined the alligator handbag.

I was no expert on ladies' purses, but I did know that this particular one had cost a great deal of money. It wasn't so much the fact that all metal parts were of silver as it was that the entire bag, from first operation to last, had been done by hand.

The bag appeared to have seen very little use and was completely empty.

Stan walked over to me, weighing something in his hand.

“I'll trade you,” he said, and held out a pair of sapphire earrings. Even in the poor light from the lantern the stones burned like blue-black fire.

“Those are for pierced ears, Stan,” I said. “I couldn't wear them.”

He dropped the earrings into one of the small cellophane envelopes detectives carry for such purposes and put the envelope in his pocket. “What was in the box?”

I showed him the handbag and the receipted bill.

“This isn't the kind of bag a woman would hide away.”

“Why even keep a box in the first place?” he asked.

“People get some pretty weird ideas about security,” I said. “But the point is, she kept the bag and the receipted bill in what she thought was a safe place.”

“Didn't Marty Hutchins tell you she kept all kinds of stuff in there?”

“Yes, but I don't think he meant to stretch that far enough to include something like a handbag. It just doesn't jibe out somehow.”

“You worry about the bag,” he said. “Me, I'm interested in that bill, Nadine wasn't any lawyer or doctor, was she? What'd she want with a translation like that?”

“The outfit will have a copy of whatever it was.”

“Sure, but that doesn't mean we'll know what she wanted with it.” He shook his head.

“Anyhow,” I said, “it's no problem. What we've got to do now is—”

There was a sort of muffled yell. Johnny Farmer sat up suddenly, lost his balance, realized his hands were cuffed behind him, and rolled over on his side. In another instant he was sitting up again and trying very hard to get to his feet.

“Stay where you are, Johnny,” Stan said.

Farmer's pale eyes were slightly protuberant to begin with, and now they bulged even more. “Goddam,” he said thickly. “I'll be goddam.”

“Awful way to wake up, isn't it, Johnny?” Stan said, and walked over to show Farmer his badge.

“Goddam,” Farmer said.

“Old Johnny One Note,” Stan said. “Tell me something. Why'd you kill that girl, Johnny?”

“Me? Kill a girl?” He shook his head. “You're crazy, man. I never killed any girl in my whole life.”

“You didn't get those pretty blue earrings in the five-and-ten,” Stan said.

Farmer patted his pocket. “There goes my gimmick,” he said, looking up at Stan reproachfully. “Those things would have got me all the quiff I ever wanted.”

“You should have hocked them a little sooner,” Stan said.

“You nuts?” Farmer said. “With things like that you can talk women into anything.”

“You still didn't tell us why you killed Nadine Ellison,” Stan said.

Farmer changed his position a little and the chains across the insteps of his half-boots clinked softly. “Never did it,” he said.

I moved over closer to him. “What'd you do with the rest of the stuff in that box?” I asked.

“I didn't kill her,” he said.

“You robbed her, though,” I said. “Or are you going to tell us you're just keeping the loot for a friend?”

He shook his head. “Goddam,” he said. “Somebody must have seen me coming out.”

I saw no reason to dissuade him “Not just somebody, Johnny,” I said. “Four of them.”

“Oh, oh,” he said. “Four?”

I nodded. “You're not cut out for a thief, Johnny. People remember you too easily.”

“Too tall,” he said. “I was always too tall.”

“What happened to the other things in the box?” I asked.

“I burned them up,” he said.

“Where?”

“Over there in the corner. There wasn't nothing but a lot of letters and a couple little books, anyhow. I couldn't read what was in them, so what good could they've done me?”

I walked over to the corner and looked down at the small pile of ashes. There was nothing salvable. I poked around in the ashes, just to make certain; then I walked back.

“Why'd you bring that box all the way over here?” I asked.

“Because I couldn't get the lock busted off over there.”

“What'd you do with the lock?”

“I threw it away, out on the street somewhere. I got mad at it, and took it out and slung it the hell away.”

“Was that handbag in the box, Johnny?”

“Yeah — and that's all, too. I was going to keep it and maybe trade it to some girl for a little bit.”

“You were throwing some cash around this afternoon,” I said. “Where'd you get it?”

“It was in a drawer.”

“Was the handbag empty when you found it?”

“Empty as hell. I looked first thing, soon as I busted off that damn lock. Took me better'n half an hour, too.”

“Which brings up back to why you killed the girl,” Stan said. “We're real curious about that, Johnny. Why'd you do it?”

“I told you, man! I never did it.” He looked at me. “How'd you know I was here?”

“Couple people saw you lugging that box in here,” I said.

“Oh, oh,” he said. “Goddam 'em!”

“It was pretty dirty of them, all right,” Stan said. “You rape that girl before you killed her, Johnny?”

“No, man!”

“Afterwards?”

“I didn't do nothing to her. I just robbed her, that's all.”

“You choked her to death with a petticoat,” Stan said.

“I didn't do no such thing! All I did was take the earrings off her.”

“How'd you go about that?” I asked.

He seemed surprised. “How I'd do it? Jesus, how many ways could I do it? I just reached out and yanked them out of her ears, that's all. Man, are you stupid! How would you have done it?”

“She put up much of a fight?” I asked.

“Now I know you're stupid. Goddam, what a question! How's she gonna put up a fight when she's already dead? You take a dead girl hanging up there on a goddam pipe, and how is she going to put up a fight?”

“How'd you go about hanging her up there, Johnny?” Stan asked. “You made it look just like suicide. In fact, you almost fooled us completely.”

Farmer's pale eyes grew sly. “Yeah?” he said.

“You sure did,” Stan said. “It was clever as hell.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Farmer said. “Fooled you, eh?”

“One of the smoothest jobs I've ever seen,” Stan said.

Farmer grinned crookedly. “Snow jobs, you mean. Who you trying to honk, anyhow? You think you're conning me about anything, you're nuts.” He tilted his head back and looked up at Stan contemptuously. “You're too stupid to trick anybody. You know that?”

“You sneer pretty good,” Stan said. “You've got a real talent that way. All I'm worried about is how we'll be able to see you do it through that black bag over your face.”

“You scare me a lot,” Farmer said. “Look how I'm shaking.”

I lit a cigar. “Take a look around, Stan,” I said. “Make sure we don't leave anything.”

“My head hurts,” Farmer said. “I'm sicker than a dog.”

“Where are you from, Johnny?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “One cop's a bastard, and the other cop makes out like he's a nice guy. Wants to hear all about you. I know how you cops do. And you know something? You're both bastards.”

“If you didn't kill her, who did?”

“How should I know? All I know is I hit her place.

There she is, hanging on that pipe. I see she's dead, that's she knocked herself off, and I don't see what good her earrings are going to do her, and so I take them, along with the other stuff.” He shrugged. “That's what I done, and all I done, and you'll play hell ever proving different.”

“Will we?” I said. “Think about it a while, Johnny.”

“I don't have to. You think about it.”

I took a long drag on my cigar, studying him, reflecting on the strange way people like Farmer had of making you feel almost as disoriented as they were. They could be almost unbelievably gullible one moment, and surprisingly knowing and cunning the next. The only certainty about them was their inconsistency.

“How much money was in that drawer, Johnny?” I asked.

“Eighty bucks.”

“Let's have it.”

“Go get it at the bars I spent it at.”

Stan returned from his circuit of the small room. “No luck,” he said. “You'd think he might still have a little loot from his other scores.”

“What other scores?” Farmer said. “You kidding?”

“We'll tip off the burglary squad,” I said. “They can toss the house all they like.”

“That's right,” Farmer said. “Make the other stupes do all the work.”

“How about it, Pete?” Stan said. “You about ready to take this bird in?”

I nodded, replaced the alligator handbag in the fish-tackle box, and stuck the box under my arm. “All right, Farmer,” I said. “The door's already open.”

When we reached the Plymouth, I unlocked one of Farmer's handcuffs long enough to secure it to the steel bar provided in the back seat, and then got in beside him.

“What I don't like about jails,” Farmer said as Stan put the car in gear, “is you can't get hold of a woman.”

“You ought to know,” Stan said.

“It's a fact,” Farmer said conversationally, as if we were just beginning a pleasure ride into the country. “A guy without no woman around is better off dead.”

“You know a lot about jails, do you?” I said.

“Enough,” he said. “In fact, this'll be the shortest time I was ever out of one.”

“That right?”

He nodded. “I'll be breaking my own record. Goddam, I wish I hadn't soaked up all that booze. I'm sicker'n hell.”

“You'll live,” Stan said.

“Don't even know as I want to. Hey, what time did that girl get it, anyhow?”

“You know that better than anybody,” Stan said.

“No kidding, now. What time?”

“You should have remembered to look at your watch,” Stan said.

“Hell,” he said. “I bet you don't even know.”

“We know the time limits,” Stan said. “That's all we'll need, Farmer.”

“Like hell,” Farmer said. “You still need the guy that hit her. Was it before nine o'clock this morning?”

“Why nine?” I asked.

“Because if she got it before nine, I'm in the clear.”

I saw Stan glance up at the rear-view mirror. “What are you trying to pull?” he said.

“By Christ,” Farmer said, sitting up abruptly. “She did get it before then, didn't she?” He looked at me, his lips spreading back in a wide grin. “She sure did! I can tell just by the look on your stupid face.”

Neither Stan nor I said anything.

Farmer laughed. “Like I said, I set a new record today.”

“You trying to tell us you were in jail at nine o'clock this morning?” Stan said.

“I wouldn't try to tell a stupe like you anything,” Farmer said. “All I say is ask them about me at the Tombs. They didn't let me out of there until nine o'clock — right on the button.”

There was a long silence.

“When did you rob her apartment?” I asked.

“About a quarter after ten,” he said. “You know how it is. I didn't even have breakfast money.” He leaned forward to look at Stan's face. “Why, what's the matter?” he said mockingly. “Damned if you don't look a little sick yourself.”

Chapter Thirteen

IN THE muster room at the station house, a five-minute phone call to the Tombs confirmed Stan's and my foreboding that, as Stan put it later, Johnny Farmer's bad news had been much too bad not to be true.

He had been arrested yesterday afternoon on suspicion in connection with a two-month-old mugging, held in custody while a witness to the crime was summoned from Jersey, and released at 9:02 this morning. And although Johnny Farmer jeered at us incessantly during the entire time it took us to transfer him to the Burglary Squad, neither Stan nor I had very much to say, either to Farmer or to each other.

While Stan helped the Burglary detective arrange for the removal of the earrings, handbag and strongbox to Lost Property, I phoned Lost Property to ask for an expedited check on the handbag to determine its ownership. There was every likelihood Farmer had stolen it elsewhere and lied about finding it in the strongbox in an attempt to conceal still another burglary.

“Oh, that miserable damned Farmer,” Stan said, sitting down at his desk. “I'll never forget that bastard as long as I live.”

“He'll be thinking of you, too,” I said. “All the time he's up there in Sing Sing, making fifty cents a day.”

“You're a real big comfort to me,” he said. “You really are.”

There were several messages on my call spike. I separated the ones in connection with squeals upon which Stan and I had been working before we caught the homicide, and tossed them over to him.

“A little something to keep you occupied,” I said

“Thanks so much,” he said.

One of the remaining messages was from the tech chief and said that the two clear fingerprints found on the bottle in Nadine's apartment had been identified as her own.

A second message was from Ted Norton, the modus operandi expert, who notified me that a thorough search of the files had turned up no sex criminal whose M.O. satisfied the requirements I have given him.

There were two notes asking me to call back, one from BCI and the other from Dr. Vincent Baretti at Bellevue.

I decided to call Dr. Baretti first.

“Just got your message, Vince,” I said when he answered. “How's it going?”

“You can never find a policeman when you want one,” he said. “I left that message for you more than an hour ago.”

“New York cops are no damned good,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

“It's a fact,” he said. “Next to M.E.'s, they're the worst”

“You got something for me, Vince?” I asked, signaling Stan to listen in on the extension.

“Nothing very interesting,” Vince said. “I just thought you might like to have a little preliminary pitch on the cause of death.”

“Off the record, of course?”

“Of course. Nothing's official yet, but at least you'll have something to work on.”

The official report of the autopsy sometimes takes as long as three or four days, and the reports of the toxicologists even longer.

“All set,” I said, opening my notebook. “How'd she die, Vince? Fractured larynx?”

“No,” he said. “Her larynx was fractured, all rights — and pretty thoroughly too. But that isn't what killed her, Pete. She died of a ruptured liver.”

“I'll be damned,” I said.

“Yes,” Vince said. “I made the same remark.”

“When you say ruptured, do you mean from a blow?”

“From a blow, Pete. From some kind of direct force.”

“But there wasn't a single mark on that girl's body,” I said. “Not a damned one.”

“It happens that way sometimes,” he said. “In fact, I might even go so far as to say it happens that way just about as often as not.”

“Without even so much as reddening up the skin a little?”

“Yes, Pete — without leaving any external evidence at all.”

“Wouldn't it take quite a bit of force, though?” Stan broke in. “Look at prizefighters, Doc. They soak up a terrific pounding down there every time they get in the ring.”

“That's true, Stan,” Vince said. “But this girl's no prizefighter. The same-blow that killed her probably wouldn't do any more to a fighter than make him grunt.”

“For God's sake,” Stan said. “Who'd have figured a thing like that?”

“Not I, frankly,” Vince said. “I was just as surprised as you are.”

“Any other indications of a beating, Vince?” I asked.

“No, none at all.”

“How about the alky count?”

“The tox men took care of that before they did anything else, Pete. She'd had two — maybe three — ounces; no more.”

“Hardly enough to know she'd been drinking.” I said.

“Hardly enough for her to know, chances are. Others might be able to see the effect. It would depend on how used she was to liquor.”

“How about dope?” Stan asked. “She didn't have any needle punctures; but how about the other stuff? Orals.”

“I very much doubt it,” Vince said. “The tox men may be able to give us a report on that before morning.”

“Any reason to think she was raped?” I asked.

“No, Pete. At least there's no positive evidence of it — not that that means very much.” He paused. “And for whatever it's worth to you, she's borne at least one child.”

“I know,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I think that's just about it, Pete. If we come up with anything more, I'll let you know.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We'll appreciate it.”

“Ruptured liver,” I said as I hung up the phone. “That's the last thing that would have occurred to me.”

“Well, at least we know why she didn't put up any fight when somebody dropped that petticoat around her neck,” Stan said. “She was already dead.”

“Yeah. And if she was already dead, why wouldn't the guy just string her up on the rope? Why bother with the petticoat?”

“Let's don't start kicking that one around again, Pete. All it'll buy you is a headache.”

I dialed BCI and asked for the extension noted on the second message asking me to call back.

BCI told me they were still working on the check I'd requested on Dr. Clifford Campbell and that, so far, they had turned up nothing of interest. Campbell's personal life was, apparently, exemplary in every way, and he was obviously as highly regarded by his neighbors in Scarsdale as he was by the members of his profession. As for his acquisition of a teen-age wife, it seemed to have made for a fairly awkward social life; nothing more.

BCI's call had, however, been primarily in connection with Dr. Campbell's wife, whose check they had just completed, and about whom they had turned up no derogatory information whatever. Aside from my strong suspicion that she had falsified the application for her wedding license by giving her age as eighteen, her personal life — at least to a detective — was as uninteresting as her husband's.

Susan Campbell, nee Susan Leeds, had married Campbell in Scarsdale eleven months ago. The report on her went back some three years and showed a steady attendance at a variety of evening courses, including one in typing, and an even greater variety of short-term and part-time jobs. The picture BCI had put together was that of a girl determined to improve herself in as many areas as she could, and her life, for such a pretty girl, seemed to have been an exceptionally spartan one. There was every indication that she had been both high-minded and single-minded, and that she had had few girl friends and even fewer boy friends. She had met Clifford Campbell when an employment agency sent her to relieve Campbell's regular receptionist during the latter's two week vacation. Later, the receptionist had resigned, and Susan had once again been sent as a temporary replacement.

The replacement had been fairly temporary, at that: two months after going back to Campbell's office, she had married him. Whereupon Susan had, in turn, been replaced by a Miss Edna Hardesty, the disdainful, chinless brunette who had eavesdropped on Stan's and my talk with both Dr. and Mrs. Campbell in the doctor's inner office.

The phone out in the squad commander's office had started to ring a moment or so before I hung up, and Stan walked out to answer it.

I took the receipted bill from the Joyner Translation Bureau from my pocket and looked it over again, wondering whether it was important enough to have someone from the Joyner outfit open the office and give us a look at the printed matter Nadine Ellison had paid to have translated. It was now a few minutes past eleven; by the time we got hold of someone and had him locate the office copy of the translation, we would have killed at least another hour or two.

I was still mulling it over when Stan came from Barney Fells' office.

“That was Gus Heinz, at Headquarters,” he said. “He tried to get you on your phone, but it was tied up.” He grinned at me happily. “Our boy's got a mad on, Pete.”

“Which boy is that?”

“Burt Ellison.”

“Burt, eh? St. Louis come up with some more dope on him?”

“No,” he said. “Ellison called Headquarters to raise hell about the cops letting somebody else beat him to his wife.”

“You mean Nadine's husband is here in New York?”

“He sure as hell is, Pete. He didn't stay on the wire long enough for Headquarters to trace the call, but he was on there long enough to give them a piece of his mind.” He shook his head. “Boy, that guy must be a real wack. He said all he'd lived for was to kill Nadine with his bare hands, and now that somebody had cheated him out of it, he was going to find out who it was and kill him.”

“Crazy isn't a strong enough word,” I said. “When St. Louis said that Nadine's having that Mongolian baby drove Ellison out of his mind, they weren't fooling.”

“St. Louis was on the ball when they figured he'd hit for New York, too.”

“What's Headquarters doing about it, Stan?”

“What can they do? Just get out a supplementary alarm on the pickup for him — and hope for the best.”

“If we only had a picture of the guy,” I said. “That description we've got is next to worthless.”

“It'll help, once we get him, though. If we come up with a suspect with a scar on his wrist and a tattoo on his shoulder, we'll have it made.”

“Sure,” I said. “Once we come up with such a guy.”

“We will,” he said. “We've got to.”

“It occur to you that he might be trying to throw us off?”

“Sure it did,” he said. “I keep the old pineal body oiled up all the time, Pete. He could have killed her himself, and then made that call in the hopes of having us chase our tails from here on in.”

“You pretty hot on him, as the killer?”

“Not just pretty hot, Pete. Damned hot.”

There was a commotion in the hall outside, and a moment later two detectives dragged in a small, emaciated-looking man who flailed about wildly, both eyes tightly shut, his mouth working horribly and silently.

“Tried to push his wife out the window,” one of the detectives said as he and his partner pulled the struggling man toward the door that led out to the interrogation room. “When we got there, she was hanging on the ledge with her fingertips and old lover-boy here was trying to mash her fingers off with a book end.”

The detectives and their prisoner disappeared through the door and I sat wondering what Nadine and Burt Ellison's life had been like before the fateful night their car had stalled on that lonely road out in Missouri. The chances were I would never know.

My eyes fell on the momentarily forgotten bill from the Joyner Translation Bureau, and I picked it up and handed it to Stan.

“You feel like a little change of pace?” I said.

“I feel more like a four-pound steak. Why?”

“No reason you can't have both,” I said. “The steak first, of course.”

“You want me to check out this bill?”

“It's all we've got to chew on, right at the moment”

“Except a steak.”

“I'm going to try to knock off a little of the paper work,” I said. “If you asked me real nice, Stan, I just might let you stay and help me.”

He got to his feet so suddenly he overturned his chair. “Not that, by God,” he said, grinning. “Consider this bill checked out, Pete. I'm already halfway there.”

“Call in if you come up with anything.”

“I'll do even more than that,” he said as he went through the door. “I'll bring you back a new typewriter ribbon.”

I took Nadine Ellison's folder from the file cabinet, rolled a fresh report form into my Underwood, and got down to work.

When the phone rang, twenty minutes later, I had finished two reports and was starting on a third.

It was Sid Kaplan, one of the detectives on permanent duty at Communications.

“Got a little something for you, Pete,” he said. “Whether it's crank, or spite, or the McCoy, I wouldn't know.”

“What is it, Sid?”

“A telegram,” he said. “You got a pencil handy?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Well, it's addressed to Detective Selby, Police Department, New York City,” he said. “Guess the sender didn't know how else to reach you.”

“Who's it from?”

“It's unsigned,” he said. “Anyhow, it reads, 'Murderer Nadine Ellison is Albert Miller. Stop. Eight Fifteen West Seventy-fourth. Stop. Evidence bottom desk drawer his apartment. Stop.'”

“Is that all of it, Sid?” I said.

“That's the works.”

“Anybody checking with Western Union for a line on the sender?”

“We've tried that already. It's no go, Pete. The wire was phoned in from a public pay phone. The sender paid for it just as he would a toll call.”

“The operator notice anything distinctive about his voice?”

“Nothing that'd set it apart from any other. She says he sounded a little hoarse, and that she had to keep asking him to talk louder.”

“Probably disguising it,” I said. “Maybe using a handkerchief or something over the mouthpiece.”

“Yeah. You come across any Albert Millers so far?”

“No.”

“Well, the chances are it's just some sorehead taking out a little spite on him. Mr. Miller's probably got some enemies, and his enemies have got some ideas. We get more spite stuff all the time, it seems like.”

“Still, the sender knew who was carrying the squeal,” I said. “Usually spite calls end up with the Commissioner or the Chief of Police.”

“Or the Mayor,” Sid said. “He gets a lot of interesting stuff, that guy.”

“Thanks, Sid,” I said. “I'll check it out.”

“Well, don't break your neck on it. One will get you fifty that the worst thing you find in Miller's desk will be a couple of dirty books.”

“Maybe I'll wish I'd taken you up,” I said.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Between you and me, you're just not that lucky.”

“There's always a first time,” I said. “Thanks again, Sid.”

After I had phoned the BCI for a check on Albert Miller, I returned Nadine Ellison's folder to the homicide file, speared a note on Stan's desk pen to let him know where he could reach me, and left the squad room for a trip uptown to West Seventy-fourth Street.

Chapter Fourteen

ALBERT MILLER'S apartment house was a five-story. A walk-up just east of Riverside Drive, a very compact, modest-looking brick structure completely dwarfed by the much taller buildings surrounding it on all sides.

I glanced at the row of mailboxes in the foyer, noted Miller's apartment number, and walked across the deskless lobby to the stairway.

The man who answered my knock on the door of apartment 2-D was about an inch taller than I, and so abnormally broad through the shoulders as to appear almost misshapen. He was about fifty, with coarse gray hair, a slightly florid face, and a rather blunt nose that listed a little to the right. He wore unusually heavy-rimmed, perfectly round eyeglasses whose tinted lenses were just thick enough to slightly distort the dark eyes behind them.

“Mr. Albert Miller?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. What is it, please?”

“Police officer,” I said, showing him my badge. “My name's Selby.”

He frowned. “At this hour?” he said. “Do you realize it's almost midnight?”

“Sorry, Mr. Miller,” I said. “May I come in?”

He hesitated for a moment, then opened the door a little wider and stood back. “I hope this visit is justified,” he said. “I was just going to retire.”

His flat, slightly nasal voice held an edge of controlled irritation; but I got the distinct impression that what he really felt was not so much irritation as apprehension.

“Better close the door, Mr. Miller,” I said.

He stared at me resentfully, then made an impatient gesture and shut the door.

I glanced about the room, then crossed to one of the two sling chairs opposite the small television set and sat down. In addition to the sling chairs and television set, the room contained an outsized sofa bed, a sort of freeform cocktail table with a red-plastic top, a small cellaret, a pair of captain's chairs at either side of the hall door, and an exquisite French Provincial desk so beautiful that it completely dominated the room and caused the rest of the furniture to look like just so many leftovers after a forced auction in the warehouse district.

Miller's face was that of a man who has been grievously imposed upon.

“I trust you'll find that chair comfortable, Mr. Selby,” he said. “If there's anything I can do to add to the pleasure of your visit, just let me know.”

“Why so hostile, Mr. Miller?” I said.

“Hostile?” he said. “I'm sure you don't mean that, Mr. Selby. Under the circumstances, I'd say your choice of words is an extremely poor one.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said, while I studied him. “Cops aren't any great shakes in the word department Most of their work is with their feet.”

“I can well believe it,” Miller said. “And now that we've taken care of the amenities, may I ask the reason for this honor?”

“You know a girl named Nadine Ellison?” I asked. “If you do, I'd like to ask you a few questions about her.” I was watching carefully for reaction, but the thick, tinted lenses of his glasses made his eyes difficult to read.

“About whom did you say?” he asked.

“Nadine Ellison,” I said. “She was murdered this morning, Mr. Miller. You may have read about it in the papers.”

“No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, haven't even so much as glanced at a newspaper all day.”

I see.”

“But let us assume I had,” he said. “Of what possible interest could your Nadine Ellison be to me?”

“Are you telling me you didn't know her?”

“I am indeed, Mr. Selby.”

“It's possible you knew her under another name.”

He started to say something, then shrugged. “All things are possible, of course,” he said. “Even that.”

“She's been known to use the name of Norma Edwards,” I said.

He shook his head. “That's equally unfamiliar, Mr.Selby. Would you care to try again?”

“She lived in the Village,” I said. “On Bleecker.”

He glanced at the hall door rather pointedly, then sighed and sat down in one of the captain's chairs. “Mr. Selby, is it being excessively optimistic on my part to hope that you'll eventually enlighten me as to the nature of your call?”

“See if this rings any bells,” I said, and then described Nadine carefully and in detail.

“She would seem to be a remarkably attractive young woman,” he said. “She would also seem to be no one of my acquaintance.”

“Even with the best descriptions, Mr. Miller, it's some-times a little hard to—”

“Then why bother to give me one?”

I leaned back in the sling chair and took a deep breath, wondering why it was that Miller's cop-baiting and overly precise speech should annoy me so much. A cop is supposed to hear what people say, not to be irked by what they say or the way they say it.

A cop's job is to listen, not to react.

“Miller,” I said, “just what the hell is bugging you?”

He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You've been giving me a hard time ever since here, Miller. From here on in, cut out the bullshit.”

He was as powerfully built as any man I'd ever talked to, and it was plain he'd never had to take very much of the kind of talk I was giving him now. He seemed not to believe his own ears.

“I beg—” he began again. “What?”

“I'm not the kind of cop who tiptoes into a place with his hat in his hand and touching his forelock every time some citizen speaks a civil word to him,” I said. “I treat people just exactly the way I'd expect to be treated if things were the other way around.”

“That's very… very commendable,” Miller said. “Perhaps I've been under something of a… I think I owe you an—”

“All you owe me is a little cooperation,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, nodding almost eagerly. “Yes, of course.”

“That's fine,” I said. “And now that we've really got the amenities out of the way, tell me whether you have any serious enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“Yes — enemies. Say, someone who might go to almost any length to embarrass you.”

He shook his head. “I haven't any enemies at all,” he said. “That is, none of which I am aware. It's always conceivable I may have offended someone unknowingly, of course…”

“But no one who's really out to get you?”

“Why, no, Mr. Selby. Certainly not.”

“Think about this very carefully,” I said. “You in any kind of woman trouble? How about your job? Anybody you work with have a beef against you? Think it over.”

“There's just no one,” he said. “I sincerely believe I'ves never made what one might characterize as a real enemy.”

“Where do you work, Mr. Miller?”

“I'm with the McMurdon Dental Laboratories.”

“Doing what?”

“To put it succinctly, I construct dentures for people who have undergone major oral surgery.”

“You ever hear of a Doctor Clifford Campbell?”

“Is he a dental surgeon?”

“No. Neurosurgeon.”

“I don't think so. Should I know him, Mr. Selby?”

“No. It just occurred to me in passing.”

He looked at me for a moment. “I think you can appreciate my position, Mr. Selby,” he said. “In all friendliness, I think I have a right to know why you are here.”

“The police receive a great number of spite letters and phone calls and telegrams and so on,” I said. “We received one about you, Mr. Miller. It accused you of a crime.”

Once again I watched closely for reaction; and once again I saw nothing beyond what, under the circumstances, I should have expected to see.

“Are you serious?” Miller said. “A telegram about me?”

“Yes.”

“And you say someone accused me of a crime?” He leaned forward. “Accused me of what?”

“Of murdering Nadine Ellison,” I said.

His enormous shoulders stiffened visibly and his mouth very slowly sagged open in what was either consternation or, if not, then something for which I could find no ready-made label.

“Good Lord,” he said softly. “Who would do a thing like that? Who could do a thing like that?”

“You still say you have no enemies?”

“I–I must have. I never realized a man such as I could ever affect another person so negatively that he…” He shook his head. “Whatever I did, I did unknowingly. I would have been willing to take an oath that—”

“No use punishing yourself,” I said. “It may have been a crackpot. Nine-tenths of them act just like everybody else — until they're alone. Then they do some pretty weird things. Chances are, this is just another instance.”

“You — you think so, Mr. Selby?” he said almost pleadingly. “I'd very much like to believe that. The thought that someone might have cause to… Well, you know what I'm trying to say, I'm sure.”

“If you're sure you don't know Nadine Elli—”

“Oh, but I am! Until you came here this evening, Mr. Selby, I'd never even so much as heard of her.”

“The telegram said we would find proof that you'd killed her.”

“Mr. Selby, may I see that telegram?”

“It was read to me over the phone.”

“Is it possible there may have been some mistake in the name? There are, after all, a great many Millers, you know.”

“No mistake,” I said. “It said the evidence was in the bottom drawer of your desk.”

His eyes swung toward the desk; then he rose, walked to it, and turned to face me. “Would you care to examine it, Mr. Selby?” he asked.

I crossed to the desk and watched him as he pulled out both of the bottom drawers and emptied them of their contents.

The drawer on the left held a miniature Speed-Graphic, old but well cared for, a Rolleiflex without a carrying case, a Leica, another 35 mm camera that looked as if it might be Japanese, and an assortment of flash guns, sun shades, interchangeable lenses, and filters in individual boxes.

The drawer on the right contained what was perhaps two hundred rolls of 35 mm film in aluminum cans, six or eight flat file boxes filled with transparencies, and a small, futuristic-looking color-slide projector.

Miller looked up at me, waiting.

“Thanks,” I said.

He sat rubbing the ball of his thumb back and forth against the back of the Leica case thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged and began to return everything to its place.

“Not precisely 'evidence,' Mr. Selby,” he said. “Except of a rather expensive hobby, perhaps.”

I nodded, thinking about Burt Ellison's call to Headquarters and the anonymous telegram addressed to me personally; and that the phone call and the telegram had all come in within a comparatively short period of time.

There was probably no connection between the two.

Still…

“I asked you about Nadine Ellison, Mr. Miller,” I said. “How about men with that last name? The particular first name I have in mind is Burt.”

He replaced the last box of transparencies in the drawer very carefully and shook his head. “The name 'Ellison' has been going around and around in my mind ever since you first mentioned it,” he said. “I'm certain I've never known anyone with that name, Mr. Selby.”

“Let's take a wild stab at nothing,” I said. “You know any young man, say, about twenty-six, with brown hair and eyes and a V-shaped scar on his right wrist?” I thought a moment. “He'd be a fairly recent acquaintance, if you do know him.”

“No one with a scar, no,” he said. “In all truth, I know hardly any younger men at all. I'm — one might almost say a recluse. Except for my work, and picture-taking strolls here and there, I lead a very withdrawn existence.” He closed the drawers and straightened up. “What was the nature of the evidence, Mr. Selby?”

“What?”

“Didn't the telegram tell you what to look for?”

“No.”

“In that case, it might be just anything at all, mightn't it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it could.”

“Then I suggest we continue with the desk, and then proceed in any way you like.”

“Why not?” I said. “One starting place is as good as another.”

“It's just that I have all my cameras and things in here,” he said. “I'd much rather handle them myself, Mr. Selby. You know how it is, I'm sure.”

I nodded. “Let's get started.”

“At least we'll have the exercise,” he said as he turned to pull out another drawer. “Perhaps it will help us enjoy a much sounder sleep.”

It takes a lot longer to search a one-room apartment when you don't know what you're looking for than it does when you do. When you have no idea at all, it's largely a matter of lifting and shifting and pawing and shuffling, and wishing you had taken the examinations for the Fire Department.

But there are tricks in every trade, and I used every one of them. I worked hard and rapidly, and, to my surprise, so did Albert Miller. It was he who did most of the lifting and shifting, and I who did most of the pawing and shuffling. For a man of his age, his energy was almost as amazing as his strength.

Even so, my search of Miller's apartment, including the removal of the back of the television set for a look inside the cabinet, took almost an hour. And when I'd finished, I knew no more about Miller than if I'd searched my own.

Chapter Fifteen

I HAD just gone out to the bathroom to wash my hands when the phone rang. As I started to run some water in the basin I heard Miller answer it and then ask someone to hold on.

“It's for you, Mr. Selby,” he called. “You want to take the call now, or would you rather call back?”

“I'll take it now,” I said as I turned off the water and walked back into the living room. “It's probably my precinct partner. I left your number on his desk.”

Miller nodded absently, glanced at the palms of his hands, and started for the bathroom. “I think I could profit from a little soap and water myself,” he said. “Feel free to use the phone as much as you like, Mr. Selby.”

The phone was on a nightstand at one end of the sofa bed. “Selby,” I said.

“Stan, Pete. How's the roving detective?”

“Bushed,” I said. “Nothing like a toss to wear you down.”

“Any luck?”

“Not a bit.”

“Tough. What kind of a guy is this Miller, anyway?”

“Big,” I said. “How'd you know about him?”

“Sid Kaplan called. He said he just wanted to know how you'd made out on that telegram.”

“He wanted to bet me I wouldn't make out at all,” I said. “I'm glad now I didn't take him up.”

“Dead end?”

“Looks that way. All I got was a good workout.”

“You had another call. From BCI. They said to tell you they don't have anything on Miller at all. Not ever a traffic ticket.”

“Good for him,' I said. “What'd you find out from the Joyner Translation Bureau?”

“Very cooperative outfit, Pete. The boss came down right away.” He paused. “Boy, what a head on that one! The guy speaks seventeen languages. Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said. “What'd you find out?”

“Well, it seems this bill Nadine had in her strongbox was for translating an item from a French newspaper.”

“New York paper?”

“No, this was published in France, in Bordeaux. I can't pronounce the name of it, but it was published almost eight years ago.”

“What's it about?”

“Pretty interesting, Pete. Just what good it is to us, I don't know. But those French cops are on the ball.”

“Stan…”

“All right, keep your hair on. It's about this joker that knocked off his wife and planted her in the flower garden behind his house. Guy's name was Maurice Thibault. He was a linguist with some kind of import-export outfit in Bordeaux. That's a seaport city, Pete.”

“So they say,” I said. “What's the rest of it?”

“Well, the guy was a pillar of the community, and all that, and all at once he turns up missing. So does his wife. After a while the neighbors call the police, and the police toss the guy's house and yard and ask around a bit; and then one of the cops happens to notice that all but one of Thibault's flower beds aren't doing so well. But this one flower bed looks like it could nose out the champ flower bed in the whole country. The plants are all up and blooming like crazy. But it's the only one. The flower beds all around it have just about had it. And so do you know what the payoff was?”

“I've got a pretty good idea,” I said. “And even if I didn't, I know I can depend on you to tell me. Not necessarily tonight, of course, but—”

“Knock off, will you? It was terrific police work.”

“All right; so the cops found Thibault's wife beneath the champion flower bed. Terrific police work. And then?”

“Well, then they find out Thibault's pulled a disappearing act. They put a lot of men on it, and they stayed with it a long time, but they never came up with a single lead on him. Nothing. It was like he'd just jumped straight up in the air and kept right on going.”

“Is that all there is to the item?”

“No. It goes on to say that they dug up so much evidence that he'd knocked off his wife that they were able to go ahead and try him for it, anyway. In absentia, it says here.”

“How'd the trial come out?”

“Guilty. If they ever do find the guy, he'll get the guillotine.”

“And you say all this happened eight years ago?”

“Just about.”

“Damn few people ever just disappear into thin air, Stan. Funny they wouldn't have come up with at least a nibble or two in all this time.”

“It says they figure he could pass as just about anything. Speaking all those languages, and all, he could blend right in, anywhere he went. This export-import outfit he worked for in Bordeaux had sent him all over. He even spent two or three years in Canada — in Quebec, it says — and five or six years, off and on, here in New York.”

I listened to the water running in the bathroom, wishing I'd had time to wash my own hands, and wishing even more that I'd gotten something to eat before I came up here. I'd put off eating for so long that I was getting a little nauseated.

“I've got the clipping right here,” Stan went on. “It was stapled to the carbon copy of the translation. The boss at the Joyner outfit said they'd asked Nadine if they could hold on to it. Everybody around there was pretty interested in this Thibault, seeing as how he was a fellow linguist.”

I cocked my head to hold the phone against my shoulder and tried to clean some of the grime off my hands with my handkerchief. “You think our girl may have been pulling a little blackmail?” I said.

“She sure didn't have that thing translated just for the hell of it. If it wasn't blackmail, what was it?”

“With what little we know about her so far, it could have been anything.”

“Look at it this way, Pete. Say you had to bet your life on it, one way or the other. Either it was blackmail, or it wasn't. Which way would you bet?”

“Well, in a case like that…”

“You see? Remember that, Pete. Any time you've got to decide on something, one way or the other, just pretend you have to bet your life on being right. It'll cut through all the ifs and maybes and on-the-other-hands just like they weren't even there.”

“I'm sure that's very sound advice, Stan,” I said, “but—”

“Damn right. You just try it next time; you'll see.”

“I will. But even so, Stan—”

“Didn't you tell me that woman down at the antique shop — what's her name? — Pedrick. Iris Pedrick. Didn't you tell me the prowler that walked in on her in Nadine's apartment that night had some kind of accent? She said he just stood there for a while with this flashlight in her face and kind of talking to himself in some kind of foreign language. Right?”

“Yes, but what's a foreign language in New York, Stan? You can't walk more than two blocks without hearing half the foreign languages there are. And as far as just plain accents go… My God, how long've you been around this town, anyhow?”

“Long enough to know a girl like Nadine Ellison doesn't pay to have an eight-year-old newspaper clipping translated just for the fun of it. And she kept it in her strongbox, too, don't forget.” He paused. “That Pedrick woman have any idea at all what kind of language this guy was using?”

“She thought it might be Slavic,” I said. “But that's as close as she could come.”

“Slavic, eh? Well, that could be a lot of things, but it sure couldn't be French.” He paused. “You say she just thought? She wasn't sure?”

“Slavic was the best she could do,” I said. “But now that I think about it, Stan, I'm beginning to wonder how a man's French — or any other language, for that matter — would sound if he'd just raised his knife to kill a woman he thought was Nadine Ellison, and then suddenly realized the woman he was about to kill wasn't Nadine after all.”

“Maybe I don't hear so good any more,” Stan said. “How was that again, Pete?”

“A man in that position would be downright stunned, Stan. He'd be wondering just what had happened, and maybe mumbling to himself while he tried to figure it out. He'd be so choked up that his voice and tone and inflection would be completely changed. Chances are, whatever came out of his mouth would sound like just about anything you cared to call it.”

“Go, man,” Stan said, laughing. “Go! Go! Go!”

“What's the matter? You think it couldn't happen?”

“You kidding? I'm with you all the way, Pedro.”

“Well, it gives us something to hunch with, anyhow. If this Maurice Thibault did make it to this country, and if Nadine did tumble to him and start blackmailing him, it's easy to see why he'd show up some night with a knife.

“You know it,” Stan said. “Those guillotines give me the crawling sweats, just to think about them.”

“They're not too healthful, at that,” I said.

“So now we can figure on another suspect.” He paused. “You know, I think maybe I could get to like this Thibault just as much as Burt Ellison.”

“It's a good thing you never started playing the horses,” I said. “You'd be betting the whole field, every race.”

“In our racket, that's not always a bad idea.”

“We'll kick it around a little more when I get back to the squad room. Has there been any other action at all, Stan? It's time we heard from Frank Voyce and those fifty cops of his.”

“Don't worry about Voyce. When he gets hold of what we want, we'll hear about it.”

“All right, then. I'll grab a bite and come in.”

“Tough you had the trip for nothing, Pete. Hurry home.”

I hung up, started to reach for a cigar — and then suddenly stood very still, with the cigar halfway out of my pocket.

The water was still running in the bathroom. But there was no other sound. No splashing noises, no scrape of shoesole or whisper of towel, no sound of movement — nothing but the hissing pound of water against the bottom of the basin and the steady, hollow gurgling of the drainpipe.

“Miller?” I said, crossing quickly to the bathroom door. Then, much louder, “Miller!”

There was no answer, and no sound other than the water.

I tried the door. It was locked.

I stood there for a moment, trying by sheer force of will to deny what I knew intuitively had to be. It could be a heart attack, of course; Stan and I found DOA's in bathrooms practically every other day. It could even be suicide, just as it had been the time one of Stan's and my suspects locked himself inside his bathroom and cut his throat.

But this was neither heart attack nor suicide, I sensed; this was something that had happened because a cop had been inexcusably careless.

“Miller!” I called once more; and then, getting as much leverage as I could with nothing to brace my shoulders against, I booted the door about six inches beneath the knob.

The door burst open on an empty bathroom and a wide-open window. I glanced inside the shower curtain first, just to make sure, and then went to the window and looked out.

The only way Miller could have gone was straight down. There was no ledge beneath the window, no way he could have climbed upward or to either side — nothing but the flat brick rear of the building and a sheer drop of at least twenty feet to the moonlit concrete of the alley below.

It was the kind of plunge no sane man would take unless his only alternative was almost certain death.

But Albert Miller had taken it. And he had not only lived through it; he had been able to walk away.

The phone rang, and I went out to answer it.

It was Stan Rayder again.

“Glad I caught you before you left,” he said. “There've been a couple of developments.”

“There sure have,” I said.

“What's with the doomsday voice? I just got some pix of Maurice Thibault, Pete. Barney Fells came in, and he remembered there was a picture of the guy in one of those Justice Department circulars they're always sending us. He dug it up out of the basement and—”

“You think this Maurice Thibault is a pretty hot suspect, do you, Stan?”

“What the hell gives with you, anyway, Pete? You got a wild hair somewhere? All I wanted to do was tell you about the pix and ask you if you'd pick up some coffee on your way back. Why so steamed?”

“Miller took a walk out the window,” I said. “While you and I were talking, he—”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he's almost certain to be pretty badly hurt.”

“You mean he took a dive and… Jesus Christ!”

“So, if it's hot suspects we wanted, we've got one.” I said. “Now hang up, Stan, so I can call in an alarm.”

“You want me to come up there?”

“No. Stay where you are — and see if you can't use your head a little better than I did.”

“Hell, it could happen to anybody, Pete.”

“It didn't though,” I said. “It happened to me.”

Chapter Sixteen

WHEN I into the squad room at five the air was still hot and muggy with the stored heat of the day and the oscillating fan atop the file cabinet did little more than stir the papers on the desks and move the stale tobacco smoke from one part of the room to another.

Stan Rayder was sitting at his desk, sipping from a quart container of coffee and gazing thoughtfully out the window at the dense, dark-gray haze that passes for the first light of morning in New York City.

“Lovely city, New York,” he said as I sat down. “I wish I could see it.”

“Maybe you will someday,” I said. “Then you'll be ahead of all of us.”

“Is that what they call being enigmatic?” he said, extending the container toward me. “I wouldn't exactly say it's coffee, but it's hot.”

I got my mug from the bottom drawer of my desk, filled it from the container, and handed the container back to Stan.

“Talk a lot, don't you?” Stan said. “Regular chatterbox.”

“If I hadn't spent so much time talking to you on that phone…”

“That's what they're for, Pete. Talking. The guy wasn't a suspect when you were talking to me. He didn't start being a suspect until he took his swan dive. In other words—”

“In other words, I let him get away,” I said. “That's what it amounts to, any way you slice it.”

“Balls. So what've you done about it? I mean, aside from asking Communications to get out an alarm.”

“Well, the first thing I did was hit for that alley out back. There's only one way he could have got away from there, Stan, and that's through the alley and across a couple of courts to Riverside.”

“Any bloodstains?”

“Not a one.”

He nodded. “The damage must all be on the inside.”

“Communications has put all the hospitals on the watch-and-wait,” I said. “I think he must have made it as far as Riverside under his own power, and then taken a cab.”

“They checking the trip-sheets?”

“Yes. There's a cop at every cab garage. They'll check every sheet the minute the driver turns it in.”

“You think he might have holed in somewhere around there?”

“It wouldn't be easy. But if he did, the uniform men will flush him out.” I finished the last of my coffee and put the mug back in the drawer. “You said Barney came up with some pictures of Maurice Thibault,” I said. “Where are they?”

“He sent them over to Centre Street for copies,” he said. “You want to read the translation of that newspaper story?”

“I remember it,” I said.

“Which reminds me,” he said. “Barney Fells is still here, Pete.”

“At this hour? How come?”

“Hell, he spends half his life here, Pete. All he uses his home for is to store his clothes.” He paused. “He… uh… said he wanted to see you.”

“About Albert Miller?”

“Damned if I know, Pete.”

“If this is going to be a chew-out, I want to know.”

“He's a little bit steamed, Pete. Whether it's about Miller or not, I don't know.”

“Which way would you call it?” I said.

“Well…

“Well?”

“Miller,” he said.

I got up and walked out to the squad commander's six-by-six office and sat down on the straight chair beside his desk.

“You wanted to see me, Barney?” I said,

He scowled at me a moment, nodded almost imperceptibly, and then looked away from me and sat drumming a pencil eraser against the top of his desk. “I can think of a lot of people I'd rather see,” he said.

I didn't say anything. Barney had his own ways of backing into a chew-out, and squad-room protocol required his detectives to say nothing until asked for comment. I watched him, feeling a lot more sorry for Barney Fells than I felt concerned for myself.

Acting-Lieutenant Barney Fells is a Department tragedy, a tough, wiry, graying, dedicated cop who had become so good at his job that he lost it. He had wanted to remain a working detective for the rest of his career; instead, he had, against his protests and threats of resignation, been promoted to acting-lieutenant, a rank he had never wanted, and elevated to squad commander, a desk job he hated.

And so now he sat in his cubbyhole, prevented by his rank and command from doing the work that had been his entire life, forced to watch other men trying to do his old job only half as well as he had.

“Quarter past five,” Barney said, glancing at his watch. “The Ellison girl was killed about twenty-four hours ago.”

I nodded.

“A long time, twenty-four hours,” he said. “Hard grind. Takes the starch out of a man.” He sighed. “Another thing,” he added quickly. “You and Stan are always splitting up. Why do you think we set up detective teams in the first place? So you two heroes can…” He broke off. “Oh, screw it. You're hopeless, Pete. Give you another five years and you'll end up in the same damn fix I'm in. And you know something, smart-ass? It'll serve you right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So smart. So brave.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Stan, too,”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long's it been since you ate?”

“I'm never hungry when there's time, and there's never time when I'm hungry.”

He stared at me pityingly for a moment, then sighed again and sank back in his chair. “God, I'd liked to have caught this one,” he said. “In the old days, it'd have been my special meat.”

“These girl-murders are tough,” I said.

“That's what I mean,” he said. “Gives a man something to really tear into.”

“And the newspapers, too.”

“You seen them?”

“I don't have to.”

“They're calling this one the 'Petticoat Murder,' Pete. Of course, she actually died some other way, but 'Petticoat Murder' sounds sexier.” He shook his head. “First time I ever saw them fail to come up with a picture for the first page.”

“The snapshot Stan snagged off her dresser was the only one around.”

“Stan filled me in pretty well, all in all. That Nadine must have been a natural-born little liar.”

“Either that, or having the kind of baby she did, and having it the way she had it could've triggered something in her mind.”

“What are you, now? A psychologist?”

“Well, look at what happened to her. She had the kind of baby that would tear any mother's heart out. And she not only had it, Barney, she had it beside the road out in the middle of nowhere, with not a soul around to lift a finger to help her. And then her husband goes insane right before her eyes, and runs, and she lies there all night with this baby dying beside her and maybe she goes a little crazy herself.”

Barney shook his head. “The wonder is that she didn't go all the way.”

“And when she gets out of the hospital, up jumps her husband and tries to kill her with his fists. He was stupid enough to think she was to blame for it. God knows what he thought. He must have figured she'd been sleeping around with a grown-up mongolian idiot or something.”

“A guy like that's the most dangerous kind of man there is,” Barney said. “As for myself, I'll take an honest gunman, every time.”

“He beat her up twice,” I said. “He came pretty close to killing her both times; and even after Nadine left St. Louis, he kept swearing that he'd get her if it was the last thing he ever did.”

“And he may have done it, too,” Barney said. “That phone call he made about getting whoever killed her — that could be just so much manure.”

“It's pretty hard to make a guess about anybody as crazy as Burt Ellison.”

“He didn't come to New York for the World's Fair, because we don't have any,” Barney said, ignoring me. “Ellison's a psycho. He's a standout suspect all the way; and with me, he's number one. How about you?”

“I'm trying not to play any favorites,” I said.

“You mean you don't want to put down any bets until the horses pass the finish line?”

“I just don't like to look so hard at Jack I can't see John”

“Or Jill,” Barney said. “Never rule out the ladies, Pete. It's the one sure way to end up sad, sick and sorry,” He picked up his pencil again, wrote Burt Ellison's name at the top of a scratch pad, and then sat staring at it broodingly for a moment. “Funny how these psycho cases can be so shrewd, isn't it? They've got some very hotshot detectives in St. Louis, and yet Ellison gives them the slip.”

“Just like he's doing us,” I said.

“Don't remind me. All right; so much for Ellison. Next we've got this character with the lousy manners.”

“Meaning Albert Miller?” I said.

“Yes. Men with the right kind of upbringing don't jump out bathroom windows and leave their company standing in the middle of the floor with his mouth hanging open. Now, do they?”

“Not often,” I said.

“Okay. Albert Miller. No police record, and BCI is checking him in all departments. I know they are, because I made damn sure of it right after Stan told me how he left you standing around to admire his furniture. That telegram you got said Miller had evidence in a drawer of his desk. There was no evidence in the desk, or anywhere else, and now there's no Miller either. We don't know whether he has motive, but we can assume opportunity; and if ever flight was an indication of guilt, Miller is guilty of everything since Cain. He was so anxious to get away from a cop that he dived twenty feet into six inches of concrete. That, Pete, is what I call flight.”

“Almost literal, in fact,”

He wrote down Miller's name. “You put a stakeout in his place?”

“Yes.”

“Probably a waste of manpower. A guy that anxious to leave somewhere sure doesn't figure to come back.” He thought for a while. “We got anything else in his favor?”

“No.”

“Okay; so much for Albert Miller. Now we've got this Dr. Clifford Campbell and his wife, Susan. We know Nadine threatened him with something, but we don't know what. He admits the threat, but says he's never seen her, doesn't know what she was talking about. What have we got on him beside the threat from Nadine?”

“Nothing,” I said. “BCI is still running an all-out check on him.”

“Nothing negative on him so far?”

“No. So far, he's a model citizen.”

“All right. Now we've got Mrs. Campbell. Susan.”

“Mrs. Campbell, Barney?”

“Stan says she's an eighteen-year-old beauty with a pretty fair temper and a shape that'd charge up a truck battery. Right?”

I shrugged. “Right.”

“And her husband's a man twenty-five years or so older than she is.” He paused. “From what Stan says, this Nadine Ellison was one of the most beautiful women he ever laid eyes on. If she and Campbell were up to any hanky-panky, and Susan tumbled to it, she might've decided to kill her. After all, how could she be sure Nadine wouldn't do her out of her meal ticket?”

“If she married Campbell just for dough, Barney, she wouldn't worry about Nadine one bit. In fact, she'd love her. All she'd have to do is get a little proof, and then she could just sit back and let some lawyer go to work for her. In a very short time she would be dragging in a lot more money in alimony than she ever knocked down as a wife. And even if she took a cash settlement, she'd get a potful.”

“You going to tell me you buy this May-and-December business, Pete?”

“Oh, come off it, Barney. Clifford Campbell is only forty-two or-three years old.”

“All right. Then maybe Susan wanted to keep the money she was getting as an honest wife plus the prestige and position that go with being the wife of a big-wheel medico. Lots of girls go for that other stuff even more than they go for the cash loot. Right?”

“Yes, but—”

“That 'but' of yours keeps rearing up all the time. You know the trouble with you, Pete? You're a natural-born sucker for 'little ladies.'”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Who's next in the line-up?”

“This Frenchman who knocked off his old lady and buried her in the flower bed. What we know about him is that he can speak any number of languages so well that the native-born folks can't tell the difference.”

“Was that in the clipping Nadine had translated?”

“No. It was in the same magazine along with the pictures we sent over to have copied. Anyhow, he's a pretty solid candidate. Stan says you and he think Nadine might have been blackmailing him. It's an easy idea to buy, and I'll buy a big piece of it.” He wrote on his pad for a while. “So here's Maurice Thibault. No novice in the murder game. Could be talking to you right now and you'd never guess he wasn't a native son. We can assume opportunity; and as for motive, a guillotine doesn't need any assuming at all.” He paused. “And now we come to Iris Pedrick who runs the antique store. She's the one with the boy friend and the sick husband. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And she gave you a line of bull about being real worried about her husband finding out about the boy friend.”

“She sold me, Barney,” I said. “Just because people want to have their cake and eat it too doesn't mean they like to hurt other people.”

“That isn't the point. The point is, who was she doing the real sweating about? Her husband, or herself?”

“Who knows?”

“This Nadine might have been shaking her down a little.”

“The same might go for all the other people who used her place.”

“True. And yet we have to stick with Mrs. Pedrick because she's the only one we know about. She and her boy friend, Eddie Dycer. You run Eddie and Iris through BCI?”

“Yes.”

“Well, keep an eye on those two, Pete. You never know.”

I nodded, thinking how tough it must be for Barney. More and more often of late he had been sitting down with the men on his squad for sessions like this one. It was the closest thing to working a squeal that his command and title permitted; but it was still a long, long way from the real thing.

“And this young guy that Nadine had such a big yen for,” Barney went on, really warming up now. “There's the guy to watch, Pete.”

“Marty Hutchins, Barney,” I said. “I checked him out, Remember?”

He frowned. “Yes, I remember now. Stan said he was shacked up all night with some kid in a hotel.”

“That's right.”

“Now where does that leave us, Pete? Who've we over-looked?”

“If you've overlooked anyone, it must be someone who just hit town five minutes ago.”

“Another one of your troubles, Pete, is that you don't use a wide-angle lens. You're always trying to whittle suspects down to just two or three.”

“I always try to whittle them down to just one,” I said.

“You better watch it, boy. A real smart one like you is likely to make lieutenant in less than five years.” He paused. “You just plain forgot that Bowman girl, didn't you?”

I grinned. “Barney, I didn't forget her. I simply—”

“Well, I haven't. Judy Bowman is the one who found the body — and that gives her a good ten-yard lead on everybody else. Half the time, the murderer turns out to be one of two people: the spouse, or the one who finds the body.”

“All right,” I said. “She lived within fifty feet of Nadine. She had opportunity, but no known motive. She checked clean at BCI. She ran out into the street yelling for a cop. This was at least six hours after Nadine died, and it may have been as many as ten. She was hysterical when we got there, and she very nearly got that way again while I was questioning her.”

“How come you're so sure this Judy Bowman wasn't acting?”

I shrugged. “Hysteria isn't acting, Barney.”

“Never sell the ladies short, Pete. So who else is there? It seems to me we're still missing somebody.”

He sat doodling on the scratch pad awhile, as if trying to think of anything we'd overlooked; then he tossed the pencil aside, glanced at his watch, and stood up.

“Well,” he said, “if I want to get home and eat and shave and clean up a little and still get back to work by eight o'clock, I'd better get a move on.”

I walked back out to the squad room with him. He waved to Stan, who was busy on the phone, and then paused in the doorway for a last look around.

“Pete,” he said, “may I give you some words of advice?”

“Sure, Barney. What are they?”

He turned to leave. “Get hot,” he said.

Chapter Seventeen

AS PULLED out the chair at my desk, Stan dropped the phone in its cradle. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“What's up, Stan?”

“You know all the fussing around you did over that handbag we found in Nadine's strongbox?”

“What about it?”

“Pretty expensive bag, it seems. Worth about two hundred bucks.”

“You mean you've got something on it? That's what the phone call was about?”

He nodded. “It was Lost Property, Pete. They've just found out who it belonged to.”

“Who?”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Stan.”

“You can't beat Lost Property, Pete! Those guys've—”

“Stan, who did the bag belong to?”

“Edna Hardesty.”

For an instant, the name didn't register. “Who?”

“Edna Hardesty, Pete. That black-haired girl that gave us the cold eye when we asked her to let us talk to Dr. Campbell.”

“Oh, sure. Campbell's receptionist.”

“Little Miss Fish Eye.”

“Well, I'll be damned.”

“You see the way she had her ear in that intercom when we came out of Campbell's office?” he said.

“Sure. She didn't miss a word.”

“Maybe she didn't like the idea of anybody else even talking to the guy. You know?”

“Could be, Stan. But let's stick to what we know. How'd Lost Property pull it off?”

“They worked all night.”

“Yes, but how did they pull it?”

“Well, they started in with the manufacturer's code number inside the bag. The company that makes them is just a little one-horse outfit, maybe twenty guys in all, and the two brothers that own the shop work right along with everybody else. You know the kind of place?”

“All I know is that I wish you'd get on with it.”

“It's one of these outfits that does everything by hand. Every stitch and every cut is done that way. That's what makes those things so damn expensive.”

“I kind of suspected that all along,” I said. “But what about Lost Property?”

“They get one of these brothers out of bed and talk to him a while. It turns out he's a real nice guy, so he takes them down to the office, just like that guy at the Joyner Translation Bureau did with me, and gives the boys a look at the records.”

“And the records showed that Edna Hardesty bought—”

“You're getting ahead of the game, Pete.”

“All right,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“Well, what the records usually show are exactly what bags go to any given outlet. They number the bags with consecutive serial numbers, and they keep a record of what goes where, just like banks do with new bills sometimes. So all they have to do is look at a bag's serial number and they can tell you where it was sold, and when the store got the shipment, and so on.”

“And?”

“And the only exception is when somebody's knife slips, or somebody makes a slip some other way. They inspect every bag four times, and if it isn't perfect, it doesn't go out. They cancel that serial number and sell the bag to their employees for just what it cost in the way of raw material. They're culls, and the employees can buy them for maybe fifteen or twenty bucks, depending on what kind of leather it is. The point is, there's never anything really wrong with these bags; it's usually some little thing that nobody but an expert would even notice.”

“And that's what the bag we found in Nadine's strongbox was? A reject?” I shook my head. “That's hard to believe.”

“That's because you didn't have a magnifying glass handy. Anyhow, after they cancel the serial number on the list of stuff going out, they add a couple little marks to it on the leather to make sure nobody slips up and sends it out anyway. Then they enter the serial number in another book, and when one of the employees buys the bag, they write his name down beside the number to show exactly where it went.”

“Careful outfit.”

“Too big a reputation to take chances with.”

“Who bought the bag in the first place?”

“Some young guy just learning the trade. Lost Property was talking so fast I muffed his name.” He shrugged. “Doesn't make any difference, anyhow. The point is, he bought this beautiful hunk of alligator hide and gave it to Edna Hardesty as a present.”

“Boy friend?”

“Don't know. Maybe he just figured he was making an investment.”

“When did he give it to her?”

“Couple of weeks ago.”

“Lost Property find out anything else about this

“Just that he'd given Edna the bag and she'd turned right around and given him the air.”

“They do any checking on Edna Hardesty herself?”

“No. They said they'd been asked to establish ownership, and they think they've done it. But they also said that if we wanted them to go any farther, just let them know.”

“If they went any farther, they might be taking our jobs away from us, Stan. As Barney Fells would say, from here on in that handbag is our own special meat.”

“Well, well,” Stan said musingly. “Little Miss Fish Eye.”

“I just hope we're not making too much out of it.”

“That'd be pretty difficult, wouldn't it? What're you doing — dumping in the ice cubes again?”

“Not exactly. I was just mulling it around a little.”

“Well, how many ways are there to mull it? How do you mull it?”

“The same way you do. We know that Nadine Ellison kept a very expensive handbag locked up in a strongbox. Why she did it, we don't know. What we do know is that it wasn't her handbag; it was Edna Hardesty's. How it got from Edna to Nadine, we don't know. But we do know Edna works for Dr. Clifford Campbell in his office. What the relationship between Edna and Campbell is, we don't know. What the connection between Edna and the dead girl is, we don't know. But we do know Nadine phoned Dr. Campbell at his home and threatened him.” I paused. “That jibe out with your take on it, Stan?”

“All the way — but I'd go a little farther.”

“How much farther?”

“A couple more things we do know is that Edna Hardesty tried to give us a stall when we wanted to see Dr. Campbell, even though Campbell didn't have any patients and she knew we were cops. Second, when we walked in on Campbell, he tried to stall us with that business about pineal bodies. If we hadn't stopped him, he'd still be talking about brains.”

I looked up at the clock. It was a quarter of seven.

“You feel like having a spot of coffee with a young lady, Stan?”

“You mean Edna Hardesty?”

“Yes.”

“She's young, all right. But a lady?”

“That stall she gave us might have been strictly office procedure around there, Stan. It might not have been anything personal at all.”

“I'm laughing,” he said.

“Did Lost Property give you her address?”

He glanced at his scratch pad. “It's the Misener Apartments, on Fifty-first between Lex and Third.”

“That's less than half a block from Campbell's office building.”

“I noticed that. Very handy.”

“Handy for what?”

“Who knows? Maybe Edna and her boss might want to drop over to her place for a drink or something.” He grinned. “You know I haven't got an evil mind, Pete. Why ask me something like that?”

“I want to hit her before she leaves for work,” I said. “You mind holding things down a while?”

“Not this time, Pete. That Edna Hardesty is one girl you can have all to yourself.”

“Thanks.”

“No sacrifice, believe me.”

I had almost reached the door when the phone rang, and I paused while Stan answered it, listened for a moment, and then replaced the receiver very carefully and shook his head.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Pickled Lii,” he said. “You're in bad trouble, Pete. She says if you don't arrest her letter carrier by noon today, she'll have the FBI arrest both of you.”

“Well,” I said as I turned to leave, “another day has officially begun.”

Chapter Eighteen

EDNA HARDESTY'S apartment at the Misener was on the twenty-first floor. She seemed completely unsurprised to see me and invited me in with no more than a brief nod and a quick glance to see that her housecoat was properly drawn together.

“You'd better sit on the sofa, Mr. Selby,” she said. “I wouldn't trust a man your size in any of the chairs.”

“They do look a little fragile,” I said as I sat down. “Very handsome chairs, though, I'd say.”

“They're hideous,” she said. “And the word isn't 'fragile,' Mr. Selby. It's 'flimsy.'”

With her black hair brushed back in loose waves and her small round face much more softly made up than it had been at Campbell's office, she was almost pretty.

“The management's been promising me new chairs for the last six months,” she said.

I watched her as she sat down on a hassock, folded her arms about her knees, and sat frowning at the chairs, first at one and then another, as if I had arrived by appointment for the express purpose of discussing them. She was, I reflected, using the chairs just as Dr. Campbell, in a similar situation, had seized upon the pineal body in the jar on his desk.

“I take it you expected to see me,” I said. “Why?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I mean, I don't know why you should think Doctor Campbell had anything to do with it.” She paused. “But I knew you would want to talk with me. After all, I was around him more than almost anyone else.”

“Was?”

“I was fired yesterday afternoon.”

“For tuning in the intercom a little too often?”

“I don't think that's amusing,” she said. “No, it certainly wasn't that.”

“But you did tune in on our talk with Dr. and Mrs. Campbell.”

“Yes, I did.”

“What is it you're so sure Dr. Campbell didn't have anything to do with, Miss Hardesty?”

“With what happened to that girl down in Greenwich Village, of course.”

“You know any reason why we should suspect Dr. Campbell?”

“Certainly not.”

“How long had you known her?”

“Known whom?”

“Miss Ellison.”

She looked at me directly for the first time since she'd sat down. “Known her! Why, I'd never even seen her.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

“You do own a very expensive alligator handbag, though.” I said. “That is, you did own it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We found your bag in Nadine Ellison's apartment.”

“What?”

“Which is one of the reasons I thought you might have known her,” I said. “Another one is—”

“In her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“So that's what happened to it!”

“You had some doubts about it, did you?”

“Well! No wonder she was upset.”

“You're losing me a little, Miss Hardesty.”

“I mean Susan. Mrs. Campbell. She told me she'd lost it in a taxi.”

“Are you telling me it wasn't your bag, or that you lent it to Mrs. Campbell — or what?”

“It was Susan's.”

“My information is that it was yours.”

“It was, originally. A friend of mine gave it to me, and I gave it to Susan.”

I didn't say anything for a moment, trying to think of all the implications of what she had just told me.

“Well!” she said again. “No wonder!” She was, it seemed to me, beginning to be very gay about something.

“You pretty fond of Mrs. Campbell, are you?” I asked.

“I detest her.”

“Then why give her such an expensive bag?”

“Because, for one thing, I don't care for alligator. And second, she was my employer's wife. I didn't think she liked me any more than I did her.”

“Is that the reason women give other women expensive handbags?”

“It's the reason I did.”

“You have a better opinion of Dr. Campbell, do you?”

“I respect him as a doctor.”

“That isn't what I meant, Miss Hardesty”

“I know very well what you meant. And my answer was that I respected him as a doctor.”

“Pretty bitter about his firing you?”

“He didn't. It was Susan.”

“You mean, indirectly?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Campbell tell you so?”

“He didn't have to. I know she was behind it.”

“Why should she want you fired?”

“I don't know. I think it must have been because of something that happened last week.” She paused. “Actually, I'm not too sure just what did happen.”

“Maybe I can help you figure it out.”

“It was such an odd thing, really. I happened to run into her on my lunch hour, and we decided to stop in this little place and have a quick sandwich and a coke. I was in a hurry, and so was she. But, just as we sat down at the counter, Susan got the strangest look on her face. I didn't know what to think; and then I saw that the waitress behind the counter was staring at her. Susan actually turned white. Then the waitress smiled at her and said, 'What's the matter, Suzy? Don't you remember me?' And then Susan — why, you'd think the woman had slapped her! She just whirled around and practically ran out of there.” She paused. “That was the beginning of the end, Mr. Selby. After that, Susan would scarcely speak to me.”

“No explanation whatever?”

“No. When I caught up with her outside, I asked her what in the world had happened. She just shook her head and walked off without even saying good-by.”

“Where's this place located?”

“Just West of Third on Fiftieth, McConnery's, I think it's called.”

“What'd the waitress look like?”

“She was very heavy. About thirty, I think. Kind of brassy hair.”

“Pretty weird occurrence, Miss Hardesty.”

“I was completely baffled by it. I still am.”

I stood up and walked to the door. “If there's anything else you'd like to say to me, Miss Hardesty,” I, said, “now's the time.”

She rose and crossed to the door to open it.

“I suppose you'll be talking to Susan now?” she said, smiling.

“Does that please you?”

“You must have forgotten she cost me my job.”

“I'm not forgetting,” I said.

“She'll be in the city today. If anyone should happen to want her for anything, they just might find her at the Verlaine Drapery Shop.” Her face was a little flushed, her eyes very bright. “It's at Forty-seventh and Fifth.”

“You're sure?”

“I made all the arrangements myself, Mr. Selby. Her appointment with the salesman is at eleven o'clock.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll keep it in mind.”

“Yes,” she said softly, “I'm sure you will.”

Chapter Nineteen

MCCONNERY's was a very small, very clean lunchroom with a chrome-and-red counter across a narrow aisle from a single row of chrome-and-blue booths. There was an elderly lady in the cashier's chair, a brunette waitress behind the counter, a heavy-set blonde woman drinking coffee in the last booth at the rear, and no customers at all.

The woman in the rear booth was wearing a waitress' uniform and, in a place the size of this one, the chances of her being the woman Edna Hardesty had told me about were pretty good.

She glanced at me, pursed her lips for a moment, and then smiled without really meaning it.

“Friendly cuss, aren't you?” she said.

“Most of the time,” I said.

“Cop?”

“Yes.”

“And no free coffee on the house? You're slipping.”

“Are you the only blonde waitress working here?”

She nodded. “Thanks for not saying fat blonde waitress. What's your problem?”

“A girl named Suzy.”

“Oh?”

“She came in here last week. She and another girl. You asked her if she didn't remember you, and she ran out on you.”

Her smile went away. “What about her?”

“Suzy acted very strangely. Why?”

“Are you backing into something else? Is that it?”

“I'm interested in why she acted that way. If that leads to something else, all right.”

“This straight?”

“All the way.”

“I sure don't want any trouble with cops.”

“The sight of you had quite an effect on her. How come?”

“You've got me. Why she should snoot me that way is something I can't understand.” She paused, her face hardening a little. “Of course, she's got it made now. Anybody could see that from her clothes.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

“If you mean in the last four or five years, I can't tell you anything. That's how long it's been since I saw her. That time last week was the only time I've even thought about her.”

“Something happened, Miss—?”

“Josie,” she said. “Josie Daniels.”

“Something happened to send her out of here that way,” I said. “It was a lot more than a matter of snooting someone, Miss Daniels.”

“Sure. But what? I tell you, you could have knocked me over with a napkin.”

“Could it have been something that happened four or five years ago?”

“I don't know what.”

“Where did you know her?”

“Down home. In Mississippi.”

“She's been away from there that long? Four or five years?”

“Call it four. Yes, she cleared out of there when she was about fourteen. Me, I've been on the go ever since I was about the same age. But I always made it home couple of times a year, no matter what.”

“What town is this, Miss Daniels?”

“Little wide spot in the road called Kirkman.”

“Suzy from the same town?”

“No. She lived right out in the cotton.”

“Plantation?”

“You Yankees! No. It was just a little old shack right out in the middle of nothing — just like all the other 'croppers' shacks.” She shook her head. “A lot she's got to snoot people about! Why, I knew her when she didn't have but one dress to her name.”

“Tell me what you can about her.”

“Don't think I won't. The way she snooted me? I should care!” She took a long swallow of her coffee, leaned a little nearer to me across the table, and rested her weight on her arms. “That girl's family was the laughingstock of the whole county. Why, that family would have starved if it hadn't been for Suzy's mother being friendly with the landlord and the storekeeper and so on. There wasn't any two of her brothers and sisters that looked alike; and she had eight of them. In fact, Suzy's the only one that looked any more like her old man than you do.

“They all lived out there like a bunch of damn hogs, and if that girl ever had a clean face before she was ten years old, I never saw it. When the old man would come to town, everybody would make fun of him. He couldn't read or write, and so they'd spell out words in front of him, just like you would with a little kid when you don't want him. to know what you're saying about him. You know what I mean?”

I nodded, trying to picture a girl like Susan Campbell being a part of what the waitress was telling me. It wasn't easy.

“It's no wonder she lit out,” Josie Daniels went on. “After a girl's been a laughingstock all her life, living no better than the pigs did, and running herself ragged trying to keep her old man from getting his hands on her, you can't blame her much for marrying the first man that asked her, even if he was—”

“Marrying?” I said.

“When she was thirteen. Just about old enough to start having babies or start going to high school. Suzy, she didn't do either.”

“At thirteen?” I said.

“Can't get over it, can you? Why, down there, a girl can get married at twelve, My sister-in-law did. And besides, the legal age right here in New York is only fourteen. What's a couple of years?”

I didn't say anything.

“But she jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, Suzy did,” Josie Daniels went on. “She married-this no-good from across the hollow, thinking he'd take her out of the mess she was in. So what did he do? He worked her ragged all day and beat on her all night.”

She finished her coffee. “How she ever stood it for a whole year, I'll never know. Damn if I'm not starting to feel sorry for her all over again. That Marty Hutchins was the meaniest boy in the entire state of Mississippi.”

I looked at her.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don't tell me I'm starting to affect you the same way did Suzy?” she said, suddenly beginning to smile again. “Pretty soon we won't have any customers left at all!”

Mrs. Suzy-Susan Hutchins-Campbell, I thought, of Kirkman, Mississippi, and New York City, New York.

“Hey I What's wrong

It wasn't easy, but I got a grin on my face, anyhow. “Nothing,” I said. “Little tired, I guess.”

“Oh. I was beginning to think you might've had some of our coffee, after all.”

“No divorce?” said.

“No anything at all. She just up and lit out. So far as I know, I'm the only one from around there that's ever ever heard of her again.”

“And her husband?”

“That one! A couple of months after Susan lit out, so did he. Nobody ever knew where or why, and cared less.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “Just between you and me and this empty coffee cup — what'd you want to know about her for?”

“I wasn't too sure,” I said as I slid out of the booth,

“I'm still not.”

“I've got another ten minutes yet before I have to go back to work. Why not stick around a while?”

“Thanks very much, Miss Daniels. Next time I'm in the neighborhood.”

“You do that,” she said. “Any time.”

I left the lunchroom, walked around the corner, and went into a drugstore to call Stan Rayder and tell him the alligator handbag had belonged to Susan, and that the young Mrs. Campbell had once been — and might very well still be — the even younger Mrs. Hutchins.

Chapter Twenty

THE PHONE was answered by Barney Fells.

“About time, Pete,” he said. “Where've you been?”

I gave him a quick rundown on my talks with Edna Hardesty and the waitress in the lunchroom.

“I'll be damned,” he said. “Looks like things are popping just about everywhere.”

“Is Stan there, Barney?”

“No. He wasn't here when I got back to the shop, and he hasn't been here since. In other words, just like him — and you, too.”

“You have any idea where he went?”

“No, I don't. But if you think you can bring yourself to spare the time, I'd like to tell you about a faintly interesting development.”

“What is it?”

“I just got back from taking a look at Albert Miller. He was in the morgue. I just got back from taking a look at Maurice Thibault, too. Same place.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes, both of them. Albert Miller and Maurice Thibault were the same man, Pete. So you can write off two suspects for the price of one.”

“But—”

“The guy that went out of his bathroom window under the name of Miller was the same character that planted his wife beneath a flower bed in France under the name of Maurice Thibault.”

“My God,” I said. “That means I was talking to Stan about him on the phone at the same time he was going out the window.”

“Yes, but you'd never seen his picture, Pete. I had. By the time you got back here, I'd already sent it out to have copies made.” He paused. “Of course, you might have come right out and asked him if he was Thibault; but that wouldn't have been polite.”

“How'd he wind up in the morgue?”

“Internal injuries. Walked into the hospital under his own power, and then collapsed. By the time they'd found out what was wrong with him, he was on the way out. He said he wanted to talk, and they got hold of the nearest patrolman. Thibault said he went out the window because he thought you were just stalling around awhile before you really put the squeeze on him and brought him in. Once that happened, he knew his fingerprints would give him away as Thibault; and so he decided it was either the window in the apartment or the guillotine in France — and out he went.”

“What'd he say about Nadine Ellison? Anything?”

“All that's necessary, I think. He said he met her about a year ago — which must have been right after she hit New York — and she started living with him. After they broke up, he found out that she'd stolen that clipping about what he'd done in France, The clipping had his picture, and I guess Nadine saw the word 'guillotine' and maybe some others she could make out, and realized she was on to something. Anyhow, she started bleeding him. It kept up, for a long time — long enough for her to make him give her those sapphire earrings and a couple or three grand in cash.”

“So that's where she got them,” I said. “I wondered.”

“Yeah — and where Thibault got them was off his wife, right after he killed her.”

“Funny he wouldn't simply have gone somewhere else.”

“It's tough for a man in that position to get all the papers and things to start up under a new name, Pete. And besides, he kept telling himself that he was going to kill her and get the earrings back again.” He paused. “He damn near did it, too. He was the one that walked in on Iris Pedrick the night she told you about when she woke up to see some guy standing over her with a knife. And incidentally, that's how he got in the apartment; with the knife. Pushed the bolt back with the point.”

I waited until I was sure he had finished. “He deny killing Nadine, Barney?”

“Yes.”

“But you said we could write him off as a suspect. How do we know that—”

“He didn't do it, Pete. The check on the dental lab where he worked showed that he was up all night doing some kind of table-top photography with some friends of his. The next day was his day off, so he stuck around with these friends until they all went out for breakfast together, about eight o'clock. There are six of the employees have this sort of club, or whatever it is, and Thibault wasn't out of their sight more than four or five minutes at a time all night.” He paused. “That's about the story, Pete. You want to leave a message for Stan?”

“No,” I said. “I'll try him again a little later.”

“Well, stay with it, Pete. Things're really beginning to pop.” He hung up.

I put the receiver back on the hook and glanced at my watch. It was eighteen minutes past nine.

If I hoped to finish all the things I had to do and still stand a chance of catching Susan Campbell before she left the Verlaine Drapery Shop, I would have to hurry.

I did hurry; but even so, I very nearly missed her. I had just started to turn in at the door when I saw her standing at the curb, signaling futilely for a cab.

I walked toward her, and spoke her name; and even before she turned slowly to face me, I could see the sudden tensing of her shoulders beneath the thin summer dress and the trembling of the hand that held her white gloves. The time was eleven forty-two.

Chapter Twenty-one

AT TEN MINUTES past one, I braked the Plymouth in front of the station house and started up the steps just as Stan Rayder started down.

“My God, Pete,” he said, looking at me with even more surprise than usual. “Where've you been?”

“Why is it everybody always asks me that?” I said.” Somebody has to work around here. Why shouldn't it be you?”

“You come up with anything?”

I nodded. “Yes. In fact, quite a bit. How about you?”

“Same here. Where'll we talk? Down at the corner?”

“What's wrong with the squad room?”

“For one thing, it's lousy with cops. For another thing, you owe me some coffee.”

We went down to the corner diner, a place so much patronized by the police that it is known locally as “Blue Heaven.”

When our coffee had arrived, Stan said, “It's your squeal, Pete. After you.”

“I guess Barney told you about Albert Miller's being Maurice Thibault and—”

“Yeah, I heard all about it. He's telling everybody.”

“He tell you that Edna Hardesty gave that alligator handbag to Susan Campbell?”

“Yeah — that, too.”

“All right, then. We can start with the talk I had with a woman named Josie Daniels. She and Susan are from the same little town in Mississippi, Stan. Susan was married when she was thirteen, and ran off from her husband when she was fourteen.”

He opened his mouth, closed it again, and sat staring at me. “Okay,” he said. “You talk, I'll listen.”

“The guy she married was our friend Marty Hutchins.”

“For Christ's sake!”

“That's listening?”

“All right, all right! Go on.”

“She never got a divorce from him. She was afraid he might find out where she was.”

“You get all this from the Daniels woman?”

“Not this part, no. I got it from Susan herself. But first I did a little telephoning around. I found out that she'd cashed in about four hundred bucks in savings bonds and whittled down her personal checking account right down to the nub. All in the last couple of weeks. Another thing she'd done is advertise that alligator hand — bag in the lost-and-found columns. I wanted a little ammunition before I braced her, and I got it.”

“You've got me, too. What's with the checking account and the bonds and so on?”

“Marty Hutchins and Nadine Ellison were shaking her down, Stan. Marty ran into her about two weeks ago; and five minutes later he was telling her she'd have to pay him to forget she was a bigamist. One look at her wedding ring and expensive clothes was all he needed to know he was in business.”

“And Nadine wanted in on the gravy?”

“She even made Susan fork over that bag. Susan had it with her, and when she couldn't give Nadine any money, Nadine took the bag as a sort of pacifier until Susan could get up some money for her.”

“Dr. Campbell know about this?”

“He knows now. Susan finally reached the point where she had to tell him.”

“To get more dough?”

“I don't think so. You can say what you want, Stan, but I think she's just as fond of Campbell as he is of her. If you'd been with me when I talked to her a little while ago, you'd bet your last nickel on it.”

“How about that telephone call Nadine made to Campbell up in Scarsdale?”

“Campbell was vulnerable too, don't forget. A man in his profession, especially with his reputation, was a sitting duck.”

“Did he pay off?”

“No. That's why Nadine was threatening him.”

“Then why'd Susan try to pass off the handbag in the lost-and-found? Or was this before she told her husband?”

“Before.”

“If she was so crazy about Campbell, how come she never got around to telling him she was already married to Hutchins?”

“She says she thought no one would ever know. It seems that when she got to New York, she started right in trying to get a little of the schooling she'd missed. She worked literally day and night, trying to better herself. She was ashamed of the kind of family she'd come from, and she tried every way she could to make herself over into something a little better. When she got a job in Campbell's office, they started hitting it off so well that ages didn't mean a thing. When he wanted to marry her, she had her choice of telling him about a big mistake she'd made when she was only thirteen, or not telling him and being happy for probably the first time in her life.”

“How'd you get her to tell you all this?”

“I explained to her that a bigamous marriage was a pretty serious proposition, just in itself, but that it could get a hell of a lot more serious if the papers got hold of it because we had to drag it out in the middle of a homicide investigation. She's too smart a girl not to have seen the light.”

“You didn't give her much of a choice, did you?”

“I didn't give her any at all.”

Stan sipped reflectively at his coffee for several moments.

“Is that all for your side?” he said.

“Such as it is,” I said. “Your turn now.”

“Well, all I know for sure is that some more of Nadine's loot turned up.”

“Where?”

“You remember that booster that used to give the boys such a fit in the liquor stores around the Garden?”

“The one they called Lonesome Liz?”

“That's the one. Her real name's Elizabeth Emmert. Anyhow, some citizen saw her throw away a paper bag in a trash basket. She was acting so scared and furtive that the citizen got curious and dug the bag out to see what was in it.”

“And what was?”

“Enough to make the citizen think he'd better take it over to the Sixty-eighth Street station house. There was a closed-out bank book with Nadine's name and address, and an ankle bracelet with her name engraved on it, and a fairly valuable-looking wrist watch, and the original copy of the translation she had done of that French newspaper clipping about Maurice Thibault. There was also a big double-handful of costume jewelry. It'd cost you quite a bit in a store, but you couldn't hock it for more'n a couple bucks.”

“Where'd Liz say she got it?”

“She said she found it on the street. That's her story, and she's sticking to it.” He paused. “There's a funny thing, Pete. Liz kicked the bottle about six years ago, and since then she hasn't been in any trouble at all. The boys up in the Twentieth Precinct say she's got some kind of night job that pays pretty well, and that she's been toeing that old mark all the way.”

“That where you were all morning?”

“Yes. The Twentieth called me up there just as soon as they saw Nadine's name on the loot. We tried to get something out of Liz, but all she'd say was that she'd found it on the street. We went up to her apartment and tossed it hard, but we didn't find a damn thing. She'd just moved in there, and she didn't have very much to look through.”

“How about the place she lived before?”

“Some of the other boys tossed that; too. Nothing in it.”

“Liz have an alibi for the murder limits?”

“She was on the job. Seems all Liz does these days is work and save her money.”

“No signs of boozing?”

“Nope. For a ginhead like Liz used to be, she's sure neat. Keeps that little apartment up on Seventy-fourth Street looking like—”

“Where?” I said. “Did you say Seventy-fourth Street?”

He glanced at me curiously. “That's right. Seventy-fourth Street. What's the matter with you, Pete? You look like I'd just—”

“What street number?”

“Eight… something. Oh, yeah. Eight Fifteen.”

“Eight Fifteen!” I said. “Stan, that's it!”

He put his cup down slowly and shifted around on his stool to look at me. “That's what?”

“The same apartment house where Maurice Thibault went out the window.”

Stan stared at me blankly; then, suddenly, he grinned and shook his head. “I guess the old flash-point's not all it used to be,” he said. “It took me a couple of seconds there to make the connection.”

I pushed my cup aside and stood up. “Better get on the outside of that coffee, Stan,” I said. “You and I are heading into some very hard work-and a lot of it.”

“Who needs coffee?” Stan said as he slid off the stool. “Just where do you think we should start?”

“With Lonesome Liz,” I said. “I've got a hunch she has a few things to say to us.”

“And,” Stan said, “the other way around.”

Chapter Twenty-two

BY THE Stan and I were satisfied that we had done all we could and sat down for a breather on the sofa in Lonesome Liz's fifth-floor apartment, it was eight minutes of five.

“Who's going to make the call?” Stan said. “You or me?”

“Me,” I said. “He's never heard your voice, Stan. It might start him wondering.”

“It'd be just our luck if he wasn't home.”

“If he isn't, we'll keep calling back until he comes in.”

“You say he'd be a hard man to tangle with?”

“Plenty.”

“Well, what're we waiting for? Go ahead and bait the trap, Pete. I'm anxious to get a look at him,”

I picked up the handset and dialed the number of the pay phone in the hall at Marty Hutchins' rooming house on Bethune Street.

“I hope this works,” Stan said. “I must've lost twenty pounds on this squeal, already.”

“You never weighed twenty pounds to begin with,” I said.

“Well, at least I haven't got twenty pounds of fat between my ears — like you, for instance.”

“Quiet down,” I said. “It's ringing.”

Stan nodded, leaned back against the cushion, and took out his gun to see that all was as it should be.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Hutchins?”

“Yes. Who's this ”

“Detective Selby,” I said.

“For Christ's sake! What now?”

“I think we've got a line on the man that killed Nadine,” I said. “It looks pretty much as if it's a man named Albert Miller.”

“Yeah?” he said, his voice suddenly without its belligerency. “Albert Miller, huh?”

“You ever hear Nadine mention him, Mr. Hutchins?”

“It does sound kind of familiar, now that I hear you say it.”

“Can you tell us anything about him?”

“No. I'm not even sure she ever said anything about him. It's just that the name sounds kind of familiar, that's all.”

“Well, the thing is that he's given us the slip. We've come up with some evidence that sticks the finger right in his eye; but Miller himself is nowhere around.”

“Evidence, eh? What kind?”

“Well, actually it's more than just evidence, Mr. Hutchins. I rather not talk about it on the phone, but the Police Department would appreciate it if you could spare us a few minutes to take a look at it.”

“You really think is was this Albert Miller, eh?”

“I don't think there's any doubt about it,” I said. “We found some other things here in his apartment that… Well, as I said, it's not good policy to say too much on the phone. You understand how it is?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think you'll have time to give us a hand, Mr. Hutchins?”

“Hell yes. I'm just as damn anxious to see him get it as you are.”

“Could you make it right away? We'd appreciate it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Right away. Hell, I'll even take a cab.” He hung up.

Stan grinned, gave the cylinder of his revolver a final spin, and returned the gun to its holster.

“Take the bait, did he?” he asked.

“Sounded that way,” I said.

“What do you mean 'sounded'?”

“In this business, who's ever sure of anything?”

“Me,” Stan said. “If Marty Hutchins knocks on that door, Pete, he's our boy.”

The knock on the door came at five twenty-four. I glanced at Stan, then walked to the door and opened it

“Hello, Marty,” I said.

He came into the room smiling, his dark hair still damp from rapid combing and his eyes bright and alert, The spotless white polo shirt clung tightly to this massive chest and shoulders, and the biceps beneath the shirt's short sleeves were as big around as some men's thighs.

“Well, what do you know about that,” he said in his soft, pleasant voice. “So you've got him, have you?”

“We think so, Marty,” I said as I closed the door. “In fact, we're all but positive.” I gestured toward Stan. “My detective partner, Marty. Stan Rayder.”

Hutchins nodded to Stan, then turned back to me. “Well, where's this evidence you told me about? That's something I'd like to see.”

“It hasn't changed much,” Stan said.

Hutchins looked at him. “What?” he said.

“Sit down, Hutchins,” I said.

“Hey! There's something wrong here. What's with this skinny friend of yours?”

“You're under arrest, Hutchins,” I said.

“I'm what?” he said. “Me? What for?”

“We can start with extortion,” I said. “You and Nadine were blackmailing Dr. and Mrs. Campbell, Hutchins.”

“You're sick in the head, mister. I don't even know anybody like that.”

“No more than you know anyone in Kirkman, Mississippi,” I said. “Josie Daniels, for instance.”

He raised his right hand. “I'm telling you the God's truth,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “I—”

“We've got sworn statements from both Susan and her husband,” I said. “You can stop lying — or not; it really doesn't make much difference.”

“Blackmailing your own wife,” Stan said. “You get some pretty original ideas, don't you, Hutchins?”

Hutchins turned his head slowly to look at him. “Prove it,” he said.

Stan grinned. “We'll just do that, Hutchins. But that's the least of our worries — just like it's the least of yours.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Hutchins asked.

“Nadine Ellison,” Stan said. “You didn't pussyfoot around with any blackmail when it came to her, Hutchins. You killed her.”

“You're even crazier than Selby,” Hutchins said. “I don't know who you guys think you're trying to frame, but—”

“Shut up, Hutchins,” Stan said softly. “Don't say that again.”

“My partner and I worked pretty hard this afternoon,” I said. “Just about the only thing we didn't find out is why you wanted Nadine dead.”

He shook his head contemptuously. “Boy, if I was as sick as you are, I'd be sick!”

“You'll be sick enough,” Stan said. “Don't worry.”

“You guys know damn well I was shacked up with a girl all that night,” Hutchins said. “You talked to her yourself, Selby. You went over to the Leighton Hotel and pulled that little Elaine Walton out of bed and damn near scared her to death. What's the matter with you? She was telling the truth, and you know damn well she was telling the truth.”

“She thought she was telling the truth,” I said. “As far as she was concerned, she was telling the truth. But I talked to her again this afternoon, Hutchins. It was the first time she'd ever done any heavy drinking. She was passed out cold.”

“She told you I never left the room!”

“Wrong. She told me she never saw you leave the room. She couldn't have seen you. She was dead to the world.” I paused. “We also checked with every man and woman that works for that hotel, Hutchins. We have three employees to swear you left the Leighton at about one-thirty, and two other employees to swear you got back around five. Nadine, as you know more exactly than I do, was killed somewhere between two and six.”

“And that,” Stan said, “means you have no alibi at all. Not a shred.”

“It's a little ironic,” I said, “but if you hadn't tried to fancy things up so much, you might have got away with it. I don't mean the way you hung her up on that pipe to make us think it was suicide. I'm talking about the way you tried to frame Albert Miller.”

“I never even heard of him! Not till you called me up and said—”

“Keep quiet a while, Hutchins,” Stan said. “Don't you know better than to interrupt people before they've finished?”

“You knew Miller,” I said. “You knew Nadine had been blackmailing him, and you knew his real name was Maurice Thibault, and that he was wanted in France for killing his wife.” I paused. “You got together a translation of a French newspaper item with a cut of Miller, and one of Nadine's bank books, and enough other stuff to keep the translation and the bank book from being too obvious, and planted them in Miller's desk drawer. Then you sent an anonymous telegram to the police, telling us exactly where to find it.”

Hutchins shook his head. “Jesus, no,” he said.

“Every hall door in this apartment house is fitted with one of the most expensive small locks on the market,” I said. “It's probably the only pickproof lock of its size in the country. You had a key, Hutchins. Otherwise you'd have had to break the door down.” I thought I saw something in his eyes, but I couldn't be sure. “You knew Nadine used to live with Miller, and you knew she still had her key. Perhaps she kept it in her strongbox, perhaps not; it doesn't matter. The point is, you had access to it, and you used it to let yourself in Miller's apartment and plant everything you figured the police would need to make them suspect him,”

Hutchins shook his head, but he didn't say anything. He stood there without body movement of any kind, blinking at me, frowning a little; the way a near-sighted person will do when he's forgotten his glasses.

I kept thinking of the momentary change in his eyes when I had talked about the key. It was worth a try. “How do you carry your keys, Hutchins?” I said. “Ring or folder?”

I–I don't have any,” he said. The look was there; I was certain of it.

“Everybody has at least one key,” I said. “Let's see them, Hutchins.”

“No,” he said. “I haven't got any.”

“All right,” I said, “then tell us why you didn't ask me where Miller's apartment was.”

“What?”

“I didn't tell you Miller's address when I asked you to come over,” I said. “I didn't tell you, and you didn't ask. You didn't have to ask, Hutchins. You already knew.”

“I looked it up in the phone book.”

“He looked it up in the phone book,” Stan said. “In the phone book, Pete. That's where he looked it up.”

Hutchins didn't even so much as glance at him.

“There are six Albert Millers in the Manhattan directory,” I said. “Not to mention four Al Millers.”

He wet his lips. “After I hung up I remembered Nadine did mention somebody named Miller once. That's what I was trying to think of when you asked me about him. I got to thinking, and I remembered she'd said something about a man that lived up on West Seventy-fourth Street, and I…”

“You're doing real great,” Stan said. “Don't stop now.”

“There's still another point that sort of puzzles me a bit,” I said. “After you agreed to come to Miller's apartment, why didn't you do it?”

His eyes flicked about the room, touched the small desk near the window, and stayed there. “I—” he began.

“You what?” I said. “Looked under the mailboxes downstairs for his apartment number?”

“Yes. Yes, that's what I did.”

“If you'd done that, Hutchins, you'd still be looking. We inked out the apartment number on Miller's card less than an hour ago.”

“And this building's a walkup, don't forget,” Stan said. “No desk clerk or elevator operator to ask for information.”

“This is Miller's apartment!” Hutchins blurted. “It has to be!”

“It was Miller's apartment,” I said. “But he moved down to the second floor, less than a week ago. The second floor, Hutchins. You came straight up to the fifth floor. And you didn't look in the phone book or under any mailboxes. You came straight here today just the same way you came straight here at the time you planted that evidence in what you thought was Miller's desk drawer. You knew you had Miller's key, and Miller's key was stamped with this apartment number, 'and so you knew you were in the right place. Only you weren't.”

Hutchins' eyes were abnormally bright and his lips were slowly turning a pale dead-gray.

“This apartment belongs to a woman named Elizabeth Emmert,” I said. “She has a police record, and when she found your evidence in her desk drawer, she thought one of her old enemies must be trying to frame her. She panicked and tried to get rid of it in a trash basket. She was caught at it; and after we'd added everything up, we knew. that you were the only one with the means and knowledge to—”

“Stop!” Hutchins shouted. “Stop it! You hear? Stop it, damn you!”

“Let's see your keys, Hutchins,” I said

“No!”

I took a step toward him. “Why wait till we take them off you at the station house?” I said. “Let's try them on that lock right now.”

“No,” he said, “Stay away from me!”

There was an almost insane look in his eyes now, and I could understand how he had been able to stare down a much larger man, like the one the bartender at the Hi-Lo had told me about.

I took another step forward.

“Stay away from me!” Hutchins said. “One of you bastards is gonna beat me up while his buddy holds a gun on me so I can't fight back.”

I glanced at Stan. Neither of us said anything.

“If it wasn't for your guns, I'd whip the both of you,” Hutchins said. “I'd kill the both of you, sure'n hell!”

“The point is,” Stan said, “we do have guns.”

“I can't stand pain,” Hutchins said. “I can't stand it!”

“What pain?” I said. “You look in pretty, good shape to me, Hutchins.”

“You'll beat my belly off!”

“Listen, Hutchins,” I said. “We—”

“Lying bastard' You'll lock me in the washroom at the police station and beat me to death!”

I took a deep breath. I had never beaten a prisoner since the day I joined the force. And neither had Stan.

“Hutchins,” I said quietly, “I think the time has come for you to tell us what happened.”

“You won't beat me?”

“We won't beat you.”

“You'll keep all the other cops from beating me?”

“No one will lay a finger on you, Hutchins,” I said. “Now how about it? Didn't things happen pretty much the way we said they did?”

He sank down on the sofa very slowly. “Yes,” he said.

“Why did you kill Nadine Ellison?”

“She got too greedy,” he said. “She tried to horn in.”

“On the blackmail from Susan?”

“Yeah. And she tried to hit up Campbell, too. That's when I killed her When I found out she'd done that, I knew she had gone too damn far. Clipping Susan a little bit here and there was one thing; but trying to hit up a big man like Campbell was another.”

“How'd you go about it?' I said.

“Killing her, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“It just happened, that's all. I'd been shacked up with this girl at the hotel, and when I got over to Nadine's she started to lay down the law. She said she was starting to work on Campbell and that I wasn't going to get a dime out of it. She'd turned on me, see? Just like that. One night she'd have spent any amount of money on me, and the next night she was telling me to go to hell. She was crazy that way, anyhow. One time she'd be doing everything she could for somebody, and the next time she'd be doing everything she could to hurt them. Anyhow, when I heard she'd tackled Campbell already, I could see she'd knocked over the apple cart. I knew Campbell would never stand still for anything like that, and I knew he'd do something about it that would knock me out of even the little bit I was clipping off of Susan.”

I waited a moment or so. “Go on, Hutchins,” I said.

“I guess you probably figured out the rest,” he said “She'd started taking off her clothes while she was talking, and when she got to the part about Campbell she was standing there mother-naked with this petticoat in her hand, and all at once she kind of slapped at me with it and I slugged her in the belly.” He shrugged. “I guess it must've been that slap she took at me that did it. I was goddam mad about Campbell, and that slap just pushed me the rest of the way. Anyhow, she's down there, out cold, and I figure, what the hell, I might as well kill her.”

“Just like that, Hutchins?” I said.

“Yeah. I figured, why not, she's fouled me up plenty, and she'll only foul me up some more. So I took this petticoat she'd been holding and choked her with it a couple of minutes, and then I got the clothesline out of the bathroom and hung her up so it would look like suicide.”

“And then what, Hutchins?” Stan asked.

“From there on it was just like you guys said. I planted the stuff in Miller's desk, and hit back to the hotel and crawled back in bed with Elaine Walton. I knew damn well she was too drunk to know the difference.”

“Just one point, Hutchins,” I said. “What made Nadine think she could cut you out of your blackmail?”

“On that little bit I was chipping off of Susan?”

“Yes.”

“Nadine knew I wasn't married to Susan any more. She knew I'd got a divorce when I wanted to marry a rich widow woman, while I was down in Florida a couple years ago. Hell, I was bluffing Susan all the time.”

“In other words,” I said, “Susan hadn't committed bigamy at all. You just made her think she had.”

“That's right. I got my divorce from her a whole year before she married Campbell.” He shook his head. “The hell of it is, I got skunk-drunk one night and told Nadine.”

I glanced at Stan. “Give Barney Fells a ring and ask him to tell the Campbells they can stop worrying,” I said.

While Stan called the squad commander, Marty Hutchins and I stood and looked at each other. And slowly, very slowly, I saw the beginnings of comprehension in his eyes. He would understand any moment now that there were things far worse than a beating in some station house washroom.

“Barney was glad to hear the news,” Stan said as he put down the phone. “He had a little for us, too, Pete. It seems Nadine's husband Burt made another of those phone calls to Headquarters. But this time he stayed on the line long enough for the call to be traced. They got him in the Greyhound station on West Thirty-fourth.”

I looked at Hutchins a moment longer; then I opened the hall door and nodded to him. “All right, Marty,” I said.

Hutchins said nothing more until I had handcuffed him to the bar in the back seat of the Plymouth and Stan had started the motor. Then he turned slowly to look at me with eyes that at last understood. “Selby,” he said.

I didn't say anything.

“Selby,” he said again, reaching out hesitantly to touch my sleeve, “Selby, what'll happen to me?”

But he didn't really expect me to tell him.

He already knew.

Nothing else could have filled his eyes so full of fear.

Content

Jonathan Craig
The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two