Having Wonderful Crime Page 14

  Helene said, in a thin little voice, “Malone, you’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m not out of my mind,” the lawyer said indignantly. “I’m just using my mind, which is more than these police dopes have done. Because, when women are beaten and strangled, in a room that shows all the signs of a terrific struggle, their faces get bruised and marked, too.” There was a half-strangled gasp from Dennis Morrison. “That body is bruised and marked,” Malone went on ruthlessly. “You can see where hands tore at the arms and shoulders, and where the blows landed. But look at the face. There isn’t a tiny scratch on it, or even the faintest discoloration.”

  Arthur Peterson said, “Good God! Of course!”

  “Therefore,” Malone said, ignoring him, “obviously, you have two murdered women here. The two pieces fit together very neatly, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that match in everything except the design. Only, it’s the head of one, and the body of another.”

  19. Body Number 147

  “Don’t be so downcast about it,” Malone said sympathetically to the young assistant medical examiner, “People seldom find things they’re not looking for. You had what seemed to be the body of a murdered and decapitated woman. Certainly you weren’t looking for it to be parts of two murdered and decapitated women. You were looking for the cause of death and anything that might lead to identification, and you did the best you could.”

  The young doctor smiled wanly. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Malone. But how did you know?”

  “Me?” Malone said modestly. “I guessed.”

  Schultz snorted rudely, O’Brien beamed admiringly and muttered something about Malone being a cousin. Arthur Peterson looked cold and said, “I hope you’re telling the truth about it being guesswork. Because withholding information from the police is a serious business.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing,” Malone said, in his smoothest voice. He looked around, and decided it was perfect etiquette to light a cigar here in the medical examiner’s office. “I noticed the fact that the head and the body didn’t seem to belong together, because I wasn’t looking for it.”

  Schultz growled that Malone was obviously a lying scoundrel who should be promptly arrested. He was immediately shushed by O’Brien and Birnbaum.

  “I thought I just made it plain,” Malone said. He bit off the end of the cigar with loving care. “If you’re looking for something specific, like the cause of death, or the motive for a murder, you’re not inclined to notice what may seem like irrelevant and unimportant facts.” He paused to light the cigar. “But if you’re only a mildly interested bystander, like myself, just looking, you may accidentally see something important. That’s all.” He expelled a cloud of smoke. “I just thought I’d help you out.”

  “We appreciate your co-operation,” Arthur Peterson said stiffly.

  “And you were right, of course,” the young medical examiner said, almost wildly. “Those tests should have been made before, but there didn’t seem to be any need for them. But there are two different blood groups, the skin texture is dissimilar, and the hair type—” He paused. “Only, the head and the body fitted together so perfectly”—he paused again—“the thing is, though—where is the other head and the other body?”

  “The head has been identified,” Arthur Peterson said. “Hazel Puckett’s father is on his way here now to view the body. If we can identify the body now—”

  “Bertha!” young Dennis Morrison said hoarsely. He buried his face in his hands, gasping.

  Helene said sharply, “Stop that, Dennis! You don’t know that it is.”

  Birnbaum pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stuck it into Dennis Morrison’s hands. O’Brien said, “C’mon, fella,” and Schultz said, “Cut it out. It prob’ly ain’t her, even if she did get a t’reatenin’ letter—” at which Peterson said, “Shut up, Schultz.”

  “The thing is,” the young medical examiner said, “the cause of death was the same in—both cases. Asphyxia. Undoubtedly as the result of manual strangulation. Decapitation followed, in both cases, within a matter of hours. Examination of the head, after scalp reflection—”

  “Now you shut up,” Helene said. She slipped her hand over Dennis Morrison’s arm.

  “Yes, but the thing is,” the medical examiner said again, “where is the other body, and where is the other head?”

  “That isn’t in your department,” Arthur Peterson told him.

  “All right, but the thing is this,” the young medical examiner said, his face very pink, “the head’s identified, but the body isn’t. Whose body is it?”

  Arthur Peterson said, “That isn’t strictly in your department either,” but nobody heard him. Everybody was looking, instinctively, at Dennis Morrison.

  “I don’t know,” Dennis Morrison said. “How could I know? We’d just been married. That afternoon. We had dinner. We went to the hotel. She wanted to do a little unpacking, so I went downstairs to get a drink—”

  “We’ve heard all that before,” Arthur Peterson said.

  “He’s just trying to tell you,” Malone said, “that he married her sight unseen.”

  “And therefore,” Helene finished, “he can’t identify the body.”

  O’Brien looked sympathetic, and Schultz blushed. There was a brief silence.

  “She was about five-foot-eight,” the medical examiner said helpfully, “and weighed about one hundred forty pounds. Her general skin tone was blondish.”

  Dennis groaned, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and whispered, “It must have been. But I couldn’t swear to it. I couldn’t identify her. Not possibly.”

  “Don’t worry,” Arthur Peterson said gently. “We’ve sent for her family doctor, and we’ve sent for the father of—” He started to say “the father of the head,” stopped himself, and said, “Dr. Puckett. I’m sure we can manage an identification without troubling you further.”

  Within the next half-hour Bertha’s family doctor and her gymnasium teacher from boarding school arrived to view the body. Neither one was able to offer a positive identification. The doctor, an embarrassed and nervous middle-aged man, highly excited at his first brush with police procedure, explained that he’d removed Bertha’s tonsils at the age of seven, treated her for a severe cold which threatened to develop into pleurisy when she was ten, and explained the facts of life to her, at her father’s request, when she was twelve. Since then, he’d prescribed a tonic for her during her adolescence, treated her for a sprained ankle at twenty-two, and worked out a reducing diet for her two years ago. Body number 147 might be Bertha’s, or might be the body of any healthy, slightly overweight young woman. He couldn’t say for sure. “In my profession,” he said apologetically, “you see so many—”

  The gymnasium teacher, a Miss Hazlett, was no more help, and turned out to be a lot of trouble. After she was through being ill, and had downed a dose of spirits of ammonia, she took center stage, patted her stringy reddish hair, blushed unbecomingly, and started to deliver a little lecture on the importance of daily gymnastic exercises. As far as Bertha Lutts was concerned, and the Thing she’d been asked to look at—she refused to refer to it as a body—she couldn’t say yes, and she couldn’t say no. “I was her gym teacher, yes,” she said. “For three years. But naturally, I never”—she looked coyly at the floor—“saw her in the flesh, so to speak.”

  “It’s her, though,” Schultz repeated, after they had come and gone. “Because she was the one that got the t’reatenin’ letter.”

  “That letter business was settled yesterday,” Arthur Peterson said.

  Schultz said, “Well, anyway, it’s gotta be her. Because if it ain’t her, then how did the body get into that hotel suite? You can’t just go carrying headless bodies up and down in hotel elevators. So that means it’s her, and therefore—”

  Dennis Morrison turned white. Helene said, “That’s enough. Stop it.”

  “Yes, but, lady,” Schultz said, “when you’ve got a headless body—if you
were a man, and it might be your wife, wouldn’t you want to know—” Dennis Morrison uttered a half-strangled sound.

  “You shut your mouth,” Helene said to Schultz, “or I’ll shut it, and good, you tactless ape.”

  “Don’t you call me no ape,” Schultz said.

  “I’ll call you worse than that,” Helene said, and did.

  Dr. Puckett arrived at that moment, a providential diversion. The room was instantly hushed, and Malone put down his half-smoked cigar. Dennis Morrison was the anguished husband of a missing and possibly murdered bride, but here was the father of an identified and authentically murdered girl. Malone looked curiously at the small, gray-haired man, trying to imagine him as the father of the girl who had been born Hazel Puckett and died Gloria Garden. It wasn’t easy to imagine.

  Dr. Puckett took out his pipe, tapped it against the palm of his hand, and managed to put everybody at ease. “Kind of surprising, isn’t it?” he said mildly. “It turning out that this isn’t Hazel’s—I mean, Gloria’s—body at all, only her head. I’m mighty sorry, I’d figured on taking Hazel home to her ma, right after the inquest, and now it looks like I can’t.” He fiddled with the pipe for a minute, then stuffed it back into his right-hand coat pocket. “Hope you can find out who this other girl is, without calling in her folks. Hard on a girl’s folks, to be called into something like this.” He took the pipe out again.

  “Have a cigar,” Malone said, his throat dry.

  “Thanks,” old Dr. Puckett said, “I will.” He reached for it, carefully snipped off the end with a knife that hung from his watch chain, and lit it. “My name’s Puckett. What’s yours?”

  “Malone,” the little lawyer said, hoping his voice wouldn’t break.

  Arthur Peterson gave Malone a grateful glance and said, “Dr. Puckett, if you don’t mind—”

  “Oh, sure, I’ll view the body,” Dr. Puckett said. “That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? Hope I can help you out, that’s all.” He walked toward the inner door, handed his cigar to Birnbaum, and said, “Hold this, will you?” and went on in, just as though the head of number 147 wasn’t that of his only daughter.

  He came back a few minutes later, plucking the cigar from Birnbaum’s nerveless fingers as he came in through the door, and shaking his head. “Sorry,” he said apologetically, “I can’t help you out. Never saw her before. It isn’t Hazel, that’s about all I can tell you, and I guess you know that already. Hazel had a scar on her—” He bowed toward Helene and said, “Pardon me, ma’am, left backside. Where a neighbor’s dog bit her when she was seven. It wasn’t a vicious dog, just nervous.” He puffed at the cigar. No one moved or made a sound. “Well,” he said at last, “sorry I can’t tell you who she is. Was, I mean.” He managed a wan smile in the direction of Arthur Peterson. “I guess now you’ll be looking for Hazel’s—I should say, Gloria’s—body. I guess you’ll call me up if you find it. I hope you do. I’d like to take her home.” The cigar had gone out. He relit it. “Maybe some of you’ve seen Hazel’s picture in the magazines. She was a beautiful girl.”

  There was another silence after he had gone. Then Arthur Peterson jumped up and said briskly, “Well, that’s all.” At the downstairs doorway of the gloomy building he added to Dennis Morrison, “Don’t go out of town. We’ll telephone you if we need you again.”

  O’Brien and Birnbaum grinned at Malone and climbed into the police car. Schultz followed them, muttering, “I still say, you can’t take no headless body up in no elevator—” The slamming of the car door shut off any further thoughts on his part.

  They stood on the curb for a moment, looking after the police car. Malone said, “Let’s go home. It’s not much of a home, but it has a bar. Home is where the bar is.” He waved at one of a pair of taxis parked down the street. Both taxis approached, one a Yellow, and one a Checker. The Checker got there first. Malone gallantly opened the door for Helene and ushered her in. Then he looked around for Dennis Morrison. Dennis Morrison wasn’t there. The other taxi, the Yellow, was speeding down the street.

  Malone jumped in and slammed the door. Helene leaned forward and said dramatically, “Follow that cab!” “Which cab?” the driver said gloomily. The Yellow cab was already out of sight around a corner. “On these streets,” the driver added, even more gloomily, “a bloodhound couldn’t follow a snail. Where d’ya want to go?”

  With a little prodding, the driver went around the corner the Yellow had turned. They caught a brief glimpse of it far down the street, then it disappeared again. Finally they found it, beside a subway kiosk, empty save for a disinterested driver reading the Racing Form. He had no idea where his passenger had gone. Dennis Morrison had disappeared again.

  20. The Wrong Note

  Getting into Gloria Garden’s apartment hadn’t been as difficult or expensive a task as Jake had anticipated. It was just a matter of getting acquainted with the janitor.

  The janitor, one Carl Burns, was sufficiently impressed by Jake’s Chicago Herald Examiner press card not to notice that it was eight years old, or to remember that the Herald Examiner was no longer in existence.

  He was even more impressed by the fact that a copy of The Nation protruded from Jake’s coat pocket. After all, he had no way of knowing that Jake had hung around the corner bar long enough to get a line on one Carl Burns, janitor, and on Carl Burns’ political preferences.

  When Jake whispered to him about the social significance of the Gloria Garden slaying, and the articles that could be written about it, he nodded wisely, and uncapped one of the bottles of beer Jake had brought along. Only, he said, shoving a glass of beer across the oilcloth table in the basement kitchen-apartment, it should be a book, not a series of articles. Now he, Carl Burns, had always planned to write a book—When Jake confided that he, too, planned to write a book, Carl Burns came through with the key to Gloria Garden’s apartment. When Jake unobtrusively left a ten-dollar bill under one of the beer bottles on the table, Carl Burns ignored it and offered to keep an eye out for intruders.

  Jake took the key and went up the carpeted stairs. It was a small, three-story building, in the East Sixties, with an antique shop on the ground floor. Someone announced as “Detweiler, Dress Designs, Closed until May 15th” had the second floor; Gloria Garden had lived on the third. Carl Burns inhabited the rear basement. Jake listened for a moment outside the door before he thrust in the key and opened it. Not a sound. He went in, closing and bolting the door behind him.

  Gloria Garden, née Hazel Puckett, had been a person of bad and expensive taste. The beige carpet was thick and spongy as June grass; over it were tossed, with an unsuccessful air of carelessness, bright little scatter rugs that pretended to have been made by hand in colonial looms. The heavy lace curtains would have done credit to an expensive boarding house, and an immense oil painting of a tired-looking man in a red coat and plumed hat hung over the fireplace. There was maple furniture everywhere, so much that Jake found himself wondering if he should have brought along a bucket to collect sirup.

  There were glass ash trays and tiny china figures everywhere, and a magnificent pipe stand designed to look like a startled owl. End tables were placed strategically beside every chair, and glass-topped coffee tables turned up everywhere. In one corner, looking lost and incongruous, was a big, well-worn, red-leather armchair, with a footstool before it. The effect was of much money spent, frantically, in an attempt to buy comfort and luxury. Jake looked around the room and reflected that the attempt had been successful, too, regardless of what interior decorators might think of it. It was a comfortable, costly, ugly, pleasant room, a room to be lived in. Jake prowled around it aimlessly. He wasn’t searching, he was trying to get impressions. There couldn’t be anything to find in this apartment. But it could tell him something about Gloria Garden.

  The living room told him a great deal. A girl with money she’d made herself, who wanted nice things and didn’t care how much she paid for them, and picked them all wrong. A girl who put on the dog
. That portrait over the fireplace—an ancestral portrait, no doubt, whenever friends dropped in. Had she ever told anybody about old Doc Puckett, the general practitioner in a small town? The maple furniture was damn near antique. Gloria had probably given it a family history, and comfortably forgotten the mission-style fumed oak back home.

  But the pipes in the owl pipe stand had been smoked, and the big red-leather chair was worn and dented. A permanent boy friend? A husband?

  Jake went into the tiny hall that led to the kitchen, and wished that Helene were with him. She could interpret a lot of things that didn’t make any sense to him. Still, he could figure out a few things for himself. Whoever had used this kitchen had worked at cooking. There were gadgets everywhere, electric mixers, juicers, beaters. He pulled open the cupboard shelves and saw Bisquick, Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour, vanilla, raisins, and a long shelf of spices and flavoring. Molasses, and sage and garlic, and onion and celery salts. Cooking sherry, and dinner wines, and five quarts of cheap bourbon, one opened.

  The table in the tiny dining room was set for two; it looked as though it were permanently set for two. Tall white candles, burned down an inch or so, lace mats, roses, that should have been thrown away two days ago, dropping their brown-edged petals from a crystal bowl.

  Jake opened the door to the bedroom and paused there. So far the apartment had baffled him. It fitted a girl who had married well, and been allowed to pick her own furnishings, but who had made a concession in the matter of the red-leather chair. A girl whose husband or boy friend loved good food, a girl who loved to cook for him. A girl with bad taste and a warm heart, raised on Grand Rapids Furniture and a country-school cooking course. But it didn’t fit Gloria Garden, the lovely model, with her moon-colored hair.