Masters of Noir: Volume Two Page 6

  But at a quarter past four, Control gave the signals and coding that meant the killer had been apprehended, and that all off-duty detective teams should report back to their precincts.

  Ben, who was driving our RMP car, sighed and turned onto Broadway, heading back uptown to the Eighteenth.

  "I'd a little rather we'd grabbed the guy ourselves,” he said. “But now that he's nailed, I got no thoughts but bed. A cold shower, and then ten straight hours of sack-time."

  I felt pretty much the same way, and started to say so, when the dash speaker rattled and Control broke in again. This time the lady dispatcher's voice sounded a little sorry for us. The gist of the call was that a suicide had been phoned in from an apartment house at 905 West Fifty-third Street. The assistant M.E. and the tech crew were already there, but the detective team which would normally have handled the squeal was the same team which had just trapped the killer on a roof top. That meant they'd be tied up with him for many hours, and it was up to Ben and me to fill in for them.

  Ben touched the siren just enough to get us through the next intersection and fed the RMP a little more gas.

  "You and I made a mistake when we signed up with this outfit, Pete,” he said. “We should have taken the examination for fireman, like sensible men."

  I grinned. “Sometimes I think you're right,” I said.

  He turned west on Fifty-third. “The job keeps you young, though,” he said. “I will say that for it."

  "Maybe it's just that cops don't live so long,” I said. “You ever think of it that way?

  "All the time, Pete. That's another reason I wish I'd taken the exam for fireman."

  "You're too fat for a fireman. You'd never get up the ladder."

  "Who's worried about ladders? I'd stand around and give orders, and let skinny guys like you fool with the ladders."

  "Sure,” I said. “Pull up, Ben. That's nine-oh-five, there on the corner."

  2.

  It was a converted brownstone, like a lot of others in the neighborhood. All New York brownstones look pretty much the same from the outside, but inside, they range all the way from Bohemian pigpens to millionaires’ showplaces.

  This was one of the pigpens.

  The dead man was in the basement apartment, suspended from a water pipe near the ceiling by a double thickness of dirty cotton clothesline. The apartment itself was something to see. There were two filthy mattresses side by side in one corner, newspapers spread on the cement floor in lieu of a carpet, an exposed toilet and sink in one corner, with an overflowing garbage pail between them, and pornographic drawings on the grimy stucco walls. There were scraps of food and cigarette butts everywhere, and a large cardboard box near the door seemed to be completely filled with empty liquor bottles and beer cans. It was a tossup as to whether the place looked worse than it smelled, or vice versa.

  The tech crew was going about its business with even greater speed than usual, and the expressions on the men's faces showed that the sooner they finished the better they'd like it.

  Bill Marcy, the beat cop who'd been waiting for us at the street door, nodded toward a woman who stood leaning up against the far wall.

  "Her name's Janice Pedrick,” Bill said. “She goes with this dump."

  "She the one who called you?” Ben asked.

  "Yeah."

  The woman was smoking a cigarette, watching us sullenly. She was very tall, close to six feet, I'd say and somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. She had short blonde hair, dark at the roots, and while she wasn't especially pretty, her figure made up for it.

  "Who found him, Bill?” I asked.

  "She did."

  The woman dropped her cigarette to the floor, left it smoldering there, and turned to watch the photographer adjust his camera for another shot.

  Les Wilbur, the assistant M.E., nodded to Ben and me and motioned us over to the man hanging from the water pipe.

  "I remembered the blasting you boys gave me last time I cut down a DOA, Pete,” he said wryly. “This time, I left the guy hanging for you."

  I nodded. “It's usually best, Les.” I stepped close to the corpse. His feet cleared the floor by only a few inches, but I could still look down slightly when I looked at his face. He had been in his early forties, I guessed, a very small man who couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten or fifteen pounds. His sport shirt and slacks were expensive-looking, and his shoes obviously had been made by hand. His nose was badly flattened and there was a heavy tracery of scar tissue around both eyebrows.

  "A fighter,” Ben said. “Most likely a pro. You sure as hell'd have a hard time getting that marked up, just mixing it in back alleys."

  I glanced at the doctor. “How long would you say he's been strung up here, Les?"

  He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Call it six to eight hours."

  "That's a lot better than M.E.'s usually do,” I said.

  He smiled. “Well, this one's pretty easy, Pete. Rigor mortis usually begins within three to five hours, starting in the jaws, and takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to become complete. In this case, the RM has progressed only to the hips. That would put the time of death at from six to eight hours ago."

  I glanced at my watch. “That would mean he suicided between ten-thirty and twelve-thirty."

  "Okay to take this guy down now, Pete?” Ben asked.

  I looked over at the photographer. “You finished?"

  He nodded, and I pulled a straight chair over to a position beneath the body, climbed up, and untied the clothesline from the pipe. I carried the body to one of the mattresses on the floor, put it down, and then untied the noose from the man's neck. I paid particular attention to the way the rope fibers had been scuffed. If they had been scuffed toward the body, I would have known that someone had thrown the rope over the pipe and dragged the body up—which would have meant our suicide wouldn't have been a suicide at all.

  But, although there was nothing suspicious about the rope fibers, there was something else very wrong. I noticed it the instant I bent down to look closely at the dead man's neck.

  The rope had left a deep, purple collar around his neck, and if he had died from the rope there would have been small black-and-blue marks around the collar's lower edge. Such marks are caused by the bursting of tiny blood vessels.

  There were no such marks—and that meant our man had not been alive when he was hanged. It meant we had a murder on our hands.

  Les Wilbur noticed the absence of black-and-blue marks at the same moment I did. “Looks like you boys are in for more than you bargained for,” he said.

  Ben stood frowning at the dead man a moment, and then he glanced over toward the woman. “Let's get started, Pete,” he said.

  3.

  We walked over to the woman. She had lighted another cigarette. She left it dangling from the side of her mouth as she crossed her arms across her chest and stared at us.

  "You Miss Pedrick?” I asked.

  She let a little smoke trickle from her nose. “That's right."

  "This your apartment?"

  "If you want to call it that."

  "Who's the dead man?"

  She shrugged. “I don't know."

  "A man's found hanged in your own apartment, and you don't know who he is?"

  "That's what I said. You hear pretty well—for a cop."

  "When did you find him?"

  "Why, the minute I got home. When'd you think?"

  "How long ago was that?"

  "Just a couple seconds before I went out after that cop over there. About an hour ago, I guess. I don't have a phone, so I had to go out after a cop."

  "And you haven't any idea who the man is?"

  "I told you I didn't. I don't know him from Adam."

  "How long had you been out of your apartment?"

  "Since last night."

  "About what time?"

  "Oh, about nine o'clock, I guess. Somewhere around there. Better say nine-thirty."

  "You ke
ep your door locked, don't you?"

  "Sure. But it's a cheap spring lock. Anybody could open it."

  "Is that the way you figure it?” I asked. “I mean, that he broke in and—"

  "Look mister,” she said. “I don't figure anything. All I know is that he got in here somehow and knocked himself off. I don't try to figure any further than that, because I don't have to. I haven't been here since last night, and I can prove it. I never saw the guy before, and you can't prove I did. Maybe he broke in to see what he could steal, and then all at once he decided to hang himself. How should I know what happened? And who cares, anyhow?"

  I turned to Ben. “See if you can find any identification on him,” I said. “And then look up a phone and tell them what we've got here."

  He nodded and walked back toward the corpse.

  I studied the woman's face a moment. She'd lived a lot of years the hard way, I could tell. It was all there in her face. And it was there in her voice too, if you listened for it. Just as the indications of lying were there. Even the best confidence men in the country are troubled with a dry throat when they lie, though they're usually very skillful at covering it up. Mrs. Pedrick wasn't skillful at all. Her voice had grown increasingly husky, and she was swallowing a lot more than was normal.

  "Why don't you start telling the truth?” I asked.

  "Listen, you! I—"

  "Just take it easy,” I said. “In the first place, I'm tired of listening to nothing. And in the second place, this isn't suicide. It's murder."

  She took a half step back from me, and one hand darted up to her throat and stayed there. “Murder!” she whispered, and the word had the right ring of astonishment to it.

  I nodded. “He was already dead when he was strung up there, Miss Pedrick. Does that give you another slant on things?"

  She glanced about her for something to sit on, and finally moved to a stack of newspapers and sat down on that. “Lord,” she said.

  "You still claim you don't know him?” I asked.

  She took a long time to answer. “No,” she said at last. “No, I don't know him. I was telling the truth. I never saw him before in my life."

  "But you do have a pretty good idea how he got into your apartment, don't you?"

  She moistened her lips, glancing along her eyes toward the mattress.

  "Well?” I said.

  "If—if I tell you, can you keep my name out of it? Can you make it look as if you found out from someone else?"

  Before I could answer her, Ben Muller came up. “No luck, Pete,” he said. “Somebody clipped his wallet. There isn't even any loose change in his pocket. No tie pin or wristwatch, either. We'll have to get a make on him some other way."

  I nodded. “Nose around a little. See if you can find anything."

  "Okay. Want me to call the lieutenant first?"

  "Yeah, I guess you'd better."

  He moved away again and I turned back to Miss Pedrick. “You said you wanted us to keep your name out of it,” I said. “Who are you afraid of?"

  She got to her feet slowly and stood there a moment while she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. “It's so close in here,” she said. “Can't we talk outside? I don't want to go out in the street, but there's sort of a little court out back. Can we go out there?"

  I nodded, and then followed her through a narrow corridor and out a door into a walled-in area about twelve feet square.

  "This is better,” she said. “At least we can breathe out here."

  "Better start again,” I said. “And this time, tell the truth.” I gave her a cigarette, lit it for her, and then lit one for myself.

  "It's one of Leda's friends,” she said. “It has to be. There's no other answer."

  "Who's Leda?"

  "A girl friend of mine. She—well, she was here last night. She came by the bar where I work and asked me if she could borrow my apartment, and I said all right. She had a date with someone, you see, and she wanted a place where they could be alone."

  "When was this?"

  "Last night—about eight o'clock."

  "All right. Go on."

  "Well, it wasn't the first time I'd done that. Leda always gave me ten dollars, so I could get a hotel room and have a few dollars left over. She couldn't go to a hotel room herself, because she was afraid her husband would get wind of it. He has two or three different businesses going for him, and he knows just about everybody. He gets around a lot, and so do his friends. Leda was afraid to take a chance on a hotel or a furnished room."

  "But she didn't mention the name of the man she had the date with?"

  "No, she didn't. She'd never done that any of the other times, either."

  "She borrow your apartment often?"

  "I guess you'd call it often. Sometimes she'd ask to use it a couple of times the same week, and then maybe I wouldn't see her for a week or ten days."

  "You think it was always the same man, or different men each time?"

  "I couldn't say. I never felt like being too inquisitive, if you know what I mean."

  "You make a habit of that?"

  "Of what?"

  "Of loaning your apartment out to your girl friends. At ten dollars a night, and with a hotel room costing you only three or four, that could turn into a pretty profitable sideline."

  Her eyes moved away from mine. “You'd find out anyhow, wouldn't you?"

  "You know we would."

  "Well, what was the harm in it? If I hadn't accommodated them, they'd have gone somewhere else, wouldn't they? Listen. If a woman's going to play around, she's going to play around. It was better they did it in a safe place than—"

  "All right,” I said wearily. “About this Leda, now. What was the arrangement supposed to be?"

  "Why, just the same as it always was. I gave her my key, and told her I wouldn't be home before three or four o'clock this afternoon."

  "How'd she get the key back to you?"

  "She didn't. Not personally, that is. She always hid it in a crack in the stonework over the basement door. The one that leads up to the street."

  "That's pretty high. She a tall girl like you?"

  "Yes. She used to work in chorus lines, just like I did."

  "You known her long?"

  "Yes. A long time. About—oh, about fifteen years."

  "And when you came home this afternoon you found the key where you expected it to be?"

  "No. It wasn't there. I got a passkey from the landlord."

  I took out my notebook. “What's Leda's full name, and where does she live?"

  4.

  She hesitated. “Listen, officer ... Isn't there some way you can keep me out of this? I've known Leda half my life. I think the world of her. So long as I thought that man had killed himself, I was willing to bluff through a story to protect her. But if it's murder, I—"

  "It isn't Leda you're worried about,” I said. “You might as well level with us. You've been around enough to know that the more you cooperate with cops, the easier it'll go.” I paused. “All right, so who is it you're afraid of?"

  "If you were in my place, you'd be afraid of him too. He—he used to be a hoodlum. Maybe he still is, for all I know. He's mean—mean all the way through. He beat up one of his best friends once, just because the guy danced with Leda a couple of times too often. Once he knocked a man unconscious, just because he brushed against Leda on the street."

  "You still haven't told me who,” I said.

  "Leda's husband. Eddie Willard."

  I wrote the name down. “Where do they live, Eddie and Leda?"

  "You haven't promised to—"

  "I can't promise anything,” I told her. “I'll do what I can for you, yes—but I can't commit the police department that way. You should know that."

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They live at the Bayless."

  "That an apartment house or a hotel?"

  "Hotel. It's at the corner of West End Avenue and Sixty-second Street."

 
I made a note of it. “What hotel did you stay in last night?” I asked.

  "The Paragon, on West Fifty-fourth."

  "I know where it is. It's just down the street from the station house. What time did you leave there?"

  "Well, their check-out time's a little earlier than it is most places. At one o'clock. I—let's see—I guess I checked out about noon."

  "And then what did you do?"

  "I took a walk."

  "Where?"

  "Oh, just around. I walked over to Fifth Avenue, and up Fifth to Central Park. I went to the zoo, and watched people rowing boats on the lake a while, and then I sat down on a bench and tried to get a little sun."

  "You walk home from Central Park?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "You see anyone you knew?"

  "On my walk? No.” Her eyes suddenly grew round. “You don't think I ... ?"

  "I have to ask questions,” I said. “Then I have to check them out.” I took a final drag on my cigarette and flipped it away. For some reason I kept thinking about those filthy mattresses back inside. A cop sometimes turns up a lot of muck in the course of an investigation, and sometimes the stench of the muck stays with you far longer than the memory of the investigation. I had a feeling I'd be recalling those sweat-soured mattresses for a lot of years to come.

  Janice Pedrick shifted her position slightly, and as she did so I noticed the play of muscles through the hard, dancer's body. She was a large girl, and a strong one. She would be physically capable of handling a small man the size of the corpse. She would have had no trouble at all stringing him up. On the other hand, the dead man had apparently been a prizefighter, supposedly capable of taking care of himself. And the girl showed no signs of having been in anything like a fight. There were no bruises or scratches, and none of her fingernails had been broken. If she'd been a party to his murder, I reasoned, she had either caught him while he was drunk or drugged—which would come out at the autopsy—or she had had help.