Manhunt. Volume 3, Number 2, February, 1955

The police turned up suspect after suspect. But every suspect had a perfect alibi...

1

The dead girl lay near the chimney, about four feet from the parapet that fronted on Sixty-ninth Street. It was only a quarter past eight of a hot August morning, but the surrounding roofs were crowded with tenants who had climbed up to see the show. We were nine stories above the street, but this was still one of the smallest buildings in the neighborhood, and with all those people watching, you got the feeling of being on a stage, with the roofs and windows of the taller buildings all around serving as a kind of amphitheater.

My partner, Walt Logan, and I had caught the squeal just as we came on duty at the squad room for the day watch. The apartment building was only two short blocks from the Twentieth Precinct station house, and so we’d double-timed it on foot, rather than bother checking out an RMP car.

Walt and I stood together, a little apart from the other cops, studying the dead girl. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up, an extremely pretty girl of about twenty or twenty-one. She had been stabbed twice in the back and once in the left side. There was very little blood, which meant that she had probably died from the first thrust of the knife. She had dark auburn hair, caught at the back with a wide silver band, and was wearing a pale green dress and black shoes with very high heels. Both the dress and the shoes seemed to be of high quality, and so did the jeweled watch on her left wrist.

We couldn’t examine the body further, or search the clothing, because female DOA’s can be touched and searched only by policewomen. We’d had one of the patrolmen phone for a policewoman at the same time he notified the District Attorney’s Office for us.

Walt shook his head slowly. “Looks almost as if she’d just lain down there to take a nap, doesn’t it, Steve?”

“Maybe she was lucky,” I said. “Maybe she never even knew what happened to her.”

“Well, it was over fast, anyhow. There’s no sign of a struggle, that I can see. Not a scratch on her face or arms, and that dress looks like it’d been pressed just a couple minutes before somebody slipped that knife into her.”

I nodded. “I think we can forget about assault, and that wrist watch pretty much rules out robbery.”

“I wonder what the hell she was doing up here.”

“She was with some guy, most likely. Somebody she knew well enough to come up on the roof with.”

“That wouldn’t have to be too well,” Walt said. “There’s a lot of romance takes place on these roofs at night.”

“Yeah, that’s so. Well, we’ll probably find out soon enough, once we get a make on her.”

“I wish that policewoman would hurry it up a little. We’re not doing any good hanging around here.”

A gust of wind blew across the rooftop and lifted the girl’s dress. There were a couple of long whistles from the roof just above, and someone giggled. Walt bent quickly and tugged the dress back down. Several watchers laughed out loud.

“Listen to those characters,” Walt said tightly. “They’re probably sorry they didn’t see her get stabbed.”

“There’s always a few like that,” I said. “Listen, Walt. There’s no point in both of us losing time up here. You got the sixty-one?”

He fished a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It was the regular Complaint Report Form, which is made out for all squeals, from disorderly conduct to murder. Walt had grabbed it from the desk officer as we passed through the muster room on our way out of the station house. It was brief and undetailed, but it would be the key document in the department file pertaining to this homicide, and would be the basis upon which everything else was built.

Walt and I followed the usual practice of detective teams in splitting our watch, so that one of us caught squeals for the first half of the watch and the other for the second. This one had come in during my half of the watch, and so I would be in charge of the entire investigation and responsible for all paper work connected with it, while Walt would act as my assistant.

“What’ve you got in mind?” Walt asked.

“I want to talk to the super, and maybe to the guy who spotted her.”

“And leave me alone with the D.A.’s man? This is your squeal, don’t forget.”

I grinned. “You’ve handled D.A.’s men before, Walt. We want the fastest make we can get.”

“Yeah. Well, just don’t get lost. Things are really going to get cracking around here, once everybody shows up.”

I glanced up at the surrounding roofs. “No use giving them a spectacle,” I said. “Take the girl inside before the policewoman and the assistant M.E. go to work on her, Walt.”

“Yeah. Just don’t leave me by my lonesome too long, that’s all.”

“While I’m gone, you might as well take another look around the roof. Maybe we missed something the first time.”

“All right.”

I turned and went down the iron stairs to the top floor and along the corridor to the self-service elevator. I’d left a patrolman stationed midway between the fire stairs and the elevator, so there were no tenants in the corridor. But the door of almost every apartment was either wide open or partly ajar, with peoples’ heads bobbing in and out along its entire length. I took some pretty sour looks and ignored some pretty definite remarks about my ancestry. I couldn’t blame them. Most of them had jobs to go to, and they didn’t like being ordered to stay inside their apartments until we told them they could leave. New Yorkers are not the most reticent people in the world when it comes to telling cops what they happen to be thinking at the time, and these tenants were no exception. But what seemed to them a highhanded way to operate was SOP in a situation such as this one, and there was nothing I or Walt could do about it.

Two radio units had arrived at the apartment house a few moments before Walt and I reached it. We’d stationed patrolmen at the front and back entrances, and put a third on the switchboard. While this last man had been calling each apartment, requesting the tenants to stay inside, Walt and I had posted another man in the elevator, and then gone up with the other patrolmen to the roof.

Meanwhile, the Communications Bureau had sent an ambulance from the nearest hospital and notified the Medical Examiner’s office. As soon as Walt and I had discovered we had a homicide, Walt had called the squad commander at the station house. He, in turn, would notify other interested parties and offices.

My first job was to determine the dead girl’s identity. I’d sent a patrolman to round up the super, but the patrolman had come back to report the super gone and his wife unable to tell us where we could find him. The super’s wife had told the patrolman she knew none of the tenants, and had never seen any of them, except for one or two men who had come to the super’s basement apartment at one time or another to make complaints or request repairs. She’d said she was an invalid, spent most of her time in bed, and had not been out of the apartment in nearly two years.

The switchboard was not in operation between midnight and eight A.M. The super’s wife had told the patrolman that the operator who came on duty then, a man, was often late. Apparently such had been the case this morning, because there had been no one at the board when we arrived. Usually, when we have an unidentified DOA in an apartment house, we can get a tentative identification from either the super or the switchboard operator, but in this case we hadn’t been able to contact either one.

The patrolman we’d posted in the elevator took me down to the ground floor. The switchboard operator was still missing, and a check with the patrolman posted at the rear entrance showed that the super had not returned to his apartment.

I rode back up to the top floor, glanced at the Complaint Report again to make sure of the apartment number, and walked along the corridor to 908.

2

The man who opened the door to my knock was, I guessed, no more than thirty, but his hair was as white as it would ever be. It looked even whiter because of his deep tan and dark eyes, and when you noticed that his eyelashes were white too, the effect was a little startling. He was about an inch taller than I, and about four inches wider through the shoulders.

“You Mr. Henderson?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I showed him my badge. “My name’s Manning. I’ll be in charge of the investigation.”

“You don’t believe in taking any chances, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Making everyone stay in his apartment this way. You certainly can’t suspect all of us.” He glanced both ways along the corridor and raised his voice as he said this, wanting, I supposed, to be a self-appointed spokesman for the others on the floor.

“We can talk better inside, Mr. Henderson,” I said.

He hesitated a moment, then stood back to let me step past him. He kept his hand on the doorknob, frowning at me.

“Would you mind closing the door, please?” I asked.

He shrugged, closed the door and motioned to a studio couch. “Might as well sit down,” he said.

I sat down and waited a moment for him to look me over before he sat down in an easy chair across from me and crossed his legs.

“You found the body, I believe,” I said.

He nodded.

“How’d that come about?”

“Why, just the way I told the man on the phone. I went up to the roof this morning, and she was there. I saw her as soon as I stepped out.”

“Did you touch the body?”

He smiled at me, a little pityingly. “Of course I didn’t. Anyone knows better than to touch somebody who’s been murdered.”

“But you did get close enough to know she was dead?”

“Naturally. I said she was dead when I phoned the police.” He shook a cigarette from a package and took his time lighting it. “I held the back of my pocket watch close to her nose and mouth. When I took it away again it was still bright. No breath had condensed on it. I knew then she was dead.”

“I see.”

“I hope what I did doesn’t upset you.”

I didn’t let him nettle me. You run into all kinds, and Henderson’s form of cop-baiting was comparatively mild. We treat citizens with as much respect and politeness as we can; and sometimes, with types like Henderson, that can be the toughest part of an assignment.

“Can you identify the girl for me, Mr. Henderson?” I asked.

“Her name is — was Barbara Lawson.”

I got out my notebook and pencil. “Did she live here in the building?”

“Yes, she did. In 601.” I got the pitying smile again. “That’s really surprising, isn’t it? I mean, that she’d live right here in this very building.”

I wrote down the girl’s name and apartment number. “There’s nothing so surprising about it,” I said. “And then again, it wouldn’t be too surprising if she’d been a guest here, either.”

His eyes narrowed a little. “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

I closed my notebook over my finger and settled myself a little more comfortably on the couch. “It’s not supposed to mean anything, Mr. Henderson,” I said, keeping my voice a lot more friendly than I wanted to. “I was just pointing out the reason for my question. We have to follow routine, you know. All this is just part of it.”

“It didn’t sound that way.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you know the girl well?”

He studied me for a moment, as if debating with himself whether he should let me off so easily or give me a bad time. Finally he shook his head. “No, I didn’t know her too well. I got her an apartment here about — well, I guess it was about six months ago. I’d gone out with her a few times, and she was looking for a place. When I found out there was going to be a vacancy here, I told her about it.”

“She live there alone?”

“Yeah — alone. She wasn’t married, if that’s what you’re getting at. Fooling around with married women is one thing I don’t do, and never have.”

I opened my notebook again. “What can you tell me about her?”

He leaned forward and, without his eyes once leaving mine, began slowly and carefully to mash out his cigarette in a tray on the cocktail table. “I want to know one thing,” he said. “I want an honest answer... Do you suspect me of this?”

“It’s a little early for us to suspect anyone yet, Mr. Henderson,” I said. “And on the other hand, cops have to work on the premise that anyone could be guilty. It’s as I told you. These are simply routine questions that have to be asked, and it’s up to me to ask them. It’s my job, just like driving a truck or keeping books.”

He straightened slowly and now his face showed a slight flush beneath its heavy tan. “That’s just about the kind of answer I expected,” he said. “I didn’t have to call the police, you know. I could have just left her there and saved myself all this annoyance.”

I let him glare at me a while, and then I said, “About Miss Lawson. What can you tell me about her?”

“Not a hell of a lot, Manning. I met her in a bar. I had the stool next to hers... Well, you know how those things go. We went out a few times after that. And like I said before, I told her about the vacancy here in the apartment house. Frankly, I thought that by doing her a favor like that, and having her in the same building, might facilitate things.” He paused. “It didn’t, though. I saw her only a few times after that. After she moved in, I mean. She was a beautiful girl, but she was just a little too hard on my billfold.”

“You know any of her friends or acquaintances?”

“No. I always tried to keep her by herself as much as I could. I guess I worked up a pretty good-sized yen for her, but nothing came of it. It cost me around a hundred dollars every time I took her out. A man can’t take too much of that. Not me, anyhow.” He lit another cigarette. I noticed he did it naturally, without making a production of it, and it seemed that some of his hostility might be leaving him. “She mentioned a lot of people, off and on, but I don’t remember any of them.”

“You ever in her apartment?”

“Once. I didn’t make out. That was the last date I had with her.”

“What’d she do for a living?”

“She was a model. Fashion work, I think.”

“What’s your line of work, Mr. Henderson?”

“I’m a draftsman. With Sheaffer and Jacoby.”

“And you never met anyone else who knew Barbara Lawson?”

“That’s right.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“I told you.”

“You told me the last time you had a date with her. You mean you haven’t seen her since? Even on the street? In the hallway here?”

“Oh.” He seemed to be having a hard time keeping from getting teed off again. “I saw her yesterday afternoon. She was getting out of a cab in front of the house here when I came home. I walked on down to the corner and back, to make sure she’d have time to go up before I got there.”

“Why?”

“Personal matter.”

“I appreciate that. Still...”

He shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t make any difference, at that. It just happens I didn’t want to meet her in the lobby or the elevator. We didn’t hit it off too well on that last date we had. Both of us got around to saying some pretty nasty things before it was over. I... well, I just simply didn’t feel much like coming face to face with her again, that’s all.”

I heard the elevator doors slide open, and then several pairs of footsteps came along the corridor. I listened to them going up the iron stairs to the roof, and then I rose and moved toward the door.

“Just one thing more, Mr. Henderson,” I said. “Do you make a habit of going up on the roof every morning?”

“I was waiting for that,” he said. “You just had to ask that one, didn’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. How about it?”

“You’re in for a disappointment. The answer’s yes. I go up there every morning, except when the weather’s too bad.”

“Any particular reason?”

“A very particular one, Manning.

I go up there because I like to go there. I like the view. I like to look down toward the Hudson. I don’t feel obliged to describe the feeling it gives me, but it’s a good one.” He got up and crossed to the door and opened it for me. “You’ll have to try it yourself sometime, Manning, you really will.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” I said, as I stepped into the corridor. “Well, thinks very much, Mr. Henderson. I may have to talk to you again later on. I’m sorry about the inconvenience, but—”

“I’m already dreading it,” he said, and closed the door with just a little more force than most people find necessary to accomplish the same operation.

I thought about him as I made my way to the roof. One of the fundamentals of police investigation — in a homicide where the killer is unknown — is that you must look first to the husband or wife, and then to the person who found the body. They are automatic suspects, always, and as often as not your investigation need go no further. The reason for suspecting the husband or wife is obvious enough, and while I don’t pretend to know the mental quirks behind a murderer’s wish to have policemen admire his handiwork, a surprising number of them do report their own homicides. This is equally true of arsonists. And the fact that detectives are sent to the funerals of persons who have been murdered by unapprehended killers, is well known.

Many a murderer has been caught that way, and because of this fact, some funerals have been attended by more detectives than mourners.

3

I stepped out on the roof and walked over to the girl’s body. The footsteps I’d heard in the corridor had belonged to the policewoman, the assistant M.E., and the ambulance attendants. The surrounding roofs were more crowded than ever and there were at least two people watching from every window in sight.

“Well, if it isn’t my partner,” Walt Logan said with mock sternness. “Glad to see you back. How was your trip? And why didn’t you drop us a post card now and then?”

I nodded to the policewoman and the assistant M.E. “Hello, Rosie. How are you, Ted?”

“This is a fine way to start the day,” Rosie said. “Let’s get her inside somewhere.” She motioned to the gallery. “Those yahoos make me sick.”

“It would be better,” Ted said. “Is it all right to move the body, Steve?”

“Can’t, right now,” I said. “The lab boys and the photographer haven’t been here yet.”

“They’re on their way up,” Rosie said. “We saw them unloading their gear off the truck as we came in.” She looked up at the other roofs again. “Listen. There’s enough of us here so that we can stand real close around her. Sort of form a screen. You know?”

“We might as well, I guess,” I said. “It’ll take the techs a while.”

I called the patrolmen and the ambulance attendants in close, and we made a tight circle around the girl’s body. The policewoman made her search quickly and efficiently, and then the assistant M.E. took over. Neither of them disturbed the position of the body by even the fraction of an inch.

“Well, that just about does it,” the assistant M.E. said. “There’s nothing more I can do till I get her to Bellevue.”

I looked at the policewoman. “How about it, Rosie?”

“A waste of time, Steve. No hidden money or narcotics. No weapons — not even a razor blade in her hair. No anything. All I can tell you is that those clothes are good. The best. There aren’t any National Recovery Board tags in the seams — not that it matters. She got the dress at Delano’s, on Fifth Avenue. The shoes are Helen Munson’s, and that’s just about the most expensive brand there is, outside of custom stuff.” She took a search form from her shoulder bag and began filling it out. “And if you’re interested — that auburn hair’s natural. The girl was born with it.”

“I wonder what happened to the D.A. and his guys,” Walt said. “Maybe they’re as shorthanded as we are.”

“They stay pretty busy in this town,” I said. I turned to the assistant M.E. “How’s it look, Ted?”

He snapped his bag shut and shook his head. “I’m a little concerned about the lack of blood, Steve. We can’t expect much, if she died almost instantly. But still there seems to be just too darned little of it. Those are knife wounds, of course, but there’s always the possibility she died some other way before she was knifed. I remember a case — back in ’41, I think it was — where a man shot another. Got him right through the heart, but it was dark and he couldn’t be sure. He tried to shoot the man again, but the gun jammed. So he shucked out a knife and stabbed him a dozen or so times in the chest. We thought we had a clear case of death by stab wounds, until we posted the body. Then we found that one of the knife thrusts had gone into his chest at exactly the spot where the bullet struck him. The slug was flattened out against a bone, and it had a slice in it where the knife had struck it as it traveled exactly the same path.”

I nodded. The doc was right not to take anything for granted, of course. Sometimes the most obvious things are obvious only because someone went to a great deal of trouble to make them look that way.

“How long would you say she’s been dead?” I asked.

“Well, the postmortem lividity is as pronounced as it’s likely to be, but the rigor mortis has worked down only to her knees. I may be able to tell the time exactly, once I get her on the table, but right now I’d say she’s been dead about eight hours. That’s rough, mind you. You’ll have to operate on the assumption that it could be as much as an hour either way.”

I glanced at my watch. It was nine-thirty. “That would put it around one-thirty this morning, give or take an hour.”

He nodded. “Better call it between midnight and three, and be on the safe side. I’ll phone you later, if I can give you a closer estimate.”

The roof door opened and the lab crew and photographer came through it and walked toward us. They needed no instructions. They said hello to the rest of us, and went straight to work with their chalk and tape measures and powders and cameras. They worked as a team, silently, with no lost motion and no lost words. Their appearance on the scene had brought a round of cheers from the rooftoppers and window-watchers.

“You’d think it was a floor show, and a new act had just come on,” Rosie said. “Well, Steve, do you want me for anything else?”

“Guess not, Rosie. Thanks a lot.”

“The only time I get any results is when they bring the girls in on a raid. Then there’s some action. They soak their hair in a solution of dope and water, so they can rinse it out again once they’re in the tank. And razor blades in their hair — my God, I must have found a thousand of them. And girls with big bills rolled into their garters. You men think you’ve got something when you get a prisoner with an ice pick tine hidden in his tie, don’t you? Well, you should see some of the things the girls come up with. You’d never believe it.” She waved to the group of men around the body and walked toward the entrance to the stairway.

A moment later, the assistant D.A. and two of the detectives attached to the D.A.’s office arrived. Walt and I briefed them, told them what we’d done so far, received the usual pep talk from the assistant D.A., assured him we’d wrap up a good case for him, and then the assistant D.A. and the detectives left. Their work — most of it — would come after Walt and I had got together enough of a case to take before the grand jury. It was Walt’s and my job to conduct the investigation and find the killer. It was the job of the D.A.’s office and staff to make sure the killer was indicted, tried, and convicted.

The chief of the tech crew called to me. “She’s all yours, Steve.”

I got a receipt for the body from one of the ambulance attendants. Then he and his partner set up their collapsible stretcher, eased the girl onto it, and took her away.

“I’ll go along now, too,” the doc said. “Maybe I’ll be able to schedule a fast autopsy for you, Steve.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll let you know.” He followed the ambulance attendants toward the stairs.

Walt had been giving one of the tech crew a hand with a tape measure, and now he came back to where I stood.

“You make another look around up here?” I asked.

“Uh huh. No go. Not even any fresh cigarette butts. The super back yet?”

“No. And neither is the switchboard operator. I talked to the guy who phoned in the squeal, though.”

“Henderson?”

“Yeah.”

“You get a make on the girl?”

“That’s just about all I did get. Her name’s Barbara Lawson. Henderson says she was a model.”

“It figures. She was sure as hell pretty enough.”

“She lived here in the building. I think we’d better go down and hit her flat, Walt.”

“Fine. I’ve had enough of this roof. There’s nothing more we can do here, anyway.”

I told the tech chief Barbara Lawson’s apartment number, in the event he should want us for anything, and Walt and I went down the fire stairs to the sixth floor. We got the complimentary treatment from the open doors along the corridor again, and stopped in front of 601.

“Spring locks on these doors?” Walt asked.

“Yeah. At least the one on Henderson’s was.” I took a strip of celluloid from my billfold, inserted it in the crack between the door and the jamb, and pushed the edge of the strip against the bevel of the bolt.

We stepped inside and closed the door behind us.

“Some layout,” Walt said. “Maybe you and I should have gone in for modeling, Steve.”

I figured that it would take roughly a year of my salary to furnish my apartment the way Barbara Lawson had furnished hers. It had the look that comes only when a top interior decorator is given a free hand and money is no object.

“I keep-thinking about what the doc said about there not being enough blood,” Walt said. “Maybe she lost some of it down here.”

“I don’t think so, Walt.”

“Why not?”

“She was wearing that same dress when she was stabbed, of course. The position of the wounds and the slashes in the cloth showed that. If there’d been a heck of a lot of bleeding, her dress would have been soaked, no matter where she was killed.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right. Let’s give the place a look.”

“Just a minute, Walt.” I lifted the phone from the top of a gossip-seat, and when the patrolman I’d posted on the switchboard answered, I asked him if either the regular switchboard operator or the super had shown up yet. He said they had not. I told him Walt and I would be in 601 for a while and to let us know as soon as the switchboard operator or the super came in.

“I remember when I was a patrolman,” Walt said as I hung up. “Running switchboards was the thing I hated most. I never did really catch on to it.”

“Patrolmen are smarter these days,” I said. “They learn faster and remember longer.”

Walt nodded soberly. “You’re so right,” he said. “Now, so far as you’re concerned—” He broke off as the phone rang. The officer on the switchboard was routing all incoming calls exactly as the regular operator would have done — except that he was monitoring every one of them. The same was true, of course, of outgoing calls.

I picked up the phone again. “Hello?”

There was a short pause on the other end of the line. Then a girl’s voice said, “Is Barbara there?”

“Not right now. May I—”

“Who’s speaking, please?”

“A friend of hers. Where can she call you back?”

Another pause. “Just tell her Ann Tyner called, please. Do you expect her back soon?”

“It’s a little hard to say.”

“Well, tell her it’s important. I’ll be home all day.”

“You want to give me your number?”

“She knows it.”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

I dropped the phone back in its cradle and reached for the directory. There was no Ann Tyner listed, but there was an entry for a Wilma A. Tyner. I dialed the number. When the same girl answered, I hung up without saying anything. I looked at the address and entered it in my notebook. She lived at 917 West Seventy-second Street.

“Well, we’ve found a friend of hers,” I said. “Or at least an acquaintance.”

“We’d better get to talking to the tenants,” Walt said. “There’s going to be some terrific yelling done if we don’t spring them pretty soon.”

“I was just going to call the lieutenant and ask him for some more men,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll wait for that. We can send the patrolmen through the building, and if they come up with anything interesting, we can take over.”

“That’s not strictly according to the book,” Walt said, grinning.

“Maybe not. But the precinct’s already got two other murder investigations on its hands. If we drag in any more men on this one, it’ll mean canceling a lot of the guys’ leaves and days off. I’d like to avoid that, if we can.”

“I’ll get the boys off the roof,” Walt said. “The techs can get along without them.”

“Put one officer to work on each floor,” I said. “Start with the top ones, and work down. I’ve already talked to Henderson, so they can skip him. Tell them to make the routine pitch. We might as well operate out of this apartment, so tell them the number and make sure they understand they’re to call here the minute they come up with anything.”

“When can the tenants leave?”

“As soon as the officers have finished talking to them. Tell all the boys to keep an eye out for the knife.” I thought a moment. “Maybe you’d better make one exception, Walt. Have a cop go down to the basement and make a thorough search for the knife down there. Have him check the back yard, all trash cans, and so on. And ask him to check all the manholes within two blocks of here. That’ll take him some time, but if he should finish before the others have questioned all the tenants, you can put him to work helping them.”

Walt grimaced. “Here’s where I make some cop an enemy of mine.”

“And on the other hand, he might find that knife and get a nice piece of paper in his record.”

“Okay. I’ll get started.” He glanced about the apartment again as he opened the door. “This is the way everybody should live, Steve. You and me and everybody.”

“It’s a little frilly for the likes of you, Walt,” I said.

“I could get used to it. You ought to see the trap Florence and I are living in now. Compared to this place, it’s just a hole in the wall. I’d like to try this for a change.”

“But think of the interesting life you lead. Think of all the adventure.”

“Ha!” he said, and went outside.

4

I didn’t spend much time on Barbara Lawson’s living room. I moved the furniture around enough to look under it, and I searched beneath the cushions on the twin sofas and the two deep chairs, but that was about the extent of it. There was a thick wall-to-wall rug, but there were no stains of any kind on it. Only a professional could have cleaned stains from a rug like that, and I was pretty sure that Miss Lawson had never lain on it or been dragged across it.

The bedroom took me a little longer. There was a large color photograph of the girl on one of the walls, with several smaller photographs of her arranged around it. There were no other photographs or pictures of any kind. I took a good look at the large color job. She was beautiful, all right, and of course the photograph was truer to the way she’d really looked than the face we’d seen on the roof.

The bed was made up, with a negligee thrown across the foot of it. The negligee looked like pale green mist. There were mules on the floor beside the bed, and a fashion magazine lay beside them. I looked beneath the bed, then walked to the dressing table and started going through the drawers. I wasn’t interested in bottles and the usual paraphernalia you find around dressing tables. I was looking for letters, photographs — things like that.

But I didn’t find any. You could search through the table for a week, and all you’d find out was that it belonged to a woman. You’d never find out which one.

I went through the two large closets, looking in every coat and suit pocket I came to. I found two sticks of gum and some small change, and that was all.

The kitchen gave me even less. There was very little food, either on the shelves or in the refrigerator, but there was a fine supply of very good liquor. And while there were no pots and pans, there were any number of mixed-drink glasses, some with shapes I couldn’t remember seeing before.

I took a fast look at the bath, and then crossed to a small room which was fitted out in a lady’s version of a den. There was a large leather reclining chair, a shelf of books, mostly autobiographies, and what must have been a hundred or so pictures of Barbara Lawson. Some were framed covers from magazines, and some were crayon and water colors, but most were photographs. All of the work was professional, and all of it was good. Most of them showed an even younger Barbara than the large color photograph in the bedroom. If she’d been beautiful when she died, she had been more than that when she was a little younger.

There was a long table on the side of the room opposite the bookshelf, covered with neat stacks of fashion and beauty magazines. There was a drawer in the table, and I opened it. I found a sewing kit and a flat wooden box about a foot wide and eighteen inches long. The box was locked, so I went back to the bedroom, got a bobby pin, and opened it. It contained a bank book and the stub section of a checkbook. The bank book showed no deposits had been made during the last ten months, and the checkbook stubs showed that the last check, entered about a week ago, had reduced the balanced in the account to $80.45.

I reached back into the drawer, felt around, and came up with three folded billheads. All three were from top stores, all for amounts between two and three hundred dollars, and one of them had the word Please! handwritten in red ink beneath the amount due. I put the book and stubs and billheads back in the wooden box and returned it to the drawer.

There was a knock at the hall door.

It was the chief of the tech crew. “We’re through up there, Steve,” he said. “This the girl’s apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“You want us to start in here now?”

“Might as well. You do any good for us on the roof?”

He lowered his heavy kit to the floor and shook his head. “Afraid not. There isn’t anything up there that’d take a print, except the chimney. Those are glazed bricks, and usually they take a nice print.” He shrugged, mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief. “God, it’s hot.”

“No prints on the bricks?”

“Nope. Few partials, but they were old as hell. There was a wine bottle lodged down between the two sections of the chimney, but it’d been there long enough to pick up a scum. No prints on it. We checked, just to get it down on the report. The only prints we got, Steve, are the ones we took off the girl’s fingers.” He turned back toward the corridor. “Well, I’ll tell the gang to come down here and get started.”

“All right. Walt and I are going to use this as headquarters, but we’ll stay out of your way.”

He grinned. “We’ll do the same for you.”

The phone rang. It was the officer I’d posted on the switchboard.

“The super just came in,” he said.

“Good. Ask the officer on the elevator to bring him up here, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hear anything interesting on that board?”

“No, sir. Lots of calls to explain why people will be late to work, and a couple to the newspapers to complain about police methods. That’s about all.”

“Uh huh. Well, call me if that switchboard operator shows up.”

“Yes, sir.”

The tech chief and his crew came into the apartment and went to work, and a few moments later Walt Logan came back to report that he’d assigned a patrolman to search for the knife, and that all the other officers, except the ones we’d posted, were questioning the tenants on the top three floors.

“Listen, Walt,” I said. “I’m getting tired of waiting for that switchboard operator. The super’s wife says he has a habit of showing up late, but this is too damned late.”

“You think maybe he’s got a real good reason this time, Steve? Like a dead girl, for instance?”

“Could be, I guess. But I want to see that guy bad, Walt. Those switchboard people know everything that’s going on around a place like this. They see people coming in and going out, and they listen in on calls all the time. Of course, this guy wasn’t on duty at the time the doc says the homicide took place, but he’ll still know a lot about the girl’s habits and acquaintances. If her killer came in before midnight, chances are the operator will remember him.”

“You want me to round him up?”

“I think you’d better. The super came in. He’s on his way up here now. But for every fact the super knows, the switchboard operator will know a hundred.”

Walt nodded and turned to open the door.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Before you go on the prowl for that guy, take a run over to—” I paused long enough to glance at my notebook — “to 917 West Seventy-second Street. You remember the girl that called here? Well, that’s her address. We don’t know enough about the dead girl yet, and maybe this other girl can help us out. It may take a while to get hold of the switchboard operator, so you’d better grab the girl first. Her name’s Tyner.”

“What’s the apartment number?”

“Look on the mailboxes. She said it was Ann, but she’s listed in the phone book as Wilma A.”

“Anything else?”

“That’ll do it for a while.”

He opened the door just as the patrolman and the super came abreast of it. He stood back to let them in, gave me a mock salute, and left.

“You want me to stay here, sir?” the patrolman asked.

I shook my head. “No. Thanks, Sam.”

“There are some reporters down in the lobby.”

“You’ll be taking Walt Logan down in the elevator. Tell him I said to give them a fast statement. He’ll know how to handle it.”

“Yes, sir.” He hurried after Walt.

I turned back to the super. “How are you, Mr. Brokaw?”

He stared at me sullenly, a short, muscular, flat-featured man with pale skin that sagged away from his jowls and eyes — as if he had once been much heavier than he was now, had lost weight, and the skin had remained stretched and sagging. The bursted blood vessels around his nose and in his eyes showed he’d done his share of whiskey drinking in his fifty-odd years. He didn’t seem drunk now, but he did appear to be suffering from a hangover.

“What’s going on here in my house?” he asked. He spoke with scarcely any movement of his lips, and his voice had that deep huskiness that heavy drinkers sometimes have. “I come home, and the first thing that happens, I get stopped by a cop. Now I’m up here. For why?”

“I wonder if you’d mind stepping out into the kitchen with me, Mr. Brokaw? These men are trying to work here, and we’re only in their way.”

He muttered something beneath his breath, but he turned and followed me to the kitchen. I sat down at one end of the white enamel table and motioned him to the chair at the other. He sat down heavily and glanced about him.

“I hope this don’t take long,” he said. “Me, I got work to do.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll make it as short as I can.”

“You going to tell me what the hell this is all about?”

“Did you know the girl who had this apartment, Mr. Brokaw?”

“Had? Hell, she’s still got it. Nobody gets an apartment here, unless I give the word.”

“Did you know her pretty well?”

He grasped the fingers of one big hand with the fingers of the other and began cracking his knuckles. “Yeah. I guess you’d say I know her pretty good. Why?”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t see her to talk to, though. I just seen her leaving the building.” He hunched forward in his chair, cracking the knuckles a little louder now. “What’s the difference when I seen her? She in trouble?”

“Just let me ask the questions, Mr. Brokaw. It’ll go faster that way.”

“This sure ain’t getting my work done.”

“You know where the switchboard operator might be?”

“Benny? Listen, I never know where that guy is. Ever since he started working a double shift, he’s been coming in late. The people that own this place have been warning him about it. But Benny — he don’t listen to nobody. He’s like a damn mule, Benny is.”

“He’s the only switchboard operator, I understand.”

“Yeah, and we ain’t going to have him long, the way he’s been laying down on the job. We used to have two of them here, you know. One of them would work from eight till four, and the other one’d come on at four and work up till midnight. But the other guy quit — guess it’s been all of two months ago now — and old Benny, he talked the owners into letting him work both shifts. Don’t ask me how he done it — he just done it, that’s all. Damn fool was putting in sixteen straight hours. ’Course he took a nip on his jug now and then, to help him along. He—”

“But you don’t have any idea where he is now?”

“No — and I don’t give a damn. Maybe they’ll fire him for sure this time and we’ll get somebody around here that’ll show up mornings, like they’re supposed to.”

I drummed on the table top with my fingertips a moment. “Your wife tells us you weren’t home last night, Mr. Brokaw.”

The knuckle-popping stopped for a moment, then started up again. “So?”

“Mind telling me where you were?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your goddamned business.”

I took out my pack of cigarettes and extended it across the table to him. “Smoke, Mr. Brokaw?”

“I just smoke cigars. Listen, fella. What I do at night, and who I do it with — that’s all up to me, understand? I don’t have to answer to you, or any other copper.” He half rose from his chair. “That plain enough for you?”

I put my cigarettes back into my pocket without lighting one.

“Miss Lawson was killed last night,” I said casually, and watched closely for his reaction.

The hard-guy look left his face as quickly as if it’d been wiped off with a towel. He stared at me incredulously.

“You’re horsing me, ain’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Miss Lawson? She’s dead?”

“Killed.”

“Ahhh. Ahhh, no...”

I waited.

“How... how’d she get killed?”

I studied him. Generally, we tell people as little as we can, hoping that during the questioning they’ll reveal knowledge which they could not have had if they were not in some way involved. But that’s always up to the detective, and sometimes we hunch it differently and play it that way.

“She was stabbed to death. Up on the roof.”

“Stabbed... My God... Who did it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“You think I...?”

“We would like to know where you were last night. Say, from midnight until three o’clock.”

Brokaw put his hands on the table and folded them and stared at the thick, knobbed fingers. “I guess I’m kind of in the crack, ain’t I?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it looks to me like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I don’t tell you where I was, you’ll take me over to the station house and slug the hell out of me. And if—”

“That’ll be enough, Mr. Brokaw. You know better than that.”

“Well, maybe so. Yeah, I guess I do know you wouldn’t do that. But you sure wouldn’t give me no rest.”

I nodded. “It isn’t likely.”

“Yeah. But if I do tell you, then my wife’s going to find out.”

“Find out what?”

“That’s just it. She’s pretty damn sickly, you know. Never hardly even gets out of bed.” He paused. “It ain’t easy on a man, fella. I try to do right by her, but it sure ain’t easy. There’s times...”

“Is that what happened last night?”

“Yeah.”

I got out my notebook. “Tell me the woman’s name,” I said.

“It ain’t myself I care about so much,” Brokaw said. “It’s Maude. She drives herself pretty near crazy, just suspecting me of stuff like that. If she finds out I really done it... God, I think it’d damn near kill her. I ain’t just talking, mister. Maude — she’s sicker’n hell. Been that way forever, it seems like.”

“We’ll check it out, Mr. Brokaw. If it’s as you say it is, the information will go no further.”

He gave me the name and address, and I entered it in my notebook.

“How long were you there?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see... I got there about ten minutes after eleven, I guess. A couple of minutes one way or the other. The reason I’m sure is because I called her at eleven o’clock sharp. I’d just looked at the clock, because Maude had yelled at me to know what time it was. She has to take her medicine at a certain time, you know.”

“And what time did you leave?”

“Few minutes ago.”

“You always call this woman before you go to see her?”

“Not unless I want to spend the night. Then I got to call her, to make sure it’s agreeable.”

“Didn’t your wife overhear you talking to this other woman?”

“It ain’t likely. Our apartment’s laid out like they are in railroad flats, you know. Maude was back in the bedroom, and there are a couple rooms between that and the living room, where the phone is. And besides, I always use a sort of code when I call. I make out I’m calling a man, see? I pretend I’m calling a guy to see if there’s going to be a poker game. I call this woman ‘Mike’ on the phone. She knows what I mean, when I ask if there’s going to be a poker game. If she wants me over there all night, all right, I go. And if she doesn’t, then I tell Maude there ain’t no game. I do that just in case Maude ever does kind of tune in on me one of these nights.”

“I see. What was your personal opinion of Miss Lawson?”

“You’d never find a finer girl than her, mister. They just don’t come no better. I guess I liked her better than any woman tenant I ever had in this house. She never got snotty, the way a lot of these extra-pretty girls get.”

“You see her often?”

“Quite a bit. She was just about the most helpless woman ever was born. Couldn’t fix a thing. Had me up lots of times, to fix this and that. I didn’t mind doing it, though. You just naturally like to help a person like her.”

“You know where we might find the switchboard operator?”

“I sure don’t. He’s a funny one, Benny is. Don’t say nothing to nobody. I did hear him say a couple of times that he walks to work. A fella like Benny, he’s the kind would walk all the way from the Bronx, just to save subway fare.”

I nodded. “I guess that’ll be all for now, Mr. Brokaw.”

He got to his feet slowly, glancing at the pocket where I keep my notebook. “You sure Maude won’t get wind of where I was?”

“I’m sure.”

“Yeah. Well, if there’s anything I can do to help you find the one that done it, you let me know. Hear?”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll do that, Mr. Brokaw.”

“I’m stronger than I look. You leave me alone with him five minutes. That’s all — just five minutes. He won’t stab any more girls like Miss Lawson, I guarantee you.”

I got up and walked to the front door with him. “Benny’s last name is Thomas, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Thomas.”

“Who owns this apartment house, Mr. Brokaw?”

“Corbett Brothers. They got an office on Sixth Avenue.”

“Well, thanks again.”

He nodded and walked toward the elevator. I watched him until the car came up and he got into it. The patrolman I’d posted in the car glanced at me questioningly.

“Mr. Brokaw’s going down to his apartment,” I said, making it just pointed enough for Brokaw to get the drift.

I wanted to check Brokaw’s story immediately, of course, and I called the station house, gave the lieutenant the data, and asked if he would send a detective over to see the woman Brokaw had said he’d spent the night with. The lieutenant called a detective to the phone, and I repeated my request to him. He told me he would be able to check it out right away, and would call me back as soon as he finished. I thanked him and hung up. If the detective found any cause for suspicion, I would, of course, make a personal check.

I looked up the phone listing for Corbett Brothers and called their office. Although I identified myself as a police officer, the girl to whom I talked refused to give me Benny Thomas’ home address. I wasn’t surprised. People in personnel work get a number of calls from men impersonating police officers, and most of them are under strict orders to release personal information about employees to no one except when the one requesting the information goes to the office and positively identifies himself.

When I knew my attempt was hopeless, I hung up and called BCI. I asked for run-throughs on Gus Brokaw, Benjamin Thomas, and Edward Henderson. I’d been thinking about the man with the dark tan and the white hair ever since I’d talked to him. He hadn’t struck me as the kind of man who’d go up on the roof every morning just to see if the Hudson River was still there.

The phone rang, and the officer on the switchboard told me there was a delivery boy downstairs with a package for Miss Lawson. I told him to send the boy up.

5

I was waiting for him at the elevator. He was about nineteen, I judged, with the smallest features I’d ever seen on a man’s face. He was only an inch or so shorter than I, and his head was of normal size, but his eyes and nose and mouth belonged to a boy of seven or eight. He was carrying a long white box, of the kind florists use for cut flowers.

“You Detective Manning?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

He smiled at me, a little weakly. “They told me downstairs you’d want to talk to me.”

“Uh-huh.” I dropped my cigarette in the sand urn near the elevator and gestured toward Barbara Lawson’s apartment. “We can talk in there.”

He bobbed his head, still smiling that unsure smile, and walked toward the door.

The tech crew had finished their work in the living room and had gone into the bedroom. I motioned the delivery boy to a chair and sat down across from him. He kept staring through the open doorway to the bedroom where the techs were working. He wasn’t smiling at all now, and his tiny, child’s eyes were troubled.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

“We’ll get around to that in a minute,” I said. He’d put the box on the floor beside his chair. I reached down and picked it up, shucked off the white ribbon, and glanced at the dozen or so roses it contained. Then I replaced the lid and the ribbon, and put the box down beside his chair again.

“You deliver flowers here often?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. Every day, except on week ends.”

“You always bring them yourself?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, I do unless I’m off sick or something.” He tried to look at me, but he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes away from the techs. “Miss Lawson has a standing order with the shop. We send her a dozen roses — or whatever happens to be extra nice — every morning about this time.”

“I see. You ever notice anything unusual on your deliveries?”

He moistened his lips. “Unusual?”

“Uh huh. Like Miss Lawson having an argument or a fight with someone. Like that.”

“Oh.” He shook his head and the wide forehead between the miniature eyebrows puckered a bit. “No, I never did. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone else here with her. No, wait... I did see another girl here once. But they weren’t fighting or arguing or anything.”

“Where’s the shop you work for?”

“Across the street, up near the corner.”

“You ever see Miss Lawson anywhere else but here? At a party, or in a bar somewhere — anything like that?”

“No, sir. Can I ask... I mean, has anything happened to her?”

“She’s dead.”

He looked at me for fully half a minute while the color seeped slowly from his face and the little boy’s eyes grew smaller and brighter. “Jesus...” he said softly.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

It took him a while to get the words out. “Roy. Roy Jackman.”

“Did Miss Lawson seem like a pretty nice person to you, Roy?”

He rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, as if to wipe the sweat from it, but I noticed that the wrist also brushed across his eyes, and I thought I knew the reason for it.

“She was the best,” he said. “I looked forward to coming over here every day. How did she die?”

I told him.

It was a long time before he got control of himself. There wasn’t much on the surface, but I knew there must be plenty going on inside.

Suddenly his body stiffened and he sat up straight in his chair. “You know something?” he said, almost challengingly. “You know how she was? Well, I’ll tell you. You might think I don’t realize how I look to other people, but you’re wrong. I do know. I know too damn well. But you think Miss Lawson ever let on I wasn’t the best-looking fellow she ever saw? Not Miss Lawson. Why, the first time she opened her door and saw me, she smiled at me just like I looked like anybody else. Most people try to hide it — the way my face makes them feel, I mean. But she wasn’t hiding anything. You know why? Because she didn’t even think about it. She didn’t even care! She...” He broke off, got to his feet so abruptly that he almost tripped, and headed for the door.

I let him go. I started once to call to him to take his flowers, but I thought better of it. I listened to him running down the corridor to the elevator, wondering if my own first thoughts about him had shown in my face. It left me feeling a little uneasy, a little guilty.

6

Walt Logan called at five past twelve.

“I’m phoning from a drug store, Steve,” he said. “I can’t raise that Tyner girl. I hammered on her door for ten minutes, off and on.”

“That’s funny. She said she’d be home all day.”

“Well, she changed her mind.”

“What kind of building does she live in?”

“One of those converted brown-stones. No desk, no switchboard, no elevator, no anything.”

“All right. We’ll forget her for a while.”

“You wan t me to come back now?”

“No. Grab a bite to eat, and then go over to the Corbett Brothers Realty Company. That’s on Sixth, in the Townley Building. You know where it is?”

“Yeah.”

“Corbett Brothers owns this house here, and hires the switchboard operators. I called them to ask about Benny Thomas—”

“He hasn’t shown up yet?”

“No. And Corbett Brothers wouldn’t give me any information on him over the phone. But they’ll give it out fast enough if you go over there in person. Nobody around here even knows where the guy lives. If you can get his home address, you’ll have a start.”

“What’s Benny’s last name again?”

“Thomas.”

“Check. When are you going out to eat?”

“Right now. But I’ll leave somebody here on the phone, in case you want to buzz me.”

“Okay, Steve. I’ll try to bring Benny back alive for you.”

I hung up, left the apartment, and went down the fire stairs floor by floor until I found the sergeant in charge of one of the two radio units. I told him I was going out for a sandwich and that I wanted him to stay in Barbara Lawson’s apartment until I got back. He would answer the phone, take down all messages, and explain my absence to the skipper if he should happen to call for a progress report. The sergeant told me the apartment-by-apartment questioning was coming along in fine shape and that it should be completed before one o’clock. I asked if he wanted me to bring him a sandwich and some coffee from the restaurant, and when he said no, I started down the stairs again.

But I kept thinking about Edward Henderson. I’d had too little time to question him, before the arrival of the policewoman and the assistant M.E. I stopped where I was and turned back up the stairs again. The uniform men had finished questioning the tenants on the top floor, but there was a chance Henderson had not yet left his apartment. And if he had, it would give me an opportunity to make a search.

Henderson didn’t answer my knock. I waited about half a minute, then tried again, and when he didn’t answer the second time I got out my celluloid and let myself inside.

I made a very rapid search. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular — though the knife that had been used to kill Barbara Lawson was always in the back of my mind, of course — and I limited myself to a quick circuit of the apartment and a hurried thumbing-through of papers and letters in the writing desk.

I didn’t find anything that could tie Henderson in more closely with the dead girl. The only thing of interest in the desk was a sizable stack of pornographic pictures, but none of the pictures were of Barbara Lawson, and the only really unusual thing I’d found in the apartment was the sunlamp arrangement Henderson had rigged up in his bedroom. On the side of the room opposite the regular bed, he’d placed an army cot. The cot was covered with a white rubber sheet, and there was a thick pillow in a white rubber pillow case. Suspended directly over the middle of the cot hung one of the most expensive-looking sun lamps I’d ever seen outside of a health club. At the foot of the bed stood a television set, arranged so that Henderson could lie on the cot, absorb the rays from the sun lamp, and watch television programs. A metal footlocker lay on its side next to the cot, and on top of it were several fishing and hunting magazines, three pipes, a tobacco humidor, and two large, neatly folded blue towels.

I let myself out of the apartment, walked to the elevator, and let the patrolman take me down to the street.

I stopped at the first eating place I came to, a small cafeteria, and bought two beef sandwiches and a cup of coffee. I took the tray to a table with only two other diners at it, and sat down. I’d just started the first of the sandwiches when a thought struck me. If the dead girl had been a model, then it stood to reason that many of her friends and acquaintances would probably be in the same or related lines of work. If Ann Tyner, the girl who’d called Barbara, happened to be a model too, the chances were that she would subscribe to some telephone answering service. Almost all professional people did, and free-lance professionals, such as models, almost invariably did.

I finished the sandwiches and coffee in a hurry, and then went back to the phone booth at the rear of the cafeteria. I dialed Ann Tyner’s number, and got an answer before the second ring.

It was an answering service, and I was informed that Miss Tyner had told them she could be reached at Borden, Webb and Martin, an advertising agency between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets on Madison Avenue.

I lit a cigarette, mulling things over in my mind. I didn’t much like the idea of going down to the advertising agency to talk to Ann Tyner; but on the other hand, Walt and I had come up with nothing so far to indicate that the dead girl had any enemies or that there’d been anyone in her life who might have had sufficient motive to kill her. She could have been murdered by almost anyone in New York, of course, and for almost any imaginable reason — but what we were looking for was someone who had a reason to do it. We needed to find someone who knew her, and knew her well. So far, we hadn’t found anyone who could tell us even as much as her next of kin.

The one certain thing was that Walt and I couldn’t sit around and wait for the murderer to come in and sit down in our lap. We had a little circumstantial suspicion, of course, in connection with Edward Henderson and Benny Thomas — and with the super, Gus Brokaw, until we could check his story — but that’s all it was: circumstantial. And before we got much further, we’d have to know a lot more about the girl herself.

I called the sergeant I’d posted in the apartment, told him where I was going, that I should be back within an hour or so, and then walked to the station house to check out an RMP car. I never phone people before I go to question them. Whether they’re guilty of involvement or not, it gives them time to anticipate questions and think up the right answers. And the ‘right’ answers, for the person you want to interrogate are sometimes far different from the ones you get when you hit them cold. No one likes being questioned by police, and even wholly innocent people can twist the truth into some pretty fantastic shapes. The ideal situation occurs when the person to be questioned has absolutely no inkling that he is to be questioned — until the interrogation actually begins.

Walt and I, of course, had been taken off the regular duty roster the moment the skipper knew we had drawn a homicide. We would be on special detail until the case was disposed of, relieved of all other duties and investigations, and expected to stay on the job day and night until we’d finished it. If we got any sleep at all, it would have to be during one of the infrequent lulls which sometimes occur when detectives have done everything they can and must wait for developments beyond their control.

I got the white-topped Ford under way and headed downtown to talk to Ann Tyner.

7

The receptionist at the advertising agency directed me to the photographic studios on the fifth floor. There were several sets and props scattered about, but people were working at only one of them. I walked over and asked a young man in a blood-red waistcoat and pink slacks to point out Ann Tyner to me. He indicated one of four girls grouped around a washing machine. All four were very pretty, all wore simple housedresses, and all looked down at the washing machine with varying degrees of ecstasy. I started forward.

“Hold it a minute, buddy,” the man in the red waistcoat said. “They’re ready for the take.”

I nodded, watching while another man trucked a large color camera an inch or so closer to the group, ducked his head beneath a black cloth, and yelled, “Now!” There was a blinding flash of white light, the camera shutter made a small thumping sound, and instantly the girls’ ecstasy changed to boredom and they moved away from the washing machine.

I walked over to the girl who’d been pointed out to me as Ann Tyner.

“Miss Tyner?” I asked.

She started a smile, then noticed that I couldn’t be anyone of importance to her, and let the smile go. “Yes?” She was blue-eyed, with very short dark hair and a body that looked as if it would never grow used to housedresses.

I identified myself. She glanced at my card without any change in expression. The other girls had gone over to talk to the cameraman.

“I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” I said.

“Can you wait till I get out of this damned dress? I feel like Mother Hubbard.”

“This won’t take long.”

She shrugged. “Well, at least let’s sit down. I’ve been standing in front of that stupid washing machine for almost an hour.” She indicated a couple of kitchen chairs that had been part of the set for the photograph. “Over there.”

I followed her and we sat down.

“Now,” she said. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“You’re a friend of Barbara Lawson’s, aren’t you?”

“I know her.”

“How well?”

“Well enough to want to know why you ask.”

“She a particular friend of yours?”

“Yes, she is. Why?”

“I hope you won’t mind if I ask the questions, Miss Tyner. It’s usually best that way.”

“Listen. Barbara’s my best friend. If something’s happened that concerns her, I want to know about it. You can save that hard-cop talk for somebody else. What’s wrong?” She still hadn’t changed her expression very much, and she hadn’t raised her voice at all, but I could sense that she was alarmed.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but we’ll have to do it my way.”

“That’s right. It’s always the cop’s way, isn’t it?”

“Do you know most of Barbara’s friends, Miss Tyner?”

“I know all of them.”

“Can you tell me if she has any serious enemies?”

“Well, this racket is a good place to breed them. It’s strictly dog eat dog, and naturally Barbara...” She paused. “Something awful’s happened to her, hasn’t it?”

“Just answer the question, please.”

She stared at me, biting at her lip. There was an almost imperceptible sheen of perspiration on her forehead and her eyes seemed to have grown a little darker.

“She isn’t the kind to have really serious enemies. She always goes out of her way to avoid trouble with the other girls. Other models, I mean. There’s always a lot of spatting and feuding going on in this business, but she never takes any part in it. Now tell me what’s hap—”

“Do you know any of the men she went out with?”

She leaned toward me, studying my face intently. “You said ‘went out with’ — not ‘goes out with’ but ‘went.’ ”

“Well, I—”

“Does that mean she’s — that she’s dead?”

There’s a limit. “Yes,” I said. “She was killed last night.”

Ann Tyner caught her lower lip between her teeth and I heard the sudden, sharp hiss as she drew in her breath.

“How?” she whispered finally. “How was she killed?”

“She was stabbed.”

“Murdered? Barbara? Oh, no... Oh, no...”

“I’m sorry to bring the news,” I said. “But these things happen and—”

“But who... who could have done such a thing?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “But we’ll find out.”

Her eyes narrowed a trifle. “Good lord! Maybe I even talked to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I called her this morning. I knew she didn’t have any assignments, and neither did I, and I thought we might spend the day together. Anyhow, when I called, a man answered the phone. He sounded funny — you know, like there was something wrong with his being there. He said Barbara wasn’t there, and I asked him to have her call me. But then I got an emergency call to fill in on this picture, and I had to leave.”

“I answered the phone,” I told her. “I was there in the apartment when you called.”

“Oh... I see.”

“I know this is rough on you, Miss Tyner, but the more you can tell us about Barbara Lawson, the sooner we may catch the person that killed her.”

“It was a man, wasn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. The odds kind of look that way, but there’s no reason to be sure.”

“I wish I had a drink.”

“Time’s very important just now, Miss Tyner.”

“Yes... yes, of course. Just what do you want to know?”

“Everything you can tell me. What kind of person she was, the people she ran around with, any habits that might have thrown her in with dangerous characters. Say she used dope or gambled or was playing around with some other woman’s husband — I’d want to know about it. We’ll find out anyway, but the sooner we know the sooner we can break the case.”

She took a handkerchief from the front of her housedress and touched it to the inner corners of her eyes. “There wasn’t anything like that. She’d take a drink now and then, but she certainly never used anything stronger. And she never went out with a married man in her life, that I know of. It’d be ridiculous. Why she could pick and choose from... from just hundreds of them.”

I got out my notebook. “We’ll have to have a positive identification. Can you tell me her next of kin?”

“She doesn’t — didn’t have any relatives here in New York. She was from Kansas City, Missouri. I think her brother’s still there. Her mother and father are dead, I know. She said once that that’s all the family there was, just she and her brother.”

“That her real name — Barbara Lawson?”

“Yes.”

“You know her brother’s first name?”

“Alan. She talked about him all the time.”

“We’ll contact him. What else can you tell me? Just remember that everything’s important.”

She sat staring at the wadded handkerchief a moment. “Well, she didn’t concentrate on any one man. She liked modeling, and she wanted to stay in it a few years yet before she settled down. She’d already been in it quite a while, because she started when she was only seventeen. She did a lot of juvenile work.”

“Was she pretty successful?”

“She used to be. But it isn’t like being an actress or a singer or something like that. After you’ve been in it a few years, say four or five, the agencies think people are tired of your face. Then you have to start taking just about anything you can get. Barbara was as pretty as anybody, and she was only twenty-one, but she’d been around quite a while.”

“It was getting a little tough, then?”

“Well, yes. The really good assignments were getting farther apart — but she could have worked for another two or three years. No matter what kind of modeling she did, it would still have paid her more than she could make almost anywhere else. And she wasn’t trained for anything else, you know. It was either model or get married, and she wasn’t quite ready to get married yet.”

“Let’s get back to her men friends. You ever hear any of them threaten her, or did she ever tell you about a threat?”

“No. Like I said, she didn’t go out with any one man in particular. When a man would start to get serious about her, she’d shy away from him. You know. She’d just keep turning him down when he asked for dates, until he gave up.”

“Any of these men take it hard?”

“I guess maybe they did, but she never said anything about it. I think she would have told me, if any of them had threatened her or anything.”

“You’d needn’t be hesitant about this, Miss Tyner. We’ll keep what you say confidential.”

“There isn’t much to tell. She led a pretty normal life, I’d say. She got along with almost everybody, and everybody seemed to like her. She... she was one of the nicest girls in this town, she really was.” Her voice was strained now. “I... I feel a little sick. I think I’ll go home.”

“I have a police car downstairs. I’ll drop you off if you like.”

“Thanks. Just give me a minute to get out of this dress.”

It took her closer to five, and when she came back in a blouse and skirt, carrying her man’s hat box, I noticed she’d been crying.

I kept questioning her, as gently as I could, all the way uptown to West Seventy-second Street. It didn’t add anything to what I already knew. I let her out of the RMP in front of her brownstone and had just started away from the curb when she came running back to the car.

“I just this second remembered something,” she said breathlessly.

“Good. What is it?”

“There was somebody who bothered her. Somebody who wouldn’t take no for an answer, I mean. But all this was months ago, and I’d forgotten about it. It was somebody from her home town, from Kansas City. She met him when she went home on a visit. He must have fallen pretty hard, I guess, because he followed her here to New York. She tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. She said he even quit his job so he could come.”

“This was several months ago, you say?”

“Four or five.”

“What happened?”

“He got her phone number and address from the directory and kept calling her up and waiting for her outside her building. Once he even went up and waited for her in front of her apartment. But she wouldn’t let him in, and she wouldn’t go out with him, and finally he called and told her he was going back to Kansas City.”

“She ever mention him to you again?”

“Yes, she did. That’s just what I’m getting around to. He showed up again... let’s see... it was about two weeks ago. She said he’d called her and begged her to let him see her, and that she felt sorry for him, but she just couldn’t stand him and she didn’t want to let him think she was encouraging him. She told me he was crying on the phone, and everything, but that she didn’t know what else to do.”

“What was his name?”

“Carl. I don’t know his last name. She mentioned it a couple of times, but I just can’t seem to remember it.”

“Did she appear to be afraid of him?”

“No. If she had, I would have thought of him right off when you asked about men threatening her. No — she seemed to just feel sorry for him, because he’d worked himself up so, and all, but she never hinted that she thought there was any harm in him. He was kind of a nuisance, and he embarrassed her, I guess, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t afraid of him.”

“We’ll get on it right away,” I said. “Thanks very much, Miss Tyner.”

“You think he could be the one?”

“He sounds pretty good, from what you’ve told me. We’ll see what he’s got to say.”

“If there’s anything I can do for Barbara, will you let me know? Maybe you’d want me to pack her things... or something...” She turned her head away quickly.

“We’ll let you know if there’s anything like that,” I said.

She nodded, without saying anything, and walked slowly back toward her brownstone.

8

It was almost three o’clock when I got back to Barbara Lawson’s apartment. The uniform sergeant who had been subbing for me said I’d had calls from both the BCI and the detective I’d asked to check the super’s alibi for me. I called the detective first. He told me Gus Brokaw had been where he’d said he had been. The detective had checked with the woman and her common-law husband, and he was convinced that Walt and I could cross Brokaw’s name off our list of suspects. He had told the vice men about the woman and her husband, and the pair would be placed under surveillance by detectives specializing in vice work.

I called the BCI and found that they had no package or prints on Edward Henderson or Gus Brokaw, but that they did have a package and prints on the switchboard operator, Benjamin Thomas. Thomas’ rap-sheet extended back to 1937, showing six jail terms for disorderly conduct, four for vagrancy, one for unauthorized use of an automobile, two for petit larceny, and one for felonious assault. He’d finished the sentence for felonious assault in April of 1951, and there was no record of his having been in trouble since then.

The tech crew had finished and gone back to Headquarters. I called the crew’s chief and asked him to match Benny Thomas’ prints with those the crew had lifted in Barbara Lawson’s apartment. He told me they were already at work on it, because BCI had told him as soon as they’d pulled the package on Thomas and seen the rap-sheet, and that he’d let me know if they made a match.

The uniform sergeant had been watching me as I talked on the phone.

“The boys finished talking to the tenants,” he said. “I put them to looking for the knife. They’re spreading out all over the neighborhood. Okay?”

“Yeah, fine, Lew. We want that knife the worst way there is.”

“We figured the guy might have thrown it off the roof. Some of the boys are looking on the other roofs around here. If some citizen hasn’t picked it up, we’ll find it — that’s if the guy didn’t keep it with him, of course.”

“Good.”

“I made sure the boys all had something to eat first.”

“How about you?”

“I could stand to lose a little weight.”

I grinned and gestured toward the door. “Not today. Go down and get yourself something to eat, Lew.”

“Wouldn’t hurt me any, I guess.”

After the sergeant left, I called Headquarters again and asked for the Correspondence Bureau. I told them we’d discovered a next-of-kin for Barbara Lawson, gave them her brother’s name, and explained that we hadn’t been able to get a street address but that he lived in Kansas City, Missouri. The CB would take care of the details. They’d contact the Kansas City police by phone or teletype, ask them to notify Alan Lawson of his sister’s murder, and request instructions for disposition of the body.

But I had additional business with the CB this time. I asked them to have the Kansas City police check with Lawson to find whether he knew a man named Carl, last name unknown, who had been acquainted with Barbara and followed her to New York. I made sure that Lawson would be told he must keep this last item strictly confidential. I was especially interested in Carl’s last name, hoping that he might still be in New York.

Walt came in just as I was hanging up the phone.

“Our boy’s flown the coop, Steve,” he said.

“Benny Thomas?”

“Yeah. I got his home address from the rental agency easy enough. He had a furnished room on Twelfth Street. When I got down there, he’d moved out and his room had already been rented to somebody else.”

“You talk to the landlady?”

“It’s a landlord. Yeah, I talked to him. He said Benny came in about eight-thirty this morning, paid him a couple bucks he owed him, and said he was moving. The landlord seemed pretty hurt that Benny’d move out on him. I got the impression he was sort of fond of him. Anyhow, he said the money was in payment of a personal loan, not back rent or anything. He told me Benny never caused any trouble, never went over on his rent, and was always helping the landlord do little odd jobs around the rooming house. The landlord’s pretty old — about seventy-five or eighty.”

“I just talked to BCI,” I said. “They’ve got a package on him.”

“Bad?”

“Bad enough. Mostly dis-con and vag, but he did bits on two P.L. raps and another on a felonious assault.”

Walt whistled softly. “And now the guy turns up missing on the same morning our girl turns up dead.”

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe this is it, Steve. You want to lay any bets?”

“Not me. I’ve been in this job too long.”

“You going to get out an alarm for him?”

“Sure. Right now.” I called the CB, asked them to get a description of Benjamin Thomas from BCI and put out an alarm for him. The alarm would go out over the teletype to every station house in New York. It would be broadcast to every RMP car and every police radio station. If the first alarm didn’t result in Thomas’ apprehension, I’d ask for its big brother — the alarm that went to the police in every city of any size in thirteen states and the District of Columbia.

“You seen the papers yet?” Walt asked.

“No. They playing it big?”

“You’ll never see them play anything bigger. What they haven’t got in story, they’ve got in pictures. It looks like all the papers are having a contest to see who can print the most pictures of her. They must have gone to her agent and carried back glossies in a truck.”

“This case has what it takes, all right. The sheets should do real well with it.”

“And of course there’s a couple of editorials giving us the needle.”

I smiled. “So soon?”

“Well, they had it handy — from the last time.”

“We’ve got only about twenty thousand cops in this town, Walt. We need forty thousand. That’s the story and the answer — no matter who says what.”

“I think we’ll keep them happy on this one. Five will get you ten that Benny Thomas is our boy.”

“He’d look a lot better to me if I hadn’t just talked to Ann Tyner.”

“You get her over here?”

I told him how I’d located Ann, and filled him in on what she’d said about the man named Carl who had followed Barbara Lawson from Kansas City to New York.

“Those odds on Benny Thomas just went down,” Walt said.

“Barbara had a brother in Kansas City,” I said. “That’s where she met this guy Carl, on a visit to her brother a few months ago. The brother seems to be all the family she had. Communications is notifying him, and at the same time they’re having the Kansas City police ask him about Carl.”

“Anybody find the knife yet?”

“No. Lew’s got the patrolman going over the neighborhood. They finished questioning the tenants quite a while ago.”

Walt glanced at his wrist watch. “I guess I’d better call Florence and tell her I won’t be home for dinner tonight. It won’t do any good, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’ll cook just as big a dinner anyway. She’ll even set a place for me, exactly the way she always does.”

“I don’t get it, Walt.”

“Funny thing. About three years ago I called her up and told her I had to work and wouldn’t be home to eat. So about twenty or thirty minutes after that, a guy walks into the station house, confesses to the armed robbery I’m working on, hands me the gun, puts the other guy’s billfold down on my desk, and says lock him up. Just like that. The guy’s psycho, you see — a real nut. So then I call in the man who’d made the squeal. He identifies the holdup man, identifies his billfold — and that’s that. All over in about half an hour. I put the boy in the tank and hit for home. When I get there, Florence has warmed up a can of soup for herself and is just finishing it when I walk in.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “So ever after that, she goes right ahead and fixes a big dinner anyhow.”

“Then what’s the point in calling her, Walt?”

“Because she’d raise hell if I didn’t, that’s why.”

I watched him as he lifted the phone and began to dial, and then I left the apartment and climbed the metal stairs to the roof. I walked over to the parapet that faced toward the Hudson, thinking about the trips Edward Henderson had said he made every morning just to look down that way. There might have been worse views of the river, but I’d never seen them.

I turned and looked toward the spot where Barbara Lawson’s body had lain. The place was in the shade of the chimney now. The chimney itself was one of these twin affairs, actually two chimneys, but built very close together and mounted on the same three-foot-high foundation. The top of the double chimney was about ten or eleven feet above the level of the roof.

I hurried back to the apartment.

“Listen, Walt,” I said, “did you check that chimney up there?”

“Chimneys, Steve. There are two of them.”

“Have it your own way. Did you check them?”

“Why, no. Hell, Steve, they’re too tall. You couldn’t get up there without a ladder. And if we couldn’t, then nobody else could have, either.”

“But you could toss a knife into one of them, Walt.”

“I thought of that. It’d be almost impossible, though. Those things are a good ten feet high. You’d be lucky to get a knife to fall in one of them in less than a couple of dozen throws. And every time you missed, you’d have a clatter on the roof. The guy would have been afraid of attracting attention from some of the windows around here, Steve. Who’s going to stand up there, trying to put a knife in the top of a chimney, like a basketball player, for God’s sake?”

“Let’s check it, anyhow.”

He shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

“Phone the super and ask him to bring a ladder up here.”

Fifteen minutes later, I stood on the top of a stepladder, held firmly by Walt and the super, and threw a flashlight beam into the first of the two chimney stacks. There was nothing as far down as I could see. I climbed down to the roof, rearranged the ladder, and went up again to look into the second stack.

I found it had been plugged with cement, about four feet from the top. On the cement lay a large bath mat. I pulled the mat from the chimney and dropped it down to the roof. There was no knife in the chimney.

I climbed down, told Gus Brokaw he could return the ladder to the basement, and then Walt and I examined the bath mat. It was quite new, obviously had not been in the chimney long, and was stained with something that was almost certainly dried blood.

“Looks like the doc was right,” Walt said. “The Lawson girl got knifed in her apartment, and then the guy dragged her up here. But why in hell would he bring this thing along?”

“To keep from getting blood on his clothing,” I said.

“And on the floor along the way. He probably wrapped it around her, over the knife wounds.”

“Probably.”

“What I’d like to know is why he bothered bringing her body up here in the first place. And why would he go to the trouble of stuffing the mat in the chimney?”

“Why he brought her up here is anybody’s guess,” I said. “But the reason he wanted to hide the mat might be because he didn’t know we couldn’t lift prints off it. It’s pretty big, and it would be hard to wipe clean, and so he might have thought the chimney was the quickest way to play safe.”

“I see how he could have done it,” Walt said. “If he stood on that foundation the chimney rests on, and reached as high above his head as he could, he would have been able to push the mat across the top bricks toward the opening.”

“We’d better get the mat over to the lab. The guy probably took the knife with him. I don’t think he’d climb up on this side of the chimney and drop the mat inside, and then climb up on the other side and drop the knife. If he’d wanted to get rid of the knife, he would just have tossed it in after the mat.”

“You want me to take the mat to the lab?”

“We’ll ask them to send for it.”

9

We received the autopsy report at half-past four. Barbara Lawson had died from two stab wounds in the heart, one in the left ventricle and the other in the right auricle. The third wound, in her side, would not have been fatal, the knife having been deflected by a rib. She had not been under the influence of alcohol or narcotics at the time of death, and there was no evidence of a sexual assault. Fingernail scrapings showed ho body tissue, which meant she hadn’t tried to scratch anyone, and there were no indications that she’d suffered violence of any kind prior to the first knife thrust. The assistant M.E. had been unable to tighten up his original estimate as to the time of death, and it still remained at somewhere in the period between midnight and three A.M.

A few moments later we received the report from the Bureau of Criminal Identification. They’d checked Benny Thomas’ prints against those they’d lifted in the apartment, with no success.

And ten minutes later, a patrolman brought in the knife. At least we hoped it was the knife. It was a bone-handled snap-up knife with a six-inch blade. There were dark stains in the places where a knife would be difficult to wipe clean; and while very small amounts of dried blood are difficult to distinguish from certain other kinds of stains, the chances were fairly good that blood was what it was. The patrolman had found the knife in a manhole, near the intersection of Sixty-ninth and Columbus Avenue.

“You don’t see many switchblade knives with blades as long as that one,” Walt said. “Not any more.”

“It’s pretty worn,” I said. “Probably an old-timer.”

“It’d be almost impossible to trace, wouldn’t it?”

“Almost. We’d have to give it a try, though, if everything else dead-ended on us.”

Both the patrolman and I had been handling the knife by holding it with thumb and forefinger touching only diagonally opposite edges of the handle, to avoid superimposing our own prints on any that might already be there on the flat surfaces. I handed it back to him carefully and asked him to rush it to the police lab for a print job and an analysis of the dark stains. Then I entered his name and badge number in my notebook, so that later on I could make sure he got a paper in his personal file.

The next phone call was from the skipper.

“These reporters are giving me a bad time, son,” he said. “Give me something to get them off my back.”

I told him as much as I could, knowing he’d decide just how much to release to the press. Chances were he’d give the reporters all of it, with the understanding that certain items were off the record until he gave the green light.

“The realty company sent over another switchboard operator,” Walt said. “I saw him on my way up. He’s standing by down there, waiting for the officer to give up the board.”

I checked the time. “It’s almost five o’clock,” I said. “I think we might as well clear out of here. All the patrolmen are due for relief in a few minutes. This would be a good time to break camp.”

“That squad room’s going to be hard to take, after this place.”

“We’d better send somebody over to the morgue for an identification,” I said. “We might as well nominate the super. He’s handiest.”

“I don’t guess I have to ask who’s nominated to cart him over there and back.”

“That’s right. And kind of hurry it up, will you, Walt?”

“Any other little things I can do for you, before I die of hard work?”

“Uh-huh. Look up Lew and tell him to release everybody.”

“No stakeouts?”

“No.”

“After I bring the super back from the morgue, I go straight to the station house, right?”

“And bring some coffee along. I’ve got a hunch we’re going to have some action on that alarm for Benny Thomas, and we ought to be hearing from Kansas City any time now.”

We left the apartment and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Walt headed toward the basement after Gus Brokaw, for the trip to Bellevue, and I crossed over to the switchboard. I told the officer posted there that Walt and I had decided to close up shop and that he could return to the station house to report out.

The new switchboard operator the realty company had sent out seemed very nervous. It was understandable. It was not only his first day on a new job, but he had to take over from a policeman in a house where a murder had been committed only a few hours ago. I explained to him that there would be incoming calls for Barbara Lawson’s apartment, and that such calls were to be routed to the detective squad room at the Twentieth Precinct station house. I gave him the phone number, and a little encouragement, which he plainly needed, and went out to my RMP car.

There was quite a crowd of people out front, and there would probably be a larger one soon, now that it was nearing quitting time in most of the stores and offices. And there would be the usual traffic problem caused by people driving past the apartment building just for a look at the front of it. But all this was out of my department. Both the congestion on the sidewalk and the additional traffic would be handled by the uniform squad as a matter of routine, just as the squad would handle any other problem.

10

Back in the squad room once again, I rolled the original Complaint Report form into my typewriter and added some of the data from my notebook. When I had finished with the Complaint Report, I made up a folder for it, entered Barbara Lawson’s name and the necessary coding on the file tab, and placed the folder in the section of the files reserved for homicides.

Her file would begin to build rapidly now. There would be supplemental reports, prepared on DD-5 forms, coming in from everyone working on the case, including the laboratory technicians, photographer, detectives on the D.A.’s staff, and others, as well as the ones which Walt and I would prepare from time to time. I hoped that we would soon be able to prepare a DD-14, the Résumé of Homicide Case form, which is filled out when a case is closed.

Headquarters called at six o’clock to say that they’d been unable to contact Barbara’s brother in Kansas City. The Kansas City police had checked at both his home and at the office where he worked, but it had been Alan Lawson’s day off and none of his acquaintances knew his whereabouts. The Kansas City police would stay on it, of course, and notify us as soon as the brother was located.

Walt Logan came in, carrying two cardboard containers of coffee.

“You look a little down in the mouth, Steve,” he said. “Anything happen while I was at the morgue?”

“Headquarters just called. Kansas City hasn’t found Barbara Law-son’s brother yet. That’s bad, because until they do find him we won’t be able to get a line on this guy Carl.”

“The Tyner girl didn’t have any idea of his last name at all?”

“She couldn’t remember.”

“My own memory isn’t so good sometimes. I got them to put sugar in your coffee again.”

“I’ll drink it anyhow.”

“That super was one sad guy when I took him over there. You’d think it was his own daughter.”

“A lot of people were fond of her, it seems.”

The lab called at six-twenty to report that the stains on the knife were blood, and that the blood was type ‘O’ — which was the same type as Barbara Lawson’s. There had been no prints. I asked them to return the knife to me.

“It was blood, all right,” I told Walt. “And it could be Barbara Lawson’s. But ‘O’ is the most common type, and it doesn’t really prove anything, except that somebody with type ‘O’ was cut with it. Wouldn’t mean anything in court.”

“I’m sold,” Walt said.

“Sure. So am I. But we won’t be prosecuting the case.”

The coffee Walt had brought back was none too hot, and I drank steadily. I’d crossed the room to drop the carton in a wastebasket when two patrolmen came in, escorting a very short, very thin, hawk-faced man of about forty-five.

“This is Benjamin Thomas,” one of the patrolmen said. “We spotted him coming out of a bar on Amsterdam.” He grinned down at Thomas and then winked at Walt and me. “He put up one hell of a fight, but we finally subdued him.”

Benjamin Thomas smiled. He had a pleasant, bland face, faded gray eyes with a heavy tracery of laugh lines around them, and was dressed in a fresh white shirt, dark tie, and sharply creased brown suit. “I would have been able to handle these two easily,” he said. “I just didn’t want to embarrass them.” He opened the gate in the wooden railing, came in inside, and sat down on the straight chair beside my desk. “It’s good to be in a squad room again. Just like old times.”

I glanced at the patrolmen. “Better stick around a few minutes, boys.” They sat down on the bench near the hall door, watching Benny Thomas.

“Now, Mr. Thomas,” I said.

“Yes?”

“You know why we want to talk to you, don’t you?”

“Well, I do look at a newspaper now and then.”

“You knew the Lawson girl?”

“Yes, of course. To speak to, that is. A lovely girl.”

“Your record goes back to 1937, Benny.”

“Yes, and it stops — and stops dead — in 1951.”

“You did a bit for assault. What weapon did you use?”

“A fifth of whiskey. That is, it was a fifth of whiskey, until after I’d hit the man once or twice. Then it was just an empty bottle with no bottom to speak of. Unfortunately, I kept right on using it... Lost my head in the heat of battle, you know.”

“Next thing to a knife, wasn’t it, Benny?”

“Even better, I’d say.”

“We understand you moved out of your room this morning.”

“That’s right. Bag and baggage.”

“Why?”

“I found a much nicer place, and I needed more room.”

“That a new suit?”

“Just bought it. Haven’t had it on more than three or four hours.”

“You ruin the other one, Benny? Get stains on it, or anything?”

His smile widened. “I’m enjoying this more than you are. But if you grow tired of sparring around with me, let me know.”

“All right. Tell us where you were this morning, between midnight and three o’clock, and how you can prove it.”

“I can do a little better than that,” he said. “I can tell you where I was between ten last night and eight o’clock this morning.” He adjusted his chair so that he could face Walt as well as me.

“Suppose you do that,” I said.

“Well, if you’ll go to 873 West Eightieth Street, apartment 4-B, you’ll meet a very charming woman.”

“And?”

“And you’ll discover she’s my wife. But that isn’t all. You’ll also meet two very nice young ladies — teen-agers, but quite nice. They’re my daughters. We were together last night. All four of us. From ten o’clock, right on through till this morning. We hadn’t seen one another in some years, you know, and so we had an all night reunion.” He paused long enough to turn a friendly smile toward the two officers who’d apprehended him. “I haven’t even been to bed yet, which is why I stopped in the bar for a bracer.”

I stared at him a long moment.

“Would you like to hear more?” Benny asked.

“A great deal more, Benny.”

“Good. I like talking about my family. You see, I’ve been trying to get my wife and daughters back for a very long time now. Ever since I left the walls, in fact. She — my wife — finally agreed. I think my daughters must have worked on her until she gave in. They think the world of me, those girls. Anyway, when my wife gave me the good news, I rented this apartment on Eightieth Street. I’d been hoping and planning for this so long, you know, and I’d saved every dime I could. I’ve held at least two jobs at a time ever since I came out of the walls. That switchboard job, for instance. I worked a double shift there. And I did all that so I’d have enough cash on hand to set my family up properly — if and when.”

I looked at Walt a moment. Neither of us said anything.

“They arrived at the apartment at a quarter of ten last night,” Benny Thomas said. “I’d given my wife the key, and she called me as soon as they got there. And I... well, I simply got up from the switchboard and went home. I knew I would be fired for it, but I didn’t care at all. And that, naturally, is why I didn’t show up for work this morning.”

“You left at a quarter of ten?”

“Yes. And it so happens I know the cab driver who took me over to the apartment. His name’s Johnny Webber, and he works for Pyramid Cabs. You can check with him, which will show the time I left the switchboard. And I know you’ll enjoy meeting my wife and daughters when you ask them about my whereabouts for the rest of the evening.”

“All this seems to amuse you, Benny,” I said.

“Perhaps it seems to — but have you thought about what this will do to my wife and girls? Here they come back to me, after all these years, and the first thing that happens is that detectives start questioning them about me... And about a murder, at that. It’s going to queer things good for me, don’t you think?” He was still smiling — and for the first time since he’d started talking, I realized he wasn’t just trying to be a wise guy. If his story was true — and I had a strong feeling it was — little Benny Thomas was giving us all a lesson in how to roll with the punches.

“We’ll have to check, Benny,” I said.

“I know.”

I glanced at Walt. “How about it, Walt? You want to take a run up to Eightieth Street?”

Walt got to his feet. “What’s that address again, Benny?”

“Eight-seventy-three. Apartment 4-B.”

Walt left to check out Benny’s alibi, and I told the two patrolmen they could go back to their posts. Benny moved over to sit by the window, gazing down at the traffic in the street below. It was hard not to think about Benny and his family, and how it is that innocent people are often hurt in the course of investigations such as this one.

A messenger from the lab returned the snap-up knife to me at half-past seven, and at seven-forty Headquarters called to say they had the Kansas City police department on the wire.

I talked to a Sergeant Dabney. He told me they had located the dead girl’s brother, and that the brother was taking the next plane to New York. The brother had said he knew of only one person named Carl, and that this man had crashed a party given for Barbara Lawson while she had been home on her visit several months before. He had never seen the man before, did not know his last name, or anything else about him. He had, however, given the Kansas City police the names of other men and women who had been at the party, and the police were now checking the list in the hope of finding someone who did know Carl’s last name and where to find him. Sergeant Dabney asked if I wanted the man held, pending further instructions from us, and I said that I did. He then asked if I wanted the Kansas City to conduct a preliminary interrogation. I told him no, that if Carl was apprehended I’d arrange for a telephone interrogation. I thanked him for Kansas City’s cooperation, and hung up.

If the Kansas City police picked Carl up, and if my telephone interrogation indicated he was our boy, I would, of course, arrange to go to Kansas City. I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, but it would be the only thing I could do — unless we came up with enough new information to justify an outright accusation of murder and the steps required to bring him to New York. We were a long way from that point now, and not getting any closer.

Walt Logan returned at eight-twenty. “Come on, Benny,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

Benny Thomas laughed softly. “No, thank you. I’ll take a cab.”

“All clear, Walt?” I asked.

“All the way. And listen, Benny — I put it to your family the best way I could. It didn’t upset them at all, Benny. They said they’d known there would be times like this. They said they knew your record would bring the police around, if you were ever even near trouble, because of your rap-sheet. But they’re for you, Benny. A hundred per cent.”

“Thank you,” Benny said. He nodded a good-by to both of us and walked quickly from the squad room.

“There goes our hottest suspect,” Walt said. “And I don’t mind telling you I’m just as glad. He’s got a damned nice family.”

“You check with the cab driver?”

“Sure. I guess Benny must have wanted to laugh at us a little, just to get even. He didn’t say so, but the cab driver’s a retired cop. He’s the same one that put the arm on Benny a couple of times, years ago. Seems like he and Benny got to be friends, after Benny got out the last time and the cop retired and started driving a cab. Anyhow, he drove Benny home all right. He even went up and joined the party. He stayed there until a little after four o’clock, so that means he was with Benny from a quarter of ten till—”

“Wait a minute!” I said.

It had hit me. It should have hit me before, of course. It should have hit me the instant Benny Thomas said it the first time.

I ran to the window and leaned out. Benny Thomas was just stepping out onto the sidewalk.

“Hold it, Benny!” I called. “I’ll be right down.”

He looked up at me, frowning a little for the first time since he’d been brought in. “All right,” he said.

I grabbed up the knife and started for the door. “Come with me, Walt. I want to ask Benny a couple of questions.”

We went down the steps to the street two at a time.

“What’s up?” Benny asked. He had his smile back now.

I handed him the knife. “Take a look at this, Benny. You ever see it before?”

He studied it carefully. “No... No, I can’t say I have.” He returned the knife to me and I dropped it into my pocket.

“All right,” I said. “Now about that switchboard, Benny. You were the only operator, I understand. You worked a double shift, from eight in the morning until midnight. Right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Did the owners ever have an operator on duty between midnight and eight in the morning?”

“No. The board has always been cut out of the lines at midnight.”

“That’s what I thought. And when you cut the board out of the lines, the private phones in the apartment house begin to operate just like private phones anywhere else?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I just want to get the picture clear in my mind. I was pretty sure it was one of the boards you can cut out, but I wanted to check.”

“That particular kind of switchboard was something of an experiment, I think. I understand the telephone company never installed very many of them. But they’re very good for a house where most of the tenants are away all day. When the board’s cut into the lines, it provides people with an answering and message service, you know. There wasn’t much point in providing that kind of service after midnight, though.”

“Do all the phones in the building work that way, Benny?”

“Oh, no. I’d say about a fourth of the tenants have just the regular house phone — the one that goes with every apartment. Those work through the switchboard too, of course, but when the board is cut out at midnight, those phones go dead.”

“Did the owners send anyone out to take over that board, after you walked off it last night?”

“No, they didn’t. I went past there just a while ago, to pick up my pay, and they read me off about it. They were furious. They said they didn’t know anything about it until today. You’d think I’d stolen the board, the way they carried on.”

“What kind of phone does Gus Brokaw have in his apartment?”

“A house phone.”

“And if the switchboard wasn’t in operation, Brokaw’s phone wouldn’t be of any use to him, would it?”

“No, I’m afraid it wouldn’t.”

“That just about takes care of it. Well, thanks for the information, Benny. We’ll see if we can help you land another job.”

“I’d appreciate it. A word from the police would go a long way.”

Walt and I said good night to him, and then Walt turned to me and said, “Give.”

“Gus Brokaw seems to have got his story twisted a bit.”

“How so?”

“He told me he called a woman on his phone at exactly eleven o’clock. But Brokaw has a house phone, and Benny Thomas cut off the switchboard and walked out on his job at a quarter of ten. Brokaw’s phone would have gone dead. He couldn’t have called that woman from his apartment. Not if he called after a quarter of ten.”

“Maybe he meant to say he called from some other phone, Steve.”

“No. He made a production of it. Told me how he and this woman had a code cooked up, so he could call her right from his apartment without his wife knowing what he was up to.”

“You check it out?”

“No, I didn’t. You were gone, and I didn’t want to leave the apartment. I had somebody else check it out for us.”

“Looks like we’d better recheck.”

“And fast,” I said.

11

The room was small and hot and smelled of sweat. The woman who had opened the door to Walt and me stared at us belligerently. She was about forty, a big-boned woman with heavy, almost masculine features and hair so black there were blue highlights in it.

I showed her my badge. “You talked to Detective Meers earlier today,” I said. “What, exactly, did you tell him?”

“About Gus Brokaw being here, you mean?”

“That’s right.”

“I told him the truth. Gus called me up and wanted to come over. He got here a little after eleven o’clock.”

“For what purpose?”

“To play cards. He likes to play poker, and so do my husband and I. We played all night.”

“You know we don’t believe that.”

“So you don’t believe it. So who cares?”

“You think impeding a homicide investigation is something to take lightly, Mrs. Chase? Have you any idea at all of how much time you and your husband will do, as accessories after the fact?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not even interested.”

“Where’s your husband?”

“Away.”

“Where?”

“How would I know? He just went for a walk, that’s all.”

“Mind if we look around?”

“Naturally I mind. You got a warrant?”

“We can get one fast enough.”

“Suppose you get it, then.”

There was a man’s voice from the next room. “Edna,” he said. “Come here a minute.” It was a thin, wheedling voice, scarcely strong enough to carry to us.

I turned and walked to the room and stepped inside.

He was sitting on a straight chair beside a rumpled bed, a frail-looking, sunken-faced man in his early fifties. Despite the heat, he wore heavy trousers and a sweat shirt.

“Are you Mr. Chase?” I asked.

He stared at me a long moment. “Yes.”

“I’m a policeman, Mr. Chase.”

“I know. I heard you talking to Edna.”

“You know why we’re here?”

“I know.”

“We’ll get to the truth eventually, Mr. Chase.”

Behind me, Mrs. Chase said, “You got no right coming in here like this. Get out!”

Mr. Chase looked at her, shaking his head slowly. “It’s no use, Edna. I told you right from the start that—”

“Bill, shut your mouth!”

“This isn’t the time to brass it out, Edna,” he said. “That time’s come and gone. All we got now is trouble, and we’re heading straight for more, unless we—”

“Shut up, you crazy fool!”

“I’m sick. I can’t stand any more of this.”

“He’s got a fever,” Mrs. Chase said, jerking her head around toward me. “He’s sick, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“He seems to know well enough,” I said. “Why not let him finish?”

“Gus was drunk when he came here,” Mr. Chase said. “He didn’t say anything about a killing. He just said he was in a little trouble, and that he wanted us to tell the police he’d been here since eleven o’clock, or a little after. He gave us two hundred dollars, and told us we should say he didn’t leave here until late this morning. We didn’t know anything about that girl getting murdered. I swear it.”

“Bill...” Mrs. Chase began, and then stopped.

“He got over here about two o’clock in the morning. He said he’d give us some more money as soon as he could get it out of the bank.” He paused to glance at Mrs. Chase. “If we’d known the score, we’d have kicked him out the door. But we didn’t know. We figured it was an easy touch, so we put him to bed out there on the couch. When that other detective came around, he never did say anything about a murder. Edna and I talked it up big, not knowing what we were getting into.”

“But now you know,” I said.

“Yeah. When it’s too damned late, we hear about it on the radio. Then Edna goes out and gets a paper.”

“We did it because Bill’s sick,” Mrs. Chase said suddenly. All her toughness was gone now. She looked almost as ill as her husband. “We would never have done anything like that if—”

“You’d better get one thing straight,” I said. “Both of you. If you cooperate with us, we’ll let the D.A. know about it. We can’t make any deals with you, but there’s a chance the D.A. will appreciate your cooperation.”

Mr. and Mrs. Chase looked at each other a long time without saying anything. Then Mrs. Chase began to cry. It struck me as odd, that a woman like that should cry.

12

Two hours later, Walt and I knocked on the door of Gus Brokaw’s basement apartment.

He opened the door almost immediately and stood back to let us in. The skin that sagged away from his eyes and jowls looked even more pale than it had before, and his eyes were more bloodshot.

“Come in, boys,” he said. “Any luck yet?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe you’d better get your coat, Mr. Brokaw.”

“We going back to the morgue again?”

“We’re taking you over to the station house.”

“What for?”

“We want you to talk to a couple of people.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Chase.”

I watched Brokaw’s eyes crawl toward the open door, hesitate, then move back to me. “What for?”

Walt stepped behind him and touched his arm. “Let’s go, Mr. Brokaw.”

13

At the station house, we took Brokaw into an interrogation room, motioned him to a folding chair, and sat down across from him.

“We know you bribed the Chases to alibi you, Gus,” I said. “They’ve signed statements.”

He stared at a spot midway between Walt and me, and said nothing.

“We found your knife. A few minutes ago we showed it to a couple of people you really do play cards with sometimes. They’ve identified it as yours. There was blood on your knife, Gus. It was the same type as Barbara Lawson’s. How’d you feel when you found out that Benny Thomas had cut off the switchboard more than an hour before you said you called your woman friend?”

He stared straight ahead.

“We just heard from the lab, Gus. They’re working on that bath mat. They’ll be able to prove that some of the fibers from your clothes were left on the mat when you carried Barbara up to the roof. And the other way around, too. Some of the fibers from the mat will be rubbed into your clothing.”

“That Benny Thomas,” Gus said, almost as if to himself. “That damned Benny.”

“Why did you kill her, Gus?” I asked.

He grasped one hand with the other and began cracking the knuckles.

“Why?” I said.

He took a deep breath, then let it out very slowly.

“I just went crazy, I guess,” he said.

“You want to tell us about it?”

“Well, it was the whiskey that done it. If I hadn’t been drunk I’d of kept my head. I saw her in the elevator about nine o’clock. She was going out somewhere. She said the bathroom faucets needed fixing, and I said I’d take care of it while she was out. Then I got busy with something else, and I didn’t get up to her apartment until about midnight. I figured she’d still be out, but she was there. Anyhow, I went to work on the faucet.

“She come in to watch, and with her standing there, looking so pretty and smelling so good, I got so I couldn’t think of nothing else. I hadn’t been able to get her out of my mind for more than a minute at a time for two or three months. I didn’t much care what happened to me for doing it — all I knew was that I had to grab her and kiss her.” He paused a moment. “Then I done a crazy thing. She was all dressed up, and I didn’t want to get her clothes dirty, so I washed off my hands. And then I turn around and reach out for her. You never seen such a change in anybody. All at once she wasn’t sweet and nice, like she always was before. She jumped back from me and started cussing me.

“I don’t know what happened. I just couldn’t think. I couldn’t even see good, I was so mad. I started to grab her again, and damned if she didn’t spit right in my face. She did it twice, and then she turned around to run off from me — and that’s when I hit her with the knife. I swear I didn’t even know I had the knife out.”

“Why did you take her up on the roof, Gus?” Walt asked.

“I figured she might be expecting somebody. Maybe a guy with a key she’d given him. She was all dressed up, and all — and I guess I just got panicky. I’d remembered this chimney, see, and I thought I could put her in it. By the time anybody found her, I’d have an alibi.”

“But you’d forgotten how tall those chimneys really were — isn’t that what happened, Gus?” I asked.

“Yeah. I just wasn’t thinking none too clear. I climbed up on the base and got the mat in, but I couldn’t lift the girl uphighenough.”

“Is that all, Gus?” I asked. “We’d like to get this down on paper.”

“I’ll tell Kansas City they can stop looking for that guy Carl,” Walt Logan said.

Brokaw began cracking his knuckles again. “That damned Benny,” he said softly. “You never could depend on him for a minute.”