Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 6, June 1999

The Danger of Being Frank by John H. Dirckx

The chiming clock in the parlor struck five, setting up faint sympathetic vibrations in the dusty mandolin that lay next to it on the mantel. Mrs. Helm felt that the mandolin lent a note of refinement and culture to the decor of her boardinghouse on Ninth Avenue even though, over the years, none of her many tenants had been able to play it.

The parlor looked like something out of a Currier & Ives print entitled Home and Hearth or Domestic Tranquillity, and the rest of the house was pretty much of a piece with the parlor. Hardly a likely setting, one would have thought, for coldblooded murder.

Boyd Bland lounged in his favorite chair in the corner, watching the traffic through the dingy lace curtains and dingier windows and savoring the smell of dinner cooking. The door from the side porch opened, and Frank Strode came in humming, the evening paper under his arm. He took a seat opposite Bland and busied himself with his paper, from time to time reading a headline aloud.

Mrs. Helm’s head appeared suddenly and briefly in the doorway. “I’m putting it on the table, gentlemen,” she said. Bland and Strode filed into the dining room, where Hans Drebbel was already seated at the table. Hugh Gardner was just coming in from the back hall.

Mrs. Helm brought the platter of roast beef in from the kitchen and carved and dispensed it with ceremony. “You eat that before you get any more, Mr. Bland. Your turn is coming, Mr. Drebbel.” If her manner fell short of a mother’s tenderness, it wasn’t quite as uncompromising as a major league umpire’s.

She ate with the boarders, dividing her attention between her plate and their needs. Experience had taught her that if she left them to serve one another, some petty conflict would inevitably arise. Middle-aged bachelors were a lot like little boys; wherever their lives rubbed together, sparks were apt to fly.

As stomachs began to fill, conversation broke out in the dining room. Frank Strode yawned, said he was sleepy, and reached for the coffeepot.

“Didn’t sleep very well myself last night,” sighed Hugh Gardner with a faintly theatrical air. “Accursed television blaring until all hours.” He stared pointedly at Strode.

Strode stared back. He was a wiry restless man to whose face a bushy mustache lent an air of pugnacity. “Bogart festival last night,” he explained matter-of-factly.

“I won’t comment on your taste,” grumbled Gardner. “But the racket was entirely unreasonable. And unseasonable.” He sat back in his chair as pleased with his impromptu rhyme as if he’d just invented some particularly ingenious improvement on the wheel.

“Well, cheer up,” said Strode. “I’m thinking of buying a car one of these days, and if you’re lucky, I’ll move uptown.”

Gardner eyed him with a flicker of derision. “Pretty free with the cash all of a sudden, aren’t you?”

“When you’ve got it, you spend it.”

John T. Drebbel — Hans to his friends — cleared his throat portentously and cracked a knuckle or two before joining the conversation. “If the cash is flowing in as freely as that, Strode, you may have to open a bank account after all.” He nodded after he spoke, a habit of his, as if to underscore the aptness and correctness of his remarks. A pair of glasses with thick round lenses accentuated the froggish tendencies of his features.

“Not on your life,” said Strode. “My folks lost all they had back in the Depression by trusting banks.”

“We’ve heard that story a few times before,” Gardner reminded him. “And how, by the time you came along, they couldn’t afford to send you to school, and you were making your living selling chickens when you were nine.”

“Shoes. When I was thirteen. I’m not ashamed of that. I wouldn’t trade my work record with anybody at this table.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. I never had a disciplinary suspension in my life. Never even had a bad performance evaluation. And never any trouble with the police, either. More than I can say for some folks. And it’s all a matter of record.” He laid particular emphasis on the last word.

“But hardly public record,” asserted Drebbel, with something tentative and even interrogative in his tone.

Boyd Bland let his mashed potatoes get cold while following this exchange of thinly veiled hostilities. He seldom had much to say at the table, but he didn’t miss a word of what the others said.

“Records can get public in a hurry when there’s a reorganization, or a reduction in force,” said Strode. “The dead wood goes first.”

“Who’re you calling dead wood?” countered Gardner, his voice raised now in anger. “Getting pretty big for your britches, aren’t you?”

At this point Mrs. Helm saw fit to intervene. “Don’t let’s argue at the table, gentlemen,” she chided in a sharp tone that effectively put an end to the conversation. “It’s bad for your digestion, if you know what I mean.”

All of Mrs. Helm’s current boarders worked for the same company, a manufacturer of medium-priced traditional furniture whose factory was situated five minutes’ walk from the house. Since each of them worked in a different department, they didn’t ordinarily talk shop at the table.

That had changed since Frank Strode’s recent advancement, abrupt and unforeseen, to the position of personnel director. Over the years Strode had struggled steadily upward despite the lack of a formal education and a regrettable habit of often speaking out of turn and without due reflection.

When the sudden death of a supervisor had led to his promotion, the increase in salary, prestige, and power had gone to his head. Access to a roomful of confidential records gave him the whip hand over people with more education and skill than he, to whom he had been yielding and deferring for years. With Gardner and Drebbel, who had long ago fallen into the habit of baiting and bullying him, he had lately become condescending, demanding, and sarcastic.

After the six o’clock news when Gardner and Drebbel sat down to their nightly chess game the hostilities resumed. Strode turned on his favorite quiz program and pushed the volume up a couple of notches.

The chess players had no intention of standing for this distraction. “They make headphones for the benefit of the deaf,” shouted Gardner, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“And they show the questions on the screen,” added Drebbel with savage sarcasm, “for the benefit of those who can read.”

Strode turned from his program, his controlled manner giving no indication of the rage that churned within him. “And I guess people who can’t read push little statues around on a board, is that it, Hans?”

“Impudence is the first recourse of stunted minds,” announced Gardner, who had once been a high school teacher.

“You know what you can do with your big words,” snapped Strode, his voice rising suddenly to such unaccustomed loudness that Mrs. Helm came in from the kitchen to see what was the matter. She stood in the dining room doorway clutching a dish towel and regarding Strode with brows knitted in disapproval.

But Strode had gone too far to stop now.

“If you two don’t get off my back,” he went on darkly with an ominous tremor in his voice, “you’re going to wish you’d never laid eyes on me. I’ve got enough dirt on both of you to get you fired tomorrow morning. You might even be hearing from the police.”

He switched off the television with a violent snap of the wrist. He got up and went to the closet for his hat. “I need some air. You coming, Bland?”

“It walks by night,” droned Gardner in sepulchral tones, but there was cold sweat on his forehead.

Mrs. Helm bustled into the parlor. “Here, Mr. Strode, Mr. Bland, don’t you think of going out there tonight. It’s going to storm any minute. They just said so on the weather. Plus my operation hurts.”

“Well just go as far as the tracks into the plant,” said Strode.

Without further ado he and Bland trudged out of the house and started along the dark reaches of Ninth Avenue. The wind muttered in the leafless trees and squawked around the old houses. For a time they walked in silence, but at length Strode’s wrath boiled over into speech.

“Sharks and vultures. That’s all there is out there. It’s all a question of survival of the fist.” Bland vaguely remembered having heard his friend use this odd phrase before. Strode ranted on in the same vein, vowing revenge on his enemies but assuring Bland that he himself had nothing to fear in the coming purge, and perhaps something to gain. Bland tagged along wordlessly at his side, his doglike loyalty spiced with a dash of fear.

“Nothing out there but sharks and vultures. You forget that and you’re a lost man.” About the time the walkers reached the railroad crossing, the threatened storm broke, with the result that they returned home drenched, shivering, and out of breath.

Frank Strode’s fatal decline dated from that night. For a day or two he thought it was only a cold, and maybe it was at first, but then matters grew graver. He took to his bed and stayed there. No longer was Hugh Gardner’s sleep disturbed by dusk-to-dawn film festivals on television. No longer did Hans Drebbel fumble at chess while listening with half an ear to one of Strode’s quiz programs.

Mrs. Helm turned nurse as was her custom in such circumstances, and Boyd Bland took to sitting at Strode’s bedside for hours in the evening. The sick man would touch nothing but soup and juice.

A week passed, during which he seemed to go steadily downhill.

One evening when the dinner dishes were done, Boyd Bland tapped at the half-open door to Mrs. Helm’s private domain, which opened off the kitchen. In the parlor the chess players hunched in sober and contemplative silence over their board.

Mrs. Helm was taking advantage of a spell of leisure to black her shoes while watching a sitcom on her own television set.

“Is he awake?” she asked Bland.

“Yes, but he says he doesn’t want anything to eat. Says nothing tastes right to him.” Bland hovered indecisively in the doorway, the picture of a man chronically overwhelmed by the choices that life presents. “He seems awful weak.”

“You just take him some broth. I’ve got it on simmer.” She put aside the bottle of blacking and padded to the stove in her stocking feet. “That’s pretty full now, Mr. Bland. Don’t you spill it.” She watched him totter up the back stairs before returning to her sanctum.

Next morning Mrs. Helm was measuring the breakfast coffee into the twenty-five-cup urn (its contents would serve for lunch and dinner as well) when Hugh Gardner came into the kitchen looking pale and disheveled. “Well,” he announced with forced nonchalance, “old Strode won’t be drinking any more coffee. He’s dead.”

Mrs. Helm dropped the scoop into the coffee can and began wringing her hands. “Oh, are you sure, Mr. Gardner? Are you sure?”

“Yes, quite sure.”

“Oh, the poor dear soul! Mr. Schell! I have to call Mr. Schell.” She bustled distractedly into her room to find the phone directory.

In the course of the morning Mr. Schell of Boone and Schell, Funeral Directors, called with an assistant, conferred briefly with Mrs. Helm, and removed the late Frank Strode from the premises.

In the course of the afternoon a pudgy man with dark curly hair and gold-rimmed glasses called and handed Mrs. Helm his card.

“ ‘Coroner’s office,’ ” she read aloud in a vaguely inquiring tone. “ ‘Nicholas Stamaty.’ That’s foreign, isn’t it?”

“According to my grandfather,” said Stamaty with a good-humored expression that accentuated the premature crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, “it’s a Hungarian spelling of a Czech version of a Greek name.”

“Isn’t that interesting! Where was your grandfather born?”

“Right outside Cleveland.”

She may have thought that was interesting, too, but she didn’t mention it. “Is anything wrong? About Mr. Strode?”

“Mr. Schell at the funeral parlor reported the death to us, and we’re following it up as a matter of routine. Did you think anything was wrong?”

“No, but I’m just saying — nobody came to see me after Mr. Ambrose died. Another one of my boarders. That was two or three years ago.”

“Probably just an oversight. How long had Mr. Strode been living here?”

“About two years.”

“Was he related to you?”

“No, sir. What he told me is, he was born in Wisconsin—” she pronounced it “West Consin” “—but he didn’t have no living relations there nor here, neither one.”

“How long was he sick?”

“Only just a few days. He caught a terrible cold from walking in the rain about a week ago.”

“Did he have a doctor?”

“No, he didn’t. He didn’t trust doctors nor lawyers. Nor banks.”

“When did you last see Mr. Strode alive?”

Her bushy brows sloped down to a point above her nose as she concentrated on her reply. “It must have been about noon yesterday. I nursed him as good as I could, but I don’t go up and down them stairsteps no more than what I have to. Mostly Mr. Bland took his trays up to him. Or Mr. Drebbel, once or twice.”

“I’d like to talk to them if they’re around.”

“They’re at work. All my boarders works over to Gromacki’s — the furniture factory. They’ll be in for dinner about five.”

“Who found Mr. Strode dead this morning?”

“That was Mr. Gardner. He stayed home today, if you want to talk to him. He’s not feeling very well himself.”

She went to the foot of the front stairs and called up to advise Gardner that he was about to have a visitor. “You just go on up,” she directed Stamaty. “It’s the room right at the top of the stairs.”

Stamaty found Gardner reading at a small desk on which stood an old fashioned brass lamp with a pen-holder built into the base. Between the crowded bookshelves and the heavy, battered bedroom suite there was little room to spare anywhere.

“Mr. Gardner? Coroner’s office. I understand you found Mr. Strode dead this morning.”

“That’s correct, sir.” Gardner stood up and bowed with an exaggerated and palpably phony cordiality. “Here, please take the chair. I’ll sit on the bed.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need to sit down.” For the rest of the interview they both stood. “What time was it when you found Mr. Strode dead?”

“A couple of minutes before seven. I looked in on him while I was getting dressed because he’d been sick of late.”

“Did you notice anything unusual in the room?”

“No. Just that Strode was dead. Must have been dead for hours.”

“You touched him, then?”

“Why yes.”

Gardner was suddenly wary, but instead of abandoning his pompous, melodramatic manner, he laid it on thicker.

“When I saw that Strode had — dropped out of the game, so to speak, I closed his eyes and covered his face. ‘Last sad office of a friend’ type of thing.”

“Covered his face with what, sir?”

Gardner shrugged. “The covers on the bed. An old green quilt. He used to wrap up in it like an Arab when the house was cold at night.”

“Mind showing me which is Mr. Strode’s room?”

Gardner led him to a bedroom smaller than his own, wedged between the bathroom and the back stairs.

“Thanks,” said Stamaty in a tone of polite dismissal. “I won’t bother you any more. I understand you’re a little under the weather today.”

“Oh, it’s nothing much. Strode pegging off like that just sort of threw my nerves out of gear. I called in sick and went back to bed. Slept past noon.”

Having gotten rid of Gardner, Stamaty conducted a thorough search of Frank Strode’s room. The undertaker had left the covers pulled down to the foot of the bed — a cotton sheet, a khaki blanket that was unmistakably army surplus, and a worn green quilt. He subjected the quilt to intense scrutiny, but being a stickler for protocol, he forbore to handle it, much less remove a sample of the fabric.

Under the bed Stamaty found only mounds of dust and cobwebs and a fragment broken from the crystal of a good-sized clock, probably an alarm clock. Of the clock itself there was no sign. The drawers of the stained old dresser were crammed with miscellaneous personal effects — all except the shallow top one, the only drawer that had a lock. Stamaty found it unlocked and practically empty.

On the top of the dresser lay a matching wallet and keyfold, both ancient. He made a note of Strode’s Social Security number and a few other data from the wallet, which contained seven one-dollar bills.

He found Mrs. Helm in the kitchen peeling potatoes and carrots.

“Sorry to have inconvenienced you, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll be going now, but somebody may be back in touch with you later. Do you expect to be here all afternoon and evening?”

“Why yes, I’ll be here. I don’t never go out after dark, and this time of year it’s dark by the time dinner’s over.”

After letting himself out of the house, Stamaty drove as quickly as the afternoon traffic would permit to a pay phone in front of a laundromat. From there he called police headquarters and asked to speak with the senior watch lieutenant.

Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn was at his desk at headquarters bringing his memoirs up to the hour and wishing he’d had something other than coffee on his afternoon break when Lieutenant Savage appeared in the doorway. “You want to pick up line two, Cy? Stamaty thinks he’s got a homicide over on Ninth Avenue.”

Less than twenty minutes later Auburn parked his car next to Stamaty’s van at the laundromat and joined him in the van.

“You alone?” asked Stamaty.

Auburn spread his hands. “Totally solitary.”

“But you’ve got a warrant?”

“Not this trip.”

Stamaty squirmed in his seat and shook his head. “You guys operate funny. I told you—”

“The lieutenant wants me to check it out first. If there’s probable cause, he’ll send Kestrel with a search warrant.”

“If there’s probable cause? Didn’t you tell him about the green fibers and the toothmarks?”

“I told him. What are those women looking at?”

“Us. It’s the sign on the door. People always think I’ve got a body in the back. Listen, Cy, there’s a ratty old green quilt on Strode’s bed. Warrant or not, you or Kestrel or somebody else from your lab better get your hands on it quick.”

Mrs. Helm’s boardinghouse was a tall, narrow, white frame building with peeling paint and rusted spouting, nearly indistinguishable from its neighbors. Auburn’s ring at the door was answered by a stout woman in a voluminous apron.

Her cheeks blazed with rouge, and her sturdy square-toed shoes looked as if they had been polished with a tar brush. He showed identification.

“I just had another person here,” she said, “a white man, not no more than an hour ago, asking me all kinds of questions.”

Auburn nodded patiently. “Mr. Stamaty works for the coroner. I’m from the police department.”

The parlor was full of her perfume — an old woman’s perfume, heavy and sweet, like overripe fruit. “I never knew such a fuss to be made about somebody dying in their bed.”

Auburn took note of his surroundings — the chessboard, the mandolin, the potted ferns, the matched porcelain partridges with the chipped sides turned towards the wall. For some women the battle against dust is a consuming passion. Evidently Mrs. Helm wasn’t one of these.

“Mr. Stamaty’s department had one or two reasons for thinking Mr. Strode’s death might not have been natural.”

Her heavy eyebrows bunched up like storm clouds. “What do you mean? What kind of reasons?”

“The coroner’s preliminary investigation suggested that he died of suffocation.”

“You mean something cut off his air, like?”

“Something or somebody.”

Her frown deepened. “But the poor soul died in his bed. How could he have suffocated?”

“It’s only a preliminary impression. There may be nothing in it, but we have to follow up on it for the coroner.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions and look around the house.” He slipped a three by five file card from his pocket and made a notation in an upper corner. “If you don’t mind.”

They went over the details of Frank Strode’s final illness and death. “I understand Mr. Strode has no known next of kin,” said Auburn. “Who’s in charge of his affairs?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, somebody will have to take responsibility for making funeral arrangements and settling his estate. Do you know if he had a lawyer?”

“I know full well he didn’t. Mr. Strode didn’t trust nobody. Wouldn’t even put his money in the bank.”

“Kept it all here in the house, did he?”

“I guess so. I really wouldn’t know.”

“Did he have any close friends in town?”

“Just the other gentlemen that lives here in the house. Which they get along together sometimes like a cageful of tigers.”

“Any particular trouble between Mr. Strode and any of the others recently?”

“Only that he’s been talking high and mighty the last couple of weeks since he got a promotion over to the factory. Plus his usual pickiness and feistiness.”

“Have you or the tenants had any visitors at the house in the last two or three days?”

“No, sir. I’m pretty strict. No visitors after dinner, no liquor in the house, no bad language—”

They were interrupted by the entrance of a gaunt, elderly man in a tweed suit that had gone out of style three times and come back in twice. “This is Mr. Gardner,” she told Auburn. “He’s the one that found Mr. Strode dead this morning. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get on with dinner.”

Auburn identified himself. “Sit down, sir, and please make yourself comfortable,” said Gardner with the flamboyant gestures and grandiloquent manner of a frustrated actor. His broad brow and steely eye promised intellectual power and strength of character, but a sensual mouth and an irresolute chin reneged on the deal. Auburn took particular note of his hands, which were chalk-white with tapering fingers — the idle hands of an aesthete.

“Surely Strode’s death isn’t really a police matter, is it?” asked Gardner. “I mean, the chap from the coroner’s office said he was just making routine inquiries, and now...” He watched in evident dismay as Auburn entered his name on a file card.

“At this point it’s not exactly routine any more,” admitted Auburn. “All I can tell you is that the forensic examination of Mr. Strode’s body turned up some questionable findings, and I’ve been assigned to take over the investigation from here on.”

They reviewed the events of the morning. “Are you sure Mr. Strode was dead when you covered him up?”

“Good Lord, yes!” exclaimed Gardner. “I told the other investigator and I’m telling you, Strode was as dead as a frozen mackerel. What sort of questionable findings, if I may ask?”

“Did you hear anything unusual during the night?”

“No, but I sleep very soundly.”

“Were you and Mr. Strode particularly good friends?”

Gardner looked into a remote corner of the parlor and cleared his throat. “Not particularly good, no. But of course we had practically nothing in common. I’m a literary type, if you will. Started out teaching high school English, but now I do all the technical writing and advertising copy for Gromacki’s — the furniture factory, you know, up in the next block. In fact all of us here in the house work there.

“Strode was one of those poor devils that have had littleness thrust upon them, if you follow me. A good deal of native shrewdness, but lazy. Dropped out of high school because he thought it was smart to make cigarette money by working as a stock boy in a grocery warehouse while his Mends were still bisecting triangles and analyzing Paradise Lost. Sort of slid into the gutter and stayed there. A miser and a confirmed bachelor.”

“How did he get along with the other boarders?”

Gardner passed his hand over his forehead like a silent movie actor signaling discreet reflection. “Let me give you a clue, sir. We walk to work in all weathers, the lot of us. But only Frank and Boyd Bland walked together. Bland’s a blue-collar worker at the factory, the sort of chap who never quite adjusts to life outside the womb.” He leaned closer and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “I suspect he may have been a drinker at one time. I understand he came from a good family but got himself into some kind of trouble early on in life — disinherited, I don’t know... But Strode was always friendly with Bland — I think because Bland was plainly his inferior. Drebbel and I incurred Strode’s contempt because we were educated, cultivated, successful...”

Auburn had a little difficulty reconciling the notion of success with his present surroundings. “I think you said Mr. Drebbel also works at the factory?”

“Correct, sir. Hans is an engineer — still works full-time at seventy-two. Sort of a know-it-all. Devious, manipulative, but nothing very impressive in the brain department. He’s been working on some kind of pneumatic stapling gun for seven or eight years and still hasn’t got it right.”

“And what about your landlady? How did she and Mr. Strode get along?”

“Mrs. Helm? Oh, she mothers us all in her rough-and-tumble way. Basically a decent soul even if her grammar does grate on the refined ear like a rusty hinge.”

“Does she have any family of her own?”

“Not that I know of. She’s been widowed for years.” The mantel clock struck four. “Here’s Bland already.”

A squat little dumpling-faced man probably not much over fifty drifted aimlessly into the room and, discovering Auburn’s presence, gazed at him with the timid, panicky manner of a cornered mouse. Gardner made introductions.

“Sit down, Mr. Bland,” said Auburn. “I hear you and Mr. Strode were pretty good Mends.”

“Yes. I miss old Frank already.” Bland swallowed hard, and Auburn thought he was going to cry. His flabby, spade-shaped hands looked like the ineffectual flippers of some clumsy mud dwelling creature. “We looked out for each other, Frank and I. But he said he might be moving out pretty soon.” Hugh Gardner made a surreptitious exit into the hall, and a moment later they heard him going up the back stairs.

“I understand you work at the furniture factory, too, Mr. Bland. What sort of work do you do there?”

“I’m in dunnage and pack-out. Frank was trying to get me a better job in receiving; now I guess I’m probably stuck where I am.”

“How did Strode get along with the other two boarders — Gardner and Drebbel?”

Bland scrutinized the palm of his left hand as if he were looking for a splinter. “Not very well. They had a lot of arguments.”

“What about?”

“Different things. Frank just got promoted at the factory. Personnel director. He said there was stuff in the records that made the other guys look bad. Said he might get them fired if they didn’t get off his back.”

Auburn made a mental note to get a look at those records as soon as possible. “What were they on his back about?”

“Different things. They used to gang up on him, make fun of him because he never went to college, things like that.”

“I’m just going over a few details about Mr. Strode’s death. Do you remember the last time you saw him alive?”

“Last night, late. I checked on him around eleven thirty to see if he needed anything before I went to bed.”

“And was he all right?”

“Said he felt cold and weak. I pulled his quilt up around his shoulders.”

“What kind of a quilt?”

“A green comforter. Frank used to wear it around the house like a bathrobe.”

“Let’s go upstairs and see if we can find it.”

The second story of the house was just as blatantly unmodernized and grubby as the first. An indefinable smell, suggesting dirt and decay, seemed to rise from the mud-colored carpet and emanate from the papered walls. A dark, narrow hall ran straight from the front stairs to the back stairs with two bedrooms on each side and a bathroom sandwiched between those on the left. Frank Strode’s room was at the rear, behind the bath.

Auburn noted the findings Stamaty had reported and retrieved the fragment of clock crystal from under the bed, observing that there was no dust on its upper surface. Bland said he was sure Strode had an alarm clock with a crystal like that, but he couldn’t remember how recently he’d seen it on the nightstand.

There was no sign of a green quilt in the room.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve got other things to do,” said Auburn. “I’ll just look a little further on my own, thanks.”

Although Boyd Bland almost certainly had nothing else to do, he accepted his dismissal demurely and vanished down the back stairs.

The oblique position of the heavy steel bedstead seemed to accentuate the awkward smallness of the room. Originally it must have been a hospital bed, and several screw-clamp fittings remained attached to the frame. Auburn stood for a few moments in the middle of Frank Strode’s room, trying to get a feel for the personality of its late occupant by surveying the things he’d treasured and used to adorn this bleak little chamber.

On a corner shelf stood a very old plaster Mickey Mouse figurine that might have been of some value as an antique if it hadn’t been smashed to bits at some time or other and put together again with glue that had oozed out of the joints and turned canary yellow on hardening. An Art Deco ashtray on the nightstand, with most of the electroplating scorched off, contained about two packs’ worth of cigarette butts. The reek of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air like a fog and permeated everything in the room. In a dresser drawer Auburn found stacks of baseball cards and a collection of miniature liquor bottles, all of them empty.

Something had happened in that room last night — something fatal to Frank Strode. And by no stretch of the imagination could it have been an accident.

He made a lightning search, more intent on thoroughness than on putting things back as he’d found them. Everything in the room was cheap, shabby, damaged, or worn out, and not a single article of real worth was to be found. None of the keys in the keyfold fitted the lock of the empty dresser drawer.

It was about four thirty when Auburn widened the sphere of his search. Stepping softly, he had a quick look around Gardner’s stuffy and book-cluttered room, hazarded a glance into the closet, and got out again. Across the hall in Boyd Bland’s room everything was in hopeless disorder. Magazines, cardboard boxes, paper bags, empty soft drink cans, and articles of clothing were strewn everywhere as in the aftermath of a cyclone. Although a thorough search was obviously impracticable, Auburn satisfied himself that the green quilt wasn’t there.

His next stop was the bathroom, where the plumbing was antiquated and the enormous medicine cabinet stuffed with the makings of a pharmaceutical museum. Auburn saw packages and brand names that he remembered from his childhood but hadn’t seen since. An assortment of patent medicines and a cache of old prescription bottles filled three shelves. He started to investigate these but then resolutely shut the cabinet door and left the bathroom.

On his way to the back stairs he took a quick look into the last bedroom, which by default must have been Drebbel’s. Here the decor was spartan, the geometric order of things almost painful. A drawing board stood in the corner, and on a small table in front of the window were ranged tools, mechanical parts, and scraps of hardware. Auburn’s hand was on the closet doorknob when the tenant of the room walked in.

“Anything I can help you with?” asked Drebbel with a brittle pugnacity that Auburn would have sworn was nine-tenths bluff.

“Police officer, sir,” said Auburn, hauling out his badge.

“I know who you are,” said Drebbel. “Go ahead. No skeletons in there.” A smile played fitfully over his rubbery cheeks. Auburn took note of the gold pen and pencil set in his shirt pocket, the blanched burn scar on his neck, the knobby, sinewy hands, the deformed left little finger.

“I’m just having a quick look over the house.”

“So I heard. Something fishy about Strode’s death?” The thick lenses of Drebbel’s glasses magnified his eyes grotesquely, creating the illusion of exaggerated alertness, if not morbid curiosity.

“In a way, yes. Got a minute?”

“Certainly. Just wanted to take off my tie before dinner.” He proceeded to do so, hanging it with elaborate care on a rack on the inside of the closet door and incidentally giving Auburn a clear view of the interior of the closet. “I’m John Drebbel, by the way.”

Auburn had a file card in his hand. “Were you particularly close to Mr. Strode?”

“Oh no. Not at all. Mere acquaintances, you might say, even though he lived right across the hall. Surely his death isn’t really a police case, is it?”

“Just routine for now. What kind of a man was Mr. Strode, would you say?”

Drebbel pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks. “A very ordinary man. No education or culture to speak of. Low self-esteem. Passed himself off as a suffering hero.” As he finished voicing each observation he emphasized it with a curt nod.

“Pretended to know secrets about people. Claimed he had a lot of money stashed away here somewhere.”

“What about that? Did he have money here?”

“Possibly. Strode didn’t have much use for me personally, and he certainly didn’t confide in me about his financial affairs.”

“Was there someone else in the house he was closer to?”

“Boyd Bland. They used to pal around together like a couple of lost souls. You’ve already talked to Bland, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“A sad case. The sort of chap of whom it might be said that a great future lies behind him. His family had money, I believe, and he’s a lot brighter than he acts, but something went wrong somewhere. Drugs, drink, I don’t know. It’s his personality structure that’s pathological. Passive-dependent. For him, life’s a spectator sport. Of course, he’s Mrs. Helm’s pet — the son she never had.”

“How did Mr. Strode and Mr. Gardner get along?”

Drebbel turned the full glare of his monstrous eyes on Auburn.

“This is getting to be a regular gossip session. Gardner’s nothing but a windbag. Not very bright — a plodder. Prides himself on his cunning, but he’s as transparent as that window pane. I know what I’m talking about: I play chess with him every night. He didn’t do anything to Strode, and neither did any of the rest of us. The only one in the household with enough backbone to kill anybody is Mrs. Helm. You should see that woman swat flies.”

He meant it jocularly, and Auburn pursued it in the same vein. “Any reason why she’d want to kill Strode?”

“To the contrary. The dead don’t pay rent. After old Ambrose died, it took her six months to get Bland in here because she won’t have liquor in the house. No, the autopsy will show that Frank just pegged off with a bad case of the flu. We old geezers do that, you know.”

The parlor clock struck five as they were going down the back stairs, which creaked worse than the front ones. They found the others just sitting down to eat in the stark, gloomy dining room. A low-hanging chandelier above the table shed a wan ivory glow over framed photographs of the Arch of Triumph and the Sphinx hanging on the wall above the buffet.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at mealtime,” said Auburn, addressing them all, “but we need to do some further investigation yet this evening. I expect to have an evidence technician here within half an hour or so. I’ll have to ask you all to stay in the house until we’ve finished.”

If Stamaty’s and then Auburn’s own operations in the house that afternoon had stirred up a ground-swell of uneasiness among the tenants, the last announcement nearly set off a panic. But he was deaf to their protests and even forbade anyone to go upstairs until he returned.

He needed some fresh air, and besides, the smell of Mrs. Helm’s beef stew was making him hungry. First he visited the dark alley behind the house and went through the trashcans with the help of a flashlight. In a brown paper bag with coffee grounds and eggshells he found a big old alarm clock, its crystal broken and missing a segment.

He went to his car and, less wary than Stamaty had been of putting sensitive material on the air, he radioed headquarters to request background checks on the surviving occupants of the house on Ninth Avenue, including Mrs. Helm. Then he reported briefly to Lieutenant Savage, expressing himself with sufficient vagueness and ambiguity to prevent electronic eavesdroppers from picking up anything substantial.

“I’m voting with the gentleman who has his office in the courthouse,” he said. “The subject was helped on his way, and one of the focus group did the helping. Maybe all of them did and divided up the residuals. Anyway, we need to disassemble the premises, and we’d better request a document before—”

“It’s lying right here on my desk. Get back over there and sit on them until Kestrel shows up.”

“How come you’ve already got a warrant?” asked Auburn, abandoning the doubletalk.

“Update from the gentleman at the courthouse. Kestrel will tell you.” Savage hung up.

On returning to Ninth Avenue, Auburn found Mrs. Helm and her boarders still in the dining room, sitting somberly over their coffee. The two candy bars and the bag of peanuts he’d nibbled in the car had taken away most of his hunger, but the smell of stew lingering in the air brought some of it back.

When he asked to talk privately with Mrs. Helm, she took him into her sanctum, a long narrow room off the kitchen that had probably been an enclosed porch in the original design of the house.

“There are a couple of other things I want to ask you, ma’am. What day is your trash pickup here?”

“Trash pickup? Friday. Which they’ll have double their work this week after I clean out Mr. Strode’s room.”

“I’ll ask you not to do any cleaning or throwing out just yet. We don’t know whose property Mr. Strode’s things are now, legally. There may be a relative somewhere, or he may have left a will. What arrangements were you planning to make with Mr. Schell for the funeral expenses?”

“Well, I just don’t know. It was different when Mr. Ambrose died. I had power of attorney for him.” She pondered a moment, her brows twitching convulsively. “What are you looking for up there, anyway?”

“Well, a couple of things actually. Mr. Stamaty and I both thought it was a little strange that the top drawer of Mr. Strode’s bureau was unlocked and empty. Would you happen to know if he kept anything in there?”

“No,” she said, studiously avoiding his eye. “I don’t mess with the gentlemen’s personal things. But that drawer never had no key.”

“Then there’s this green quilt from Mr. Strode’s room. A couple of the boarders remember seeing it on the bed lately, but now it seems to be missing. Do you know where it might be?”

“The undertakers must have wrapped him up in it when they took him away.”

“They say they didn’t. Besides, Mr. Stamaty saw it here earlier this afternoon.”

The doorbell rang, but before she could get to the parlor, Gardner admitted Kestrel, the police evidence technician. Standing just inside the door with a camera case in one hand and a field investigation kit in the other, Kestrel gave signs of profound relief when Auburn appeared from the back of the house. They went upstairs to escape prying eyes and curious ears.

Auburn showed Kestrel the room where Strode had lived and died, and Kestrel handed Auburn the search warrant and a memo faxed from the coroner’s office. While Auburn read by the light of the dim ceiling fixture, Kestrel stood in the doorway surveying the room with the eye of an artist. Austere in manner and sparing of speech, he was a perfectionist at his work, more comfortable with cameras and microscopes than with suspected felons or recalcitrant witnesses.

“Before you get too deeply involved in here,” said Auburn, “I want to see what you think about this medicine cabinet.”

A minute or two later he was back downstairs, formally serving the search warrant on Mrs. Helm. He started his serious searching in the basement.

In spite of the sketchy lighting system, fetid drains, and a rank stench of mildew that assailed him like a wire brush up each nostril, he made a good job of it but found nothing. Mrs. Helm and her boarders were watching the news when he went up the back stairs and climbed a further flight beyond a door opposite the bathroom to reach the attic. Here the smell was dusty and mousy and the cobwebs lay so thick that they obviously hadn’t been disturbed for months or years.

He rejoined Kestrel in the bathroom. “There’s not much hope of lifting prints with all this dust,” said Kestrel. “But somebody’s been into this stuff lately.”

Auburn examined the row of bottles ranged on the chipped and discolored washstand. There were three brands of patent medicine for swelling, all with the same active ingredient.

“Mean any thing to you?” he asked.

Kestrel grunted. “Not my field.”

Auburn looked at his watch. “What time does Stamaty go home?”

“Depends. Sometimes he doesn’t.”

“I’m going to try to catch him at the office. Not from here, though. Keep an eye on the folks while I’m gone.” Kestrel glared at him but said nothing.

Phoning from the laundromat, Auburn found Stamaty at home celebrating the birthday of one of his numerous children. “Nick, did you do a toxicology screen on Strode?”

“That’s routine. Reports won’t be back till Friday.”

“Do they test for ammonium chloride?”

“I wouldn’t think so. What’s that — some kind of chemical fertilizer?”

“Pills for swelling. Over the counter. Ring any bells?”

“No, and I haven’t got anything here to look it up in. Let me give you the number of the Poison Control Center.”

“Thanks, I’ve already got it.”

As Auburn was returning to the boardinghouse he saw a familiar figure scuttling along the sidewalk in the deep gloom of evening with a small suitcase under its arm.

“Leaving town, Mr. Bland?”

Bland nearly jumped out of his skin. “Oh no. Just stepping down to the bus station.”

“With your suitcase? Why don’t we go back to the house and see what’s in it?”

Bland offered no resistance as Auburn took charge of the suitcase. Gardner and Drebbel barely looked up from their chess game as Auburn led Bland through the parlor and back to the kitchen. He put the suitcase on the kitchen table and called up the back stairs for Kestrel to come down.

“This seems to be locked, Mr. Bland,” he said. “Got the key handy?”

Bland, cowering in the corner, passed a tremulous hand over a tremulous jowl. “That’s not my suitcase,” he said “Mrs. Helm asked me to put it in a pay locker down at the bus station for her.”

“Do you know what’s in it?”

The door to Mrs. Helm’s room flew open as if on cue, and she bowled into the kitchen. “Those are some things of my sister’s she asked me to put away safe,” she said.

“Would you please open the case, ma’am?”

“I don’t have the key.”

Kestrel inspected the catches briefly, then wrenched them open one after the other with the can opener blade of his pocket knife. He turned back the lid of the suitcase. Inside was a tattered green quilt, redolent of stale cigarette smoke like everything in Strode’s room. Rolled up in it were several thousand dollars in bundles of bills done up with red rubber bands. Kestrel pulled out the long-sought quilt and spread it on the kitchen table.

Auburn made a formal arrest, charged Mrs. Helm with murder and robbery, and read her her rights, vaguely aware that Gardner and Drebbel were lurking in the dark dining room. “He was such an aggravating person,” she fumed. “Always whining about something not being right. And lately he was just unbearable, bragging about how important he was over to the factory. Plus he wouldn’t never pay his rent till I threatened to put him in the street.”

Sometimes Auburn got a little cheeky when things were falling into place at the conclusion of a case. “And on top of that,” he suggested, “he blabbed once too often about this collection of miniature portraits of the presidents he had in his dresser drawer, didn’t he?”

It took her a moment to catch on. “Oh, he never made no secret of that money. He was always talking about how much he saved by never getting married, and how he wouldn’t put it in the bank because his folks was ruined in the Depression. He kept it locked in that top dresser drawer, and he wore the key on a chain around his neck. The key’s in there with the money somewhere.”

“Was that why you killed him? For the money? And because he was talking about moving out?”

Mrs. Helm glowered. “I never said I killed him. You said that. I took the money after I found him dead, mostly to pay for his back rent and his funeral.”

“You found him dead? When was that?”

“Right after midnight. I went up to see how he was feeling before I went to bed, and I found him dead.”

Auburn’s stomach was churning, and his mouth was dry. He got a drink of water at the kitchen sink before proceeding.

“Not quite dead, Mrs. Helm. Pretty close to it, maybe, but not quite. I found some old medicine bottles up in the bathroom. The marks in the dust show that those bottles have been handled and opened recently. The medicine in them is ammonium chloride, a nonprescription diuretic. An overdose causes dehydration, acid buildup, and extreme weakness. How many of those pills did you put in Frank Strode’s soup and juice every day?” He didn’t credit Mrs. Helm with enough toxicologic savvy to know that even a large overdose of ammonium chloride probably wouldn’t be detected by the pending laboratory tests.

She swept Auburn and Kestrel with a scowl of defiance. “Those pills was my husband’s, which he’s been dead for seventeen years from blood pressure. I take them myself sometimes when my feet is swollen. But I never gave none of that medicine to Mr. Strode.”

“You gave it to him, all right. Maybe it didn’t work as fast on him as it did on Mr. Ambrose—”

“Mr. Ambrose!”

“—or on your husband.”

Her complexion turned the color of slate. Auburn took another drink of water.

“When you went up there last night and saw that he was too weak to put up a fight, you burked him — sat or knelt on his chest and held the covers over his face until he stopped trying to breathe. He put up just enough of a struggle to knock the alarm clock off the night stand and break it.”

“I never done that.”

“Yes, you did, and I’ll tell you how we can prove it. Mr. Schell, the undertaker, found Mr. Strode’s mouth and throat full of green polyester fibers, and there were fresh cuts inside his mouth from his teeth. After Mr. Schell called us, Mr. Strode’s body was removed from the funeral parlor to the coroner’s morgue, and this afternoon an autopsy showed three fresh rib fractures.”

“That don’t mean I had anything to do with it.”

“Look at this quilt. What are those black marks all over it?”

“I don’t know,” she sulked, looking everywhere but at the quilt. “Probably some dirt Mr. Strode got into.”

“That’s black shoe polish, Mrs. Helm. And I don’t think Officer Kestrel and the people at the forensic lab will have any trouble proving it’s chemically identical to the polish on the shoes you’re wearing right now.”

He was far too polite to point out that, in addition, probably she alone in that house had sufficient avoirdupois to have burked Strode.

“After Mr. Stamaty was here, you took another look in Mr. Strode’s room and noticed those marks your shoes had made on the quilt. So you hid it, and you sent Mr. Bland to get it out of the house along with the loot.”

They took Mrs. Helm downtown to be booked, leaving her surviving boarders (two of whom had learned to play chess while serving stretches in prison) to fend for themselves and thank their stars they kept their meagre financial resources in the bank and had always been punctual with the rent.