Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)

A Killer in the Crowd by Bruno Fischer

His alibi was perfect — or it should have been. Thousands saw him at the moment of the crime, but not one remembered his face. They were minding their own business — as he was minding his. And he swore it wasn’t killing.

So Many out-of-towners are always saying that our city isn’t friendly, that we New Yorkers don’t even bother arguing with them any more, if we can avoid it.

There’s no way to make them understand that you can live in a house for ten years and not even know the names of all the people on your floor, let alone everything that happened to them since the day they were born.

The thing is that New Yorkers are too busy minding their own business, of which they have more than anybody else. Besides, New York is too big. There’s nowhere a man can be lonelier than in a crowd — and more unnoticed.

I’m a homicide lieutenant on the finest police force in the world. That’s why I was there on the inside that time New York came pretty close to killing a man by minding its own business.

John Garson was a young man who had a terrific crush on a fiery brunette named Isabel Lewis. One evening at eight o’clock he called on her in her two-room apartment in a run-down apartment house in the West Nineties.

A minute after he entered, her closest neighbors in the building got an earful of them arguing. The battle was as loud and shrill as if they’d been husband and wife, and practically every word came through those paper-thin walls. The usual thing. Garson had learned that Isabel was seeing a lot of a lad named Clarence Hannen, and he didn’t like it one bit.

It took Garson ten minutes to say all he had to say. Then he walked out on her.

Night was falling and it was starting to rain when he reached the street. His car was parked a couple of hundred feet away. He drove east to Central Park West, then turned south. He was very upset and didn’t remember much of the drive except that at Columbus Circle he went through a red light and came close to knocking over a man who jumped out of the way just in time. At Fifty-Seventh Street Garson headed east again. He lived in Queens and was taking the widest street to the bridge.

As he was crossing Seventh Avenue, his motor stalled. The car rolled a short distance more and came to a dead stop directly in front of Carnegie Hall.

By that time it was close to eight-thirty. There was a concert in Carnegie Hall, and a mob trying to get in was jammed under the marquee, out of the rain and the street was packed solid with cabs and private cars trying to get to the curb to discharge their passengers. And there was Garson’s car stuck in the middle of it, with traffic piling up behind him past the Seventh Avenue intersection. Garson almost wore out his battery, but the motor stubbornly refused to catch.

Well, the point of what happened from here on, is that nothing happened. Horns honked and drivers yelled to him to get out of the way, and people waiting to get into Carnegie Hall stood watching. Nobody came over to him. Garson just sat there helplessly pressing the starter.

After a while the traffic cop at the intersection walked to within fifty feet of him and yelled to Garson to push that heap of his out of the way. Garson got out and looked around. The cop had gone back to his post; he had his own immediate business, to unsnarl the traffic jam enough to let cars go through Seventh Avenue. Garson tried to push his car, but he couldn’t budge that ton and a half on wheels. He wiped a face wet with sweat as well as rain and looked at the people on the sidewalk. Not one of those hundreds of men moved to give him a hand.

Maybe they were dressed too fancy and the rain discouraged them. I don’t know.

The fact remains that nobody there thought it was his particular business to help Garson.

Behind him, practically touching his rear bumper, was a coupe. The woman driver was the only one in it. Garson asked her for a push. She said she didn’t want to break her clutch or transmission, she wasn’t sure which, and she lit a cigarette and waited for something to happen so she could move on.

Garson returned to his car and stood a while in the rain. Then he got into the car and got behind the wheel. If nobody worried about him, why should he? He was comfortable.

Eventually the snarl untangled itself. Cars swung around him. He was still blocking a good section in front of Carnegie Hall, but nobody seemed willing to step into the rain to help him, so nothing was done about it.

Some ten or fifteen minutes after he’d got stuck, he tried the starter again, and the motor turned over. A flooded carburetor, probably. John Garson drove home.

At nine o’clock that same evening my squad and I were in Isabel Lewis’ apartment — on official business.

There were plenty of witnesses to give us an idea of what had happened. It was generally agreed by the neighbors that at ten after eight the battle between her and the man had stopped, and that after a fifteen minute silence — or about twenty-five after eight — she was heard to scream. Nobody was sure whether she screamed with rage or was beaten, and nobody seemed to want to horn in on what seemed to be none of his or her business.

A few minutes later, though, a man and woman next door heard her moan. That made it a little too much to stay out of. The man found the door unlocked. He went in, and there was Isabel Lewis on the floor with a carving knife in her. She was too far gone to talk, and she was dead before the ambulance arrived.

It wasn’t hard for us to find out who the man was she’d had the battle with. Nobody had seen him come or go — there was an automatic elevator — but she was heard to call him John during the argument. In a drawer we found passionate letters to her signed John, and there was his full name and his address on the envelopes. So we picked John Garson up in his home in Queens, and he freely admitted that he had been in her apartment.

It looked like an open and shut case. The way we saw it, fifteen minutes after he and Isabel Lewis had stopped shouting at each other, he’d gone into the kitchenette for a carving knife and slipped it between her ribs.

But his story was that he’d been there only until ten after eight. Where had he been at the time of the murder? Stuck in his car in front of Carnegie Hall.

A perfect alibi.

Except that nobody had seen him there. Nobody had seen him go down the elevator and walk to his car, and nobody had seen him in front of Carnegie Hall. Hundreds of people had looked at him, but not as an individual to be identified later. He’d been a shape in the dark and the rain, a shadowy head in a car.

There had been the traffic cop. A stalled car? Sure, cars were stalling all the time. He had all he could do attending to his business, which was directing traffic. Besides, if he did recall one particular stalled car at eight-thirty that night, he hadn’t come close enough for a good look at Garson or the car.

That left the woman Garson had asked to push his car with her car. The newspapers helped us find her. She read that we were looking for her and got in touch with headquarters.

She recalled the incident. But to her the man in the stalled car had only been somebody who had stood in the rain beside her own car, without identity except as a male. As for the make of that car, she couldn’t distinguish one from another. And she was vague about the time; for all she knew, it might have been as late as nine o’clock, so at any rate she couldn’t have alibied him.

The fact was that everything was against Garson. He’d been in Isabel Lewis’ apartment; he’d been jealous; he’d quarreled loudly with her. It was still an open and shut case.

Well, I never before heard anybody curse anything as bitterly as Garson cursed New York. Because if one person among those hundreds had helped him push his car, he would have had his alibi. Or if the traffic cop had come close enough to give him a hand or at least speak to him, the cop would have been able to identify him.

But there he was, with what at first had seemed a terrific alibi, right there in the sight of hundreds of people in a conspicuous spot, and it didn’t amount to a hill of beans because every last one of those people was minding his own business.

When Garson stopped cursing, he started to think. He told me that he was convinced that the murderer was Clarence Hannen, Isabel’s other boy friend. Both he and Hannen had been two-timed by her with each other. Garson had let off steam by telling her off, Hannen by slipping a knife into her. Anyway, that was Garson’s idea.

So we picked up Clarence Hannen in his home in Brooklyn. He claimed that at the time of the murder he was in his room writing letters. Prove it? He lived with his sister and she had been out that evening, but he didn’t have to prove anything. That was up to us.

And we couldn’t, although early in the evening Hannen had walked three blocks to the subway station, had taken a long ride on the subway, had walked to the apartment house and had gone up the elevator, then had retraced his journey back home. And nobody along the way who knew him had noticed him.

There was irony for you. Garson, who was innocent and was seen by hundreds of people, was on his way to the electric chair. Hannen, who was guilty and had no alibi, was as far in the clear as a man could be.

Of course, at the time we didn’t know anything except that the case against John Garson was complete. Anyway, not until another New Yorker attended to business of his own.

A man named Ambrose Smith started a suit against a hit-and-run driver who, he claimed, had nicked him with his car one rainy night on Columbus Circle. Smith had written down the license number and the exact time.

The car turned out to be John Garson’s and the time only two or three minutes before Isabel Lewis had been murdered some two miles away.

So there’s the story. A man who hadn’t even seen Garson, who’d been attending strictly to his own business, which was to make a profit on a near accident, provided Garson with the alibi he needed. We concentrated on Clarence Hannen and eventually his nerve broke and he confessed, but that’s another story.

I hear that this Ambrose Smith is suing Garson for five thousand dollars. He claims he was actually hit and that a scar on his hip proves it. Garson says he never touched him and is contesting the suit.

If I were Garson, I’d show my gratitude by paying off. After all, Ambrose Smith saved his life. And Garson carried liability insurance on his car. What’s it his business if the insurance company loses five thousand dollars?