Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 47, No. 4. Whole No. 269, April 1966

William MacHarg East Side Homicide[6]

You never can tell what O’Malley is thinking. There’s never much to work on, he says; he’s got no ideas, he says; it’ll never be solved, he says — but leave it to O’Malley, the unimaginative cop.

“A woman got murdered on the East Side,” O’Malley said. “It looks like it was a funny kind of case. She was about sixty years old and everybody in the neighborhood knew who she was, but there didn’t nobody know anything about her.

“The name they knew her by was Miss Dubois, but it turns out she had several different names. There was some addresses in her place, and they found one guy that told ’em things about her but it don’t point to why she should get killed.”

“What have you got to work on?” I inquired.

“Not much. My idea is this gets marked ‘Unsolved.’ Well, still I got to run around and look at it.”

We looked at the woman. She must have been very pretty in her youth. She had been strangled with a woman’s belt. Her clothes were of the best quality and the belt matched the dress.

“What’s this?” O’Malley asked.

He showed me some pinholes in the bosom of her slip.

“She seems to have worn a brooch,” I said.

“Yeah? On her underclothes?”

He took a pattern of the pinholes on a piece of paper.

“We’ll see the guy that told the cops them things,” he said.

The man’s name was Collingham. We found him in a small but impressive office in the Wall Street neighborhood. He was a distinguished-looking man of about fifty.

“How was it about that lady that got knocked off?” O’Malley asked.

“I’ve already told the police all I know, but I don’t mind repeating it. She was a sort of pensioner of mine. Years ago this woman was a motion-picture actress. Her screen name was Vera Cain. I worshiped her on the screen, but at that time I didn’t meet her. A few years ago I encountered her on the street. Of course, she was greatly changed, but in spite of that I recognized her and introduced myself, and I learned that she was in want.

“In memory, as you might say, of my youth, I got her address and sent her a small check. A man like myself, who has made a great deal of money, picks up a certain number of people who are dependent on him. After that, each month I sent her a small check.”

“I guess you seen her pretty often after you found out where she lived.”

“No, I never saw her except that one time on the street. She wrote me a note of thanks each month but I didn’t keep them.”

“You send her a check this month?”

“Yes, on the first, as I always did if I remembered it.”

“That check been cashed?”

“Yes, it was cashed.”

“You don’t seem to feel very bad because the dame got bumped off.”

“There’s no reason why I should. She was no longer the girl whom I remembered.”

“Okay.”

“That’s a nice fellow, O’Malley,” I remarked after we had left him.

“He talks like it.”

We went to see her home where she was killed. It was a poor neighborhood. There were pushcarts along the curb and a street filled with children; people sat on crowded doorsteps. A cop let us into her apartment. It was luxurious. The furniture was of expensive make, the bed things were lace and silk.

“Well, this is a surprise, O’Malley!” I exclaimed. “Collingham can’t have known she was well off. Why did she live in this neighborhood?”

“I guess she wanted to. How was this?” he asked the cop.

“They don’t know much. The guy came in the window.”

He showed us. A rear window had been forced open. The window opened on a court. There was a fire escape under the windows of the next apartment.

We examined the place carefully. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and the things scattered about; the cops hadn’t done that. The closets were filled with expensive clothes. In one closet there was a trunk. The police had searched it but we went through its contents. There were souvenirs from hotels and steamship lines and summer and winter resorts.

“This dame was a gay one in her time,” O’Malley remarked.

“She must have been.”

“It’s my idea it will turn out she was some kind of crook. What time did the medical guy say this dame got bumped?” he asked the cop.

“About four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“What become of that address book they found?”

“They got it at the station house.”

O’Malley telephoned the station house to send us the address book.

“What do you make of it so far?” I asked.

“I got no ideas.”

“I have,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“This is the kind of case,” I said, “where the police go wrong because they find too many things that might be clues. They aren’t really clues, and so they waste time on things that get them nowhere. Those things have nothing to do with her being murdered.”

“Go on — you’re doing swell. What is it that has got to do with it?”

“The way she lived and the way she dressed. In this kind of neighborhood she was simply courting robbery. Collingham had just sent her some money; whether she kept her money in her apartment or not, people around here must have believed she did. Anyway, the murderer believed it. It’s plain how he got in. He came up or down the fire escape and reached across and forced the window open and stepped from the fire escape onto the sill.”

“You’re good. Who was the guy?”

“Of course I don’t know that, but it’s plain he lives in this neighborhood. The killing took place in midafternoon when other windows were open on this court and someone may have seen him.”

“Well, we can find that out.”

We went around and asked the people whose windows opened on the court. The window directly across belonged to a photographer. He hadn’t seen anything, but he said his partner might have; the partner wasn’t there. The other people hadn’t seen anything.

When we got back to the apartment a man was there with the address book. There wasn’t much in it — a few telephone numbers and a few street numbers. O’Malley called one of the phone numbers.

“Is Freeman there?” he asked. Somebody answered. “Ain’t this the Sheffield Hotel?” he inquired.

“What is it?” I asked.

“He says it’s a meat market.” “Who’s Freeman?” I asked.

“That ain’t no guy. I just made that up to find out whose phone it was.”

He tried the other phone numbers the same way, but they all turned out to be tradesmen’s places.

“Well, nothing in that,” he said. “I guess we won’t find nothing in these addresses either.”

One of the addresses was Collingham’s. We went around to all the others. The first one turned out to be a beauty shop.

They knew Miss Dubois as a customer, but of course they had no idea who’d killed her. She was known the same way at most of the other addresses. At two places we couldn’t find anyone who’d ever heard of her. One of these places wasn’t really an address at all — the street number came in Central Park.

“Well, that ends that,” I stated.

“Why, no,” O’Malley said. “It ends them places where they knew about her, but we got two they don’t. Why would she have a number that comes in the park? I think that looks funny. I’m figuring this dead dame was a crook, and crooks got ways of writing things so that whoever finds ’em won’t read ’em right. It might be we got that kind of business here. One way is, they write the numbers backwards.”

I studied the two addresses. One said 236 Cathedral Parkway and the other one, 345 Columbus Avenue. On the same page it said “3F.” We looked up 632 Cathedral Parkway and 543 Columbus, but it got us nothing.

“There’s still another way they do,” O’Malley said. “If they write two addresses, one gives the right number but the other one gives the street.”

There was no such number as 345 Cathedral Parkway, so we tried 236 Columbus. A good-looking young man about 22 years old opened the door of apartment 3F.

“Who’re you?” O’Malley asked.

“Joe Harrill. How about yourself?”

“A cop don’t have to give a name.” O’Malley showed his shield. “We’d like to look around your place.”

“Well, go ahead.”

We searched the room, and then him, and in his pocket we found three $100 bills with pinholes through them. The holes matched the pinholes in the pattern O’Malley had taken from the dead woman’s slip.

“Well, guy,” O’Malley said, “we got you.”

“For what?”

“For knocking off Miss Dubois and robbing her of her dough.”

“I haven’t killed anybody and I never heard that name before. My aunt gave me that money.”

“Yeah? You’ll get a chance to prove that to the Inspector.”

We took him to the station house.

“This has been extraordinarily fine police work, O’Malley,” I commended him.

“Sure, it’s swell work,” he said, “except I don’t think this is the guy that done the killing.”

I was astonished. “Why, you’ve practically proved it,” I said. “You must be crazy!”

I saw O’Malley next day.

“Well, have you got the proof on Harrill?” I inquired.

“Boy, we ain’t got no proof on nobody. Most cops think Harrill was the one. That Miss Dubois had a police record but it was long ago; some old-time cops remembered her. Collingham ain’t the only guy that give her money. So we got other suspects, but we don’t know who.

“That Collingham ain’t what he looks and talks like; he ain’t rich, he’s broke. The report is he made what dough he once had dealing in counterfeit bonds, but it was never proved on him.

“Guys came to Miss Dubois’ place sometimes to see her, and some kids saw a strange guy around there the afternoon that she got killed. They can’t describe him except he was wearing a checkered suit. I don’t know if anybody could get from that fire escape into the window, so we’re going to try that out.”

We went to Miss Dubois’ apartment. Some plain-clothes cops were there and one was wearing a checkered suit. The man in the checked suit went up to the roof, while we stood in the courtyard watching him, and he came down the fire escape and tried to force the window open from the landing.

He couldn’t do it. Then a younger cop tried it and he did it all right.

“There you have it, O’Malley!” I exclaimed. “It was a young man. That shows it was Harrill.”

“Yeah, fine!” he said. “Only the laboratory says them casts they took of the toolmarks on the window frame show that the window got opened from inside. You try it that way now,” he directed the man in the checked suit.

We went inside. The cop in the checked suit forced the window open with what I thought at first was a jimmy, but I saw later that it was a steel knife sharpener. Apparently he didn’t do it right, for O’Malley made him repeat it several times.

“That’s the right way,” he told him at last.

Then another cop who had waited in the court came in.

“Okay,” he said.

We went to headquarters. After a while a cop came and gave O’Malley an envelope and O’Malley went into the Inspector’s room. He came out again and we waited and Collingham came in with a couple of cops.

“We need your help on that Dubois killing,” O’Malley told him.

“I’ll be glad to do anything I can.”

“We want you to tell us how you knocked her off.”

Collingham got white.

“You’re nutty in the head!” he declared.

“Our heads are all right. You want me to tell you how it was? You’d been paying blackmail to her, but now she tried to shake you for a bigger bunch of dough. You went there to argue with her. We got some kids seen you go in her place.

“She wouldn’t believe you when you told her you was broke and you strangled her to shut her mouth. You got a knife sharpener out of the kitchen and fixed the window to make it look like some guy had broken in, and you scattered her things around so we’d think it was a robbery.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Yeah, sure, we’re crazy. A photographer has a place across that court. What you don’t know is that the guy happened to be trying out a camera.”

He showed Collingham a photograph. Collingham gazed at it and then stared at the floor and his body seemed to be folding up.

“I’ll talk with the Inspector,” he said after a couple of minutes.

They went into the Inspector’s room. Some cops were studying the photograph and I looked at it over their shoulders. It showed the cop in the checked suit pretending to force open the window; the man’s face was in shadow but his clothes showed plainly.

“Collingham was a fool to fall for that fake picture,” I told O’Malley when he came out of the Inspector’s room.

“You can’t tell what no guy will fall for. He recognized his own checked suit.”

“His suit?” I asked. “How was all this?”

“Why, I’d think you’d guess. That Miss Dubois was one time in pictures, like Collingham said, but she was a lot of other things besides. She was a gay kid and she picked up enough on several well-off guys to ruin ’em, and then afterwards she lived on it. She lived in that neighborhood so she wouldn’t meet people that she knew in her old days.

“I guess she could have went on like that until she died, except for this young guy Harrill. She told him she was his aunt, but we can’t find out she ever had a sister or brother, and it’s my idea he is her son. However that was, she didn’t want him to know nothing about what she’d been or how she lived.

“He understood his folks was dead and he was always in school and in summer he was with other kids in camp, and the money for them things was sent through a bank. He says he never seen his aunt but twice, and the name he knew her by wasn’t none she used anywhere else.

“The second time he seen her was the day she got killed. He was through school and he had come to New York and got a room, and she came to see him and she give him some money that she unpinned from inside her clothes. She asked him what business he wanted to get in and said she’d send him the money to get started in it. She expected to get the dough from ColIingham. The rest was the way I told it just now to Collingham.”

“I don’t see yet,” I said, “how you knew Collingham was the one who killed her.”

“I didn’t till the guy admitted it. You’re kind of dumb. I only figured this dead dame was a crook, and Collingham had a reputation as another one. It looked like she had been holding him up, though he wouldn’t tell she was, so I wondered did he kill her?

“Some kids had seen a guy go to the building in a checked suit. Collingham wasn’t wearing no checked suit when we seen him, and I wondered did he own one.

“Some cops went round the neighborhood where he lived and seen all the clothes cleaners, till they found out who cleaned his clothes; and the people there said they’d cleaned and pressed that kind of suit for him. So then we had a guy from the cleaner’s go to Collingham’s and tell his wife that Collingham had telephoned ’em to press his checked suit; she give it to him.

“I didn’t have no idea about the photograph until after we got the suit, but then I figured we might try that piece of business on him. So I found a cop that looked as much like Collingham as I could and had him put on Collingham’s suit. After he’d tried getting into the window from outside, we went inside and I had ’em take that photograph. You know, I ain’t sure even yet if Collingham really fell for that photograph, or if it only made him think we had so much on him he might as well confess.”

“It was a smart trick, O’Malley.”

“Anyway it caught a fish. Maybe instead of a cop I ought to be a crook, but I figure a crook works harder than a cop, and I ain’t that fond of working.”