Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

Mrs. Hallaby had heard a sound she was sure was a gunshot. It looked like just another timewaster — until the cops found the dead girl.

1

It had been one of the slowest mornings we’d had all summer. And one of the hottest. There were a couple of electric fans in the squad room, but they did little good. They kept the desk tops reasonably free of soot, and occasionally whipped a report across the room, and that was about all. It was Fred’s and my morning to grab telephone squeals, but the phone hadn’t rung once since eight A.M., when we’d come on duty. We’d put the time to good use, though, catching up on odds and ends of paper work.

Fred rolled a form into his Underwood and mopped at the back of his neck with a handkerchief.

“I know why we haven’t had any squeals this morning, Jake,” he said. “It’s just too damned hot. No self-respecting criminal would—”

And then, as if on cue, the phone did ring, and I grabbed it.

Fred grimaced. “Now watch that thing make a liar out of me.”

“Sergeant Thomas,” I said. “Eighteenth Squad.”

“I want to speak to the commissioner!” It was a woman’s voice, loud and very high-pitched, and obviously belonged to someone pretty well along in years. “Is this the commissioner’s office?”

“No, ma’am,” I told her. “You have the Eighteenth Precinct detective squad.”

“But I asked that other man for the commissioner. I distinctly told him I wanted—”

I switched the phone to the other hand and fished for a cigarette. “The commissioner is kind of tied up,” I said. “Maybe I can help you.”

“Who was that other man — the one I talked to first?”

“That was the desk officer.”

“Why didn’t he connect me with the commissioner?”

“If you’ll tell me what the trouble is, I’ll be glad to—”

“Well! The trouble is that someone has just been killed in the next apartment... Now will you connect me with the commissioner, young man, or shall I—”

I put the cigarette down on the edge of my desk and reached for a pencil. “How do you know someone’s been killed?”

“Because I heard a shot over there, that’s why. Now will you—”

“What’s your name and address?” I asked.

“Hallaby. Mrs. Edward Creighton Hallaby.”

“And the address, Mrs. Hallaby?”

“Nine-sixty-one West Fifty-fifth. Does that mean anything to you, young man?”

“We’ll be right over,” I said. “Nine-sixty-one.”

“No, no! I’m not referring to the address. I mean the name. Does the name Edward Creighton Hallaby mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “You’re home now, I take it?”

“Yes. Indeed I am. And now I can understand why I wasn’t routed directly to the commissioner. You must be very new to New York, young man, or the name Edward Creighton Hal—”

“We’ll be right over,” I said again, and hung up.

“What’ve we got?” Fred asked.

“Hard to say. Woman over on Fifty-fifth thinks she heard a shot in the next apartment.”

“Thinks? You means she sounded like a crackpot?”

I nodded. “Well, let’s check it out, Fred.” I lifted my jacket off the back of my chair and slipped it on, and then scrawled a message for the squad commander so he’d know where we were.

“Nothing like hot weather to bring out the crackpots,” Fred said. “It never fails.”

2

Nine-sixty-one West Fifty-fifth was an eight-story apartment house on the north side of the street. There was a small foyer with a row of mailboxes along one side and two self-service elevators on the other. We looked at the names under the mailboxes until we found Mrs. Hallaby’s apartment number, and then took one of the elevators up to the sixth floor.

Mrs. Hallaby opened the door at almost the same instant Fred pushed the buzzer. She was older than I’d guessed, somewhere between seventy and seventy-five, but she wore no glasses and her movements were quick and sure. She had alert blue eyes and a lot of white hair wound into a tight bun at the nape of her neck.

“I’m Sergeant Thomas, Mrs. Hallaby,” I said. “This is Detective Spence.”

She bobbed her head about an inch to each of us. “And the name Edward Creighton Hallaby — it still means nothing to you, I suppose?”

I shook my head. “Which apartment did the shot come from?”

She indicated the apartment to the right of her own. There were only three apartment doors on this floor, Mrs. Hallaby’s and the ones at either side of it. The other side of the hall had a row of windows opening on an air shaft.

“These apartments have back doors?” I asked.

“No, they don’t. Why do you ask?”

“Because we’d want to cover both doors, if there was more than one.”

“When’d you hear the shot?” Fred asked.

“Why, just a few seconds before I called. I dialed the operator and asked for the police, and she—”

“We’ll be back to talk to you,” I said. “Come on, Fred.”

We walked down to the next apartment. Fred stood on one side of the door while I stood on the other. I knocked. There was no answer, and after a moment I knocked again.

“Police officers!” Fred yelled. “Open up!”

There wasn’t a sound. I glanced at Fred and shrugged. “You’re a better burglar than I am,” I said. “See if you can make that lock.”

He took a strip of celluloid from his billfold, inserted it in the crack between the door and the jamb, and moved it up and down until he located the tongue of the lock. Then he positioned the celluloid against the bevel of the tongue and pushed firmly, meanwhile twisting the knob with his other hand. The entire operation took, perhaps, ten seconds, and then the bolt snapped back and the door swung inward.

The girl on the floor was very blonde and very young. She was fully clothed, but her white dress was torn at the neck and waist, and her hair was disheveled. A cocktail table had been overturned and a small hooked rug lay half on the table and half on the floor, as if kicked or thrown there.

I closed the door behind us and knelt down beside the girl. She had been shot in the neck, about three inches beneath the right ear. There was just the one bullet hole, and that, coupled with the angle of entrance, meant the slug was still inside her skull. There was almost no blood.

“Looks like she put up a pretty good fight,” Fred said. He lifted one of the girl’s hands and glanced at the fingernails. “She didn’t get a chance to do any clawing, though.”

I straightened up. “Better call the lieutenant and tell him we’ve got a homicide,” I said. “I’ll check the other rooms.”

There was no one in the bedroom or bath or kitchen, and no evidence of any struggle. I got back to the living room just as Fred was hanging up the phone.

“The boys are on their way,” he said. “You find anything?”

“Nope. Looks like all the action took place out here.” And now I noticed something I hadn’t seen when we first came in. On the floor, hidden from the hall door by a large leather hassock, was a woman’s purse. It was upside down, and open, and when I lifted it a lipstick rolled away across the carpet.

There were the usual feminine items, but no money and no wallet. There was only one piece of identification, an Actor’s Equity Association card made out to Elizabeth Hanson. The apartment number and address indicated it had belonged to the dead girl.

“Any dough?” Fred asked.

I shook my head. “No wallet, no loose bills, no change, no anything.”

“Kind of looks like somebody killed her, scooped whatever dough she had out of her purse, and took off,” Fred said.

“It looks that way, all right,” I said.

“Maybe this was one of our loid-workers,” Fred said. “They’ve made a lot of hits in this neighborhood lately.”

I closed the purse, put it on top of the hassock, and stared down at the girl again. Fred was probably right, I knew. “Loid-workers” are burglars who get inside an apartment with the aid of a strip of celluloid, exactly the way Fred had done. Most of them use pretty much the same M.O. Usually they’ll step into an apartment house foyer, make a fast note of several names and apartment numbers, and then go down the street to a phone booth. They look up the telephone numbers for each name, and then call each one in turn until they find a phone that doesn’t answer. They let it ring long enough to be certain no one is home; then they return to the apartment house, go to the apartment, and get to work with their celluloid. That’s their only tool, the celluloid — if you don’t count the gun they’re sure to have. And use, if you’re unlucky enough to walk in on them.

It’s not at all uncommon for a long-time loid-worker to hit several apartments in the same building, one right after the other, spending no more than two or three minutes in each. They’re after jewels and money, mostly, but if they come across something larger that they think is worth while, they’ll look in the closet for a traveling bag and carry it out in that.

“Better look around a little, Fred,” I said. “I’m going back and talk to Mrs. Hallaby.”

“What was that bit she got off about somebody named Edward Creighton Hallaby?” Fred asked. “I never heard of the guy.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

3

Mrs. Hallaby had been peering out her hall door, but when I stepped into the hall she jerked her head back inside, and when I reached her apartment the door was shut. I knocked, and after about half a minute the door opened.

“Well?” Mrs. Hallaby said.

She didn’t ask me inside, so I stepped in anyway. “You were right about the shot, Mrs. Hallaby,” I said.

“Of course I was right!”

“Did you know the girl in the next apartment?”

“Know her? Well, I felt as if I knew her. I’d never actually met her, of course.” She paused, and her eyes grew very bright. “Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

She tried to look shocked and saddened at the same time, but she didn’t do a very good job of it. I sensed that, mentally, she was licking her lips.

“It’s the Lord’s way,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I could have predicted it.”

“That so?” I asked. “How?”

“Why, from the way she was carrying on. There wasn’t a night she didn’t have some man in there. Not a single night. Drinking, and playing that hideous jazz music, and Heaven knows what all. And the language she used! It was enough to singe your ears.”

“Did I understand you to say you’d never met her, Mrs. Hallaby?”

“Well, not personally. I don’t think I’d care to actually know such a person. As my dear husband always used to say...” She paused, smiling pityingly at me. “Were you sincere when you claimed you had never heard the name of Edward Creighton Hallaby?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well, then, let me enlighten you. Edward Creighton Hallaby — God rest his soul — was for more than twenty years the commandant of the Danielson Military Academy.” She squared her thin shoulders. “Danielson — as even you must know — is one of the three most select military academies in this country, and—”

“Mrs. Hallaby,” I said, “there’s a girl dead in the next apartment. Murdered. It’s my job to find her killer. What can you tell me to help me do that?”

“Well, of all the—”

“You said you could have predicted her murder, and indicated you’d overheard things. Can you remember any specific thing — any of the men’s names, for instance?”

“Well...”

“First, though, did you hear anything unusual over there this morning? Anything that sounded like an argument or a struggle?”

“Just before the shot, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I did. I heard her cry out — not actually scream, you understand — but just cry out, as if she had been surprised by something.”

“How long was this before the shot?”

“Oh, just a few seconds.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then I heard sounds... well, as if she were putting someone off.”

“Putting them off?”

“Yes. As if some man wanted to kiss her, and she was trying to goad him on by pretending to—”

“You hear the man’s voice?”

For once she looked truly sad. “No, I didn’t.”

“Can you tell me anything more?”

“I... I’m afraid not... Oh, yes! Just before the shot there was a sort of thumping sound.”

“As if a piece of furniture had been overturned?”

“Precisely. As if they’d knocked something over.”

From the hall I heard the elevator doors slam open, and then the sound of heavy steps in the hall, and I knew that the tech crew and the assistant M.E. had arrived. A moment later, the sounds faded to nothing. I listened closely. I knew there would be a lot of talking and moving around in the next apartment, but I could hear nothing. Not a sound.

I took out a cigarette and started to light it.

“I’d rather you didn’t smoke, if you please,” Mrs. Hallaby said.

I rubbed out the cigarette in a tray. Mrs. Hallaby glared at the butt with pretty much the same expression she might have used if I’d dumped a pail of garbage in the middle of her floor.

“Mrs. Hallaby,” I said, “there are several men in the next apartment now. They’re making considerable noise, and yet I can’t hear a thing. I’m wondering how you were able to hear so much.”

The reaction I’d expected and the reaction I got were two different things. She smiled, turned abruptly, and walked to a small carved table. When she returned she was holding a clear crystal water tumbler. She held the tumbler up for my inspection, and her smile became knowing.

“This is how I heard,” she said.

I stared at her.

“Come with me,” she said. She walked to the wall between her apartment and the murdered girl’s and placed the bottom of the tumbler against the plaster. Then she leaned her head against the open end of the tumbler in such a way that her ear was inside it.

I didn’t say anything.

She straightened and extended the tumbler to me. “Try it,” she said. “The tumbler picks up sounds and amplifies them. I’m surprised that a police officer doesn’t know such things.”

I went through the routine with the tumbler. What she had said was true. I could hear the different voices distinctly enough to identify each of them, and I could hear the sound of footsteps and the popping of flashbulbs.

Mrs. Hallaby stood with her hands on her hips, smiling triumphantly. “Well, young man...?”

I handed the tumbler back to her. “Amazing,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Her eyes began to shuttle between the tumbler and the wall, and I knew she was itching to listen in on the activity over there.

“About her men friends,” I said. “Can you remember any of their names?”

“Well...” She frowned.

“It’s very important to us, Mrs. Hallaby. I know you’d like to help the forces of the law.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Well, I remember only one, really. That’s the man that apparently spent the night with her.”

“Last night, you mean?”

“Yes. Of course I couldn’t swear he was there all night, but—”

“Exactly what happened, Mrs. Hallaby?”

“Well, I awaken quite early — around six o’clock, most mornings. Usually my first act is to place the... well, telephone against the wall. If I hear nothing, I prepare breakfast. Otherwise—”

“You remember this man’s name?”

“Quite well. It was—” she paused dramatically — “Jeffrey Stone.”

“Was their conversation friendly, would you say?”

“No, indeed. It was far from that.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’d been keeping up a running argument for several weeks, she and this Jeffrey Stone. It seems that Mr. Stone was jealous of her other men friends. He apparently wanted her to devote herself entirely to him.”

“You hear him threaten her?” She hesitated. “Well... no, I couldn’t say he actually threatened her.”

“You ever see this man?”

“Why, no.”

“Or the girl?”

“Oh, yes. I saw the girl. Several times. In the hall and in the elevator, and several times on the street.” She made a clucking noise. “A shame. She was such a pretty little thing, to be so utterly abandoned.”

I turned toward the door. “We’d like to get a statement from you, Mrs. Hallaby,” I said. “Would you mind if—”

“A statement? Why, I’ve just given you one.”

“I know. I meant a written one. Would you mind if we drove you down to the station house? We’d like you to dictate—”

“Is it absolutely necessary?”

“It’s the usual routine, Mrs. Hallaby.”

“Then, of course, I shall be glad to.”

“We’ll send someone around for you a little later in the day,” I said. “Will that be all right?”

She nodded, trying very much to look like a martyr. It was the first really successful expression she’d had since I’d met her.

I went back to the murdered girl’s apartment.

4

The tech crew and the assistant M.E., Dave Anders, were hard at work. The carpet was covered with chalk marks, the photographer had climbed to the top of the writing desk to get an overhead shot of the body, and the fingerprint men were dusting every flat surface in sight.

Fred Spence glanced at me a little glumly. “Looks like a real fast hit, Jake,” he said. “One will get you ten it was a loid-worker.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Our girl friend next door says there was an argument over here this morning. Seems Elizabeth Hanson here had been having a running feud with somebody named Jeffrey Stone.”

“Yeah? Who’s this Stone?”

“I don’t know.” I walked over to the telephone table and picked up the directory. Dave Anders glanced at me and nodded.

“Be with you in a minute, Sergeant,” he said.

I nodded, running my finger down a page of S’s. Jeffrey Stone was listed at an address in Greenwich Village, Five-thirty-one Charles Street. I made a note of the address and phone number in my note book.

“There was a call came in while you were talking to Mrs. Hallaby,” Fred said.

“You get the name?”

“It was one of those telephone answering services. They said they had a call from a Miss Doris Webber, and that Miss Webber wanted Miss Hanson to call her back. They told me the Webber girl said it was urgent.” He handed me a slip of paper with the name and phone number. I transferred them to my note book and lit a cigarette.

Dave Anders stripped off his rubber gloves, put them in his bag, and came over.

“You wouldn’t want to go out on a limb about the cause of death, would you, Dave?” I asked.

“Not me, Sergeant.”

Neither of us was kidding. No matter how obvious it may seem that a person has been killed in a certain way, nothing is official until after a body is posted. People have been shot after they have died of poison; others have walked a considerable distance with a bullet wound through the heart, only to step in front of an automobile and be killed that way. Stranger things have happened, and will happen again. That’s the reason for the postmortem. The cardinal rule in any medical examination is to establish the actual cause of death, and do it in such a way that there is no possibility, however remote, of any other cause. It is not always so simple as it sounds, but it is vital in any criminal investigation and prosecution, as well as in the settlement of estates and life insurance policies.

“One thing, though,” Dave said. “You notice that stain on her lip?”

“Yeah. Blood?”

“Hard to be sure.”

“Can’t you check it at Bellevue?”

“No. There isn’t enough for that. And it’s mixed with her lipstick, too. We couldn’t do a thing with so small a quantity, Sergeant.” He glanced over at the girl. “The point is, though, it might not be her blood.”

“What makes you think that, Doc?”

“Well, there was no bleeding through the mouth. It’s surprising, but that’s the way it is. So, unless her killer got some of her blood on himself, and then brushed it against her mouth, the chances would seem pretty good that she got her teeth into someone.”

“But there’s no way to test the blood, right?”

“I’m afraid not. We’d need a lot more of it before we could make any kind of test.”

“So, offhand, you’d say that if we got a suspect with a few teeth marks in him, we’d be pretty close to home?”

“That’s the way it strikes me, Sergeant.”

“Thanks, Dave. That’s the kind of thing a cop likes best.” I turned to Fred Spence. “Stick around till the techs are through,” I said. “And you’d better call the lieutenant and ask him to send you a stake-out to leave here for a while.”

“Okay. You leaving?”

“Uh-huh. I think I’ll talk to this guy Stone.”

“Don’t forget that girl. The one that called here. Doris Webber.”

“I won t.”

“It shouldn’t take us long.”

“Fine. I’ll check with you at the station house, Fred.”

5

Jeffrey Stone’s room on Charles Street in the Village was even hotter than the squad room back at the Eighteenth. And it was much smaller; so small, in fact, that the two of us made the room seem cramped. He was a very handsome guy, Stone was, a big guy with a lot of chest and very long yellow hair. I went through the preliminary routine without getting any reaction from him at all. But when I told him Elizabeth Hanson was dead, I did get a reaction. He’d told me he was an actor, but there was no acting involved in the way he took the news. It took me nearly half an hour to quiet him down enough to question him further. And even then he sat on the side of his bed, staring at the wall, as if he had heard my words, and understood them, but couldn’t permit himself to believe them.

I poured him a drink from the fifth on his dresser, but he didn’t touch it.

“What were you and the girl arguing about this morning?” I asked.

“The same old thing,” he said dully. “Other men. It was just her way, I guess. She... She never seemed to feel right with only one guy in the picture. I... I wanted to marry her, but she... she...” He broke off, biting his lip.

“You know any of these men personally?”

He shook his head. “No. But she’d tell me about them. Not by name, though. And sometimes I’d go to her apartment, and she wouldn’t let me in. Sometimes I’d call her, and hear a guy laughing at her place... Things like that.”

“She was killed about eleven o’clock,” I said. “Where were you at that time, Mr. Stone?”

His eyes came over to me slowly, and then moved away again. “You couldn’t think I killed her. You couldn’t think that.”

“I don’t think anything,” I said. “But I do have to check. Can you prove where you were from, oh, say ten o’clock?”

He drank his whiskey and sat staring at the glass. “I can prove it,” he said. “I got to my sister’s house at a little after eight. I had breakfast with her and her husband, and I stayed there until about twenty minutes ago. I just got home.”

I took out my note book and wrote down his sister’s name and address.

He mumbled something beneath his breath, and I asked him what he’d said.

“I said she was a fine actress,” he told me. “So far, she’d had only a few walk-on parts in Broadway shows, and she’d done a little television work, but she was on her way. Another year or so, and she...” He shrugged. “Why would anyone want to kill her? Why?”

“Can you think of anyone who might have? I mean, did she ever tell you of any threats? Did she have any enemies, that you know of?”

“No. Everybody was crazy about her. Men and women both.”

“She have any family here in New York?”

“No. She didn’t have any family at all. She was from Canada, originally, and her mother and father were dead.”

“I don’t like to ask this,” I told him. “But we’ll have to get a positive identification. We’d appreciate it if you’d go over to Bellevue and do that for us.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly. “All right. And listen, officer — can I take care of the funeral and all?”

“I think we can work that out,” I said.

“I haven’t much,” he said, “but what little I do have I’d like to... to...” He broke off again.

I poured him another drink, then went out to the hall and called his sister on the pay phone. She backed up Stone’s story in every detail. I wasn’t surprised. A cop seldom can afford to believe anybody about anything — until the evidence is all in — but this was once when I’d been willing to bet six months’ pay that a man was telling the truth. It’s a good feeling to have once in a while, when your job involves you with so many phonies.

I stepped back into the room and told him we’d call him before we sent a car over to take him to Bellevue.

He nodded. “There’s one more thing I’d like to ask,” he said slowly. “She had a ring. It was my mother’s, until she died. I gave it to Betty about a month ago.” He paused. “I thought of it as sort of an engagement ring... Anyhow, I’d like to have it. You know how it is. My mother wore it so long, and then Betty wore it — and, well, I’d like to keep it. It... it would mean a lot to me.”

I started to tell him I hadn’t noticed any ring on the girl’s hand, but I caught myself. “I think we can arrange that,” I said. “It’ll take a little time, of course, but we’ll probably be able to work it out for you.”

“It’d sure mean a lot.”

“What’d it look like?”

He took a sip of the second drink I’d poured him and put the glass on the floor. “It was a wide gold band,” he said. “There were several small red stones set into the metal. I don’t know what they were, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t very valuable. The stones were set flush with the gold, all around the ring. And they were of an odd shape — something like red tears.”

I nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”

I went to the door.

I said so long to him as I left, but he didn’t answer.

6

Fred Spence was waiting for me when I got back to the squad room.

“You come up with anything?” he asked.

“Nope. Stone checked out clean.”

“How about the girl?”

“Doris Webber? I haven’t talked to her yet.”

“Want me to do that?”

“Might as well, I guess.”

“What’s her number again?”

I looked it up in my note book, and Fred called Miss Webber and told her he was on his way over to see her.

After he left, I rolled a Complaint Report into my typewriter and began filling it in with as much data in connection with the homicide as we’d been able to get. Then I called Headquarters and talked to the chief of the tech crew. They hadn’t been able to do much for us. Most of the clear prints they’d gotten had checked out to the girl herself. There had been a number of larger prints — presumably male — but they’d been too blurred to work with. I asked the chief to call me the moment he got anything worth while, and hung up.

It was much too early to expect anything from the postmortem. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but as I said before, you never can tell.

It was a tough proposition to face, but the fact was that we were stymied. I couldn’t even call Stats and Records and ask for a list of possibles. Without a single fact about the man we wanted, without a witness, without a single clue — without anything, it looked like we were in for a hard time.

Fred came back an hour later. Doris Webber had an alibi for the entire day, and she’d convinced Fred she knew nothing about the murder. She’d called Elizabeth Hanson because she’d just heard of a possible opening for her in summer stock, up in Connecticut. She’d wanted Elizabeth to get up there in time for the audition. Other than the fact that the girls were friendly in a professional way, there seemed to be little connection between them. Fred had long-distanced the theater in Connecticut, and checked out Miss Webber’s story. The producer had told him Miss Webber had spoken up for Elizabeth Hanson and that he had agreed to hold the part open another day.

And so there we were. Nowhere.

We went back to the apartment house and talked to several of the other tenants and the resident manager. We called Miss Webber again, got a list of Elizabeth Hanson’s friends, and talked to every one of them. We talked to her agent, the delivery men who served her building, the man who did her hair, the stores where she sometimes modeled clothes. We talked to the producers and directors of the stage shows she’d been in, and to everyone connected with the television shows she’d done.

We knocked off once for sandwiches and coffee, and once again, along about three A.M., for a few hours’ sleep — and at ten o’clock the next day we were still nowhere. The autopsy had established positively that the girl had died from the bullet wound, and that was it. The tech crew had checked out every fingerprint, but they’d come up with nothing except the girl’s. A set of her prints had been fed through the IBM machines at Headquarters, but the result had been negative. Another set had been sent to the FBI in Washington, with the request for a teletype reply. The reply had just come in. Like our own check, it was negative. Which meant that if our girl had ever been in trouble, she’d somehow avoided arrest.

Fred and I sat in the squad room, drinking coffee, and trying to think up a new angle.

The phone rang and I lifted it.

“This is Barney Coe, in Lost Property, Sarge.”

“Hi, Barney. What’ve you got?”

“You called us and asked us to be on the lookout for a ring with red stones. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, we’ve been going through this morning’s DB 60’s, and I think maybe we’ve come up with something.”

“What’s the description?”

“Wait a minute... Okay. It reads, ‘One three-eighths inch fourteen carat yellow gold band with seven garnet stones.’ ”

I was on my feet before I’d hung up the phone. “What pawnbroker?” I asked.

“DeLima’s, on Eighth Avenue. You know where it is?”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks, Barney.”

“No trouble, Sarge. I hope you make out.”

7

“What’s up?” Fred asked.

“Lost Prop’s got a DB 60 on a ring. It looks like it might be the one I told you about, the one Jeffrey Stone gave our girl.”

“Maybe this is the break.”

“Maybe.” I called Stone and arranged to pick him up in fifteen minutes for a trip to the pawnbroker’s. Then Fred and I told the lieutenant where we were going, and went downstairs to check out an RMP car.

“Sounds good, you say?” Fred asked.

“Couldn’t sound better.”

The DB 60 card, from which Barney Coe had read, is the form furnished by the police to every pawnbroker in the city. Pawnbrokers are required to fill out one of these forms for every item they receive, and they must do it the same day of receipt. At the close of business each day, they mail these forms to Headquarters. There the forms are checked against lists of lost and stolen property. In case of a match-up, the police call the person whose property has been lost or stolen and arrange to take him to the pawnbroker for identification and recovery.

At the pawn shop, Jeff Stone identified the ring at once, but we couldn’t return it to him. It was our one and only piece of evidence.

The pawn record showed the ring had been hocked by a woman named Ann Hutchins, and listed an Eighth Avenue address not far from the pawn shop.

8

Ann Hutchins was, at the most, about seventeen. I hadn’t known her by name, but I recognized her immediately as one of the Eighth Avenue B-girls. But she was smarter than most. She didn’t try to be coy. She told us the ring had been given to her by a boy named Frank Rogers. She said he had given it to her yesterday afternoon, and that, as soon as Frank left her room, she had gone straight to the hock shop. She had, she said, planned to tell Frank she’d lost the ring. She volunteered the name of a run-down hotel on Ninth Avenue, where she told us Frank lived and where we could probably find him at this hour. We asked her if she had a picture of Rogers. She did, and showed it to us. He didn’t look much older than she was, a thin, hawk-faced youth with hardly any shoulders at all.

We went back out to the RMP and drove over to the hotel on Ninth. Just as we started across the sidewalk, a young man came out of the hotel. He took one look at us, and then whirled and ran back inside, with Fred and me right behind him.

As he came abreast of the desk, he skidded to a stop and turned to face us, one hand at his pocket.

But Fred Spence’s gun was already out. “Don’t try it, Rogers!” he said.

Fred Spence had guessed right. Rogers was a loid-worker, as well as a heroin addict. Once he realized we had him cold — what with proof that the fatal bullet had come from his gun, the garnet ring, and teeth marks in his left forearm — he seemed to take pleasure in telling us about it. The girl had come in a minute or so after he’d let himself into her apartment with his strip of celluloid. He’d jumped her, and tried to choke her, but she’d been stronger than he’d thought. When she’d sunk her teeth into his arm, he’d decided to kill her. He’d then stripped the ring off her finger, dug the wallet out of her purse, and gotten away down the fire stairs.

When Rogers finished with his admission, he mopped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and sneered at me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Can’t you cheap cops even afford air-conditioning?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t remind him how much hotter it was in that little chair up at Sing Sing.