Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos

Four

“It was the most horrible thing that ever happened,” she told me, her eyes wide and her voice trembling. “I was home at the time. It was three days ago. Monday evening. I live in a building kind of like this one. Except I live in a room, not an apartment. Just a furnished room. It’s a nice neighborhood and the rent’s cheap enough for me to afford and—”

“You saw a murder,” I reminded her.

“Yes. It was at night, around nine. I was in the hallway on the way back to my room. There’s no bathroom in my room, I just have this furnished room, and—”

She actually blushed. I didn’t know American girls still knew how to accomplish it. I told her to go on.

She did, in a rush. “A man named Mr. Keller had the room at the end of the hallway. His door was open. There were two men in there with Mr. Keller. They were arguing, shouting at each other. I heard Mr. Keller call one of them Dautch. That’s how I know his name.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“I’m not sure. Money, I think. Mr. Keller kept saying he didn’t have it and the two men kept on arguing with him. Then the other man — not Dautch — hit Mr. Keller in the stomach. Mr. Keller let out a moan and started to fall forward. Then he straightened up and went straight for Dautch.”

“And then?”

She closed her eyes for a second. She opened them and looked at me, her face a mask of fear. “It happened very quickly. I heard a click. Then Mr. Keller stepped back with a horrible look on his face. He put his hands to his chest. There was blood coming through the front of his shirt. He started to say something. But before he could say a word he fell over onto the floor.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I must have screamed or something. Because all of a sudden Dautch and the other man were turning and looking at me. Dautch had a bloody knife in one hand. I don’t know what would have happened next. But I ran into my room and locked the door. I even pushed the bed in front of it. I was scared they were going to kill me the way they killed Mr. Keller.”

“But they left you alone?”

She nodded. “One of them wanted to break down my door and take care of me. That’s the way he said it. But the other told him they couldn’t waste time. I just stayed where I was and prayed. I was sitting on the edge of the bed to make it harder for them to open the door. Then I heard them going down the stairs. It sounded as though they were dragging something heavy.”

“Keller’s body?”

She shuddered. “It must have been. I... I stayed right where I was for about half an hour. I was scared stiff, too scared to move. Then I moved the bed out of the way and, unlocked my door and went back to see if Mr. Keller was still there. I thought I could help him if he was still alive. But I knew he was dead, I was sure of it. Anyway, I thought I could call the police.”

“The body was gone.”

“That’s right,” she said. “There... there wasn’t even any I blood on the rug, nothing to show that anything had happened. I even started to think it was my imagination or something. I knew I couldn’t call the police. They would tell me I was crazy. I kept reading the newspapers to see if they found Mr. Keller anywhere. But they didn’t.”

“So you never got in touch with the police,” I said. I thought it over. “Well, I can do one thing for you. I can find out if Keller turned up.”

“How?”

“By calling the police and asking them. That’s simple enough, wouldn’t you say? Could you give me a full description of the man?”

She stared at me for a moment or two, then described Keller for me. I went over to the phone and dialed Police Headquarters. I asked for Hanovan at Homicide. He answered the phone gruffly.

“Roy Markham,” I told him. “I’m looking for an unidentified corpse, male, around thirty-five, dark brown hair, sallow complexion, going bald in front, about five-eight, medium build. You turn up anything like that since Monday night?”

“Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“To hell with you,” Hanovan snapped. “Listen—”

“You listen,” I said sweetly. “I’m supposed to receive full cooperation from all police officers. Don’t you remember? Now give me a little of that cooperation, damn you.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he said he would check. I held the line while he disappeared for a few minutes.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “Nothing even close on the unidentified list. Nothing even close on the identified list. You gonna tell me what this is all supposed to be about or should I guess?”

“You may guess,” I told him. “And thanks very much for your cooperation.”

I hung up and turned to Linda. “Your Mr. Keller hasn’t put in an official appearance yet,” I said. “So evidently there’s little point in your contacting the police.”

“How come they told you that?”

“We’ll get to that later,” I said briskly. “Let’s get back to this fellow Dautch. He was after you tonight. Is that the first you’ve heard of him since the murder?”

“No. He... he called me the next day. At least I think it was him. I picked up the phone and a voice told me to forget everything I saw last night or I would get hurt. Dautch rang off before I could say a word.” She paused. “I’ve had a few more calls like that since then. Always the same voice. Sometimes he’s been very... explicit. About what would happen if I didn’t forget Keller. He said filthy things, things he would do to me.”

“And then you saw him tonight?”

She hesitated. “I ate a late dinner downtown tonight. I had the feeling that somebody was following me but I didn’t see anybody. But I didn’t want to go home. I went to a movie by myself on Broadway. And even in the theater I felt that there was somebody watching me. It’s a terrible feeling. The picture was lousy but I stayed for the whole double feature. I was afraid to go home. And then finally I had to leave.”

“And you saw Dautch?”

“That’s right. That’s how I... landed in your lap, I guess. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

“Worse things have happened.”

She smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Anyway, I was on Forty-second Street and I saw him, him and the other man. They were behind me and I looked at them and they looked at me. I don’t think they were going to try anything. I think they were just following me waiting for a chance to get me alone. I ran for the nearest cab. It happened to be the one you were getting into but I didn’t let that stop me.” She grinned. “I just hauled open the door and hopped inside. I don’t think it was too ladylike but I wasn’t worried about it then.”

I thought it over. There had to be something I could do for the girl but I was damned if I could put my finger on it. A man was trying to kill her and all she knew was his last name. I could try to find out who he was, could try to discourage him from bothering her any more. I could find out more about Keller and try to solve things completely — by sending Dautch to the chair.

But all that would have to wait until morning.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said. “Roy, all you did was call the police and they told you everything you wanted to know. Are you a policeman?”

“Not exactly.” She looked at me questioningly. “I’m a private detective,” I explained.

“That sounds exciting.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“What are you working on? Can you help me? Or are you busy? Or do you just do divorce snooping and things like that?”

So I told her about it, because there was nothing much else to do and because I felt like talking. I ran through my initial discussion with Edgar Taft a night earlier, told her about my pursuit of wild geese in New Hampshire told her about the phone conversation with Taft, the return to New York, the game we were playing with the man in Bedford Hills.

“Then you’re not doing anything,” she said slowly. “You’re just pretending to look for a killer.”

“Not exactly.”

She looked at me.

“I’m not entirely convinced of this suicide,” I said.

“But if the police—”

“The police are occasionally wrong. You’ve got to consider their position. There’s an enormous temptation to write off a homicide as a suicide whenever possible. It makes their work a good bit easier.”

“That’s terrible!”

I shrugged. “I’m sure they believe it’s a suicide,” I said. “It certainly follows an established pattern. But I don’t think they’ve investigated as diligently as they might.”

“Then you’re going to waste your time looking for a killer who doesn’t exist?”

“You could call it that.” I smiled. “To be truthful, I suspect the suicide verdict is the right and proper one. I suspect my hesitation to accept it stems more from a personal distaste for getting paid for work without performing it. Edgar Taft has hired me. He’s paid me a size-able retainer and will pay me more. I can’t abandon the case, much as I’d like to. So I might just as well give value in return, if it’s possible.”

She was silent. I looked at her and saw how pretty she was. I wondered where Dautch and his friend were, and what they were doing. I wondered why Keller had been murdered.

“Besides,” I said, “there are a few points here and there that bother me. People in Cliff’s End seemed reluctant to talk to me about Barbara Taft. There was a secret somewhere that no one was saying anything about. God alone knows what it might be. Probably just my imagination. But I want to take a closer look.”

“You’re not going back up there?”

“Not yet. Not until we straighten out this Dautch-Keller business, anyway. But I’ll probably get back there in time. I’d dearly like to delay my trip until the spring, though. It’s cold in New Hampshire.”

We sat there and finished our drinks. It took me that long to remember what time it was. It was very late.

I stood up.

“Where are you going, Roy?”

“Back to my hotel. It’s late. We both need our sleep.”

“Don’t go, Roy.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to.”

Maybe it was too late for me. I was thick-headed, more so than usually. I stood looking at her while she stood up and moved closer to me.

“I don’t want to stay here alone,” she said.

“Frightened?”

She nodded.

“I suppose I could sleep on the couch,” I suggested, idiotically. “I’d be right here then. In case you wanted me for anything.”

She laughed, a sweet girlish laugh. She came close to me and was all at once in my arms, her face pressed against my chest. My arms went around her at once and I held her close. I may have been an idiot, but there are limits.

I tilted her face up and found her mouth with my own. I kissed her. Her lips were sweet. Her own arms went around my neck and her soft young body was tight against me.

“You silly man,” she was whispering. “You’re not going to sleep on the couch. You’re going to sleep in the bed, you silly old thing, and so am I. And that way you’ll be right there when I need you. And I’ll need you.”

And then she kissed me again.

We moved softly through the apartment, turning off lights and discarding articles of clothing. We found Carole’s bedroom in the darkness, and we found her bed in the darkness, and, finally, we found each other in the darkness.

There were violins and muted trumpets and crashing cymbals and all the other orchestral paraphernalia one reads about in cheap novels. There were her breasts, firm and full and sweet, offering their young freshness to me. There was her soft and wonderful body, and there was her small animal voice at my ear making small animal noises.

Then, afterward, there was sleep.

When I awoke I was the only one in the bed. It was bitterly disappointing. I called her name once or twice, fumbled my way out of the bed and into my clothing. Then I found her note. It was pinned to her pillow, and I should have seen it in the first place.

Roy darling, it read. A working girl must work. I’m off to the typing pool at Midtown Life. I hope I don’t drown in it. I get finished with work at five and I’ll come right back here. Please be here when I get here. You have the only key, and I’d feel silly as sin cooling my heels in the hallway.

By the way, your “friend” who lives here has funny taste in clothes. I borrowed one of her dresses. By the way, I think I’m jealous...

There was more, but it was a little too personal to repeat. It was also too personal to leave lying around. I read it, smiled a silly smile, and shredded it. I threw the pieces into the toilet and flushed them away.

My watch told me that it was ten-thirty. I found a small restaurant on Hudson Street which was open. Most restaurants in the Village begin serving breakfast at noon — which, when you stop to think about it, makes a considerable amount of sense. Ten-thirty is altogether too early an hour for a civilized man to be awake. I went into the restaurant and ate orange juice, toast, and coffee. It wasn’t much but it appeased the inner man.

It was then time to begin annoying the police.

I went to the Homicide division. My boon companion Hanovan wasn’t around but he had left word to the effect that I was an abominable nuisance who had to be tolerated. They tolerated me. Someone brought me a copy of the medical examiner’s report on Barbara Taft.

I read it carefully, which was only a waste of time. It said essentially what Hanovan had told me a night ago — death had occurred roughly three to five days ago, death had been caused by drowning, and no supplementary injuries were described. There were contusions here and there upon the body of the corpse but they were interpreted as having been caused while the body was in the water. None were on the head, which seemed to kill the notion that she’d been knocked unconscious before being dumped into the river.

I put the report back and asked to see the criminal records of everybody named Dautch. This jarred them a little. They asked why and I told them it was none of their business, which may have been stretching things a bit. But the orders to humor this British idiot had evidently been firm ones indeed. A uniformed policeman brought me a tray filled with cards. There were fourteen of them in all. Who would have suspected that that many persons named Dautch had criminal records in New York City?

I looked through the cards. Four of the men were obviously out of the picture. They were all over fifty, white-haired and feeble. Five more were currently serving sentences in one prison or another. Of the five who remained, one was nineteen years old, two were tall and blond, one was a Negro. The final “suspect,” if you want to call him that, just didn’t seem to fit the mold. He was a former bank teller who had been convicted once of minor embezzlement and who was now working as a shoe salesman in Washington Heights. I couldn’t picture him as the heavy type who’d been giving Linda such a bad time.

I sighed. I lighted a cigarette and returned the tray of cards to the long-suffering policeman. There seemed to be no additional way to bother him, so I left the station.

There was a public telephone booth on the street corner. I went into it and called my answering service. There had been half a dozen calls since I spoke to them last. I jotted down names and numbers on a slip of paper, thanked the properly honey-voiced girl on the other end of the line, and caught a cab back to the Commodore.

It is hard to say which I needed more, the shower or the shave. I had both and felt human again. I put on clean clothes, went to the phone and began calling the names and numbers on the piece of paper.

Dean Helen MacIlhenny came first. She’d had a roundabout report of what had happened and wanted to check it with me. I confirmed what she had heard.

“A terrible thing,” she said. “I feared this, of course. It’s a dreadful thing when a student ends his or her life.”

“You were afraid it would happen?”

“Of course,” she said. “Weren’t you, Mr. Markham? Neither of us suggested the possibility, of course. One never does. But one always fears suicide when a moody youngster is missing. It’s one of the less pleasant facts of life. Or of death.”

I agreed that it was unpleasant.

“And it happens once or twice a year,” she went on. “Even at a small college like Radbourne. You can count on it — one, two suicides each year. It’s awful that it had to happen to someone like Barbara. I thought a great deal of the girl. Difficult to handle but worth the handling.”

We talked some more, then ended it. I told her I might be coming up to Cliff’s End soon to round out the case. She assured me that I should always be welcome there and that she’d do anything she could to assist me.

I made three more calls, none of them having anything to do with Barbara Taft. One was to a tailor who had a suit ready for a preliminary fitting. I told him I was damnably busy and made an appointment for a week later. My bank had a check of mine that I’d written standing up. The signature was different from normal and they wanted to check with me before honoring it. I told them to go ahead. Another number turned out to belong to a man who wanted to sell me some life insurance. When I found out what he wanted I told him that it was sneaky of him to leave a number with no explanation. Then I told him to go to the devil and rang off on him.

That left two calls to make. One was to a tabloid newspaper. A reporter with gravel in his throat asked me if I had any statement to make in regard to my role in “the Taft case.” I told him I’d been retained by Edgar Taft. He asked me what else I had to say. I said that was all and rang off.

Then I called Edgar Taft himself.

“Just wanted to check with you,” he said. “Got anything yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Listen, they think she killed herself. They think she drove all the way from New Hampshire to New York just to throw herself into the Hudson. That make any goddamned sense to you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Hell,” he said. “Think about it, Roy. Now let’s forget about the kind of girl Barb was. I say she wouldn’t have killed herself in a million years, but let’s forget that for a minute. Suppose she wanted to do it, she was depressed, maybe she was a little sick in the head. Okay?”

“All right. But—”

“Let me finish,” he said. “Now, wouldn’t she just go ahead and kill herself there in Radbourne? Or maybe race her car and crack it up on the road? Hell, why should she drive all the way into New York, go straight into the city without even stopping at home, then park the car neat as you please and take a jump in the river? It doesn’t add up.”

“Unless she wanted to see somebody here first.”

“You mean some guy?”

“A man or a woman. Anyone.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “I guess it could have been that way. But I can’t see it, Roy. I know somebody killed her.”

He paused. “You’ll really work on it, won’t you? That cop sounded so goddamned sure of himself I think he was measuring me for a padded cell of my own. Don’t just play along with me, Roy. Don’t just humor me. If you don’t want to work for me, tell me. I can get somebody else.”

“I want to work for you, Edgar.” I wasn’t lying. There were too many loose ends for me to accept the suicide pitch that easily. “I think there’s a lot in what you’ve just said. I don’t know what I can accomplish, but I want to work on it.”

“That’s all I wanted you to say.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I’m a pest,” he went on. “I’ll probably call you once a day. Ignore me, Roy. I’m used to yelling at people until I get results. Just do what you have to do and ignore me.”

I wanted to tell him it would be as easy to ignore a tornado. Instead I repeated that I’d do what I could. Then I replaced the receiver and left the hotel.

That afternoon was a painful process of calling people and checking leads that didn’t even begin to develop. All I succeeded in obtaining were some negative results. A friend in the newspaper morgue at the Times brought me what copy had appeared concerning Barbara Taft. There was next to nothing, and none of it helped.

I ran through other sources and drew other blanks. I managed, in short, to kill a batch of hours until all at once it was five o’clock. That made it time to go back to Horatio Street. I had to be there when Linda arrived. After all, I didn’t want her to cool her heels in the hallway, as she had put it.

I caught a cab and let my driver worry about the rush hour traffic. He sweated and cursed his way to Horatio Street. I got out of his taxi, paid him, tipped him, and went into the building.

I walked into the vestibule, stuck my key in the door. I opened it and started inside.

Some sixth sense warned me. It warned me just in time, and I stepped back quickly.

The sap whistled past my ear.

I caught the hand that held it, twisted quickly and moved forward. My man spun around. I let go of him and sank a fist into his middle. He folded up and I hit him in the face.

But there was another one. He had a sap, too, and he hit me on the head with it. The world spun around and I got a glimpse or two of celestial bodies. I recognized Mars and Saturn. And a boatload of miscellaneous stars.

I went down to one knee. The first one — the one I had belted, the one who had missed me with his blackjack — was standing against one wall, doubled up in pain and looking unhappy. The other one was ready to hit me over the head again.

I rolled out of the way. He missed me — evidently neither of them could do much against a moving target. I picked myself up and threw myself at him and we both went down to the floor with me on top. I took one hand and hit him in the face with it. The room was still rocky and my head hurt horribly, so I took my hand and hit him again.

It was a mistake.

Because, while I was busy lying there and pounding one clown in the face, the other clown had time to make a partial recovery. I remembered him a little too late. I started to get out of the way but this time, by God, he knew how to nail a moving target.

The sap crashed over the back of my head and I flopped onto the floor as a fish flops into the bottom of a boat. The whole bloody galaxy paraded itself in front of my eyes this time. I even saw Uranus.

Then all the stars and planets winked and were gone. The world turned black and grew quiet.

And that was that.