Masters of Noir: Volume 1

Identity Unknown by Jonathan Craig[1]

The cheap furnished room in the brownstone where the girl had been murdered was so cramped that it was hard for Walt and the assistant M.E. and me to keep out of each other’s way. The photographer and the other techs had finished half an hour ago and gone back to the station house. I’d put a patrolman at either end of the third-floor corridor to keep the crowd back. From the noise that came up both the front and back stairs, it seemed that half of New York’s west side must be down there.

The building super was talking to the two ambulance attendants in the hallway just outside the door. He was beginning to rub on my nerves. The M.E. had stripped the girl, of course, and the super was trying his damnedest to get a clear gander at her.

“Relax, Jacobson,” I told him. “You’ve seen young girls before. Wait for us down the hall.”

He gave me a hard look, but he moved away.

The M.E. pulled the sheet up over the girl’s body. “That’s it,” he said.

I motioned for the ambulance attendants to take her away. When the body was gone, and I’d shut the door, the M.E. sat down on the side of the bed and lit a cigar.

“She had a lot of living left to her,” he said. “She was about eighteen, I’d say. No older.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”

“You find anything besides those lumps on her jaw?” I asked.

“Not a thing, Dave. I won’t know for sure till I post her, of course, but right now I’d say the cause of death was a fractured skull.”

“Those bumps didn’t look so bad though,” Walt said dubiously.

“That doesn’t mean much,” the M.E. said. “When a person’s hit hard enough on the chin, the force of the blow is transmitted to the point where the jaw hinges on the skull. That causes a fracture, and a lot of times it’s fatal. The brain’s a semi-solid, Walt, and it doesn’t take much to damage it, or even tear it away from the skull altogether.”

I nodded. “The skin wasn’t broken, so the murder weapon was probably somebody’s fist. And besides, if the killer had used a club or something, say, he’d have hit her almost anyplace else but on the jaw.”

The M.E. took a deep drag on his cigar. “How’d you boys make out?”

“No good,” I said.

“No identification at all?”

“Not a bit.”

“That’s odd.”

“Yeah,” Walt said. “The only clothes in the room were the ones she had on. Nothing in the closet, not even a suitcase. And nothing in the dresser. No letters. No anything. She must have used this room for something else besides living in it. We did find a purse, but there wasn’t any identification in it. If she had any identification at all, then it must have been in a wallet, and somebody took it along with him.”

“You’re sure she wasn’t attacked, Doc?” I asked.

“I can’t be positive until I get her downtown, Dave. But I’d say no. There’s no evidence of that at all. Her lipstick was a little smeared, you noticed, so she’d probably been kissing somebody. But I don’t think there was anything more than that.”

“I’ve got a hunch this is going to be one of the tough ones,” Walt said. “It just smells tough, if you know what I mean.”

The M.E. got up and walked to the door. “Well, the sooner I get started on the autopsy, the sooner I’ll know whether I can give you any more help.”

Walt went over to the open window and sat down on the sill. “You got any ideas, Dave?” he asked.

“Just the shoes,” I said.

“The shoes? What about them?”

“The rest of her clothes are going to be hard to trace,” I said. “They’re nice enough, but they’re just like a million other garments. They aren’t expensive, and all they’ve got in the way of labels is the manufacturer’s name. They could have been bought in any of a thousand places, all over the country. But the shoes are something else again. They’re Jules Courtney shoes, and that makes them just about the most expensive shoes she could buy.”

“So?”

“They can be traced. The Jules Courtney outfit stamps all their shoes, not only with their trade name but with the name and address of the retailer to whom they’re shipped. This girl’s shoes were bought at a store in Atlanta, Georgia, Walt.”

“Fine. Nothing like an out-of-town corpse on your hands.”

I moved toward the door. “Let’s take another crack at that super.”

We left a patrolman in the murder room and took the super down to his living quarters in the basement.

He was middle-aged, surly, and about half drunk. “I told you guys I don’t know nothing about the girl,” he said. “She come in looking for a room last Friday. She paid me a week in advance, and that’s all I see of her.”

“You told us before that you didn’t know her name,” I said. “How come? You had to sign a receipt for the rent, didn’t you, Jacobson?”

“Receipt? Hell no, I don’t sign no receipts. It’s too much trouble. If people don’t like the way I run this house, then they can go live someplace else.”

“She didn’t even tell you her name?”

“I told you once. No. She asked me for a receipt, and I said no dice — so what’d I care what her name was?”

The wall behind Jacobson’s bed was covered with photographs torn from magazines and newspapers. Nothing but girls. Some in bathing suits and some nude. Walt walked over to look at them.

“Kind of like the ladies, eh, Jacobson?” Walt said.

“All right, so I like girls. Who doesn’t, for God’s sake?”

“We’ve talked with the other people on the third floor,” I said. “Nobody knew the girl at all. Nobody had seen her. They’d never even heard her in there. She have any company, so far as you know?”

He shook his head. “As long as the tenants don’t bust up the furniture, I don’t ask no questions. I don’t spy on them. I just plain don’t give a damn what they do. Maybe she had company, maybe she didn’t; I don’t know.”

“You mean to say you had a girl living in your house almost a week, but you never saw her but once, and never heard any of the other tenants say anything about her?”

“That’s right. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“How about when you took towels and linen up there?”

“Towels and linen ain’t due till tomorrow.”

“Where were you last night?”

He moistened his lips, staring at me. “You got nothing on me, copper.”

“Answer the question,” I said.

“You going to take me down?”

“I’ll damn well take you down if you don’t open up.”

“I ain’t saying till I have to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The people I was with — well, I don’t want to cause no trouble.”

“How would you cause them trouble?”

“If their husbands knew I’d been with them, there’d be trouble.”

“These are two married women, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Two of them, Jacobson?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” I said. “We’re going down to the station house.”

“Now, wait a minute. You can’t—”

“I’m tired of fooling with you. On your feet.”

He chewed at his lower lip a moment, glaring at me balefully. “All right. What the hell. I was in the first floor rear with Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. Austin. Their husbands work at night, up in Queens someplace. I was there all night.”

The M.E. had told us the girl had been murdered about midnight, give or take an hour either way.

“Listen,” Jacobson said, “if Cressy and Austin find out I was up there, they’ll—”

“We’re just interested in where you were,” I told him. “If your story holds up, that’s as far as we take it.”

“I never left the room,” he said. “There’s a bathroom goes with their place, so I didn’t even—”

“Those two couples live together?”

“Yeah. They share the same apartment.”

“We’ll check,” I said. “And meantime, Jacobson, don’t run off anywhere.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I got nothing to hide — except I sure as hell hope you won’t tell—”

“It’s a little late to fret about that,” I told him. “Come on, Walt.”

We checked with Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. Austin. They said Jacobson had been in their apartment until a little after five o’clock that morning. Both of them were sure he hadn’t left the apartment, even for a moment. That canceled out the super, at least for the time being. Neither Mr. Cressy nor Mr. Austin was home, and their wives told us the men often stopped at bars after they got off work, and that sometimes they didn’t get home until around noon. Both were very anxious that we not tell their husbands they’d entertained Jacobson.

We talked to as many of the other tenants as we could find, and then I left Walt to round up the others while I went over to check with the Missing Persons Bureau and send a wire to the Chief of Police at Atlanta. There wasn’t much I could do with the wire. I concentrated on giving the best physical description I could of the girl, mentioned the Jules Courtney shoes, their size, color, style, and the name of the store where they had been bought.

There had been nineteen women reported missing in New York during the last twenty-four hours, I found. I skimmed through the sheaf of flimsies and discarded all but two of them as soon as I glanced at the data on their sex and color. Either of the two remaining reports could have fitted the murdered girl. It happens that way sometimes, though not often. I went back to the heading of the one on top and read it through again more slowly.

There wasn’t much in it to help me decide.

I went down the PHYSICAL (NOTE PECULIARITIES) column. Everything checked. There were no peculiarities. But the CLOTHING column told me that Thelma Olsen had been wearing a blue cotton dress with small red figures, high heeled shoes, no coat or jacket. The murdered girl’s dress had been blue, but it had been silk jersey, not cotton, and there had been no figures. In itself, that didn’t mean too much. Descriptions of women’s clothing, especially if they’re made by a man, can be pretty far off. We’d had plenty of cases where men couldn’t remember whether women were wearing dresses, or skirts and sweaters. Women, on the other hand, are seldom wrong about clothing, and they can usually give an extremely accurate description of it, even after a lapse of months, or even years.

I read down to the space for REMARKS:

The report had been filed by telephone with the MPB by the girl’s father.

When I read the second report, I discovered I’d missed something. The girl fitted the description, all right, but her weight was given as 145 pounds. The murdered girl had been, at the most, about 115. There was the possibility of error, but it looked as if Thelma Olsen was my best bet.

Before I left the Missing Persons Bureau, I called the assistant M.E.

“Nothing much, Dave,” he said. “She hadn’t been attacked. That’s for sure. And she did die of a fractured skull, as I thought. We found a dental poultice in her mouth, tucked down between a lower left molar and her cheek.”

“Look like she’d been to a dentist recently?”

“No. There’s an abrasion on the gum, and she probably was troubled with it from time to time.”

“Doesn’t seem to be much point in checking dentists, then.”

“I’m afraid not. She’s never had any restorations or extractions. This dental poultice acts as a counterirritant. They’re sometimes pretty effective.”

“You know the brand?”

“I’d guess offhand it’s a Feldham poultice.”

“Yeah. I’ve used them myself. Anything else?”

“We found some blue fibers in the finger nail scrapings. There’s enough of them to match up under a comparison microscope with any blue material you happen to come up with.”

“How about her dress?” I asked. “That was blue.”

“Not the same kind of fiber, Dave. We’ve already checked. Not even the same shade.” He paused. “That’s about all, so far, I guess.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll check with you a little later.”

I phoned the lieutenant commanding my squad and asked him to detail some men to talk to people in the neighborhood of the brownstone where the girl had been murdered. I made sure all of them would have copies of her photograph, which had already been developed and printed in the lab, and told the lieutenant about the dental poultice. He said he’d detail a detective to check all the drugstores in the neighborhood.

I hung up, and then dialed the Bureau of Criminal Identification to see if I could expedite the check on her prints. They’d just finished. The girl had never been printed, at least in New York. A copy of her print card would go to the F.B.I. in Washington, D.C., of course, but we couldn’t count on a reply today, and possibly not before tomorrow morning.

I was just debating whether it might not be a good idea to knock off for lunch, when the answer came in on my wire to the Chief of Police at Atlanta.

Louise Ann Johnson’s partial dental plate ruled her out, and I wired the Chief at Atlanta to that effect.

I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then I went back to the precinct, checked out a car, and drove over to 418 West 74th Street to talk to Thelma Olsen’s father.

I asked him first for a photograph of Thelma, and he brought out a muddy snapshot of a girl in shorts and a halter, holding a tennis racket. The photo had apparently been taken around noon. The eyes were deeply shadowed by the eyebrows and the shadow of the nose extended down beneath the lower lip. You could tell that she had good features, and was probably very pretty, but that was about it. She might or might not be the girl whose skull someone had fractured.

“How long ago was this taken?” I asked.

“About two years ago.”

“You haven’t got anything more recent?”

“No.”

“Look, Mr. Olsen, your daughter was a professional singer. You sure there aren’t some better pictures of her around here? Publicity shots, or maybe a composite?”

“No. She had an apartment of her own, until she got arrested. They made her move back here, but she didn’t bring any of her stuff with her. Nothing but clothes, that is.”

“You know where this apartment is?”

“She’d never tell me. She said she was going back there, as soon as her probation was over.” He paused. “She didn’t want me showing up around there, I guess.”

“She have an agent?”

“Yeah. Let’s see...” He thought a moment. “Guy named Tyner, down in the Brill Building.”

I went down to Tyner’s office, took one fast look at the nine by twelve glossy he showed me, and knew I was no further along than I’d been when I first picked up Thelma Olsen’s missing-person report. I thanked Tyner and went back downstairs to the cruiser. Later on I found that Thelma had been picked up at a reefer pad over a curio shop in Greenwich Village. It seems one of her personal enemies, another girl, had seen Thelma go there, knew she was on probation, and saw an opportunity for personal vengeance by tipping off Thelma’s probation officer.

I drove back to the brownstone. Walt Nelson, my partner, hadn’t found out a thing. He’d talked to the rest of the tenants, but no one had even seen the girl, let alone known anything about her. Or so they said. Walt had had to call a few people in from their jobs, and the hard time they’d given him had left him a little bitter.

“Funny thing,” he said, “but the very ones that yell the loudest when you ask them for help are the same jokers that yell the loudest for help when their own toes get stepped on. I never saw it fail.”

We left a patrolman staked out in the murder room, and started back to the precinct. Neither of us said much on the way. I knew Walt was probably thinking the same thing I was — that we’d shot an entire day on the case, without turning up anything whatever. The first hours after a murder are the most important ones for a detective, and a lot of them had already gone by. You can usually tell, in those first few hours, just how the case will go. And this one was going nowhere. Our score was exactly zero, and it was beginning to look as if it might stay that way for a long time.

And then, when we walked into the squad room, the picture changed completely. We hadn’t been there more than a minute when I got a phone call from the morgue. It was from Johnny Morton, who had been on his job a long time.

“Listen, Dave,” he said. “I’m calling from a pay phone in the hall. There’s a kid in my office, see, and he wants to look at that girl you guys are working on. He hasn’t got a permit, and he’s acting funnier than hell. He isn’t drunk, but he kind of acts that way; I mean, like maybe he isn’t sure just what’s going on. He won’t say who he is, or why he wants to see the body. I stalled him by saying I had to leave the office to check with somebody else on letting him in without a permit. But he isn’t going to stay put long, Dave. You’d better get a move on.”

We got a move on. The boy was still in Johnny’s office. He was a nice looking kid, tall, and very thin. We took him out to the cruiser to talk to him. I could see what Johnny had meant about his acting funny. The kid was so scared he couldn’t think straight.

I climbed into the back seat with him while Walt got into the front, and then I said, “All right, son. What’s your name?”

“I knew this would happen,” he said. His voice was shaky, as if it wouldn’t take much to get him bawling.

“What’s your name?” I asked again.

“Ted,” he said. “Ted Wimmer.”

“Why’d you want to look at that girl, Ted?”

“I–I read about it in the newspapers, and I–I just had to see her again, that’s all.”

“Did you kill her, Ted?”

“No! God, no, mister!”

“What was your interest in her?”

“She — well, we were going together. I—”

“What’s her name?”

“Grace Knight.” He seemed to be pulling himself together. “But she didn’t like Grace. She made me call her Judy.”

“How long did you know her?”

He frowned thoughtfully; then, “From the first part of February. I met her right after she got to New York.”

“Where was she from? Atlanta?”

“Atlanta?” he repeated. “No. She was from Nebraska. From Omaha.”

“You sure about that?”

He nodded. “That’s about all she ever talked about. She liked it here in New York, but she kept talking about Omaha. She was pretty homesick, I guess.”

“She ever mention being in Atlanta?”

“No. This was the first time she ever left her home town.”

I studied his face a moment. “When was the last time you saw her, Ted?”

“Yesterday afternoon. We went to a movie.”

“You didn’t see her last night?”

“No.”

“Where were you around midnight last night?”

He hesitated. “I–I was just walking around the streets.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know where I walked, exactly. I just felt like walking. I guess I must have walked nine or ten miles altogether.”

“What time did you get home?”

“About one.”

“Just walking around, eh, Ted?”

“I know how it looks, officer, but—”

“We’ll take that up a little later,” I said. “Now here’s the way it is, Ted. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear from us. Understand? You tell the truth, and tell all of it, and you’ll be okay.”

He nodded, swallowing hard a couple of times.

“All right,” I said. “Now tell us this. Who do you think might have killed her?”

“That bastard she started running around with,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t. I just know she started fooling around with somebody else. She wouldn’t tell me his name or anything else about him. I guess maybe she was afraid I’d beat him up.” He reflected a moment. “And I would have, too.”

“She must have dropped something about him, Ted. Think again.”

“Well... she did say once that he really knew his way around. She said he was always getting things for her at half price; things like that.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Oh, you know... clothes and stuff.”

“You ever in her room, Ted?”

“Her room? Not a chance. That hotel she lived in won’t let men past the front door.”

“Hotel?”

“Yeah. That girl’s hotel over on the east side.”

“She wasn’t killed at any hotel, Ted.”

“I know that. The paper said where she was killed. The way I figure it, this guy and Judy rented that room just so they could use it once in a while.” His voice was starting to break again.

He could be right, I knew. And if the rest of his story was true, then he probably was right. It would explain why we hadn’t found anything in the furnished room but the girl herself. If she and this other guy were using it for a trysting place, she wouldn’t be likely to keep anything there.

We talked to Ted for another twenty minutes, but we didn’t get anything more. When he started getting rattled and panicky again, we took him down to the precinct. We left him in a material witness room, with a police matron to keep him company, and went down to the corner for a cup of coffee.

We sat there, drinking coffee and mulling things over, and suddenly I got a flash. I pushed the coffee cup back and stood up.

“What goes?” Walt asked.

“We do,” I said. “Out to Long Island.”

“What’s out there?”

“The Jules Courtney shoe factory. I’ve got an idea that’ll bug me to death till I check it.”

“All right, so let me in on it. I work for the same people you do, you know.”

I told him about it on the way out to the factory. I’d been thinking about the dead girl’s expensive shoes off and on ever since we’d come on the case, and talking with Ted Wimmer had triggered something in my mind.

“It was those shoes that threw us,” I told Walt. “They were stamped with the name of a store in Atlanta, Georgia, and so we naturally assumed they’d been bought there. That’s where we were wrong.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“Because those shoes could have been bought right at the factory. It should have hit us before, damn it.”

“Give.”

“All right. When a shoe company with a reputation like Jules Courtney’s makes up an order for a retailer, they stamp his name and address on their product, but before those shoes are shipped, they’re checked and double-checked for the tiniest flaw. If a knife slipped a fraction of an inch somewhere, or there’s a stitch out of place, they put those shoes aside.”

“So?”

“They won’t ship shoes with flaws, but they’re still perfectly good shoes, so they mark the price down to the actual cost of manufacturer and put them up for sale to their employees.”

Walt grinned and pressed down on the gas pedal a little harder.

We got to the Jules Courtney factory about ten minutes before closing time. We talked to the office manager, and then to a records clerk. The clerk was very efficient. Five minutes after we’d given her the size, style and other data in connection with the dead girl’s shoes, she was back with a signed receipt. They had been sold to one Ernest Coleman, an employee on the fourth floor.

It was past closing time when we got to the right floor and the right department. Everyone had left except one of the floor foremen.

“It wouldn’t have done you any good if you had come earlier,” he told us. “Ernie Coleman didn’t come to work today.”

We went back to the office, got Coleman’s home address from the office manager, and left the building.

Coleman lived in a railroad apartment just off Third Avenue. He was about twenty-five, about average height, and very muscular. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and a pair of overall pants. When he stood back to let us in, I caught the smell of whiskey. But he didn’t look drunk; he just looked sick. He didn’t seem surprised to see us. I got the impression he was even relieved.

He told us his mother and father were out for a while, and then he sat down on the old-fashioned davenport and stared at us. Walt and I sat down in chairs facing him. For a long time none of us said anything.

Then I said, “There’ll be finger prints, Walt.”

“Yes,” Walt said. “There’ll be finger prints. And of course Ernie here wasn’t home last night, Dave.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And then there’s the blue fibers under her nails, Walt.”

Walt got up and moved through the apartment, trying all the closet doors. Ernest Coleman and I sat there and stared at each other. After a while Walt came back with a blue sleeveless sweater. He sat down again and ran his finger tips across the material. “Yes,” he said. “There were blue fibers under her nails. The boys in the lab can put them under the comparison microscope with some of these fibers, and know right away, eh, Dave?”

A full minute went by, and then another.

Finally Ernest Coleman took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and gently rubbed the knuckles of his right fist with the palm of his left hand.

“She fell for me,” he said softly. “She was as dumb as they come. I–I thought she’d get round heels for me... but she didn’t.” He was silent a moment. “I got her to rent that room for us, and when she did I thought I had a good setup. But she... she was crazy...”

Walt started to say something, but I caught his eye and shook my head. He frowned and compressed his lips.

“She — she just wasn’t right somehow,” Ernest Coleman said. “She’d let me kiss her, and that’s all. I know she was burning up half the time, but she’d never... she’d never...”

I nodded. “Exactly what happened, Ernie?”

The sound of my voice seemed to startle him. He moistened his lips. “Last night it got so bad I couldn’t stand it any more. I tried to, but she wouldn’t — and all at once I just saw red and I hit her. She started to scream, and all I could think of was that she was going to get me in trouble. I don’t know — I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted to stop her from screaming. I just meant to knock her out.”

I glanced at Walt. He shrugged and shook his head.

“And then, Ernie...?” I asked. “When I found out she was dead, I lost my head. I thought I’d have to get away. I took all the stuff that might identify her and beat it. I thought the longer it took the cops to find out who she was, the more time I’d have to get away. But after a while I knew I’d have a better chance if I didn’t run away. I–I didn’t think you could tie me to her.”

I got up and walked to the telephone to call the precinct and tell them to let the other boy go.

When I’d finished my call, Ernie Coleman said, “Can we wait just a few minutes, till my folks get here? I–I want to tell them what happened.” He looked down at his right hand, with the faintly bruised knuckles. “It’ll be easier for them, if they hear it from me.”

I nodded. “All right, Ernie.” I went back to my chair and sat down to wait.