The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Fifteen

I HAD just gone out to the bathroom to wash my hands when the phone rang. As I started to run some water in the basin I heard Miller answer it and then ask someone to hold on.

“It's for you, Mr. Selby,” he called. “You want to take the call now, or would you rather call back?”

“I'll take it now,” I said as I turned off the water and walked back into the living room. “It's probably my precinct partner. I left your number on his desk.”

Miller nodded absently, glanced at the palms of his hands, and started for the bathroom. “I think I could profit from a little soap and water myself,” he said. “Feel free to use the phone as much as you like, Mr. Selby.”

The phone was on a nightstand at one end of the sofa bed. “Selby,” I said.

“Stan, Pete. How's the roving detective?”

“Bushed,” I said. “Nothing like a toss to wear you down.”

“Any luck?”

“Not a bit.”

“Tough. What kind of a guy is this Miller, anyway?”

“Big,” I said. “How'd you know about him?”

“Sid Kaplan called. He said he just wanted to know how you'd made out on that telegram.”

“He wanted to bet me I wouldn't make out at all,” I said. “I'm glad now I didn't take him up.”

“Dead end?”

“Looks that way. All I got was a good workout.”

“You had another call. From BCI. They said to tell you they don't have anything on Miller at all. Not ever a traffic ticket.”

“Good for him,' I said. “What'd you find out from the Joyner Translation Bureau?”

“Very cooperative outfit, Pete. The boss came down right away.” He paused. “Boy, what a head on that one! The guy speaks seventeen languages. Can you imagine?”

“No,” I said. “What'd you find out?”

“Well, it seems this bill Nadine had in her strongbox was for translating an item from a French newspaper.”

“New York paper?”

“No, this was published in France, in Bordeaux. I can't pronounce the name of it, but it was published almost eight years ago.”

“What's it about?”

“Pretty interesting, Pete. Just what good it is to us, I don't know. But those French cops are on the ball.”

“Stan…”

“All right, keep your hair on. It's about this joker that knocked off his wife and planted her in the flower garden behind his house. Guy's name was Maurice Thibault. He was a linguist with some kind of import-export outfit in Bordeaux. That's a seaport city, Pete.”

“So they say,” I said. “What's the rest of it?”

“Well, the guy was a pillar of the community, and all that, and all at once he turns up missing. So does his wife. After a while the neighbors call the police, and the police toss the guy's house and yard and ask around a bit; and then one of the cops happens to notice that all but one of Thibault's flower beds aren't doing so well. But this one flower bed looks like it could nose out the champ flower bed in the whole country. The plants are all up and blooming like crazy. But it's the only one. The flower beds all around it have just about had it. And so do you know what the payoff was?”

“I've got a pretty good idea,” I said. “And even if I didn't, I know I can depend on you to tell me. Not necessarily tonight, of course, but—”

“Knock off, will you? It was terrific police work.”

“All right; so the cops found Thibault's wife beneath the champion flower bed. Terrific police work. And then?”

“Well, then they find out Thibault's pulled a disappearing act. They put a lot of men on it, and they stayed with it a long time, but they never came up with a single lead on him. Nothing. It was like he'd just jumped straight up in the air and kept right on going.”

“Is that all there is to the item?”

“No. It goes on to say that they dug up so much evidence that he'd knocked off his wife that they were able to go ahead and try him for it, anyway. In absentia, it says here.”

“How'd the trial come out?”

“Guilty. If they ever do find the guy, he'll get the guillotine.”

“And you say all this happened eight years ago?”

“Just about.”

“Damn few people ever just disappear into thin air, Stan. Funny they wouldn't have come up with at least a nibble or two in all this time.”

“It says they figure he could pass as just about anything. Speaking all those languages, and all, he could blend right in, anywhere he went. This export-import outfit he worked for in Bordeaux had sent him all over. He even spent two or three years in Canada — in Quebec, it says — and five or six years, off and on, here in New York.”

I listened to the water running in the bathroom, wishing I'd had time to wash my own hands, and wishing even more that I'd gotten something to eat before I came up here. I'd put off eating for so long that I was getting a little nauseated.

“I've got the clipping right here,” Stan went on. “It was stapled to the carbon copy of the translation. The boss at the Joyner outfit said they'd asked Nadine if they could hold on to it. Everybody around there was pretty interested in this Thibault, seeing as how he was a fellow linguist.”

I cocked my head to hold the phone against my shoulder and tried to clean some of the grime off my hands with my handkerchief. “You think our girl may have been pulling a little blackmail?” I said.

“She sure didn't have that thing translated just for the hell of it. If it wasn't blackmail, what was it?”

“With what little we know about her so far, it could have been anything.”

“Look at it this way, Pete. Say you had to bet your life on it, one way or the other. Either it was blackmail, or it wasn't. Which way would you bet?”

“Well, in a case like that…”

“You see? Remember that, Pete. Any time you've got to decide on something, one way or the other, just pretend you have to bet your life on being right. It'll cut through all the ifs and maybes and on-the-other-hands just like they weren't even there.”

“I'm sure that's very sound advice, Stan,” I said, “but—”

“Damn right. You just try it next time; you'll see.”

“I will. But even so, Stan—”

“Didn't you tell me that woman down at the antique shop — what's her name? — Pedrick. Iris Pedrick. Didn't you tell me the prowler that walked in on her in Nadine's apartment that night had some kind of accent? She said he just stood there for a while with this flashlight in her face and kind of talking to himself in some kind of foreign language. Right?”

“Yes, but what's a foreign language in New York, Stan? You can't walk more than two blocks without hearing half the foreign languages there are. And as far as just plain accents go… My God, how long've you been around this town, anyhow?”

“Long enough to know a girl like Nadine Ellison doesn't pay to have an eight-year-old newspaper clipping translated just for the fun of it. And she kept it in her strongbox, too, don't forget.” He paused. “That Pedrick woman have any idea at all what kind of language this guy was using?”

“She thought it might be Slavic,” I said. “But that's as close as she could come.”

“Slavic, eh? Well, that could be a lot of things, but it sure couldn't be French.” He paused. “You say she just thought? She wasn't sure?”

“Slavic was the best she could do,” I said. “But now that I think about it, Stan, I'm beginning to wonder how a man's French — or any other language, for that matter — would sound if he'd just raised his knife to kill a woman he thought was Nadine Ellison, and then suddenly realized the woman he was about to kill wasn't Nadine after all.”

“Maybe I don't hear so good any more,” Stan said. “How was that again, Pete?”

“A man in that position would be downright stunned, Stan. He'd be wondering just what had happened, and maybe mumbling to himself while he tried to figure it out. He'd be so choked up that his voice and tone and inflection would be completely changed. Chances are, whatever came out of his mouth would sound like just about anything you cared to call it.”

“Go, man,” Stan said, laughing. “Go! Go! Go!”

“What's the matter? You think it couldn't happen?”

“You kidding? I'm with you all the way, Pedro.”

“Well, it gives us something to hunch with, anyhow. If this Maurice Thibault did make it to this country, and if Nadine did tumble to him and start blackmailing him, it's easy to see why he'd show up some night with a knife.

“You know it,” Stan said. “Those guillotines give me the crawling sweats, just to think about them.”

“They're not too healthful, at that,” I said.

“So now we can figure on another suspect.” He paused. “You know, I think maybe I could get to like this Thibault just as much as Burt Ellison.”

“It's a good thing you never started playing the horses,” I said. “You'd be betting the whole field, every race.”

“In our racket, that's not always a bad idea.”

“We'll kick it around a little more when I get back to the squad room. Has there been any other action at all, Stan? It's time we heard from Frank Voyce and those fifty cops of his.”

“Don't worry about Voyce. When he gets hold of what we want, we'll hear about it.”

“All right, then. I'll grab a bite and come in.”

“Tough you had the trip for nothing, Pete. Hurry home.”

I hung up, started to reach for a cigar — and then suddenly stood very still, with the cigar halfway out of my pocket.

The water was still running in the bathroom. But there was no other sound. No splashing noises, no scrape of shoesole or whisper of towel, no sound of movement — nothing but the hissing pound of water against the bottom of the basin and the steady, hollow gurgling of the drainpipe.

“Miller?” I said, crossing quickly to the bathroom door. Then, much louder, “Miller!”

There was no answer, and no sound other than the water.

I tried the door. It was locked.

I stood there for a moment, trying by sheer force of will to deny what I knew intuitively had to be. It could be a heart attack, of course; Stan and I found DOA's in bathrooms practically every other day. It could even be suicide, just as it had been the time one of Stan's and my suspects locked himself inside his bathroom and cut his throat.

But this was neither heart attack nor suicide, I sensed; this was something that had happened because a cop had been inexcusably careless.

“Miller!” I called once more; and then, getting as much leverage as I could with nothing to brace my shoulders against, I booted the door about six inches beneath the knob.

The door burst open on an empty bathroom and a wide-open window. I glanced inside the shower curtain first, just to make sure, and then went to the window and looked out.

The only way Miller could have gone was straight down. There was no ledge beneath the window, no way he could have climbed upward or to either side — nothing but the flat brick rear of the building and a sheer drop of at least twenty feet to the moonlit concrete of the alley below.

It was the kind of plunge no sane man would take unless his only alternative was almost certain death.

But Albert Miller had taken it. And he had not only lived through it; he had been able to walk away.

The phone rang, and I went out to answer it.

It was Stan Rayder again.

“Glad I caught you before you left,” he said. “There've been a couple of developments.”

“There sure have,” I said.

“What's with the doomsday voice? I just got some pix of Maurice Thibault, Pete. Barney Fells came in, and he remembered there was a picture of the guy in one of those Justice Department circulars they're always sending us. He dug it up out of the basement and—”

“You think this Maurice Thibault is a pretty hot suspect, do you, Stan?”

“What the hell gives with you, anyway, Pete? You got a wild hair somewhere? All I wanted to do was tell you about the pix and ask you if you'd pick up some coffee on your way back. Why so steamed?”

“Miller took a walk out the window,” I said. “While you and I were talking, he—”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he's almost certain to be pretty badly hurt.”

“You mean he took a dive and… Jesus Christ!”

“So, if it's hot suspects we wanted, we've got one.” I said. “Now hang up, Stan, so I can call in an alarm.”

“You want me to come up there?”

“No. Stay where you are — and see if you can't use your head a little better than I did.”

“Hell, it could happen to anybody, Pete.”

“It didn't though,” I said. “It happened to me.”