The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Twenty-one

AT TEN MINUTES past one, I braked the Plymouth in front of the station house and started up the steps just as Stan Rayder started down.

“My God, Pete,” he said, looking at me with even more surprise than usual. “Where've you been?”

“Why is it everybody always asks me that?” I said.” Somebody has to work around here. Why shouldn't it be you?”

“You come up with anything?”

I nodded. “Yes. In fact, quite a bit. How about you?”

“Same here. Where'll we talk? Down at the corner?”

“What's wrong with the squad room?”

“For one thing, it's lousy with cops. For another thing, you owe me some coffee.”

We went down to the corner diner, a place so much patronized by the police that it is known locally as “Blue Heaven.”

When our coffee had arrived, Stan said, “It's your squeal, Pete. After you.”

“I guess Barney told you about Albert Miller's being Maurice Thibault and—”

“Yeah, I heard all about it. He's telling everybody.”

“He tell you that Edna Hardesty gave that alligator handbag to Susan Campbell?”

“Yeah — that, too.”

“All right, then. We can start with the talk I had with a woman named Josie Daniels. She and Susan are from the same little town in Mississippi, Stan. Susan was married when she was thirteen, and ran off from her husband when she was fourteen.”

He opened his mouth, closed it again, and sat staring at me. “Okay,” he said. “You talk, I'll listen.”

“The guy she married was our friend Marty Hutchins.”

“For Christ's sake!”

“That's listening?”

“All right, all right! Go on.”

“She never got a divorce from him. She was afraid he might find out where she was.”

“You get all this from the Daniels woman?”

“Not this part, no. I got it from Susan herself. But first I did a little telephoning around. I found out that she'd cashed in about four hundred bucks in savings bonds and whittled down her personal checking account right down to the nub. All in the last couple of weeks. Another thing she'd done is advertise that alligator hand — bag in the lost-and-found columns. I wanted a little ammunition before I braced her, and I got it.”

“You've got me, too. What's with the checking account and the bonds and so on?”

“Marty Hutchins and Nadine Ellison were shaking her down, Stan. Marty ran into her about two weeks ago; and five minutes later he was telling her she'd have to pay him to forget she was a bigamist. One look at her wedding ring and expensive clothes was all he needed to know he was in business.”

“And Nadine wanted in on the gravy?”

“She even made Susan fork over that bag. Susan had it with her, and when she couldn't give Nadine any money, Nadine took the bag as a sort of pacifier until Susan could get up some money for her.”

“Dr. Campbell know about this?”

“He knows now. Susan finally reached the point where she had to tell him.”

“To get more dough?”

“I don't think so. You can say what you want, Stan, but I think she's just as fond of Campbell as he is of her. If you'd been with me when I talked to her a little while ago, you'd bet your last nickel on it.”

“How about that telephone call Nadine made to Campbell up in Scarsdale?”

“Campbell was vulnerable too, don't forget. A man in his profession, especially with his reputation, was a sitting duck.”

“Did he pay off?”

“No. That's why Nadine was threatening him.”

“Then why'd Susan try to pass off the handbag in the lost-and-found? Or was this before she told her husband?”

“Before.”

“If she was so crazy about Campbell, how come she never got around to telling him she was already married to Hutchins?”

“She says she thought no one would ever know. It seems that when she got to New York, she started right in trying to get a little of the schooling she'd missed. She worked literally day and night, trying to better herself. She was ashamed of the kind of family she'd come from, and she tried every way she could to make herself over into something a little better. When she got a job in Campbell's office, they started hitting it off so well that ages didn't mean a thing. When he wanted to marry her, she had her choice of telling him about a big mistake she'd made when she was only thirteen, or not telling him and being happy for probably the first time in her life.”

“How'd you get her to tell you all this?”

“I explained to her that a bigamous marriage was a pretty serious proposition, just in itself, but that it could get a hell of a lot more serious if the papers got hold of it because we had to drag it out in the middle of a homicide investigation. She's too smart a girl not to have seen the light.”

“You didn't give her much of a choice, did you?”

“I didn't give her any at all.”

Stan sipped reflectively at his coffee for several moments.

“Is that all for your side?” he said.

“Such as it is,” I said. “Your turn now.”

“Well, all I know for sure is that some more of Nadine's loot turned up.”

“Where?”

“You remember that booster that used to give the boys such a fit in the liquor stores around the Garden?”

“The one they called Lonesome Liz?”

“That's the one. Her real name's Elizabeth Emmert. Anyhow, some citizen saw her throw away a paper bag in a trash basket. She was acting so scared and furtive that the citizen got curious and dug the bag out to see what was in it.”

“And what was?”

“Enough to make the citizen think he'd better take it over to the Sixty-eighth Street station house. There was a closed-out bank book with Nadine's name and address, and an ankle bracelet with her name engraved on it, and a fairly valuable-looking wrist watch, and the original copy of the translation she had done of that French newspaper clipping about Maurice Thibault. There was also a big double-handful of costume jewelry. It'd cost you quite a bit in a store, but you couldn't hock it for more'n a couple bucks.”

“Where'd Liz say she got it?”

“She said she found it on the street. That's her story, and she's sticking to it.” He paused. “There's a funny thing, Pete. Liz kicked the bottle about six years ago, and since then she hasn't been in any trouble at all. The boys up in the Twentieth Precinct say she's got some kind of night job that pays pretty well, and that she's been toeing that old mark all the way.”

“That where you were all morning?”

“Yes. The Twentieth called me up there just as soon as they saw Nadine's name on the loot. We tried to get something out of Liz, but all she'd say was that she'd found it on the street. We went up to her apartment and tossed it hard, but we didn't find a damn thing. She'd just moved in there, and she didn't have very much to look through.”

“How about the place she lived before?”

“Some of the other boys tossed that; too. Nothing in it.”

“Liz have an alibi for the murder limits?”

“She was on the job. Seems all Liz does these days is work and save her money.”

“No signs of boozing?”

“Nope. For a ginhead like Liz used to be, she's sure neat. Keeps that little apartment up on Seventy-fourth Street looking like—”

“Where?” I said. “Did you say Seventy-fourth Street?”

He glanced at me curiously. “That's right. Seventy-fourth Street. What's the matter with you, Pete? You look like I'd just—”

“What street number?”

“Eight… something. Oh, yeah. Eight Fifteen.”

“Eight Fifteen!” I said. “Stan, that's it!”

He put his cup down slowly and shifted around on his stool to look at me. “That's what?”

“The same apartment house where Maurice Thibault went out the window.”

Stan stared at me blankly; then, suddenly, he grinned and shook his head. “I guess the old flash-point's not all it used to be,” he said. “It took me a couple of seconds there to make the connection.”

I pushed my cup aside and stood up. “Better get on the outside of that coffee, Stan,” I said. “You and I are heading into some very hard work-and a lot of it.”

“Who needs coffee?” Stan said as he slid off the stool. “Just where do you think we should start?”

“With Lonesome Liz,” I said. “I've got a hunch she has a few things to say to us.”

“And,” Stan said, “the other way around.”