The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Five

THERE ARE, it seems to me, more different kinds of people, places and things in Greenwich Village than there are in any other part of the city. The Village, as a whole, is like no other place anywhere. It is all things to all people, and yet it is not always the same thing to any of them.

There are, for example, the saloons.

The Hi-Lo was a workingman's bar, a small, narrow place with black paint halfway up the plate-glass front and, above the paint, a couple of hundred playing cards stuck to the glass in fan-shaped groups of five, mostly straights and flushes. To the left of the Hi-Lo was a posh drinkery called The Academy, complete with gold-and-blue canopy and liveried doorman. To the right was The Ultimate Ecstasy, a shabby-looking dike joint that usually had more lesbians cruising the sidewalk outside it than it had paying customers within.

I walked into the Hi-Lo's air-cooled dimness and took the stool nearest the street end of the bar. Aside from the barkeep and a middle-aged lady loner, it was empty.

The bartender was about forty, a powerfully built man with a square, heavy-featured face, thick black hair combed straight back to the nape of his neck, and gray eyes with tiny hoods at their outer corners. He finished totalling up a handful of bar tabs, stacked them neatly beside the cash register, and walked up to my end of the bar.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “What'll it be?”

“Glass of water,” I said.

“Characters,” he said softly. “Straight?”

“With an ice cube,” I said, and showed him my potsy.

He sighed, drew a glass of water, dropped an ice cube into it, and sat it down before me. “So?” he said.

“You Eddie Dycer?”

“Maybe.”

“It's a hot day,” I said. “Too hot to fool around.”

He shrugged. “So I'm Eddie Dycer. So?”

I showed him the snapshot of Nadine and Marty. “You know these people?” I asked.

He glanced at the picture disinterestedly, then made a pass at the bar with his towel. “I think maybe I've seen them around,” he said. “The guy, anyway.”

“You've seen the girl, too,” I said. “You've seen her two or three times a week for the last six months.”

“What a fink,” he said. “She's got a big mouth, that one.”

“How much do you know about her?”

“What's to know? She's a friend of a friend of mine. All I know is she's too good-looking a piece to have such a big mouth.” He put both elbows on the bar and leaned forward. “What's the beef?”

“Nothing that'll be any skin off yours,” I said, “Just answer my questions.”

“So ask one.”

“I did. I asked you what you knew about her.”

“Look friend. I used her place a few times. That's all. If she tells you different, she's even a bigger liar than I thought she was.”

“She come in often?”

“No. Call it half a dozen times, maybe. No more.”

“But you've seen her quite a bit.”

“Like you say — two or three times a week. But I never took to her so much. The only times I ever really talked to her was when she came in here — and that hasn't been for quite a while.”

“What makes you think she's a liar?”

“You kidding? That girl can outlie anybody I ever heard. There used to be a couple of old-time con men come in here and lie to each other, just for practice. But hell, they weren't even in her league.”

“For instance?”

“Well, for instance, there was this stuff about a tapeworm. She's got this terrific shape on her, and so when I say something about it — you know, just kind of kidding her along a little — she says the way she keeps it is that she's got a tapeworm. That's the way she keeps from getting fat, see? She had this tapeworm put inside her by a doc in Europe. She says, over there, it's legal; all the women do it. But not over here. Here, it's against the law.”

“Bar talk, maybe,” I said.

“Nope, it isn't that. She doesn't drink much. It's just that she just plain can't help lying. Why, once she told me she was a Canadian. She went on and on about how her folks had this big stash up there and how she'd grown up speaking French and English at the same time. And then, about two weeks later, she sat right there where you're sitting now and gave me a long story about how she was brought up on this big-assed ranch down in Texas.” He lit a cigarette and let the smoke dribble slowly through his nostrils. “I could go on for the rest of the day,” he said. “One wild story after another. It was like she knew goddam well you knew she was lying, but she had to do it anyway. She just couldn't help herself.”

“All right,” I said. “Apart from the lying, what can you tell—”

“You've got it all,” he said. “Why should I stiff you? The only other thing I can tell you about her is that she never wore anything under her dress. No brassiere, I mean. She'd sit there and drive the boys nuts. If she wasn't sitting there swinging those knockers around, she was all the time yanking up her skirt and fooling with her garters. Between one thing and the other, she had the boys in a bad way.”

“And that's the story?” I said.

“That's it,” he said. “I don't know one damn thing about her, except what I told you. Lies, legs, and knockers — that's all I know.”

“How about the man in the picture?” I asked. “She ever come in here with him?”

“Every time. I never saw her with anybody else.”

“You know who he is?”

“His name's Marty something; I don't know what.”

“You know where I can find him?”

“Why don't you ask Nadine?”

“I'm asking you.”

“How should I know? He never says much. In fact, he never says anything. All he does is sit there and drink beer and look down the front of Nadine's dress.”

“You know what he does for a living?”

“No. But if you ask me, he's some kind of hustler. He's got it written all over him.”

“Any theories, Eddie?”

“Pimp, maybe. He's got the look-but then, so do half the characters that come in here. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Anything special about him?”

“If there is, it sure don't stick out. He talks kind of Southern. Real soft and lazylike. One night there was this dock walloper came in. A big bruiser-type guy with a real mean eye, and juiced up just enough to be nasty. He was sitting next to Marty, and I guess he must have been tuning in on his conversation with Nadine, because pretty soon he starts making out he's got a Southern accent.”

The lady loner down the bar banged her glass down hard enough to shatter it. “Service!” she yelled. “What'n hell kind of bartender are you, Eddie?”

“You're cut off, Mildred,” he said. “Go pass out some place else.” He shook his head. “What a way to make a buck,” he said to me. “Anyhow, this big guy is pretty pitiful. You know, like maybe he hasn't got all his agates. And so Marty is just sitting there, getting redder and redder, and all of a sudden he comes up off his stool and grabs this big guy by the front of his coat and lifts him clean off the floor. You never saw anything like it. He didn't say one word, Marty didn't; he just holds this guy up off the floor and looks him in the eye. My God, what a look he gives him! It'd chill your blood.”

“This Marty's a pretty good size, is he?”

“Yeah, he's pretty big. But this other guy is a damn sight bigger. He'd shade Marty fifty pounds, at least.”

“What happened?”

“Well, like I say, Marty isn't saying one word. He's just standing there holding this guy up by his coat and giving him the eye. The guy's like he's frozen stiff. And all at once his coat starts to come apart at the seams and he just sort of oozes down through it, real slow like, all the way to the floor. Must have taken him damn near a minute to get there, and all the time there's not a sound in this whole bar. Nobody can believe what they're looking at. And then the guy's feet finally touch the floor, and Marty just politely turns him around so he's facing the door and gives him a little push. Just a little tap on the shoulder, you know. But that was all, brother, that was all. The bruiser takes off. Hell, he didn't even look back once.”

I took a sip of my ice water.

“Marty and Nadine get along together?” I asked.

“Like mother and son,” he said. “Man, you should see them. She babies him like he was about nine years old.”

“How old is he, by the way?”

“About thirty — give or take a couple years.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“They get along beautiful. Nadine does all the paying, too. She won't let Marty spend a dime. All friend Marty does is slop up beer and look down her dress. It's like she had a magnet hanging down there.”

“How long's Marty been around?”

“Couple months, I guess. That's the first I ever saw of him, anyhow.”

“You think any of your other customers could give me a line on him?”

“I doubt it. He only talks to Nadine. I'll, bet that guy hasn't said more than ten words to anybody else in all the times he's been in here.”

“A little service down here, God damn it,” the lady loner said to nobody in particular.

“Anything else you can tell me, Eddie?” I asked.

“Nothing that'd do you any good, chief.”

“All right,” I said, getting off the stool. “If you think of anything else, give me a call at the station house. My name's Selby.”

“Sure thing, chief. I'll do that.”

“And ditto if Marty should happen to drop in. If I'm not there, ask for Detective Rayder. If he isn't there either, leave a message.”

I walked outside, turned back in the direction of the specialty store above the dead girl's apartment, then paused.

The store was on the other side of Bleecker, little more than half a block away, and I was surprised at the size of the crowd that had already obstructed the sidewalk and was beginning to spill over into the street. The reporters and photographers would be there by now, I knew, as well as two or three D.A.'s men, a cop or so from Homicide West, and a growing number of brass hats from Headquarters and the other precincts.

It was an old story. The brass swarms in, mills around, makes statements to the press, and then swarms off again, leaving the squeal to the men who'll do the actual work: the precinct detective team.

I felt a little sorry for Stan, sweltering down there in that one-room apartment. What with bowing to the visiting royalty and answering the same questions over and over again with each new arrival, he'd have his hands full for some time to come. Still, if I went back to the apartment, I'd have to go through exactly the same routine — which would mean that both of us would be hung up indefinitely while there was urgent work waiting to be done, that ought to be begun at once.

I walked back into the bar, looked up Nadine Ellison's number in the directory on the shelf outside the phone booth, and called it.

Stan Rayder's voice was very pleasant, very polite.

“Sorry, Stan,” I said. “It's only me.”

“Just my luck,” he said.

“You mind holding the fort alone?” I asked. “I'd like to head back to the squad room and get things rolling.”

“Good idea. We've got wall-to-wall brass here, and brass on top of brass.”

“Any new developments?”

“No. How about you?”

I filled him in on my sessions with Iris Pedrick and Eddie Dycer.

“So that's what our girl was doing,” he said when I'd finished. “Making a damn good living just renting out her workbench!”

“The body still there?”

“Yeah, but the M.E. is about to ship it to Bellevue.”

“Well, I guess that's just about it, Stan.”

“Say hello to the gang at the precinct,” he said wryly.

I hung up, left the bar, and walked down to the unmarked Plymouth sedan in which Stan and I had arrived.

On my way back to the station house I kept seeing Nadine Ellison's naked body twisting slowly on the steam pipe. Her killer could be in Miami by now, I reflected. Or in Los Angeles. Or he might be out over the Atlantic, halfway to Europe.

And then again, he might be quietly drinking beer in a Village bar just like the one I'd walked out of a few moments ago.