The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Six

BY THE TIME I reached the detective squad room on the second floor of the station house, the clock over the speaker on the wall said twenty minutes of two. There were no reports in my In basket and no telephone messages on my call spike. Aside from a teen-age blonde girl handcuffed to a chair near the door, I was the only one in the room.

“You, too,” the girl said. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, skin-tight blue jeans, and cream-colored moccasins with yellow lacings. “You, too, Buster.”

“What?” I said.

“The same thing I told the other cops they could do. You can do it, too.”

“They giving you a bad time?”

“They're trying. They've got me in on a possession.”

“Tea?”

“No, damn it; 'H.' They think I was holding two decks of the stuff.”

“Well, were you?”

“Hell, no. It's nothing but powdered sugar.”

“Been doing a little cutting, have you?”

“I was going to bake a cake.” She shook her head contemptuously. “Possession! What a gas. All they can do to me is apologize.”

I went out to report to Acting Lieutenant Barney Fells, the Commander of the Sixth Detective Squad, but the little cubbyhole he calls an office was empty.

Back at my desk again, I sat down, lit a fresh cigar, and went to work.

My first call was to the Bureau of Criminal Information, to ask for checks on Nadine Ellison, Judy Bowman, Iris Pedrick, and Eddie Dycer. Then, while I waited for BCI to call me back I phoned the officer who had been in charge of that morning's line-up to ask whether he'd shown any loid-workers or sex offenders. It seemed to me that there were enough unusual factors in the homicide to suggest the possibility of a sex angle, and I wanted to touch all the bases.

The line-up officer told me he had shown no loid-workers, and that although he had shown a sex offender, the man had been jailed yesterday afternoon and kept there ever since.

Still waiting for BCI, I went through the arrest flimsies and the D.D. 104's — the Reports of Unusual Occurrences by Detectives. I didn't find anything. There'd been the usual number of arrests and unusual occurrences, but none of them seemed to tie in with the homicide.

Checking the flimsies and D.D. 104's was standard routine, of course, because sometimes a person will commit one crime, and then commit one or more other crimes in an effort to cover up the first. A man who has knifed another may have gotten blood on his clothing and steal other clothing to replace it. Or a man who has killed someone may try to get out of town in a stolen car, or mug someone in the subway to get money for train fare. If the second crime is committed in the immediate vicinity of the first, and can be related to it in some other way, the arrest flimsies and D.D. 104's can prove helpful indeed.

But this, apparently, was not one of those times.

“You got a cigarette?” the blonde girl said

“Sorry,” I said. “I use cigars.”

“You would,” she said, rubbing her wrist where the handcuff had chafed it. “Why'n hell don't you send up a smoke signal for your buddy-boys? I'm getting tired of waiting. And besides, this particular type chair is hard on a girl's ass.”

“Quiet down,” I said.

“You know what you can do,” she said.

The more I mulled it over, the better the possibility of a sex angle began to seem. People do weird things for sexual enjoyment; strangling themselves and others is only one of them. The idea, of course, is to stop just the other side of climax and just this side of death; but by the time that point is reached, the victim is often in such a state of excitement that he know longer recognizes it. In our years together, Stan and I had cut down a lot of them: men dressed in women's clothing, girls with their bodies covered with obscene words written in lipstick, men and women with stomachs bristling with needles or forearms livid with cigarette burns.

But if Nadine Ellison had died in a similar way, it had been someone else who had handled the petticoat and the rope.

I didn't want to tie up my own phone again, in case BCI should try to get through to me, so I went back out to Barney Fell's office to use his.

I called Ted Norton, a modus operandi expert in another department of BCI.

“It looks like you've caught yourself a dilly, Pete,” Ted said after I'd told him how we'd found Nadine's body. “Maybe some guy was playing along with that petticoat, just for kicks, and went too damn far.”

“It's just an outside chance,” I said. “But if it did happen that way, the most logical thing for him to do would be to simulate a suicide.”

“Uh-huh. Well, it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time. You get an alky count of her yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “She had a bottle in the room, though.”

“Smell any on her?”

“No.”

“Sounds pretty good, Pete. If she wasn't dead drunk when the guy worked on her with that chemise—”

“Petticoat.”

“Petticoat, chemise — who cares? The point is, if she wasn't completely jugged when he was working on her, and if she hasn't got a single scratch or bruise on her to show she tried to stop him — well, what else could it be but that she was letting him do it, just for jollies?”

“We don't even know the cause of death yet, Ted.”

“Yeah. Well, even so, it looks pretty good.”

“How long'll it take to sift out the likely M.O.'s?”

“Not too long, Pete. Couple hours, at the outside. Now get off the phone so I can go to work.”

I hung up and walked out to my desk again. The arresting officers had taken the blonde narcotics suspect away, and in her place was Louis Lozeck.

“Hello, Mr. Lozeck,” I said.

“Mr. Detective Selby,” he said, and then sat smiling at me, bobbing his head happily, a harmless, pitiable old man with soft, gentle eyes, an enormous white mustache, and a yellowed, leathery face so completely and deeply corrugated with wrinkles that more than one press photographer took his picture almost every time he saw him.

Lozeck lived in terror of his sister-in-law, a woman who he was certain possessed the evil eye and bewitched him regularly. On the days when he found his sister-in-law's evil eye unbearable, he came to the squad room and sat there, smiling and nodding, until her sorcery lost some of its potency.

“Coffee, Mr. Detective Selby?” Louis asked.

“A quart, Louis,” I said, and put a bill on my desk.

He picked up the bill and went away, still smiling and nodding, but glancing about furtively, alert to anything his sister-in-law might send to bedevil him.

I sat in the empty squad room for a while; and then, tired of waiting for BCI to call me back with the results of their checks on the people I'd talked to, I phoned Lost Property and asked for a watch-and-check on Nadine Ellison's sapphire earrings.

The Lost Property Bureau maintains records of everything, from automobiles to billfolds, that has been reported as lost, found or stolen. If anyone tried to sell or hock the earrings at any of the city's hundreds of pawn shops, the transaction would, I hoped, appear on one of the Bureau's D.B. 60 cards — the form-cards which the city provides all pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, and which they in turn are required by law to submit daily for every article pledged or purchased.

In the event of a promising listing, the Bureau would check it out immediately; and if, as sometimes happens, the name and address of the seller proved to be phony, a detective would be sent to the shop to get a physical description of the seller, as well as to obtain as much additional information about him as the proprietor could provide. Later, Stan and I might come up with a suspect answering the seller's description; and if that happened, the chances were fairly good that we would also have come up with our murderer.

I'd no sooner returned the phone to its cradle than it began to ring. It was Milt Farrel, the detective who'd been running the checks for me at BCI.

“Just finished up, Pete,” he said. “Sorry to take so long, but I had to do a little phoning around.”

“That's all right. What've you got for me, Milt?”

“Well, first I'll tell you what I haven't. What I haven't got is anything on Judy Bowman, Iris Pedrick, and Eddie Dycer. What I have got is quite a bundle on Nadine Ellison.”

I picked up a pencil. “Let's have it,” I said.

“You should have told me the girl was married, Pete. It would've helped.”

“I didn't know she was.”

“Well, she is, boy. And if you want my two bits' worth, you'd better get out a pickup on her husband right away.”

“Why so?”

“Mostly because he's tried to kill her a couple of times. Maybe, this time, he got lucky.”

“When was this?”

“Little over a year ago.”

“Here, in New York?”

“No. In St. Louis. That's where they're from. I came across a hold order from St. Louis. They were after him for beating somebody to death in a brawl. They thought he might hit out for New York because his wife was here.”

“This brawl have anything to do with Nadine?”

“No. It was a long time after she left town. The guy just naturally likes to beat hell out of people, it looks like.”

“What about these tries on Nadine's life?”

“Well, they couldn't quite prove he tried to kill her; but that's what he did. He beat her up twice, and both times passers-by pulled him off her just in time.”

“Maybe you'd better back up and give me this from the beginning,” I said.

“Sure, Pete. I just finished talking with the St. Louis police a couple of minutes ago. They said Nadine and her husband were both orphans, and that they met each other at some kind of reunion at the orphanage. Anyhow, they got married, and everything was jake until Nadine had a baby. That damn near flipped both of them. Especially the husband. He went right off his rocker.”

“How come?”

“Hold on a minute and I'll tell you. They were at this little fishing shack out in the country somewhere, and all at once Nadine knows it's time to have her baby, and they jump in the car to start back to the city. But the car won't start, and the baby won't wait, and Nadine has it right then and there. Nobody else around for miles; just her husband.”

“That's pretty bad, I'll admit,” I said. “But it happens all the time, Milt. You mean it was enough to—”

“Jesus, will you wait a minute? It wasn't just having it that way; it was what the kid was when he finally got born.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn't a regular baby, Pete. It was a Mongolian idiot. My God, imagine how it must have been. Here they're out there in the middle of nowhere, and she goes through a thing like having a baby; and then it turns out she hasn't had a baby at all. Not a real baby. She looks at it and sees the poor little bugger's a monster.”

I didn't say anything.

“That's what flipped them,” Milt went on. “Hell, it would flip almost anybody. Her husband went right off his head, right then and there. He's pretty stupid, according to St. Louis, and he thought Nadine must have been making it with somebody that looked just like the kid. She told the cops she thought he was going to kill her on the spot.”

“Hell of a thing,” I said. “What happened?”

“I just told you. Her husband went off his head. He ran around in circles for a while, and then he took off down the road and left her lying there. She was there all night. By the time somebody drove along and picked her up, the baby was dead.”

“What's the husband's full name, Milt?”

“Burton C. Ellison. Goes by the name of Burt.”

“And you say Nadine took it pretty hard, too?”

“She took it hard, all right. She spent about a month in the hospital, trying to get over it. Some kind of trauma, St. Louis says. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't talk to anybody, wouldn't open her eyes. You know.”

“What happened to Burt?”

“He disappeared. The first anybody saw of him again was when he caught Nadine on the street outside her house one night and tried to beat her to death with his fists. This was about a month after she got out of the hospital.”

“He go to jail?”

“Not him. He got away from these passers-by who'd finally pulled him off her, and disappeared again.”

“How about the second time?”

“Practically the same thing all over again, Pete. This time he was waiting for her outside a movie.”

“And St. Louis thinks he might still be after her?”

“They don't think; they're positive. They say that's all the guy ever had on his mind. He's gone psycho as hell.”

“What's he look like?”

“It says here he's twenty-six, five-eleven, a hundred and sixty, brown eyes, brown hair, V-shaped scar on right inner wrist, and four-inch tattoo of dancing girl on upper right shoulder.”

“Is that all?” I said. “Hell, Milt, there must be at least half a million men in New York that would—”

“I know,” he said, “but that's all St. Louis had. They couldn't even find a picture of him, except for a couple of kid pictures from the orphanage.”

“How about the F.B.I.?”

“No luck. The guy'd never been in the service, never been arrested, and never been fingerprinted anywhere.” He paused. “That scar and tattoo ought to help, though.”

“Sure,” I said, “provided he happens to be walking around town with his shirt off and his right wrist turned up so everyone can see it.”

“Don't be bitter, boy. A little's better than nothing.”

“You got anything else on him, Milt?”

“No, that's all,” he said. “Got a little more on Nadine, though. She was in a small-size fracas a couple of days ago.”

“What kind?”

“Seems she and a friend of hers got in a hassle with a cab driver. Some kind of argument over the fare. The driver yelled for a cop, and the cop straightened everything out without having to haul anybody in. But he took their names and made a report, just in case.”

“What was her friend's name?”

“Hold on a minute while I find that damn sheet again… Yeah, here it is. The friend's name was Martin Hutchins.”

Martin, I thought; “Marty” for short.

“You got his address, Milt?” I asked.

“That's the only other thing I have got. It's nine twenty-three Bethune Street.”

I wrote the name and address in my book. “Anything else, Milt?”

“No, but you'd better get out that pickup on Burt Ellison. Ten to one, he's your boy.”

“I will,” I said. “Many thanks, Milt.”

“No trouble,” he said, and hung up.

Once again the phone started ringing almost instantly. But it was only Pickled Lil, a lonely old alcoholic who called the squad room at least twice a week to demand that we arrest her letter carrier because he never brought her any mail. I told her we'd arrest him that same afternoon, and then called Communications, gave them Burt Ellison's description, and asked that they broadcast a city-wide pickup on him. Then I reconsidered, and asked that they put the pickup on the teletype network that covers thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Communications fussed a little about the meagerness of the description; but there was nothing to be done about it.

When I had finished with Communications, I called the Chief of Detectives' office and requested the assignment of fifty detectives to full-time duty in and around Nadine Ellison's neighborhood for the purpose of learning as much as possible about her friends and associates, with particular emphasis on anyone thought to have used her apartment for assignations. The detectives were to be placed under the direction of Frank Voyce, an experienced man who would be responsible for the deployment of the other detectives and the evaluation of their reports, and who would be the only one of the special group with whom I would have direct contact. The group's primary objective was the collection of personal information about a specific individual, and not the investigation of a homicide. Each man would be furnished a copy of Nadine's picture, blown up from the snapshot Stan Rayder had taken from her dresser, and would be asked to watch very closely for reaction when he showed it to the people he questioned about her.

When I had completed working out the details, I hung up, took a blank folder from the supply cabinet, typed “Ellison, Nadine-Homicide” on the tab, placed the original UF 61 form inside it, and put the folder in the file drawer reserved for active homicides.

Next, after I had separated the picture of Nadine and Marty with a pair of scissors, I placed Nadine's half in an envelope, wrote both her and my names on it, and slipped Marty's half into my billfold.

Then I made one last call, to tell Stan Rayder about the arrangements I'd made for the fifty detectives under Frank Voyce, and that we now had, not only a line on Nadine's boy friend, Marty Hutchins, but also a brand-new, white-hot suspect in the person of her husband.

As I said so long to Stan, old Louis Lozeck came in with my quart container of coffee. He placed it on the corner of my desk and stood smiling down at me, the ends of his long white mustache looking a little frayed and his lined forehead a bit moist from his round trip.

“Never mind the change, Louis,” I said.

“The coins I will give to some small child, Mr. Detective Selby,” he said, smiling his beatific smile.

It was just a little fiction we indulged in. Louis' pride was too great to permit him to accept tips, even though he never had even so much as tobacco money; and so we had somehow fallen into this routine about his giving the tips to the little ones. A half-hour from now, Louis would make another trip to the corner, to return with some of the most incredibly vicious pipe tobacco I had ever smelled.

Louis Lozeck was the only citizen ever allowed to remain in the squad room alone; and I think the reason we'd made the exception was that the sight of the harmless old man enjoying his poisonous pipe in the chair by the door was the sole touch of gentleness in a place where, without him, it would have been unknown.

The coffee was too hot to drink. I took a few small sips of it in deference to Louis, picked up the envelope containing Nadine Ellison's picture, and went downstairs to leave the envelope at the desk and pay a call on Nadine's boy friend, Marty Hutchins.