The Case of the Petticoat Murder

Chapter Eight

FORTY MINUTES later I braked the Plymouth in front of Marty Hutchins' rooming house and let him out at the curb.

“I sure hope you're satisfied,” he said angrily as he slammed the door and bent down to peer in at me through the open window “You loused me up with that girl forever, I guess you know. From here on in my name will be crap.”

“Sorry, Hutchins,” I said as I put the car back in gear. “It was just something that had to be done.”

“Not that way, it didn't,” he said. “Hell, it was the first time she'd ever slept with anybody in her life! How do you think she felt?” He turned away from the car abruptly. “Cops!” he said, and spit on the sidewalk.

I eased the car out into the traffic, turned right at the next corner, and headed back toward the station house. I couldn't sympathize too much with Hutchins, but I did feel a little sorry for the young girl with whom he'd spent the night. She had been one of the few women I'd ever talked to who seemed completely incapable of sustaining more than one emotion at the same time. Elaine Walton had been terrified, and nothing else. She had been so terrified that she had found it all she could do to hang on to her reason, much less lie or dissemble, and for the first several minutes of our talk I'd thought I might have another hysterical woman on my hands. Once she had realized that she was in no danger of arrest, however, and that I had no intention of informing her family, she had been able to collect herself sufficiently to convince me that she and Hutchins had gone to bed together shortly before midnight and had stayed there until almost noon.

As I left the Plymouth and crossed the street to the station house, I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter after four.

I nodded to the sergeant on the switchboard and the lieutenant on the desk and walked over to the teletype machine to see whether the tape showed anything that might have some bearing on Stan's and my investigation. It was still a little too early to hope for any action on the alarm Communications had put out for the dead girl's husband, of course; but the station house teletype — or “gossip box” as it is sometimes called — is seldom still, and there is always a possibility that the next item to chatter its way across the yellow paper will be the one that breaks your case.

It was, all in all, an average tape:

A jumper was poised on the George Washington Bridge and one of the emergency units was trying to throw a net between the man and the river.

An ether addict had taken too much of the drug in the women's lounge at the Arcana Theater and had been pronounced DOA at Roosevelt Hospital.

A stolen Buick had been recovered at 73rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

A man had been swindled in a handkerchief switch in one of the bus terminals.

A teen-age gang rumble had been broken up in Washington Heights.

A cab driver had been slugged and robbed by two female passengers on Riverside Drive.

A man had been decapitated by a freight elevator in a building at 37th Street and Sixth Avenue.

There were others, many of them, but none of them of any interest to me. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, had a drink of water from the cooler in the hall, and walked into the squad room.

Old Louis Lozeck was still on his chair beside the door, asleep now, his white mustache stirring a little in the faint breeze from the electric fan mounted on one of the file cabinets. Two detectives were at the far end of the room, talking to a ragged, nervous-looking man with a bruised cheek and a heavily bandaged forehead; and another detective was standing by the window, one foot on the sill and a note pad on his knee, writing down something being told to him by a very thin Puerto Rican girl in slow and halting English.

Stan Rayder was at his desk, hammering furiously at his No. 5 Underwood, staring at the paper with mingled surprise and dislike. The surprise was always there, of course, and the dislike was for paper work of any kind.

“Hello, Pete,” he said, nodding to me as I pulled out my chair. “How's everything?”

“A little slow,” I said. “Any further developments after I talked to you on the phone?”

“No, damn it, we didn't come up with a thing.” He took the report form from his typewriter, folded it, and pushed it beneath a corner of his desk blotter. “What'd you find out from Nadine's boy friend?”

“He's in the clear,” I said, and told him the result of my talks with Marty Hutchins and Elaine Walton.

“This Hutchins sounds like a real wheel,” Stan said. “Here he's got a beautiful girl like Nadine picking up his bar tabs for him, and another beautiful girl stashed out in a hotel room, just to help him pass the time on his nights off from Nadine.” He paused. “Hey, I wonder how Frank Voyce is making out with his fifty detectives and their pictures of Nadine. No word yet, I guess?”

“Too early. Getting that many men under way takes time.”

“Barney Fells in his office?”

“No,” Stan said. “What could we tell him, anyhow?” He leaned back and put his feet up on his wastebasket. “You know something, Pete?”

“What?”

“I'll bet if we had a little more dope on Nadine's husband, we could wrap this squeal up in nothing flat.”

“You pretty sure Burt Ellison's our boy, are you?”

“I'd hate to be any surer. If I was, I wouldn't bother to check out another lead, unless it had his name on it.”

“We've got out an alarm,” I said. “That's all we can do.”

“Tough. If we knew a little about his ways and habits and what he does for kicks, we could really do a job on him.”

“If we knew, yes,” I said, reaching into the middle drawer of my desk for a fresh supply of cigars. “Funny that Nadine wouldn't bother to change her name, isn't it? With a guy like Burt Ellison on her trail, you'd think she would.”

“Who knows about people?” Stan said. “The things they should do, they don't — and the things they shouldn't do, they do first of all.”

“That's very profound, Stan.”

“Of course,” he said. “But here's something that isn't. You remember you told me to ask the phone company for a list of Nadine's toll calls?”

“They come up with one?”

He nodded. “About five minutes before you walked in,” he said. “Just four toll calls, Pete — all of them to the same place.”

“Where?”

“If I weren't so hot on Burt Ellison, I'd be a lot hotter on this Dr. Clifford Campbell, whose number she called.”

“Let's hope it's the same Clifford she threatened over the phone,” I said.

“I never saw such a guy,” Stan said. “Here I was figuring to perk you up a little.”

“There are lots of Cliffords,” I said.

“Not in any one person's life, though, Pete.”

“Where's he live?”

“Scarsdale.” He took the folded report form from beneath the corner of his desk blotter. “I ran a little check on him, while I was waiting for you to get in from the Coast. This guy's a neurosurgeon, Pete, a real big noise.” He glanced at the report form. “He's on the staff at Buchanan Memorial — if you want to know how big a noise.”

“Where's he have his office?”

“Warrison Building. You know where it is?”

I nodded. “Just off Lex on Fifty-first.”

“When I said he lived in Scarsdale, I meant that's where he has his home. He has an apartment behind his office, too, according to the dope I got from BCI.”

“What time were these toll calls made to Scarsdale?”

“That's another reason to think this is the same Clifford, Pete. The phone company can't say what time of day, but they were all made day before yesterday.”

“That's when Nadine's neighbor, Judy Bowman, said she heard Nadine tell somebody named Clifford that he was going to be the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived.”

“Hell, it's the same guy, Pete. Why make things any tougher than they are?”

“Just thinking out loud,” I said. “You say this Dr. Campbell's pretty well thought of?”

“I asked a couple of the does in the M.E.'s office about him. They both said he was one of the best.” He lit a cigarette and leaned forward to drop the match in the wastebasket. “And besides, Pete, Buchanan Memorial is the place where the doctors go. Everybody knows that.”

“I hate to think of tearing you away from that typewriter.”

“I'll live,” Stan said. “You want me to phone him first?”

“No,” I said as I pushed back my chair. “It's always better when you hit them cold.”