The Copper Frame

Chapter 5

On New Year’s Eve, Saxon took Emily out for a single cocktail at 4 P.M., then dropped her at home and reported for desk duty at five.

It had long been the custom in Iroquois for the police to be tolerant of drunks on New Year’s Eve. Local drunken drivers were allowed to park their cars and were driven home by police, provided no accident or flagrant violation of the law had occurred. Out-of-town speedsters were usually merely warned and sent on or, if too drunk to drive, were escorted to jail to sleep it off, then were released without charge. Consequently, New Year’s Eve was usually a quiet night at police headquarters.

Until nine o’clock there wasn’t a single phone call, and the only radio message was from one of the squad cars reporting that it would be out of service for fifteen minutes for a coffee break.

At 9 P.M. Patrolmen George Chaney and Mark Ross came into headquarters hustling between them a lean, knobby-jointed man in his mid-forties. The man had a narrow, ascetic face, a humorless, thin-lipped mouth, and wore steel-rimmed glasses that began to cloud over the moment he came indoors. His overcoat and hat were obviously expensive.

Getting up from his chair, Ted Saxon approached the counter and gave Chaney an inquiring look.

“Forty-five miles an hour on downtown Main Street,” Chaney said laconically. He tossed a driver’s license and a car-registration form on the counter.

According to the operator’s license, the man’s name was Edward Coombs and he lived on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. The birth date made him forty-six.

Saxon raised his eyes from the driver’s license to give Chaney a puzzled look. Coombs showed no indication of being under the influence of alcohol, and it wasn’t customary to pull in sober speeders on New Year’s Eve.

“We stopped him twice,” Chaney explained. “About an hour ago he was speeding south on Main. We warned him and let him go. We just stopped him again going north, and he decided to give us a hard time. He wanted to know why we hick cops weren’t off catching criminals instead of bugging law-abiding citizens.”

Saxon looked at the motorist. “Well, Mr. Coombs?”

Coombs unbuttoned his overcoat, probed in his hip pocket, and drew out a handkerchief. Removing his glasses, he briskly massaged the lenses and put them back on. Immediately they started to cloud again, though not as badly.

“It’s a clear, moonlit night out, Sergeant,” he started to say.

“Not sergeant,” Mark Ross interrupted. “You’re speaking to the chief of police.”

“Oh?” Coombs said with a supercilious show of interest, which Saxon and both police officers found irritating. “You always work this late, Chief?”

“Just get on with your alibi,” Saxon said.

“All right,” Coombs said agreeably. “As I started to say, it’s a clear, moonlit night out, and besides, the main street of your one-horse town is brightly lighted. Apparently it hasn’t snowed here recently, because the road was clear and dry. Furthermore, there wasn’t another car on the street. I feel the speed at which I was traveling was entirely safe under the circumstances.”

The man’s tone was deliberately provocative, as was his reference to Iroquois as a one-horse town. Nevertheless, because it was New Year’s Eve and there was a tradition of tolerance for New Year’s Eve celebrants to uphold, Saxon attempted to be patient.

“The arresting officer says you were traveling at forty-five.”

“Possibly,” the man admitted. “I wasn’t watching the speedometer.”

“The speed limit on downtown Main happens to be twenty-five.”

“Yeah? You run a speed trap, huh? How much cut do you get from every fine, Chief?”

After gazing at him coldly for a moment, Saxon opened the traffic charge book and entered as much of the pertinent data as was available from the driver’s license and registration form.

Then he said, “Occupation?”

“Accountant,” Coombs said.

“Place of employment?”

“The Upstate Harness Racing Association, Incorporated.”

“Oh,” Saxon said. “The outfit that wants to build a race track here.”

“Yeah. Then it won’t be a one-horse town any more. You’ll have a stableful.”

Saxon silently finished filling out the charge, tore off the original and pushed it, the driver’s license, and car-registration form across the counter to Coombs.

“You will appear in City Court on the second floor of this building on Monday, January fifth, at ten A.M., Mr. Coombs. Bond is twenty-five dollars.”

“I’m not carrying that much money,” Coombs said.

Saxon indicated the phone sitting on the counter. “You may use that to call your family in Buffalo. You’ll have to reverse the charges.”

“I don’t have a family. I’m a bachelor.”

“Then I suggest you use it to call either a lawyer or a bondsman.”

“I don’t believe I’ll bother,” Coombs said with arrogant cheeriness. “Now what are you going to do?”

Saxon finally lost patience. “Throw you in the can, mister. Empty your pockets here on the counter.”

“Sure,” Coombs said with a shrug. He started to draw items from his pockets and lay them in a neat pile.

Aside from a wallet, he was carrying a key ring, penknife, handkerchief, glasses case, package of cigarettes, lighter, and forty cents in change.

“Take the money out of your wallet,” Saxon ordered.

Coombs drew out two one-dollar bills.

Saxon wrote out a receipt listing two dollars and forty cents in cash, one key ring containing six keys, one penknife and one cigarette lighter, and one wallet containing personal papers. Tearing off the top copy, he handed it to Coombs, sealed the enumerated items in a manila envelope, and stapled the second copy to the envelope.

“You may keep the handkerchief, glasses case, and cigarettes,” he said.

“How about my lighter?”

Ordinarily a mere traffic violator would have been allowed to keep all the items, but the man’s attitude had irritated Saxon to the point where he was according him the treatment usual for felony prisoners.

“You can call me when you want a light,” Saxon said. “Give your topcoat, scarf, and hat to one of the officers.”

Obediently the man removed the items and handed them to Mark Ross, who carried them into the squad room to put them in one of the lockers.

“Shake him down,” Saxon said to Chaney.

Chaney ran his hands down the man’s sides from beneath his armpits to his ankles, patted his hips, and rose from his stooped position. “He’s clean, Chief.”

“Take off your belt,” Saxon said to Coombs.

The man raised his eyebrows. “Think I might hang myself?”

“If I thought it probable, I’d let you keep it,” Saxon said dourly. “Get it off.”

Slipping it off, Coombs laid the belt on the counter. Coiling it, Saxon laid it on top of the manila envelope on the shelf beneath the counter.

Saxon lifted the cell key ring from its hook beneath the counter and tossed it to Chaney. “Stick him in cell number one.”

When the prisoner was lodged in the first of the three cells, Chaney and Ross prepared to go back out on cruise. At the door Chaney looked back and said, “Think he’s nuts, Chief?”

“He certainly has a defective personality,” Saxon said. “He did everything possible to get himself jailed.”

“Guess we obliged him,” Chaney said with a grin.

He and Ross went out.

It was quiet again for another hour. Twice Coombs called for cigarette lights and Saxon went back to the cell block to hold lighted matches between the bars. Otherwise, nothing at all happened.

At 10 P.M. the street door opened and a slimly built woman of about thirty preceded a man inside. The woman wore a full-length mink coat and a white headscarf that completely hid her hair but exposed a round, full-lipped, rather attractive face. She was wearing handcuffs.

The man was about forty, well over six feet tall, and with a burly frame. He had a heavy-featured, rather glowering face and his expression suggested that he was in some pain.

Saxon rose and rested his arms on the counter as they approached. The man held out his open wallet to display a Buffalo police badge that read: Sergeant of Detectives.

“I’m Harry Morrison of Buffalo’s Homicide and Arson,” he said in a deep, rumbling voice.

“Ted Saxon, acting chief of police,” Saxon said, extending his hand across the counter.

Morrison looked surprised. Clasping the hand, he said, “Glad to know you, Chief. How come you work New Year’s Eve? Shorthanded?”

“Just a favor for one of the men who wanted to go to a party. I didn’t have anything planned.” He looked at the woman with curiosity and she gazed back at him sullenly.

“This is Grace Emmet,” Sergeant Morrison said. “I’m bringing her back to Buffalo from Erie. Maybe you read about her.”

Saxon had. Grace Emmet had been the purported mistress of Buffalo industrialist Michael Factor, who a month previously had been found shot to death in the apartment he had been maintaining for the woman. Grace Emmet had disappeared. Neighbors’ testimony of overhearing a violent lover’s quarrel preceding the shooting, plus the fact that someone, presumably the woman herself, had carefully removed from the apartment all photographs of Grace Emmet, resulted in a warrant for her arrest on a homicide charge issued by the district attorney of Erie County.

The case had received considerable sensational coverage as a “love nest” murder, one of its most played-up factors being the woman’s cleverness in destroying all photographs of herself before fleeing. A composite drawing based on descriptions by acquaintances had been widely circulated, but Saxon saw that it was only a mediocre likeness of the woman. She possessed the same round face and full lips that he had seen pictured, but aside from that, he wouldn’t have recognized her from the drawing.

“She was in Erie all this time?” Saxon asked.

“Yeah,” Morrison said disgustedly. “How do you like that? We’ve had reports of her being seen everywhere from Denver to Miami, and all the time she was less than a hundred miles from Buffalo. The Erie police picked her up last night and she kindly waived extradition. Wonder if you’ll do me a favor, Chief?”

“Sure,” Saxon said.

“I’ve been developing a pain in my side ever since we left Erie, and it’s getting worse by the minute. I think maybe I have a hot appendix. I’m afraid to risk the last twenty-five miles. Can you stick my prisoner in a cell until I can get looked at by a doctor?”

“Of course. The woman we use as a matron happens to be at a party, but I know where she is. I’ll phone her to come over.”

“Why pull her away from a party?” the sergeant said. “At least until I’m sure I won’t be able to drive on. The prisoner won’t have to be searched, because she was searched by a matron in Erie, and I have everything she’s not allowed to carry in an envelope in my car. If I can find a doctor, I should know within an hour if it’s safe to drive on. If it isn’t, phone your matron then.”

Rules required that a matron be present at the jail any time there was a female prisoner. As this occurred too seldom to justify a full-time matron, the town’s only meter-maid, Jenny Waite, pinch-hit as matron when necessary. As a condition of her employment she had to keep headquarters informed of where she could be reached in emergency. But as the sergeant suggested, it would be a shame to interrupt Jenny’s New Year’s Eve celebration if the female prisoner was going to be there no more than an hour.

“I guess we can skip regulations this time,” Saxon agreed. He said to the woman; “I’ll hang your coat in one of the lockers.”

“Can’t I keep it?” she asked huskily. “I’m still cold from the ride. This dumb cop hasn’t got a heater.”

“Let her keep it,” Morrison said. “Which way do we go?”

Saxon took the cell key ring from his pocket and led the way back to the cell block. The three cells were in a row, the last one having a solid steel wall between it and the center one so that it couldn’t be seen into from the others. This was the “women’s section.”

As they passed the first cell, Edward Coombs said, “Company, huh? Maybe we can have a New Year’s Eve party.”

No one answered him.