Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “How would you cause them trouble?”

  “If their husbands knew I’d been with them, there’d be trouble.”

  “These are two married women, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Two of them, Jacobson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re going down to the station house.”

  “Now, wait a minute. You can’t—”

  “I’m tired of fooling with you. On your feet.”

  He chewed at his lower lip a moment, glaring at me balefully. “All right. What the hell. I was in the first floor rear with Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. Austin. Their husbands work at night, up in Queens someplace. I was there all night.”

  The M.E. had told us the girl had been murdered about midnight, give or take an hour either way.

  “Listen,” Jacobson said, “if Cressy and Austin find out I was up there, they’ll—”

  “We’re just interested in where you were,” I told him. “If your story holds up, that’s as far as we take it.”

  “I never left the room,” he said. “There’s a bathroom goes with their place, so I didn’t even—”

  “Those two couples live together?”

  “Yeah. They share the same apartment.”

  “We’ll check,” I said. “And meantime, Jacobson, don’t run off anywhere.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got nothing to hide—except I sure as hell hope you won’t tell—”

  “It’s a little late to fret about that,” I told him. “Come on, Walt.”

  We checked with Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. Austin. They said Jacobson had been in their apartment until a little after five o’clock that morning. Both of them were sure he hadn’t left the apartment, even for a moment. That canceled out the super, at least for the time being. Neither Mr. Cressy nor Mr. Austin was home, and their wives told us the men often stopped at bars after they got off work, and that sometimes they didn’t get home until around noon. Both were very anxious that we not tell their husbands they’d entertained Jacobson.

  We talked to as many of the other tenants as we could find, and then I left Walt to round up the others while I went over to check with the Missing Persons Bureau and send a wire to the Chief of Police at Atlanta. There wasn’t much I could do with the wire. I concentrated on giving the best physical description I could of the girl, mentioned the Jules Courtney shoes, their size, color, style, and the name of the store where they had been bought.

  There had been nineteen women reported missing in New York during the last twenty-four hours, I found. I skimmed through the sheaf of flimsies and discarded all but two of them as soon as I glanced at the data on their sex and color. Either of the two remaining reports could have fitted the murdered girl. It happens that way sometimes, though not often. I went back to the heading of the one on top and read it through again more slowly.

  There wasn’t much in it to help me decide.

  POLICE DEPARTMENT

  City of New York

  REPORT OF MISSING PERSON

  Surname: Olsen; First Name: Thelma; Initials: G.

  Nativity: Norway; Sex: F; Age: 17; Color: W

  Address; Last Seen At:

  418 W. 74th, Mnhtn. Leaving home address

  Date and Time Seen; Probably Destination:

  5/3/54 Unknown

  Cause of Absence; Date and Time Reported

  Unknown 5/4/54 6:20 A.M.

  I went down the PHYSICAL (NOTE PECULIARITIES) column. Everything checked. There were no peculiarities. But the CLOTHING column told me that Thelma Olsen had been wearing a blue cotton dress with small red figures, high heeled shoes, no coat or jacket. The murdered girl’s dress had been blue, but it had been silk jersey, not cotton, and there had been no figures. In itself, that didn’t mean too much. Descriptions of women’s clothing, especially if they’re made by a man, can be pretty far off. We’d had plenty of cases where men couldn’t remember whether women were wearing dresses, or skirts and sweaters. Women, on the other hand, are seldom wrong about clothing, and they can usually give an extremely accurate description of it, even after a lapse of months, or even years.

  I read down to the space for REMARKS:

  Girl is on probation on possession of narcotics charge (marijuana), no other arrests or convictions. Looks much older than true age. Once, when fifteen, passed as eighteen and toured country with dance orchestra. Father has long record of D&D arrests, four short-term sentences.

  The report had been filed by telephone with the MPB by the girl’s father.

  When I read the second report, I discovered I’d missed something. The girl fitted the description, all right, but her weight was given as 145 pounds. The murdered girl had been, at the most, about 115. There was the possibility of error, but it looked as if Thelma Olsen was my best bet.

  Before I left the Missing Persons Bureau, I called the assistant M.E.

  “Nothing much, Dave,” he said. “She hadn’t been attacked. That’s for sure. And she did die of a fractured skull, as I thought. We found a dental poultice in her mouth, tucked down between a lower left molar and her cheek.”

  “Look like she’d been to a dentist recently?”

  “No. There’s an abrasion on the gum, and she probably was troubled with it from time to time.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be much point in checking dentists, then.”

  “I’m afraid not. She’s never had any restorations or extractions. This dental poultice acts as a counterirritant. They’re sometimes pretty effective.”

  “You know the brand?”

  “I’d guess offhand it’s a Feldham poultice.”

  “Yeah. I’ve used them myself. Anything else?”

  “We found some blue fibers in the finger nail scrapings. There’s enough of them to match up under a comparison microscope with any blue material you happen to come up with.”

  “How about her dress?” I asked. “That was blue.”

  “Not the same kind of fiber, Dave. We’ve already checked. Not even the same shade.” He paused. “That’s about all, so far, I guess.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll check with you a little later.”

  I phoned the lieutenant commanding my squad and asked him to detail some men to talk to people in the neighborhood of the brownstone where the girl had been murdered. I made sure all of them would have copies of her photograph, which had already been developed and printed in the lab, and told the lieutenant about the dental poultice. He said he’d detail a detective to check all the drugstores in the neighborhood.

  I hung up, and then dialed the Bureau of Criminal Identification to see if I could expedite the check on her prints. They’d just finished. The girl had never been printed, at least in New York. A copy of her print card would go to the F.B.I. in Washington, D.C., of course, but we couldn’t count on a reply today, and possibly not before tomorrow morning.

  I was just debating whether it might not be a good idea to knock off for lunch, when the answer came in on my wire to the Chief of Police at Atlanta.

  POLICE DEPARTMENT, NEW YORK CITY, EIGHTEENTH PRECINCT, DETECTIVE SQUAD, HOMICIDE, ATTENTION DETECTIVE-SERGEANT DAVE EMORY—RE YOUR QUERY THIS DATE STOP ONLY MISSING PERSON ANSWERING DESCRIPTION IS LOUISE ANN JOHNSON STOP ESCAPED POLICE CUSTODY MONDAY LAST WHILE BEING TRANSFERRED FROM TRAIN TO POLICE VAN STOP LOUISE HAS TWO INCH SCAR RIGHT FOREARM AND PARTIAL DENTURE WITH RIGHT UPPER INCISOR CANINE BICUSPID AND MOLAR STOP ADVISE IF THIS TRUE OF SUBJECT GIRL STOP ONLY ONE OUTLET JULES COURTNEY SHOES HERE STOP THEY NOW CHECKING RECORDS AND SALESPEOPLE TO DETERMINE IDENTITY PURCHASER OF SHOES DESCRIBED YOUR WIRE STOP WILL ADVISE SOONEST STOP

  Louise Ann Johnson’s partial dental plate ruled her out, and I wired the Chief at Atlanta to that effect.

  I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then I went back to the precinct, checked out a car, and drove over to 418 West 74th Street to talk to Thelma Olsen’s father.

  I asked him first for a photograph of Thelma, and he brought out a muddy snap
shot of a girl in shorts and a halter, holding a tennis racket. The photo had apparently been taken around noon. The eyes were deeply shadowed by the eyebrows and the shadow of the nose extended down beneath the lower lip. You could tell that she had good features, and was probably very pretty, but that was about it. She might or might not be the girl whose skull someone had fractured.

  “How long ago was this taken?” I asked.

  “About two years ago.”

  “You haven’t got anything more recent?”

  “No.”

  “Look, Mr. Olsen, your daughter was a professional singer. You sure there aren’t some better pictures of her around here? Publicity shots, or maybe a composite?”

  “No. She had an apartment of her own, until she got arrested. They made her move back here, but she didn’t bring any of her stuff with her. Nothing but clothes, that is.”

  “You know where this apartment is?”

  “She’d never tell me. She said she was going back there, as soon as her probation was over.” He paused. “She didn’t want me showing up around there, I guess.”

  “She have an agent?”

  “Yeah. Let’s see . . .” He thought a moment. “Guy named Tyner, down in the Brill Building.”

  I went down to Tyner’s office, took one fast look at the nine by twelve glossy he showed me, and knew I was no further along than I’d been when I first picked up Thelma Olsen’s missing-person report. I thanked Tyner and went back downstairs to the cruiser. Later on I found that Thelma had been picked up at a reefer pad over a curio shop in Greenwich Village. It seems one of her personal enemies, another girl, had seen Thelma go there, knew she was on probation, and saw an opportunity for personal vengeance by tipping off Thelma’s probation officer.

  I drove back to the brownstone. Walt Nelson, my partner, hadn’t found out a thing. He’d talked to the rest of the tenants, but no one had even seen the girl, let alone known anything about her. Or so they said. Walt had had to call a few people in from their jobs, and the hard time they’d given him had left him a little bitter.

  “Funny thing,” he said, “but the very ones that yell the loudest when you ask them for help are the same jokers that yell the loudest for help when their own toes get stepped on. I never saw it fail.”

  We left a patrolman staked out in the murder room, and started back to the precinct. Neither of us said much on the way. I knew Walt was probably thinking the same thing I was—that we’d shot an entire day on the case, without turning up anything whatever. The first hours after a murder are the most important ones for a detective, and a lot of them had already gone by. You can usually tell, in those first few hours, just how the case will go. And this one was going nowhere. Our score was exactly zero, and it was beginning to look as if it might stay that way for a long time.

  And then, when we walked into the squad room, the picture changed completely. We hadn’t been there more than a minute when I got a phone call from the morgue. It was from Johnny Morton, who had been on his job a long time.

  “Listen, Dave,” he said. “I’m calling from a pay phone in the hall. There’s a kid in my office, see, and he wants to look at that girl you guys are working on. He hasn’t got a permit, and he’s acting funnier than hell. He isn’t drunk, but he kind of acts that way; I mean, like maybe he isn’t sure just what’s going on. He won’t say who he is, or why he wants to see the body. I stalled him by saying I had to leave the office to check with somebody else on letting him in without a permit. But he isn’t going to stay put long, Dave. You’d better get a move on.”

  We got a move on. The boy was still in Johnny’s office. He was a nice looking kid, tall, and very thin. We took him out to the cruiser to talk to him. I could see what Johnny had meant about his acting funny. The kid was so scared he couldn’t think straight.

  I climbed into the back seat with him while Walt got into the front, and then I said, “All right, son. What’s your name?”

  “I knew this would happen,” he said. His voice was shaky, as if it wouldn’t take much to get him bawling.

  “What’s your name?” I asked again.

  “Ted,” he said. “Ted Wimmer.”

  “Why’d you want to look at that girl, Ted?”

  “I—I read about it in the newspapers, and I—I just had to see her again, that’s all.”

  “Did you kill her, Ted?”

  “No! God, no, mister!”

  “What was your interest in her?”

  “She—well, we were going together. I—”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Grace Knight.” He seemed to be pulling himself together. “But she didn’t like Grace. She made me call her Judy.”

  “How long did you know her?”

  He frowned thoughtfully; then, “From the first part of February. I met her right after she got to New York.”

  “Where was she from? Atlanta?”

  “Atlanta?” he repeated. “No. She was from Nebraska. From Omaha.”

  “You sure about that?”

  He nodded. “That’s about all she ever talked about. She liked it here in New York, but she kept talking about Omaha. She was pretty homesick, I guess.”

  “She ever mention being in Atlanta?”

  “No. This was the first time she ever left her home town.”

  I studied his face a moment. “When was the last time you saw her, Ted?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. We went to a movie.”

  “You didn’t see her last night?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you around midnight last night?”

  He hesitated. “I—I was just walking around the streets.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know where I walked, exactly. I just felt like walking. I guess I must have walked nine or ten miles altogether.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “About one.”

  “Just walking around, eh, Ted?”

  “I know how it looks, officer, but—”

  “We’ll take that up a little later,” I said. “Now here’s the way it is, Ted. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear from us. Understand? You tell the truth, and tell all of it, and you’ll be okay.”

  He nodded, swallowing hard a couple of times.

  “All right,” I said. “Now tell us this. Who do you think might have killed her?”

  “That bastard she started running around with,” he said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t. I just know she started fooling around with somebody else. She wouldn’t tell me his name or anything else about him. I guess maybe she was afraid I’d beat him up.” He reflected a moment. “And I would have, too.”

  “She must have dropped something about him, Ted. Think again.”

  “Well . . . she did say once that he really knew his way around. She said he was always getting things for her at half price; things like that.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Oh, you know . . . clothes and stuff.”

  “You ever in her room, Ted?”

  “Her room? Not a chance. That hotel she lived in won’t let men past the front door.”

  “Hotel?”

  “Yeah. That girl’s hotel over on the east side.”

  “She wasn’t killed at any hotel, Ted.”

  “I know that. The paper said where she was killed. The way I figure it, this guy and Judy rented that room just so they could use it once in a while.” His voice was starting to break again.

  He could be right, I knew. And if the rest of his story was true, then he probably was right. It would explain why we hadn’t found anything in the furnished room but the girl herself. If she and this other guy were using it for a trysting place, she wouldn’t be likely to keep anything there.

  We talked to Ted for another twenty minutes, but we didn’t get anything more. When he started getting rattled and panicky again, we took him down t
o the precinct. We left him in a material witness room, with a police matron to keep him company, and went down to the corner for a cup of coffee.

  We sat there, drinking coffee and mulling things over, and suddenly I got a flash. I pushed the coffee cup back and stood up.

  “What goes?” Walt asked.

  “We do,” I said. “Out to Long Island.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “The Jules Courtney shoe factory. I’ve got an idea that’ll bug me to death till I check it.”

  “All right, so let me in on it. I work for the same people you do, you know.”

  I told him about it on the way out to the factory. I’d been thinking about the dead girl’s expensive shoes off and on ever since we’d come on the case, and talking with Ted Wimmer had triggered something in my mind.

  “It was those shoes that threw us,” I told Walt. “They were stamped with the name of a store in Atlanta, Georgia, and so we naturally assumed they’d been bought there. That’s where we were wrong.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “Because those shoes could have been bought right at the factory. It should have hit us before, damn it.”

  Give.”

  “All right. When a shoe company with a reputation like Jules Courtney’s makes up an order for a retailer, they stamp his name and address on their product, but before those shoes are shipped, they’re checked and double-checked for the tiniest flaw. If a knife slipped a fraction of an inch somewhere, or there’s a stitch out of place, they put those shoes aside.”

  “So?”

  “They won’t ship shoes with flaws, but they’re still perfectly good shoes, so they mark the price down to the actual cost of manufacturer and put them up for sale to their employees.”

  Walt grinned and pressed down on the gas pedal a little harder.

  We got to the Jules Courtney factory about ten minutes before closing time. We talked to the office manager, and then to a records clerk. The clerk was very efficient. Five minutes after we’d given her the size, style and other data in connection with the dead girl’s shoes, she was back with a signed receipt. They had been sold to one Ernest Coleman, an employee on the fourth floor.

  It was past closing time when we got to the right floor and the right department. Everyone had left except one of the floor foremen.