Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  At five, he gave up waiting, hailed a taxi, drove back to the hotel and sought out Alfredo who met him with a smile that made him want to smash his face in.

  “I am very sorry, Mr. Withers, but there was no need to phone.”

  An obvious lie, but it was too late to do anything about it. “How much did you ask of the lady for not phoning me?” said Jim.

  “Your wife? But she knew nothing. I went to Juan and he offered more than you.” Alfredo smiled and shrugged. “Of course you want your money back.”

  “Keep it,” Jim snarled, walking away.

  The shower was running when he entered the room. He slammed the door shut and Kathy called out: “How was the trip, darling?”

  “Wonderful. I didn’t go.”

  “You didn’t?” The pattering and splashing ceased in the bathroom. Towel around her, Kathy came out to find Jim standing at the door to the balcony, his face flushed and sweated, his eyes like glass.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to understand. I didn’t go because I met a party from New York. We went to a cafe and talked.”

  “And drank.”

  “So what? As long as you enjoyed yourself.”

  “I didn’t exactly pine away.”

  Still acting, flippant now. He wanted to knock her little head off. Why in hell did I marry her? he asked himself. But he knew why and turned away, going to the bathroom to shower himself. “I’ll meet you on the upper balcony,” he said.

  Kathy was waiting for him and, as usual, Juan was at the table. He bowed, smiled at Jim, drew out his chair, and suddenly the cook began screaming at him from the kitchen. She was brandishing an ugly machete. Juan turned pale and didn’t move till she turned away. Then he scampered into the kitchen.

  “My God, did you see that?” said Kathy.

  “Perhaps he’ll tend to his business now,” Jim answered calmly.

  But he was wrong about that. At least, Juan found time to return to their table to drop a word when he served them coffee.

  “And how was the jungle trip?” he asked with a gloating smile.

  “You should know,” Jim answered. Then, to deflect comment concerning this curious remark, he quickly turned to Kathy and said, “You know, we’re leaving tomorrow. Do you think a hundred and fifty pesos too little to tip the cook?”

  “Are you going out of your mind, Jim?”

  “In deepest appreciation for services rendered, that’s the way I feel about it.”

  “Oh, do what you wish.”

  Smiling, Jim counted out the money while Juan watched, obviously shocked. “And this is for you,” said Jim, adding a mere ten-peso note as a tip for Juan who could not protest. He looked sick but managed a smile and retreated to the kitchen from which he returned some moments later to extend the cook’s appreciation.

  7.

  Later, on the lower balcony after Kathy had gone to join the card players, Jim sat with another guest. Conversation led to the cook and her tirade against Juan.

  “Nothing new about that,” said the other guest. “Last year she got to him with that machete and put him on his back for a month.”

  “Really?”

  “A nasty old woman, but she can really cook.”

  “The best,” said Jim, looking at his watch. He stood up, excused himself and went to the upper balcony. Quiet there, the diners and waiters gone, a light in the kitchen, the Indian woman cleaning up. As Jim stepped into the kitchen, she turned.

  “Just wanted to make sure you received the tip I sent you,” said Jim. “You did get it?”

  The cook nodded, smiled.

  “All of it? A hundred and fifty pesos?”

  “It was but ten, Senor.”

  “That was for Juan. He must have made a mistake,” said Jim and, with that, he turned round and left the kitchen.

  Some minutes later, while standing at the front of the lobby, Juan passed him without notice and started down the dark road under the motionless palms. Almost within seconds the Indian woman followed him.

  Next morning neither the cook nor Juan appeared at the breakfast hour. Then news came of the murder. Juan had been found just below the hotel in the bushes, hacked to death. The Indian woman could not be located.

  The guest of last year, whom Jim had spoken to the night before, was heard to say the obvious: “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the cook. They scrapped last night, and she slammed him with that machete once before, you know. Too bad, because she could wrestle up a meal.”

  Kathy had nothing to say. Not until she and Jim were aboard the plane and flying north toward Mexico City. Then she turned to Jim and said, “Wasn’t it awful?”

  Not looking at her, he lit a cigarette. “You mean about Juan? He had that coming, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jealousy, of course. The cook was soft on him, but yesterday she found he’d been going around with another woman. One of the hotel guests. Lucky the cook didn’t go to work on her.”

  Kathy had turned dead white. “How do you know all this?” she finally asked.

  “Alfredo told me,” he replied, continuing the lie. Then he waited, for she had to ask, her woman’s curiosity greater than her fear.

  “Did he say who the woman was?”

  Her words were weighted, barely audible. They made Jim smile, and at last he turned and looked at her. “Alfredo didn’t have to,” he said slowly, watching her turn pale again. Then she raised her hand in a peculiar constricted gesture, as if to ward off a blow, and he laughed.

  “You see, I knew all the while,” he went on. “And next time, if there is a next time, you’ll know what to expect.”

  THE FLOATER

  Jonathan Craig

  1.

  She was a small girl, and she looked even smaller, lying there at the river end of the vast, empty pier. A tugboat captain had sighted her body off Pier 90, radioed the Harbor Precinct, and a police launch had taken her from the water and brought her ashore. There was a chill wind blowing in from the Hudson and the pale October sun glinted dully on the girl’s face and arms and bare shoulders. The skirt of her topless dress was imprinted with miniature four-leaf clovers and horseshoes and number 7’s, and on her right wrist there was a charm bracelet with more four-leaf clovers and horseshoes.

  A sergeant and three patrolmen from the Uniform Force had arrived in an RMP car a few minutes before my partner, Paul Brader, and I. They had just finished their preliminary examination of the body.

  The sergeant glanced at me and then back down at the girl. “They’d didn’t do her a hell of a lot of good, did they? The lucky symbols, I mean.”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “How old do you figure her for, Jim?” Paul Brader asked.

  “Eighteen, maybe,” I said. “No more than that.”

  “Well, we’ve got a homicide all right,” Paul said. “She sure wasn’t alive when she hit the water. You notice the skin?”

  I’d noticed. It wasn’t pale, the way it would have been had she drowned. The river water was cold, and cold water contracts the blood vessels and forces the blood to the inner part of the body.

  “And there’s no postmortem lividity in the head and neck,” Paul went on. “Floaters always hang the same way in the water, with the head down. If she had been alive when she went in, she’d be a damned sight less pretty than she is now.” He stepped close and knelt beside the girl. “How long would you say she was in the water, Jim?”

  “That’s always tough to figure,” I said. “Taking the weather into consideration, and the fact that she’s a little thin, I’d say anywhere from three to five days.” I looked at the sergeant. “Any label in that dress, Ted?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How about the underclothes?”

  “Just brand names. No shop names at all.”

  Paul gently rolled the girl over on her left side. “Take a look at these lacerations on the back of her head,” he said.

&nbs
p; I knelt down beside him. There were two lacerations, apparently quite deep, and about three inches long. But lacerations and other mutilations of bodies found in the water are often misleading. Marine life takes its toll, and bodies frequently bob for hours against pilings and wharves and the sides of boats before they are discovered.

  “We’ll have to wait and see what the M.E.’s shop says about those,” I said. I looked at both the girl’s palms. There were no fingernail marks, such as are usually found in drownings. It’s true that drowning people clutch at anything; and when there’s nothing to grasp, they clench their hands anyhow, driving the nails into the flesh.

  The girl had pierced ears, and the small gold rings in them appeared expensive. So did the charm bracelet, and the dress was obviously no bargain-counter item. There were four dollar bills tucked into the top of one of her stockings.

  The uniformed sergeant removed the jewelry and the bills and listed them on his report sheet. “Four bucks,” he murmured. “Mad money, probably.”

  Paul and I straightened up. “You want to wait for the doc?” he asked.

  “Not much point,” I said. “He won’t be able to tell us anything until after he autopsies her. We don’t need him to tell us we got a homicide.”

  “No I guess not,” Paul said. He stared down at the girl a moment. “Tough, Jim. There’s something about pulling a pretty girl out of cold water that gets me. Every time.”

  I nodded, and we turned back toward our prowl car. I knew what he meant. We handle about four hundred floaters a year in New York, most of them in the spring and summer. The majority of them are accidental drownings. A number are suicides, though there are fewer than is generally supposed. An even smaller number are homicides. And of the homicides, only about one in ten are women.

  I got behind the wheel and we drove along the pier and turned downtown toward Centre Street, where the Missing Persons Bureau is located.

  “You going to hit the station house first?” Paul asked.

  “No. We can call in from the Bureau. I’ve got a hunch we’ll save time if we go through the MP reports ourselves.” The first thing a detective does when he has an unidentified body—provided it’s a homicide and the body has been dead more than a day or so—is check the reports of missing persons. In the event of a routine drowning, the investigating officer’s report is sent to the Bureau and the description matched against MP reports by MP personnel.

  2.

  We found the matching MP report almost at once.

  POLICE DEPARTMENT

  City of New York

  REPORT OF MISSING PERSON

  Surname: TAYLOR, First Name: LUCILLE, Initials: M, Sex: F, Age: 19

  Address; Date and Time Seen:

  751 W. 72nd, 10/11/54, 8 P.M.

  Last seen at LEAVING HOME ADDRESS

  Probable Destination: UNKNOWN

  Cause of Absence: UNKNOWN

  I scanned the rest of the MP form. It was all there—a close physical description of the girl, the skirt with the lucky symbols, the pierced ears and gold earrings, the charm bracelet. There, was, however, one item of jewelry listed on the report which had not been on the girl when she’d been taken from the river. A diamond engagement ring, assumed to be about half a carat.

  “You were off a year on the age, Jim,” Paul said, grinning.

  “All right, so fire me,” I said.

  “I’ll take it up with the commissioner,” he said. “You want me to handle the ID confirmation?”

  “Might as well,” I said. “No use both of us killing time with it.” I glanced down at the bottom of the form. The report had been phoned in by a Mrs. Edward Carpenter, with the same address as the girl’s. Mrs. Carpenter, it seemed, was the girl’s aunt. I wrote down the name and address on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to Paul. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “You get Mrs. Carpenter and take her over to Bellevue for the ID, and I’ll handle the paper work on this.”

  “All the way through?”

  “Sure. What’d you think?”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal. You want me to take her home, after the ID?”

  “Nope. Take her to the precinct . . . That’s if she isn’t too upset. If she takes it too hard, drive her home and call me from there.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, you might get her to fill you in on the girl, if you can. Don’t push too hard, unless you think she can take it.”

  He nodded. “You going back to the station house now?”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll ride that far with you, and then you can go on up to Seventy-second Street and get Mrs. Carpenter.”

  3.

  Back in the squad room, I finished typing up some 61’s in connection with other cases Paul and I were working on, completed several Wanted cards on a gang of Philadelphia hoods a stool had told me were now in New York, and then rolled a fresh 61 form into the Underwood and began the suspected homicide report on Lucille M. Taylor. I kept remembering how small she had looked there on the end of the big pier, and how angry the river had sounded as Paul and I stood there in the chill wind.

  Paul came in an hour later. There were two people with him, a tall heavy-set blonde woman of about fifty and a small, wispy little guy with an almost completely bald head and eyes the color of faded blue denim. It took me a few moments to realize he was probably not much older than the woman. Of the two, the man seemed much the more upset.

  “This is Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, Jim,” Paul said. “Folks, this is Detective Coren.”

  We all nodded to one another and I pushed two chairs close to my desk and asked them to sit down. Mrs. Carpenter frowned at the chair, took a large, flowered handkerchief from her purse and dusted it thoroughly, and finally sat down. Mr. Carpenter watched her closely, biting his lip. He didn’t sit down until she had settled herself. Paul Brader leaned a hip against my desk and lit a cigarette. He extended the package to the Carpenters, but both shook their heads.

  I could sense that there was no point in condolences, and I was relieved. I knew Paul hadn’t got anything on the trip to Bellevue or he would have taken me aside and briefed me. Mrs. Carpenter was obviously the dominant member of the family, and I addressed my remarks to her.

  “We’ll make this just as short as we can,” I said. “The first question, of course, is whether you know anyone who might have killed your niece.”

  She sat very straight, almost rigid, staring at me unblinkingly. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

  “You reported her missing as of eight p.m. last Monday, and the time of your report was ten a.m. Tuesday. Was it unusual for Lucille to stay out all night?”

  “It was the first time she’d ever done that. She would never have had the opportunity for a second time, I assure you.”

  “We’ll want to notify her parents.” I picked up a pencil. “What’s their address?”

  “They’re dead. Lucille has been living with Mr. Carpenter and me ever since then. Almost a year now.”

  “Did she go on a date Monday night, Mrs. Carpenter?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. We’d had very little to say to one another the last few weeks.”

  “You have no idea at all where she was going? No idea whom she might have planned to meet?”

  “None at all.”

  “Was she wearing a coat or jacket when she left?”

  “I told them what she was wearing when I called to report her missing. If she’d been wearing a coat, I would have said so.”

  “It’s been very chilly the last week or so. I thought you might have forgotten—”

  “I forgot nothing.”

  I looked at Mr. Carpenter. “How about you, sir? Do you have any idea of whom Lucille planned to see that night?”

  “He knows nothing about it,” Mrs. Carpenter said crisply.

  Mr. Carpenter glanced furtively at her, then dropped his eyes and shook his head. “She didn’t mention,” he said.

  I turned back to Mrs. Carpenter. “You said she w
as wearing a diamond engagement ring when she left. There was no such ring on her hand when we found her.”

  “She was wearing it when she left the house. I’m quite certain of it.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “Why, her own, of course.”

  “I mean, who gave it to her? Who was the man?”

  Mrs. Carpenter had very thin lips, and when she pursed them, as she did now, she gave the impression of having no lips at all. “I’m afraid I don’t know,” she said finally.

  Paul Brader leaned forward. “Mrs. Carpenter, do you mean to tell us that your niece was engaged to a guy, wearing his ring, and you don’t know who he was?”

  Mrs. Carpenter took a deep breath, staring at Paul fixedly. “I don’t like your tone, young man,” she said. “I—”

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “It’s just a little hard to understand, that’s all.”

  “She began wearing the ring about a month ago. It was shortly after the time Lucille and I—well, you might say we stopped confiding in one another.”

  “And why was that?” Paul asked.

  “Because I discovered certain things about her. At first I was of a mind to ask her to leave my house.” She turned her head slightly to glare at her husband.

  “You mind telling us a bit more about it?” I asked.

  “Not at all. Why should I pretend to protect the reputation of a girl like Lucille? She was an extremely pretty girl . . . she liked to flaunt herself. Especially around Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Now, Cora . . .” Mr. Carpenter began.

  “Please be still, Mr. Carpenter,” she said coldly. “You’ve defended that disgraceful person often enough already.”

  “It just don’t seem right somehow,” he said. “Her being dead and all, and—”

  “That’ll do,” Mrs. Carpenter said. She looked at me. “As I said, she flaunted herself. She thought nothing of going through the house in her slip, or parading from the bathroom with just a towel wrapped around her. Why, once she even—”