The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

by Deming, Richard

  He raised his eyebrows. “Will we need your evidence to convict?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. You got it.”

  I told him the whole story.

  On the basis of what I had told him, Sergeant Burmeister requestioned the husbands of all six victims. Three of them reported that TV repairmen had been called to their homes. Unfortunately in two cases, arrangements had been made by their wives, the husbands were out when the repairman arrived, and they had no idea who had been called. The two men who had been out of town when their wives were murdered both had traveling jobs. Neither knew of any TV repair work being done in their homes, but both conceded it was possible their wives had called repairmen and had just neglected to mention it. The sixth man was sure no TV repairman had been to his home, but the man who had arranged for the service call himself said he had called Lyle Barton, and had a canceled check to prove it.

  No response resulted from a subsequent public appeal, after Lyle’s arrest, for whoever had made the TV service calls to the two homes where the husbands didn’t know who their wives had engaged, but a number of things transpired before that.

  On Friday, Sergeant Burmeister descended on Martha with a search warrant. In deference to me he explained he was there because it had been learned her husband made a TV service call on one of the victims of the Stocking Killer, and may have called on others, and that the police wanted a look at his repair-service records. However, along with authorizing the look at Lyle’s records, the warrant authorized search for tools that might have been used for illegal break-in and for “items which may have been illegally removed from the premises of any of the victims.”

  Martha was considerably upset by the search, but she had no idea that I had instigated it.

  The leather case and tin box were found where I had told the sergeant they would be, but Lyle’s records showed no repair calls to any of the victims’ homes other than to the one Burmeister already knew about.

  Six of the stockings found in the tin box matched those used as murder weapons. The police lab stated there was no way to establish them as definite mates, because similar stockings were manufactured by the millions, but at least they were established as possible mates. The other two stockings were sent respectively to Kansas City and Chicago.

  Monday afternoon Lyle was arrested when he stepped off the plane from Chicago.

  Martha nearly fell apart. I thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown. Deciding she shouldn’t be left alone, I continued to stay with her instead of moving back to my own apartment.

  Naturally I had myself taken off the story, because it was too close to home, but I kept in close touch with Fritz Burmeister so that I would know what was going on.

  The sergeant was convinced Lyle was guilty, but his case was far from airtight. One thing that bothered him was Lyle’s records showing a service call to only one victim. Burmeister was morally convinced he had made at least the two other calls known about, and perhaps had also made calls to the homes of the two traveling men. He thought Lyle had been cunning enough not to enter anything about those calls in his records, but to enter the one where he had been paid by check because the visit could be proved.

  He wouldn’t be able to make that sort of speculation from the witness stand, though.

  Another setback was the reports from Kansas City and Chicago. Neither stocking matched the ones used to strangle the victims in those cities. It was also established that Lyle had arrived back in St. Louis from Kansas City the day before the murder there. So apparently the original police theory that those murders had been imitations of the Stocking Killer by other psychos was right after all, if Lyle actually was the Stocking Killer.

  Burmeister had a possible explanation for that setback too, but it would never have been admissible as evidence. He theorized that Lyle had broken into a couple of places, intending to commit murder, had gotten as far as locating a stocking to use, then had somehow been frightened off and had carried the stocking away with him.

  Despite these loopholes, Burmeister thought he had a pretty strong case. It was going to be difficult for the defense to explain that miniature burglar kit and the cache of stockings that included six exactly matching the six used as murder weapons. Then a second search warrant turned up a pair of black slacks, a black long-sleeved sweater and a matching black cloth cap in Lyle’s closet. The witness who had once seen the Stocking Killer from the rear, and had described him as wearing similar clothing, was asked to view him wearing the outfit from behind. She couldn’t identify him as the man she had seen that night, but she was willing to testify that he was of the same height and general build. On top of all that, Lyle’s psychiatric history was bound to influence the jury.

  It was a boon to the prosecution that Lyle had no alibi for any of the murder dates. There is little question in my mind that Martha would have sworn he was never out of her sight on any of the occasions, except it was a matter of record that he was.

  Because Tod was so young, Martha didn’t care to work regularly, preferring to be at home with her son, but she filled in at Barnes Hospital when nurses went on vacation, or simply wanted nights off. She was on call only for night duty, so that Tod could be left with Lyle, thereby saving baby-sitter costs.

  It just happened that Martha was on nursing duty every night that the Stocking Killer struck—except Sergeant Burmeister surmised that it hadn’t “just happened” at all. He suspected Lyle had deliberately chosen those nights to commit murder because his wife was away.

  Despite my concern over her, Martha rather quickly recovered from her initial emotional collapse. By Tuesday she had regained full control of herself, although she remained pale and drawn and refused to eat anything. Meantime a friend had taken Tod into her home until Martha could completely quiet down.

  Even in the face of the devastating circumstantial evidence against her husband, Martha fiercely denied any possibility of his guilt. She hired George Brinker, St. Louis’ top criminal lawyer, to defend him.

  I accompanied her when she went to see the man for the first trial-strategy conference after he had interviewed Lyle and had studied the evidence against him. He was a plump, smooth-looking man in his mid-forties with considerable personal charm.

  He started off by saying, “The evidence against your husband is entirely circumstantial, of course, Mrs. Barton. And the prosecution must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not up to us to disprove his guilt. All we have to do is cast doubt on it.”

  “How do you plan to do that?” I inquired.

  “Let’s start with the so-called burglar kit. That’s what the prosecution is calling it, but we’re calling it an emergency repair kit for electronic appliances. Your brother-in-law has explained to me how that so-called picklock is used as a tool to test electrical contacts, and how, when it is used that way, the gloves are necessary for insulation.”

  I noticed he made no mention of the glass cutter and rubber suction cup. I said, “How are you going to explain the stockings?”

  “Ah, but we don’t have to, Mr. Conner. It’s up to the prosecution to prove they are the mates of the ones used in the murders, and the two extra stockings are certainly going to confuse that issue. We don’t have to explain why the defendant kept nylon stockings in a locked box. I don’t care if the jury thinks he’s eccentric; I just don’t want them to think he’s a murderer.”

  He similarly felt that he could cast doubt that Lyle had met his victims by making service calls to their homes. He planned to block any reference by the prosecution to the two service calls where it had not been established who the repairman was, which would leave them with only the one call Lyle had admitted making to present to the jury. The lawyer felt he could convince the jury that was pure coincidence.

  When we left Brinker’s office, I came away with the feeling that he really
didn’t have much hope of acquittal, but had been optimistic merely for Martha’s benefit. From her pinched expression, I suspected she had gotten the same impression, but I didn’t mention it.

  By now Martha seemed well enough not to require me underfoot any longer. She moved Tod back home and I returned to my apartment. Periodically I dropped by to check on her, and while she seemed terribly depressed, she was holding up well enough to function.

  Trial had been set for six weeks after the arrest, which put it in mid-May. A week beforehand I happened to be in the city room when a call came in that there was a murder on Dover Place, down on the south side. I volunteered to go out on it, and thus got the assignment.

  I didn’t realize until I got down there that Dover Place was the street just south of Bellerive Boulevard. The house was the one whose back faced the rear of Lyle’s and Martha’s.

  There were several people inside in the front room: a couple of uniformed cops, a man from the police lab, a dazed-looking man of about thirty seated in an easy chair, and Sergeant Fritz Burmeister. The lab man was just leaving, apparently having finished his work.

  When I glanced curiously at the seated man, Burmeister said, “Husband. Come on upstairs.”

  I followed him up the stairs. In the same bedroom I had once looked into from Martha’s kitchen window, the same blonde I had watched undress lay on the bed wearing a filmy nightgown. Her face was purple and was horribly bloated because a nylon stocking had been knotted tightly around her throat.

  “Husband found her when he came home this morning,” the sergeant said wearily. “He works nights. Same old story. No sexual assault, no prints. Both doors have inside bolts. A small square was neatly cut out of the glass pane in the back door, right next to the bolt. As usual, the second stocking is missing.”

  I tore my gaze away from the dead woman. “What’s this do for Lyle?” I asked.

  “Clears him,” he said in the same weary voice. “How the hell could he be the Stocking Killer when he’s locked in a maximum security cell?”

  That’s almost the end of the story. Lyle was released with full apologies and again he and Martha seem radiantly happy.

  There have been no more Stocking Killer murders, but recently I’ve been thinking. I keep remembering Martha saying, “The way I feel about Lyle, I’d continue to love him even if he became a raving maniac. I’d do anything in the world for him.”

  I also keep remembering that Martha had judo training when she was an Army nurse. An hour a week for twelve weeks, I think she said, certainly not enough to win her a black belt, but maybe enough to handle another woman not much larger than herself.

  Anybody can buy a glass cutter. They’re on sale in every dime store.

  Martha doesn’t work at the hospital nights anymore either. Now she’s on call only for days, and arranges for a baby-sitter when she’s called in.

  The last time they had me down to dinner, little Tod took me down to the basement to show me something. The partition had been taken down and there was no longer a television repair shop there.

  I was afraid to ask why Lyle had gotten out of the TV repair business, but I can’t help wondering if Martha insisted on it, just to remove future temptation.

  MAGGIE’S GRIP

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1975.

  I was working the four p.m.-to-midnight trick out of Homicide when the call came in from the Carondelet Precinct, way down on the south side of St. Louis.

  I logged the call as coming in at 6:02 p.m., but it was 6:30 by the time I got to the scene, a good ten miles from headquarters.

  The address was a two-story frame house, probably fifty years old, but in good condition. In front of it was a police car, a black sedan with MD license plates, and a crowd of onlookers.

  Harry Dodge, who had gone through the Police Academy with me a quarter of a century ago, opened the door. I had forgotten that Harry now worked out of the Carondelet Precinct. He had never made it beyond the rank of patrolman and was still in uniform, but one several sizes larger than he wore when we graduated from the academy.

  “Hi, Sod,” he said in a pleased voice as I moved inside past him, then poked a finger into my belly. “Hey, you been putting it on, buddy.”

  “If I was a pot, I wouldn’t comment about a kettle,” I growled at him.

  A lean, leathery-looking man in a tan jacket and a plump woman in a house dress sat in the front room, the man probably fifty, the woman perhaps ten years younger. After closing the door behind me, Harry introduced them as Henry Crowder and his wife Emma, then added that Mrs. Crowder had discovered the body.

  I asked both of them how they did, and asked them to please stand by until I could get to them. Then to Harry I said, “Where is it?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  He led the way into a central hall where we met a tall, graying man just emerging from the kitchen. He was carrying a medical bag.

  Coming to a halt, Harry said, “This is Dr. Lischer, Sod, the victim’s doctor. Mrs. Crowder called him instead of us when she discovered the body. After talking to her, he phoned the precinct before he came over.” To the doctor he said, “Sergeant Sod Harris of the Homicide Squad, Doc.”

  Shifting his medical bag from his right hand to his left. Dr. Lischer shook hands with me. “Glad to know you, Sergeant. Terrible thing. She was only twenty-eight.”

  “They’re all terrible,” I said. “Mind sticking around a few minutes until after I’ve had a look at the body?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He went on into the front room. Harry and I continued into the kitchen. Another uniformed cop was in there, leaning against the back door. He was in his mid-twenties and looked vaguely familiar.

  There was also a corpse in the room. It belonged to a fairly attractive blonde, slim and pleasantly contoured. She was wearing a light cloth coat, unbuttoned and wide open, over a street dress, no hat and an expression of surprise. She lay flat on her back in the center of the kitchen with the handle of what appeared to be a butcher knife protruding from between her breasts. On the floor to the left of her body was an open purse from which a number of items had fallen when it dropped to the floor. To her right was an old-fashioned iron door key. It seemed apparent that she had been stabbed just after entering by the back door, apparently as she was in the act of replacing the key in her voluminous purse.

  The young patrolman said, “Hi, Sarge.”

  “Hi,” I said. “I know you, but I can’t place from where.”

  “Carl Budd. You were on the first homicide call I ever answered, back when I was a rookie. The Thursday-night Strangler.”

  “Oh yeah, the guy who sent happy birthday wires to his victims before he killed them.” Glancing around, I spotted on the wall over the stove a rack of knives with black wooden handles similar to that of the murder weapon. They were of assorted sizes, ranging from a small paring knife to a carving knife with an eight-inch blade. The only vacant space looked as though it might accommodate the butcher knife stuck into the corpse.

  Seeing me looking at the rack, Harry said, “That’s what we figured, too. The killer grabbed it from there because it was handy.”

  Grunting, I looked back down at the dead woman. “What was her name?”

  “Joan Turnbell. Mrs. Joan Turnbell, although her husband don’t live here. According to Mrs. Crowder, they’ve been separated about four months, and the victim lived here alone. Mrs. Crowder also has pretty well pinpointed the time of death to within a minute or so of five-thirty.” Glancing at a wall clock, he said, “About an hour and five minutes ago.”

  “How’d she pinpoint it?” I asked.

  “She heard Mrs. Turnbell come home, then discovered the body only minutes later.”

  Although that wasn’t awfully clear to me, I
decided the details could wait until I talked to Mrs. Crowder. “She know who did it?” I asked.

  Harry shook his head. “Seems to have been a prowler who panicked when she walked in on him. There’s some drawers dumped out in the other rooms. My guess is nobody saw him because he lammed out the back way. If you’ll look out back, you’ll see the yard is enclosed by a high wooden fence that would have kept him from being seen by neighbors if he headed for the alley. At any rate he wasn’t seen.”

  “Oh, you’ve asked all those people out front?”

  He flushed slightly. “Well, no, but no one has come forward to report seeing anything.”

  That was why Harry Dodge was still a patrolman after twenty-five years. If he had been a rookie, I would have jolted him alive with some acid comments on how to make a preliminary investigation, but you can’t do that to a veteran of twenty-five years even if he deserves it.

  I said, as pleasantly as I could manage, “Better go see if anyone saw anything before the crowd disperses. Maybe you’d better hit the nearby houses on both sides of the street too, just in case some of the neighbors have gone back inside.”

  “Okay,” he said agreeably, and headed for the front of the house.

  I went over to peer through the glass pane of the back door into the yard. In mid-March, sunset was about six p.m., and it was just now starting to get dark. It was still light enough, though, to see that the yard was enclosed by a seven-foot-high board fence. At the rear of the yard, some fifty feet away, was a garage that gave onto an alley. Next to it was a gate in the fence, also leading to the alley.

  I tried the back door, found it unlocked and stepped out onto the back porch. From it I could see over the top of the fence onto the back porches on either side, which meant anyone on their back porches at the time the killer emerged from the house could have seen him too. I could also see the back porches of the houses whose rears faced this way from the other side of the alley.