04-Strangler

by Parnell Hall

Time crawled.

  By the time I thought I’d reached the end of my endurance, it was nine o’clock.

  Jesus.

  Three hours to go.

  And that was just until Leroy got back. Which really meant nothing in terms of the trap. Because Sam didn’t know about the bar, and didn’t know who Leroy was, and didn’t know whether he was in or out. So midnight meant nothing. In all probability Sam wouldn’t strike until three or four in the morning.

  If he struck at all. That was the thing. And as I sat there watching and waiting, the doubts came thick and fast. I mean, the plan had seemed so good in theory, but was it? Well, on the plus side was the fact that I had given Sam the case. That was a big lure. Because, in Sam’s mind, that would make it fit the pattern. All the clients that had been killed had been ones that I had in some way been involved with. Making me a suspect. And if Sam wanted to shift suspicion from himself, what could be better than another crime where I had the victim’s name and address? Where I could have done it.

  Yeah, that was the plus side. That and the fact that Sam didn’t know what the police were doing. He didn’t know that they were staking out the addresses of each case that came in.

  But on the minus side, he could guess. I mean, Christ, it was such an obvious move, wasn’t it? So Sam should know. Right? Wrong. He didn’t know, otherwise he would never have killed his uncle. If he’d thought the police were staking out the houses, then that would presumably have been walking into a trap. But he’d done it. So he couldn’t know. Right? But if he did suspect, then he’d be sure to kill the night before, wouldn’t he? That was the beauty of the trap, wasn’t it? That was why it would work. Right?

  I was driving myself crazy.

  And the hours dragged by.

  By eleven I was sure the trap would never work.

  By eleven-thirty I wasn’t sure I even cared.

  Midnight.

  There came the sound of footsteps from the other side of the street.

  I tensed up. Watched.

  A man came walking from the direction of Lenox Avenue. He was a black man, wearing a dark coat and a knit cap. I couldn’t see well enough to make out his features, just well enough to tell that it wasn’t Leroy.

  He went up the steps and into the building.

  Not a totally unexpected occurrence, but still it caught me flat-footed. No one had been in and out of the building all night, so it hadn’t occurred to me. But Leroy hadn’t rented the whole building. People lived there. And by midnight, it was not unreasonable to assume they might want to go home.

  More footsteps. I looked, but once again, it wasn’t Leroy. Another black man. He went into the building, too.

  Christ, what was it, Grand Central Station?

  More footsteps. Third time’s the charm. Yes, this time it was Leroy. Stepping along. Staggering a little. I wondered if the stagger was feigned. I thought not. I figured Leroy wasn’t going to have a good time in the morning.

  Leroy turned and started up the steps.

  That’s when I saw him.

  He was in the shadows, behind a parked car. His head came up slightly, and I caught the movement. Then I saw the silhouette. A man, that’s all I could tell. A man. I knew instinctively who it was, but I couldn’t see him. Just his shadow.

  Leroy went in the front door and it banged shut.

  The man moved.

  He crept out from behind the car and darted toward the steps. He was crouched over with his head down. All I could see was that he was also wearing a dark jacket and knit cap.

  But there was no doubt who he was.

  He was not some resident of the building returning to his apartment.

  He was the murderer.

  The murderer reached out his hand for the stair rail.

  Shock.

  The hand was black!

  The murderer was not Sam Gravston.

  The murderer was black.

  A black man from Harlem.

  Jesus.

  The murderer started up the front steps. As he reached the top step, light from the upstairs window fell on his face.

  I gasped.

  The murderer was Detective Thomas Walker.

  41.

  SOME THINGS ARE too hard to comprehend. You see them or hear them, but you don’t believe them. The mind leaps up and says, “That can’t be true.”

  That happened now. I saw Detective Thomas Walker, and I realized he was the murderer, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. I mean, I’d spent time with the man. I’d ridden around in my car with him for two days. He was a responsible police officer. He had a wife and kids, for Christ’s sake. It couldn’t be.

  But it was. And in a flash, I realized that that day when Clarence White had turned out to have been killed the night before, so it hadn’t cleared me, it hadn’t cleared Detective Thomas Walker either. He also had no alibi.

  And now I knew why.

  I watched in horror as Detective Thomas Walker pushed his way in the front door.

  My mind leapt to Sergeant Clark. A black man. All right, a black man. But not from Harlem. And not poor. And not uneducated. So did this really bear out his theory?

  A crash from within brought me to my senses.

  Schmuck!

  It doesn’t matter who’s right or who’s wrong. Or what motive could drive a seemingly normal cop to turn to crime. Your friend, Leroy Stanhope Williams, is about to be strangled, and you’re just standing there off on an ego trip!

  I vaulted out of my hiding place and ran across the street. I took the front steps two at a time. I jerked open the front door.

  I could hear the sound of a struggle up above. Christ, don’t let me be too late.

  I raced up the stairs, turned the corner. Ahead of me was the other stairs. But it was dark. There’d been a hall light on the third floor, but it was out now.

  A thud and a grunt.

  A grunt!

  He’s still alive!

  I tore up the stairs.

  I grabbed the top of the banister, vaulted around the corner into the hallway.

  And tripped over them.

  I couldn’t see them, of course, but I felt them. And I felt myself going down. I flung out my hands, barely got them out in time, protected my face. And then I was on the floor, bracing myself, cushioning the blow, rolling over, and coming into position to get to my feet.

  Something hit me hard in the side, thrust me back down, landed on top of me. It was as if I were a running-back being tackled short of first down. As I hit the floor I felt my arms being grabbed and wrestled behind me, and then I felt something cold and hard on my wrist. Seconds later I was jerked to my feet.

  The light clicked on.

  The first thing I saw was Leroy Stanhope Williams. He was sitting on the floor of the hallway with his back propped up against the wall. He must have had a good few at Duke’s Place, because I swear in spite of everything that had just happened, there was a bemused expression on his face.

  The next thing I saw was the man holding me. He was a black man, and he had his hand on the pair of handcuffs that he had just clapped on my wrists.

  Then I saw the other two men.

  One was Detective Thomas Walker. He was breathing heavily, and holding onto the man behind him. Walker’s back was to me, and he was blocking my view of the man.

  Walker straightened up and jerked on the handcuffs the man was wearing.

  The man swung around and I saw his face.

  He was Tessie the Tumbler’s boyfriend, Charlie.

  42.

  RECIPE: take one medium crow, skin, season with pepper and thyme, fry till golden brown.

  Sergeant Clark, Detective Thomas Walker, Richard Rosenberg and I were in Richard’s office.

  Sergeant Clark was explaining about the murders.

  I was eating crow.

  “As I have said,” Sergeant Clark began, “it was early in the game that we deduced that the murders were the work of an uneducated black man from Harlem. Everything po
inted to it. Even the apparent contradictions were not contradictions. The answer, as it usually is in these situations, was obvious. As long as we ignored any distractions and concentrated on the obvious, a solution was inevitable.

  “Again, as I said, the answer was in the files. And, without making any excuses, I must state that the only reason the case was not solved before now was owing to the fact that the files were in such disarray.”

  Richard stirred restlessly and seemed about to say something. I hoped he wouldn’t. I hoped he’d shut up and let Clark get on with it. Nothing Richard could say would help, and I didn’t want to prolong the moment.

  “So,” Clark said, “I’ll tell you briefly how things progressed. To begin with, the obvious suspect was Mr. Hastings here. When I say ‘obvious suspect,’ don’t be confused with ‘obvious solution.’ Hastings was the obvious suspect, but I never seriously considered that he had committed the crimes. He was one of those distractions I mentioned, one I wanted to dispense with as quickly as possible. I did so by assigning Walker to ride with him. And while this didn’t provide the optimum result, an unimpeachable alibi, it did the next best thing. It gave me Walker’s confirmed opinion that Mr. Hastings had not, indeed, committed the crimes.

  “Which was enough for me. I pulled Walker off Hastings, not because Hastings was conclusively cleared, but because, as I said, I had better things for him to do.”

  Sergeant Clark walked over to the window and looked out. We all sat, watching him. No one said anything. We waited. Clark turned back.

  “The Clarence White killing went a long way toward clearing things up. The killer phoned in, giving the name George Webb. He had the right address, but the wrong name. This told us that, one, the killer didn’t know Clarence White, two, Clarence White was not a real client, and three, the killer had gone to great pains to make it appear that Clarence White was a client. This confirmed without question the fact that the killer had no animosity against Richard Rosenberg’s clients, but against Richard Rosenberg himself, and that the whole point of the series of crimes was to discredit Mr. Rosenberg.

  “And then there was the phone call itself. There were a lot of possibilities—the killer could have had an accomplice, the killer could have paid someone to make the call, the killer could have been a white man disguising his voice. But, once again, the obvious solution was the best—the phone call was from the killer himself, an uneducated black man living in Harlem.

  “This allowed us to narrow the field. We were looking for a black client in Harlem. Now, I admit that was not as much help as it seems. The files, as I’ve said, were barely adequate. They are certainly not cross-filed by location. About fifty percent of all clients were black, and of those, a large number lived in Harlem. Still, the field had narrowed down from several thousand to several hundred cases.

  “The other thing, of course, was we were looking for a man. At the risk of being labeled a sexist, I must state that I concluded that a woman could not have strangled those people. And the phone call was, almost definitely, a male voice. This narrowed the field further—or so we thought.”

  Clark pulled a pen from his pocket and tapped it into his palm.

  “Now we come to the murder of Marvin Gravston. And this was the key. This was the dead giveaway.

  “Marvin Gravston was a genuine client. The case had been on the books for three weeks. So this could not be a case of the killer murdering the victim and then calling in. This was a bonafide client.

  “This required specific knowledge.”

  Clark looked at Richard, then at me. “You will recall, when Sam Gravston was in here I questioned him about when his uncle was admitted to the hospital with relation to when he saw him there and persuaded him to make the call to Rosenberg and Stone. He said he saw his uncle the day after he was admitted.

  “A check with the hospital records gave us the date when Marvin Gravston was admitted. The call to Rosenberg and Stone was presumably the following day.”

  Clark snapped his fingers. “And that was the key. That was the day the information about Marvin Gravston came in and was entered into the log. That was the only day the log would have been turned to that page. So, for a client to have had that information, they would have to have been in the office on that particular day.

  “We went straight to the books. And there, at least, the records were helpful. Richard Rosenberg’s appointments are logged. On the day in question, only one client came to the office to keep an appointment with Mr. Rosenberg. And that client was Shirley Woll.”

  I started. Tessie the Tumbler. My déjà vu.

  Clark saw me. “Yes, Mr. Hastings. Shirley Woll. And that did throw us for a while because we knew the killer was a man. But one of the secretaries happened to recall—which is remarkable, knowing them—that Shirley Woll had brought a boyfriend with her. He didn’t accompany her into Mr. Rosenberg’s office—not being the husband, just the boyfriend, that was not allowed. So he had to wait in the outer office by the switchboards. This boyfriend, one Charles Banks, was a rather hostile, aggressive type. I rather think that’s why Miss Millington remembered him. He made her nervous. At any rate, he was out there for the whole meeting.

  “Which is when the phone call from Marvin Gravston would have come in. And been entered into the log, three weeks in advance, on an otherwise blank page.”

  Clark paused for emphasis. “Another key. An otherwise blank page. One lone name on an empty page. Charles Banks would look at it, and all he would see would be one name and address. And the name Gravston would be unusual enough to stick in the memory. He would look at it, first think it said Gravestone, look again, and maybe think, ‘That cat got some weird name.’”

  Another of my extraneous questions answered. Sergeant Clark could do jive black.

  “So he would know. He would have the information, and at the proper moment, he could act.”

  I could contain myself no longer. “But why?” I said. “Why would he do that? You’ve been talking about a disgruntled client, someone Richard wronged. She was a happy client. She got thirty thousand dollars, for Christ’s sake.”

  Sergeant Clark favored me with the cold, thin-lipped smile. “Mr. Hastings,” he said. “Do you understand your job?”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Your job. What you do. Do you know what it’s all about?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me. Tell me what you do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, as I understand it, you were the one who originally signed up Shirley Woll as a client. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Tell me what you did.”

  I blinked. I felt totally stupid. Because I didn’t know what he wanted or what he was getting at. Recite what I did? It was like a job interview. And I hate job interviews.

  “Well,” I said. “I called on her, took down the information about the accident and signed her up.”

  Sergeant Clark raised a finger. “Ah. You signed her up. And how did you do that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What did you have her sign?”

  “A retainer, of course.”

  Clark nodded. “Yes. A retainer. And are you familiar with the provisions of that retainer?”

  I stared at him. “It’s a standard form. There is nothing sinister about the retainer.”

  “I never said there was. I just asked if you were familiar with the provisions. If you know what you are asking people to sign.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, irritably.

  “Fine. And what are they?”

  I sighed. “It is a standard form. The client employs Richard Rosenberg to act on his behalf on a contingency basis. There is no charge to the client except in the event of a settlement, in which case Mr. Rosenberg retains one third of the settlement as his fee.”

  Clark nodded. “Yes, but that’s not exactly right. He
retains one third of the settlement after recouping his expenses off the top.”

  My jaw dropped open. “Are you accusing Richard Rosenberg of padding his expenses?”

  Clark shook his head. “Not at all. Don’t be so quick to jump to conclusions and fly off the handle. I am merely stating facts. Your statement of how the settlement is split was slightly inaccurate, that’s all. But leave it for a moment. Going back to the retainer. Isn’t there a paragraph in their stating that any liens against the client shall be settled from the clients share of the settlement, and shall in no way reduce the amount of Mr. Rosenberg’s fee?”

  “Yes. Of course. If the client has outstanding debts, they’re responsible, not Richard.”

  “Exactly,” Clark said. “Which is totally fair and as it should be. But which is a fact.”

  “What’s the point?” I said.

  Clark didn’t answer. “What about the other papers you have the client sign?”

  “What about them?”

  “Tell me what they are.”

  I took a breath and blew it out again. “There’s a Request For Aided Accident form to get the police report. There’s hospital release forms to get the patient’s medical records. There’s two sets of them, actually, one set for us, and one set for the attorneys of the defendant. There’s an assignment to the hospital, assuring them of payment in the case of a settlement.”

  “Ah, yes,” Clark said, “an assignment to the hospital. What is the purpose of that form?”

  I shrugged. “Basically, it’s to enable us to get the client’s medical records. When we ask the hospital for the records we give ’em that form. That tells them the case isn’t a medical malpractice against them, and that they have something to gain by cooperating, and then they release the records to us.”

  Sergeant Clark nodded. “Yes. That’s what you use it for. That’s what it means to you. But what it is, actually, is just what it says—an assignment. It allows the hospital to attach the client’s settlement to cover any outstanding bills.”

  I sat up in my chair. “Are you saying—”

  “I am,” Clark said. “Here’s what happened in the case of Shirley Woll. Richard Rosenberg got her a settlement of thirty thousand dollars. His expenses, in round numbers, were about fifteen hundred dollars.” He held up his hands. “Perfectly reasonable. No argument there. Fifteen hundred. We take that off the top. Leaves twenty-eight thousand, five hundred. Rosenberg takes a third of that as his fee, that’s nine thousand five hundred. Leaves nineteen thousand.