Promising himself that when he made sergeant he would do his share of the clerical drudgery instead of leaving it all to his junior partner, Casey jumped out of bed, padding barefoot through the quiet house to the kitchen, where he plugged in the coffeepot. The dogs whined as usual on the back porch, but they’d have to wait the twelve and a half minutes—no margin for error or indecision—which was all the time he allowed himself for shaving and dressing. Squeezing orange juice took another couple of minutes, and by then the coffee was perking, two slices of bread almost browned in the toaster.
The dogs scratched frantically to get in, and the youngest one, Bimbo, was tuning up to bark. Braced for their assault, Casey slid through the door to the back porch, and shushing the canine hysteria which greeted him, let the three dogs out into the fenced backyard. Bimbo ran in lunatic circles. But the other two sedately traveled from shrub to shrub, happily unaware of the several kinds of patented dog repellent with which his parents regularly sprayed their garden. Serves ’em good and right, Casey thought unkindly. If they insist on giving house room to every flea-bitten stray that wanders down the street—
A thought struck him like a revelation. The dogs were surrogate grandchildren? Imagining his mother’s outrage if he suggested such an idea to her, Casey grinned. He had long since learned to keep his theories to himself, for although hip to Freud, his parents were offended by any analysis of themselves or their motives. From me anyway, Casey amended fairly. A son’s wisdom doth not a sage make.
Trotting down the driveway, he scooped up the morning Times lying on the front lawn. Two more planes had been hijacked. In Belfast the trouble went on. Spreading the newspaper on the tile drainboard, Casey leafed through it quickly while he gulped orange juice and crunched toast, waiting for his coffee to cool. There was only a small item about the Barrett case which last night’s Evening Outlook had featured as headline news—hit and run death murder say police. No mention of counterfeiting. As a local resident, Susannah Roche had received some free publicity, but Paul Rees’s name had been left out.
An ex-con, Casey thought. Three years for manslaughter. Felony. Which meant a merciful judge and extenuating circumstances, or a capital charge which a clever attorney had managed to get reduced in exchange for a guilty plea…
“I say let’s drop on him,” Krug had insisted last night. “Right now, the quicker the better. Even if he’s clean on everything else, we got him cold—”
“Not so fast,” Timms stopped him. “You’re jumping the gun, Al. Picking up Rees isn’t going to accomplish anything now.”
“How d’you figure that? The way I see it, it’s two birds with one stone. We give him protection if he needs it, and we got him on ice—”
But Timms kept shaking his head. “No, we’ve got to wait till we talk to San Francisco. No use going in blind, maybe scaring him off. He’s still the only real witness we’ve got.”
“Some witness,” Krug had answered, and for the second time that day, Casey had been inclined to agree with him. But this morning, he wasn’t so sure. A guilty man, a parole breaker, wouldn’t have stuck his neck out the way Rees had. No man on the run deliberately involves himself in anything which will also involve the police.
Five-thirty, according to the clock on the stove. By pushing the traffic lights a bit he could make it to the station in seven and a half minutes, maybe even less this early. But in deference to its middle-class, early-morning quiet, Casey spared his own street the howling screech of his customary high-speed departure. The residents along the rest of his route did not fare so well, however.
“Heard you highballing that Mustang two miles off,” a night-tour man named Smithers said as Casey pounded up the stairs, slid into the squad room and checked the clock. “Real hotdog stuff.”
“Hi, Smitty.” Casey beamed triumphantly. “Seven minutes exactly, door to door!” He glanced around the squad room. “You get stuck here all night while everybody sacked in?”
“Quit kidding. We’ve had two stickups, a break-in, a rape and last but not least, a jumper. Call came in about half an hour ago. Some dame with the shakes so bad she could hardly talk. Claimed she heard this screaming, so she got out of bed and looked out the window. Surprise, surprise, there’s a body splattered all over the pavement outside.”
Suicide. Casey glanced at the call sheet. The woman who had reported it was a Mrs. Elizabeth Hale. Identity of the victim was as yet unknown. But the address rang a bell. Scrambling through his notes from yesterday, Casey checked to make sure. Then he started running.
“Hey, where you going?” Smitty yelled after him.
But by then Casey was already gone.
THIRTEEN
Light from somewhere stabbed through his eyelids. The bathroom, Rees thought groggily, and groaning, rolled over on the tangled bedsheets, drifting again on the edges of sleep. Then he sat up abruptly, listening. No sound from the bathroom. “Hey,” he called softly. “Good morning.” No answer.
Staggering up, squinting in the glare, he peered into the bathroom. No Susannah there. And the light was not electric but gray hazy daylight let in through the pebbled window he had forgotten to close last night. Oh, lovely, he thought, smiling. An earful was had by the neighbors, no doubt. Ooo-wow-you-scare-me. That’ll be the day, he decided as he cranked the window closed; the man doesn’t live who can scare Susannah.
Yawning and stretching, Rees turned toward the mirror, gasping as he saw it written there in blood across his hangover face. But after the first shock, he realized the red was lipstick: Ooo-wow-you-scare-me had been scrawled across the medicine cabinet mirror in wavering capitals. Oh, Susannah.
Laughing hurt his head, but Rees laughed anyway, leaning on the basin. And drinking glass after glass of water, he savored the message. A private joke now. Our joke, he thought happily. Susannah’s and mine.
His watch lying on the nightstand said nearly seven. She must have left only a couple of hours ago. He decided that it was like her somehow to slip away like this. And her apartment was only a couple of blocks north on Ocean Avenue. They couldn’t go there, she had told him last night. Rees had not asked why—or cared then.
The bed seemed to swing gently under him as he lay back, his mind swarming with images of her lithe, greedy, predatory body clamped to his as if she had grown out of him, the succubus of some insatiable and exhausting dream. The new breed of woman, he thought, laughing and unsentimental, utterly free.
Suppressing the vague distress this idea roused in him, he slipped into sleep, then was instantly awake again, conscious of something trying to surface in his mind. Something about last night. Susannah laughing. What you can’t see…But that was earlier, over dinner; no laughing then. So it was later on? At the party. Jervis boozes like it’s going out of style tomorrow, too.
A dim impression of a bearded, pasty middle-aged face with staring eyes swam out of his murky recollections. Say good night to your host, Paul…Th at was it. They were leaving, and the man came plunging out of the crush of dancers muttering something cryptic about “M.” Something had been found. And Susannah laughing, yes, she knew. Play it for giggles, Jervy, keep living dangerously. Then they were out in the dark, twining like snakes in the car. Can’t go to my place…Because someone would be there waiting?
Spoiler, Rees thought, staring gritty-eyed at the ceiling. He had no claim on her, so why torment himself as if he did? But he couldn’t stop thinking. Play it for giggles.
Sick, dizzy, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting with his head in his hands until the hangover vertigo passed. Drinking. Another parole violation. Reaching for the phone on the bedside table, he waited tensely until a sleepy voice answered, “Office,” and he gave Susannah’s number. Let her be awake, he thought as it rang once at the other end. Let her be there alone. Two rings. Damn, he’d forgotten her call service, and at this hour they would answer fast. Another half ring sounded, then the line was open. No one spoke, but he could hear breathing. “Susannah?”
“Who’s this?” a rasping male voice demanded.
“Sorry, I must have the wrong—”
“No, you don’t. Who is this?”
“None of your damn business,” Rees said furiously. “Let me talk to—”
“Not so fast, mister. And not so smart either. This is Detective Sergeant Krug, Santa Monica Police Department. Been an accident here. Now you gonna tell me who you are, or shall I start guessing?”
FOURTEEN
“No, I didn’t say that, I said almost dark. I mean, if it’d been really dark, I couldn’t have seen—seen—Oh, my God, it was so awful—!”
“Take it easy, ma’am,” Krug said soothingly. “We know it was a shock, all we’re trying to find out now is approximate time.”
“Well, it must’ve been about five. I didn’t look at the clock. Just barely getting light, anyway. I was sound asleep, of course. What woke me up, you see, was the screaming. You never heard such a sound! Horrible. And it went on and on…”
“Must’ve yelled all the way down,” the night-tour detective who answered the squeal had reported as soon as Casey arrived on the scene. “Got six people so far say they heard the screaming. All of ’em live on this side of the building, so it’s probably straight.”
The body was in the ambulance sitting in the wide concrete drive on the south side of the high-rise apartment building. Tenants in bathrobes clustered near the lobby entrance, watching the ambulance attendants swabbing up the huge pool of blood. Wouldn’t think a human body could hold that much, the rubbernecks would be telling it later at the office, the shop, the beauty parlor. Worst thing I ever saw. But that doesn’t keep them from looking, Casey thought. Public appetite for gore seemed insatiable.
“You take a look at the remains?” the night-tour man was asking.
“Not yet.”
“Nearly puked myself. Christ, what a way to do it. I figure ten stories or higher. Maybe from the roof. That’s seventeenth floor on this one. How long you figure it’d take to fall that far?”
An eternity, Casey thought with a clench of horror in the pit of his stomach. Not like a dream of falling, where you float down and down harmlessly. No, a rushing plunge and the ground coming up as you shriek and shriek and claw the air—
“Not positive yet,” the other detective was saying, “but a fast check of the upper floors makes 1005 the only one missing so far. Manager took a look, but with the head bashed in like that, could be anybody. Somebody off the street even.”
“What’s the name?” Casey asked. “The tenant in 1005.”
“Roach, I think he said. Female, anyway.”
“Susannah Roche. About five-six. Gray eyes. Long dark hair.”
“Well, the hair’s right—what’s left of it, that is. Sounds like you knew her.”
Remembering that the night-tour man had been on sick report for two days, Casey thought of explaining, but there was no time for fill-ins: Krug had to be called immediately. “Tell you later,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in her apartment,” he called back over his shoulder as he rushed off. “Better separate anybody who knows anything—”
Krug was there in twenty minutes, unshaven and red-eyed, savagely impatient with the onlookers still hanging around. “Get the names of anybody with anything sensible to say,” he snarled at the nearest patrolman, “and tell the rest of those turds to get back in their apartments, or we’re charging every one of ’em with interference.” Then he rounded on Casey. “You got the manager and that dame who reported it stashed some place handy?”
“Both in their apartments, Al. Night-squad guy’s holding the fort in 1005.”
“You call the lab yet?”
“They’re on the way. I’ve got a list from the manager of all the tenants in adjacent apartments. So far there’s only one—a woman who was up feeding her baby—who heard anything that might’ve come from 1005.”
They talked to the neighboring tenants one by one then, starting with the young mother who seemed confused and distracted by the squalling of her newborn baby in the bedroom. “If only my husband was here,” she kept saying helplessly. “Everything happens at once, it’s too much for me! First the baby, and then his father has a heart attack. I mean, his first duty should be here, shouldn’t it? But he just fell apart when his mother called—”
They had leased their apartment—1006—only two months ago, she explained, and what with her condition then, she hadn’t paid much attention to any neighbors. But of course she had seen the girl in 1005 in the hall once in a while, and a couple of times in the elevator. A model, she had decided, or an actress. Certainly nobody—as she had told her husband—she could ever imagine herself getting really friendly with later.
“She do much entertaining you could hear?” Krug asked.
“Well, no, not much. No parties, anything like that. But sometimes she played records awfully loud. I guess it was records. Anyway, rock stuff. Sometimes late, too. Came right through the walls of our bedroom—”
“How about last night? You hear anything like voices or music last night?”
“N-no, I don’t think so. But around three I thought I heard somebody come in. It’s so quiet, see, and I was sitting up in bed feeding the baby.”
“Hear anybody talking?”
“No, nothing like that. Just the door closing, and somebody moving around in there. I mean, I’m not all that snoopy I listen to be listening. But these new buildings, you can hear everything. Some man upstairs has even complained about the baby already, and I’ve only been home from the hospital—”
“You’re sure about the time?” Casey interrupted. “Three o’clock?”
She sighed exhaustedly. “You wouldn’t ask that if you knew anything about babies. He’s like an alarm clock. Starts fussing every night the same time. But even if he didn’t, I’d wake up. It’s the pressure, you see. When you breast-feed, it builds up—”
Except for the occupant of 1004, a stockbroker who was gone by six every morning to catch the opening of the New York Exchange—seven o’clock on the West Coast because of the time differential—they covered the other tenants on the tenth floor. Then they went on to Mrs. Hale, who was still shaking, still almost incoherent, but positive all the same that it was barely light when she had heard the screaming. After leaving the Hale apartment on the first floor, they rode the elevator back up to the tenth. A patrolman guarded the door of 1005; inside they could hear the voices of the technicians. As the cop opened the door for them, they heard the telephone. Krug was across the room in two long strides, grabbing it on the third ring.
“Guess who,” he said as he hung up. “I told Timms we should nail that guy. You”—he pointed to a fresh-faced rookie patrolman standing just inside the door—“get over to the Pelican Motel and baby-sit with a guy named Rees—Paul Joseph Rees—till we get there.”
“Yes, sir.” The rookie hesitated. “But what’ll I tell him, Sergeant?”
Krug groaned. “For Chrissake, don’t they teach you guys anything at the Academy anymore? Tell him any damn thing you want, just keep him there. Now get moving!”
The rookie disappeared.
“You guys on round-the-clock duty too, I see,” McGregor, the senior laboratory technician, commented bitterly. “You know it was almost midnight by the time we finished with that Mercedes last night?”
“Tough luck, Mac.” Krug sucked his teeth, surveying the small pop-style living room furnished in molded plastic and bean-bag chairs in op-art colors. White shutters closed off all but one of the south-facing windows—a casement which stood wide open. “That the window she went out of?”
“That’s the one.”
“No screen,” Casey commented when McGregor opened the shutters, revealing a wide stationary pane flanked by tall casements on either side. “The other window has one, I see.”
“Somebody unhooked it and took it down,” McGregor said. “Watch that shoe.” They carefully stepped around the white sandal lying on the floor near the
window. “Figure she lost it going out. They usually take their shoes off for some reason, but it don’t look like this one bothered.”
“Any sign it could’ve been an accident?” Krug inquired. “Or maybe she had help?”
The lab man shrugged. “We got a couple marks here—” He pointed with his pencil to two small gouges in the wall below the window embrasure. “Could be a heel did those. Could be furniture, too. Or somebody careless with a vacuum cleaner. If somebody pushed her, you got trouble, Al.”
“Convince me.”
“Well, for starters, why no hand marks around the window? Gouges in the carpet? Anybody fighting for their life, stands to reason they’ll be stomping and clawing every which way. But there isn’t a sign of a struggle.”
“Okay, where’s this window screen?”
“Behind the door in the bedroom.” McGregor grinned. “And there goes your accident theory.”
“So maybe a window washer forgot it. Make a note to ask the manager,” Krug instructed Casey. “While we’re at it, we better find out whether she was late on her rent, any money problems he might know about.”
Casey was still scribbling in his notebook when the lieutenant arrived. In his usual fashion on a new case, Timms walked around with his hands in his pockets while Krug filled him in. “Coincidence,” he kept muttering. “The sudden death of a witness in a homicide case. Jesus,” he exploded, “even if it is suicide, we’ll have to prove it! And if it’s accident, our necks are really in a sling. No coroner’s inquest is going to sit still for anything but concrete proof there’s no connection when they hear she’s on record in that Barrett mess.”
Glum-faced, he turned to the other detectives who had arrived with him. “Everyone in the building must be questioned,” he instructed, “help as well as tenants. Find out when trash was collected, milk was delivered. Find out when the Times deliveryman usually gets here in the morning. With the tenants, find out who was out and how late. Find out if anybody saw her in the halls or the elevator—
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 26