by Otto Penzler
“What—” Bly said, startled.
“You live here?” the policeman asked. He was standing, spread-legged, as immovable as a rock, his thumbs hooked into his broad leather gun belt.
“Yes,” Bly answered blankly.
“You been in here before this evening?”
“Yes. I went out to get these hamburgers for the girl who lives below me in 107.”
The policeman’s expression was so elaborately disinterested that it was a dead give-away. “Dame by the name of Fitzgerald?”
“Yes. She asked me—”
The policeman came one smooth sliding step closer, suddenly caught Bly’s right arm by wrist and elbow.
Bly struggled unavailingly. “Here! What— what—”
“March,” said the policeman. “Right up those stairs. Get tough and I’ll slap you down.”
He steered Bly across the lobby and up the stairs. He went down the hall with Bly stumbling along beside him willy-nilly like a clumsy partner in some weird dance.
The door of Patricia Fitzgerald’s apartment was partially open and the policeman thrust Bly roughly through it and followed him inside.
“This is the bird,” he said importantly. “I nabbed him downstairs in the lobby.”
Bly heard the words through a thick haze that seemed to enclose his brain. He was staring unbelievably at Patricia Fitzgerald. She was lying half twisted on her back at the end of the couch. There was a bright thin line across the strained white of her throat and blood had bubbled out of it and soaked into the carpet in a pool that was still spreading sluggishly. Her eyes were wide open, and the light above her glinted in the brightness of her hair.
There were two men in the room. One was sitting on the couch. He was thick and enormously wide across the shoulders. He sat with his hands on his knees, patient and unmoving, as though he were waiting for something he didn’t expect to happen very soon. His eyes were blankly empty and he wheezed a little when he breathed.
The other man was standing in the center of the room with his hands folded behind him. He was small and shabby-looking, but he had an air of queer dusty brightness about him, and his eyes were like black slick beads. He had a limp brown-paper cigarette pasted in one corner of his lower lip.
“Name?” he asked, and then more loudly, “You! What’s your name?”
“Dave Bly,” Bly said. “Is—is she—”
“Claims he lives upstairs,” said the policeman. “Says he went out to get some hamburgers for the dame, here. I figure they was havin’ a party and he gave her the business and then run and got them hamburgers and came back all innocent, tryin’ to fake himself an alibi so—”
“Outside,” said the shabby little man.
The policeman stared. “Huh?”
“Scram.”
“Well sure, Lieutenant,” the policeman said in an injured tone. He went out and shut the door.
“I’m Vargas,” the shabby man said. “Lieutenant of detectives. This is my partner, Farn-ham. What do you know about this business here?”
Bly fought to speak coherently. “Nothing. Nothing at all. She was playing her radio too loud and I asked her to stop, and she said she would if I’d go get her a couple of hamburgers….”
The big man, Farnham, got off the couch slowly and ominously. He came close to Bly, caught him by the front of the coat. Effortlessly he pulled Bly forward and then slammed him back hard against the wall. His voice was thick and sluggishly indifferent.
“You lie. She was drunk and you got in a beef with her and slapped her with a knife.”
Bly felt a sinking sense of nightmare panic. “No! I didn’t even know her! I wasn’t here—”
“You lie,” Farnham droned, slamming Bly against the wall again. “You’re a dirty woman-killer. She got sassy with you and you picked up that knife and stuck it in her throat.”
Bly’s voice cracked. “I did not! Let go—”
The policeman who had brought Bly in was having some trouble in the hall, and they could hear him say indignantly: “Here now, lady! You can’t go in there! Get away from that door! Lieutenant Vargas don’t want nobody— Lady! Quit it, now! There’s a corpse in there—all blood …”
A thin querulous voice answered snappily: “A corpse! Phooey! My dear departed husband was an undertaker, young man, and I’ve seen a lot more corpses than you ever will, and they don’t scare me a bit. You want me to jab you right in the eye with this knitting needle?”
Evidently the policeman didn’t, because the door opened and a little old lady in a rusty black dressing-gown pushed her way into the room. She had a wad of gray hair perched up on top of her head like some modernistic hat, and she wore rimless spectacles on the end of a long and inquisitive nose.
“Hah!” she said. “I thought so. Bullying people, eh? My husband—dear Mr. Tibbet, the mortician—knew a lot of policemen when he was alive, and he always said they were extremely low-class people—rude and stupid and uncouth.”
Farnham sighed. He let go of Bly and went back and sat down on the couch again. The springs creaked under his weight, and he relaxed into his position of patient ominous waiting.
“Who’re you?” Vargas asked.
“Tibbet. Mrs. Jonathan Q Tibbet—Q for Quinlan—and you’d better listen when I talk, young man.”
“I’m listening,” said Vargas.
“Hah!” said Mrs. Tibbet. “Insolent, eh? And your clothes aren’t pressed, either, and what’s more, I’ll bet you drink. Go ahead and bully me! Go ahead! I dare you! My dear dead husband was a personal friend of the mayor, and I’ll call up and have you put in your place if you so much as lay a finger on me or this nice young man.”
“Lady,” said Vargas in a resigned tone, “I wouldn’t touch you for ten dollars cash, but this lad is a suspect in a murder case and—”
“Suspect!” Mrs. Tibbet repeated contemptuously. “Bah! Did you hear me? I said bah!”
“I heard you,” said Vargas.
Mrs. Tibbet jabbed a steel knitting needle in his direction like a rapier. “And why isn’t he a suspect? Because he has an alibi, that’s why! And I’m it. I was listening to this hussy carrying on in here. I saw this young man come and request her very courteously to stop playing her radio so loudly. I was watching right through my keyhole across the hall. He didn’t even go inside the room. And when he left I heard her laughing in here. There was another man in here all the time, and if you and your low-class companion on the couch weren’t so stupid and lazy you’d start finding out who it was.”
“Did you see this other gent?” Vergas asked patiently.
“Oh! So you’re insinuating I’d snoop and spy on my neighbors, are you? I’ll speak to the mayor about this. Mr. Tibbet laid out his first two wives, and they were very friendly all Mr. Tib-bet’s life, and if I tell him that his drunken policemen are insulting and bullying me, he’ll—”
“Yes, yes,” said Vargas. “Sure. Absolutely. Did you see the other guy that was in here?”
“I did not.”
“Did you hear his voice?”
“Yes. It was a very low-class voice—like yours.”
“Yeah,” said Vargas. He raised his voice. “O’Shay!”
The policeman peered in the door. “What, Lieutenant?”
“Escort Mrs. Tibbet back to her room.”
The policeman looked doubtful. “Take it easy with that needle, lady. Come on, now. The lieutenant is very busy.”
Mrs. Tibbet allowed herself to be guided gingerly to the door, and then turned to fire a parting shot. “And let me tell you that I won’t hear of you bullying this nice young man any more. He’s a very courteous and quiet and honest and hard-working and respectful young man, and he could no more commit a murder than I could, and if you had any sense you’d know it, but if you had any sense you wouldn’t be a policeman, so I’m telling you.”
“That’s right,” said Vargas, “you are. Goodbye.”
Mrs. Tibbet went out with her escort and slammed the do
or violently and triumphantly. Farnham, sitting stolidly on the couch, wheezed once and then said: “Back door.”
Vargas glanced at him with his beadily cruel eyes, then stared at Bly. “Maybe. Yeah, maybe. What about it, sonny?”
“About what?” Bly demanded, bewildered.
Vargas said: “Farnham thinks maybe you went around and came in the back after you left the front door.”
“I didn’t!” Bly denied angrily. “You can check up at the stand where I got these hamburgers.”
“Yeah. You said you didn’t know the dame. Then why did you get her those hamburgers?”
Bly’s face was flushed with anger. “I could have told you in the first place if you’d given me a chance!”
“You got a chance now. Do it.”
“Gus, the janitor, asked me to stop here on the way up and ask her to be more quiet. She was tight and she said she would if I’d run over and get some hamburgers for her. I didn’t want to argue with her and I didn’t have anything in particular to do, so I went. She gave me the money for them.”
“What hamburger stand?”
“Doc’s place—over on Third. He’ll remember.” Bly had a sudden thought. “I was in there when I heard your sirens. I was waiting then. Do—do you know when she was killed?”
“And how,” said Vargas. “She let out a screech like a steam engine when she got it. We got three calls from three different tenants. Did you see the guy that was in here with her?”
“No,” said Bly. “I thought there was someone, but I didn’t see him. She didn’t open the door wide.”
Vargas nodded. “O.K. Beat it. Stick around inside the building. I’ll maybe want to talk to you again.”
Bly stood his ground. “Well, you listen here. You have no right to grab me and push me around and accuse me—”
“Sure, sure,” Vargas agreed lazily. “Your constitutional rights have been violated. Write a letter to the governor, but don’t do it here. We’re going to be busy. Scram, now.”
CHAPTER THREE
FALL-GUY
LY went out into the hall. He was so blindly indignant at the manhandling he had received that it wasn’t until he had reached his own room that the reaction began to take effect. When he fumbled for his key, he found that he was still carrying the paper sack with the two hamburgers inside.
The odor of them and the feel of their warm-ness seeping through the wrappings against his palm suddenly sickened him. He went very quickly through his apartment and dropped them, still wrapped, into the garbage pail on the enclosed back porch. He sat down then in the living-room and drew several deep steadying breaths. He noticed that his forehead was wet with nervous perspiration.
Bly had never before run into violent and criminal death, and coming as it had without the slightest warning made it seem like a hazily horrible nightmare. Even now he could see Patricia Fitzgerald as plainly as if she were in the same room with him—lying so queerly crumpled on the floor, with the bright red thread across her throat and the light glinting in the metallic yellow of her hair.
Back of him the door into the kitchen swung shut with a sudden creaking swish. Bly’s breath caught in his throat. He came up out of the chair and swung around, every muscle in his body achingly tense.
There was no other sound that he could hear, no other movement. He approached the door in long stealthy strides, pushed it back open again. The kitchen was as empty as it had been when he had gone through it just the moment before, but now, standing in the doorway, he could feel a distinct draft blowing against the back of his neck.
Puzzled, he turned around. The door into his bedroom was open. There was no other place from which the draft could be coming. Bly went across the living-room and turned on the light in the bedroom.
One of the two windows on the other side of his bed was open. Bly started at it, frowning. He remembered very distinctly that he had closed and locked both of the windows before he had left for work in the morning because it had looked like it might rain.
He stepped closer, and then he saw that the glass in the upper pane of the window had been broken at a spot which, had the window been closed, would have been just above the lock. Fragments of glass glinted on the floor below the window, and there was a long gouge in the white paint of the sill.
Bly turned and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs to the first-floor hall. The policeman was still on guard in front of Patricia Fitzgerald’s apartment, and he surveyed Bly with evident displeasure.
“So it’s you again. What do you want now?”
Bly said: “I want to see Vargas.”
“It’s Lieutenant Vargas to you,” said the policeman. “And what do you want to see him about?”
“I’ll tell that to him.”
“O.K., smarty. He’ll throw you right out of there on your can, I hope.” The policeman opened the apartment door and announced: “Here’s that dope from upstairs again.”
Vargas and Farnham had changed places now. Vargas was sitting on the couch. He had his hat pulled down over his eyes and he looked like he was dozing. Farnham was standing in the center of the room staring gloomily at the rumpled contents of an ornamental desk he had hauled out into the middle of the floor.
“There ain’t nothing like that in here,” he said to Vargas.
“Look out in the kitchen,” Vargas ordered. “Sometimes dames stick stuff away in the coffee cups or the sugar bowl. Don’t paw around too much until the fingerprint guy gets here.” He pushed his hat-brim back and stared at Bly. “Well?”
Bly said: “There’s something upstairs—in my apartment—I think you ought to look at.”
“There’s plenty of things I ought to look at around here, if I could find them,” Vargas said. “O.K. Come on.”
The policeman said: “You want I should go along with you, Lieutenant? This guy is a suspect and—”
“If I wanted you to go along, I’d say so,” Vargas informed him. “You get out in that hall and keep your big feet and your big mouth out of this apartment.”
“Yes, sir,” said the policeman glumly.
Vargas jerked his head at Bly. “Come along.”
They went back upstairs to Bly’s apartment, and Bly took Vargas into the bedroom and showed him the broken window.
“So what?” Vargas asked.
“I locked both those windows when I left this morning,” Bly told him. “This apartment is directly above Patricia Fitzgerald’s, and the fire-escape goes past her windows and mine. I think the man who killed her came up the fire-escape from her bedroom, broke in this window, and then went through my apartment and out into the hall.”
“You’re quite a thinker,” Vargas said sourly. “Just why should he clown around like that when he could just as well go out the back door of Fitzgerald’s apartment?”
“Because of the lay-out of the apartment building,” Bly explained. “If he went out her rear door, he couldn’t get away without going past the front of the building because there is a blind alley on this side that doesn’t go through the block. But if he came through here, he could go along the second-floor hall, down the back steps, and out through the garage underneath and at the rear of the building. He probably didn’t want to come out the front door of Patricia Fitzgerald’s apartment because someone might be watching it after she screamed.”
Vargas grunted. Hands in his pockets, he strolled closer to the window and examined it and the glass on the floor carefully. “Look and see if you’re missing anything,” he said over his shoulder.
Bly looked in his closet and the drawers of his bureau. “No. Nothing. There’s nothing around here anyone could take except a few old clothes.”
Farnham came quietly in the bedroom and nodded at Vargas. “I couldn’t find it, but I found out why I couldn’t.”
“Why?” Vargas asked.
“She didn’t pay none.”
Vargas swung around. “What? You mean to say they let a tramp like her in here without payin’ any r
ent in advance?”
“Yeah,” Farnham said. “They had a reason for it. It seems another tenant—a party who’s lived here for over a year and paid his rent on the dot every month—recommended her and said that she was a good risk.”
Vargas’ eyes looked beadily bright. “And who was this accommodating party?”
Farnham nodded at Bly.
“So?” said Vargas very softly.
He and Farnham stood there motionless, both of them watching Bly with the coldly detached interest of scientific observers, and Bly had the same sense of helpless bewilderment he had had when they were questioning him in the apartment below.
“What is this?” he demanded nervously. “What are you two talking about?”
“Sonny,” said Vargas, “it seems like every time we turn around in this case, we fall over you. We’re beginning to get tired of it. When you interrupted us downstairs, we were looking for Fitzgerald’s rent receipt, just because we didn’t have anything better to look for. We didn’t find it, because she didn’t have one, because she hadn’t paid any rent yet. The reason she hadn’t paid any is because you told the guys who own this building that she was O.K. and a good risk.”
Bly swallowed hard. “You said that—that I recommended—”
“Yeah,” said Vargas. “You. It seems mighty funny. You don’t know this Patricia Fitzgerald at all, as you say, but you run errands for her and you recommend her as a good credit risk. You’d better come up with some answers about now.” “I never recommended her for anything to anyone!” Bly denied indignantly.
ARNHAM took a long step closer. “Don’t pull that stuff. I called up the bank that owns the place, and I talked to Bingham, the vice-president in charge of all their rental property. He looked it up, and said you did.”
“But I didn’t!” Bly said. “I don’t know—”
Farnham took another step. “Maybe you lost your memory. Maybe if you fell downstairs, you’d find it again.”
“I heard you,” said Mrs. Tibbet. She was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, nodding her head up and down meaningfully. “Oh, I heard you, all right. I’m a witness. Falling downstairs, eh? I know what that means. Third degree. Dear Mr. Tibbet told me all about it. I’m going to report you to the mayor.”