4 Strangler

by Parnell Hall

  And Sergeant Clark had already asked specifically that we be quiet and get on with it.

  I looked at Richard.

  And Richard held his tongue. He smoldered. He fumed. He looked about ready to jump out of his chair and bite Sergeant Clark in the neck.

  But he kept quiet.

  And I kept quiet.

  And we got on with it.

  24.

  SERGEANT WALKER resumed.

  “Gerald Finklestein. Sixty-three years of age. Widower. Door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. For Electrovac. Company in Brooklyn. Two grown sons. One lives in Florida, one in Michigan. Owns a car. Eighty-one Chevy. Sells vacuum cleaners door to door in New York City, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. Neighbors report him as quiet, mild-mannered, respectable. Express the usual shock and surprise.

  “Finklestein’s one hobby seems to have been bridge. He was a member of the Hillsdale Social Club in Queens. Played duplicate there Wednesday nights. Members of the club report Finklestein took the usual amount of good-natured ribbing about his accident, and noted stated intention to call Rosenberg and Stone, increasing the likelihood that his phone call was, indeed, genuine.”

  Walker turned the page.

  “Winston Bishop. Black. Forty-two years of age. Single. No children. Parents deceased. No known brothers and sisters. Occupation, construction worker. Unemployed at time of death. On public assistance.

  “Drug paraphernalia, including hypodermics, found in apartment. All indications user, not pusher. Two priors, both possession.

  “With regard to the accident. Winston Bishop fell on the subway steps at 135th Street, officers on scene, treated at Harlem Hospital for broken arm.”

  Walker flipped the page.

  “With regard to Darryl Jackson—”

  With regard to Darryl Jackson, I didn’t want to hear it. But I had to. I had to sit there and listen while Walker went through the whole thing. It was infuriating, of course, seeing as how I knew the Darryl Jackson case had absolutely nothing to do with what we were talking about. But there was nothing I could say.

  Eventually, Walker finished.

  “Fine,” Clark said. “That’s the picture. At least that’s the general picture. We have some details, and we’ve been able to draw a few parallels. Go ahead, Walker.”

  Walker flipped another sheet.

  “With regard to Clarence White. He had been known to frequent a bar known as Duke’s Place, on Lenox Avenue. At least three people remember seeing him in there the day before the murder. They remember because he had a cast on his leg. However, no one seems to know any more about it than that. Apparently, he was not in a particularly talkative mood. As we understand it, he had quarreled with his girlfriend, was in a blue funk and was sitting off in a corner by himself getting soused. As far as we know, he spoke to no one in particular, and no one in particular spoke to him. Nobody even seems to know how he injured his leg, let alone whether he intended to call an attorney to do anything about it. The best we can get is that he was there.

  “And there’s a link—Winston Bishop also used to frequent the same establishment.”

  The first hard clue. I straightened up.

  “Is that right?” I said.

  “That is right,” Walker said. “In the Winston Bishop case, even less is known. The best we have is that the bartender and two customers identify Winston Bishop as someone they had seen in the place. None knew his name, none recall seeing him recently, none recall seeing him with a cast on. In his case, you must remember, it was his arm that was broken, not his leg. Therefore he could come and go without notice. A man on crutches coming in the door, everyone would see. Whereas a man with a cast on his arm, perhaps even covered up with a coat, could go unnoticed. At any rate, no one saw it.

  “No one recalls any discussion about hiring a lawyer for any purpose whatsoever.” Walker smiled. “With the exception of one gentleman whose brother was a crack dealer, and who was concerned with raising bail.”

  “And there you are,” Clark said. “It’s a thin lead, but it’s there. We’re running it down. We’re doing everything we can. But if there’s anything that Duke’s Place brings to mind, please let me know.

  “What’s next, Walker?”

  “Next is Harlem Hospital. Bishop and White were both treated at Harlem Hospital. I know that’s nothing to write home about, seeing as how both live in Harlem and their accidents occurred there.

  “But here’s the thing. Finklestein was injured in Long Island. He was treated at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip. Nothing special there. But a check into his background shows that approximately two years ago he was a passenger in a taxi that was in a motor vehicle accident in Harlem, and he was taken to Harlem Hospital for observation.”

  “So what?” I said. “I fail to see how that means anything.”

  “I’m not saying it does,” Clark said. “I’m merely listing coincidences. The coincidence in this case is the fact that the doctor who treated Gerald Finklestein in emergency was the same doctor who treated Winston Bishop.”

  “What?” I said.

  “For what it’s worth,” Clark said. “Those are the facts. Now, with regard to the phone calls.” Here he looked at Richard. “And I must say, your secretaries have not been particularly helpful on this point. However, this much is known. The phone call from Winston Bishop, which neither of your secretaries will positively admit to taking, was received at a time when the gentleman in question presumably could have been alive. In other words, it’s entirely possible Winston Bishop actually made that call.

  “We have indirect evidence to the effect. Winston Bishop was black, he was a dope addict and he was not particularly well educated. Presumably, his English would have been recognizably black. Or what can be colloquially referred to as jive. In other words, his speech could not be mistaken for white English, like Walker here. However, had the speaker been white, calling up and giving an address in Harlem might have been an unusual enough occurrence that one of those girls might have remembered it.”

  “I doubt it,” Richard said.

  “It’s a very slim chance, and I say, might,” Clark said. “Now, with regard to Gerald Finklestein, the reverse is true. We have the testimony of Janet Fishbein that she took the call. Presumably with a man named Finklestein, had he sounded like a black man, that would have rated some notice. We also have the corroborating testimony of Mr. Hastings here, to the fact that he called Mr. Finklestein to postpone the appointment. The gentleman answered, claiming to be Mr. Finklestein. And though there is nothing to substantiate this, there is every reason to believe that he was. The medical examiner’s report concludes that he could have indeed been alive at that time.

  “Now we come to Clarence White. There is no need to speculate here. We have a tape recording of the actual call. Walker.”

  Walker opened the briefcase and took out a small, battery-operated tape recorder. He set it on Richard’s desk. He took out a cassette, slipped it in and punched play.

  There was a crackle of static, and then the dulcet tones of Wendy/Janet filled the room.

  “Rosenberg and Stone.”

  It was so familiar I almost smiled. But this was no laughing matter. There was an instant of dead quiet while we waited for the next voice.

  It came.

  “Is this the lawyer?”

  It was a high-pitched voice, and so typically black as to be almost a caricature of itself, as if a stage comedian were doing a jive black man.

  In contrast, came the coldly oblivious tones of Wendy/Janet.

  “This is the law firm of Rosenberg and Stone.”

  CALLER: “Tha’s it. Tha’s what I want. I hurt myself. Broke ma leg. Want a lawyer.”

  WENDY/JANET: “And how did you break your leg?”

  CALLER: “Fell down.”

  WENDY/JANET: “And where did you fall, sir?”

  CALLER: “Stairs of my building.”

  WENDY/JANET: “What is your address?”

&
nbsp; The voice gave the address and apartment number of Clarence White.

  WENDY/JANET: “Your phone number, sir?”

  CALLER: “Ain’ got no phone.”

  WENDY/JANET: “Your name, sir?”

  CALLER: “George Webb. My name is George Webb.”

  WENDY/JANET: “All right, Mr. Webb. If you are going to be home, I will schedule you an appointment with our investigator.”

  CALLER: “I be home. Ain’ goin’ nowhere. Broke ma leg.”

  WENDY/JANET: “How would four o’clock be?”

  CALLER: “Don’ matter. I be here. Sen’ him over.”

  WENDY/JANET: “And could I check your address, please?”

  There came a click and then a dial tone. The caller had hung up.

  Walker snapped off the recorder.

  “Well,” Clark said. “That gives us a pretty clear picture. That caller was not Clarence White. It was either the murderer or some stooge hired by the murderer to make the call. Personally, I think it was the murderer.

  “So,” Clark continued, “our picture of the murderer becomes clearer. In all likelihood, he is an uneducated black man, living in Harlem, in fact, the man whose voice we just heard. In which case, the murderer was at a phone booth on the corner of Broadway and 125th Street yesterday afternoon at exactly four-fifteen.”

  “That’s a guess,” I said. “All that is is a guess.”

  “Granted,” Clark said. “A guess. A deduction. Whatever you want to call it. As far as we’re concerned, we take it as a supposition. Not the only supposition, but certainly one.”

  Clark shook his head. “Now, the secretary who took the call, this Janet Fishbein, has been somewhat less than helpful. The question, of course, being whether she had ever heard this voice before. She claims as far as she knows she hadn’t. It would help if we knew if she was the one who took the Winston Bishop call, but we don’t, and having talked exhaustively with both of the young ladies in question, it is doubtful if we ever will. In addition, Miss Fishbein claims a lot of these black voices, the ones talking jive, all sound the same to her anyway. So there we are.

  “At any rate, we were building a picture of the murderer. So we have a black man. Uneducated. Strong—to have strangled the victims. And probably poor.”

  “Why poor?” I asked.

  “That’s the other thing,” Clark said. “The bodies had all been robbed.”

  “Oh, really?” I said.

  “Yes. And you see what that means. None of the victims was affluent. They would not have been carrying much cash on them. But what they had, was taken. Now, admittedly, that could just be a ploy by the murderer to throw us off the track. But taken at face value, it tells us the murderer was someone who was hard up, even for small amounts of cash. That would tend to indicate a junkie. It would also tend to indicate that the murderer was someone who had killed before to get money. By before I mean before all this started. But the thing is, these killings are so typical of the routine murders committed by junkies to get money to feed their habits that if it hadn’t been for the fact that the victims called Rosenberg and Stone, the connection might have gone unnoticed.”

  Sergeant Clark took a breath. “But we have the connection. And that is why I believe that what we have to look for is a black client whose case was lost or rejected”—Richard shifted restlessly—“or on the other hand, a black man who Rosenberg and Stone successfully sued.”

  “Entirely more likely,” Richard said. “Though still farfetched.”

  “Perhaps,” Clark said. “But that is the premise on which I am working. So let me tell you how we intend to proceed. We shall continue very much as we have been. We shall keep the lid on publicity. In other words, there will be no mention of Rosenberg and Stone. Meanwhile, we shall continue going through your files, we shall maintain the taps on your phones and we shall attempt to trace every call that comes in.

  “Now, with regard to that. I have not instructed your secretaries to attempt to keep the people who call in on the phone until we can trace the call and get to them. In the first place, I don’t want those girls to know we’re doing it. As far as they know, we don’t even have taps on the phones. In the second place, they couldn’t do it. They’re not swift enough. They would tip the guy to what they were trying to do right away. Then we’d have lost him. So we’ll keep trying this way. We’re tracing the calls pretty fast, we got men out all over the place. If there’s a chance of nabbing them through the phone calls, we’ll do it. To keep him talking longer wouldn’t help.

  “As I said, I don’t want the girls to know what we’re doing. I also don’t want anyone else who works here to know what we’re doing. This is just between you and us.”

  He pointed his finger at me. “Now this joker here wouldn’t know what we’re doing, but he happened to be there when the last one went down. So now he knows. And now you know. We’re staking out the address of every call that comes in. But I don’t want anyone else to know that. Your other investigator, this Mr. Gravston. Your secretaries. Your file clerks. No one. I don’t want this leaking out. ’Cause everyone knows someone, and everyone talks. And eventually the word gets to the person you don’t want to have hear. So you keep the lid on.

  “Now, as for Mr. Hastings here.”

  I knew what was coming. Walker would be riding with me again.

  “For the time being,” Clark said, “we may consider Mr. Hastings provisionally cleared. As it happens, the time element on the Clarence White case doesn’t do that. From what the medical examiner has told us, Mr. Hastings still could have killed him. But I don’t think so. I have to go with the best information I can get. And Walker here tells me Hastings didn’t do it. He bases that on an assessment of his character after having ridden around with him for two days. Says he’s not the type of guy who would have committed these murders.” Clark shrugged. “Personally, I take that with a grain of salt. I think murderers come in all kinds of packages. But Walker has one convincing argument. He says Mr. Hastings simply wouldn’t have the guts. That I can buy.

  “So, for the time being, Mr. Hastings, you can consider yourself temporarily cleared. Detective Walker will not be riding with you today. It’s not really that I think you’re so innocent. Frankly, he has more important things to do.

  “So that’s it. The main thing is, if anything should come up, or if you should remember anything that ties in with what we’ve told you, contact me at once. You may not like the way we’re going about this Mr. Rosenberg, but the sooner we clear this up, the less chance there is of your business going under.”

  During this, Walker had packed up his briefcase. Now he and Clark turned and walked out the door. I started to follow.

  “Stanley,” Richard barked.

  I turned around.

  Richard’s face looked murderous, as if he wanted to strangle someone.

  “You stay,” he said.

  25.

  “THAT MAN IS A MORON.”

  I could have hugged him. Finally. Another person who shared my opinion of Sergeant Clark. It had been getting depressing, one person after another telling me what a good man he was. At last, a sane, rational human being who could see the obvious.

  But the thing was, from the look on Richard’s face when he’d asked me to stay, I had thought he was going to tear into me for some reason. As if somehow I was to blame for all this. But no, he wanted to cut up Sergeant Clark. It was almost too good to be true.

  “The man’s a complete idiot,” Richard said. “He has this insane idea that somehow I’ve wronged a client, and he’s basing his whole investigation on that. And this other idea, that the killer might be someone I’ve successfully sued, that seems more likely until you think about it. And when you do it’s just as stupid. I mean, everybody carries insurance. It’s not the individual, it’s the insurance company that eventually pays. So why should anyone hold a grudge?”

  Richard had been holding this all in for a long time, so he was getting more and more excited and wor
ked up as he went on.

  “And this idea that the killer is some poor, uneducated, black man in Harlem. I mean, come on, give me a break. How does that tie in with someone I’ve successfully sued? A poor, uneducated, black man in Harlem doesn’t have any money. How the hell could I have sued him?”

  “I know. I know,” I said.

  “You know. I know. We know. Of course, we know. It’s that moron who doesn’t know. He’s a fool. He’s out chasing his own shadow. Meanwhile, I’m in danger of losing my business.”

  “No, you’re not, Richard. At least they’re controlling the publicity.”

  “Yeah. No thanks to him. If you hadn’t come up with the copycat killer theory, they’d be spreading it all over the papers. That was an inspired piece of bullshit, by the way. But it’s only a stopgap measure. It’s only temporary. If this goes on, the publicity is going to get out. It’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, that moron is running around in circles.”

  “I know. But what can we do about it?”

  “What we can do about it is do what he ought to be doing. We can investigate this thing right side up.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean we can’t wait for that moron to solve this crime. We have to take matters into our own hands.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean we have to take an intelligent look at what’s happening here.”

  I knew what that meant. Richard, having had two days to do nothing but sit and stew it over, was now going to tell me his theory of the case. Which wasn’t necessarily brilliant, and wasn’t necessarily right. But as far as I was concerned, it had one big thing going for it.

  It wasn’t Sergeant Clark’s.

  “All right,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “All right,” Richard said. “Here’s the thing. This Sergeant Clark is going about the whole case ass-backward. I mean, looking for some wronged client. That’s bullshit.

  “Now I’ll tell you what I think. If someone is knocking off the clients who call in, that means to me just one thing.”